A damaged home in the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood of Aleppo. (Mauricio Centurion) via The Nation
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.
We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
February was short, so we decided to do a combined February-March newsletter – and it’s a good one! We collected stories on Syria, Turkey & Rojava, the Cop City movement in Atlanta, and false climate solutions; a critique of Elon Musk’s Twitter; a discussion of the sustainability of bicycles; and a reflection on the importance of redefining ‘abundance’, to name a few. We also included a climate action toolkit for tired people, because that’s most of us in this vast capitalist hellscape.
If you find these lists useful, you can support us by sharing them on social media and with your friends and family!
A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!
Debt and ecological crises. A series of briefings looking at financial mechanisms that (in theory) support climate action and biodiversity conservation in the midst of a new debt crisis.
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.
We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
Belated new year’s greetings and welcome to our first newsletter of 2023! This time, you’ll be able to read up on biodiversity and colonialist conservation; the battle to save Germany’s Lützerath from being swallowed by a coal mine; the ‘Cop City’ protests in Atlanta, Georgia to save the South River Forest; nuclear fusion; why fake meat is just another food fad; psychedelics and climate activism; international struggles for justice; and so many other important topics.
If you find these lists useful, you can support us by sharing them on social media and with your friends and family!
A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.
We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
On this month’s list, you’ll find a bunch of readings on the COP15 and COP27, worker exploitation behind AI innovation, the disastrous environmental impact of the World Cup in Qatar, the importance of working less, the growing popularity of degrowth, and so much more. We also linked a website you can use to get past paywalls! We don’t always have time to run articles through it before adding them, so keep the page bookmarked for those we might miss.
If you find these lists useful, you can support us by sharing them on social media and with your friends and family!
A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!
Escape from the closed loop. Protests in China are shining a light not only on the country’s draconian population management but restrictions on workers everywhere.
Activists of “Just Stop Oil” glue their hands to the wall after throwing soup at a van Gogh’s painting “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London, Britain October 14, 2022. Just Stop Oil/Handout via REUTERS
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.
We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
In October, the infamous soup incident – in which two young Just Stop Oil activists threw soup on a Van Gogh painting at the National Gallery in London as a form of climate protest – was on everyone’s lips, so we decided to dedicate a section in this newsletter to discussions around activism and strategy. We also unfortunately lost three great thinkers: philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, Leftist urban theorist and historian Mike Davis, and ecological economist Herman Daly. We featured readings on their legacy in the ‘theory’ section. For some good news, we have a huge victory to celebrate this month: Lula won the Brazilian election, and while this is only the beginning, the dystopian era of Bolsonaro is over! Finally, we read great articles on convivial technologies and the deep history of work, and enjoyed a two-part podcast series on what a just green transition might look like; and, as usual, we turned the spotlight on struggles around the world, and compiled a section on fake climate solutions and real reparations.
If you find these lists useful, you can support us by sharing them on social media and with your friends and family!
A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!
Uneven Earth updates
Green growth | Capitalist and neocolonial fantasies are hampering a just transition
Don’t tell me to just breathe. An animation that speaks to the spiralling levels of anxiety and depression in the UK and other rich nations by revealing the often silenced links between these mental health crises and the current economic system, including not only the increasing pressures upon people’s basic needs, but also the ‘capitalist realism’ that allows climate breakdown to unfold before our very eyes.
It is fair to say that most environmental books and political attention are centered on the climate crisis. And for good reason: for the vast majority of the world, a planet burning past 1.5℃ is existential. But for every article or text written about simply reducing CO2, audiences and the public are left thinking that if we just switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy it is enough to avert catastrophe. As the authors Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettesse of the new book Half-Earth Socialism argue, we have much more work to do than simply reducing carbon pollution.
Instead, the authors claim we need a holistic ecological program that puts the economy back into balance with the living world by respecting limits, nonhuman nature, and thinking at a planetary scale. Half-Earth Socialism seeks to do just that through a political program consisting of a variety of policies in the realm of worldwide conservation, vegan diets, and sufficient provisioning to the world’s population.
Where the book thrives in its utopian imagination, its originality in synthesizing disparate thinkers and traditions, and its criticisms of “prometheanism”, it also lacks a strong analysis of democracy, a more thorough argument against some its targets, and at times, can be found to concede to anticipated criticism regarding its more provocative ideas, especially as it concerns veganism.
An original synthesis
As a general summary of the book, the authors begin by describing a dystopian scenario where a solar radiation management (SMR) scheme fails, leading to species loss, acid rain, and reversing the environmental wins from the previous century. Following the introduction, the authors critique the promethean worldview that seeks to dominate nature, essentially making the nonhuman world a machine of inputs and outputs.
The authors then draw from biologist E.O. Wilson’s idea of conserving half the earth for wildlife and nonhuman nature as a counter to this promethean program. This means protecting large areas of the earth for wildlife to thrive, where Wilson identified thirty biomes across the globe that could largely contribute to this conservation effort. To achieve this rewilding, the authors suggest universal veganism is required due to the vast amount of land animal agriculture uses.
Unlike Wilson, who the authors describe as center-left, Half-Earth Socialism compliments worldwide conservation with socialist central planning. Here they engage with the work of theorists like Otto Neurath and the Soviet mathematician Leonid Kantorovich to explain how utopian socialist planning would work in a Half-Earth economy. The author’s vision for central planning is inspired by the socialist and designer William Morris who was interested in how socialism could offer fulfilling work by integrating labor with arts, nature, and leisure. They end the book describing a future of organic veggie farms, communal living, and life under a centrally planned economy. Half-Earth Socialism’s originality in synthesizing such disparate thinkers is laudable in and of itself.
The author’s vision for central planning is inspired by the socialist and designer William Morris who was interested in how socialism could offer fulfilling work by integrating labor with arts, nature, and leisure
Dominating the non-human
There are many things worth praising in the book. First, their critique of prometheans and ecomoderns who seek to subdue and dominate the natural world is arguably their strongest chapter. In “Binding Prometheus”, the authors take issue with this bipartisan worldview of convserative billionaires, centrist political parties, and sects of Marxism. Vettese and Pendergrass largely blame Hegel’s concept of “humanizing nature” for this ideology. Showing how Hegel’s concept was influenced by Christian theology, the authors describe this “humanizing” as “the process by which humanity overcomes its alienation from nature by instilling the latter with human consciousness through the process of labor.”
In other words, our relationship with nature is only good for what humans can put it to use for: nature becomes nothing more than an instrument, ignoring all the ways not putting nature “to use” is vital for our own species survival. Since the nonhuman world must be instilled with human consciousness (rather than species having their own), this is used as a justification to plunder and even exterminate the nonhuman world.
In this way, the authors tell us, the neoliberals and many Marxists aren’t so different in their attitude towards nonhuman nature. Each agrees nature is to be controlled, dominated, and capitalized: one just believes markets are the best mechanism, the other believes it is nation states. Both free marketers and state socialists fail to account for the agency of nonhuman nature, and they lack critical reflection on the ways this worldview has culminated in our present environmental crises and ultimately promote a secularized religiosity that believes humanity can take a god’s eye-view of nature. “Marxism”, the authors write, “cannot simply be greened by reading Capital with viridian-tinted glasses.” If religion is the opiate of the masses, as Marx said, then prometheanism is the opiate of Marxists.
“Marxism”, the authors write, “cannot simply be greened by reading Capital with viridian-tinted glasses.” If religion is the opiate of the masses, as Marx said, then prometheanism is the opiate of Marxists
Utopianism is good, actually
Another strong point of the text is its unabashed embrace of utopian socialism. Utopian socialism — used as a pejorative by Marxists (who are themselves called utopians by anyone not on the radical left) — has been defined as an early form of socialist thought that seeks to build socialism in the name of it being more desirable than capitalism, rather than as an inevitability, as Marx predicted.
Utopian socialists typically start from a place of what they would like the world to be and experiment in bringing about this better, more ideal society. It is no coincidence then that the authors end their book with a utopian future set in Massachusetts, itself a place of previous utopian socialist experiments.
The authors argue at length about utopian socialism being more than just idealistic dreamers wishing on a star for a better society. Instead, they advocate for a “scientific utopianism” as “blueprints for the future” that they believe can remedy many problems for both environmentalists and economic planners. For environmentalists, the utopian tradition allows the movement to project forward what kind of world we want to build in the ashes of capitalist ruins with a critically anticapitalist edge. Here, the authors tell us, is where we need to contemplate our blueprints for the future that help inspire and mobilize people.
For planners, and the socialist tradition more generally, the authors point out that centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union suffered from an immense lack of imagination and participation outside of the party line, resulting in the lifeless and bureaucratic state that it ultimately became. Utopian socialism in this way allows us to imagine and fight for a world not yet built with the flexibility and experimentation the utopian socialist tradition advocated for.
Given utopian socialism has been condemned by most Marxists, Vettesse and Pendergrass’ attempt to revive a tradition during troubling times is certainly welcomed. Marxism might have many answers, but the socialist tradition has too many layers to simply be narrowed to just what Marx, Engels, and their followers said over a hundred years ago. As a final note, the utopian socialist tradition, like many anarchists and libertarian socialists, has long championed an ecological sensibility and often much more than most Marxists. We can and should explore other options and schools of thought in times of ecological collapse.
A blueprint for utopia
Finally, the author’s exploration of socialist central planning history is fascinating, as well. Here, their planning philosophy is largely influenced by Soviet mathematician Leonid Kantorovich and linear programming (which itself was developed by the utopian theorist Charles Fourier). As the authors explain, the social engineers of “Gosplant” — a play on words the authors develop based off of the original Soviet state planning commission “Gosplan” — would receive information about the local conditions of the social and natural world in order to devise models about what kind of future could be planned. These planners might ask themselves what societal outcomes could be maximized while limiting ecological damage, such as the amount of land that can be used while delivering the necessary energy requirements for individuals and industry. This chapter is the author’s technical “blueprint” for utopia. To complement what can often be abstract and technical planning language, the authors help manifest what planning in practice is like through their own computer game. And beyond its originality, it is also fun! Half.earth helps the reader experience — from the position of the planner’s seat — what kind of impact certain policies, technologies, and forms of organization have on the climate, biodiversity, and social prosperity. It serves as an especially nice complement to the third chapter in order to help readers better understand programming, planning, and decision making.
Central planning or participatory planning?
Half-Earth Socialism makes many good arguments and interventions to expand the horizons of ecosocialism. With that said, it also suffers, at different points, from a lack of follow-through on some of their more ambitious plans. While the authors repeatedly emphasize the importance of democratic values, they fail to explore, on both a practical and conceptual level, what democracy would be in a centrally planned economy. Because the authors rely so heavily on Soviet thinkers, this oversight is hardly acceptable. Soviet society suffered from an extensive amount of technocracy, bureaucracy, and ultimately, autocracy due to a lack of democratic decision making. It would be wise of Vettese and Pendergrass to look at other utopian thinkers and their emphasis, not on central planning, but participatory planning. One of those utopians is Murray Bookchin.
Bookchin might be the thinker most responsible for making utopia an endearing term during the late 20th century and into today. But Bookchin’s utopian social ecology was predicated on a system of deep and direct democracy. Bookchin looked at Ancient Greece, despite its commitment to patriarchy and slavery, as an example of what democratic structures looked like. The ekklesia, or citizen assembly, was a major institution within Greek society where everyday men would directly contribute and decide the direction of the polis. Greek culture was also imbued with a democratic ethos in the sense that there were dedicated gathering places — the agora — for instilling democratic values in Athenian citizens.
Likewise, a contemporary example of this form of direct democracy comes in the New England Town Meeting. The Town Meeting is still practiced by a number of New England municipalities where at least once a year, town members come to debate and vote on things such as changes to the town charter, the municipal budget, and are able to offer up policies and proposals to be taken up by the town.
Such examples provide a counterweight to the lack of democracy prevalent in centrally planned economies. Contemporary citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting are other examples of direct and deep democratic systems being flirted with today and all over the world. Despite Marxists and democratic socialists saying they are committed to democracy, often their horizons end at representative government and unions. Here Bookchin’s distinction between administration—the technical and coordinating work planners would do, and policy-making, where people make decisions through democratic structures like popular assemblies or councils for the planners to enact—is helpful. With this in mind, it can feel like Vettese and Pendergrass view planning as an end in and of itself, rather than a deliberative outcome of democratic politics. Like too many Marxists, their political imaginations are stifled by ruminations about a benevolent Soviet State commanding and controlling from on high.
It can feel like Vettese and Pendergrass view planning as an end in and of itself, rather than a deliberative outcome of democratic politics
The issues with universal veganism
Readers might be turned off by some of the more upending policies Pendergrass and Vettesse propose like universal veganism. One of the book’s strongest arguments for veganism is the large-scale “humanization” of animals for food. The authors point out that, in the context of the 300,000 years humans have existed, zoonoses have only emerged within the last 10,000 years or so — the time period in which humans domesticated animals. With the Covid-19 pandemic originating in a meat market and, by at least one study’s account, at least 60% of infectious and 75% of “emerging” diseases originating from animals, there is more and more evidence pointing out that the “humanization of nature” is actually quite deadly.
While it’s increasingly clear that meat-heavy diets are not only morally problematic but also irrational, the prospects for universal veganism are slim, even in a world with improved plant-based “meats.” This presents a real political problem the authors don’t really address. Yes, we need to reduce meat consumption, but in order to build a coalition powerful enough to reduce current consumption rates, many will be turned off if the “planners’” demands are universal veganism. I respect and appreciate the principles of vegans, but this must be balanced with a proper political analysis that examines a more astute point regarding the unsustainability of Western diets: industrial farming and capitalism.
In this vein, the authors confusingly propose universal veganism but ask animal rights activists to temper their criticisms of Indigenous hunting practices, given that many Indigenous tribes have more sustainable and reciprocal relationships with the animals they eat. This seems to be a concession that there are at least some forms of sustainable animal consumption and that, on both a practical and political level, Indigenous people are vital to preserving the nonhuman world. Furthermore, Indigenous people are often viewed as relevant to protecting nature rather than as direct political participants in how decisions are made about nature—further relegating them to the colonial divide that subjects them to an “outside nature.” While the authors acknowledge that Indigenous people have a deeper relationship with the nonhuman world than western conservationists, a program in the name of “Half-Earth Socialism” is still in reference to one of the West’s most famous conservationists who has influenced the United Nations and other international conservation programs (like the 30×30 program), often at the expense of Indigenous perspectives, sovereignty, and stewardship.
With the lack of attention on democracy in the book and emphasis on top-down central planning, it is more than reasonable to expect already vulnerable Indigenous people to be victims of such a Half-Earth plan. Just because your Half-Earth is socialist, does not necessarily make it equitable, just, anti-racist or democratic given, by the authors’ own admissions, many centrally planned socialist societies were deeply undemocratic. It would be wise of the authors to tackle both the Indigenous and democracy problem together. The authors are correct that we need to vastly expand conservation efforts. It might just not be in the name of “Half Earth” or Western conceptions of centrally planned socialist economies.
With the lack of attention on democracy in the book and emphasis on top-down central planning, it is more than reasonable to expect already vulnerable Indigenous people to be victims of such a Half-Earth plan
Complicating nuclear
Another issue is the author’s swift explanation for why nuclear energy does not belong within the environmental movement. While I share the author’s criticisms of nuclear energy being an unstable technology given an increasingly unstable climate, the author’s argument hinges on the practicality of not isolating environmentalists who previously formed the anti-nuclear movement. Here, they reveal themselves to be political strategists while the rest of the book is provocative and visionary.
With that said, I do not think ecologists should spend time or resources trying to shut down currently operating nuclear plants. For anyone familiar with the energy debate, you quickly learn how much nuclear advocates suffer from a sort of dogmatism and zealotry when it comes to nuclear power — believing it can power the majority of the world’s electricity needs despite few studies or institutions saying so. This archetype has been referred to as “Nuke-bros” due to their arrogance and chauvinism, oftening exhibiting authoritarian character traits as well (which shouldn’t be a surprise, as nuclear energy requires an authoritarian military). Nevertheless, decarbonization will largely fall on the shoulders of renewable energy, with or without an anti-nuclear movement, in my opinion. But because they move so quickly through their critiques of nuclear power, this, among other points (like the land sparing of nuclear power), is hardly addressed in any detail.
Following the example in arguably their strongest chapter, prometheanism should be critiqued and destroyed from leftist thought all together. And with that philosophy in retreat, we might expect a retreat of nuclear energy, geoengineering, and the senseless killing of animals as well.
Conclusion
Half-Earth Socialism sees the ecological landscape and makes its own unique intervention. Their critique and commitment to a Half-Earth economy is admirable and provocative, even if at times unclear and lacking details on how to form the political coalition powerful enough to bring about their vision.
Unlike many on the Left, Pendergrass and Vettese do not suffer from either carbon or Marxist-tunnel vision, offering their own synthesis and analysis of ideas and thinkers across ecological and leftist thought. Half-Earth Socialism is thinking at a planetary scale. Now we need to think about bringing these ideas to everyday people. To borrow and reword a phrase from the French students of the 1960’s: “Do the impossible! Plan utopia!”
Andrew Ahern is an ecological activist and freelance writer based in Massachusetts. You can follow him on Twitter @PoliticOfNature. Full disclosure: Andrew is a member of Boston DSA alongside author Drew Pendergrass.
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.
We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
This month, we are thinking about animal rights. Many of us know that industrial, for-profit animal agriculture must end—but is eating animals, or animal byproducts, inherently wrong, and how do we organize for supporting animals? And what about ecosystem rights, versus animal rights in particular? We feature several articles on different sides of the debate, including those from feminist socialist, Indigenous, social ecology, and Global South perspectives.
We also saw many articles about what Uneven Earth editor Vijay Kolinjivadi calls green gaslighting in an essay for Al Jazeera: ““climate solutions” that protect, if not boost, profits of big corporations are deployed and presented as the only way to combat climate change.” Finally, there has been some excellent discussion on climate reparations and what a truly global Green New Deal would look like.
If you find these lists useful, you can support us by sharing them on social media and with your friends and family!
A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!
Uneven Earth updates
Exciting news from Uneven Earth: we have had our first ever Annual General Assembly, approved our new constitution, and are on the way to becoming a non-profit registered in Germany. Stay tuned: we’ll have some more big announcements in the coming months.
If the desert was green. Mass tree-planting programs in the desert often cause lasting damage to the ecosystems they are purportedly trying to repair.
Re-learning the past to re-imagine the future. In his new book, Modibo Kadalie examines the convergence of maroon and Indigenous cultures in the US and rediscovers a lost history of intimate direct democracy.
Oh friends, the forest burns. Does friendship between human communities and with the more-than-human realm offer a way forward in an age of climate crises and racial nationalisms?
Beings seen and unseen. Amitav Ghosh on decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.
There is nothing past about historical land injustice. Kenya still faces intractable land problems, including unequal concentration of land in the hands of the wealthy, land grabbing, landlessness, and unresolved historical land injustices.
The
world had stopped changing, and yet it continued to move. It kept
floating and spinning, circling the sun, cooling and heating as
seasons passed by. Life flourished upon it, and people did, too. They
created, destroyed, loved, and forgot — caught up in desire and
lost in their fears. Though an endless repetition had taken hold of
this world. There was, in a sense, no uncertainty left, nothing to
dance with beneath the long rain. Except in the minds of those truly
alive.
Amid
the far-reaching fields and their colorful plants, there was a mighty
machine. From its back hung a plough, heavy and wide, digging through
the soil without hurry. Inside it, comfortably seated, there was an
old farmer, dressed in long sheets of linen, and lost in her
thoughts. As they were running along, the tractor added a quiet hum
into the evening’s soft noises and filled its surroundings with an
ambient light.
The
farmer’s name was Nara. She had always been the one to take care of
these fields. Her friends had fled from the droughts, her family had
died from the rains, and her thoughts had dulled from the silence of
their absence. But her work had remained. The fields were all that
was left, and her life was tied to them like a tree to the ground.
