For your reading list, these books meld sci-fi, social justice
Our world changes when we dare to ask what if … What if our carriages could harness the strength of 100 horses? What if we could transport our voices across oceans? What if we could hold all the information we desired in the palms of our hands?
Science fiction and fantasy have been asking the great and powerful what if for generations.
In fact, early speculative fiction seems to have predicted much of the technology we have now: 104 years before NASA launched Apollo-11, three Americans in Jules Verne’s “From Earth to the Moon” boarded a “space-bullet” in Florida, and decades before we had cellphones and 3-D printers, characters on “Star Trek” were using communicator and replicator devices aboard the Starship Enterprise.
Though entertaining, these six works of speculative fiction, each with a heart for social justice, offer more to readers after the book is closed. And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll cite one of these books as having inspired some social change before its realization.
