Rabbi Romiel Daniel felt something particularly poignant this Hanukkah season as he and his congregation sang the words of “Ma’oz Tsur,” a 13th-century Hebrew poem that is sung each night during the ceremonial lighting of the menorah’s candles.

“It is a song about the victory of the weak over the strong, a victory of good over evil, a victory of the holy over the unholy, as such,” says Rabbi Daniel, head of the Rego Park Jewish Center, a synagogue in Queens. “It’s about the fact that all this was possible, not because of man’s strength at all, but because God was on our side.”

But Ma’oz Tsur, which recounts the history of God’s saving acts and is often translated as “Rock of Ages,” also carries a lamentation: “Our salvation takes too long, and there is no end to the bad days,” worshippers sing in the final stanza.

There have been at least 10 anti-Semitic attacks in the New York region during this year’s holiday celebrations, officials say, but many of the city’s Jewish residents remain most stunned by the attack of a machete-wielding man who burst into a rabbi’s home in Monsey Saturday evening, injuring five of a group who had gathered to celebrate the seventh night of Hanukkah.

The attack came 2 1/2 weeks after a pair of assailants in Jersey City, New Jersey, a man and a woman, targeted a kosher supermarket in a Jewish neighborhood, shooting and killing four, including a police officer. Since then, Jewish residents, most of them from Orthodox and Hasidic communities, have been accosted on the streets.

This April, a gunman shot and killed a worshipper in an attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, wounding three others. In October 2018, a gunman stormed into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, killing 11 and wounding six.

“We cannot overstate the fear people are feeling right now,” tweeted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who called the recent acts of anti-Semitic violence a crisis and a nationwide epidemic. “I’ve spoken to longtime friends who, for the first time in their lives, are fearful to show outward signs of their Jewish faith.”

Such feelings, says Rabbi Daniel, have come as a shock for many of the members of his synagogue, who include a number of Holocaust survivors, such as the Jewish Center’s chairwoman, Ruth Lowenstein, who witnessed the burning of her family’s synagogue in Berlin.

“The climate has changed”

More than half the residents in this part of Queens are part of the kaleidoscope of Jewish traditions represented in New York, which include many different Hasidic and Orthodox traditions, as well as Conservative, Reform, and secular. Tens of thousands of Russian-speaking Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have also made their homes here.

“People were always quite comfortable here – even I have always been very comfortable here, to tell you frankly,” says Rabbi Daniel. He notes, as others have, that Jewish people in the United States, and in New York City in particular, have always felt an unprecedented level of inclusion and equality when compared with other countries, and other times of history. 

“But suddenly in the last two or three years, the climate has changed,” he says. “It is something where you tend to always look over your back all the time. It’s a constant feeling, that it is not as safe as it should be, even here.” 

His synagogue decided to install a series of bulletproof glass doors a few years ago, just inside the ornate outer doors. Visitors are now required to buzz into the office and school, along with other security protocols.

Indeed, as the Monitor reported in 2018, there has been a reawakening of overt and violent anti-Semitism throughout the United States and Europe. In New York City, anti-Semitic hate crimes are up 63% this year, officials say, with 152 reports of crimes in 2019, compared with 93 in 2018.

“We are in some ways where we have always been, which is that humans are prewired to see an us and a them,” says Ken Stern, an expert on anti-Semitism at Bard College in New York. “And there are lots of messages in society from politics, from media and other places, that reinforce that sort of view of the world – that we’re not all one big happy human family, but we are looking and highlighting and searching for differences.” 

“Anti-Semitism is one of those manifestations of that world view,” continues Professor Stern, “because historically Jews are seen as an other, a danger, and conspiring to harm non-Jews. We do know that when there is a glorification of the us versus them mentality, anti-Semitism is always going to rise.”

But one of the most disturbing aspects of this particular epidemic of violent anti-Semitism, many experts say, is the fact that it is transcending ideological and cultural boundaries. Even though many of the attacks can be linked to neo-Nazis and classic white supremacists, it has been coming from many other parts of society as well.

“On the radical right, they often glorify violence,” says Gunther Jikeli, who studies the history of anti-Semitism at Indiana University Bloomington. “When you saw how the radical right were discussing the Pittsburgh shootings, nobody questioned the violence. They either glorified the murderer or said, ‘Oh, he’s stupid, just killing elderly Jews.’”

“On the left, it’s more to do with their worldview of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism, where the Jews are somehow in line with imperialists and the colonialism of the state of Israel,” says Professor Jikeli. “You have American college campuses where pro- or even neutral Israeli sentiments are attacked in the name of ideology that has its roots in Mao, Che Guevara, and Third World-ism.”

When hate doesn’t fit in a box

At the same time, the violence cannot be bifurcated into easy right- and left-wing political categories, observers say. 