And over the decades, again and again, life had flourished through
her hands in new colors and forms.
Nara
was about to turn in for the day. She had ploughed the whole sector,
which was now standing out like a brown patch on a colorful tapestry.
Slowly, the tractor came to a stop. She got off and stroked its blue
hull, praising it for being such a sturdy companion. Tomorrow she’d
sow. A joyful pride filled her body when she looked over the fields,
and so she kneeled down and touched the soil with her cheeks to thank
it.
The
farmer then left her machine and started to roam through the fields
without aim. It was a beautiful night. The sky was painted in heavy
strokes of ruby and blue with a few thin white lines stretched across
the horizon. A slight breeze was blowing through Nara’s hair and
the plants bent back and forth in a gentle rhythm. After some time,
her thoughts started to fade into a comfortable trance until she was
just listening to the sound of her feet.
Beyond
the fields, one could see the distant towers glimmering in the
falling darkness. To Nara, they were a reminder that the world was
finally in good hands. She appreciated that such matters were far
away and out of her reach. But when she was walking through the
fields on that night, she made out something unusual that woke an old
rusty feeling of excitement from deep within her heart. There was a
person in the fields, first barely visible from afar, then
increasingly clearer, running towards her and waving their hands.
It
took a few minutes until the stranger came into Nara’s reach. It
was a woman, dressed in a long cyan dress with two sturdy boots
sticking out beneath. Much smaller than the old farmer, with a fair
and spotless face and hair so short that it was barely visible. For a
second, the woman looked at Nara with curious eyes before she dropped
to the ground in exhaustion. Her body rose and fell with heavy
breaths and it took a few minutes for her to come back to her feet.
Then, in a tone that was careful but clearly excited, she started to
speak:
“Are
you from around here?”
Nara
nodded slowly and muttered her name. She had not talked to anyone in
a very long time, so her voice was brittle and rough.
“I
take care of these fields.”
The
strange woman looked around and praised the farmer on the beauty of
her garden.
“My
name is Yhi”, she added after a few seconds, “and I take care of
people.”
This
created some immediate sympathy in Nara, and they shook hands. After
that, she asked the strange woman what had brought her all the way to
her fields.
“I
am searching for something”, she explained, “Something that is
both old and new, that never breaks. Something always remains. Do you
know what I mean?”
Instinctively,
Nara looked back to her tractor, still visible as a slight blue
glimmer on the horizon behind them. Following the farmers gaze, Yhi
expressed in excitement:
“Of
course! And you never had any trouble with it?”
“Not
really, it’s been serving me well.”
The
mysterious woman asked if she could see it up close. As there was no
objection, they began to walk back to the plough. On the way, she
started to ask about the old farmer’s life. About her town, her
family, her past, her dreams, and so on. But Nara had little to say.
So the stranger surrendered at some point and started to talk about
herself instead. Nara learned that she was an artist. When she asked
her how that takes care of people, Yhi started to laugh.
“Maybe
it is more about taking care of myself. And what I want is just for
others to discover the same. Think about it, when was the last time
you saw someone dancing?”
Nara
shook her head, and the woman explained to her that there were many
such things that people had forgotten. But there were exceptions to
every rule. And she would find it and spread it like a disease in
order to return some uncertainty to the world. Nara stopped for a
second at this remark, wondering what that woman had in plan for her
tractor. But before she could say anything, Yhi had already figured
out what was on her mind.
“Bah,
this could be the most interesting thing to ever happen to you! Think
about it!”
Her voice was raised, and Nara got the
feeling that she was rather talking about her own life. After that,
they continued to walk in silence for the rest of the way until they
finally arrived at the freshly ploughed field, softly illuminated by
the ambient light of the tractor. With Nara’s skeptical look fixed
upon her, Yhi started to walk around the machine in amazement. How
curious it was for the farmer not to know what would happen next. And
how anxious it made her at the same time. It reminded her of the
past.
Somewhere
at the front of the machine, Yhi stopped her inspection and lifted a
hood. Nara came closer and saw hundreds of pipes that went around and
connected to each other without any clear system behind it. In the
middle sat a white little box, as big as a fist, so seamless and
perfectly formed that the old farmer was not sure whether she was
seeing an actual object. There was an obvious connection between that
box and the mysterious woman. They were like two pieces of a
different world, lost out here in the wilderness.
After
some careful investigation, Yhi removed the box from its slot and the
humming noise of the tractor died down. They then sat down and opened
the box. Nara held her breath and could hear the air fill the empty
space within the object. There was nothing inside it, it was as empty
as something can be. Just as seamless and perfect on the inside as it
was on the outside.
Yhi
looked devastated. All the strength and fire inside her had suddenly
disappeared.
“I
thought there would be something”, she muttered with tears in her
eyes.
The
old farmer wanted to console her new friend but still had little to
say. So she offered her a hand. Yhi got up to her feet and they
looked at each other for a while. Then, slowly, they started to turn
in circles. Step by Step. One breath at a time. They continued for a
long time, never going faster or slower, drawing circles into the
freshly ploughed soil as the ambient light of the tractor slowly
faded away and left them alone in the void of darkness.
When
they came to a stop, Nara realized that the faraway towers, as well,
had lost their light. Everything had become dark and silent. But
something unavoidable was on its way. At first it was only a soft
noise in the distance. As time passed, it became louder and
uncomfortable. And then, suddenly, a glaring light was aimed on them
from the sky.
Yhi
began to tremble.
“We
have to put it back”, she said faintly with almost no air in her
voice.
The
box was where they had left it on the ground, reflecting the light
like a diamond. In rapid movements, Yhi jumped towards it, closed it
again, and put it back into the tractor. Then she started to run. Her
cyan clothes fluttered wildly, and the dirt started to swirl up from
the ground as the helicopter started to follow behind her.
Nara,
in the meantime, was completely paralyzed. She had grown too old for
this and didn’t know what to do or how to react. Suddenly, a loud
noise ripped through the air and she saw her new friend stumble and
fall to the ground. But Yhi raised her body again and slowly turned
towards Nara with a bitter smile on her face. Looking genuinely
relieved but also clearly in pain, she shouted towards the farmer:
“Wasn’t
that quite an irregular day?”
The
old farmer stood there and looked as Yhi dropped back to the ground.
And then, just as fast as the trouble had come, it went away again.
The helicopter landed right next to Yhi’s body and a group of tall
men appeared. They moved the body inside and, without sparing a
second, the helicopter rose up again and disappeared into the
darkness.
After
a long time, the ambient lights and familiar humming of the tractor
returned and reminded Nara of the present. When she started to move
again, there were little feelings left in her heart, and no trace to
remind her of what had happened. She told herself that the story
would have ended this way with or without her. That this stranger had
died because that was what she had set out to do in the first place.
That death had been the only real change this person had possessed
the freedom to bring about.
And
so, there was nothing left to do for the old farmer but to keep doing
her work as she had always done. In the days to follow, she started
to plant new seeds on the field. And over time, the usual serenity
slowly returned to her old mind. Only every once in a while, when the
gleaming towers in the distance caught her eyes, she thought that she
saw a shadow moving through the fields. But it would fade away every
time, never to reach her again.
Thank
you to Marlene Wagner and Aaron Vansintjan for helping out with this
story.
Joël
Foramitti is a researcher and activist from Barcelona and Vienna.
The New River flowing into Imperial County, California from Baja California, Mexico
by James Banks
I remember
when I was young, I wanted to go on a road trip real bad. My mom said, “Maybe next
summer”. But I wanted to go that
summer. So she said, “We can’t go
on a road trip, but we can pretend.”
I was six years old, so I was okay with that. My sister was nine years old and she knew
better. But what was she going to
do? And my dad got into it.
They got us
sitting in chairs next to each other.
And Dad started out driving, and he described us driving down Chase
toward Avocado, and then getting on the 94.
We were taking the scenic route.
There were giant metal dinosaurs.
I knew which kind of dinosaurs they were. And then we caught up to the 8 and drove down
the twists into the Imperial Valley.
It was
beautiful there, hot, humid, and beautiful, everything irrigated. There were giant date groves, and fields full
of alfalfa. We stopped in El Centro to
get some ice cream, my Dad pulling over and all of us unbuckling and getting
out and walking over to the refrigerator.
We got back
in the car. Mom was driving. She was the only one who could take over because
me and my sister weren’t old enough to drive.
We wanted to
play music, so Mom pulled over and Dad hopped out of the passenger seat and got
the boombox from the garage and dusted it off and we listened to the radio and
Dad’s old CDs.
It was a pretty
good trip. We went for four hours and
then we got off at our motel room in Tucson.
—
I remember
when I was in college. We lived in the
old house in El Cajon. I walked to the
El Cajon Transit Center to take a trolley to SDSU. It was about a mile or a mile and a quarter
walk. I remember during that time my mom
invited a mother and her son to live with us.
The mother lived in my sister’s room, and the son slept in mine. They were from the Imperial Valley. There used to be a big salt lake in the
Imperial Valley called the Salton Sea, but it dried up for the most part and
there were terrible dust storms from the exposed lake bed, and most people left
around the time I was in college.
I remember
the son being a bully, and I remember how finally I couldn’t take it
anymore. I couldn’t get any sleep with
him around. I think he thought that
since he and his mom didn’t have any place to go, and we were good people, that
we would have to help them, but finally we confronted them. He talked his mom into leaving instead of him
changing. I heard she got a job at the
Viejas Solar Farm, and he started school at the community college out
there. I remember one day she came back
to visit and she was talking about her son.
She was really worried because he had a gambling problem. All his money went to the casino.
It’s a sad
story. Some years later they shut down
the casino and remodeled it, and they use it for different things now.
—
I remember
one time there was a big protest.
“No More Ecosocialist Nightmare!” said one sign. Another said “War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Poverty is Wealth.” They were protesting in favor of personal
liberty. They said that climate change
might be bad, but so would an “Orwellian sustainability”.
The political science professors had theories of how to not have Orwellian sustainabilities, but I only had one political science class, so I wasn’t taught them. One of my friends was a poli sci major. He wanted to go into politics. I asked him about it and he said “Basically, it comes down to whether people who end up in power are the kind of people who don’t want there to be Orwellian sustainability. And, whether they’re the kind of people who can carry through that commitment.” I thought there should have been a better answer.
—
I remember
rations. I went to a hardcore concert
with my friend once. The singer was
screaming about rations, complaining because they didn’t think they needed to
be so tight. I also used to go to stand up
comedy back then and everyone talked about rations. I think people still complain about rations.
Song of protest
We used to
have FFDs (“fasting and frugality days”) where we tried to consume as
little as possible. Usually on a day we
all had off. We got out the CD player
and put on some Indian music and we would sit there with our stomachs digesting
themselves (or at least that’s what it felt like). We would groan and make jokes about being
hungry.
—
I remember my
sister moving out to get married to her boyfriend. First they moved into the master bedroom of a
house in Rancho Peñasquitos, where the widower moved to the downstairs
bedroom. They had to work some shifts as
caregivers to lower the rent. Then after
he passed on, they moved into a house with another couple they were close to,
and the two couples started to have kids, and the kids grew up in one little
mob.
—
I remember
trying to find people to fit in our house.
We needed people we could really trust.
It took a few years, but I finally felt like one of my friends could
share my room. We adopted him into our
family, but not legally. My sister’s
room was free by then so we invited some older people from church to stay
there. They were okay for me and my
friend. But then they had to move to a
nursing home after about five years, and we had to find someone new. Mom and Dad were also getting older, so they
called up some old friends in another state, people they “never got to see
enough these days”. And they agreed
to move in. So my parents and their
friends were having a good time all the time, but it was too much for me and my
friend, so we started going out more.
—
There were a
lot of people who didn’t work, or didn’t work much. I remember spending whole days walking
through El Cajon, looking at the people walking around. There were some days I got real bored, and
there were two days to get through before my next shift at my job. I remember some people getting into mischief
because they were bored, and that bothered me, so I decided to try to talk to
those people. I would tell them about
imaginary places, and if they were bored enough, they would listen.
—
I remember
one time we did take a road trip through Imperial Valley. There were big signs that said “Dust
storms likely next 45 miles.” We
saw an old house and wondered if anyone lived in it.
—
I remember rent being low. But water was expensive. A lot of electricity went into the desalination plants.
Salt ponds by day, from above
When I was in college, some friends and I went out trespassing one night and ended up in the salt ponds at the end of San Diego Bay. We walked along the paths at the edges of the pond. Then we saw something lit up a little in the dark, a huge building. “Is that the desalination plant?” we wondered. When we got close enough to read the sign, we were close enough to be seen by the guard who ran us off the property and warned us harshly to never do that again.
—
I remember
when some people set fire to someone’s mansion.
They said it was for crimes against the environment, for hoarding
resources. The conservatives said,
“I don’t know why you would burn down a house to protest resource
waste.”
Looking back,
I think the people who burned down the house had a point, and the conservatives
had a point. How can you stop someone
without hurting them? And how can you
hurt people without destroying something good?
I can’t think of how to get some people out of their mansions, but maybe
we can prevent people from becoming the kind of people who live in them,
without burning anything down.
—
Our neighbors
never took anyone in. After the son left
it was just the mom and dad. “We’re
fine the way things are”, they said.
They were nice neighbors, always brought us something good at
Christmas-time.
Eventually my
friend and I started sleeping in tents in the backyard and my parents let a
couple of my cousins have our room. When
it rained, a few times a year, we slept inside in the living room.
I think I’m
okay with my neighbors not taking anyone in.
Some people can do some things, other people other things.
—
I remember
when the last homeless person got a place to stay. It was on the news. I heard that some of them messed up the
places they moved into, because they weren’t used to having their own
property. I guess some of them had
personality issues too. The city of San
Diego had a call for volunteers to be their friends, although they called it
something other than “friends”.
You can’t hire people or force people to be friends, was their thinking.
—
I remember
one night my friend was making too much noise getting into his bed and I said
vicious things. I needed my sleep and I
had been around him too much anyway. So
my parents sent us out to have vacations at separate hotels. We each had our own room in the hotels we
stayed in. We came back and found out
from each other that both the hotels were on the beach and had amazing
views. They were both in Mission Beach. We laughed when we realized that it wouldn’t
have been hard for us to have run into each other by mistake, down there on the
boardwalk. He said “That would be a
terrible mistake, to see someone when you shouldn’t”.
—
I remember
when my father died, and then a few years later, my mother. My sister and I sold the old house in El
Cajon, and I left San Diego County for good.
I left everyone behind. Time to
try something new, I thought. My friend
waved goodbye to me.
I took a
train to Chicago and then one to New York City and then one up to Maine. On the opposite end of the country, I got my
own place to stay. But there didn’t seem
to be enough people inside my house, and I didn’t know anybody to live with
me. My friend had to stay in San Diego. But I met a nice woman and we settled down,
so that’s what kept me up there, for many years.
—
These are all some things I remember. And what will you be remembering, as you live the life ahead of you?
—
James Banks lives in San Diego, CA and has written fiction and non-fiction about the sustainable future, being lost, development, trust, and (anti)romance. Website: 10v24.net
Photo
credits:
Photo
one: Calexico New River Committee /
public domain / https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nrborderborderentrythreecolorsmay05-1-.JPG
Photo
two: by Dave Shearn / CC BY 2.0 /
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dustin_Kensrue.jpg
Photo
three: by Pacific Southwest Region USFWS
/ CC BY 2.0 / https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panoramic_aerial_of_completed_Western_Salt_Pond_Restoration_Project!_(6967928908).jpg
Once upon a time there was, and there was not, a French landscape architect named Judith. On this particular day she waited in a traditional tea house in Yangnyeongsi, Daegu. The Korean city of street trees, apples and oriental medicine.
She was always looking for a way to be “different”, “special” and “unique”. As a young woman, she tried to challenge the status quo by experimenting with alternative lifestyles and joining protests. She said she would devote her life to activism, art and travel. Even now, at the end of her thirties, she proclaimed to everyone that she will never marry and have children but will have loved ones in every corner of the world – even in the deserts of Mongolia.
It was all the fault of author Simone de Beauvoir. Her interview with Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber in 1975 convinced Judith to never end up as a housewife, and to become a free woman. Judith wanted to be the next Simone.
Though, she also desired a soul-mate. Judith knew she had met her “amour de ma vie” when she was 21. It was someone who inspired her, brought the best out of her and with whom she could experience endless love and adventures. But it didn’t last, as society didn’t allow surrogate mothers to have partners. The surrogate mothers could only be married to the earth.
***
Seven months ago, Judith was assigned by her boss to work out the e-plantification of this city.
“Daegu?” she had repeated. “Why Daegu?”
“Because they have money,” her boss answered bluntly. She was Dutch. They are always honest. After her working day, Judith returned to her apartment feeling it was time to meet her former love, who lived in Daegu. She looked at the photo of Simone and her lover Sartre on her desk. They never lived together, but they were lovers until their deaths. Simone’s biggest success, she said herself, was Sartre. The promise of death, of separation evoked a certain curiosity from Judith.
Judith reflected on her own former partner. In this world, Sartre didn’t exist anymore. Women’s successes were their own. Needing men were a thing of the past. Perhaps she could at least check in with her lover, even if society wouldn’t allow them to be together.
***
Seven months later, Judith was on the other side of the world. After a work inspection by contractors, Judith went to this famous district in Daegu, where you would find innumerable herbs and medicines. In oriental medicine, the point is not to cure a disease but to fix the body. People get sick because the dual powers of yin and yang are unbalanced.
“Dong quai nourishes the blood and Omija juice reduces coughing.” A toothless woman told Judith.
In response Judith bought some kudzu, because it would help her with a hangover.
She noticed that the women in the contracting company drank soju like mountain water. She joined them last night, to quell her nerves. She would soon find herself in a meeting akin to an interrogation.
From the moment Judith left her hotel until she took a seat in the tea house, she hesitated a thousand times. From her bedroom to the taxi, the same thought echoed in her mind. “This has to be the craziest, if not the stupidest idea of my life.” But something in her – whether it be female intuition, her guardian angel or the voice of her dead grandmother – told her that meeting Han-Sol is what she needed to be able to heal her. Perhaps she would realise the feelings were only memories and nothing more.
Daylight shifted, and Han-Sol appeared. Judith held her breath. After all this time she had not changed from her time as an exchange student.
They greeted each other, but it was awkward. They used polite gestures to greet one another, trying to hide their invisible relationship. On the day they met, they called themselves ecofeminists. They shaved their hair off as a protest against the “patriarchy that intoxicated the French minds.” They slept together that night. Han-Sol had come from Daegu. Among their many talks, she expressed topics as diverse as K-Drama, beauty contests (which they also detested), and that Daegu produces so many beautiful women because of their apples.
“We have changed so much,” Han-Sol said. “I became a housewife, and you an architect for one of the most powerful companies in the world.”
Judith blushed. “We both do important work.”
Han-Sol continued, “Some women call me a Kim Yi Joung or a Mam’Chung, after a famous novel which was published ten years ago.”
“I’m not so familiar with Korean literature. Not since 2012, at least.” Judith admitted.
“Oh yes, 2012. What a year.” She looked down. They both recalled the painful memories which took place in that French village. “You know… It’s an insult for women who live easily by the money of the city to think my kind don’t work.”
“Really? That is ridiculous.”
“Some people joke that we are yang-banged,” she said, “because we convert yang energy into yin through our bodies. That is our only function.”
Judith could not look her in the eyes anymore. She knew about the discrimination. She also judged women who volunteered to be surrogate mothers. Or rather, she felt it was a pity. She felt their life was that of a machine.
“So, how does it work?” Han-Sol asked.
“What?” Judith was brought out from her thoughts.
“The e-plantification of our light infrastructure.”
“Oh. Well, do you know the process of photosynthesis?”
“Yes. I recently helped my eldest child with her biology homework.”
Judith wondered how many children Han-Sol had produced, but she now preferred ease so she stayed on technology.
