The future we write instead

My job is to write about a better world and make people donate to making it happen. I'm a communications intern at an environmental NGO in Nairobi and I'm good at the work, but there is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from writing about crises at scale. At some point in the evening I need to write something where I control the outcome. The speculative fiction I write is set in East Africa, usually near-future, usually within thirty years. I'm not interested in dystopia as a genre, not because I think things are fine, but because I spend all day in the actual dystopia and it does not need my help. What I write tends toward something I'd describe as complicated survival: people doing things that work for strange reasons, futures that are neither good nor bad but specific. I went to Strathmore University and studied communications and the creative writing elective I took in my second year was the only class I attended every single session of. The lecturer used to say: 'Journalism tells you what happened. Fiction tells you what it felt like to be there.' I've been testing that idea ever since.