“While we have seen an increase in extremist movements, we’re also seeing new groupings of possible extremists that either aren’t clearly identifiable, or who are a mixture,” says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “We saw that with the El Paso terrorist, who borrowed from ecofascism and [fears of] automation.”

“Today’s world is not this boxed lunch, but everything is spilled over with each other,” says Mr. Levin. “There is anti-Semitism on the left, misogyny being shared by fundamentalists and nationalists of all stripes, ecofascism, and appropriations of cultural symbols.”

The attacks this holiday season have drawn attention to the anti-Semitism within many black communities, which also manifests in varying ways, experts say.

One of the Jersey City assailants was a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites, more than 100 branches of which have been designated as hate groups according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. After the shooting rampage, one of the city’s Board of Education trustees, Joan Terrell-Paige, disparaged the outpouring of grief and support for the Hasidic community. 

“Where was all this faith and hope when Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the Jewish community?” Ms. Terrell-Paige wrote in a lengthy Facebook post. Though her words praising the attackers sparked outrage and calls for her resignation, she told reporters she did not regret what she said. 

“Anti-Semitic ideas ... they can be on the radical right, but they are also available in other forms on the left and in other forms in African-American communities,” says Professor Jikeli, author of “Muslim Antisemitism in Europe.” “These boundaries to voicing anti-Semitism are not as high as they were 10 or 20 years ago.” 

“The media has difficulty in addressing that and naming this group of perpetrators,” he continues. “That means that the boundaries are less high for those on the margins than for others,” a phenomenon he often sees in similarly marginalized communities in Europe.

The lowering of such boundaries can also be seen throughout the kind of discourse that has risen within the anonymity of the digital age, its increasingly siloed communities, and the rise of nationalism throughout the globe, many observers say. 

“The people who are most susceptible to fear – and that includes people with mental conditions and the angriest among us – the more that fear is validated by a bully pulpit and overall coarse political milieu, that makes this a wildfire that crosses both sides of the ideological ridge,” says Mr. Levin.

Responding to Jewish leaders, officials in New York have bolstered the police presence in many majority Jewish neighborhoods, and civic groups such as the Guardian Angels have announced they would also be patrolling areas where many of the attacks have occurred.

Yes, the fear is potent, and his people have felt such fear for millennia, says Rabbi Daniel. But that’s the precise meaning of this year’s just-completed holiday celebrations, and the song they sing each of the eight nights they light the menorah.  

“Hanukkah is really a time when we say, yes, these things have happened throughout our history, but though we were not too strong at those times, we were able to overcome much stronger enemies,” he says.

“This is what really gives hope to many people, who are in the same place even today, saying that, OK, we’re not alone,” continues Rabbi Daniel. “God is never going to let you be alone, so there’s no reason why we will not be able to overcome any of the problems that we have today. And that gives us hope, that gives hope that lingers on through the ages.”

The depression that settled over Tyler Solorio after his combat tour in Afghanistan gave rise to dark thoughts. He attended counseling at a Veterans Affairs clinic in his hometown of Modesto, California, where he had returned in 2012 following a yearlong deployment with the Army National Guard. Therapists prescribed medication to level out his moods and subdue his suicidal impulses, yet as he recalls, none of them ever asked if he owned a firearm.

“That’s a difficult conversation that a lot of clinicians don’t necessarily want to have,” Mr. Solorio says. “But I wish someone had brought it up because I was a risk to myself at times.”

The polarized tenor of the country’s gun debate complicates the question of how – or whether – private clinicians and those at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) discuss firearms with patients struggling with a mental health crisis. Raising the topic with combat veterans poses a thornier dilemma for therapists because of the life-or-death bond that troops form with their weapons in a war zone.

“It’s like a security blanket – it’s always with you,” says Mr. Solorio, who belonged to an infantry unit. After coming home, he found that keeping a gun close at hand offered solace as he coped with panic attacks that provoked fear of imaginary threats. “It took the edge off because I knew I could protect myself.”

Guns rank as the most lethal method of suicide, with 9 in 10 attempts proving fatal. Almost 70% of veterans who take their own lives use a firearm – compared with about half of civilians who die by suicide – and one-third of former service members store guns loaded and unlocked in their homes.

In response, the VA has sought to promote firearm safety as part of its campaign to reduce suicide risk, urging veterans to consider precautions that include gun locks, removing a gun’s firing pin, or storing firearms outside the home.

The safety measures can slow a person’s ability to follow through on suicidal thoughts and preempt an irrevocable choice, explains Matt Miller, the VA’s acting director for suicide prevention. Research shows that 70% of suicide attempts occur within an hour of a person deciding to act on the idea; a quarter occur in less than five minutes.

“We know that creating more time and space within those impulsive periods can allow for a change of heart,” he says. “If we can buy some time, that can be life-saving.”

