To celebrate World Futures Day on March 1st, we at Envisioning hosted a series of talks, workshops, and round tables around the themes of innovation and futures thinking.
One of the round tables that we hosted was “Decolonizing Futures”, a space to talk about science fiction subgenres that are decolonizing mainstream futures. After all, the future is much more than the Jetsons could make of it, so we invited the panelists Alexander Meireles da Silva, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Lauren Klein, Monika Bielskyte, and Sarena Ulibarri to join us for a chat documented in the video featured below.
During this 1h30 round table, you will learn about:
- Utopias vs dystopia: are they really so opposite or just different sides of the same coin?
- Solarpunk: what books and authors are addressing this prominent science fiction subgenre.
- Brazilian science fiction: learn about the new subgenres sertãopunk, amazonfuturism, tupinipunk, politics of recognition and global south sci-fi.
- Sexism and stereotypes in science fiction: why we should reconsider space opera from a decolonial perspective, the beauty representations and expressions in science fiction.
- Science fiction and politics of recognition: why we should be writing about our own cultures so that we don’t leave this task for foreigners that might distort and dishonor our traditions.

The Zoom chat cannot be streamed on YouTube, but the fruitful conversation that happened there was something that the participants asked to be shared later on. So here is a list of works mentioned in the chat:
- Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures
- Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory
- Protopia Futures: a post by Martin Mitchell
- Eutopia: good(eu) topia(place)
- History of the Future, by Georges Minois
- Por que fazer o Nordeste sertãopunk?, a post by Alan de Sá
- Star Trek: Lower Decks
- The Expanse
- Braulio Tavares and Roberto de Sousa Causo: Brazilian authors cited
- Ada Palmer, Kameron Hurley, Ann Leckie: authors deconstructing space opera
- Diana Slattery: Glide
- Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers
- Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World
- Speculative fiction in translation
- Desi solar punk, Desi futurism and Turfurism
- Nirvana, movie by Gabriele Salvatores
- Indra’s Web, short story by Vandana Singh — example of desi solarpunk
- Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown
- Writing the other: Learn to write characters very different from you sensitively and convincingly
- Three Percent: a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester
- New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color
- Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of ‘fear’
- New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival
- Rebuilding Tomorrow: Anthology of Life After the Apocalypse
- Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation
- Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation
- The Waste Tide, a novel by Chen Qiufan
- Ambiguity Machines: and Other stories, by Vandana Singh
- The Woman who Thought She was a Planet: And Other Stories
- Castles in Spain: 25 Years of Spanish Fantasy and Science Fiction
- Diverse U.S. speculative fiction/science fiction: Nisi Shawl’s anthology New Suns and the New Suns academic book series through Ohio State UP.
- Alucinadas: Women Writers of Spanish Science Fiction
- Tales of the Tikongs, by Epeli Hau’ofa
- Bio of a Space Tyrant, by Piers Anthony
- See No Stranger, by Valarie Kaur
- The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future
- Aesthetic Autonomy, Lauren Klein’s website
- Imagine 2200: Climate fiction for future ancestors, short story contest
- Women of colour spend billions on bleaching creams worldwide every year
- Fantasticursos, Alexander Meireles’ channel on YouTube
- Protopia Futures, Monika Bielskyte’s profile on Instagram
- Lauren Klein’s profile on Instagram