Social Visions of Future Sustainable Societies 423because of ‘the mixture of realism and fantasy that lies at the psychic core of all
humans’ and the key role played by fantasy ‘in the enlivenment and transformation
of culture’ (Tuan, 1990, p444). In fact, a free but disciplined imagination may ‘be
the essential method or technique of both art and science’ (LeGuin, 1979, p41).
Storytelling is perhaps the most common imaginative expression. According to
novelist Ursula LeGuin (1979, p31), stories are integral to human society:
... [A] person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story,
would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would
not know quite fully what is it to be human. For the story ... is one of the basic tools
invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have
been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did
not tell stories.The writer’s exploration of her own imagination taps into Jungian archetypes – the
collective unconscious of deep, shared experience that makes possible aesthetic,
intuitive and emotional (as well as rational) communication (LeGuin, 1979, p78).
This type of communication – accessing multiple dimensions of experience – is
precisely what we argue is missing from discussions of the planetary future. Story
provides one avenue (among many) for achieving it.
Stories of the future: science fiction
The accessibility and multidimensionality of the story medium serve both to pro-
mote a more democratic public discussion and to compensate for the failure of
imagination reflected in the sterility of much existing debate about the future.
Applied to the future, story adds participant observation to the available methodo-
logical repertoire.
A fiction of the future, argues literary scholar Robert Scholes (1975), responds
to Sartre’s call for literature to be a force for improving the human situation. Such
a fiction combines entertainment and intellectual value – wedding idea and story,
satisfying both cognitive (content) and speculative (narrative/escapist) needs, and
providing suspense with intellectual consequences (Scholes, 1975, p41). Writers of
such fiction produce imaginative models of the future, alternative projections that
can give us some sense of the consequences of present actions and do so ‘with a
power which no other form of discourse can hope to equal’ (Scholes, 1975, pp17,
74). Scholes asserts that what we need in all areas of life is more sensitive and vigor-
ous feedback. A futuristic imagination ‘will inform mankind of the consequences
of actions not yet taken. But it must not merely inform, it must make us feel the
consequences of those actions, feel them in our hearts and our viscera. [This]
imagination must help us to live in the future so that we can indeed continue to
live in the future’ (Scholes, 1975, p16).
In practice, science fiction is the primary literary genre seeking to accomplish
these goals (although Scholes and other critics would deny that all science fiction