What if the future didn't have to be dystopian?
In a time when every headline screams of crisis and many governments seek power instead of solutions, these stories dare to ask a radical question: What would it be like to create a better world?
From a professor who plants the seeds of democratic renewal in high school classrooms to farmers who fight climate change through a neighborhood newsletter; from actresses who shatter Hollywood's sexual predator culture to artists who transform a city's business environment with celebratory murals-here are fantasies, not of perfection, but of possibility.
These are stories about neighbors who choose cooperation over tribalism, and about citizens who reach out bravely to construct the world they want to live in. Neither utopian nor naive, these tales explore the messy, complicated, deeply human work of making things better.
The first book in the Protopia Series, this collection of linked short stories is for readers who loved A Paradise Built in Hell, The Ministry for the Future, or The Dispossessed. It's for fans of near-future science fiction who appreciate the social sciences. But most of all, it's for everyone who is ready to see the good guys win for a change.
What if the future didn't have to be dystopian?
In a time when every headline screams of crisis and many governments seek power instead of solutions, these stories dare to ask a radical question: What would it be like to create a better world?
From a professor who plants the seeds of democratic renewal in high school classrooms to farmers who fight climate change through a neighborhood newsletter; from actresses who shatter Hollywood's sexual predator culture to artists who transform a city's business environment with celebratory murals-here are fantasies, not of perfection, but of possibility.
These are stories about neighbors who choose cooperation over tribalism, and about citizens who reach out bravely to construct the world they want to live in. Neither utopian nor naive, these tales explore the messy, complicated, deeply human work of making things better.
The first book in the Protopia Series, this collection of linked short stories is for readers who loved A Paradise Built in Hell, The Ministry for the Future, or The Dispossessed. It's for fans of near-future science fiction who appreciate the social sciences. But most of all, it's for everyone who is ready to see the good guys win for a change.
Rosie Calderón’s fingers were numb as she rang up her fifteenth copy of the season’s hottest bestseller. The bookstore was packed with last-minute Christmas shoppers, their faces flushed with a holiday excitement that Rosie couldn’t even begin to muster.
“Would you like this gift-wrapped?” she asked automatically, her retail voice masking her underlying exhaustion. Seven hours of teaching middle school followed by five hours at the bookstore had left her running on fumes.
“Yes, please!” The customer beamed, sliding her credit card across the counter. “It’s for my daughter.”
Rosie nodded, expertly folding shiny green paper around the hardcover. It was three days before Christmas, and all she had to look forward to was an empty apartment and another stack of bills. She’d cancelled her planned visit to her sister in Ohio. The plane ticket was an expense she just couldn’t justify with fifty-seven thousand dollars in medical debt hanging over her head.
“Happy holidays.” Rosie handed over the wrapped package.
“You too, honey! Hope they’re magical for you.”
Rosie smiled weakly. It would take more than magic to ease the worry in her chest. It might take miracles.
By the time her shift ended at 10 PM, the mall was closing. Rosie trudged to her car in the nearly empty parking lot, her breath hovering in the still December night. She automatically tallied the night’s income as she walked. Since her emergency appendectomy last year — the one her insurance had only partly covered — the bills had piled up relentlessly. It was an impossible sum on her teacher’s salary; impossible even with the bookstore job as well. She’d cut every expense she could, but with compound interest the debt kept growing like a malignant tumor.
At her apartment complex, Rosie checked her mail with the usual dull dread. She almost missed it, sandwiched between credit card offers and holiday catalogs: a plain white envelope with a printed return address she didn’t recognize. Probably another notice – her credit card debt was bought and sold every few months. It didn’t really matter to her… no matter the creditor, the numbers stayed the same. But she opened it, to be sure.
Inside was a single sheet of paper. She read it once, then again, convinced she’d misunderstood:
Dear Ms. Rose Calderón,
Season’s Greetings!
We write with good news: Your medical debt in the amount of $57,246.40 has been forgiven. You no longer owe this debt. This is not a loan. This is not a scam. This is a gift with no strings attached. You are no longer under any obligation to settle this debt with the original creditor, any bill collector, or anyone else.
Debt should not be a life sentence, and no one should have to go into debt for basic needs such as housing, education or medical care. If this relief has helped you and you want to help others experience the same freedom, consider joining the movement for economic justice. Together, we can build a world where healthcare doesn’t lead to financial ruin.
In solidarity,
STRIKE DEBT
###
Rosie sat down hard on the kitchen floor, letter trembling in her hands. A gift? From whom? The letter explained little beyond that cryptic signature and its vague call to action.
“It isn’t true,” she whispered to her empty hallway. But every inch of her wanted to believe.