“Plants convert CO2 into oxygen,” Han-Sol continued, “with the help of chlorophyll in the leaves.”
“That’s true,” Judith said, “but they also produce sugars. These sugars do not remain in the leaves. They are transported throughout the plant, and some of these sugars are excreted by the roots. There are bacteria that surround the roots, and they break down these sugars, too. In this decomposition process, they release electrons. Our technology collects the electrons in the minus pole of our plant battery. When the electrons flow through the wire, they can be used as electricity.”
“But is it healthy for the street trees?”
“Yes, the electrons continue their journey to the plus pole, the cathode. We do not disturb the trees and plants.”
She paused to think. “I think I understand.” She smiled. “You really have found a purpose.”
Judith looked up. “Han-Sol, what is going on?”
She hesitated, looking to her tea cup as if she was looking for advice, and then gazed right into Judith’s eyes.
“I know how you think about us. I am sure that book of Simone de Beauvoir is still in your suitcase at your hotel.”
Judith turned her eyes away.
“I wanted this,” Han-Seol said. “I truly love my daughters, but sometimes… I don’t know. I feel so confused. I know the work of de Beauvoir is not relevant, or can’t be relevant anymore, in this world. However, sometimes it is… I think that becoming a caretaker was a mistake, and that I should have stayed with you. To make art…create amazing ideas…to build a regenerative economy. I feel so… invisible. While you are so… unique. You are visible. I am sure you look down upon me.”
“No.” Judith looked down. “Not anymore.”
“But you did?”
“…Yes,” Judith admitted. She felt as if a colony of termites were eating her stomach.
“It is like I am struggling with ‘The Problem That Has No Name.’ Though, it has a slightly different nature than what Betty Friedan once described.”
Judith craned her neck. “Han-Sol, what is going on?” she repeated.
She hesitated. “I am confused… or maybe I need help. The insults that I hear make me mad. They do not know what it’s like to bear and take care of children.” She bit her lip, and her hands started to shake. “Actually, I think I lost my mind nearly seven months ago. I blame an old Korean novel that I found from the time before The Reckoning.”
People did not talk about The Reckoning because everyone had lost loved ones in this war. The ones who had survived The Reckoning now had a better life than they did before.
Judith looked up. People did not talk about The Reckoning because everyone had lost loved ones in this war. The ones who had survived The Reckoning now had a better life than they did before. If only they could forget the feelings of loss, Judith wished. The earth is healthier… so are bodies, but the memories of pain were hard to forget. It was easier not to talk about it. Han-Sol had always believed that The Reckoning was inevitable, after all the pollution, terror and other crimes she had seen in Asia and Europe.
Han-Sol paused before asking,“Have you ever read ‘The Vegetarian’ by Han Kang?”
Judith shook her head.
“Han Kang wrote this after she was struck by an idea from another writer who suggested that humans should be plants. I wish sometimes I could also be a plant. They probably have all the answers to the questions I have because they live for so long, witnessing so much.”
She sighed.
“Yes, there is something wrong. Sometimes I feel I need a break from her children,” she whispered as if confessing to first-degree murder. “Seven months ago, I had another episode. My sister took over. She advised me to take a long walk. Mountain air is the best medicine.” She hesitated. “…I had an inner voice telling me to look up the eldest apple tree. Did you know that Daegu has the oldest apple tree in Korea?”
“Yes, you told me once. I remember you said that apple trees have an average lifespan of 30-40 years, but this tree produced apples for more than 80 years.”
“ I realise now why I was so attracted to that tree. She keeps living, keeping society alive.”
Judith didn’t know what to say or do, other than to continue listening to her story.
“I was alone when I arrived at the apple tree… or not really. There were three young guys…” Suddenly Judith held her breath as Han-Sol turned down her eyes. The biggest victims of The Reckoning have been men. Judith had not seen any men since then.
Han-Sol continued, “… and they seemed to have expected me.”
“Are they…” Judith did not finish her sentence, because she did not want to say it aloud.
“Yes, they introduced themselves as… gods. But we know what they are.” She scanned Judith’s face. “Do you believe that I really saw them?”
“I believe that there are still free men on earth, and only those kinds of men would have survived The Reckoning.”
Han-Seol smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t think I was crazy.” She sighed, feeling relief rush over her.
“What did they want from you?” Judith asked carefully.
“They wanted me as a judge in their beauty contest, ” she said.
Judith blinked, confused.
“I thought they were all … the same. You know? And they realised soon that I did not become a surrogate mother because I love yang energy so much.” That remark gave Judith her first smile of the day. “So they tried to bribe me with their powers. One offered to make me queen of a forested island, and my daughters would all become princesses.”
“Do they really have that power?”
“I think there is probably a place where they hide and where they would like to have some women around. I think that was the dodgiest offering.”
“What about the second?”
“He offered me wisdom and skill in war.”
That took away Judith’s remark. “Do they expect another war?”
“I don’t know. But as my aunt once said to my mother, and my mother later to me, as long as some people are oppressed there is always a risk for an uprising.” She hesitated. “My aunt told my mother that before she went to Gwanju.”
Judith remembered the death of her youngest aunt in the democracy uprising of the eighties. She thought of how her grandparents fought for a long time against the plans of the governments to wipe away the bloody history of Gwanju. Han-Sol was not born in that time, but she was aware – from a young age – of the memories of losses. They were intertwined in her family’s memories.
The two women looked at each other and continued to conversation.
“So what about the third?” Judith finally asked
“The third one offered me the love of my life. A love that I could finally keep until my death.”
Judith straightened her back. Her fingers were tingling, and it was not because of the medical herb tea.
“So, this meeting was more than seven months ago?,” Judith asked with a smile. Han-Seol nodded.
Judith took her cup again and drank from her tea, feeling the medicine flow through her body. This was indeed what she needed.
“Why don’t you ask me who I chose?” Han-Seol asked.
Judith looked her deep in the eyes and already knew the answer.
Wendy Wuyts is a Belgian PhD student in Environmental Studies at Nagoya University, Japan. She blogs about sustainability issues in Japan for Mo*, a Flemish magazine focusing on social and environmental matters globally, and has her own personal blog where she collects stories about trees, tree spirits and forest bathing (woodwidewebstories.com). In her free time she works on a second novel about tree spirits. This short story situates in the world of that novel, but is about other characters. In november 2019, Wendy’s first fiction book got published: ‘Als Meubels Konden Spreken’ (If Furniture Could Talk), which introduces the main character to the different dimensions and aspects of the circular economy.
Special thanks goes to Andrew Winchester Greer for proofreading and editing.
We had to start somewhere so we decided we would start from the beginning. From birth.
Let us first track who we are, I mean, exactly who we are, what we can do, or what we could do with some training.
We don’t have access to energy credits, that’s something we all have in common. And we live outside of the inside. Sounds kind of silly, outside of the inside, but English is not my language and I don’t know how to write it in a better way. Almost none of us have English as our mother tongue, but English is anyway the language we use every day here. Not so strange as this is a community of almost ten thousand people with more than a hundred (old) nationalities represented … The second language, quite unexpectedly but fortunately—and the tendency is clear as I see it—is becoming Lule Sámi, or julevsámegiella, the language of our hosts: the Sámi people of Jokkmokk. But the purpose of this message is to communicate our strategy to other outside communities all around the world, so English is the best choice.
Our strategy is, oh, it sounds very big to call it a strategy. I would fit better to say our first step. Yes. Our first step.
Our first step is to organize the safety of the births, of giving birth and of being born, the mum’s and the child’s perspective, health and well-being. How to handle it here on the outside? Most of the births go well with not much intervention, but “most of the births” still leaves lots of births in the risky zone, and we wanted to improve that.
You’ll find the technical and medical details in the attached file: a cost effective, low-tech and energy saving procedure, with ideas and input from doctors and nurses from more than ten (of the old) countries. In the other attached document, you’ll find the financial and organizational aspects of the project, the first act of our taking-back-the-public-services agenda.
– Alex, Alberto, Magda, Ibtisam, Ahmed, Rebecka, Eva! The text is almost ready, attachments included. Who wants to check my English? Alooo? Somebody at home? No? Really? Nobody at home? First time ever. Let’s have a look on the second floor. Somebody here? Ups! Yes, Alex and little Nico. Alex sleeping like a baby and you, Nico, awake with your eyes wide open, as if today were the first day of your life. Well, that was not so long ago, the first day of your life. You’re not older than a month, are you? Time flies. It feels that it was yesterday, but at the same time it feels like you’ve always been here. What are you looking at? What are you looking at? Do you like my glasses? Yes, they are red, like your trousers. Come with me to the kitchen so Alex can continue in sleeping mode. Let’s see if the cat is in the kitchen. We’re alone: you, me, Alex and maybe, just maybe, the cat. Where’s everybody? Do you know where everybody is? I’m sure they’ve told you where they’ve gone, but you’re not saying a word. And I’m sure they’ve also told me, but you know how distracted I am. Maybe we’ll find some clue written in the calendar in the kitchen? Oh yes, oh no! how could I forget that? And why didn’t anybody tell me? Of course, nobody told me because I’m always saying that I don’t like to be disturbed when I’m writing, especially if I’m writing in the basement with the door closed. But anyway, they should have told me! The Vidsel Test R.I.P., Nico, the day when we celebrate the closure of Vidsel Test Range. It seemed impossible to achieve, but we managed, somehow, we managed, and the big military companies finally left the area: no more bombs, no more tests with scary airplanes flying in the blue spring skies. We’re on the outside, yes, but this is becoming a good place to be outsiders. And maybe someday, maybe someday when you’re, I don’t know, twenty or twenty-five years old? Maybe then we’ll regain the access to the river, the river that is now controlled by the insiders and their obsession with energy resources. Or who knows, maybe we’ll not need to wait that long. Nico, what are you looking at? The window? The sun and the snow? Oh, that’s a fox. And here is Ninina, being a cat as usual. And you’re a little kid. Yes, you are. The first kid born in the new Birth House. You’ll be happy to hear about that when you are old enough to understand what that means. You know what? I’ve heard stories about the babies that are born on the inside, how they measure everything, and constantly! with thousands of tables of optimal progressions, graphs and percentiles left and right, up and down, and that was some years ago, who knows what they’re measuring nowadays. Don’t misunderstand me. Measuring in itself is not a bad thing, but getting obsessed with measurements is almost a disease, a disease that nobody is measuring. I guess they measure so much because they’re afraid. Afraid of life, afraid of death, afraid of things that they can’t control. And we? I mean, and I? Am I afraid too? Well, to an extent indeed I am. But there’s so many things that we can’t control, here on the outside, that finally you stop being afraid, there’s no point. And you never know when something bad can turn into something good, or even really good. Look at you! I remember how sad we were when the avalanche destroyed our house in Kvikkjokk. Luckily no one was injured but we needed a new place to live. We found this house, our house now, your house as well; this beautiful house with beautiful people living on it, and it was then that your parents met each other. Did you know that? Did you know that they met here? And here you are, looking at me, demanding milk, and of course your nonexistence is inconceivable. I’ve not read much philosophy, but I would call it Axiom of existence. Ok, I get it, you are really hungry, but how lucky we are, there’s plenty of mum’s milk in the fridge. I’ll warm up 120 ml right now. And after your lunch I’ll play a song for you.
*
Birth
If the way you look at me is the look of future days If the lightness of your body, make us lighter If the joy of being still with you sleeping in our arms Is a joy that is contagious and incurable.
I will tell you all the fables that I could someday forget I will walk with you to lakes that still are hidden I will sing a thousand songs, I will talk with you in words From the language that was used by our ancestors And you tell me, that you’re hungry.
Not afraid of the ruins of the city that is gone Not afraid of the future that has perished ‘Cos for you those would be stories, just some legends from the past Like the Holy Roman Empire or the Soviet.
And surrounded by the whiteness of the boreal spring And the quietness of the snow that still is falling With the firewood on the fireplace and the rocking chair for us It is time for you to eat, for me to wonder Such an energy, when you’re hungry.
Photo and recording by the author.
Miguel Ganzo Mateo is a Spanish writer and songwriter who works as a math teacher in a secondary school in southern Sweden. In 2018 he published the novel Sesenta metros cuadrados (Sixty square meters), and with the short story “Birth”he returns to Jokkmokk, the area in northern Sweden where the novel takes place. More info at www.miguelganzomateo.com.
Alwena walked along the black scorched hillside of the Ménez Hom. In the distance, she could see dark clouds accumulating over the Crozon peninsula. The constant rain that used to be so emblematic of the region had become increasingly rare. Each droplet was a welcome relief.
As a mountain, Ménez Hom did not impress by its height, but by the fact that it completely dominated the landscape. One could stand at the peak and survey a large amount of the north-western French coast.
The Wehrmacht, having observed that during World War II, built a large radar and artillery base on the peak. The French resistance paid a heavy price to take it back from the fifteen thousand German soldiers sworn to defend it with their lives.
Alwena walked slowly over the small path of sandstone and inspected the fire damages. There had been fires before, but each year they were more frequent and destroyed more of the ecosystem. She remembered the landscape of peat and marshes, with wildflowers that added bright red and purple over brown like a painter’s brush on canvas. It was left dark and fuming now. Droplets of rain freckled her skin as the unpleasant smell of wet ash reached her nose. It wasn’t her first survey; the scent had become familiar.
A patch of colour caught her eye. Right in the middle of the devastated landscape, in the ruins of a bunker, Sundew was growing back. Alwena approached and reached down to examine the small red plant. She smiled at it. “Brave little one,” she said, “I don’t see any insects left to catch.”
After a few hours of searching for surviving plants by the mountain side, she noticed a pattern. June 11, 2043. Sundew survived on N flank but only near or inside bunkers, note: investigate passive cooling of concrete, she jotted down on her notepad with a pencil.
The wind picked up and ash flew into her eyes. It reminded her of tear-gas. She started to cough and cursed herself for not bringing a mask. She ran back to the surveyor’s van, trying not to trip among the spiky shrubs as the winds began to whip around her. The van was almost out of gas and not going anywhere, but it made for a perfect base for the surveyors. The sliding door opened and they shouted at her to get in.
When her eyes adjusted to the dim interior, she could see the faces staring at her.“You ok?” Wassim asked, handing her a wet towel. She looked for a clean corner and wiped her face and eyes with it. It came out grey. “I’ll be alright. That came out of nowhere,” she replied, “Find anything interesting?” “Some traces of a mudslide, heather and gorse is growing back, sphagnum moss isn’t. You know… the usual,” he said with a sigh, “How about you?” “Somehow sundew survived, near the bunkers.” “Who would have bet that out of all plants, sundew would outlive buckwheat.” “I’m going to look into how that happened though, maybe what worked for the sundew can work for the wheat.” “Maybe,” Wassim replied. She couldn’t tell if he was lost in thought or simply disinterested as he stayed silently looking out the window. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Uh…? Oh. I’m… I’m losing hope.” His forced smile barely hid his despair. “About the crops?” “Yeah, I mean, the weather. One second it’s calm, the other there’s a storm. It’s probably what they felt like, in cities during the war.” “What do you mean?” “You’re waiting for the airstrike, it could happen any time so there’s no point in hiding in a bunker. Same for the storms, the floods. It could happen anytime. Life has to go on, but deep down you know. You’re at the mercy of the climate, and the climate is at the mercy of crumbling ideologies.”
Life has to go on, but deep down you know. You’re at the mercy of the climate, and the climate is at the mercy of crumbling ideologies.
As a Zadist, Wassim spent years trying to build anarchist utopias while being under constant threat of expulsion. He knew what it felt like to keep hope when things could end in an instant. He had been labelled an extremist when he blocked airports and oil pipelines from being built. Now, years later, throwing a wrench in the gears of civilization was the new norm for young people. Quite often Alwena would get swept up by her group of friends into more trouble than she signed up for. She grew up in a world where she saw the damages of climate change in the news. They were raised in a world where the school’s cantina occasionally served moldy EU humanitarian aid rations.
Another surveyor in the van spoke, “Yeah I’m struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel here. I used to be an optimist like you, Alwena. I thought we could exit the system. Live on our own, demonstrate the alternative. But now with the floods and shitty soil, we can’t even do that anymore.” Alwena took a deep breath. Outside of the van, the storm was raging. A small burned twig impacted the window and startled her. “Guys, my optimism is fueled by the reality of the crisis. Yes, dozens of millions are going to die from famines, I know that. But when that’s done, the old world dies. I can guarantee you that we won’t be able to find a single person to defend industrial civilization when shelves and stomachs are empty. All we have to do is prepare to survive the next ten years.”
They waited for the storm to pass and rode bicycles down to the little town of Argol.
*
Alwena spent the next year down a rabbit hole to find out why the sundew survived in the bunkers. She obtained approval for the construction of multiple test greenhouses sunken ten feet deep in the limestone of the Ménez Hom. For Alwena, the way out was underground.
She walked down into the greenhouse and felt a strange satisfaction as she shut the door behind her. The carefully tended piece of microclimate was her pride. Many came to visit, perhaps to find hope. The fresh air almost made her shiver, or perhaps it was excitement. Many endangered flower species bloomed on the twenty meters of ground, while tomatoes grew on the side wall. The whole scene bathed in a serene and diffused sunlight.
The system was fairly simple and didn’t require any electricity. A few well-placed earth tubes would exchange warm air for cold using the massive thermal inertia of the mountain, smoothing out the sudden heatwaves. Alwena’s latest experiment was to tap into the cold air from the underground bunker complex. The structure of each greenhouse was twenty meters long but was almost invisible from the outside as it blended with the slope.
Alwena often called the greenhouse her “time-machine” for transporting crops to temperatures from before the Anthropocene. A time where scientists could still use radiocarbon dating to figure out the age of fossils. Alwena was still young, but the carbon isotopes in her bones appeared decayed, as if she were born nine hundred years ago.
She kneeled on a pad of wool and looked at the sensors. Temperature, moisture—she would record it all in a text file on her phone. Alwena angled the LCD screen towards the light to read the text better. “Phone” might be an overstatement—a mere hacked calculator capable of transmitting radio signals—but somehow it was so solid and the battery lasted for so long that she preferred it over anything else.
Just as she was about to finish reading all the sensors, she heard footsteps approaching. “Is someone inside? We’re looking for Alwena Bihan,” a voice said from the outside. Through the blur of translucent plastic, she could see the silhouette of a man and a woman. Alwena stood and opened the hermetic door. A camera and a notepad: news reporters. A large number of them showed up during the food shortages, but they soon lost interest in Alwena’s project. “Yes?” “We’re looking to get a few words from you about conservation efforts in light of the recent developments.” “Sure… But first, get in there! I’m losing fresh air,” Alwena closed the door behind them. The man threaded carefully through the plants to get both her and the reporter in the frame. “What recent developments?” “The construction of a phased array radar system on top of the Ménez Hom?” “What… Why?” The camera man lowered his camera, and the woman laughed nervously. “We thought you would know. Since you’ve been so invested in the site. The radar and surface-to-air missiles will be part of the new nuclear security reinforcement program.”“So, do you want to comment about how the construction might affect the biodiversity of the Ménez Hom and your food security experiment? We’ve also seen a large mobilization of the green resistance on the internet after the announcement, what do you have to say about that?” She said, inching the microphone closer to Alwena’s face with every word. “No, sorry. I need to think about it,” Alwena said, holding her head in her hand, “Please leave.”
Once the door closed, Alwena lowered herself to the ground. She had heard that countries throughout the world were boosting their anti-nuclear defense in preparation for famines. All the leading game-theorists said that it would end in threats of annihilation, or protection in exchange for food and oil. They said it could only result in the four biggest nuclear arsenal countries—France being one of them—dominating the flux of food and energy and escalating tensions. She didn’t think it would impact the Ménez Hom.