Suicide rates for veterans and the overall population have climbed over the past 20 years, and more than 6,100 former service members died by their own hand in 2017. Mental health researchers suggest that, given the public’s esteem for veterans, the VA campaign holds potential to influence civilian attitudes about lethal means safety as a deterrent to suicide.

“Veterans are venerated in our society,” says Dr. Joseph Simonetti, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has studied gun storage habits among veterans and civilians. “To the extent that they make changes in their approach to gun safety, that could have an effect on the rest of the country.”

A self-preservation tactic

A survey last year of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with mental health needs revealed that 20% worried that seeking care from the VA could result in confiscation of their firearms.

The concern arises from the agency’s authority to provide a veteran’s records to the FBI for inclusion in its system of national background checks for gun purchases. Federal reports show that such referrals, based on a finding of “mental incompetency,” occur in less than 1% of patient cases.

The misgivings among veterans hinder the VA’s efforts to persuade more of them to receive treatment and add to the complexity of discussing firearms with those in crisis. Clinicians work to defuse their wariness by framing gun safety as a self-preservation tactic that aligns with the military training principle of injury prevention. Several studies link unsafe gun storage to elevated suicide risk across demographic groups, including active-duty soldiers.

“We’re not talking about restrictions,” Mr. Miller says. “We’re talking about safety.”

A firearm can represent something akin to a fifth limb to veterans. The sense of attachment presents a chance for therapists to discuss secure storage practices as one element in a regimen of practical self-care. Dr. Simonetti likens the decision to apply a gun lock or stow a firearm outside the home to choosing to take medication or attend counseling.

“We’ve been treating gun safety as a separate issue,” he says. “But it should be integrated into an overall course of care.”

Broaching guns in the context of injury prevention enables behavioral health providers to learn about the storage habits of their patients. Craig Bryan, who leads the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah, advises his team of clinicians to pose open-ended inquiries to elicit relevant details.

“We often ask questions like ‘How do you typically store your guns?’ and ‘Why do you store your guns that way?’” says Mr. Bryan, an Air Force veteran who deployed to Iraq in 2009. Contrary to the common assumption that veterans will recoil from considering precautions, he adds, “I’ve found that, on the whole, they’re open to the idea.”

In a recent VA study, three-quarters of veterans receiving mental health care at its medical facilities endorsed at least one of four voluntary options for limiting access to their firearms. The choices ranged from clinicians providing guidance to a veteran’s family members on safe storage to VA programs for storing or disposing of guns.

The agency’s growing emphasis on firearm safety draws support from Mr. Solorio, a policy analyst with Swords to Plowshares, a veterans advocacy organization based in San Francisco. His generation has borne much of the burden of the country’s 21st-century wars, and he falls within the age group – 18 to 34 – that had the highest suicide rate among veterans in 2017.

“Guns are such a delicate topic. But they need to be talked about,” he says. “Too many of us are being lost here at home.”

Veterans as catalysts

Researchers with the American College of Physicians estimate that 4 in 5 doctors never raise gun safety measures with patients at risk of suicide. Their reluctance stems from the country’s fraught debate on firearms and the political stalemate that has blocked almost all public funding for gun violence research since the mid-1990s.

The excess of rancor and lack of fresh data have sown uncertainty among doctors about how to identify and treat patients who present a threat to themselves. As Dr. Simonetti says, “We learned a lot about diabetes prevention in medical school. We didn’t hear anything about gun violence prevention.”

Between 1999 and 2017, suicides by firearm rose 44% nationwide, increasing from 16,599 to 23,854. In the view of mental health clinicians, the VA’s advocacy for lethal means safety – an effort that extends to disposal of surplus and unneeded medication – could prove vital to reversing the trend.

Mr. Bryan suggests that the lofty perch veterans occupy in American culture, coupled with evidence-based studies showing a correlation between gun safety and lower suicide risk, creates an opportunity for a more enlightened, less combative national discussion about firearms and suicide prevention.

“Military personnel and veterans are perceived to be especially knowledgeable about these issues,” he says. An embrace of secure storage practices by more veterans “could catalyze a much needed shift in our broader society that could save a lot of lives.”

The example set by former service members could ease the trepidation of doctors who hesitate to ask patients in crisis about their access to guns at home. Dr. Christopher Barsotti has confronted that scenario as an emergency physician at hospitals in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont.

“Veterans can bring credibility to the idea of being safe and responsible with guns,” says Dr. Barsotti, co-founder of the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, or AFFIRM. The Massachusetts nonprofit is one of several research groups formed by physicians in recent years that approach gun violence as a public health crisis. “That could open up the conversation around firearms and preventing suicide,” he says.

The scourge of suicide almost claimed Brian Vargas. His combat tour in Iraq with the Marine Corps ended in 2007 when he suffered nearly fatal gunshot and shrapnel wounds during a firefight with insurgents. A desire to escape his enduring physical and mental trauma fueled persistent thoughts of taking his life.

