We might be different… The world might be different…

I have been reading “speculative fiction” since I was a young girl. Fairy tales and fables came first. My dad handed me Foundation and I handed it back with the observation that it was misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ+, though I didn’t have those terms available to me in 1968. While at the University of Washington, I scoured the “Fantasy and Science Fiction” shelves at the University Book Store for books written by or featuring women characters. They were not typical at the time. Even Ursula K. Le Guin used male pronouns for her androgynous characters in The Left Hand of Darkness. She would later defend her choice in Aurora, Beyond Equality, but then later still she would in characteristic brilliance, change her mind.

The most brilliant thing my students did was to change their minds. The student writing an essay defending sea lions fishing at the dams who comes crying because, “They have to shoot them. They aren’t the main problem, but they have to die.” The student who had written three drafts of an essay defending the use of “Indian” sports logos, and then abruptly switched sides. “What do I do? I don’t have time to rewrite the entire essay by Friday.” But, you know she did manage to do that. I showed her that she didn’t rewrite it all, but concede all the points she’d already argued on the page and then use the single argument that changed her mind. Three reasonable pros against the one overriding reality on the other side. These students were smart enough to recognize another point of view, which was required for the assignment, but also flexible and smart and brave enough to rethink their thesis.

We face the world, each of us, with imperfect patience. Why does our imagination struggle so?

With climate change (overall hotter), vanishing water reserves and species, toxins and disease and war, and a President determined to exact loyalty to himself and intent on vengeance and enriching himself, demands from some conservatives that women shut up and produce more children in an already overpopulated world… we might be forgiven for wanting to explore how how to start over, what we might cast aside, and what about humanity deserves to survive.

“The important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.”

The Wave in the Mind by Ursula K. Le Guin

Thank you for reading. Please note: I use spellchecker to catch some mistakes, but frequently fail to proof my own work. AI is never used anywhere in these posts. What you find here is purely a human writing carelessly but with sincerity.

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Today, we are taught to accept that we only survive and thrive by elevating competition, power, and even selfishness as a tool for proving our worth. We accept that “survival of the fittest” allows the unfit to suffer because that is necessary. The destruction of the weak must be allowed. “May the best man win.” Does he? We are assured that no one expects people to “do the right thing,” but only what benefits that “onward and upward” trajectory that we teach as status quo. Society’s entire worldview privileges those benefits to the few over the rights of all people—a brutal amorality supported with convenient scientific “truths”.

What if that bias isn’t true or necessary? What could we thrive without competition driving us?