Imagining Tomorrow: what we can do now

Interview with Emma Newman

Imagining Tomorrow is a podcast series produced by Friends of the Earth that imagines a hopeful future. One inspired by initiatives, research and action already happening in the world today, but which might not be widely known. The series is researched, written and presented by the novelist Emma Newman. Across 10 episodes, Imagining Tomorrow explores a wide range of subjects, including how we heat and cool our homes, the impact of our pensions in divesting from fossil fuels, ways to support wildlife in our waterways and gardens, always focused on how we can reach a more sustainable and just world. In this feature-length interview, Emma talks with Bending The Arc editor Katherine Stansfield about moving beyond dystopias, channelling rage into writing, and what Star Trek can teach us.

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Can you tell me how the podcast came about?

There's two different elements to this. There's the how it became a podcast for Friends of the Earth, and there's the thought processes leading to its creation. The most recently published four novels of mine are very dystopian, near future science fiction. The year that the last of those four was published, I was going through a divorce and then had a breakdown, then the pandemic. An existential crisis on multiple levels, and at a creative level because I started to reflect on how, in the giant conversation that is science fiction as a genre, all the contributions that I'd made to that to date were portrayals of a very negative future. I think I wanted to grab people by the shoulders and shake them and say, ‘look, this is what you're going to get if we continue on this trajectory’. That's not the only reason I wrote those novels, but that was one of them, and I was thinking there must be a way to make a more positive contribution, not only to the conversation within my genre and within my world but also to reach outside that genre.

I wondered, what can I do as a very autistic, very shy person desperate to do something to help but not the kind of person who can go on marches? Then I ended up going to Shropshire to house-sit with one of my closest friends. We had this week-long, intense conversation about the world, about people, about what we can do to make things better, about social justice.

She worked for Friends of the Earth at the time and said, I think you should make something with all these ideas. Would you consider making a podcast for Friends of the Earth? And that's where that project came from.

I wanted to create something that spanned both fiction and non-fiction, that spoke to people who love genre fiction, but also people who love the environment, to unite those groups because a lot of my readership are very passionate about these things. I was hoping Friends of the Earth and my readership would benefit from that cross-pollination of worlds and ideas.

Something the podcast addresses is how people can make changes in their lives from a pragmatic standpoint, acknowledging that people have jobs and caring responsibilities, are short on time and money. I found that a very refreshing approach.

I feel it's really important to have that concern front and centre because we are all trying to survive late-stage capitalism. We are all exhausted and working three jobs. If you're trying to have a conversation with people about how we can make a better world, you can't ignore that. It frustrates me when you have conversations which don't acknowledge the role of the economic structures of oppression that we live within and how they are actively preventing us from making changes. People aren't lazy, people aren't uncaring, people are incredibly concerned about these things and incredibly passionate, but they also can't afford to feed their kids or turn the heating on, and it makes me furious. So much of my rage goes into my work.

Previously I channelled that rage into my science fiction, but I wanted to channel it in a more positive way with Imagining Tomorrow. And to do that I was always coming back to the questions of what are the real-world barriers and how can we help each other to overcome them.

Having made the podcast, do you still feel rage is necessary in your own writing?

That week-long conversation, at the centre of it was rage and despair. I was battling a huge amount of despair about the way things are and the planet. That was another motivation for doing this podcast, to force myself to look for the good.

Rage and despair are arguably negative emotions, but if you can find a way to harness them as a motivational spur to do things then they can be incredibly important. Let's slip comfortably into feminism for a moment because this is all intersectional, all of this is connected. Women are socialised to not be angry and not to express anger which disempowers us in so many ways. If we can tap into what I believe is a righteous anger about the systemic injustices that are leading to the destruction of the planet and of 99.9 % of humanity's lives then we can start to act. For a long time I was channelling that rage into my fiction but I was starting to think, somebody will read this book and go, ‘well shit that's awful’, close the book and then walk away. There's no scope within a fictional work to then say, so now we're feeling like absolute shit, what should we do about this?

The beauty of the podcast was moving into a non-fiction space where I could say, okay, this is really bad, but look at these amazing things. What can we do together? What can we actually do about this? And you can have that practical conversation with the listener in a non-fiction space.

That’s interesting because each episode of the podcast starts with a visualisation of the future that dramatises whatever that episode explores, e.g. community ownership schemes. That’s very much a fiction strategy. Can you tell me about that and how that came into the podcast?

So, I mean, you can take the girl out of the fiction world... There's nothing that can stop me writing science fiction. Those vignettes at the beginning are speculative fiction but they’re incredibly positive. I believe that there is no greater tool for humanity in terms of change and the pursuit of change than narrative and stories. We are woven out of stories, everything about the way that humans process information is through an understanding of context that we gain through story.