The vibration of her phone took her out of the storm in her brain. Wassim. “Have you seen the news?” he asked. “I heard it from some reporter who showed up just a second ago. It’s crazy. Does this have to do with L’Île Longue?” Alwena asked, fearing the worst. L’Île Longue was the biggest stockpile of nuclear warheads and submarines in Europe, and it was right in her beloved peninsula. “Exactly. The army wants to put some anti-air stuff, and an observation tower on top of the Ménez Hom.” “Wait, it’s a protected site! I remember when I was a kid the regional government didn’t even authorize the army to install a mobile base for NATO exercises. How can they build a permanent base? That makes no sense.” “Times have changed, I don’t think they care anymore. Countries with empty stomachs and an obese nuclear arsenal is not a good combo.” “Also, are we talking about a local garrison or… the Cog?” She asked. “The Cog, it’s the real stuff.” Alwena’s head was spinning. What started as an ecological conservation experiment now put her in the centre of a massive conflict. Continuation of government or, as they called it, “The Cog” was both the boogeyman and the saviour. A plan originally designed to keep critical functions of the government running through any crisis. A plan that turned into a second government, operating in some secret bunker with no oversight. The Cog was always silent, but it sure kept the engine of the old civilization humming.
Continuation of government or, as they called it, “The Cog” was both the boogeyman and the saviour.
“So what’s your plan?” Wassim asked her. “My plan?” “Yeah. We’re not going to let the army build the base, are we?” “I… I don’t know. Maybe Paris will see that prioritizing military security over food security is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what can Paris really do?” “But right now your thing is just an experiment, how many greenhouses do you have? Three?” “Yeah three.” “So we need to help you scale up then. It needs to become the embodiment of biodiversity, food security. Like a symbol, you know?” “We?” “The whole Zadist crew is talking about it, we’re ready.” “Ready for what?” “To make a stand, on the Ménez Hom.”
*
It didn’t take more than a week for word to spread, and soon Alwena was running around trying to explain to hundreds of Zadists how to build the greenhouses without harming the land. But that wasn’t why most people showed up. They showed up to defy the state’s authority once more, showing that another way of life was possible.
Alwena was torn, she resented Wassim for bringing all these people to the fragile landscape of the mountain. She changed her mind when someone working in l’Île Longue leaked the construction plans for the radar. They were going to dynamite entire parts of the mountain, drain out the marshes to make roads for armored transports.
Alwena had studied the plans and leaked photographs of the base, too. L’île longue was built on the side of a massive cliff, and the eastern side facing the Channel and the Atlantic was virtually indestructible granite. That also came at a big disadvantage; from inside the base, you couldn’t have a line of sight on enemy aircrafts coming from the west. The base was constructed before AI drones, assuming that a pilot couldn’t possibly fly below radar line of sight, or handle the g-forces from the hard turn required to strike the eastern side when coming from the west. This meant that enemy drones had a limited window to strike without being detected.
That was the flaw the Cog wanted to patch. The Ménez Hom had a line of sight over the entire peninsula, the perfect place to install surface to air missiles and radars pointed at the sea.
Alwena knew that none of that would save the country from starvation. The role of the Cog was to preserve the old world; its states, armies, and national identities. While many around her still believed in the concept of “the army” fueled by the passion of nationalism, for most people there was no choice but to feed the Cog in exchange for protection. More and more unemployed young men joined the military each year, when what the country needed was an army of farmers for the war effort of healing the land.
If they are going to destroy it all anyway, Alwena thought, might as well highlight the potential we’re losing.
She was surprised by how quickly the militants made caring about the mountain a social norm. Marginalized people who came to challenge the state stayed for the learning, food, and community. Alwena had always dreamed about this; a technological dystopia merged with a social utopia. The opposite of the world she resented.
Months passed in a blur, rhythmed by the attempted expulsions conducted by riot police. A trampled sign lay in the mud, it read “build farms, not nukes”. The riot police was ordered not to use tear gas or mortars up until that point.
Then came one day she could never forget. An early morning in August 2044.
*
The escalation of international nuclear threats eventually meant the end of roundtables and compromises. The Cog needed the mountain.
Alwena had heard rumors that local garrisons were ordered to finish the expulsions of militants and Zadists once and for all. Everyone shared one last beer and laughed nervously awaiting the deployment of more than five thousand men and armoured transport. This time, there was no way out.
One common tactic for Zadists was to chain themselves to a heavy object—a tree or metal pole—with handcuffs. She argued in vain with Wassim to not tie himself to that wooden beam. He tried to hand her the keys to the handcuffs but she refused, hoping that would dissuade him. Instead he gave the keys to a friend causing Alwena to instantly regret it. “…Plus it’s stupid, they’ll just pull you off the beam and then you’re just handcuffed.” “Good point,” he said, looking around him to people preparing for the expulsion, “Hey, you over here with the hammer! Mind nailing this plank up here?” he said, pointing to the top of the wooden beam. Alwena stood there arms crossed while he was getting attached. Wassim was like the little brother she never had, always getting into trouble. “Wait, where’s your mask?” Alwena asked, “You need to protect your eyes.” “Oh shit, it’s in the greenhouse. Can you get it for me?” Alwena instinctively dropped to the ground after hearing explosions in the distance. “No time, take mine,” she said, fitting her gas mask onto his face. “What about y…?” he tried to say before his voice became inaudible through the mask. “I’ve got spare glasses,” Alwena said after taking out safety goggles from her vest, “They never use tear gas here, I should be fine.” And before anyone could heed the screams of warning, mortars sprayed a barrage of tear gas canisters.
It all happened in a few seconds. Alwena groaned in pain as a rubber bullet hit her flank. She collapsed, out of breath under the impact. A canister fell near her and she saw the dry shrubs combust. Panicked, she looked side to side as she saw many more projectiles land in the shrubs. She ran towards the smoke grenades and threw her jacket over one of them to squelch the fire. She had begun to choke on the tear gas when sound grenades detonated.
Flashing images of heavily armored figures charged uphill and downhill in blinding coordination. It wasn’t just the police this time—the operation started with military precision.
She tried to look for Wassim but was already becoming disoriented. When her hearing finally returned, all she could hear were screams. Flames had quickly spread causing a wildfire that burned resistance and police alike. Those who chose to barricade themselves inside the greenhouses were caught in the fire and burned alive; others died after breathing the fumes of burned plastic. The finished greenhouses were completly fire-retardant, but many were in the middle of construction.
Alwena turned around and saw Wassim burning alive on his cross. She screamed as she was dragged away by the firefighters and handcuffed by the army. There was nothing she could do to save him. Neither the firefighters or the army managed to stop a small group of photographers from immortalizing the scene.
Alwena couldn’t witness any revolution from her prison cell, but she could hear it. The voices were loud, but that wasn’t enough to stop the Cog. Then, the food simply stopped coming. Alwena heard it on the radio: A general food strike. All farmers would simply refuse to give, or sabotage any food meant for the military, even under threat of death. Any acts of brutality from the local garrisons or the Cog would paint them as they really were: a mafia at the nation scale, offering protection in exchange for food but destroying anyone who declined the deal.
Alwena ripped open the last emergency ration package with her emaciated hands when she heard the announcement that a garrison flipped. They made a deal with the local farmers: the garrison would continue to receive food, but in exchange they would receive orders from a citizen assembly and reject the Cog’s authority. One by one, not without its shares of skirmishes and scare-tactics, every unit, battalion, base, and vessel turned peacefully against their central command.
“Drink! This might be your last one” a guard said, his gaunt face startling her. She took the glass and watched the bubbles. “Champagne? Where did you find that?” “It said ‘for a special occasion’ on the label, so we saved it until now,” the guard said with a faint smile crackling his lips. “What’s the occasion?” “We’ve been told there’s a submarine in the roadstead of Brest, with tactical nukes aimed at whoever flips.” “…And?” “We called bluff, so we’re flipping,” the guard replied, clinging his glass against hers.
*
Not long after that, she was free. A newly formed 6th republic built by Zadists and the food-strikers called for her help, to be a symbol against COGs and military rule in other countries, but first, Alwena wanted to see the Ménez Hom again.
A lot had changed in five months.
With streaks of burned earth barely visible under the layers of flowers, it seemed as if the surface of the mountain had already forgotten. The wind was ruthless and her locks were a tangly mess, but she felt alive. She placed blue thistles by a commemorative plaque. Red and blue wildflowers were scattered all around the base of a statue.
Wassim on the cross, a martyr in granite.
At the top of the Ménez Hom, between the earth and the sky, history had displayed the ability to repeat itself.
Granite remembered, as always.
*
In memory of my great-grandfather Jean Guennal, résistant on the Ménez Hom.
Efflam Mercier is a concept artist and writer with a passion for shining a spot-light on the effects of climate change. His upbringing in the French countryside of Brittany gave him a deep sense of responsibility to nature and its ecosystems. Efflam is currently working on a post-collapse painting series and resides in Los Angeles with his wife and two dogs.
The meal was a bowl of thin soup with a piece of chewy brisket floating in it, served on top of mashed potatoes. These were made from a powder, gelatinous, and barely absorbed the soup. A biscuit was being passed around. Deenah broke off a piece. Before she put it in her mouth she looked at it—she immediately knew this was a bad idea. A small worm was wriggling out of the jagged edge. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about it as she chewed. This wasn’t the first time she’d forced herself to do this—there were so many it would be futile to pick them out—but it still revolted her. Best not to look.
When she finished her meal she felt drowsy and wanted to go to sleep, but she knew she couldn’t. Now they would talk, digest the day. For contractees, this was their only moment of calm in a day filled with work. This evening, Amadeus was telling his story.
I wasn’t born on the water. My family, always been on the land. I grew up in Mogadishu, what was left of it. I had two younger brothers—I don’t know where they are now. I spent my childhood picking chipboards. My father and mother ran an e-waste recycling center out of their home. We would drive to landfills and dumps, and we load in as much as the waste collectors had found. Then we drive them back home, spend most of the time taking apart electronics, harvesting what can be re-used. This we’d sell to traders and mercenaries, and they sell us gas.
Mogadishu was slowly dying, like an LED at low battery. It still had a port, but, boats came less and less often. Mostly, they traded for oil, and they’d buy anything useful that we harvested.
When I was thirteen my father took us to the port. I had found an electronic keyboard, and my father, instead of telling me to take it apart to scavenge the chipboards, let me try to fix it. I got it working after two months. I re-routed the battery pack to our own, and built an adapter to change the voltage. The whole family gathered while I pressed the buttons. One said “Rock ’n’ roll” and a fast beat came on. We all laughed. I then pressed one of the large white keys and a song started playing. When I pressed a different white key, the song changed shape. I opened the back and touched part of the chipboard with a wire. The sounds coming from the keyboard bended and twisted… it was like pulling on a cat’s tail. Everyone laughed.
Photo: Jake Brown (Modified from original)
I knew my parents wanted me to be proud, but they weren’t that impressed. It was just a broken toy keyboard. They had other things on their mind, like how to feed their family. That night I told my parents I wanted to sell the keyboard. So when we got to the port the next day I walked up to the man at the trading shop. He looked at me and said, what’s this?
A keyboard, I said.
I turned it on and played the song. The man stood there glaring at me. He offered two liters of gas for it. Normally we got one barrel of oil for a month’s worth of work.
Later, when we drove away without the keyboard and a Coca-Cola bottle of gas, everyone was silent. My brothers, they were so young but they knew something happened. My father, he didn’t know what to say.
From then on I started learning to help my mother. Together we worked on the garden plot, and she taught me about the different plants and how much water they needed, how some worked well with others, and some had to be planted far away from each other. She showed me how she used a filter system powered by the wind to desalinate water. I often liked to stay home and cook and garden while my brothers went to pick through waste.
When I turned fifteen, a man came to our house. I recognized him from the port, he was the man who bought my keyboard. My parents told us to go play outside.
Later that evening at dinner, my parents asked me if I wanted to work for that man. I would work on a boat, and the money I made would be sent back home and help raise my brothers. I didn’t know this that time, but I think my parents had a lot of debt to him. They said it would only be two years, after, I could come home. I would see the world, be part of a new free trade empire. Learn languages, help the Company grow.
I went with the man. I cried when saying goodbye to my brothers and mother, my father drove me to the port. He was holding back tears. When I said goodbye to him, he told me: Amadeus, you’ll see much of the world, but know that we’ll always be here.
There was silence for a moment at the table. Deenah spoke first.
What then? What happened then?
Well, I never saw my family again. You know what happens. I could tell you stories of my years on one sailing ship, then another, then, finally, this one. Decades of forced work. Cleaning the shit of scavengers and mercenaries. I’ve been a contractee for the Company now, ten years. No more talking tonight. Someone else talk.
This is part of a climate fiction story, From the Craven to the Mains, set 300 years in the future. Read the first piece in the series here.
Aaron Vansintjan is a co-editor at Uneven Earth and is currently pursuing a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. He writes about gentrification, food politics, environmental justice, and contemporary politics.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
This is just wrong, Cariappa thought. The abstract had already tipped him off, but now that he had scrolled through the entire CDC report and compiled a mental list of all the inaccuracies and omissions along the way, he knew the conclusion was wrong. Even the writing was slipshod, superficial, like a homework assignment hastily completed five minutes before it was due.
Cariappa put down his notepad and let his eyes glaze over while he considered the facts. An outbreak of naegleriasis with multiple clusters, all located in seven states and two former territories of the United States. In the space of a summer month, the outbreak had infected 309 people, with 182 dead so far. The spike in fatalities had alarmed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with agency investigators initially fearful of a novel strain of naegleriasis that could be transmitted between people. This was quickly dismissed by flagellation tests and molecular analyses, and Cariappa got the impression that those results had relaxed the investigation to the point of complacency.
The rest of the report was academic guesswork derived mainly from the geographic distribution of the outbreak. Since most clusters were located in coastal regions with poorly maintained (or a complete lack of) seawalls and surge barriers, CDC investigators had concluded that increased flooding had resulted in more stagnant pools of water and thus a more fertile ground for Naegleria fowleri, the free-living amoeba that causes naegleriasis. The ongoing continental super summer was also marked as an environmental determinant, as N. fowleri are thermophilic and thrive in warm water sources.
It made sense at a cursory glance, but fell apart with even mild scrutiny. As he reached for his notepad, Cariappa briefly felt like a detective taking a closer look at a murder scene where the police had arrested an obvious patsy and summarily closed the case. He started reading the report a second time.
* * *
I don’t feel wrong, Sunil thought. He was sitting next to his parents in his teacher’s office when he realised they were talking about what was wrong with him. He had never been in this room before so he was counting the ceiling tiles (eleven down, fourteen across), but then his teacher mentioned something that made his dad a little angry. Now he paid attention to what was being said, with words like ‘preoccupied’ and ‘difficult’ coming up. One of the words he didn’t know was ‘autism’. He made a mental note to look it up as soon as he got home.
* * *
N. fowleri cannot survive in seawater. It was right there on Wikipedia. Cariappa had already reacquainted himself with naegleriasis when news of the outbreak first reached him, but now that the CDC report had compelled him to get up to speed properly, that one simple fact undermined its conclusion more than any other. If an increased abundance of N. fowleri was the cause of the outbreak (and Cariappa believed it had to be), coastal flooding was at the very least not sufficient to explain it. Neither was the super summer, which had started two months earlier.
Photo: Daniel Sturgess
Timescale discrepancies also complicated the other environmental determinants listed in the report, each of which had been in play since before the turn of the century. Thermal pollution and habitat disturbances that eliminated N. fowleri’s competitors for bacterial food supplies had already resulted in more documented cases of naegleriasis over the last two decades, but plotting that graph still produced a flat line with a steady slope. Under the conditions detailed in the report, the sudden spike in infections caused by the outbreak, which now turned the graph into a hockey stick, should have occurred much sooner or in a broader trend.
Next, Cariappa reviewed the two available appendices, the first of which included several interviews with infected people. They were at least treated as unreliable, given that naegleriasis tends to leave its victims in a state of confusion. This had led Cariappa down the roadmap of the infection’s pathogenesis, which affects the central nervous system. When water containing N. fowleri is inhaled through the nose, the amoebae are passed to the olfactory bulbs of the forebrain. Once there, they multiply by feeding on neurons and glial cells in lieu of bacteria, causing rapid neurodegeneration and death within two weeks. It was no surprise that N. fowleri was commonly known as ‘the brain-eating amoeba.’
The second appendix was a set of water microbiology analyses conducted at three of the cluster sites and then conveniently extrapolated to the other six. Besides a high abundance of N. fowleri and multiple bacterial concentrations, the results also confirmed that the samples came from freshwater instead of seawater sources. When he noticed that, Cariappa had to stand up and do anything else.
* * *
The writers consulted with noted medical experts to develop an accurate perception of a pandemic event. Sunil was checking out the Wikipedia page for Contagion, which he had just seen for the eighteenth time since it was released on DVD. That fact stood out to him and he wanted to know who these experts were. The idea that there were people who professionally occupied themselves with charting the spread of diseases fascinated him. After having seen so many doctors, Sunil had thought about becoming one himself, but now he wanted to be an epidemiologist more than anything.
* * *
352 million dollars. That was the CDC’s current annual budget, brought down from twelve billion since 2015. Cariappa had been aware of the agency’s decline over the years, mostly due to successive Republican administrations inflicting a chronic amount of deficit. He would occasionally commiserate with CDC officials and investigators on their stringent working conditions, which was the only reason the outbreak report had reached him in the first place. One of his CDC contacts had sent it to him attached to a mail that showed no subject line or body text.
Subsequent correspondence revealed that budgetary constraints had not been the only challenges plaguing the investigation. One of the cluster sites had to be written off because it was located in the Texas territory of a religious cult, which abhorred all government interference and saw the naegleriasis infections as ‘divine discipline.’ Media coverage of the outbreak was limited to a few local reports that only deemed it newsworthy because ‘brain-eating amoeba’ made for a juicy sound bite.
That made Cariappa think of a general correlation he had repeatedly written about. More funds and resources were allocated for visible, disaster-level consequences of anthropogenic climate change (like hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and mass displacements) because they still dominated headlines. The micro effects all but disappeared in the clutter, especially those related to diseases and infections. Even inside that particular box, stories about permafrost viruses and pandemics claimed all the attention, so an outbreak that killed less than two hundred people was lucky to be investigated at all.
Photo: Raza Ali
It was a familiar struggle for Cariappa, whose work at the Public Health Agency of Canada was mainly focused on the application of climate change studies to disease outbreak models and simulations. When his thoughts dwelled on that, he suddenly remembered a series of studies going back as far as 2018, which had demonstrated that bacteria cause stronger infections when they incubate at higher temperatures. He had no idea why his train of thought had brought him there until the report’s second appendix started tugging at him.
* * *
30,363 Canadian dollars. If Sunil was going to enroll at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, that’s what his first year would cost. The irony of having to graduate as a Doctor of Medicine before he could tackle a course in Epidemiology was not lost on him. With his parents unable (and maybe even a bit reluctant) to put up that kind of money, Sunil had no other option than to qualify for an entrance scholarship. He was eligible for several ‘visible minority’ allowances, all of which required personal essays and in-person interviews. Only the latter frightened him.
* * *
Pasteuria ramosa. It had to be the answer. Two of the three available water microbiology analyses noted a higher-than-average presence of the bacterium P. ramosa. The CDC investigators had ignored this anomaly because N. fowleri feeds on many different bacteria, and a slight predominance of one species was not nearly enough to explain the increased abundance of the amoeba.
Cariappa too had dismissed this anomaly until he remembered that one of the studies on bacterial infections at higher temperatures had been conducted with P. ramosa and its preferred host organism: the water flea. After digging up and reviewing this study, a potential chain of events dawned on Cariappa and he started pacing around the room to let it settle.
Water fleas are ubiquitous in freshwater habitats. P. ramosa, which is an obligate pathogen that needs a host to survive, infects water fleas by propagating inside their bodies and releasing endospores for further infections. At higher temperatures, bacteria cause stronger infections and reproduce through spores faster. This would imply that water fleas infected with P. ramosa could be serving as a novel food source for N. fowleri in a way that would not show up in a microbiology analysis. Since N. fowleri feeds on bacteria in the trophozoite stage, which is a stage in its life cycle where it can cause naegleriasis in humans, it would explain the spike in infectivity.