The ordeal moved Mr. Vargas, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, to help launch a suicide prevention program called Warrior Box Project. The concept involves a veteran filling a small storage case with photos of loved ones, military medals, and other mementos that serve as reminders of life’s worth.

Mr. Vargas encourages veterans who own firearms to store another item in the box. A few years ago, in a suicidal spiral, he rummaged through his own box searching for the key to his gun lock.

He saw photos of his wife. He stared at bits of shrapnel that doctors had removed from his face and body. His despair subsided. He set down his gun.

His work to bring attention to veteran suicide has taught Mr. Vargas that he and others who wore the uniform can change civilian perceptions about gun safety. “Everybody struggles – everybody,” he says. “So as veterans, because of how we’re seen by the country, we have a chance to make a difference. We have a chance to lead the way.”

For this end-of-the year installment of “Points of Progress,” we asked six Monitor correspondents to survey their regions and tell us what they saw as the significant steps of progress made there in the past year. What follows is the result. 

We began this weekly feature in response to the fact that the news media tend to report on new initiatives – intentions to make progress, program announcements, and the like – but rarely revisit them to celebrate concrete accomplishments. We’ve found that reports of measurable progress require some digging to unearth. We hope you’ve been enjoying this feature. Let us know at editor@csmonitor.com. 
– Owen Thomas / Editor, Monitor Weekly

1. Canada

When Canada’s Parliament was elected this fall, attention focused on minority underrepresentation. But in an analysis by Andrew Griffith, a senior fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and the Environics Institute, Canada is doing a much better job of getting “visible minorities” elected. While the minority population of Canada is 23%, he calculates that the proportion of minorities who are Canadian citizens is 17.2%. Parliament, which reconvened in December, is 15% “visible minority.” That’s higher than in other Western democracies, including the United States and United Kingdom, and suggests “a greater resilience here to the type of anti-immigrant populist sentiment that has proliferated elsewhere,” according to Mr. Griffith. 
– Sara Miller Llana / Staff writer

2. Latin America

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

An elementary school student in Tamaula, Mexico, studies the lesson on the blackboard. More Latin Americans are staying in school longer.

More Latin Americans are studying beyond elementary school, something that helps decrease wage inequality in the region and underscores the high rate of return on investment in education here. In 2004, about 66% of Latin Americans studied beyond elementary school, a number that grew to nearly 80% by 2014, according to a United Nations report. Education plays a much larger role in determining earnings among workers in Latin America and the Caribbean compared with members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 34 mostly developed economies. Scores on the PISA – the OECD test given in 79 participating countries every three years – are improving at a faster pace here than in OECD nations. Despite the progress, there is still work to be done to improve the quality of education in the region. 
– Whitney Eulich / Correspondent

3. Sub-Saharan Africa 

Sub-Saharan Africa has a higher percentage of women on corporate boards than any other region in the world, according to a new report by the McKinsey Global Institute. That’s good news, since appointing more women to boards tends to lead to a more gender-equal workplace overall, and even higher companywide productivity. At 25%, Africa far outpaces the global average of 17% women on corporate boards, but the McKinsey report also cautioned against reading too much into the statistic. It was a success story for “women at the top of the pyramid, but not for millions of ordinary African women” working at lower rungs of the economy. 
– Ryan Lenora Brown / Staff writer

4. Tunisia

Courtesy of Munathara Initiative

Candidates for president of Tunisia participate in the second of three debates in Tunis on Sept. 6, 2019. This was the first election in Tunisia to feature candidate debates.

Tunisia held presidential debates ahead of its Sept. 15 presidential election, the first time any Arab country had leading candidates debate policy and defend their records. The debates were the result of five years of campaigning by the Munathara Initiative, a Tunisia-based organization, and the format was based on Colombian and Mexican models in which candidates have 90 seconds to respond to moderators’ questions. “This is a moment of pride for us Tunisians – a chance to remember why our revolution and struggle was all worth it,” says Walid Ben Mohammed, a Tunis taxi driver. “Rather than our next head of our state acting like they are the boss of us, he or she has to plead with us as if they are applying for a job.” 
– Taylor Luck / Correspondent

5. European Union

The European Union is boosting protection for whistleblowers who flag breaches of EU law. Approved in October, the EU whistleblowers directive covers money laundering, tax fraud, data protection, public health, nuclear safety, and environmental protection. Companies with more than 50 employees or with annual sales exceeding €10 million ($11 million) will be required to establish confidential whistleblower channels and clear reporting mechanisms. The directive also covers the public sector with reporting requirements for state and regional administrators and municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants. If the authorities fail to act within three to six months, whistleblowers may go public. EU member states have two years to adapt their national laws. 
– Dominique Soguel / Correspondent 

6. China

Reuters/File

A man transports quilts to be recycled as his son sleeps atop them in Xiangyang, central China. Poverty is being aggressively cut in China.

