Writers and social activism: How writers set out to change the world for the better

It's actually pretty simple to incorporate social activism into our writing. In fact, I'd argue that it's hard to avoid doing. It's impossible, after all, to write anything without incorporating at least some of our own experience, and the sad fact of the matter is that every one of us is affected by at least some of the countless flaws in human society. These social issues inevitably work their way into the worlds we write, and to some small degree our audience is bound to pick up on it.
We find ourselves accidentally raising public awareness of the social issues that concern us and before we know it, bam: we're activists.

That was easy!

The most straightforward way to go about this is to go out and have ourselves a personal experience that is both directly pertinent to the issue in question, and remarkable enough to be worth writing about. John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, for instance, is a journalist's firsthand account of wandering the southern U.S. in medically induced blackface in order to expose the extreme racial tension to the public eye.

For those of us who lack Griffin's heroic-to-the-point-of-insanity dedication to our writing, this can be done quite effectively with fiction. 

Zuzak's The Book Thief uses a fictional narrative to explore the Nazi regime's exploitation of the power of literature; their mass publication of propaganda novels and burning of any books they considered subversive bears an eerie resemblance to the Harper government's recent destruction of thousands of volumes of environmental science records.

Likewise, Hosseini's The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns paint a vivid picture of contemporary race and gender inequalities in Afghanistan, and Rob Moore's deceptively comedic Fat is an uncomfortably realistic parody of the contemporary West's attitude toward body-weight.

There is, however, another approach to activist writing. It is the rogue class of socially aware literature, often unnoticed for what it is, but even more effective in its subtlety: science fiction. Seriously. It is easy (and heartbreakingly common) to dismiss the science fiction genre as mere whimsical escapism devoid of any noteworthy intellectual content. 

And to be fair to the critics, not all of it was exactly profound.

However, this assumption is also dangerously ignorant; some of the most prevalent social issues in the contemporary world can be found prophesized in science fiction literature over half a century old.

Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, for instance, presents a man raised by Martians who brings to Earth a philosophy that could solve all of humanity's problems, and who (spoiler alert) is ultimately shot to death for challenging social norms too radically. (Okay, you're safe again.) This warning against the dangers of conservatism and structural functionalism is even more relevant today than it was then, as those very same conservative attitudes are possibly the biggest threat to our sustainability as a species.

Likewise, famed whistle-blower Edward Snowden just recently exposed the United States as a dystopia all too familiar to fans of George Orwell, where every aspect of everyone's life can and will be spied on for the sake of crushing subversive elements. Orwell's prediction may  have been thirty years off, but it is no less uncanny.

We don't even have to delve into sci-fi antiquity to notice this effect. The relatively recent Hunger Games trilogy uses a post-apocalyptic America to draw attention to the power of entertainment to subdue and mollify a population: an effect which has become painfully evident over the past year. Monsanto's campaign against small-scale organic farmers and the States' drone strike on a Yemeni wedding party somehow wound up with far less media coverage than a Louisiana redneck making a homophobic remark on reality TV (surprising, I know) and the various things Miley Cyrus has done with her butt.

The point here is that if we want our writing to really resonate with the relevant social issues of the day, the vivid worlds of deep space and the distant future can offer an incomparably engaging experience that will get readers even more passionate about the issues we address. What's more, they can appeal to an audience that might be put off by more blatant means of social criticism.

The 'final frontier', essentially, should never be the last resort. After all, if our society has any hope for improvement...

... it's going to be in the future.

Sources of reasonable legitimacy:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/capt-trevor-greene/science-cuts-canada_b_4534729.html

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/nsa-carves-pathway-into-international-computers-1.2496943

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/nsa-collects-millions-of-text-messages-globally-the-guardian-1.2499963

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101331915
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/the-aftermath-of-drone-strikes-on-a-wedding-convoy-in-yemen/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0