How and why should we teach creative writing workshops to engineers? The basic claim, defended here with both reference to scientific studies on creativity and anecdotal evidence drawn from teaching experience, is that creative writing workshops can be taught in such a way as to help future innovators to both better understand the creative process and to think deeply about the ethical and social impacts involved in acts of creation. The somewhat paradoxical claim animating this article is the idea that the people who may really need courses in creative writing are not writers but engineers, those whose creations may bring us towards science fiction futures, and who, for this very reason, need to be capable of creating fictions as a guide for imagining the ethical consequences of their innovations.