China is closing in on its goal of wiping out extreme poverty by the end of 2020. By the end of 2019, about 95% of the country’s poor population will have been lifted from poverty, according to State Council Poverty Alleviation Office Director Liu Youngfu. At the same time, more than 90% of poor counties will have their “hats off,” or no longer be designated as impoverished, Mr. Liu said. “The poverty problem that has plagued the Chinese nation for thousands of years will be solved,” he said. China’s poor population decreased from 98.99 million in 2012 to 16.60 million in 2018. The government has allocated $16 billion for 2020 to support the poorest areas, mainly in western and southwestern China. 
– Ann Scott Tyson / Staff writer

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Just over two years ago, when science fiction writer Mary Robinette Kowal took part in a strategic task force looking into a Department of Next at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, it didn’t take long for her to realize why she’d been asked to attend.

Faced with flat attendance and the pressure to remain relevant in an entertainment-saturated world, the museum was looking to inject a sense of urgency into its mission. The board wanted to reposition the 84-year-old institution as “a futurist and provocateur,” as president and CEO David Mosena put it at the time. Exhibits moving forward should include plausible futurescapes and a narrative shape to how human beings might live. 

“And one of the things that happened during these massive brainstorming sessions was that people would keep saying things like, ‘We don’t think anyone has really thought through the ramifications of what would happen if you tried to colonize another planet, having to set out in a ship that would involve people living on it for generations before they got there,’” says Ms. Kowal, a four-time winner of the Hugo Award, science fiction’s top prize. 

Some 50 thinkers participated in the museum’s task force, including scientists, business leaders, and a few other science fiction writers. “I told them, that’s called a ‘generation ship,’ and I can give you a reading list of people who’ve imagined that,” says Ms. Kowal, whose own short story “For Want of a Nail” did so in 2011. 

On the cusp of this new year, 2020, the Monitor invited Ms. Kowal and a number of contemporary science fiction writers to take part in our own version of a Department of Next, asking them a simple, open-ended question: What will life be like in 2050?

Their visions vary from cargo liners that will float down from space to move your furniture, to smart robots that might make it unnecessary for people to work, to buildings embedded with crops in a new network of global green cities.

But before we get into their predictions, it might be worth asking something else: Why query science fiction writers at all? For starters, we thought that 2020 was a year practically begging for careful reflection on the future, it being a marker of two decades into the 21st century and both an election and a census year. Even its digital symmetry conjures something like a call for collective visions of the future and past.

And science fiction writers do dabble in notions that sometimes become reality. Jules Verne, Gene Roddenberry, and Philip K. Dick dreamed up technical wonders such as submarines, hand-held communication devices, and touch-screen computers dec­ades before they became reality. They and other sci-fi writers are even credited with inspiring engineers and designers who later constructed these cutting-edge innovations.

“We are the ones who inspire; we’re the ones who throw people into the future before we get there and say, ‘Well, look, our world might be better than this,’” says Tade Thompson, author of the critically ­acclaimed “Wormwood” trilogy, a series of novels about the social and political state of the world in 2066, decades after an alien invasion in 2012.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Thought experiments

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago wasn’t the only institution to invite the perspectives of science fiction writers. The consulting behemoth PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) published a 2017 corporate guide on “Using science fiction to explore business innovation,” and that same year the Harvard Business Review produced a report on “Why Business Leaders Need to Read More Science Fiction.” Since then a host of corporations, civic institutions, think tanks, and government agencies have been hiring science fiction writers to help them create their own visions of the future.

“A lot of what science fiction does is ... conduct thought experiments about the technology that we are currently grappling with, and extend the logical causal chains into the future to see what the ramifications of that technology will be on our social structure,” says Ms. Kowal. 

“For me, it’s less about what technology are we going to see in 2050, and more about what society is going to look like with the technology we have now, if it continues to develop in the way that it’s going,” she says.  

In our conversations, however, nearly every author dismissed the idea of science fiction writers being able to predict new types of technology, à la the Vernes and Roddenberrys of the past.

“It’s not going to be in the realm of technological advances, because we are already living in what was a science fictional world when I was a child,” says Mr. Thompson, who sets his “Wormwood” trilogy in Nigeria, decades after the alien invasion decimates much of the West. “So to me, it’s no longer about impressing audiences with futuristic designs of machines or spacecraft or whatever.

“The best, the most important area of exploration for a science fiction writer right now is how society will be built,” he continues. “It’s the Ursula K. Le Guin type of science fiction in which you think about alternative societies.”

But there was one thing Mr. Thompson and most all of the science fiction writers emphasized. “Science fiction cannot be ‘scientific’ if you don’t talk about global warming, talk about the effects climate change will have on everything we’re doing in 2050,” he says. “To be a good science fiction writer in this day and age, you have to include the state of the environment.”

