The following are notes from “Liberatory Futures: Lessons from the Protopian Prize,” a session with Ruthanna Emrys and Suzette Brooks Masters at Untameable Futures (U+, 21 October 2026).
Most of us can describe the futures we fear. Far fewer can describe, in concrete detail, the futures we are working towards. That gap matters: without a clear picture of the destination, it is hard to plan, easy to burn out, and difficult to recruit others. The Protopian Prize, a short fiction contest for “achievable, optimistic futures”, was built to address this. Its first year drew more than 700 stories, and winners and runners-up have recently been announced. The team has also been analyzing the content of stories to get a better sense of how people imagine change. Suzette and Ruthanna used the session to share some of what they learned from the process, and took participants on their own Protopian journey.
Why write about better futures?
Ruthanna Emrys, a science fiction writer, cognitive psychologist and lead judge for the Democratic Futures category, explained the prize’s purpose. Stories are part of an ecosystem: hopeful ones widen what people think is plausible, build hope and a sense of agency, and can inspire real change. Dystopias can provide warnings and help people understand real-world oppression, but also often make people turn away.
Writing protopian stories has value even for people who will never publish. Ruthanna compared it to singing around a campfire: a computer scientist, a plumber and a parent can sing together, not always on key, and still enjoy it and feel bonded by the experience. For anyone stuck in a planning rut or feeling helpless, imagining a better future is a way to think about new directions and new forms of agency, and a counterweight to narratives of hopelessness.
What the slush readers found
Suzette Brooks Masters, a philanthropic advisor and senior fellow at Democracy Funders Network, read about 70 of the 700 entries. According to her, the stories varied widely in quality, but shared several patterns.
Two patterns stood out. First, many stories depicted local deliberation in citizen assemblies or similar groups, frequently supported by AI. Second, many stories imagined government as force of positive change. Suzette noted that this surprised her, given how distrustful people are of government today, but it makes sense: the Democratic Futures category in particular encouraged people to imagine improvements over current governance. The stories also showed concern that technology should enhance human experience rather than replace it, and often suggested ways of constraining tool use in order to keep the overall system robust.
The hardest thing for many writers was explaining how change happens. Stories often jumped to a near future where things had changed without showing the steps in between. Stories that did show a theory of change usually started from a crisis or from something local. Few followed through: how does a citizen assembly in one town expand to a practice found around the world? Stories also rarely showed the details of what government does beyond deliberation, even when they depicted it positively, and few dealt with lawmaking as a route to change.
Who wrote the stories, and what was missing
The prize did not collect personal data, so the organisers used the settings of the stories as a rough proxy for origin. About half of those with real-world locations were set in English-speaking North America, but many were set in Asia and Africa, including a notable number set in Iran, Nigeria and Kenya. Stories from the Spanish-speaking world were fewer, a gap the organisers hope to address next year.
The stories also showed clear blind spots. A plurality of democracy stories focused on deliberation inside the meeting room. Practices such as liquid democracy, proxy voting, rights for nature, and ombudspeople for future generations appeared less often than might be expected given real-world practice. Grassroots movements appeared in a handful of stories, and NGOs and nonprofits in almost none. Ruthanna and Suzette suggested that the frontier of imagined democracy should push further beyond real-world experiments.
Workshop time: Stretching the imagination
Moving into workshop mode, the session offered two exercises. The first asked participants to reshuffle how goods and services are provided: what if the government paid for books and bread, or an employer paid for lamp repair? Participants’ stories included a public jitney that repairs your lamp and delivers your dry cleaning, and a neighbor who swaps green waste for vegetables.
The second exercise used a “Protopian Idea Generator” that combines a goal (such as lifelong learning, watershed management or public safety) with a civic method (such as crowdfunding, reputation systems or data trusts). Participants wrote short scenarios in which the method serves the goal. Ruthanna pointed to Ada Palmer’s prompt for thinking about change: what is in flux now that was not the same 200 years ago, and so will not be the same 200 years from now? Change, she noted, comes from many factors: war and competition, cultural comparison, population movement, economic shifts, technology such as the printing press, and new ideas or moral movements, with climate an increasingly powerful force.
What we take from it
The session treated imagination as a practice, not an escape. The organisers’ message was that positive futures need to be drawn in detail, that the steps from here to there matter as much as the destination, and that the people who write them can be anyone. The prize plans a second round next year, a report analysing the stories (now available here), and further events, including a conversation on democratic futures in December.