How Fantasy Worlds Can Spark Real Change | Annalee Newitz | TED

It has been a long few years.

There are just so many problems in the world,

so much is going wrong that I just … I can't even anymore.

So I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

I'm going to run away.

I'm going to pick up a book about glamorous wizards on another planet,

and I'm going to read about how they wear gorgeous bespoke suits

and have romances, and of course, defeat an evil dictatorship along the way.

Now listen, I know how that sounds.

This is the kind of story

that's going to take me away from my problems

rather than helping me face them.

But as a journalist and a science fiction writer,

I've witnessed the way escapist stories

can nourish our relationship with the truth

and help us see the real world with fresh eyes.

And I'm here to tell you that your favorite escapist stories

can do the same thing for you,

and maybe set you on the path toward building a better world.

I want to introduce you

to an amazing group of science fiction fans.

They're called the 501st Legion, and they're cosplayers.

That stands for "costume player,"

and in this case that means

that they dress up like stormtroopers and clone troopers,

and pretty much any other bad guy from the Star Wars franchise.

There's a few good guys thrown in there, too.

Now there's members of the 501st all over the world.

Your town might actually have a chapter of it,

and they do typical things that science fiction fans do.

They go to conventions,

they march in parades and show off their costumes.

But you know what else they do? Charity.

They raise money for the Red Cross and the Make-A-Wish Foundation

and lots of other groups.

And that's not exactly what you expect from bad guys.

In fact, it doesn't match our stereotype

of fans who go this deep making their own costumes.

We imagine that those people would be hiding away from the world,

but these guys, they've re-engaged with it.

This is Andrew Liptak.

He's a historian and a member of the 501st.

And he recently wrote a book called "Cosplay: A History"

where he talks about the origin of these stormtroopers' love of charity.

And he explained that it started out

because groups of these fans would get together

and they'd swap tips on how to build armor

and what to do when your armor is falling apart.

But they began to realize that people in the group

couldn't all afford the fancy injection-molded plastic

that they needed to build these costumes,

and they started raising money for each other.

And then they started thinking about other communities

that could use money and resources, too.

And that's how they reimagined their community

as going way beyond Star Wars fans into groups of strangers.

And this is how escapist stories can help us reimagine our relationships

with each other and other communities.

Now I want to introduce you to a character I created

for my science fiction novel, "The Terraformers."

Their name is Scrubjay, and they're a sentient flying train.

Now they come from a distant future on another planet

where autonomous vehicles are people,

and in fact, Scrubjay is part of a worker-owned cooperative

of other sentient flying trains

that bargain collectively with cities about how to provide the best service,

most comfortable trains.

And when I was creating the character of Scrubjay,

there were certain things I knew for sure that would be true about them.

Like, I knew that they were going to fall in love

with an investigative journalist who's a cat, because obviously.

But what I didn't know was what Scrubjay the train would do for fun.

So I emailed the head of the Department of Public Transit in San Francisco,

my hometown,

and I said, "Would you talk to me about train consciousness?"

And luckily he said yes.

His name is Jeff Tumlin, and he's a science fiction fan.

And it turns out he'd been thinking his whole life

about what trains would be like if they were people.

So what would trains do for fun?

Jeff said they'd play strategy games

because of course, they're constantly thinking

about how to optimize their routes

and how to get from one place to another in the most efficient way possible.

So strategy games, definitely it.

Now I think that Jeff and I had this admittedly odd meeting of the minds

partly because he and I are both engaged in the same project.

We both want the public to understand

that transit is part of a healthy human future.

You know, the mobility provided by public transit,

it brings communities together,

it helps people get to work or have a fun vacation or trip,

even if they can't afford to own and maintain a car,

or if they don't want to

because they don't like what cars are doing to the environment.

Now as a writer,

I can invite my readers to value public transit

by personifying it,

by creating a character who is lovable and kind,

and has a cute cat companion.

But Jeff, he has to go into rooms

full of city representatives and stakeholders,

and ask them to put resources

into our public transit system in San Francisco,

which, by the way, desperately needs it.

But when he talks to those stakeholders,

he takes inspiration from science fiction

because he tells them a story about how the city will become healthier

if they invest now in transit

that will continue to function for ten years, or maybe even 100 years.

Now luckily, San Francisco is putting some resources

into upgrading our transit this year, and hopefully next year too.