Karen Norris/Staff

A 'little, vulnerable' Earth

That was certainly a dominant theme in writer Laura Lam’s predictions about the world in 2050. When researching her forthcoming novel “Goldilocks,” Ms. Lam asked a number of scientists what Earth might look like from orbit a few decades from now, in a worst-case climate scenario. In an extended written answer to our query, she included a description from “Goldilocks,” a story about the first all-female space mission to an exosolar planet, part of a rush to the heavens because the Earth has only 30 years left of human habitation.

It didn’t look like a marble; it was too clearly alive. The clouds crawled slowly, the planet bisected by the line of day and night. …

The land on the other continents was too brown and golden, the green too sparse. There were swathes of land where humans could no longer survive, and the habitable areas were growing crowded. There was even some gold-green in the oceans from dust storms blowing off the continents and fertilising phytoplankton blooms.

Earth was such a little, vulnerable thing in the grand scope of the universe.

Yet the worst-case scenario envisioned in her novel, which will be published in 2020, is not the only possibility she sees for life in 2050. In her response to the Monitor, she weighs two different pathways. 

“Turn right: do everything we know we need to do, fix Earth, still look to space but with less urgency. Turn left: we’ll be in space in 2050 because we ran out of time,” she writes. “There was no planet in the magic Goldilocks zone. We might be in space stations, looking out the window down at what we did every morning. Well, the ones who can afford the ticket will. That won’t be most of us.

“I wonder which direction we’ll go.”

Karen Norris/Staff

Why Africa is the future

Writer Tochi Onyebuchi foresees a world in which new power centers begin to emerge on the global stage, as climate change and fast-changing population patterns disrupt those of the past. 

“One of the things that I envision is a sort of rise of the global south,” says the author of “Beasts Made of Night,” a fantasy story also set in Nigeria that depicts a group of young “sin-eaters” called the aki, who must conjure and then battle beasts that materialize from the sins they discern in others. “I often say to almost anyone who will listen that, you know, Africa is the future.”

Mr. Onyebuchi has said that “Beasts Made of Night” is in many ways a metaphor for the effects of criminal justice systems and mass incarceration, a prism through which he explores concepts of guilt and sin, who gets punished for what and why.

One of his specific predictions, however, is the growing influence of China throughout the African continent. And as China’s economic and military might continues to expand in a region often dismissed or ignored by Western media, the relationships Beijing is cultivating with African governments will have enormous cultural effects on both regions of the world. 

“You look at, for instance, Brexit, and you look ... at all the current political turmoil in the U.S., and it’s very easy to extrapolate a world in which China becomes the reigning superpower with this vast array of political and cultural influence,” says Mr. Onyebuchi. 

“African countries are already sending their students to schools in China. There’s the teaching of Mandarin in African schools, even as the interlocking of business interests between Chinese corporations and African governments continues to expand,” he says. “That in itself is a reality that can completely decenter the U.S., and that can completely decenter the [United Kingdom], and it’s essentially a sort of post-post-colonialism.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

A sleeping dragon in England

Part of the decline of the West will also have to do with the demographic challenges of an aging population, says the fantasy writer Priya Sharma, who is a London-based physician. 

“So I think in the future, in 2050, obviously this population is going to need people to look after it over the next 20 years, and that’s going to affect social movements and global migration patterns,” says Ms. Sharma. She is the award-winning author of “Fabulous Beasts” and the 2019 fantasy novel “Ormeshadow,” a family drama set in the English countryside where the landscape, according to folklore, covers a buried, sleeping dragon that dreams of resentment, jealousy, estrangement, and death. “Countries like Japan, countries like those in the West with aging populations, are going to have to welcome immigration.

“In the U.K., we’ve historically poached highly trained professionals from the former colonies,” she continues. “I mean, during the ’60s, we had this whole generation of people from India and Africa who came in to be nurses, who came in to be doctors. Taking trained staff out of those countries raised questions about the morality and ethics of it all, but as living standards in the U.K. and in the Western world change, what if we get China and India and Africa poaching professionals from us?”

Such migration patterns will also be set in motion by the effects of climate change in 2050. As the geography of coastlines begins to alter, once-powerful cities, which rose to prominence over the centuries because of their access to oceans and global trade routes, will begin to lose their clout, says Ms. Kowal. 

“California will not be a wine-growing region in 2050,” she says. “My husband is a wine-maker, and this is something that the wine industry has been talking about for over a decade.

“So I have been thinking a lot about how one of the things that’s likely to happen is that we’re going to see a population shift as people move away from the areas that are hardest hit by climate change,” Ms. Kowal says. “The coastlines’ new boundaries are going to change the world’s economic power centers as people migrate to other locations, and those locations are going to be around whatever is most conducive to power.”

Technology will play a role in these shifting global power centers. “If Elon Musk actually manages to do the things that he appears to be doing, the world’s economic centers may, in fact, become something like orbiting platforms – but this is like serious speculation at this point, beyond 2050,” Ms. Kowal says.

