Welcome to Imaginauticaa!
Welcome, traveller! I’m so delighted you’re here. But where even is ‘here’? Great question! I can already tell we’re going to be friends.
Imaginauticaa is a place where curious, sensitive creatives can come when they need hope about the future.
I don’t know about you, but for a while now, I’ve felt pretty sad about the way the world seems to be going. Worsening ecological crises; humans treated like robots (and then replaced by robots); the theft of the arts by greedy corporations, and the factory-line attitude of those in power towards the rest of the human race.
And while all those things are, indeed, happening, I’m done feeling sad about it. Because, even though they keep telling us all this is inevitable, the future is still in flux. And I want to create something better. Do you feel the same?
I’m a pretty creative person. I have a lot of empathy. Feel things very strongly. Sometimes, I feel porous, like a raw nerve held up to the flame of the world. It hurts. If that sounds like you, keep reading.
When I felt sad as a kid, I used to build duvet forts. They could be anything I wanted. Castles guarded by dragons. Space ships. Time machines. The point was, they were spaces I felt safe enough to dream how things could be better.
So, Imaginauticaa is here to be your duvet fort. It’s a place we can work together to dream a future that isn’t full of tyranny and doom. Somewhere full of respectful conversation. Collaborative dreaming. Compassion. Because, if we can work together to imagine better, then we’ve done the hard work already, haven’t we? We’ve made the bit that doesn’t exist yet. And then, all we’ve got to do is bring it from our minds into the real world.
(By the way, the artwork for Imaginauticaa is drawn by me. I don’t believe there is currently an ethical way to use Generative AI, so I don’t use it. I do sometimes use stock photos in my posts, which are supplied by Unsplash. As far as I understand, these are all human-made. I pledge that Imaginauticaa is human-dreamt, human-felt, and human-built.)
Imaginauticaa is a place of, if not optimism, then hope. It’s a place for those with quiet visions, deep questions, and a propensity for dreaming. Here, we come together to a dream space to build a web of possible futures, and find ways to work towards making them come true.
While I’ll be posting the main essays, I hope they’ll become conversations rather than lectures. I hope you’ll bring your own imaginings into the space, offer your thoughts, your dreams, your fears, your knowledge, your creativity. We’ll be talking about loads of different things, but Imaginauticaa centres itself around this question:
How can we build a robust society rooted in sustainability, compassion, and kindness?
To answer this, Imaginauticaa invokes something I like to call divergent futurism. This means visions of the future that are rooted in celebration of diversity, and the centring of the misfits and the marginalised. It involves using creativity of all kinds, and inviting all sorts of minds, to take a seat at the table and dream together. It’s going to take a lot of courage, but I have faith we can do it.
If you want to be part of that conversation, please subscribe!
What’s an Imaginaut anyway?
I guess that’s up to you! But I think a good imaginaut is someone who is a deep thinker, a creative soul, and someone with a lot of kindness and compassion. Someone who sees the broken parts of the world and feels this deep need to do something about them.
As an imaginaut, you probably feel pretty uncomfortable with where things are headed. You’re worried about climate collapse, ecological disaster, soul-stealing software, the rise of fascism, and many other things. You’ll know that these troubling developments are rooted in misogyny, racism, and a deep divide between the wealthy and the impoverished. You probably feel it, really deep. It keeps you up at night sometimes. You cry about it. Maybe you’re not sure where to turn. Perhaps you feel like everyone around you is sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff, and you don’t know why they won’t wake up. You feel this weird affinity with Cassandra of Troy - who foresaw the fall of her city, and tried to warn its citizens, but was dismissed as mad until it was too late.
You probably want to do something about all this, but you feel small. Powerless. You’re just one person, after all. What can one, tiny person do against an army of gigantic monsters? Isn’t that how it feels sometimes? How do we fix this when all the people in charge seem hellbent on breaking it even more than it’s already broken? Doesn’t it just feel like you’re losing your mind?