And that's not because

all of our public servants are reading science fiction,

although that would be nice.

It's because they're taking inspiration from this vision of a future

that doesn't exist yet,

a future that could come to pass,

where public transit is robust and allows the city to be a healthier,

more connected place.

And this is a way that escapist stories allow us to reimagine our relationship

with the places where we live

and reimagine the kinds of services

we want to offer to the people who live there.

Let me give you another example.

I recently was lucky enough to hang out with a group of researchers

who are studying how to mitigate the effects of coastal flooding

that comes from storms that will be coming more often due to climate change.

They’re building an engineering marvel called the Emerald Tutu,

and it was inspired by an escapist internet aesthetic known as goblincore.

Now before we get to the goblins,

let's talk a little bit about the engineering.

So the Emerald Tutu is a distributed network of floating gardens

that flare outward from the coastline like a ruffly tutu skirt.

And when coastal flooding comes, this acts as a permeable barrier.

And so as the waves come towards shore, it dampens their force,

preventing the kinds of floods that ruin infrastructure and claim lives.

I was lucky enough to be there when the Emerald Tutu team was testing out

one of the pieces of the Emerald Tutu.

Each of those gardens that's tied together in a network

is made from a giant blob of biomass.

The team nicknamed it the “chungus.”

Here you can see the chungus at a lab that I visited last year,

the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

And they were testing out the chungus

in one of the lab's coolest pieces of equipment.

This is a 104-meter-long cement flume full of water,

and at one end there are these huge robotic paddles

that can create massive storm waves.

So what the team wanted to know was,

is this potential floating garden

going to be able to actually dampen the force of storm waves?

So they used those paddles to unleash huge waves.

And it worked.

The waves washed past and through the chungus,

and they became smaller.

And by the time they hit the synthetic shoreline at the other end,

they were just this gentle lapping tidal bore.

Now here you can see Louiza Wise, one of the engineers.

She's in the boat.

And what she's doing is she's attaching these thick pieces of plastic ribbon

to what will be the bottom of the chungus.

And that's to simulate the seaweed and grasses

that will eventually grow on the outside of this biomass.

And what they found was

the more that seaweed and grasses grow on it,

the better it is at dampening wave force.

So the greener and more beautiful it becomes,

the more effective it is at preventing storm surges.

And I had just never seen technology like this before.

So I asked the team's architect, Gabe Cira,

who you can see there in the water with brown hair,

and I said, how did you get this idea to do this weird thing?

And he said, "Oh, it was goblincore."

And --

Now if you're very online, you may have heard of goblincore.

It is a fashion and design aesthetic that's intended to evoke

the kind of cozy, bucolic world of Hobbiton,

where the hobbits live in "Lord of the Rings,"

or maybe the mystical, magical cities of "Dungeons and Dragons."

It’s a little bit like cottagecore, which is a bucolic, simple aesthetic

but with more bugs and mushrooms, and dirt, and messiness.

It's the perfect aesthetic for urbanites

who are sick of seeing all of the hard, gray edges of concrete and steel

that you see in most cities.

And it was goblincore that inspired the Emerald Tutu team

to think about using nature to deal with the problems of storm surges

in Boston Harbor, near where they work.

And here you can see they’re testing out a larger sample of the Emerald Tutu

right now in Boston Harbor.

This is a new design for the chungus.

So it's not a bag of biomass.

It's a kind of snail-shaped woven biomass mat.

You can see the grass growing on top of it.

They call this the “cinnamon roll.”

And they're not the only group that's exploring this idea

of soft, green infrastructure.

There are groups of city planners and engineers all over the world

who are trying to bring nature into cities,

kind of creating like a plug-and-play ecosystem

or an instant wetland.

And the Emerald Tutu team could not have gotten there without goblincore.

So this is a weird but crucial lesson to keep in mind,

because changing the world doesn't start

the moment that you break ground on a new infrastructure project

or put resources toward building a better train.

It starts with a fantasy.

It starts with imagining another world

and believing that things don't have to be the way that they are now.

So the next time you're reading about sentient flying trains

or watching a movie about wizards on other planets

or enjoying whatever kind of escapist stories give you happiness,

hold that sense of infinite possibility in mind

and put it into practice in your life.

Find a community that you can reach out to and provide help or resources.

Get involved in a local project in your city

to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Because remember, sometimes we have to escape from our problems

in order to solve them.

Thank you.

(Applause)