She notes that spacecraft such as the Crew Dragon being developed by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX and the Starliner by Boeing Co. could be perfect vehicles for moving a lot of cargo quickly. “The interesting thing is that, once you can mass-produce these kinds of rockets and containers, the cost per pound of payload when launching a container into a suborbital flight and then coming back down to, say, China could be the same as if we had a train that could run from New York directly to Shanghai, but now orders of magnitude faster. 

“Then you’re looking at a future where the idea of suborbital flights, instead of airplanes or ships or trains, becomes economically viable,” Ms. Kowal says. “Whether or not we actually wind up there by 2050, who knows? But it is a future that is plausible.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Machine learning speeds up 

The science fiction writer Liu Cixin, author of “The Three-Body Problem,” a richly layered Chinese novel that describes first contact with extraterrestrial life forms, foresees the transforming effect of artificial intelligence. 

“I don’t believe that in 2050 strong artificial intelligence that surpasses human beings will appear, but AI will have developed enough to compete with humans for jobs,” Mr. Liu says in a written statement to the Monitor, translated from Chinese by staff writer Ann Scott Tyson.

“This will have two possible profound implications for society,” he says. “One is that the jobless public and AI will be in a long-standing conflict, causing long-term social turmoil and instability. The second is that humans will have smoothed out the relationship with AI and established a leisurely life in which people reduce their working hours or even don’t need to work. The latter, however, will require major changes in the current political and economic distribution system of mankind.” 

At first blush, the visions of the future many contemporary science fiction writers present, at least in their books, can seem unsettling and bleak. But for all the dystopian futurescapes and scenarios of impending doom – tropes that often define the genre – most of the authors here described the threat of catastrophe as an ironic metaphor about the resiliency of hope.

In his novel “Tropic of Kansas,” science fiction writer Christopher Brown describes an American dystopia in the middle of the 21st century, where the country’s divisions metastasize into violence and rebellion. He writes about a heartland where “big swaths of the corn belt had turned sick, from bad [gene] splices, failed economics, burnt climate, broken politics, or divine retribution.” The book opens with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arresting and deporting an American immigrating illegally at a border crossing that Canada has fortified with a 30-foot wall buttressed with machine gun towers – its efforts to keep the disruptive violence of its southern neighbor at bay. 

“But talking about a bleak future, that can also be helpful in getting people to think about how they can avoid it,” he says. 

Mr. Brown, who made climate change a major theme in “Tropic of Kansas,” was in many ways the most optimistic about the future in 2050. “I talk a lot about ecology and about the idea of green cities,” he says. He envisions urban areas restoring a lot of natural habitat. He cites as an example efforts by New York City to build tree-lined parks out of the dilapidated remnants of its industrial past – such as the High Line in Manhattan, which transformed century-old elevated train tracks into a haven for trees and indigenous plant life.

“[Such projects] show this yearning people have to bring back the urban green in the heart of the city,” says Mr. Brown, a resident of Austin, Texas. “And the prospect of that dialing up by 2050 is very probable – and when you think about the idea of a green landscape, with urban architecture embedded with greenery and vegetable production, as human populations become concentrated in cities, that will become a central component of urban development and planning all over the world.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Global competition or cooperation? 

The same ironic interplay between looming disaster and the resiliency of hope infused other authors’ visions as well. 

In “Rosewater,” the first novel in his “Wormwood” trilogy, Mr. Thompson describes an alien invasion that comes not with spaceships and ray guns, but partly with “strands of alien fungi-like filaments and neurotransmitters” that link to human skin. These filaments form a biopsychic network called the “xenosphere,” and certain people use it to sense the activities of those around them.

“At the core of the whole thing, it is me criticizing a colonialist type of past and present, while seeking ideas about how the future could be run,” says Mr. Thompson, who depicts the United States as having gone “dark,” with no country having heard anything from the former superpower in 43 years. London, as well as the rest of Europe, was devastated by the initial landing of the alien presence, which arrived in a meteorlike rock the size of Hyde Park in 2012. 

In “The Calculating Stars,” the second novel of her “Lady Astronaut” series, Ms. Kowal reimagines the space race in the 1950s, setting its urgency not in the looming presence of the menacing Soviet Union, but in the aftermath of an asteroid strike. Its impact wipes out most of the country’s Eastern Seaboard, including Washington, D.C., and will soon make the Earth uninhabitable.

Her alternate history is something of a metaphor for the globe’s current climate crisis, in which cooperation rather than global competition is critical. “The question for me is, how do we structure our world so that the people that we’re trying to protect in that first blush of disaster can survive?” she says. “When we get territorial, it’s because of how we are defining an ‘us versus them.’”

Indeed, it’s the social side of the future, the ways the societies of the near future will begin to evolve and reorganize, that’s important, many contemporary science fiction writers insist. 