For me it was important to help people visualise something because I’ve realised over my life that a lot of people don't imagine, whereas I never stop doing that. I was thinking, if I can bring people with me into what I imagine and say, ‘here's how we get there’, that that could be a powerful tool. I wanted to say to people: imagine what this would be like. Imagine having this as the real world. This is not out of reach. My hope is that when people listen to the speculative fiction openings of the podcast and then they listen to the full episode they will see there’s nothing stopping us from having that world aside from those systemic barriers that I've been endeavouring to show how to get over. Even though it’s a non-fiction podcast, I didn't want to lose the power of imagining something better. And as I said in the podcast, if you can't imagine a better world, you can't make it happen.

Why is it then, do you think, that dystopia still holds such power in many mediums?

For people who don't read a lot of science fiction or write science fiction, they can often be surprised when they hear science fiction writers saying their work is all about today. And funnily enough, living within a dystopia as we are, the natural output of writing about today is dystopian!

In my own books it was very much a logical extrapolation from what we are experiencing today and what that could create in the future. I think that’s why we see so much dystopian fiction: it's a way of taking the water that we swim in in our everyday lives and making some of it more obvious or making some of it more arch and writ large in the hope that it will make people consider the parallels between what they're experiencing in that fictional world and how it relates to their own experience.

As writers we exist in this world and we are frightened and processing the experience of going through these appalling times, and so this is the stuff that we're writing about. It's how my genre explores those fears. It's really hard to logically extrapolate from today and have a very plausible utopian near future. And that’s something I was wrestling with at the time of that conversation at the cottage. I was thinking: I don't want to write dystopian fiction anymore because I feel I'm making a negative contribution to that conversation. I want to write about something more positive.

The greater challenge that we have as writers existing today is letting ourselves imagine a near future that is better than where we are now that can remain plausible. And that's where it gets really hard because things are so bad. But one of my life goals is to write a genuinely utopian science fiction that is near future and plausible.

I know you’re a big fan of Star Trek which explores a future that’s utopian in its ideals. Do you feel that Star Trek’s vision of the future might have a role to play in moving away from dystopias towards thrutopian stories?

One of the things that’s most important about Star Trek, and I'm talking about classic, Next Generation, Discovery, Strange New Worlds, all of them, is that it’s about striving to be better as people. For me that’s at the heart of it, that we are striving to be the best of ourselves. My space dad Captain Picard is like my North Star in terms of morals. For me he’s a great example of somebody who has strength drawn from a clear moral compass and the fundamental belief in the best of humanity. Star Trek is the utopian vision that we experience in the mainstream media space but it’s set so far into the future, so distant, that it's impossible for us to imagine how to get there.

That’s interesting to think about in terms of speculative fiction, isn't it? Perhaps a relevant question is how far ahead we’re speculating, and whether it’s useful, as writers, to bring our focus a bit closer to our own time. We know the future imagined in Star Trek is great, but we don't know how they got there. That's not the point of the show. We just want to be there.

Yes, and there were two key things in the Star Trek backstory. One is that we go through World War Three, and two is that as soon as Cochrane invents the warp drive, the Vulcans come and say, hey, let's introduce you into the club. This means we’re guided by an already far more advanced species of people who have figured out a lot of stuff that we're still just children about. For me, the second of these is the ‘big lie’ that we talk about in science fiction. In my dystopian Planetfall novels there were two big lies: one was that we have neural chips that are advanced eighty years in the future, and the other was we have near-sublight travel. Everything else I kept within very strict hard SciFi. So when you're looking at Star Trek, it's tempting to think, how could we get there? But fundamentally baked into the world are A: the thing we really don't want to happen which is World War Three, and B: needing Vulcans to guide the way. And I'm not sure the Vulcans are real. But I think morally Star Trek can be a lot of help.

When we're living in a time when the very worst of humanity have the greatest amount of power, it seems even more important to have stories in which people collaborate and are motivated by something other than money. I mean, what a fucking revelation – people not motivated by money! So many times I've gushed about utopian ideals to people and they say, well, in the real world that'll never happen. And I'm like, open source! Open source software exists! This is people not motivated by money, they just want to make the world a better place. This can happen. That is what the power of Star Trek is for me.

I was struck by how often the activities explored in the podcast led to strengthening communities, even if that wasn’t the main aim of a project. This often led to ongoing projects – once people are connected and empowered, they have the confidence and skills to do more. That creates a legacy of community resilience which will become even more important as climate change impacts worsen, but in my own life this seems in short supply and society can feel very atomised. Is this something that surprised you in your research? I’m wondering if you had expected to focus more on the tech side when putting the series together, and how you feel about the balance between technological solutions and people power.

