Hope, Anger and Writing: science fiction vs the doomscroll

With E. J. Swift, Mahmud El Sayed, Stewart Hotston and Tom Hunter.

How do we tell stories about the future when every headline seems to warn that there may not be one? Is this doomsday-clock countdown the only narrative we can hear, or can we imagine a path to a better tomorrow? Join our expert panel of science fiction writers as they dive boldly into creative challenges, culture wars, existential threats, and the power of storytelling as a strategy for nurturing hope and change in the real world. 

E. J. Swift is the author of six novels including The Coral Bones, which was shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best Novel, The Kitschies’ Red Tentacle and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her latest novel, When There Are Wolves Again, is a Guardian Best Science Fiction Book of 2025 and winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel 2025. 

Mahmud El Sayed is a British-Egyptian SFF writer and translator. He lives in East London where he spends his time pondering linguistic oddities and running story ideas by his cat. A former journalist, he covered ‘serious’ Middle Eastern politics until he had enough of chasing people up for boring quotes and decided to write about generation ships, sentient libraries and memory taxes instead. He won the prestigious 2023 Future Worlds prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour and his work focuses on Arabic and Islamic-inspired themes in a genre he is calling Arabfuturism. 

Stewart Hotston lives in Reading, UK. With a Celtic-Indian mother and a father of North African/Roma descent, Stewart is a somewhat confused second-generation immigrant living in the UK who has written many short stories and several novels with the most recent being the space opera, Project Hanuman. His cold war sci fi novel, "The Next Enemy Will Be The Last" will be out in Summer 2026. Stewart is also the chair of the British Science Fiction Association and the treasurer of the British Fantasy Society. 

Tom Hunter (chair) is the director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year, named for writer, futurist, and King’s College London alum, Sir Arthur C. Clarke.