Like the standing on threshold of a cosmic portal, Seattle’s convention center buzzed with bards, fae, aliens, monsters, warriors and spaceships, far away planets and misty forests, innumerable stories of heartbreak and triumph, all tantalizingly within reach between the covers of a thousand books.

WorldCon, the annual volunteer-run science fiction and fantasy writing convention, sweeps through a different city every year. And in 2025, they chose Seattle. Writers from around the world gathered this August to share ideas, display art, make costumes, pitch stories and present the prestigious Hugo Awards. Basically anything and everything to do with speculative fiction can be found at WorldCon. The genre known as speculative fiction includes any story that has spaceships, magic, swords, dragons, robots, aliens, monsters, cryptids, zombies, dinosaurs, technobabble, prophecies, witches, or giant sand worms. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find a story with all of these until Disney decides to buy the franchise. The trunk show at Worldcon features hundreds of new speculative fiction books published this year, like a popup bookshop the size of a ballroom. There were crafting tables, book signings, an art show, and thousands of attendees hoping for a chance to talk to their favorite author, hear about the latest trends, and maybe even sell a story.

Not lost on anyone was the storm of fascism currently bearing down on the United States.

Why is Aidan not at WorldCon?

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— Aidan Moher (@aidanmoher.com) August 14, 2025 at 7:53 AM

Nor the looming threat of climate change that is threatening to end the world as we know it.

Uh…

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— Arthur Wyatt (@arthurwyatt.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 6:56 PM

But amidst the fascism, corrosive AI, and environmental collapse, the overall sentiment at WorldCon was an upbeat and enthusiastic call to action. No one was interested in letting the billionaires or their fascist friends get away with destroying the world we’ve built. After all these writers invent more competent villains in their sleep.

The theme of Seattle’s WorldCon was Building Yesterday’s Future for Everyone, a throwback to the optimistic futurism of the 1962 Seattle’s world fair while acknowledging the many non-white, non-cis, and non-male people who were left out of that vision. By 2025 the future that many of us were promised was dead, but in its place how can we imagine a better one that doesn’t leave anyone behind? As we head into the new year, we thought it was high time to examine what we learned.

Stories Matter Even if Nerds Are Annoying About Them

Speculative fiction allows people to grapple with big thorny questions, like how does one resist oppressors when you’re just a normal person (we can’t all be Katniss Everdeen), or at what point is violence necessary to achieve liberation, and if so what form should it take?

“We can be really limited by what we know,” says Amy Sundberg, a Seattle-based journalist and author of the Satori Chronicles. “If you can imagine something different, you can take a concrete step forward to make it a reality.” Before Sundberg got into journalism she got into activism. “There was a lack of development of imagination of what else could be.” Without imagining what’s even possible it’s hard to take action. Sundberg cites the Seattle primary election earlier this summer as an example of shifting what was considered politically possible. “Sci-fi is great because it can shift reality. It can ask big questions in a different milieu and catch people in an open mind.”

If technology and politics can be viewed as collective projects undertaken by a society then so can our collective imagination. The stories we tell are tools to understand the world around us. From this perspective the culture wars aren’t a “distraction” (the new cop-out-du-jour from those supposedly fighting for us), it’s the way we understand what kind of future is even possible.

Of course it is impossible to have a conversation about social change and science fiction without mentioning Star Trek. Star Trek is famous for their first interracial kiss, their first same sex kiss, and overall socially progressive vision of the future. Nichele Nicols was famously urged to remain on the show by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for her ground breaking depiction of a Black female professional characterized, not by the color of her skin, but the unparalleled skills she brought to the enterprise. Having just won its first Hugo Award in 30 years in Seattle, Star Trek has always pushed our idea of what a humanist, multi-ethnic, egalitarian, and just society would look like.