You can't write hard SciFi like I write without being a giant nerd. I have always loved technology. That's another reason I'm so filled with rage because there are so many shitty men that have made technology horrendous over my lifetime. I'm so angry that this is something I have always found exciting and fascinating and beautiful and a means for unlocking the potential of humanity, and it’s being snared by a very small number of really appalling men getting very rich from it and destroying the fabric of society in the process.

For the podcast it was easier to start with the tech side because there are things I want to achieve in my life that has made me research loads of things like green technologies. So that was my entry point and then when I discovered groups that were using an element of that type of technology, just looking at the work that they'd been doing, I got a hint that this is actually much bigger than I thought. A good example of that is the Cwm Arian wind turbine in episode one. When I found the group online I was focused on the turbine but then in conversation with them, the way that has grown into something far, far, bigger was genuinely surprising and heartening because I'd always had this kind of private thesis that you could still use technology within a utopian framework. You could still have technology that would enable people to live in a way that is less harmful to the environment and less harmful to each other. And to actually find people proving that thesis was incredibly exciting.

I went into making the podcast thinking, it's going to be the tech which is going to be at the centre of this. Then early in the research, I realised, ‘no, you muffin, it's the people. It's always the people’. I write character-centric sci-fi for God's sake, of course it's the bloody people! It was beautiful to discover that that really was the genuine path out of crisis because it is achievable, though it's hard because as you say we're often atomised, isolated, the pandemic has done so much damage on that front. And we come back to the financial structures we exist in: we don't have the money to socialise now, we're losing our third spaces, we don't have those places to congregate where you don’t have to pay for the privilege. We've lost so much but those community groups showed that not only could it be regained but that it can become so much more and unlock solutions to all these shared problems.

The podcast is full of examples of people doing just that right now. Do you have a favourite discovery, having learned so much about all the things people are doing right now to imagine a more hopeful tomorrow?

That’s like asking someone to choose their favourite child! I don't know if I could narrow it to one, but I think I can narrow it to three.

One is the community heating model and the work that GreenSCIES are doing. This is a holistic approach of taking heat that is a waste product and a problem and using it to heat people's homes that are cold and damp, which is a problem. That’s so elegant and beautiful. I used to work in central London many years ago. Going on the Tube, feeling that heat and knowing that that is a problem literally baked in, that the clay structure of the Underground is always going to keep the heat that is generated there. Having a model that is extracting that heat to warm people’s homes – the level of problem-solving fills me with joy.

Another favourite is talking with Professor Chris Chuck about seaweed and fundamentally rebuilding the idea of materials and where materials come from, from the molecular level up. I felt like my brain was cracked open in that conversation. It felt genuinely thrilling to have the privilege of being able to talk to somebody who is that smart and actually in a position to make things happen. That was something I loved.

The other one was the AgriSound pollinator listeners, because that was a great example of a very narrow application of a form of AI that is not harmful. As a writer I have a pathological hatred of generative AI and the way it's being forced upon us, how we’re already seeing it destroy many of the ways we earn income. But what I love about AgriSound is it’s an application of machine learning AI which has been used to do so many great things like protein folding and discovering new forms of antibiotics. That kind of AI is brilliant and can solve a problem that would be impossible within the financial model of our society. There is no way that we can employ enough people to stand in millions of hectares of fields and count bees. For me this is a genuine application of a cutting edge technology that solves a big problem, but also gathers data to help people solve the secondary problem of how do we bring back pollinator levels. And that made me very happy.

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Emma Newman writes short stories, novels and novellas in multiple speculative fiction genres. She is also a Hugo Award-winning podcaster and an audiobook narrator.

She won the British Fantasy Society Best Short Story Award 2015 for “A Woman’s Place” in the 221 Baker Streets anthology. Between Two Thorns, the first book in Emma's Split Worlds urban fantasy series, was shortlisted for the BFS Best Novel and Best Newcomer 2014 awards. Her science-fiction novel, After Atlas, was shortlisted for the 2017 Arthur C. Clarke award and the third novel in the Planetfall series, Before Mars, has been shortlisted for a BSFA Best Novel award. The Planetfall series was shortlisted for the 2020 Best Series Hugo Award. Her latest novel is a historical fantasy swashbuckler called The Vengeance (published 8 May 2025, Solaris Books).

Emma’s hobbies include dressmaking, LARP and tabletop role playing.

Read more about Emma’s work here.

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