A Thanksgiving letter to the storytellers who keep expanding our sense of what the future can be.
Thanksgiving invites us to pause and name the things that make our lives richer, stranger, and more beautiful. For many of us, that list will always include science fiction, speculative fiction, and the people who create it.
This is a thank-you letter to the writers, past and present, who keep pushing the edges of the possible. To the authors who fill our shelves and e-readers, who haunt our late-night thoughts, and who quietly change the way we see the world.
Thank You to the Worldbuilders
To the authors who invent galaxies, empires, and hidden pocket universes: thank you for the star maps we carry around in our heads. You’ve given us orbital habitats and ringworlds, generational starships and quantum archives, city-ships and wandering planets. You’ve shown us how fragile a single world can be—and how precious.
To the creators of intricate futures and alternate histories: your worlds are more than settings. They’re laboratories for ideas. Through them, we experiment with different technologies, different power structures, different timelines branching from a single changed decision. You remind us that nothing about our present is inevitable.
Thank You to the Explorers of the Human Heart
To the writers who use aliens, AIs, and posthuman beings to talk about us: thank you for stories that ask what it means to be a person, a community, a species. For every cyborg grappling with identity, every synthetic consciousness learning to name its own desires, every alien culture that reflects our biases back to us in sharp relief.
To those who write about love, grief, family, and friendship among the stars: you show us that emotional truth doesn’t vanish just because the setting has three suns or a sky full of orbital elevators. You give us found families on starships, fragile truces in orbital bazaars, and quiet moments of grace in the middle of galaxy-shaking crises.
Thank You to the Question-Askers
To the authors who never stop asking “What if?” What if we meet ourselves across timelines? What if climate catastrophe reshapes our cities and our myths? What if the tools we build to help us outgrow us? Those questions don’t stay on the page. They follow us into classrooms, research labs, policy debates, and late-night conversations.
To the writers who let the future be complicated: thank you for refusing easy answers. For futures that are neither shiny utopias nor unbroken dystopias, but living, messy, human worlds where progress and harm coexist. You help us imagine better futures without lying about how hard they are to build.
Thank You to the Boundary-Breakers
To the voices that were long kept at the margins and wrote anyway: thank you to the authors who reshaped the genre by insisting that other perspectives belong here—writers of color, queer and trans writers, disabled writers, writers from every culture and tradition. You’ve given us futures that don’t just include diversity, but are built from different assumptions in the first place.
To the writers who blend genres and defy labels: for stories that are part science fiction, part fantasy, part horror, part myth. For slipstream narratives that refuse to be pinned down. You remind us that the border between “realism” and “speculative” is thinner than we think—and that the world itself is stranger than any neat category.
Thank You for the Warnings and the Hope
To the authors who give us cautionary tales: your work lights up the warning signs—surveillance without limits, technology without ethics, ecological collapse, authoritarian drift. You show us the road we’re on, and the exits we might still take.
To the authors who dare to write hopeful futures: hope is not naivety; it’s a discipline. Thank you for solarpunk communities cobbling together better ways to live, for post-scarcity societies wrestling with new questions, for futures where cooperation, care, and justice aren’t afterthoughts but foundations. You give us something to work toward, not just something to fear.
Thank You to the Quiet Voices
Not every story is a galaxy-spanning epic. This is a thank you as well:
- To the short story writers, who compress entire universes into a handful of pages.
- To the indie and small-press authors, who take risks that larger markets won’t.
- To the translators, who smuggle futures across languages so we can all share them.
- To the anthology and magazine editors, who keep discovering and championing new voices.
- To the writers just starting out, scribbling on lunch breaks, late nights, and in the cracks between responsibilities—you are already part of this long conversation.
Why This Matters: Stories That Make Us Better
Science fiction and speculative fiction don’t really predict the future. They do something harder and more necessary: they widen our sense of what could be.
They ask us to look at our tools and institutions and relationships and wonder, Could this be different? They invite empathy for lives we’ve never lived and bodies we’ve never inhabited. They teach us that change is not only possible, but constant—that the future is not something that simply happens to us, but something we participate in shaping.
A Thanksgiving Letter to Every Sci-Fi Author
So to every author who has ever sent a story out into the world, uncertain how it would land: thank you. Thank you for the sleepless nights at the keyboard, the drafts that never quite worked, the risks you took on strange ideas and stranger characters.
This Thanksgiving, between the food and the gatherings and the quiet moments, may we all find a little time to be grateful for the books that bent our minds, broke our hearts in necessary ways, and left us looking at the night sky with new questions. And to the stories still unwritten, and the writers still finding their voices: we’re thankful for you, too.