You’re not. You’re not mad. Not sick or broken or wrong. You see the truth. You’re a visionary. And this space is for you. Hope is a discipline and we’ll build it together. And then we’ll build the world anew.
Welcome home.
What Do I get if I Join Imaginauticaa?
Imaginauticaa commits to always having a free tier, and that free tier will always look as it does now. If you join Imaginauticaa on the free tier, you’ll get:
Fortnightly essays from me about divergent futurism, and how we can imagine a better world.
I’ll respond to your comments on my essays, or to your emails, and take your ideas into account for future ones, always making sure to credit you if you’ve sparked an idea for a new post. (I’ll check in with you about how you want to be credited, first!)
You’ll be part of a community of other imaginauts, working together to dream better futures into being.
For the time being, Imaginauticaa will only offer a free tier, but in time, I hope to offer some other paid tiers, too. These will be opt-in, and won’t affect your free subscription if you choose not to. Here’s some of the things I’m hoping to offer soon:
Imaginaut’s Refuge
This will be my paid tier, and will offer some access to my multimedia storytelling projects, and some other gifts for the sensitive and hopeful.
I’m working on a huge, multi-media project at the moment, which will be science fiction story (don’t worry, it will definitely include octopuses!) and I really want to share my progress with Imaginauticaa. Unfortunately, anything currently put out onto the internet seems to be fair game to train AI models, which means it will almost definitely be stolen by bots and turned into slop. For this reason, I have no choice but to put any of my creative content - my fiction, my art, and my animations - behind a paywall. However, I commit to making this paywall as shallow as I can so that as many people as possible can access it.
In this tier, you’ll get:
Everything in the free tier, plus:
Access to some of the early drafts of my science fiction story.
Some posts and progress updates on my artwork and how it links to my story.
Some posts and progress updates on my animation and how it links to my story.
Character art and profiles, as and when they’re ready.
World notes, as and when they’re ready.
A bestiary of my imagined alien species, updated as it grows.
You’ll also get first dibs on the Kickstarter for this particular project once I’m ready to launch it and, if I can work out a way to make it possible, you may even get a slight reduction in pricing for the Kickstarter, too, to say thank you for supporting me this far!
You’ll also receive:
A monthly wellbeing workshop to help you find ways to navigate the maze between hope and despair.
A monthly creative challenge that present you with new ways of thinking about, and being in, the world as it is now, as well as the world as we one day hope it will be.
This tier won’t be launching for a while, but when it does, you’ll be notified.
Who Am I?
My name’s Becci. Hi! I’m a writer, artist, and animator based in the UK. In case you can’t tell, I love animals of all shapes and sizes. I’m also a pretty creative person and have dabbled in lots of creative things. I’ve always loved writing the most, though. In 2022, I published my first novel. It was called The Last Beekeeper, a YA dystopian fantasy, and its now part of a complete trilogy. I am also writing a dark fantasy series called The Nowhere Chronicles, and am about to start working on a new sci fi storytelling project, too!
In 2024 and 2025, my books won a bunch of indie awards, including The Wishing Shelf Gold Award (for The Last Beekeeper) and the Literary Titan Gold Award (for The Shadow and the Scream).
Alongside my writing, I work part-time in a state school library, which means I see, first-hand, how lots of the issues I’ll be discussing through Imaginauticaa affect young people today, and might determine their future. You’ll see me mention some interactions I have with students during my essays, and how I learn from, and reflect on, those interactions to come up with ways to build better futures.
In 2026, I was also diagnosed with ADHD and Autism (which, honestly, wasn’t a surprise), and I started to realise just how differently my mind works to other people’s. I’m a very deep thinker, highly empathetic, intellectually curious, and very imaginative, sometimes to my own detriment! I hope these abilities mean I can bring you optimism, creativity, and new ideas about divergent futures and ways we can imagine something better.
