Imagination Will Save the World
a guest column by Alan Lea
So first a little surprise announcement: this isn’t exactly a guest column. I’m Alan Lea. I’ve actually been writing fiction—largely fantasy and scifi but also stories outside the genre—for longer than I’ve been writing my nonfiction screeds. All the way back in elementary school, telling stories felt like a biological need to me. It wasn’t until high school that I reached for analytical and polemic nonfiction as a weapon for fighting back against the lies we were being told, against the ways that society was destroying the world around us.
Somehow, my rants-with-research started getting published early on and since then the books haven’t stopped flowing. I took longer to hone my fiction, though, going through the necessary process of finishing and then burying a couple novels, and then writing other ones, before finally trying to publish. That’s when I discovered how much more monopolized the fiction publishing landscape is than the non-fiction end of the pool. The fact that a number of independent non-fiction publishers have managed to survive is great news for radicals who write social criticism, polemic, and history. The flipside of this, though, is not great news for radical storytellers, and it is bad news for society in general.
To get any kind of audience for novels, especially for speculative fiction, you basically need an agent, which is the first stage in an assembly line that produces fiction according to the specifications of the market, and not according to the needs of the story itself.
So at this point, I only have one novella published, though I have a scifi novel, first of a trilogy, all ready to go, and a thousand page fantasy novel, the first of a series of five, also finished. For reasons I can no longer explain coherently, I decided to do all this under a pseudonym (hello, Alan Lea, nice to meet you); not just a pen name, I wanted to keep my authorship a fairly strict secret. Some kind of discomfort with being an anarchist with a larger platform that contradicts our supposed commitment to not creating status hierarchies? I don’t know.
The reason I say that what is bad for radical storytellers is also bad for society at large is because of the transformative importance of imagination. I think I can sum up the essence of that transformative potential with the following apparent paradox: we cannot create new worlds if we cannot imagine them; drafting blueprints of new worlds kills off the revolutionary or emancipatory potential of those worlds.
Let me flesh out that distinction with another one: between imagination and imaginaries. Imagination is the capacity to envision, experience, or describe things that exist outside of this universe or at least outside of our personal experience. Imagination breaks various laws of physics and laws of history (for those who still believe in the disgraced hypothesis that history has laws) by allowing us to step outside the totality and engage in acts of parthenogenesis. None of which is to say that imagination is untainted by our experiences, by our contact with this universe. Imagination does not exist outside of our relationships and history, though it does allow us to transform them. And in fact it does allow us to step outside of them, even as it carries them with us. This is another contradiction: imagination is the capacity to create wholly new places that always bear the hidden signals of the old places the imaginer comes from.
And an imaginary is a vision created through imagination. Do you see any contradictions here? Imagination, as described above, is very much a capacity and a process, full of contradictions, full of uses, with no implied end; in fact it is only useful and bountiful when it is ongoing, when it is something we can always turn to. An imaginary, though, is potentially a finished project. It is a vision or a horizon that has already been imagined, communicated, and shared. If we lived in a society that favored the process over the result, then we would be encouraged to think of an imaginary as a work in progress, an evolving space of dialogue between multiple imaginations, something that informs people’s actions and then evolves from what people learn through the results of those actions. Unfortunately, we live in a society that encourages another manifestation of the imaginary.
A blueprint is a kind of imaginary, and one that our genocidal society, hellbent on destroying the entire world, could not exist without. A blueprint is a two-dimensional representation of a possible future designed to be imposed on the real world in order to transform it, not through a process of dialogue, but more or less unilaterally. Blueprints exist in tandem with various sciences of architecture and engineering and branches of mathematics that tend not to look favorably on departures from the plan.
The territory, in relation to the blueprint, is meant to be inert. To not talk back.
