Every day, we are handed a world that feels increasingly out of our control. Algorithms decide what we see. Demagogues decide what is true. Division is manufactured and sold to us at scale. We scroll through catastrophe after catastrophe, numbed by the velocity of it all, and somewhere deep in our chests, we are asking a question we don’t quite know how to say out loud: Can we imagine something better? Does anyone even know how anymore?
That’s why International Worldbuilding Day on February 18th, 2026 matters — not as a quaint celebration for writers, storytellers and game designers, but as an act of radical, urgent necessity.
Worldbuilding is the practice of imagining entire worlds from the ground up — their economies, their ecosystems, their laws, their myths, the way their people love and grieve and govern themselves. It is what Ursula K. Le Guin did when she asked what a society without gender might look like.
It is what Octavia Butler did when she forced us to sit inside the skin of the enslaved and the oppressor simultaneously.
It is what every child does when they build a fort and declare it a kingdom with its own rules. It is, at its core, the insistence that the world as it is does not have to be the world as it will be.
We are living through a crisis of imagination. Political discourse has collapsed into reaction — we argue over what to tear down, but we struggle to articulate what we are building. Young people inherit ecological emergency, economic precarity, and institutional distrust, and are told to be realistic. We are not short on problems. We are short on visions compelling enough to pull us forward.
So on this International Worldbuilding Day, Draw a map of somewhere that doesn’t exist yet but should. And understand this: there is not one better world waiting to be discovered. There are thousands. A world that centers care over profit. A world that remembers its rivers. A world where justice is something you build, not just something you seek. Your world will not look like mine, and that is not a problem — that is the whole point. The future is not a single destination. It is a vast, inhabited possibility space, and we need as many people building inside it as we can get.
The future will be built by whoever shows up to imagine it first and today we launch the Radical Imagination Project.