With shaking fingers, she pulled out her phone and dialed the hospital’s billing department. It would be closed at this hour, but she couldn’t wait until morning. She’d leave a message —
A tired voice answered. “University Hospital Billing, this is Sylvia. How can I help you?” Rosie hadn’t expected a real person this late.
“Hi, um, I’m Rose Calderón. Patient number 5742913.” The number was seared into her memory from endless calls and payment plans. “I just received a letter saying my debt has been, um, forgiven? I need to confirm if this is real.”
She heard keyboard clicks. “Calderón… let me see here. I couldn’t tell you if it’s been forgiven, but your account does show a zero balance with us. Your debt was sold last week to a third-party purchaser.”
“So, I don’t… I don’t owe anything anymore? Nothing at all to the hospital?”
More keyboard clicks. “That’s correct, Ms. Calderón. Your account with us is settled in full. If the purchasing entity chooses to contact you about payment arrangements, that would be up to them. But as far as University Hospital is concerned, your balance is zero.”
Rosie pressed a hand to her mouth, stifling a sob. Whoever had bought her debt hadn’t contacted her for payment. They’d sent a forgiveness letter instead.
“Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?” Sylvia asked, her voice softening slightly.
“No, that’s… that’s all. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Happy holidays, Ms. Calderón.”
“Happy holidays,” Rosie whispered back before ending the call. She sat motionless on the tile, phone in her lap, the tears now flowing freely.
A zero balance. After eighteen months of working herself to exhaustion, of declining invitations, of calculating to the penny what she could afford to eat each week — suddenly, it was gone.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. The weight that had pressed on her chest had vanished so suddenly she felt lightheaded, dizzy with relief. But the questions kept circling: Who was Strike Debt? What movement were they talking about? Was it all random chance or had someone selected her specifically?
Well after midnight, Rosie opened her laptop and did something she hadn’t done in over a year: she shopped online. Nothing extravagant, just a few simple gifts for her sister’s family. A robotics kit for her older niece who loved building things. A set of art supplies for her younger niece who was always drawing. A pair of warm slippers for her sister who complained about her cold floors. A grilling cookbook for her brother-in-law.
As she clicked confirm order and arranged for direct shipping to their Ohio home, Rosie felt something unfamiliar bloom in her chest. Hope, maybe? Or at least the first sweet breath from a world that might contain more than bare survival.
# # #
In January, Rosie began her search for answers. The letter had no identifying information beyond a P.O. box in New York and that mysterious signature: Strike Debt. The hospital had only confirmed that her debt had been sold, not what had happened after.
During her lunch break at school, Rosie searched online for Strike Debt and medical debt forgiven, and found scattered stories like hers. People whose crushing debt had suddenly vanished with similar letters.
One comment on a forum caught her attention: Sounds like the Rolling Jubilee. Check them out.
That evening, Rosie discovered the initiative born from Occupy Wall Street — activists who had realized they could use the debt market’s own mechanisms against it, buying up defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar, then forgiving it entirely.
This is mutual aid, not charity, their website explained. People helping people, without conditions.
Rosie stared at her computer screen, tears welling up. She thought about the protesters she’d seen camping out downtown years ago — the ones she’d been too busy to pay much attention to. Back then, she’d been working multiple jobs to get through school — tutoring in the afternoons, weekend shifts at a coffee shop — all while taking night classes to finish her teaching certification and trying to afford rent in a city with skyrocketing housing costs.
When she’d finally secured her first full-time teaching position, she’d been elated. A professional job with benefits! She’d quit all her side jobs, believing what she’d been told her entire life: Get an education, find a good career, and you’ll be financially secure. Teachers didn’t get paid much, of course; still, she’d managed for a while, living modestly in her small apartment, careful with every dollar but still living paycheck-to-paycheck. Then the appendectomy happened, wiping out everything in one fell swoop. She’d had to pick up the bookstore job evenings and weekends, but even with that extra income, she barely made minimum payments most months.
Those protesters had been fighting for people like her all along, even when she’d been too exhausted to notice.
# # #
In spring, Rosie joined a local economic justice group. She shared her story at community meetings, explaining how medical debt had nearly destroyed her life, and how its forgiveness had saved it.
“The system is designed to make us feel alone in our struggles,” she told a crowd that murmured agreement at a church basement meeting. “But we’re not alone. And we have more power than we think.”
She’d learned about the mechanics of debt, how creditors routinely sell unpaid bills to collection agencies for a fraction of their value, how those agencies then hound people for the full amount plus interest. The knowledge fueled her growing anger.
In June, Rosie organized her first direct action: A small but effective campaign that pressured a nearby rural hospital to develop a financial assistance program instead of sending bills straight to collections. “If you’re only going to get five percent of the loan back anyway,” she’d asked pointedly, “why should the rest go to a third party instead of to relieve the people who can’t pay it all in the first place?” When the hospital board finally agreed to reform their policies, she understood for the first time the exhilaration of collective victory.