The drafters of blueprints and the scientists who design the tools they rely on assume they have the authority to impose their visions of the future on a terrain they assume to be lifeless. This is implicit. If they did not make that assumption, they would never be drafting blueprints in the first place. But it turns out the terrain is never lifeless, and it is always-already inhabited. Those of us who inhabit it will inevitably push back. Therefore, those who make blueprints will inevitably be faced with a choice: become maroons, deserters, traitors, revolutionaries, and leave behind the society of the blueprint in order to fight on the side of the earth and its inhabitants, or adopt and justify increasingly brutal forms of violence and control in order to impose their blueprints. This necessity, this choice, supersedes any political affiliation. This is why all the socialists who chose the State became capitalists in a very short timeline, why they all found affinity with fascists and imperialists, why they ended up butchering the revolution. Because they trusted the blueprint over the territory, the Party of the people over the people themselves.
They claim to have learned from the failures of the 20th century, but I don’t see the evidence of that. Just the other day, I read a book proposal from a socialist who claimed to have the solution in a ten point program. Had he not stopped to think how he was going to convince the rest of us to go along with his program? Were we meant to simply be so impressed by his genius that we would give up our agency, our needs, our own histories and unique relationships with unique territories that one mind could never possibly comprehend in their breadth and diversity?
That’s the thing: the original socialists never said We will create gulags to kill off all the workers and peasants who don’t go along with our plan. They simply said, We have the plan that is necessary for the liberation of the workers and peasants. And as long as they weren’t willing to become traitors to their own plan, their own Party, it was inevitable that they would create gulags, that they would ally with fascists, that they would become better capitalists than the capitalists.
That is the danger of an imaginary without an imagination, of a plan that supersedes dialogue and learning, a vision that sees the territory itself as lifeless and inert.
If we recognize the danger, warning bells should be going off in the minds of those of us who pay attention to the traditional abodes of imagination, territories that have been turned into niches and professions. These are the places of play, of games, of art. Already before the 20th century, children were defined as those who play; adults were not given the time or consideration to play. And over the last couple decades, play has also been stolen from children. You can rarely see them playing in the streets or the parks. As a writer I hate scare quotes, but please let me terrify you with the following punctuations: now children “play” with devices controlled by capitalists and designed by the hacks who sell their creativity to capitalists (and this is not a moral question: we are all hacks forced to sell the best of our energies to those who destroy life). In the space of the riot, the space of crime, in the adrenaline of the graffiti artist, we can still find play that is free. Games have been turned into products, either the consumer spectacle of professional sport or commodities for entertainment that come plastic-wrapped or as downloads. Among certain holdouts like those who design their own boardgames, those who still play RPGs, the adepts of Calvinball or some similar heresy, we can still find games that enjoy an unbridled creativity, not harnessed to the machines of extraction. And though “art” originally means a way of doing something, and was paradigmatically indistinguishable from an artisanal craft, from, simply, the way someone went about doing their work so they could take pride in it, one of the first triumphs of the bourgeoisie, in their progressive revolutions against the aristocracy, was to professionalize art and separate it from the labors of love all of us were capable of.
And that brings me to one artform in particular that I am concerned with: storytelling, which like the other forms has been professionalized and subdivided into genres and market niches, one of which is now called speculative fiction.
To reiterate: we live in a society in which imaginaries are proliferating, and imagination is stagnating. This is one of the reasons it is so dangerous for books to be turned into movies, at least with the frequency and voraciousness it is happening these days. People growing up today will never have to ask themselves what Minas Tirith looks like, they’ll never have to imagine what Meg Murry’s voice sounds like as she finds the courage to go back to Camazotz alone. That work has already been done for them. They are consuming prefab imaginaries precisely so that they never have to use their imaginations. Because imaginaries can be turned into commodities, whereas subjects of state authority with active imaginations are dangerous.
And, a topic I try to address in the later chapters of The Solutions Are Already Here, people with imaginations rooted in their territories can come up with solutions to the ecological crisis far more intelligent and subversive than those who rely on fixed imaginaries like blueprints who will only ever make the crisis worse.
Books have also been converted into commodities, though they are far less profitable than movies. They also give the reader an imaginary that is presented as a finished product, though they meet the reader halfway. Ineluctably, a reader must engage their own imagination in order to comprehend what is offered them by the book. The act of reading itself is not possible without imagination. At best, one could grammatically understand the sentences, but not what they signify. A movie, though it is a worthwhile artform that can inspire thinking and dialogue if people give themselves time for it, does not require any imagination at all in order to comprehend.