Cariappa went over it a few more times and laughed at the idea that this scenario was contingent on the heat wave after all, only now as a vector for bacteria rather than thermophilic amoebae. He sat down again, held up his notepad, and started dictating a mail to his CDC contact.
* * *
Sunil “Gregory House” Cariappa. One news report had referred to him as such because of his astute diagnosis of the naegleriasis outbreak, and the moniker stuck. He should have been bothered by the fact that an American audience still needed to see him through the shorthand lens of something American. Instead he thought it was funny, and not because the show’s lead was played by a British actor. Cariappa used to love House and would consistently look up the diseases mentioned in each episode. That’s when he had first learned of naegleriasis, which featured in the show’s second season. He had always thought it was cool.
Joannes Truyens is a writer with a fondness for near-future hard science fiction. He is currently working on his first independent project after having written for various game studios and online publications. This story was expanded from one small corner of that project and found inspiration in the works of Australian sci-fi writer Greg Egan.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
Evacuating early was the smartest thing she’d ever done, Dora Castillo thought as she stared at the ruins of her apartment. They’d left Pearland two weeks back, twelve hours before Galveston ordered mandatory evacuations and a day and a half before Houston tried to put in place staggered ones. I-45 had been slow as hell when she left, but it hadn’t been close to the twenty-four hour gridlock that happened when everyone else tried to leave at once.
Her friends told her she was crazy. ‘It never gets that bad here,’ one said. That person ended up leaving in a boat. Hurricane Elmer had blown all the other record storms — four new records in the twenty years since Harvey — off the map. Most of Houston and everything between the city and the Gulf had ended up under water.
Coming back wouldn’t make the list of smart things, though of course she’d had to do it, had to see if anything had made it through even though she’d heard floodwaters had risen to the level of second floor apartments. If they’d stayed, they’d have been lucky to get out at all and the truck would have been ruined. She had the truck and the kids and her tools and all the important papers and some clothes and food. No insurance on the apartment — tenant insurance cost too much and didn’t cover flooding anyway. No point in making a claim with FEMA; word was the federal government was tapped out. The state wasn’t even contributing to cleanup.
There was so little money for relief and rebuilding that there wasn’t work for carpenters. Getting some work was the other reason Dora had left her kids with a friend in Plano and come back down. Instead of landing a job, she’d done volunteer work alongside everyone else. The trip hadn’t even yielded enough money to pay her friend for watching the kids. She took one last look at the wrecked building, decided there wasn’t any point in trying to pull anything out of it, and headed north on I-45.
The truck had been another good decision. It had cost an arm and a leg, but the solar panels for charging in spots with no electricity and the locked tool chest under the camper cap had made it worth it. She’d scrimped on other things to pay it off and keep it in good shape.
When she’d called her folks to let them know she was safe, they’d told her to join them in Mexico. But there wasn’t work in Mexico, either. Besides, she wasn’t a Mexican citizen. Her folks had dual citizenship and U.S. Social Security checks; she needed a job.
The traffic this trip wasn’t as bad as it had been the day they’d evacuated. She passed the exit for state highway 19, the back road she’d taken to get out of five-mile-an-hour traffic that day. Traveling that road had led them to the Davy Crockett National Forest. That had been another good decision. It had been late afternoon when her daughter Tensia had spotted a weathered sign for the park that included the word ‘camping’. She’d decided it might be a good idea to stop for the night.
They’d taken one back road and then another before finally coming across a campground just as the sun began to disappear. At the entrance, they saw an old RV, a weatherbeaten sign saying ‘host’ in front of it. Dora’d figured there must be some check-in process, so she’d knocked on the door. A man who looked old enough to be her grandfather — silver hair curling above his dark brown face — had answered. ‘Nah, there’s no check-in these days. Ain’t seen any Forest Service folks in two years. Just pick any open spot you like. Y’all trying to get away from that hurricane?’
She nodded.
‘I ’spect a few more will straggle in over the next day or two. Gonna rain here, prob’ly, but likely not too bad. You should be able to sleep out tonight, you want to. Maybe not tomorrow.’
His name was Frank Jones and he’d been living there about three years. There were a few other long-term folks — the old rules about two-week stay had disappeared with the Forest Service — plus a couple of people living deep in the woods that he almost never saw. ‘Would rather not see, to tell the truth,’ he told her. ‘I’m a peaceable man, but I got my shotgun handy, just in case.’
Photo: Tim Fleck
Dora found a site with a solid picnic table and an intact grill about a hundred feet from the latrines and water faucet. Frank said the water hadn’t killed him yet and the toilets still flushed. She fed the kids peanut butter sandwiches and bedded them down on a soft spot of ground on top of the tarp from the truck. She lay there, staring up at the moon and stars in the gaps between the tops of the pine trees. It took her a long time to go to sleep.
The next day dawned cloudy, but the kids woke as excited as if this was a vacation. They bolted down some cereal and began to explore. By mid-morning they’d found three other kids staying there. Tensia — oldest of the group — was already leading them in exploring the old trails. Dora called out cautions about snakes and poison ivy, though she doubted they listened.
‘The rangers didn’t bother to cut nothing off when they pulled out,’ Frank told her. ‘But the electricity in the latrines and charging stations is kinda wonky and there are some leaks in the roof and in the pipes.’ He nodded toward the truck. ‘You do some of that kind of work?’
That first day she cleaned off some of the solar panels, patched some bad spots on the latrine roof, and put some gaskets in faucets to stop the leaks. Then the rain came, and everyone holed up under anything they could to wait it out. The hurricane had turned east, aiming for eastern Louisiana and maybe back down to New Orleans, so they didn’t get the brunt of it.
Missing the worst of the storm was cause for celebration. A couple of older women who lived in an old pickup camper on the edge of the site were growing vegetables, and they contributed some tomatoes and squash. The old man who was looking after his grandkids disappeared off in the woods and came back with a rabbit and some squirrels ready for the barbecue. Frank fired up a grill.
Dora spent another day doing some more repairs and making sure her truck had a full charge before she headed on to Plano. Frank had been sorry to see her go. ‘I was kind of hoping you’d decide to settle in here. Nice having more kids around and someone who knows how to fix stuff.’
Dora had laughed and said she was a city girl.
‘I’ll save you a space, just in case,’ he said. ‘Imagine we’re gonna get a few more refugees up here.’
The kids had cried when she said they were leaving and Tensia sulked all the way to Plano. It had been crowded at her friend’s house — another reason she’d gone back down to Houston to check out the apartment and the work options. She knew she’d have to find someplace else to go as soon as she got back.
But where was she going to go? She’d looked around Plano, but the ’62 depression had crippled the Dallas region worse than the Gulf Coast. Nothing to be had anywhere for a carpenter but odd jobs and cheap repair work. Nobody was building anything new.
Dora drove past the exit for 19, on into Huntsville. A few miles down the road, she saw the exit for another road, one that crossed 19. She’d had a late start and it was almost dark now. She might as well camp out, finish the drive to Plano tomorrow. The kids would be OK one more day. Where was she going to take them, anyway? No home to go back to. No work.
She got off the freeway, meandered around the back roads until she got to the campground and spotted Frank’s camper. Here. She was going to bring them here. She’d build them a tree house in one of the big oaks. They could do school online with their tablets – no one had turned the WiFi off when the Forest Service abandoned the place. She could get odd jobs in Lufkin or Nacogdoches, maybe. They could learn to gather nuts, hunt some game, maybe grow vegetables.
Not forever, Dora told herself. Just for now.
A native Texan, Nancy Jane Moore grew up in the area flooded in the above story, and now lives in Oakland, California. She is the author of The Weave, and her short fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies as well as in her collection Conscientious Inconsistencies. In addition to writing, Nancy Jane Moore is a fourth degree black belt in Aikido and teaches empowerment self defense.
by Srđan Miljević translation into English by Svetlana Milivojević-Petrović
*Scroll down to read the story in Serbian*
Superglue
‘Milica!!! Come over here fast, please! I’m fucked up! I need to be fixed. Hurry up, pleeeeease!’
‘Oh, OK. Ivan and I’ll get a taxi now. Don’t move.’
‘Hey, I love you!’
‘Love you too, you fool, don’t move. We’re coming.’
*
‘Fuck, he can do this every single day. Why the fuck does he have to do it? What are we going to do? There’s no point in rushing like this and trying to save him each time he gets into a dark mood’, Ivan said, looking out of the taxi window.
‘Hey, please, let’s leave this for later. It pisses me off when you are acting smart while there’s a fire burning. We’ll be moralizing tomorrow. Cool it. Do you think I haven’t had enough of this? That I haven’t felt the impulse to hang up on him at least three times and ignore him? And yet, I can understand him. I don’t know…’
‘Fuck, it’s just… Do you think he’d have the guts to do himself in?’
‘Yes, turn right here and then take the second turning on the left. We’ll get out there and you’ll wait for us for a minute, and then we’ll go to the Emergency Department. Thank you’, Milica said to the taxi driver.
The spring
evening in Belgrade was unusually hot, so the sweat stinking from the driver
made the rescue mission even more dramatic.
‘I
think he would. It makes no difference whether you’ll cut your leg off and call
Milica or just cut your leg off and not call Milica. Does it?’, she added after
talking to the taxi driver.
‘But
he always calls Milica’, protested Ivan.
‘So
far he has.’
*
The
way they entered Jasmin’s apartment looked like an ambulance crew taking
action. Milica and Ivan were so well-practiced there was no need for
instructions. They lifted Jasmin, then Ivan carried him piggyback out of the
apartment. Milica waded through the rubbish on the floor to the kitchen stove
and turned off the burner. She swiftly turned off several other appliances that
were turned on, picking up Jasmin’s leg from the floor in passing, that is the
part of his left leg below the knee. She switched off the light and left the
apartment.
*
In the ER, in the room Jasmin called the fix[1], there were body parts lying strewn around. Jasmin was sitting on the bench outside room 22, with the sign LNGH!7, which meant he was an emergency case and they were going to see him soon. Ivan looked around with curiosity, and the twinkle in his eyes confirmed what Milica already knew. He was amused by this. And all she wanted was to stay put in her crib tonight. To watch with Ivan that documentary about India in which, with the help of 6D glasses, you can feel the mud on your feet, the scent of an orchid stick getting into your nostrils, while Buddha himself is hugging you all the time.
The
digital display on the screen changed, and it was Jasmin’s turn. He walked in
by himself, out of habit. Milica was sitting, lost in her thoughts, while Ivan
went on playing a mental game in his head in which he would attach legs, arms,
ears and eyes, previously separated from their original owners, to mismatched
owners. So the old man sitting opposite him, leaning his arm on the wall, ended
up with a small turned-up nose that belonged to a girl on the other side of the
corridor.
*
‘Jasmin,
it’s you again.’
‘Again.’
‘Ok.
Let’s put everything back in its place straight away.’
‘If
necessary’, Jasmin said jokingly.
The
doctor gave him a civil smile and then said to the technician:
‘Elena,
please, the glue and fast sterilization of this leg. Well, Jasmin, is this your
fourth or fifth time?’
‘The
fifth time, Doc.’
‘You
already know everything. The state only covers…’
‘I
do, yes, Doc”, Jasmin interrupted him. “But I don’t want to kill myself.’
‘You
said it last time. And the time before. And…’
‘Well,
I didn’t want it then, either. I’ve already told you…’
‘Remember,
next time we won’t be able to receive you or react’, the doctor said, applying
glue below the knee with one hand, and on the free part of the leg with the
other.
‘Agreed,
Doc. Don’t worry. I say, it’s fascinating to me how you glue it for me so well
each time that there’s no mark. And how everything functions properly.’
‘And
this is why you’re playing with your fate and cutting yourself to see if the
leg will be glued properly next time as well?’
‘You
are quite a joker, Doc.’
‘Jasmin,
please install the application My
psychologist. Try it.’
‘Si,
señor’, said Jasmin smiling at Elena, who was already getting ready for the
next patient.
*
‘I feel brand new”, he exclaimed after leaving room 22 walking on both legs.
The doctor patted him on the shoulder and said to Milica:
‘You
know that he can only take fluids today. From tomorrow, he’ll be functioning as
if nothing had happened. Take care of him. We have agreed on the application.
This has been his fifth time”.
‘I
know doctor. Don’t worry. The three of us will be out all day tomorrow, that is
sure to raise his spirits. Thanks a lot.’
‘Take
care. And don’t forget that such procedures were almost impossible until
recently. Jasmin, there won’t be glue forever. Goodbye.’
‘See
you, Doc.’
*
The
next day they enjoyed the spring sun.
He
was alright.
They
laughed, ran and had a short swim in the lake.
After
three days Milica’s phone rang in the evening.
It was Jasmin.
[1] Abbreviation for Odeljenje za fizikalno ikoštano spajanje (the Department for Physical and Bone Attachments). Fiks = fix. Translator’s note
Srđan Miljević is a short story writer from Belgrade, Serbia. His main topic is people facing different challenges and trying to overcome them. He does not write about progress, but about process.
***
Superlepak
„Milice!!! Brzo dođi kod mene, brzo, molim te! Sjebao sam se! Moram na fiks. Požuri, pleeeeeaaaaaaaseeeeee!”
„Joj,
ajde. Sad ćemo Ivan i ja na taksi. Ne pomeraj se.”
„Ej,
ljubim te”.
„I ja
tebe, budalo, ne pomeraj se. Stižemo”.
*
„Jebote, on može tako svaki dan. Koji
kurac više! Šta da radimo? Nije rešenje da ovako trčimo i spasavamo ga čim mu
se smrači”, govorio je Ivan, gledajući kroz prozor taksija.
„Aj please da to ostavimo za posle. Smara me
kad pametuješ dok gori. Sutra ćemo da morališemo. Iskuliraj. Misliš da meni
nije muka više? Da mi bar triput nije došlo da mu spustim slušalicu i da ga
iskuliram? A opet, mogu da ga razumem. Otkud znam…”
„Jebi
ga, samo… Misliš da bi imao muda da se rokne?”
„E,
da, skrenite tu desno i onda druga levo. Tu ćemo izaći a vi nas sačekajte koji
minut, pa idemo u urgentni. Hvala vam”, rekla je Milica taksisti.
Prolećno
beogradsko veče bilo je neuobičajeno toplo, pa je vonj znoja vozača ovu
spasilačku misiju činio dramatičnijom.
„Mislim
da bi. Isto je da l’ ćeš da otfikariš sebi nogu i nazoveš Milicu ili ćeš je
samo otfikariti i nećeš nazvati Milicu. Zar ne?”, dodala je ona nakon obraćanja
taksisti.
„Ali
on uvek zove Milicu!”, bunio se Ivan.
„Dosad
je zvao.”
*
Ulazak
u Jasminov stan izgledao je kao akcija
službe hitne pomoći. Milica i Ivan bili su toliko uigrani da nije bilo potrebe
za instrukcijama. Podigli su Jasmina, onda ga je Ivan stavio na krkače i izneo napolje. Milica je kroz krš na podu otišla do šporeta i
isključila ringlu. Brzinski je protrčala i pogasila još nekoliko uključenih
aparata, uzimajući u prolazu Jasminovu nogu s poda, tj. deo leve noge do ispod
kolena. S nogom pod miškom ugasila je svetlo i izašla iz stana.
*
U urgentnom, u ambulanti koju je Jasmin zvao fiks[1], svuda su bili razbacani delovi tela. Jasmin je sedeo na klupi ispred sobe 22, s oznakom LNGH!7, što je značilo da je hitan slučaj i da će ga uskoro primiti. Ivan je radoznalo gledao oko sebe, a iskre u očima potvrđivale su ono što je Milica znala. Ovo ga je zabavljalo. A ona je samo želela da večeras ne mrda nigde s gajbe. Da Ivan i ona pogledaju taj dokumentarac o Indiji, gde uz pomoć 6D naočara na stopalima osetiš blato, u nos ti ulazi miris štapića orhideje, a sve vreme te grli Buda lično.
Displej
se promenio i sada je bio Jasminov red. Ušao je sam, po navici. Milica je
sedela zamišljena, a Ivan nastavio da se igra tako što je u svojoj glavi noge,
ruke, uši i oči koje su bile odvojene od svojih vlasnika spajao s pogrešnim
vlasnicima. Tako je dedi preko puta, čija je ruka bila naslonjena na zid,
stavio mali prćasti nos devojke s one strane hodnika.
*
„Opet ti, Jasmine.”
„Opet.”
„Dobro. Hajde da odmah vratimo sve na svoje mesto.”
„Ako baš mora”, šeretski odgovori Jasmin.
Doktor se kurtoazno nasmešio, a onda se obratio tehničarki:
„Elena,
molim vas lepak i brzu sterilizaciju ove noge. Pa, Jasmine, je l’ ovo četvrti
ili peti?“
„Peti
put, doco”.
„Sve
već znaš. Država pokriva samo…”
„Znam,
znam, doco”, prekinuo ga je Jasmin u pola rečenice. ”Ali, ja neću da se
ubijem.”
„To
si rekao i prošli put. I pre toga. I…”
„Pa,
ni tada nisam hteo. Rekao sam vam već… “
„Zapamti,
sledeći put nećemo moći da te primimo, a ni reagujemo”, rekao je doktor sad već
nanoseći lepak na potkolenicu jednom, a na slobodni deo noge drugom rukom.
„Dogovoreno,
doco. Ništa ne brinite. Mislim, meni je fascinantno kako mi je svaki put lepo
zalepite da se baš ništa ne vidi. I da baš sve radi kako treba.”
„Pa
se igraš sudbinom i seckaš se ne bi li video hoće li i naredni put biti dobro
zalepljena, a?”
„Vi
ste, doco, baš neki šaljivdžija.”
„Jasmine,
molim te da ipak instaliraš aplikaciju Moj
psiholog. Probaj.”
„Si,
senjor”, rekao je Jasmin smeškajući se Eleni koja se već pripremala za sledećeg
pacijenta.
*
„Ko
nov”, uskliknuo je po izlasku iz sobe 22 hodajući na obe noge.
Doktor
ga je potapšao po ramenu i obratio se Milici:
„Znate
da danas sme da unosi samo tečnost. Od sutra će funkcionisati kao da se ništa
nije desilo. Pripazite ga. Dogovorili smo se za aplikaciju. Već mu je peti
put”.
„Znam,
doktore. Ne brinite. Sutra ćemo nas troje ceo dan biti napolju, to će ga
sigurno odobrovoljiti. Hvala vam mnogo.”
„Čuvajte
se. I ne zaboravite da su ovakvi zahvati do skoro bili nemogući. Jasmine, lepka
neće biti zauvek. Doviđenja”.
„Vidimo
se, doco”.
*
Sutradan su uživali u prolećnom suncu.
Bio
je dobro.
Smejali
su se, trčali i kratko se okupali u jezeru.
Nakon
tri dana Milici je uveče zazvonio telefon.
Bio
je to Jasmin.
[1] skraćeno od Odeljenje zafizikalno i koštano spajanje
Srđan Miljević (Beograd, Srbija) piše kratke priče o ljudima koji se suočavaju s različitim izazovima i pokušajima da ih prevaziđu. Srđan ne piše o progresu, već o procesu.
A Latvian ecovillage based on The Ringing Cedars of Russia. (Santa Zembaha/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: things you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental and social justice, cities, science fiction, current events, and political theory.
We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
Not Afraid of the Ruins is back! In June, we launched the second season of our series of science fiction with an environmental justice twist. And we have two excellent new articles for you, one on women’s organizing against extractivism in southern Africa, another continuing the debate on utopia and science, by Max Ajl. We also highlight more articles criticizing Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and feature a discussion on the merits of and problems with utopian thinking. Finally, we are featuring an older article by Peter Staudenmaier on fascist environmentalism—something every ecologist should be aware of.
