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<p>IN this book that first came out in 1953, the writer describes a dystopian place, books are outlawed and &ldquo;firemen&rdquo; burn them. In fact, he had called the fire station to ask the exact temperature at which a book burns. Real life encounters had inspired Bradbury to write it and in later years, he said in interviews how mass media had led to a reduced reading of literature and the book was a commentary on burning of books in the United States. This book was a reaction to thought control and censorship. We are faced with such issues now along with the complexities of a post-truth world. We have been witnessing increasing censorship of free speech, and the insistence on &ldquo;good news&rdquo; has led to polarised newsrooms. There is more propaganda and less news. But there are always other ways to tell stories. Through metaphors, through allegories. Things have changed over&nbsp;the years. Fake news is real now. Facts are twisted and news is manufactured.</p>
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<p>Imaginative storytelling has the ability to navigate the complex political and social structures and expand the scope of the possible. Writers of nonfiction have always used the tools of novelists to reveal things.</p>
<p>Journalists often find themselves&nbsp;navigating the world of fact and fiction. Take memory, for instance. It is fictive, too. How does one verify memory?</p>
<p>What if there is a penalty for speaking? What if there is a mandate for writing and publishing only good news? The future is an extension of the past and the present.</p>
<p>In this issue, we have imagined newsrooms and places that do not yet exist. Or perhaps they do. This &ldquo;not-yet&rdquo;, as writer Gaiman says, is made up of three phrases.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What if . . . ? <br>If only . . . <br>If this goes on . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;What if . . . ?&rdquo; gives us change, a departure from our lives.&nbsp;(What if aliens landed tomorrow and gave us everything we wanted, but at a price?)</p>
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<p>&ldquo;If only . . .&rdquo; lets us explore the glories and dangers of tomorrow.&nbsp;(If only dogs could talk. If only I were invisible.)</p>
<p>&ldquo;If this goes on . . .&rdquo; is the most predictive of the three, although it doesn&rsquo;t try to predict an actual future with all its messy confusion. Instead, &ldquo;If this goes on . . .&rdquo; fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved.&nbsp;(If this goes on, all communication everywhere will be through text messages or computers, and direct speech between two people, without a machine, will be outlawed.),&rdquo; he writes in the introduction to Bradbury&rsquo;s 2013 edition of the book.</p>
<p>We have read these books that tell us about the not-yet places and things. In the meantime, many not-yets have become real. This issue breaks away from the traditional journalism format to imagine the dystopian world of a &ldquo;happy news industry&rdquo; and other such worlds.</p>
<p>Sometimes, formats need to be broken. We must imagine more. It is for the sake of caution. For the sake of expression, too. </p>
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A Not-yet World

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