Because books allow for a smaller profit margin, the publishing industry has undergone a rationalization process to cut costs and increase the winnings for the five companies that now monopolize fiction in the English language. Amidst this rationalization process, many people believe that speculative fiction in particular has undergone a renaissance. This may be accurate, given how the original Renaissance was very much a cultural counterrevolution.
And while there are new writers who have emerged who are truly great, as I indicated above the health of the artform should not be measured by the stature of a small number of geniuses. Every community should have its storytellers.
On the contrary, we have no communities, we have very few locally rooted storytellers who are supported in what they do, and what we have instead are mass-produced genres that manufacture mediocrity, that capture and publish tens of thousands of aspiring writers but only give one percent the chance to make a living out of it.
Curiously, that one percent includes a few true masters of their craft, and many mediocre writers as well, at about the exact same proportion as one can find among the starving writers whose works are locked up in a vault made of copyright law and never given a chance to flourish. In other words, what we have is an industry that monopolizes speculative fiction, and that is structurally incapable of recognizing good writing.
Creativity, certainly, is a requirement of the genre, because one criterion for publication by this heartless machine is a marketable level of novelty. But the industry also requires conformity to existing narrative structures. What we get are novel variations on stories we already know. There is also a requirement that the stories be relatively fast-paced in order to cater to a market or audience that the publishers assume to have a short attention span. Given the fact that in the mind of publishers, their purpose is not to help print great works of literature but to compete with a thousand other titles, we can understand why they make these assumptions. It is probably also not a coincidence that in the industrial structure of contemporary publishing, first the literary agents and then the readers for the publishing companies require a compelling hook on the first page and then a fast build up because they have to sort through literally thousands of manuscripts and their work conditions do not allow them the mental energy to pay any more than a few minutes’ attention to an individual manuscript.
In other words, the industrial structure of publishing today manufactures an audience with assumed needs and tastes that actually cater to the limitations of the production process itself. That is why it is so rare to find contemplative books with a slow build-up these days. Many of the great works of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, and Ursula K. LeGuin, or even authors without radical politics like Tolkien or Tad Williams, would have almost no chance of being published today if their authors did not already have name recognition.
To be clear, I am not at all saying that all the fiction being published is low quality. Great literature can also be fast-paced. Lyrical writing and artful storytelling can, coincidentally, also fit within the parameters of what is publishable. I would describe the work of Ann Leckie this way, to name one example.
What I am saying, though, is that most of what is published is mediocre, and mediocre fiction that fits the commercial requirements of publishers has a far greater chance of getting published than brilliant fiction that does not.
I don’t know if the fiction I write is good, or great, or mediocre, or utter crap. I offer it to you, without the support of the publishing monopolies, to make that evaluation for yourselves. What I do know is that I feel compelled to tell stories, and to hear the stories of my neighbors and of others rooted in their own territories; that I feel rejuvenated when I let myself play; that I hope I find the time soon to go to a game night at my local anarchist social center; that I love playing a board game or role playing game designed by a friend, and I love designing such games; and also that the world is in a very bad place, and frightened people are turning once again to the false and puerile comfort of blueprints, and if we are to have any chance of survival we need to restore our imaginations, and cherish them, and trust them enough to follow them into a future that is joyful and healing and unknown.
Interested in my first novel? Check it out:
Want to support my fiction? Ask your local bookstore to carry it! And if I recover from this brain tumor, invite me to your town for a reading at the end of this year or next year.
Support these independent publishers!
There are a few small and independent publishers still publishing speculative fiction. Support them!
Hey Alan. Just bought your book!
oh hey Ann Leckie is tight! AnnaLee Newitz also wrote a book called "autonomous" that also feels like a similar fit of great rad writing that happens to fit the narrow criteria of marketable fiction.
I know that Polish art cultures (i'm sure they weren't the only ones) were stifled pretty dramatically with the imposition of Socialist Realism during their time under USSR domination. I'm curious what parallels there are with our circumstances. Feels like there's some lessons in there somewhere :p