# # #
By the following Christmas, Rosie had become a key organizer in a statewide coalition fighting for medical debt reform throughout the public hospital system. An experienced teacher, she had a knack for translating complex financial mechanisms into terms anyone could understand, making visible the hidden systems that trapped people in cycles of debt.
At a regional coalition meeting, she met Ginny, a former banker who had left Wall Street after the financial crisis. As they shared their stories over coffee, Ginny smiled knowingly when Rosie described her debt forgiveness letter.
“I might have run into that purchase,” Ginny admitted. “I volunteered with Rolling Jubilee when I lived in New York. We never knew whose debt we were buying —it just came in bundles. But I remember a package of medical debt from the University Hospital here, just before I left.”
“So, it was you??” Rosie asked, astonished at the coincidence.
Ginny shook her head. “No, not personally. But I was part of the movement that made it happen. We all were, in different ways.”
“How did Rolling Jubilee start?” Rosie asked. “I’ve read about it online, but I’d love to hear from someone who was there.”
Ginny’s eyes softened. “Well, after the encampments were cleared, many of us thought the movement was done for. We felt we had failed, and a lot of us were pretty depressed. But we still had money in our accounts, and we felt like we owed it to the people supporting us to keep the fight going somehow. Financial inequality wasn’t going away.”
She stirred her coffee. “Micah and Astra realized that debt — the thing crushing so many people — was being traded for pennies on the dollar in secondary markets. The original creditors were giving up on collecting, but the ordinary people, the debtors, didn’t see any relief from that! The same markets that had profited from creating the debt were profiting again from people’s inability to pay.”
“So,” Rosie said, “you turned their system against them.”
“Exactly. We started with about $500,000 in donations and we bought almost $15 million of medical debt with that. Later, we expanded to student loans. It was direct action in its purest form — no waiting for legislation or policy change. Just people helping people, by exploiting the same loopholes that banks use to profit from misery.”
Rosie thought about the random chance of it all — how her debt had been bundled with others, sold to a group of activists she’d never met. And that had led her to this movement; to the work that, as much as teaching, now gave her life purpose.
“You know what the best part is?” Rosie said, finally. “Last month, our local group raised enough to buy and forgive almost $2 million in medical debt. That means someone else is getting that letter right now, just in time for Christmas, and maybe wondering who on earth would do such a thing.”
Ginny smiled. “And once they know, maybe they’ll join us too.”
Outside, the first snow of winter began to fall, blanketing the city’s harsh surfaces in soft white and washing everything clean.
The World As It Ought to Be comprises sixteen stories that feel especially resonant for a U.S. audience reckoning with the visible strain on American democracy.
As its foundational structure, the book poses a practical question: where does meaningful change begin in the absence or failure of democratic or public services? In Rivkis’s vision, it starts with a seed—an idea shared between allies responding to some form of systemic abandonment. A health clinic serving uninsured patients pushes back against a property developer's vision to replace their gathering space with a competitive real-estate venture. A scientist with a farming background builds an educational hub for Midwestern farmers, translating climate research into accessible practices like carbon-sequestering soil. A tech company rolls out an AI that links sustainable business practices with long-term profit, while a group of coders develops an app that transparently itemizes politicians’ actions for everyday citizens. These beginnings gradually spread, transforming individual frustrations into collective action.
Rivkis describes these transformations through the concept of “protopia”— a gradual progression of change rather than a linear leap to perfection. The idea carries a refreshing emotional charge for readers accustomed to doomscrolling through political crises and policy setbacks.
The World As It Ought to Be often reads like cozy speculative fiction, imagining systemic conflicts approached through neighborly cooperation and civic creativity. In a sense, it shares DNA with the “hopepunk” sci-fi tradition: novels like Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot series (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy) in which optimism is a core tenet of social change. This tone gives the collection its warmth and accessibility, making complex social questions feel grounded in everyday relationships rather than abstract ideology.
The book is strongest when it complicates its own optimism. One chapter, “Beyond Borders,” explores the fallout from doxxing an innocent family, forcing them to sever public-facing ties to protect one another. The uneasy resolution underscores Rivkis’s larger point that protopia is not a destination but an ongoing negotiation among ever-competing values. Setbacks, compromises, and unintended consequences remain part of the process.
At times, the stories lean a little too neatly toward inspirational messaging, but the collection’s willingness to acknowledge friction gives its hopeful vision more credibility. The fact that Rivkis has two more books planned in this series gives me hope that she’ll explore the nuances of change in even thornier conflicts that plague us today.