“We don’t use the conventions that were used in early science fiction, those ‘astounding tales’ of the 1950s and 1960s, you know, the classical science fiction tales that use the language of conquest,” Mr. Thompson says. “We now have to think of harmony. Now we have to use words like harmonization, like, how can we work in harmony with the places that we live in, and the people that we live with?”

He says he’d like to see the optimistic parts of his work inspire children so that they think, “OK, yeah, this is a pretty good idea for the future. And then one day they will grow up to be in power, and the seed has been planted, so when they’re older it has grown up with them.”

Meet the authors

Photos by Carla Roadnight & courtesy of Mary Robinette Kowal

TADE THOMPSON (l.) and MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL (r.)

Tade Thompson is the author of “Rosewater,” which won the United Kingdom’s top science fiction award. Born in London to Yoruba parents, he lives and works on the south coast of England as an emergency room psychiatrist.

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the “Glamourist Histories” series, “Ghost Talkers,” and the “Lady Astronaut” novels. She’s won four Hugo Awards. A professional puppeteer and voice actor, she lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and 12 manual typewriters. 

Photos by Mark Greenwood & courtesy of Christina Orlando

PRIYA SHARMA (l.) and TOCHI ONYEBUCHI (r.)

Priya Sharma is a physician and short-story writer whose work has appeared in top British science fiction publications. “Fabulous Beasts” won a British Fantasy Award. “Ormeshadow,” which came out last fall, is her first novella.

Tochi Onyebuchi holds an undergraduate degree from Yale, an MFA from New York University, and a law degree from Columbia. His fourth book, “Riot Baby,” is due in January. He lives in Connecticut, where he’s worked in the tech industry. 

Photos by Crawford Morgan & Tor Books

CHRISTOPHER BROWN (l.) and LIU CIXIN (r.)

Christopher Brown is a writer and lawyer whose debut novel, “Tropic of Kansas,” was a finalist for a top sci-fi award. He’s worked on two Supreme Court confirmations and co-hosted a punk rock radio show. He works out of an Airstream trailer in Austin, Texas.

Liu Cixin is a prolific and popular science fiction writer who is often called the Arthur C. Clarke of China. He’s won the Galaxy Award, China’s top prize for science fiction, nine times as well as a Hugo Award. He lives with his family in Yangquan, China.

ELIZABETH MAY

LAURA LAM

Laura Lam is an award-winning author of science fiction, fantasy, and romance novels. Raised in California, she now lives in Scotland. She lectures on writing at Edinburgh Napier University. 

Eloisa Lopez/Reuters

A reveller wears glasses shaped as the year 2020 during the New Year's Eve party in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, Dec. 31, 2019.

This is the time when calendars flip to a new year – and to a new decade (with apologies to those who hold that won’t really happen until 2021). January presents a fresh start. A new beginning. 

Plenty of bad news has been reported in the outgoing year and decade. Many commentators this season seem compelled to offer a counterbalance, gently reminding readers that much progress is underway. 

One could, in fact, make a convincing argument that these are the best times in human history. Worldwide, poverty is receding, and education and literacy are on the rise. Never in history have so many people been so well off materially. One world index shows prosperity increasing in 148 countries and falling in only 19 during the past decade. Over the past three decades, more than a billion people worldwide have moved out of extreme poverty, according to the World Bank. 

While oppressive regimes continue on in many places, in Hong Kong and elsewhere citizens are rising up to demand a voice in their own government through democratic means. 

But what of these numerous wrongs and injustices? Does noting progress mean we need to do nothing and find that wrongs somehow self-correct? 

Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t think so. “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable,” he said. “Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” He didn’t hold much with complaints of compassion fatigue, either.

Another vital piece of good news is that people around the world are responding to human needs. An estimated 1 billion volunteers do something to help others every day, according to United Nations officials involved in volunteer efforts. In the United States, 63 million people, about 25% of all adult Americans, contribute volunteer work worth an average of more than $25 per hour of service.  

Good actions provide a powerful counterbalance to news that would disturb, discourage, or enervate. “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world,” wrote young Anne Frank as the Holocaust began to rise around her.

The founder of The Christian Science Monitor, Mary Baker Eddy, saw that individual action was essential for progress.

“But what of ourselves, and our times and obligations?” she said in remarks given at a Fourth of July service honoring America’s heroes. “Are we duly aware of our own great opportunities and responsibilities? Are we prepared to meet and improve them, to act up to the acme of divine energy wherewith we are armored?”

Alan Paton, the South African author and anti-apartheid activist, once referred to the Monitor as “a newspaper of sober and responsible hope” because, he said, “it gives no shrift to any belief in the irredeemable wickedness of man, nor in the futility of human endeavor.”

Hope, sometimes referred to as the expectation of good, might be just the approach in which to ground thinking and actions in the year ahead.