Uneven Earth updates
The right to say no | Link | Women organizing against extractivism in southern Africa
All the water | Link | “Everything was on autopilot; the only thing the operator had to do was push a virtual button to engage the missiles.”
Dispatch from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec | Link | What it will take to build alliances with our neighbors to the South
To stop destruction of Liberia’s rainforest, he put his life on the line. Alfred Brownell had to flee Liberia after challenging the powerful palm oil and other extractive industries that were clearing its forests. But he remains committed to seeing that the West African nation’s biodiverse lands be developed sustainably and the rights of its indigenous peoples respected.
The mindfulness conspiracy. It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism.
How ‘maintainers’, not ‘innovators’, make the world turn. “The vast majority of technologies that surround us and underpin our lives are not innovations, and the vast majority of labor in our culture is not focused on introducing or adopting new things, but on keeping things going.”
Por
tercera vez durante cuarenta minutos, Olga daba vueltas entre la sala y la
cocina buscando los anteojos. Era extraña su manera de buscar las cosas, pues
aunque ya hubiera revisado dos o tres veces en el mismo lugar, lo volvía a
hacer sabiendo que no encontraría nada. Para concentrarse mejor, subía el
volumen de la música que estaba escuchando [estridente ya de por sí]. Pero
nada. Los anteojos esta vez parecían haber desaparecido. Angustiada porque sin
ellos no podría hacer la mayor parte de las actividades planificadas para ese
día, se recostó un momento a lado de la puerta de entrada, donde sentía que el
aire rozaba directamente su cuerpo [al menos más que por
la ventana, donde las oleadas eran siempre breves y tibias]. Entonces escuchó
los golpes.
Se
sobresaltó un poco, porque siempre que se visita a alguien, se toca el timbre y
no la puerta –a golpes– de la casa en cuestión. La extrañeza que sentía al
saber que había alguien allá afuera era doble porque casi nadie llegaba hasta
ese extremo del pueblo para ir a buscarla. Pensó que si no se movía,
quienquiera que estuviera del otro lado de la puerta se iría pronto. Pero
después de cinco minutos, algo dentro de su pecho empezó a tensarse, como si
supiera que la inmovilidad era algo poco natural en esa posición. Los golpes
seguían, cada vez más desesperados, y esa insistencia le produjo un choque
eléctrico que le recorrió las vértebras, obligándola a levantarse y abrir, con
violencia, la puerta.
– ¿Qué
te pasa? ¿Por qué pegas así? ¿Qué no ves el timbre?
– ¡Lo
he tocado ya muchas veces, pero quizá usted no lo ha escuchado! ¡Yo oigo
perfectamente lo que suena ahí dentro! –dijo El Visitante, casi a gritos.
Olga se
le quedó viendo, callada, atendiendo al sonido más que a él. Veinte segundos
bastaron para darse cuenta de que los ruidos provenientes del estéreo envolvían
no sólo todo el espacio tras su espalda, sino el jardín entero y la enramada
que llevaba al pueblo.
–
¡Aaaaah…! A ver, espera, voy a bajar el volumen.
Pero él
la tomó del brazo y le dijo que lo escuchara primero, antes de volver a entrar.
– Usted
no me conoce, pero creo que debería asomarse a la habitación del primer piso de
su casa y sacar de ahí al bisonte que acaba de entrar por la ventana.
– ¿Un
bisonte?
– Es un
bebé bisonte, no se asuste.
– ¿Pero
qué tiene que hacer un bisonte –grande o chico– aquí, a la orilla de un
acantilado patagónico, donde pega el aire térmico más denso del Sur del mundo?
– ¡Ah!
Eso quisiera yo explicarle. Mire, esa especie de bisonte no es muy popular; de
hecho sólo existen tres en el Cuadrante Cósmico Oriente, y usted tuvo la mala
fortuna de encontrarse en las coordenadas donde ubicaron a Luly… así se llama…
Olga lo
interrumpió con una mirada brusca, inquisitiva.
– No, a
ver, espera. Más raro que rondar una zona por donde sólo se puede pasear de
noche, lo que yo me pregunto es cómo hizo un bebé bisonte para subir al primer
piso de mi casa y entrar por la ventana.
– Justo eso es lo que estaba…
– ¡No!
¡Espera! En realidad, lo que no entiendo es para qué carajos va a querer entrar
un bebé bisonte a mi cuarto, y cómo sabes que es un bebé y que trepó hasta ahí.
Digamos… Si lo estás viendo trepar, ¿por qué no lo detienes, aventándole una
piedra, o asustándolo a gritos, o algo? Y en vez de eso esperas hasta que esté
dentro y entonces sí tocas la puerta, como desquiciado, sin pensar…
– Ahora
espéreme usted a mí. No hay necesidad de exaltarse tanto. Bueno, es natural
dada la situación; pero me parece que si escuchara lo que intento explicarle
acerca de ese bebé bisonte, comprendería mejor por qué sólo debe subir y
animarlo a salir de ahí, ofreciéndole un pedazo de carne roja cruda marinada en
miel. Yo le ayudo a prepararla si quiere, señorita… ¿Cómo se llama?
El
Visitante se animó a dar un paso, con la intención de cruzar el umbral de la
puerta, pero Olga se le adelantó, saliendo al jardín y haciéndole un gesto con
la cabeza, para que volteara hacia arriba:
– Soy Olga…
Me hablas como si te diera lo mismo que ahora yo te dijera “¡Mira, un tiburón
atraviesa el cielo tragándose todas las nubes!”.
El
Visitante se quedó callado, pensativo. El fondo del cielo se abrió de pronto ante
sus ojos y, sin poder evitarlo,
sostuvo la mirada allá arriba, el tiempo suficiente para visualizar cualquier
atrocidad entre las nubes.
–
Satisfacer el hambre de un tiburón debe ser mucho más terrible que lo que hay
que hacer con el bebé bisonte. Y en realidad no es tan complicado –dijo El
Visitante, mientras se asomaba al interior de la casa, decidido a entrar–, a
menos que usted esté embarazada.
–
¿Embarazada?
– Sí.
Si usted está embarazada, el bebé bisonte no se irá hasta que el feto muera y
pueda sorberlo a través de su ombligo.
II
Entraron
directo a la cocina. La música había terminado hacía rato, y era más fácil
distinguir los ruidos dentro y fuera de la casa. En particular, estaban atentos
a los movimientos que se adivinaban en el piso de arriba: el bebé bisonte
parecía estar dando vueltas alrededor de la cama, pero los intervalos de sus
pasos denotaban una pausa muy larga justo cuando llegaba a la cabecera… Es como si se detuviera a inspeccionar la
almohada y luego siguiera adelante, pensaba Olga, sin apartar la mirada del
techo, justo hacia el punto donde se encontraba su habitación, allá arriba.
– ¿Qué
estará buscando el bicho ése en mi cuarto?
– Usted
no sabe la cantidad de información que se desprende de su cuerpo mientras
duerme, señorita Olga… Un bebé bisonte de la especie Metamphynus baalis es capaz de distinguir los humores fertilizados
de las mujeres en los restos del sueño, y no me refiero tan sólo a la saliva,
el sudor o los cabellos que se desprenden durante esos lapsos de inconsciencia,
sino a lo que su cuerpo onírico exuda: muchas veces, la vida que transcurre en
duermevela no llega a manifestarse en la vigilia, a la luz del día, pero
algunos de sus pasajes suelen detonar sucesos que ocurren cuando usted
despierta. O viceversa. En este caso, si usted está embarazada y aún no es
consciente de ello, el bebé bisonte lo descubrirá después de olfatear o lamer
tales exudaciones expuestas, evidentemente, en las sábanas y la almohada de su
cama.
– Y si
lo estoy, querrá pegárseme al ombligo y tragarse por ahí al óvulo fecundado… Es
como si él supiera…
–
Exacto: que usted no desea un hijo.
– Pero
no me he realizado ninguna prueba… ¿Qué tal que no estoy embarazada y el bebé
bisonte termina por sorberme el estómago y las vísceras; o le hacen daño mis
jugos gástricos?
– Sólo
hay una forma de averiguarlo. A ver, dígame una cosa: ¿usted ha expuesto su
organismo al riesgo de ser incubado?
Ambos
se quedaron en silencio, mirándose.
– Sí.
Pero se suponía que el Exoesqueleto no quería eso. Ni yo. Ya sabes que sólo
cuando ambos organismos comparten la visión reproductiva al momento del acto
sexual, se puede dar una fertilización híbrida. De otra forma, no es posible
que la información genética de ambas especies se configure en una sola… ¿Y
entonces?
– Pues en
este caso, el inconsciente de alguno de ustedes –o de ambos– transgredió los
límites entre las leyes racionales de este mundo y las leyes naturales de
alguno –o varios– mundos espejo.
– Pero
yo no quiero un hijo. Nunca lo he querido; ni en esta vida ni en ninguna otra… No
tiene sentido.
– Sí y
no, señorita Olga: por eso el bebé bisonte está aquí.
III
El
silencio les hizo interrumpir la conversación. Al parecer, todo había vuelto a
la calma allá arriba. Se miraron un momento y El Visitante hizo un gesto con la
cabeza, indicándole que fueran a ver. Sin embargo, justo cuando iban a abrir la
puerta de la cocina, él la tomó del brazo, deteniéndola otra vez, pero ahora
con más fuerza. Un bramido como de agua borboteando era todo lo que se
escuchaba, y ese todo, indicaba sólo
una cosa: el bebé bisonte preparaba el camino entre sus fauces, su tráquea y su
flora intestinal, asegurándose de salivar y humedecer bien la lengua y los
labios de su inmenso hocico.
– Es
importante que usted no tenga miedo. El bisonte, de cerca, le parecerá más
grande de lo que es, y el proceso será incómodo, pero no dolerá. Si le teme, el
bebé bisonte recibirá una señal confusa entre lo que debe y no debe hacer, y…
– ¿Y?
¿Has estado presente otras veces, mientras esto sucede, como ahora? No me has
dicho qué pasará con mi organismo después de esto. ¡¿Cómo me pides que no tenga
miedo ante un bisonte succionador?!
– Es la
primera vez que una Incubada me abre la puerta y me escucha. Yo sólo he leído
sobre estas cosas, y deseo atestiguarlo desde hace años. Pero no… nunca…
– ¿Y
los textos? ¡¿Qué dicen los textos; cuáles son los resultados?!
– ¡No
lo sé…! Siempre se habla de la culminación exitosa de este proceso; de lo bien
que funciona el instinto del bebé bisonte; de lo importante que es no
interponerse en su labor; de la necesidad de evitar el término de cualquier
fertilización no deseada; de…
El
Visitante no pudo decir más al ver la enorme cabeza del bebé bisonte que
asomaba ya por la puerta de la cocina. Olga comprendió que aquello de bebé, como siempre, obedecía a una
noción distinta dependiendo de la especie y del mundo espejo del que provenía.
Intentó controlar la impresión de que el inmenso animal la tragaría entera,
pero su reacción al miedo fue curiosa: empezó a escupir todos los dientes
delanteros en la palma de su mano y se los entregó a El Visitante, para que
tuviera constancia de lo que estaba a punto de atestiguar por primera, y quizá,
única vez.
Iliana Vargas (Ciudad de México, 1978). Estudió Letras Hispánicas en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UNAM. Narradora de ficción especulativa, es autora de Joni Munn y otras alteraciones del psicosoma (2012); Magnetofónica (2015) y Habitantes del aire caníbal (2017). Formó parte de The Mexicanx Initiative, para participar en la WorldCon76, en San José California.
Este cuento fue editado por Diana Vela Almeida.
Este cuento es parte de Not afraid of the ruins, nuestra serie de ciencia ficción e imaginaciones utópicas.
The sun glinted its last over the peak of Majal Blanco and took with it the heat of the day. In the foothills of the Carrascoy mountains, Juanjo Cavernas shivered. He reached for the shirt he’d hung from the branch of a pine tree, and when he rolled his sleeves over the golden face of his watch, he unleashed a cloud of sand from the black matting of hair that covered his arms.
The air was infused with dirt; it ignited the sky in fiery oranges, and obscured the valley below. The Huerta de Murcia, as the land was known, had once been so fertile as to feed half of Europe. But it now lay beneath a reddened fog that hid all but the sounds of explosions and impacts of metal on stone.
Among the residents of the Carrascoy mountains, not one person knew that they were witnessing the construction of the largest advert ever conceived, that when the dust settled in a decade’s time it would reveal the word ‘PapPop’ written in glowing PapSolar laminate over a million acres of what had once been their home.
Among the residents of the Carrascoy mountains, not one person knew that they were witnessing the construction of the largest advert ever conceived.
Juanjo yanked on a rope and his muscles rippled as he rattled the cord over a pulley system he’d formed from old car parts. Again and again he tugged, until a bucket appeared splashing water from its rim. He unhooked it, knelt beside some lettuces, and dribbled liquid onto the soil with his hands.
As dusk fell, Juanjo was peeling black insect eggs from a tomato plant when he heard the rustle of tyres on tarmac. He cocked his head at the sound, dried his hands on his trousers, got up and made his way around the side of the house. At the sight of a bright yellow jeep pulling up outside, he threw himself flat against the whitewashed wall. He peeked around the corner and read the word ‘PapAqua’ printed in black over the bodywork.
Twelve-year-old Aliyá Talavera saw it all from the balcony of her house. That place had become her favourite hiding spot, where she would sit for hours on end with her knees pulled up to her chin. There she would try to forget the terror of being evicted from a city which now lay lost beneath a cloud of dust. But constant fear in her stomach would never let her be still, and the thought that kept spinning through her mind only tightened the knot of anxiety — would she ever feel normal again?
Aliyá watched the car pull up and a man get out wearing a dark suit and golden tie. His hair was slicked black against his scalp and he wore a pair of chunky PapDrive spectacles. She couldn’t make out the initials ‘PAq’ shining yellow from his lapels, nor could she hear what he said. But she peered over the railing and observed him coming through her neighbour’s gate with a single piece of paper in his hand.
“Juanjo Cavernas Galiano?” the man said.
“Qué haces aquí?” asked Juanjo, coming out from the side of the house. ‘What are you doing here?’ “This is private land.”
The man smiled, and when he spoke it was with the guttural drawl so characteristic of this part of Spain. “You may have papers for this land,” he said. “But the water you are stealing is ours.”
“Says you!” Juanjo replied. “If the judges had been allowed to give their verdict, our water would still belong to the people and we wouldn’t have to live on the side of this mountain.”
“I’m not here to discuss politics, Señor Cavernas,” said the man, “I’m just doing my job. As you know, the terms of sale of Aguas de Murcia stipulated that all water in the Guadalentín watershed now belongs to PapAqua. All the water in all the rivers, all the lakes, and all the wells.”
“So, what are you going to do? Issue me with a letter?” The man held out the sheet of paper and Juanjo skimmed over it. He glanced at his watch and back at the note. “But that only gives me three minutes,” he said.
“That’s correct,” said the man. “In three minutes’ time, your property is scheduled to be destroyed in a coordinated aerial assault. Please place your finger here to acknowledge receipt.” He pointed to a corner of the letter.
“No,” said Juanjo. “If you don’t have proof that I’ve seen this letter, you have no legal way of evicting me. I did learn something in my twenty years as a solicitor.”
“The attack’s been scheduled,” said the man. “The fingerprint recognition was just for PapSec records.”
Juanjo glanced around at the darkening haze and back at the man. He took a breath and pounced, grabbing the man’s arm and forcing it up behind his back.
Juanjo glanced around at the darkening haze and back at the man. He took a breath and pounced.
“In that case,” he said, “I’ll make you stand here in front of this house like a human shield. They wouldn’t kill their own man, after all.” Juanjo forced the man’s wrist higher up his spine.
The man struggled. “Let me go!” he shouted. “If you hold me here, they’ll kill both of us!”
Juanjo thought for a moment. He glanced up at his balcony and bundled the man inside. The man flailed and kicked in resistance. “Let me go!” he yelled.
“I’m sorry for this,” said Juanjo, throwing the man to the floor and punching his face until he shouted no more. Juanjo grabbed a length of rope that he kept by the door, and lumped the PapAqua man upstairs.
Through the master bedroom they went, around the double bed with its white laundered sheets. Juanjo slid open the balcony door and dangled the man’s body over the railing. He wound the rope around the man’s legs and wrists, then tugged at the ends to make sure of the knots. Only when the man was hanging secured over the balcony did Juanjo look over the valley. In the murk, he could make out a faint light flashing in the sky. It was moving fast towards them.
Juanjo gave a final pull on the rope and dashed down the stairs. He ran outside and into the road, waving his arms and shouting. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! You’ll kill your own man!”
The missiles may have been speeding over southern Spain, but the operator could’ve been anywhere; his location was so secret that not even the young man himself knew that he was in a PapSec base inside the rock of Gibraltar. Through his PapDrive headset he saw only the view of the missile; if he’d looked down, he’d have seen the cloud of kicked up dirt over which he was flying, surrounded by blurry mountains and a sky that appeared grainy even to the augmented-definition cameras. But all he was watching were the numbers counting down in the corner of his sight — 2km, 1.9km, 1.8…
Everything was on autopilot; the only thing the operator had to do was push a virtual button to engage the missiles. When crosshairs appeared before him, he took aim as if his empty hands were holding a joystick with both thumbs on the trigger. As the target approached, he spotted a man on the roadway waving his hands and jumping up and down. “What the…?” the operator said to himself. But he had no time to finish the thought before the target blinked red and he clicked the projected button to crash a pair of missiles into the ground.
The blast rocked Aliyá’s house and engulfed it in black dust. She jumped to her feet, cried “Juanjo!” and charged down the stairs and out of the door, her parents close behind her.
The Talaveras weren’t the first to get to Juanjo’s body; his other neighbours were already there. Old Carmen Hueso was kneeling with Juanjo’s head in her hands. Her husband was standing over the scene in his suit and golf club tie.
“Is he okay?” asked Aliyá’s mother, Dolores. “What on Earth happened?”
“He’s breathing, at least,” said Carmen. “And I don’t think he’s broken anything.”
“There were two big explosions,” said her husband. “One right after the other, and now it’s all gone.” He glanced over the road, and the Talaveras followed his gaze. In the clearing dust, they could just make out a yellow SUV with ‘PapAqua’ printed on the side, and a great hole in the rock where Juanjo’s house once stood.
Juanjo stirred. “I killed him,” he muttered. “I killed a PapCorp employee. We have to leave. They’re going to come after me.”
“Who will come after you?” asked Eduardo Hueso, Juanjo’s one-time senior partner. “You’ve just been blown up. I don’t imagine you’re really in a state to go anywhere right now.”
Juanjo sat himself up. “We need to go up into the mountains,” he said. “Somewhere they can’t find us.”
“There are wolves up there,” said Carmen. “I’m not sure it’s safe.”
“There are also a lot of people,” said Dolores. “From those we’ve seen going past our window these past few weeks, there must be hundreds taking refuge there now.”
“And there’s safety in numbers,” Aliyá’s father added.
“We can’t live on the side of a mountain,” said Eduardo. “I didn’t work all my life to end up squatting like a caveman. We’ve got supplies here. We’ll open up our well and we’ll survive on that.”
“They’ll do the same to you,” said Dolores. “When you or anyone else takes water from a well, they’ll come after you, too. PapAqua own all the water in all the wells.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
Aliyá put her hand up to speak. “A friend of mine lives up there,” she said, “with his mum and dad. We go climbing together sometimes. He told me that they’ve built a system to collect the rain out of tree branches and bits of old pipe. They’re digging holes to keep the water and ditches in the forest to plant seeds. They make houses by cutting into the side of the hills, and then cover them with leaves and grass to hide themselves.”
“You see?” said Juanjo, unbuckling his watch. “We’ll survive up there, just as long as we’re left alone, that is.” He took hold of the soft leather strap and slammed the face against a rock.
