The Imagineers

One of Scotland's most powerful children's writers, Julie Bertagna, has written the most hopeful bit of utopian 'speculative fiction' I've read in a long time, as part of the think-tank Demos's Scotland 2020 project. 'The Imagineers' imagines a Scotland made even colder through climate change, but redeemed by a generation of young, networked auto-didacts, who use their 'God-boxes' (something like the next version of wireless devices) to turn every public space into a learning opportunity, and moment of social enterprise. And what's the ethos that drives them forward, both people and politicians? Read on...

Will is beginning to understand. They’re trying to turn negatives into positives, these young imagineers. They’re imagineering the weather, connecting global ideas on all kinds of things – deep sea wavepower, windfarming on offshore platforms, water exports to countries suffering drought. At the other extreme, Coolbreak Scotland offers holidays from the soaring temperatures climate change has brought to much of the world.

As predicted, the population aged and the birth rate plummeted. What wasn’t predicted was inter-generational war. Political parties fragmented. Policies for the Young were at odds with the needs of the Old. At 36, the Internationalist First Minister Knox was just mature enough to be taken seriously by the Old and just youthful enough to be accepted by the Young. She brought the warring generations together over education, persuading older people they were essential to its success. Small group learning proved more effective than any recruitment drive. A massive public advertising campaign was launched to promote the inquisitive play ethic of the new Way. A drift back to school began.

Predictably, there was chaos. But infecting education with the virus of enterprise was the most powerful form of mass vaccination against the malady that had afflicted generations of Scots (except the diaspora of those with freak immunity): lack of confidence. Nicknamed Steemies, the new schools’ core curriculum was self-esteem. A flexible leaving age led into apprenticeships, further education or indie-enterprise. A stagnant backwater in the modern economy, Scotland began to re-envision itself as fertile land for the cultivation of ideas. As a land of imagineers.