Compelling Narratives Are Double-Edged Swords

Just because it’s about the future, doesn’t mean it’s inclusive. From the notorious racism of H.P. Lovecraft to the toxic Nietzschesque individualism of the hero’s journey, traces of Hitler particles can be found littered throughout science fiction and fantasy stories. Throughout the 20th century to today, white supremacists actively use science fiction as a rallying cry for their distorted vision of the future. Richard Spencer and other right wing podcasters have claimed that works like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Dune should be interpreted as a white European manifestos, arguing that racial hierarchies and imperial politics are the good parts of the universe and not actually what’s being criticized.

Jordan S. Carroll, who won a Hugo award in Best Related Work for his book “Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right”. Carroll’s research highlights in detail how white supremacy pieces together the overrepresentation of “white people’s experiences in SF texts” with a Manifest Destiny, settler-colonial attitude of European elites conquering the cosmos. Both of which are frequent themes in science fiction genres. “I do not want to cede science fiction to the white nationalists,” he writes, “but I also do not want to downplay science fiction culture’s complicity by treating right-wing extremists as mere interlopers who arrived late to pervert the genre by imposing their own agenda on it.”

The white centered history of science fiction has created a minefield of unconscious biases today's writers need to navigate, especially when taking inspiration from past works. If they are not careful, writers can unintentionally perpetuate colonialist, misogynist, or white supremacist themes in their own stories. While they often make for captivating fiction, themes like the colonization of space and other planets, projecting problematic social constructs onto the biology of alien species, or an Arthurian unquestioned morality of kingship, all have roots in a western colonial worldview.

Dismantling the phantasms of unconscious biases is the aim of Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford’s Writing the Other classes. Both Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford were chosen as hosts and guests of honor for the Seattle 2025 WordCon. Their classes and lectures seek to give authors tools to write about people outside their own lived experience so that people of all backgrounds are more accurately represented in both speculative histories and futures. More stories written by people from marginalized backgrounds and more representation in speculative fiction in general is critical to countering the white-supremecist project of constructing a future or past without Black, brown, queer, disabled, trans or other marginalized peoples.

At a joint talk between the two hosts, K. Tempest Bradford gave a stark warning about the evils of making or propagating stories written under racist or colonialist frameworks. “It does not matter if you personally have a white robe in your closet, you are standing on the foundations of white robed men.” As Bradford told the crowd, “one of the things I have come to see as deeply important is taking control of culture change,” urging the crowd to support and create cultural products that depict a better world while also being “aggressively awesome.”

Even with the utopian depictions of Star Trek, there have been broader discussions about its representation of an idealized vision of humanity that, despite its inclusivity, is underpinned by a military style command structure, and notably absent from the franchise is any depictions of elections or debate about broader policy change. What happens when one group’s version of utopia conflicts with another? These are the kind of thorny questions that speculative fiction revels in untangling.

Bradford loves Star Trek and cites the franchise as an example of a future where people from all walks of life are depicted being aggressively awesome and advocates for more books, TV shows, games, that are even more "aggressively inclusive.”

But no matter how badly Nazi’s want to appropriate popular narratives, WorldCon authors aren’t ready to cede their works to the worst of humanity.

Dismantling the Torment Nexus

At a panel literally called ‘Beyond the Torment Nexus’, panelists discussed if there is any way for authors to prevent the worst actors from reading their works as instruction manuals as opposed to the existential warnings they were intended to be. The usurpation of Tolkien’s world by the Peter Theil’s fascist projects or the White House’s use of AI to make Sith daddy fetish imagery for star wars day, is a testament to how stories can be blatantly anti-authoritaian and won’t stop the worst people in the world from using them to be shitty. Even if those shitty people happen to have written the work.