“Hey!” said Eduardo, “I gave you that!”
“They can track us with it,” Juanjo responded, smashing the face again. “You should do the same, Eduardo.”
“I don’t think so,” said Juanjo’s former boss, fingering the timepiece on his own left wrist. “This watch is one of the very few things I have left. And who knows, I may need to trade it one of these days. What are you doing now?”
Juanjo had tossed the shattered watch into the overgrowth, unbuttoned his shirt, and was now loosening his trousers. “I don’t want them to find me,” he said. “From now on, I renounce all possessions. It’ll be like a return to Eden. Are you going to join me?”
Adam R. Mathews is a novelist and a teacher, an incessant traveller, and a keen localist. After the idea of a corporate dystopia came to him, he spent years living across Europe, immersing himself in the cultures, quirks, and social movements of his adopted homes. He weaves his experiences into his writing to make fiction that challenges the shortcomings of neoliberalism. His latest novel PapRise: ‘A Tale of Growth and Betrayal or How PapCorp came to rule the World’ will be released in the summer of 2019. He writes at aimlesswanderer.org.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
Photo illustration by Matt Dorfman. Source photograph: Bridgeman Images.
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: things you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental and social justice, cities, science fiction, current events, and political theory.
We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
This month had no shortage of good writing from around the web. The migration debate and the Green New Deal dominated the news, as well as some of the fallout from Jair Bolsonaro’s recent election. We also saw many articles advancing the debate on whether livestock can be sustainable. As usual, we collected the latest news in degrowth and radical municipalism, and found some fun stories on and by science fiction writers.
Uneven Earth updates
How circular is the circular economy? | Link | Why this proposed solution is little more than a magic trick
Why libertarian municipalism is more needed today than ever before | Link | To fight fascism and climate change, the left must rebuild political life
Techno-fantasies and eco-realities | Link | What role does technology play in our ecologically sustainable future, and how do we get there?
Escaping the iron cage of consumerism. “If consumption plays such a vital role in the construction and maintenance of our social world, then asking people to give up material commodities is asking them to risk a kind of social suicide.”
News you might’ve missed
Modern slave ships overfish the oceans. “Seafood caught illegally or under conditions of modern slavery is laundered by mixing it with legally caught fish before it enters the supply chain.”
After a long boom, an uncertain future for big dam projects. The rise of wind and solar power, coupled with the increasing social, environmental and financial costs of hydropower projects, could spell the end of an era of big dams. But even anti-dam activists say it’s too early to declare the demise of large-scale hydro.
Denmark plans to isolate ‘unwanted’ migrants on remote island. Taking inspiration from the Australian immigration system, the Danish centre-right government together with the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party have proposed yet another anti-migrant measure. Mapping Europe’s war on immigration. Europe has built a fortress around itself to protect itself from ‘illegal’ immigration from the South, from peoples fleeing civil war, conflict and devastating poverty. The story is best understood through maps.
Exclusive: The Pentagon’s massive accounting fraud exposed. “In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained, concluded Skidmore. To convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than the entire federal government spends in a year. It is greater than the US Gross National Product, the world’s largest at an estimated $18.8 trillion.”
Extremes of heat will hit health and wealth. A new and authoritative study warns of an “overwhelming impact” on public health just from extremes of heat as the world continues to warm.
FromDayton Martindale, editor at In these times: “Paige Stanley argues that it is imprecise to demonize the meat industry with a broad brush, given that carefully managed grazing can provide certain ecological benefits; Jennifer Molidor that this is mostly irrelevant to the actually existing meat industry in this country, including the vast majority of grass-fed beef–the situation requires collective action against animal agriculture; and Nassim Nobari that even if Paige Stanley is right about the benefits of grazing, there are ethical and ecological reasons not to commodify those grazers and breed them for slaughter–the solution, she says, is a mix of rewilding and vegan agroecology.”
A government from below. Political revolution is a process, not an event – and we can start it now by creating new institutions wherever we live and work.
The politics of post-growth. The Post-Growth 2018 conference at the European Parliament marked a milestone in the history of the post-growth debate, which has predominantly been contained within academic circles. In the first part of a two-part interview, Riccardo Mastini discusses the possibilities and challenges for imagining a world beyond growth with two key post-growth thinkers at the conference. In part two, they trace the history that led to growth being prized above all else and discuss how to conceptualise a future beyond growth. What does this mean for capitalism as we know it?
An economy that does not grow?While it may be clear that the wager on endless growth is a bad one, a more difficult question arises: “what would be the characteristics of an economy that does not grow?”
Degrowth as a concrete utopia. Economic growth can’t reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation, a review of Giorgos Kallis’ book, Degrowth.
Giorgos Kallis’ Degrowth. Rethinking our economic paradigms is an urgent and fundamentally important task. Giorgos Kallis’ new book Degrowth is adding to a joint endeavour of postgrowth thinking, CUSP PhD candidate Sarah Hafner finds. It offers both, a justification as well as a vision and new imaginary for the degrowth agenda.
The ‘new’ climate politics of Extinction Rebellion? Creating a movement that can have the impact XR aims for will require confronting the political as well as the moral challenges posed by climate change.
To slow down climate change, we need to take on capitalism. When widely read Anglophone climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson tries to imagine non-fossil post-capitalism through a Green New Deal, his imagination takes him to a romanticized version of present-day Scandinavia.
But see also… Exiting the ‘realm of facts’: A plea for climate agonism, “Why would anyone make an argument based on premises they themselves do not hold? Providing the answer is Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist largely credited with helping foster the intellectual renaissance currently taking place on the European left.”
They thought they were free: The Germans, 1933-1945. An excerpt from the 1955 book by Milton Mayer about the gradual rise of fascism: “To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.”
Here’s why focusing on money misses the big climate picture. If an asteroid was going to hit the Earth in 2030, we wouldn’t be justifying the cost of the space mission to blast it out of the sky. We’d be repurposing factories, inventing entire new industries, and steering the global economy toward solving the problem as quickly and as effectively as we can — no matter the cost.
The concept creep of ‘emotional labor’. The term has become a central part of an important conversation about the division of household work. But the sociologist who coined it says it’s being used incorrectly.
Modern life is rubbish. We must recognize excessive waste for what it is: a shocking loss of resources at the cost of our environment, engineered by the very system we are living under.
What really happens after the apocalypse. The myth that panic, looting, and antisocial behavior increases during the apocalypse (or apocalyptic-like scenarios) is in fact a myth—and has been solidly disproved by multiple scientific studies.
Dystopias Now. The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
UPDATE: Call for submissions deadline is extended to January 31st, 2019!
Utopian dreamers, other-worldly explorers, and psychonautic adventurers; scholars, activists, students, and critics: drawing inspiration from the online political ecology magazine Uneven Earth (http://www.unevenearth.org/) and following the success of our 2017 round of submissions (http://unevenearth.org/not-afraid-of-the-ruins/), we are excited to announce the 2019 call for submissions for the collaborative writing project Not Afraid of the Ruins. The goal for this year’s call will be to once again showcase new, original, creative, and critical reflections to foster intimate and productive conversations across the intellectual and creative arts.
The fertile ground between science fiction and social/environmental justice has long been an arena for speculation and exploration by academics, activists, and creative writers. From the academy to the field and beyond, the works of science fiction writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood (among many, many others) have presented unique corollaries to the diverse worlds and experiences we encounter in political ecology and social/environmental justice research and activism. Our goal with this project is to create a space explicitly open to exploring such convergences, a space that is neither formally academic nor wholly creative fiction, but instead, in the true spirit of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, seeks to tap the potential that exists in the liminal space between these otherwise isolated worlds of thought. We hope that such an endeavor will produce seeds for imagining that will go forward and populate unexpected places both far and near.
Submission Criteria
This year, we are asking for more focused submissions with the goal of highlighting people, places, stories and characters that are not typically represented in the traditional Science Fiction canon. We are particularly interested in exploring ‘local science fictions’ through pieces that engage with place-based histories and geographies. Some examples for inspiration:
Aliens landing in Soweto, South Africa
Solarpunk in Belgrade, Serbia
The development of a sharing economy in a post-mining community, Northern Sweden
Local revolution against the soy plantation industry in the Cordoba Province, Argentina
Space colonisation, inter-planetary mining and a water-based economy in Singapore
Anti-petroleum activism in Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia
While we are not strict about word count, we strongly encourage writers to limit their submissions to approximately 2,500 words. Submissions can be either fiction or non-fiction.
Not Afraid of the Ruins is a collaborative project and all submissions are vetted and edited by our friendly NAOTR comrades; it is not a peer reviewed academic journal. As such, we hope that both fiction and non-fiction submissions alike are written in a clear and accessible style and we discourage strictly academic writing and excessive jargon. While we are unable to provide funding or financial compensation for submissions, we are hoping to create the possibility for publication opportunities beyond the blog.
This year, we are accepting full submissions only (no proposals). To submit, please send an email to ruins@unevenearth.org by January 15, 2019January 31, 2019 which includes:
A short biographical paragraph about yourself (2 to 4 sentences)
A manuscript of the full submission
Any accompanying artwork or visuals (We highly encourage a number of visuals for each piece. These can be photographs, digital art, video, or anything else you can think of! Please be sure to follow proper copyright rules and cite sources when appropriate.)
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In an age of unprecedented climatic, social and political change, we believe that such a project continues to be as relevant and urgent as ever. We feel compelled, as academics and activists and human beings, to not only critically reflect upon our shared human and ecological condition, but to dare to dream otherwise; to imagine things not only as they are, but to reimagine them as they could be. It is our hope that this blog will provide both space and motivation for doing just that.
Ideas about the importance of the imagination in an age of political and ecological crisis are popping up everywhere: in the arts, in activism and other forms of politics, and in a wide range of academic disciplines and fields. This blog is one example.
In addition to creative efforts to imagine other futures, we also need critical analyses of such visions. This is because imaginative responses to crises cover a broad spectrum of politics and worldviews—and even our dreams of a better future can be constrained by the political structure and ideologies of the present. A critical approach to utopian imaginaries is essential for any rethinking of political futures; without it, we risk being trapped in the same old stories even as we see ourselves as thinking outside the old story box.
Even our dreams of a better future can be constrained by the political structure and ideologies of the present.
In this essay, I discuss one category of future visions: techno-utopianism. There are plenty of techno-utopian fiction and nonfiction stories to choose from. Three that have caught my attention and that have some interesting similarities and differences are British campaigner and lobbyist Jonathon Porritt’s design fiction book The world we made, futurist Jacque Fresco’s The Venus project, and the movement for Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
To see how viable these visions are, I’ll analyze their narrative and argumentative logic and also connect the basic assumptions in these visions to the modernization hypothesis—the idea that human history is a process of evolution towards modernity through economic development and technological progress. Several schools of thought in the critical social sciences have emerged in reaction to this widespread conviction about progress. World-systems theory is one of them, and it retells the story of modernization (or of ‘the modern world system’) by taking the colonial expansion of Western Europe as a starting point. This expansion wasn’t driven by some automatic force of modernization but by the accumulation of resources in privileged areas and the consequent impoverishment of peripheries. This perspective should lead us to ask whether institutions and artefacts that are often taken for granted in attempts to reimagine politics—like the technologies that are central in techno-utopianism—are compatible with or inimical to environmental sustainability and social justice.
With this critical perspective in mind, we will now turn to the three stories and their connections to political movements.
The World We Made: Alex McKay’s Story from 2050
Jonathon Porritt, a British environmentalist with a background in the UK Green Party and Friends of the Earth, has written a 300-page design fiction imagining concrete steps from the year 2014 to an imagined sustainable future in 2050. Design fiction aims to inspire new forms of design and engineering (and sometimes also political policy), and its possible functions in relation to environmental issues are currently being investigated by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
Porritt’s report from the future, which is divided into sections of a few pages each, is permeated by a positive rhetoric that emphasizes solutions and does not linger on conflicts. He motivates this in the postscript by stating that ‘yet more tales of doom and gloom are not going to make a difference’ (p. 275). Where ecological and political crises are acknowledged—for instance concerning droughts and mass protests in the once abundant Fertile Crescent (pp. 22-27), or issues with profit maximization (pp. 54-57)—the story always moves on to hopeful conclusions about how a united world comes to its senses and decides to act in the nick of time. The narrator Alex McKay, a male community college teacher in an unspecified anglophone country (presumably the UK), writes in the preface to the report that humanity has found ‘a renewed sense of purpose as a family of nations’ (p. 1). The book conceptualizes the agent of historical change, or the protagonist in a story of action for sustainability, as an abstract, united humanity which realizes its potential for goodness and acts through the existing political institutions of the 2010s. In terms of political change, we just need the general public to protest a bit (pp. 32-36) and ‘get today’s political classes to think beyond the next election’ (p. 275). Other institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, large corporations, and powerful industries—not to mention the underlying institutions of money and industrial technology, artefacts that are presented as natural phenomena and barely subject to cultural analysis—are conveniently tamed or turn out to work for the common good. This is emblematic of a tendency in many accounts of climate change (and is a central point of disagreement in the debate over the concept of the Anthropocene): to imagine a generalized human ‘we’ as first the villain causing climate change and environmental degradation and then the chastened hero who takes responsibility for the situation.
His wish to stay away from ‘doom and gloom’ means that he also stays away from a rigorous analysis of the political and ecological crises of the present.
In doing so, The World We Made fails to analyze the complex, intertwined political and economic causes behind global environmental change, climate change, global inequity, and the lack of transformative action in current political institutions. This is at least partly due to Porritt’s choice of rhetorical strategy. His wish to stay away from ‘doom and gloom’ means that he also stays away from a rigorous analysis of the political and ecological crises of the present. Consequently, as a work of fiction The World We Made can be criticized for poor characterization of both protagonists and antagonists and the lack of a coherent explanatory backstory. The cultural and material motivations of those who participate in ecological destruction and the exploitation of other people are absent, as are explanations for how institutions that are inimical to sustainability suddenly turn out to be useful tools for political change. To compare this to another well-known narrative in speculative fiction, it is as if Boromir in The Lord of the Rings were hailed for his brilliant idea of using the One Ring to do good and then everyone goes with him to Minas Tirith, they win the war with hardly any bloodshed—Sauron accepting to keep financial profits and slavery at a minimum—and the ominous aura surrounding the Ring turns out to be a stupid doom and gloom thing which luckily no one bought into.
The proposed solutions to ecological and political crises in Porritt’s design fiction take the form of leaps of faith—often faith in technology as a kind of magic—based on best-case scenarios. As six years have passed since The World We Made was published, some of those best-case scenarios have been literally disproven. The most absurd example is the contrast between Porritt’s imagined reformist and peaceful outcome of the Arab Spring (p. 22) and today’s situation with the Syrian civil war, ISIS, the political crisis in Libya after Gaddafi was ousted, enforced EU borders and the EU deal with Turkey to keep refugees out, and so on. To this criticism we can add a world-system understanding of the ‘green’ technologies which Porritt sees as our global salvation (pp. 15-21, 274-275): since industrial technologies in the past have been built on the exploitation of resources and labour in impoverished peripheries, we have no reason to believe that a non-exploitative force of technological progress will suddenly kick in and modernize us all out of this mess. As I will return to towards the end of this essay, these technologies need to be analyzed in connection to their role in the world system as a whole and not only on the basis of the local benefits they offer the people who control them.
The Venus Project
If there are tendencies to view technologies as magic in Porritt’s thinking, it is nothing compared to what is presented in the political vision of the Venus Project. The project was founded by futurist Jacque Fresco and is an important source of inspiration in some environmentalist circles.
The Venus Project is described on the website as ‘a single man’s vision of the future where war is obsolete, there’s no lack of resources, and our focus as a species is global sustainability and the preservation of the environment.’ The key to this is the progress of modern technology. In Fresco’s vision, humanity will use ‘the latest scientific and technological marvels’ to ‘reach extremely high productivity levels and create abundance of resources.’ The scientific method will guarantee progress in all areas, from energy to social relations. In an interview in The New American, Fresco explains how:
‘Nobody makes decisions in the Venus Project, they arrive at them,’ Fresco said. For example, a soil sample would go to ‘Central Agriculture’, which would analyze it, and make a determination as to what the best crop to grow in that soil would be. ‘We intend to use surveys to arrive at decisions rather than make decisions.’
This objective scientific analysis will unleash the full force of technological progress. It will give us clean nuclear power through the development of Thorium reactors. We can also expect a system of fully automated construction with gigantic 3D printers building everything humans need. We will live in circular cities planned and managed by computers and organised around a ‘central dome or theme center’ housing ‘the core of the cybernated system, … computerized communications, networking systems’ (which is reminiscent of the utopian tradition of imagining the ideal city). There will be permanent space stations, serving as gravity-free research environments and supplying information about the earth’s ecological status to the supercomputers which run human society. The complex transportation system of the united planetary civilization will include hovercars, hovering conveyors called transveyors replacing other vehicles in cities, and hovering aircraft ‘controlled by electro-dynamic means eliminating the need for ailerons, elevators, rudders, spoilers, flaps or any other mechanical controls.’
If the scientific method and technological progress are the heroes of Fresco’s story, the main villain is money. In an interview on the website of the Venus Project, Fresco says that he can’t see peace and equity happening ‘in a monetary-based system where the richest nations control most of the world’s resources.’ The proposed alternative is a ‘Resource Based Economy’ in which ‘all goods and services are available to all people without the need for means of exchange such as money, credits, barter or any other means.’ It will be achieved through the application of the scientific method and the declaration of all resources ‘as the common heritage of all Earth’s inhabitants.’
There doesn’t seem to be any need for rigorous arguments supporting the ability of technology to create resources or in other ways transcend the laws of physics. As a result, the Venus Project’s imagined technologies are a lot like the Star Trek Replicator: a machine creating matter out of pure energy, where neither the source of this energy nor the way the machine works is defined.
The term for this type of science fiction world-building, where no effort is made to prove the feasibility or viability of future technologies, is soft science fiction.
The term for this type of science fiction world-building, where no effort is made to prove the feasibility or viability of future technologies, is soft science fiction. On the pop-culture site tvtropes.org, soft science fiction is illustrated by how it would explain time travel: ‘You sit in this seat, set the date you want, and pull that lever.’ Techno-utopianism, it seems, is soft science fiction: you pull the lever of technological progress and post-scarcity comes about. In Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street, the anthropologist and political ecologist Alf Hornborg describes this as a form of fetishism; he argues that ‘technology is our own [modern] version of magic’ as it is ‘widely imagined to have autonomous agency’. He also contends that this fetishism ‘serves to mystify social relations of exchange’. Only by disassociating modern technology from global relations of exchange, and viewing it as a quasi-living thing which can act and has a purpose in itself, can we conceive of globalized technologies as creating wealth rather than accumulating it for the few.
Fresco’s vision relies entirely on a fetishized conceptualization of technology and a disassociation of ‘technological marvels’ from the system of exchange which he sees as a root cause of injustice and environmental destruction. This is made possible by his viewing money as a social institution but technology as a natural—or even supernatural and magical—force. This ambiguous attitude to modern institutions, with a critique of modern political economy and a celebration of modern science and technology, makes the Venus Project a fascinating techno-utopian vision to study. Maybe Fresco’s critique of money can still be useful for environmentalist movement building?
Further research on similar political visions and the opinions of Fresco’s followers suggests otherwise: it seems Fresco’s cabalistic critique of the monetary system he would overthrow lends itself to conspiracy theories. The Zeitgeist Project, created by Peter Joseph, one of Fresco’s most passionate disciples, is a telling example. Peter Joseph has made three Zeitgeist films covering issues of debt, interest, and how banks create money—and affirming the conspiracy theory that the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were an inside job. And that’s not the only connection between the Venus Project and conspiracy theories. In Sweden, where I live, many who swear allegiance to Fresco’s vision are involved in the movement Vaken (Awake) which believes in a number of conspiracy theories and is based on the idea that only a small group of spiritually enlightened people can access an ‘esoteric worldview’ and see through these conspiracies. Although neither the Zeitgeist project nor Vaken explicitly talk about banking and money in terms of a Jewish conspiracy, the step is not far from their combination of conspiracy theories and a critique of banking and money to the openly anti-semitic narrative told by many contemporary national socialists and ecofascists.