I’m definitely not an expert on ecology, meteorology, technology, or politics, but I do read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction. I’ll be referencing lots of books, journals, and articles where more knowledgeable people than me have suggested ideas and shared their expertise, and considering ways we can use this knowledge and expertise to imagine better futures. I also have a lot of concerns about where our society is headed and I have some ideas for what we can do about it.
What’s With All the Octopuses?
Another great question! I knew there was a reason I liked you. I think Octopuses are pretty amazing creatures. I could rave at you for ages about how brilliant octopuses are, but we don’t know each other that well yet, so I’ll save it for another time.
Suffice to say, I think the octopus is a perfect symbol for adaptability, divergence, and dreaming. They’re the epitome of what I mean when I talk about divergent futurism. They’re also the chosen symbol for a brilliant book called Neurofuturism and Leadership, by Kai Syng Tan.
Tan talks about tentacular pedagogy, and how we can use it to reframe leadership in our universities, shaking up the core of where and how we keep our knowledge, and how we can expand this pedagogy beyond the borders of universities. I thought this was a fantastic idea, so I wanted to build on it. I’ll reference Tan’s book a lot, and do my best to make clear the differences between what they mean by tentacular pedagogy, and what I mean when I talk about octopus dreaming.
Now, I know I said I wasn’t going to spew facts about octopuses at you, but I am going to tell you just five, because they’re the basis of our octopus dreaming, and octopus dreaming is how we bring divergent futurism into being. So:
Did you know that an octopus can intentionally edit it’s RNA? You’ve heard of DNA, right? The proteins that carry all the individual ingredients for how to be you. Well, RNA is the protein that carries that information to all your cells. But an octopus can bypass its DNA and edit its RNA, changing the intructions given to its cells. That means it can adapt pretty quickly to changing environments. Pretty neat, right?
Did you know that an octopus speaks through colour? They can change their skin colour and texture in an instant, both to hide from predators, but also to communicate with others.
Did you know that octopuses have been known to build gardens? We aren’t really sure why. Lots of scientists think it’s to mark territory, or defend their dens, but it could also be just because it’s fun.
Did you know that an octopus can taste with its arms and see with its skin? How wild is that? They’re synaesthetes!
Did you know an octopus can regrow a lost limb? Octopuses have lots of predators, so being able to regrow limbs that have been bitten off is a pretty useful skill.
Told you octopuses were cool! But how’s this relevant?
These are the skills we’ll be using to build our divergent futures. This is octopus dreaming!
We’ll imagine how we, the cellular individuals of society, can come together to edit our social structure from the bottom up. We can’t always wait for our leaders to catch up to what we so desperately need, which means we’ve got to find ways to build better ourselves. We’ll think about new ways of constructing social boundaries, reworking attitudes, and rearranging community needs, just like an octopus edits its own RNA.
We’ll find different ways of communicating through creativity and imagination. Sometimes that will be words, sometimes images, or music, or animation. If we’re going to imagine a divergent future, we need to make space for all those with divergent bodies, minds, and experiences. So our language has to get a lot more diverse, and a lot more colourful, exactly like the octopus.
We’ll consider how we can create social spaces - both real and imagined, that provide space for us all to play, dream, create, and explore. We’ll unstitch the ideology that time is money and your value is fiscal, and remake our identities as something deeper and more complex, based around what matters most: our humanity. These spaces will become gardens of both defence and creativity, like the gardens an octopus builds.
We’ll broaden our senses and try to understand the world beyond ourselves. We’ll look to our non-human kin for inspiration about new ways of being, and imagine sensory experiences far beyond our own. Just like an octopus sees with its skin and tastes with its arms, we’ll explore how we can build sensory diversity and needs into our futuristic spaces so that everyone can exist in comfort and peace.
And finally, we’ll be regrowing the excised limbs of society by centring our most vulnerable citizens, and imagining how we can provide a space that holds and supports those who need it, rather than amputating them from our social body. Just as an octopus regrows lost limbs, we’ll be rebuilding our social and communal anatomy to ensure justice and support for all.
