In contemporary South Africa, debates about the future tend to split into separate conversations.
Energy specialists talk in megawatts and emissions; cultural practitioners in narratives and identities.
Yet both spheres, in different ways, are grappling with the same question: what kind of future do we consider acceptable, and what will power it — materially and imaginatively?
Last year in October, Electricity Minister Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa stated that South Africa could have cleaner energy and an end to load-shedding in 14 years.
Ramokgopa was presenting the Integrated Resource Plan 2025, outlining the country’s future electricity strategy.
The plan envisions adding 105 gigawatts of new generation capacity to the grid – more than two and a half times Eskom’s current capacity.
The minister said the electricity system was changing from reliance on coal to clean energy, while ensuring energy security for the country.
The energy sector is used to thinking in numbers: capacity factors, gigawatt-hours, investment costs.
Culture works with less tangible currencies: symbols, stories, and reputation.
But the outcomes are tightly intertwined.
Decisions about power plants, grids, and new technologies shape daily life for decades.
Public willingness to accept or resist those decisions depends not only on tariffs and regulations, but also on whether they fit a convincing story about progress, justice, and risk.
Science fiction, cinema, and popular non-fiction have long served as informal laboratories for technological ideas.
Long before most people saw a nuclear plant or a robot, they encountered them in books and films.
When South Africans argue about a “just energy transition”, they draw on expert reports but also on accumulated cultural images of blackouts, chimneys, solar panels, and cooling towers.
In that sense, the energy sector already operates inside a narrative environment, even when it prefers to speak only the language of technical feasibility.
South African novelist and scholar Imraan Coovadia articulates this link explicitly in an interview with Ahram Online during the 57th Cairo International Book Fair.
He notes that energy systems, although often invisible, “quietly shape everything, economies, education, daily life and imagination itself”, and that “every science fiction writer understands that the future depends on vast, reliable and affordable sources of energy”.
Speaking about South Africa’s crisis, he observes that the country’s economy “stopped growing in 2007 with the start of our energy crisis and has only begun again this year to expand”, which, in his view, makes it impossible to separate imagination from development.
One recent example of sectors crossing paths is the International Literary Award “Future Past” (also known as the Future History International Literary Award), a global science-fiction prize established by the ATOM Foundation with the support of Russia’s Rosatom.
In its first edition, the competition received more than 2 400 submissions from across the world.
Among the awardees is Coovadia, recognised for his short story “Highly Developed, Cold and Insensitive”.
The 57th Cairo International Book Fair in 2026 is another piece of this picture.
Coovadia took part in a programme explicitly framed as a dialogue between technological imagination and infrastructure.
Romania was the guest of honour, Naguib Mahfouz was named “Personality of the Year”, and hundreds of debates, signings, and performances ran alongside the trade activity.
For South Africa, where energy insecurity has become a defining experience, there is a lesson in this.
If energy infrastructure is going to shape social possibilities for generations, imagination about its consequences cannot be left solely to engineers and lawyers.
Writers and artists are well placed to show how load-shedding reorganises daily routines, how transmission lines reshape landscapes, and how trust in institutions erodes or recovers.
Energy professionals, in turn, bring a grounded sense of what is technologically and financially possible.
The point is not to ask novels to “explain” nuclear plants, or companies to dictate plots.
It is to recognise that sectors which once saw themselves as separate — heavy infrastructure on one side, culture on the other — are in practice deeply interdependent.
Coovadia stresses that any “truly enduring connection has to grow out of common interests and dreams, or perhaps simply the fear of being brushed aside as small to medium powers in the contemporary world.”
Energy policy inevitably tells stories about modernisation, fairness, and sovereignty.
Culture, especially in genres like science fiction, increasingly grapples with resources, risk, and climate vulnerability.
The futures that actually get built will depend not only on engineering and finance, but also on how seriously these two spheres are willing to listen to each other.
- This article is republished from the Bulrushes under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
