The act of telling stories is as old as time. It is an extraordinary, shared language; it is how cultures communicate and disseminate ideas. It is how knowledge and wisdom have been passed down through generations. Storytelling has shaped how societies understand the world and how they define themselves. In this way, stories do more than reflect reality, they construct it.

Throughout history, storytelling has been an instrument of power as much as a medium of imagination. Myths of conquest, tales of the divine, and origin stories of nations have influenced who and what is deemed important. These narratives ripple through time, sometimes persisting for centuries, not just guiding our perceptions of the world, but actively teaching people how to inhabit and live in it. Storytelling has bound groups together through myths of belonging, and persuaded citizens and voters through political visions. They organise meaning, bring people together, and sketch the contours of the worlds we come to believe are possible

The legend of Frankenstein’s Monster, created by Mary Shelley in 1818, continues to influence how we think about science, technology, and ethics. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven offers a profound reflection on unintended consequences and the fragility of utopian ideals and ambitions. And George Orwell’s 1984 endures as a cultural touchstone, embedding surveillance, propaganda, and authoritarian control deep within our collective imagination. Each of these stories reveals the enduring capacity of narrative to shape not only how we see the present but also how we imagine other alternatives, showcasing the potential of storytelling not merely as entertainment but as shared cultural and social practice.

History – as fictitious or factual as it may be – is never impartial. Every account is shaped by the vantage point of the teller, by what is emphasised, what is omitted, and what is cast as inevitable. Each relocation, each perspective, offers only one of many possible histories. What we often treat as a single, unified past is in reality a constellation of overlapping, sometimes conflicting narratives, where different communities and cultures experience and interpret events in distinct ways.

However, as society has moved through time, singular retellings of history have become the official ones, as if there were only one story leading to the present, compressing the paths not taken into one determined line. Paths not taken are erased, alternative outcomes ignored, and the contingency of events downplayed, leaving a version of the past that appears predetermined. What remains is a convenient story of origin, progress, and identity obscuring the richness and multiplicity of lived experience.

Storytelling is a way of making sense of the world as shaped by history, and the past therefore plays a central role in how narratives of what once was become the ground for what comes next. This also means that historians are never neutral recorders, but active in defining which stories of the past are told, and which futures those stories make possible.

The philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, associated with the Frankfurt School, reflected on the fallacy of viewing history as a continuum of progress unfolding homogenously through empty time. What appears as progress, Benjamin argued, is more often the wreckage of events mistaken for inevitable destiny. For him, the task of the historian was not to confirm progress but to interrupt such narratives, to seize memory “as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” and to wrest it away from conformity to ruling powers. In this way Benjamin resists the singular, linear story of history, urging us instead to recover its ruptures and suppressed possibilities.

This proclamation of singular or chosen narrative has also shaped the telling and retelling of futures. “Big stories” have dominated modern culture and our idea of what is yet to come, particularly those of apocalypse and salvation. Ecological collapse, societal degradation and technological doomsdays are accompanied by equally striking tales of redemption, whether through scientific progress, genetic engineering, or the colonisation of other planets.

The repetition of familiar story arcs across time is unescapable: the hero’s journey or the fate of the conqueror, the rise and fall of civilisations, the narrative of technological progress and disruption, and the recurring idea that the future will be either a utopia or a catastrophe. Looking through our past we find the same metaphors and myths about the future repeated across time. The myth of apocalypse, for instance, appears in religious texts, in the nuclear fears of the Cold war, and in the present imaginaries of ecological collapse. The myth of technological salvation spans from early industrial visions to Silicon Valley’s narratives of complete disruption.

Storytelling and scientific knowledge are complementary rather than opposing phenomenon. Knowledge traces what is observable, measurable, and already known, while storytelling stretches those boundaries, weaving facts into meaning and projecting them into possibility. Knowledge shows us the contours of the present; storytelling animates those contours with imagination, turning them into pathways toward what might become.

While imaginative stories are inseparable from the realities of science, scientific knowledge on its own cannot account for the full complexity and entanglement of the futures we face. Its strength lies in precision, but its limits appear when we ask how people might live with, respond to, or reshape those realities. Storytelling works in that gap – not as invention detached from truth, but as a way of combining what is known in new forms, opening questions and insights that knowledge alone cannot reach. In this sense, storytelling is itself a practice of knowledge creation. It does not discard fact but reconfigures it, making space for novelty, discovery, and transformation. By reframing the known, stories turn existing knowledge into conditions for imagining alternative and multiple futures.

Yet stepping beyond present reality to explore new perspectives – ones that resist the comfort of familiar story arcs – is more challenging than it seems. The pull of the familiar can be strong, especially for those accustomed to staying grounded in the present. To discover new ways of thinking about the world and reimagine our place within it, however, it is essential to spend time in alternate realms where familiar norms and rules no longer apply.

Looking to a great storyteller – one who embodied a critical approach to the craft – science fiction author Octavia E. Butler showed that it is how we tell stories that makes tomorrow legible, offering clear principles for creating futures through narrative. In her essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future”, she outlined her approach.

It begins with how we draw from the past. Every imagined future grows out of histories, cycles, and patterns. The act of studying those histories – and then deliberately weaving them into new narratives – is what grounds possibility, preventing it from drifting into empty speculation. This is why other recent works of science fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future resonate so powerfully. Beyond being admired as fiction, it has influenced climate advocates and policymakers. Its impact comes not from prediction, but from how it translates systemic crisis into human story – making the future something people can grasp, contest, and act upon.

It continues with asking how we respect consequences. Stories ripple outward. They shape what people believe can or cannot happen. To tell stories of the future is to accept responsibility for the images we release into the collective imagination. The practical step here is to check what might this story open up, and what might it close down?

Next comes acknowledging our lens. No future is told from nowhere. Every story is marked by perspective and bias. Futures storytelling becomes more honest and inclusive when we name our standpoint and invite other voices to fill the gaps. That act of recognition is itself method: it shows whose futures are being imagined, and whose might still be missing.

Finally, we leave room for surprise. A story that tries to fix the future as certain will fail. But a story that creates space for the unexpected prepares people to adapt, respond, and create when conditions shift. The craft here is in designing narratives that don’t close possibility but expand it, leaving audiences with more ways to act, not fewer.

To perceive storytelling as creation of knowledge is to expand our understanding of what knowledge is. Knowledge is not only facts and figures, not only data and predictions. It is also metaphors, atmospheres, myths, and imaginaries of real and unreal states. Rather than simply representing versions of reality, stories confront the real world, despite their discontinuity, these imagined worlds “return” to critique, illuminate, or offer perspectives for our actual world. As literary critic Robert Scholes puts it, the future is not a fate to be discovered, but a construction to be shaped. Storytelling contributes to this act of cultural imagination by helping us rehearse, critique, and imagine alternatives, not by describing the world as it is, but by exploring how it could be.

As another great storyteller, Ursula Le Guin, reminds us, why stories matter so
profoundly, is that in a sense we live in and through them. Without them, we struggle to understand ourselves and our place in the world as it is or may become.