"The Enemy of Imagination": Here's the Speech I Gave Last Night
I had such an incredible day yesterday, y’all. First I was at the Trans Day of Literature at George Mason University, talking with incredible authors Dominique Dickey, Andrew Joseph White and Luke Sutherland. I got to talk about the themes that animate my recent novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster to an audience of passionate bookish queers. (Ahem. This book is a great gift for your mom, or anyone else who loves mother-daughter stories about healing.)
And then! I went to the French Embassy in D.C., where I was honored to receive an award for Imagination in the Service of Society from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation. There was a pink mocktail named after me, with pink cotton candy on top. Amazing. I was so grateful to Walda, Holly, Tim, Charles and everyone else from the Clarke Foundation who made me welcome. Also thankful to Jac Jemc for introducing me so beautifully, and I’m so glad I got to hang out with fellow awardees Emmanuelle Charpentier and Candace Johnson, plus interviewer Steve Scully. A wonderful night overall.
Here’s the acceptance speech I gave last night in D.C.:
Thank you so much. I have been racking my brains trying to wrap my head around this incredible honor: being chosen to receive an award for imagination in the service of society. It's made me think a lot about what the words "imagination," "service" and "society" mean to me, and wonder what I could possibly have done to live up to those words in my own life and work.
I can only think of a couple of things I've done: I try to build community and create events that welcome excellent people from all backgrounds and ways of looking at things. And I wrote a book about how to use creative writing to make it through tough times, called Never Say You Can't Survive, which is explicitly about using your imagination to stay positive when things are hard. In a sense both of these things are about creating a space of possibility and encouraging as many people as possible to fill it with their own stories.
Never Say You Can't Survive is about saving yourself by using the brain's power to invent fictional people to create your own private reality — away from the narrative assault of the outside world. In the book, I explain that imagination is always a form of resistance to domination, because powerful people will always try to force you to recognize their reality — their version of events — but you don't have to live in their world as long as you can invent your own.
So… imagination is a way of rejecting domination. But now I want to turn that on its head and say that domination is the enemy of imagination.
People who see the world in terms of hierarchies and control cannot imagine anything better. They remain trapped in endless copies of someone else's vision. Ironically, the people who have the least ability to imagine freely because of their obsession with authority are often the ones who are hailed the most as great visionaries.
The paradox of imagination is that it's fundamentally self-centered: it happens in the privacy of your own mind. But your private, cloistered reveries turn out to be one of the best ways to create that shared, inclusive space that can shelter other people. And the act of telling and consuming stories is how we imagine together, how our imaginations intertwine to spawn something bigger that can touch the outside world.
As a little kid I had such a severe learning disability that I posed an insoluble problem for my teachers in elementary school. I was nerdy and bad at school, so I didn't really fit anywhere, and I spent hours exploring imaginary realms and constructing superhero lairs in my mind. I was so blessed to have a special education teacher, Ms. Pennington, who worked with me closely and helped me to get better at my schoolwork. And she used my woolgathering tendencies to encourage me to do the hard work of penmanship and math, rewarding me by letting me write a stage play that we performed at school. Later, she let me create a fake newspaper and distribute copies at school, and we visited the offices of a real newspaper. She changed my life and made me into a lifelong writer.
After that, I was just always scribbling, writing fan fiction in my school workborks. My first serious writing project was a group effort: a handful of us in high school used an electronic bulletin board, basically like a Reddit forum, to create a kind of exquisite corpse story. Each of us took turns writing our own chapters, featuring ridiculous characters we had created, and challenged each other to follow up the most outlandish plot twists. I learned mental flexibility and the ability to roll with the punches from that bizarropants exercise.
Every step of the way since then, I've learned more about writing by being around other people. Going to queer open mics and other literary events where I shared my work alongside other people's. Being published in magazines and anthologies where I worked with great editors and featured in the same table of contents as total heroes. Working in journalism and writing articles. And doing collaborative work in television and comics where my voice is just part of a larger patchwork.
I have found liberation through daydreaming so many freaking times. But I have never, ever done it alone. It has always been a team effort.
My latest novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, is in a way an encapsulation of this process: it's about a young woman who went into desolate places alone, and discovered a magical power that she's decided to share with her heartbroken mother. She's also a PhD student who is facing the erosion of the public sphere, the devaluing of the humanities, the closing off of those open spaces where people can create together. And that act of sharing her lonely magic with her mother slowly leads, over the course of the book, to her finding other people to share it with. A community forms, and it makes everyone stronger and more fruitful.
Imagination is about the things we can't see — or sometimes, the things we can barely glimpse, like the shark in Jaws, the monster in so many horror movies, or the tiny hints and glances in media stories that go on to power fanfiction. We say that a work "leaves something to the imagination" when it hides something important — because the greatest power of our imaginative selves is curiosity.
I've found over and over that when I speak honestly to other people about my fears and paranoias, I get a reality check. I can't really dream of a better future on my own, only with others. You're giving this award to me personally — but it really belongs to everyone in my life who has shared their daydreams and reveries with me, especially people like my partner, Annalee Newitz.
And that brings me back to the thing of domination. I survived a lot of stuff thanks to my ability spin bullshit and invent people, in concert with my friends. Thanks, in fact, to playfulness. And everyone from Charlie Chaplin to George Clinton has figured out that the would-be authoritarians cannot handle playfulness and constructive nonsense.
Imagination and empathy are closely linked. People who refuse to do the hard work of empathizing with others — and I do believe this is a choice — also tend to have stunted imaginations. They cannot envision anything other than putting their boot on someone else's neck and crushing the spirits of those they disagree with.
The real power of imagination is that it helps us envision something better than raw power. Speculative fiction, the genre I write in, has moved steadily over the decades away from hero worship of the lone genius who conquers with the power of singular will. Instead, it’s moved toward celebrating cooperation and community. The result has been a new golden age of SFF that I am so proud to be a tiny part of.
Generative A.I., the thing that drives our whole economy right now, is a perfect metaphor for the abject failure of imagination on the part of the powerful. Generative A.I. has no imagination and offers no new insights. It's a mere predictive engine that uses statistics to find the most likely next thing. What's the next word in a sequence, the next pixel in a picture? This is the opposite of imagination, which is so often about finding the least likely thing, the startling incongruity. I worry that so many of us are outsourcing our imaginations and our whole creative selves to these stochastic parrots.
So if you love imagination as much as I do — if you want to see imagination used in service of society— we must reject the technologies that seek to isolate us and stunt our minds. We need to reject hierarchical thinking, and especially the idea that imposing our will on others is virtuous.
I guess what I've come here to say is that imagination is intrinsically an act of service, and that imagination is nothing without empathy and kindness. Every vision of the future is really a theory of human nature and the one I choose is the one that says we can create larger than life flights of fancy when we really see each other, and that's how we lift everyone into the light.
Thank you so, so much.