The charismatic Jon Scalzi, (known for the Old Man’s War Series and the Kaju Preservation Society) cited Ray Bradbury late-in-life rantings as an argument for death of the author, the idea that a work can be separated from the intent of its creator.  Scalzi contrasted this against prominent authors who have books that present themselves as taking a stand against prejudice and “then out of nowhere the author becomes Voldemort!” “I don’t think the solution isn’t to stop writing books,” says Abigail Nussbaum, blogger and author of Track Changes: Selected Reviews and winner of the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer this year. It’s impossible to depict a horror that someone will not try to emulate, she said, “but science fiction wasn’t written for those people.”

Humans have perpetuated innovative atrocities long before Mary Shelley invented science fiction in 1816. If anything, science fiction is often a reaction to societal horrors and the forces behind them, not their inspiration.

“It’s fucking capitalism [...] Capitalism is the Torment Nexus,” Jon Scalzi proclaimed to a cheering audience, arguing that as long as you have a capitalist society that rewards people for extracting from others at scale, people will invent the torment nexus.

The Future Doesn’t Have to Suck

At Seattle’s WorldCon hope was not just a proverbial feel good notion, but as a tangible tool that is key to enacting real world action. Something that gives Nisi Shawl hope is her students, “The people that are doing new stuff gives me hope.”

Nearly every panelist argued that we must expand our collective imagination on what is possible, AND that imagination without real world impact is not enough.

In the Future Cities panel, Ada Palmer, author and Hugo award finalist for the Terra Incognita series, made it a point to discuss the vital role cities have historically and contemporarily played in resisting against fascist agendas, noting that old Italian cities like Florence with a strong sense of identity have been able to resist fascist ideprevent most of the right wing policies attempted by neo-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni.

The Non-American Futures Panel discussed ways to resist climate change such as development of water efficient aquaponics, using marigold to attract pests in greenhouses in liu of chemical pesticides, or building wind towers in conjunction with quats used for passive cooling in Iran. Yasser Bahjatt (author of Yaqteenya, the first Arabian alternate history novel) noted that “people like looking at extreme high tech, but they overlook simple things that can change the world.” Claire McCague (BC musician, scientist, and author of the Rosetta Man and the Rosetta Mind) concurred adding that “the populations that are under stress are the most innovative, and it’s important that everyone pays attention.” Stories that speculative fiction authors have the ability to usher into the public consciousness.

In a panel called “The Future Doesn’t Have to Suck,” there was a discussion on the importance of genres like Solarpunk and Hopepunk in guiding us towards a brighter future. Solar is shorthand to describe a technological movement for good, while punk is the human resistance of the status quo. Hopepunk was even harder to define. For Wren Handman, a novelist and screenwriter from Vancouver, “Hopepunk is the new superman movie. It takes courage to imagine something better.”

Alina Pete an indigenous writer and artist from Little Pine First Nation in western Saskatchewan,  described “at this specific moment we have a choice, to get sucked into the inevitability of the black hole, or we can push towards our guiding star.” Pete notes that indigenous people are a post-apocalyptic people, having endured a genocide of western colonial expansion across North America. For Pete hope is found “in the daily acts of existence that keep people going forward." All the panelists agreed that there should be more focus on the punk aspect of the genre with Handman questioning if something can still be considered punk if it’s not oppositional to authority.

Another key discussion was the concept of a “cozy dystopia.” A new term to genre fiction that can refer to either the coziness of “bread and circuses” that state powers deploy to engender passivity, or the day to day struggles of getting soup on the stove while living in an oppressive world. As Pete describes it, “The genre we are currently living in,” but the stories of this genre focus on the little ways we can resist. “Cozy” stories are often billed as low stakes, but for them, “interpersonal relationships are some of the highest stakes.”

As Sundberg emphasized “the future hasn’t been written yet,” and just as doom can become a self fulfilling prophecy, so can hope. So which is it? Do we let ourselves fall into the black hole? Or do we band together and reach towards our guiding star? Just as no single politician, policy, or election will save us, no single story will save us. As it always has been, it’s up to each of us to work together and save one another. There’s no shortage of problems to solve, so find those who are telling a story about a future that you believe in and get to work.