If we leave out the affinities with conspiracy theories, there are striking similarities between Fresco’s vision and the techno-utopian post-scarcity vision of a new trend in (predominantly Anglo-American) leftist thinking: Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC). The two basic premises for this vision are the concept of automation and, instead of Fresco’s critique of money, political change achieved through the seizing of the means of production by the working class.
The productive capacity of technologies is simply taken for granted—you just pull the lever.
In the same soft science fiction manner as in the Venus Project, the productive capacity of technologies is simply taken for granted—you just pull the lever. Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media and proponent of FALC, states matter-of-factly that ‘[t]here is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions’. In this same Guardian article, we learn that ‘[t]he ideology [of FALC] springs from a tangle of well-observed trends. Generally, the rate of technological progress and labour productivity is rising, but wages are stagnating and factories are shedding jobs’ (emphasis added). In a similar manner, an article in Forbes contends that ‘[t]he rate of technological progress and worker productivity is on the rise’ and that ‘[r]obots, AI, machine learning, big data, etc. could basically make human labor redundant and instead of creating even further inequalities it could lead to a society where everyone lives in luxury and where machines produce everything.’ In sum: technological progress is a fact, automation is a well-observed trend, and this is stating the obvious. We all know the Earth is not flat; we all know automation is coming and technology creates abundance.
But although ideas about automation and the end of work are spreading in Western and Westernized societies, these trends are in fact not as uncontested as it would sometimes seem. Both empirical research on the industrial energy technologies that are necessary for automation and theoretical analyses of ideas about the end of work and technological progress shed doubt on automation as an unstoppable natural force. I’ll return to the former topic in the next section.
Critical analyses of ideas about automation have been around since the concept began to spread in the 1990s. A central text is George Caffentzis’s ‘The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri’ which argues that the ‘“end of work” literature of the 1990s … creates a failed politics because it ultimately tries to convince both friend and foe that, behind everyone’s back, capitalism has ended.’ Caffentzis concludes that this kind of politics is ‘hardly inspiring when millions are still being slaughtered’ by the same processes of accumulation that have supposedly been subverted by the liberatory power of industrial technologies. This analysis recasts so-called labour-saving technology as a tool for the control of labour rather than the liberation of it. In Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm identifies the same logic in the shift to steam power in the British empire: steam engines and fossil fuels were adopted by factory owners not because they saved labour but because they allowed for more efficient control of labour.
But FALC does not simply view technological progress itself as what brings about the end of capitalism—the movement demands socialization of the industrial means of production. In The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy, David Graeber (though he subscribes to anarchist philosophy, not to statist luxury communism) provides a similar argument. He contends that capitalist ownership of the means of production means that automation has been used to save labour-time locally by displacing it to countries where unions are weaker and wages are lower. However, like FALC, he claims that it would be possible to use such machines to liberate labour if the means of production were owned collectively. The question is then whether the local benefits provided by industrial technologies can be made universally available.
The local accumulation of resources in places like Western Europe and North America becomes a universal historical trend of development towards ever more prosperous societies.
When the experience of automation and technological progress in privileged countries is situated in the larger context of the world system, there is reason to doubt this possibility. FALC relies on a Marxist version of the modernization hypothesis. It accepts theories about ‘post-industrial society’ as the stage of development that inevitably follows after industrialization and interprets the decline in domestic industrial production in privileged parts of the world as an indication that all countries can move to a post-industrial stage. The local accumulation of resources in places like Western Europe and North America becomes a universal historical trend of development towards ever more prosperous societies.
But to get a better idea of how feasible the visions of FALC, Fresco, and Porritt are, we need to unpack their ideas about societal production and reproduction. What gives life to these futuristic societies? By means of what energy are they constructed and maintained?
Three perspectives on change, one magical lever
Image: Pixabay
Solar energy is one of the most central animating powers in all three imagined futures. Bastani’s thinking is a case in point:
A world which has completely decarbonised production at some point in the twenty-first century is not the wet dream of tech optimists, but seemingly inevitable when you look at the falling cost of PV and wind technologies as a consequence of experience curves,
and therefore,
‘the idea that the answer to climate change is consuming less energy—that a shift to renewables will necessarily mean a downsizing in life—feels wrong.’
Falling prices and Bastani’s intuitions are the arguments offered for the viability of solar PVs as a replacement for fossil fuels. It is assumed that PVs are a fossil-free and practically unlimited source of energy. Such an assumption relies on the belief that the process of transforming the flow of energy from the sun into an electric current, storing that energy, and putting it to use in industrial production is at least as efficient as (or more efficient than) photosynthesis. This is the dominant view of solar PVs and it has been around at least since the Brundtland report on sustainable development, published in 1987. A contemporary leftist version of it is developed in ‘Solar Communism’ by David Schwartzman. This perspective on solar PVs has traction across the political spectrum.
If we want to create a ‘hard’ science fiction story about a solar-powered future, we would need to base the world-building on something more than vague statements about how abundantly the sun shines on the surface of this planet and how the wonders of technological progress will harvest this energy and create post-scarcity. We should instead consider the net energy that can be derived from solar power—or the energy return on energy invested (EROI). We should trace the sources of the energy that goes into the construction of the technology, and follow supply chains to investigate the resource extraction that is necessary for the construction and maintenance of the technology.
There is plenty of scientific controversy regarding the EROI of photovoltaics. The EROI is commonly calculated to around 11-12 to 1, meaning that you can get 11-12 times as much energy back from PVs as you have put into the construction of them. Some calculations (one article by Ferroni and Hopkirk and one by Ferroni, Gueko, and Hopkirk) suggest the EROI of PVs to be much lower—perhaps even lower than 1 to 1, which would make solar PVs a so-called ‘energy sink’ that costs more energy to construct than you can get in return. By comparison, the first oil fields which fuelled the booming industrial expansion of the 20th century had an EROI of around 100 to 1. (The energy investment amounted to little more than poking the earth with a stick, and the return was a high-energy fuel.)
In addition to the EROI, our hard science fiction story about solar power should include the sites of extraction and processes of refinement of the materials needed for solar panels and batteries (such as silicon, lithium, and rare earth metals). This would indicate that the construction of PVs generates pollution and CO2 emissions and exploits large areas of land somewhere in the world system—generally just not in the backyard of the privileged. A horrible story about one of the central locations in this extraction is told in an article in The Guardian: in Inner Mongolia, ‘China’s second-largest coal producing region, the main global supplier of rare earths and the site of large natural gas supplies’ (emphasis added), traditional Mongolian herders and their sheep are getting sick from pollution and are being displaced. When herders have protested, Malm writes in Fossil Capital, Chinese authorities have cracked down on them brutally, even murdering at least one herder.
Our hard science fiction story about solar power should also factor in that there is no such thing as perfect recycling and that many of the necessary materials are scarce, and hence consider that extraction should be expected to peak very fast in a solar-tech-powered version of present global civilization. This means that a high-tech luxury solar utopia modelled on the energy-intensive lifestyles of privileged groups in the current world system is not feasible. Solar-powered industrial techno-utopias should not be understood as alternatives to the current system but rather, with Hornborg, as ‘an expression of the global processes of capital accumulation which fossil fuels have made possible.’
Looking for non-magical utopias
Such soft science fiction imaginaries of magical sustainability and equity are examples not of a liberated imagination but of an imagination limited by the same fossil-fuel dependent system that it seeks to criticize.
The ideological positions may be very different in Porritt’s pro-capitalist sustainable development thinking, the Venus Project with its critique of money and possible affinities with nazism, and the movement for Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but the device of the fetishized magical lever of solar power (along with other magical industrial technologies) is equally central in all three stories. These techno-utopian imaginaries are constrained by a mainstream view of industrial technology as detached from social relations and resource flows, and the offered visions of the future can thereby conceptualize industrial technology as emancipatory. Such soft science fiction imaginaries of magical sustainability and equity are examples not of a liberated imagination but of an imagination limited by the same fossil-fuel dependent system that it seeks to criticize. Sadly, this means that the three techno-utopian visions that I have discussed here can’t be used as inspiration for the creation of anything but an upper-class gated community sucking out resources and labour from peripheries and keeping the unfortunate poor out. Their putative but ineffectual concern for the wellbeing of all people and all life makes them nice apologetic narratives to turn to for those of us who live in privileged parts of world society.
While there is a need for visions of a better future, these types of techno-utopian imaginaries—regardless of how well-meaning—will ultimately do more harm than good. In the face of current political and ecological crises, it is not comforting or empowering to be told to pull a magical lever. The rise of fascism, expanding neo-colonialism and extractivism, and runaway climate change and mass extinction call for more complex strategies and stories of change.
Rut Elliot Blomqvist is a co-editor at Uneven Earth, a musician and songwriter, and a PhD student at the University of Gothenburg. Elliot’s research explores the intersection between fiction and political theory in utopian and dystopian thinking about global environmental change.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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The usual refrains tumble from the pharmacist’s lips all delicate and light. She fills out a prescription for a daily pill. “I really think you have made the right choice”, she says. “It’s so easy. I’ve heard it’s great for improving your credit score”.
Rowan kicks an empty can of Lucozade off the step as she exits the surgery and struggles to breathe in the air all clammy and close. It’s a sullen day: the sun stays stubborn behind July’s haze. She drifts toward home through the corporate smell that thickens around the buildings all imposing and walks by the man who sits daily outside the coffee shop, reluctantly ageing. At the pharmacy there’s that lady in there again, arms up in the air, howling neurasthenia with the full bellow of her exhausted lungs. It should be comforting to medicate a throbbing anxiety, but not for her. She thwacks her hands on the counter rap-rap-rap demanding something new that will hide her sickness better. Rowan turns “hypochondriac” on her tongue and receives her cheerily patented Temperanelle®.
“Seven days”, the pharmacist says as she dispenses, folding the info-leaflet with peculiar precision. “Seven days before full effect, and remember it is not a contraceptive”.
There’s no place for erratic ups and downs these days.
There’s no place for erratic ups and downs these days. This pill is meant to remedy a lack of aptitude for emotional control. A well-behaved cycle makes the body verifiable, more investable, at the appropriate points. It’s supposed to be great for improving your credit score.
From a digital-distributor Rowan takes a newspaper that she probably won’t read and crumples it under her arm, thinking of the times she’s heard that women are too unpredictable. Like petulant schoolchildren—she’d been told—they brood around with their shoulders slumped and then, without warning, they become garrulous; incessant.
It sounds like rubbish but then she remembers “psycho Sarah” in year five who pretended to be her friend before running at her three weeks later with a pencil in art class, so maybe it’s plausible.
She picks a spider off of her cheap cotton dress, and ambles her way home.
How is it that Rowan ended up here alone, in this quietly miserable place? The paint flakes off the threshold of the front door where she used to sit, picking her mosquito bites. It wasn’t long before the green hills that tumbled down from the cottage had been replaced with a sprawling labyrinth of concrete.
Hestonmere Green had arrived uninvited, and it had unfolded violently quickly as a panicked response to London’s burgeoning finance sector. Now, towers engulf the space; their necks reaching proudly to swallow the sky above, and their staunch figures offset only by the delicate cranes that cradle the whole area. As machines that had borne the structures, the cranes had been left behind to stand as silent witnesses of a tech-savvy financial future.
A dazzling prospect, perhaps, but the landscape had become unpalatable. It was never designed to be residential, not really.
A dazzling prospect, perhaps, but the landscape had become unpalatable. It was never designed to be residential, not really. “Welcome to our town, where people and finance thrive” the sign lies, now mired in grime. Vacuous gestures had been made in attempts to soften the intrusion, with few amenities interrupting the otherwise homogeneous and colourless landscape. A poorly stocked off-licence here. A ropey café there. All serviced by outdated and, for the most part, malfunctioning Tier-1 chatbots.
In truth, the land had been appropriated for the development of new biometrics for assessment, identification, and tracking. Hestonmere Green the Profiling Machine. Transparency in the name of financial inclusion was the championed motto.
Everyone who was able soon fled to Henley, Goring, or further. “Not in my back garden”, they had said. With them they had taken their families, their councils, and their schools.
Now, the town is quiet save for the tannoy that screeches the start of the working day, and the perpetual hum of the I-Droids as they trudge through their meticulous production of wearable techs, microchips, and pharmaceuticals.
Yes, Hestonmere Green has become a sulky little corner of England. Isolated, the town is as much the revered lifeline for the country’s thirst for financial-technologies as it is considered a repellent, noxious space; the kind to threaten small children with when they misbehave. The dark walkways absorb the sunlight. There is an acrid smell after the rain.
“I like my back garden just fine”, Rowan comforts herself, absently fingering a root that pushes aberrantly through a crack in the tarmac.
Rowan; as belligerent and obstinate as the rosacea that has peppered her skin since the earliest she can remember, tormenting her with a hot and angry redness, and winning all the jeers of the playground. She had been staunch in her resolve to stay firmly where she was. We had all grown up in the same meddling world. Leaving wouldn’t change that.
Left behind like tired furniture, they spend their time tracing patterns in the dust on the walls.
The ageing, the infirm, and the insane are her only company now, although she refuses to speak to them. Left behind like tired furniture, they spend their time tracing patterns in the dust on the walls, muttering halcyon days. A reticent army of misfits, not considered worth the bother of the residential Intels, they lurch dolefully along the streets, pausing only to listen to the crackle of the power lines, and to the clickety-click of the ones that mediate their lives, working indefatigably in the towers above them.
The pregnant silence in the room is punctuated by the fan whirring stale heat. Rowan coughs heavily which reminds her that she should have asked for a repeat of Keflex whilst at the pharmacy.
Curling the bud of her Smart-Set into her ear, she watches apathetically as the field of the MixR-Lens unrolls in front of her eyes. Groping around in the middle-distance, she taps thin air to pair the set with her microchip. Ouch! The chip always pinches somewhere near her thumb. It wriggles, she’s sure. She’s had to have it re-adjusted so many times. “A wilful little thing”, the nurse jokes. The same nurse who told her it would be “just like having your ear pierced, sweetie, nothing to worry about”.
The lull of the algorithm throbs ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum. Ignoring the GIF that loops ad nauseum in her newsfeed, Rowan taps again to unfold a calendar where a small circle highlights day twelve of her cycle.
Taking a moment to stand with arms outstretched, she tries to size up the field that is in front of her. How is it that I can’t reach the edges when it seems so close up, she thinks. Despite being almost immersive, and quadruple the pixel density of the now obsolete HoloLens, the veneer of the field is diaphanous. Rowan’s focus oscillates between jiggling interactive memes and the hazy shape of the green velvet sofa that somehow has always smelled of her mother’s old perfume.
It surprises her how detached she feels despite being triangulated, and articulated, by such an invasive system of monitoring. She is adorned with a glittering array of payment chips, identification tools, and health trackers. A heart rate monitor disguised as a lace bra. An oyster-shell effect compact that approves payment when you smile into it. All the data are sent straight to the Fin-Authorities who, “committed to increasing the financial inclusion of women”, use it to oversee her credit account.
Without credit, you can’t do anything. And that’s a fact.
Possession of these items is, of course, a matter of warped choice. But it’s a choice between being captured within an image of the creditworthy hyper-feminine, and being thrown out into the cold. There’s no such thing as “cash transactions”; not anymore. Without credit, you can’t do anything. And that’s a fact. There was a woman down the road who tried to go it alone, planning to grow her own vegetables and patch together clothes from old curtains and bed linen, until she realized she needed credit just to access the allotment.
The gentle bzzt of Rowan’s memo-watch prompts her to look up at a holographic whose impossibly white teeth, framed by coral pink, is eager to tell her about the latest available accessory: a silicon vaginal rod- appropriate for daily wearing- that sends data to your smart-set regarding the health of your discharge and menstrual blood. It has the added benefit of serving as a pelvic-floor exerciser.
Rowan smiles wanly, cocking her right shoulder forward and dropping her left hip in a copycat stance, and wonders what it would be like to have breasts so irritatingly buoyant.
A moth panics in the corner of the room, catching its wing on a curling piece of wallpaper.
Butterflies aren’t that common here anymore so she catches moths instead.
Rowan enjoys preserving and mounting insects; it’s a cathartic and candid practice. Butterflies aren’t that common here anymore so she catches moths instead.
Peeling the moth from its wallpaper snare, she scoops its flickering wings into a cage of fingers. Death must be produced without disfiguring them, and that’s a skill no question. She did try to learn how to stun them by squeezing the thorax but they would gyrate and she would squeeze too hard. A clumsy end. “I find that they relax quickly with a dreamy dose of ethanol”, she says.
Pausing to place the moth in a net—acquainting the creature with its temporary confinement—Rowan stolidly prepares the killing jar, pushing ethanol-soaked gauze in to the glass mouth. The moth follows, dropping to the bottom with a surprising thud. A struggle ensues as it scours the base of the jar, feelers catching in the gauze, legs pressing pleadingly against the glass. There’s one last protest before it crumples; listless. She places the jar next to the others on a creaking bookshelf, all lined up like prized little coffins.
Sitting at a folding pine table, Rowan looks up at the dusky canvases that tile the wall with her unfortunate little trophies, stuck through with dress pins; wings frigidly splayed. She enjoys the way they fill the space with artificial flight; an awkward posture that makes their death seem comical. It is advised to keep the moths framed to prevent the growth of mould, but she doesn’t bother. She says it’s because nothing ever stays the same anyway.
Thoughtfully admiring her work, Rowan wonders where she has hidden her Twin Peaks VHS collection. She’s noticed that there are some tapes missing from the otherwise indulgently full sideboard.
Something happens. The jar—perhaps precariously placed on the edge of the shelf—topples. The glass shatters, releasing the moth on to the floorboards. A moment passes. The tap drips sporadically, and someone outside sneezes loudly. Finally, the small, intoxicated corpse lying before Rowan’s feet begins to twitch. Groping around in an addled haze (with a sense of humiliation, she imagines) the moth stutters to regain composure. Encumbered by shards of glass it jerks fiercely left and right, dragging its sodden wings from sticky fibres of gauze.
Summoning all courage, the moth valiantly collects its legs into an upright position and begins the long lope toward an uncertain freedom. Rowan watches, placidly. One laboured step is made; then two; then three. The wretched thing comes to rest no more than a centimetre from where it began. Exhausted by such a Herculean journey, it collapses; surrendered.
She leaves the moth to its pitiful deathbed and rises urgently to her feet, summoned by the sound of the telephone ringing.
Rowan retreats in her chair, suddenly repulsed by this display of hopeless perseverance. Resisting the urge to stamp out its final moments, she leaves the moth to its pitiful deathbed and rises urgently to her feet, summoned by the sound of the telephone ringing.
Vzzt-bzzt vzzt-bzzt the telephone bullies the worktop.
“Can I speak with Mrs. Hatfield?”
“Who? No one by that name lives here. Can I…?”
The monotonous voice continues.
“Hi, Mrs. Hatfield, I am ringing to tell you that you have been successful in your application for finance from LiteStart. At LiteStart there are no gimmicks or deferred interest, so you can get right on and buy those—“
Rowan puts the receiver down gently. Chatbots are still so stupid, even these days.
Returning to the moth with an unexpected level of curiosity, she crouches in a mourning position, gathering her legs underneath her to get a better look. She examines with a strange pleasure the lifeless critter and traces a deliberate finger over its body, pausing at the spiny ridges to enjoy the rather queer, crackly texture. Glass burrows its way into the skin of her knee as she leans closer to the moth, drawing a steady stream of blood that trickles, soothingly warm, down her leg to meet the floor.
Rowan notices her injury, turning her head to identify the source of a dull pain. And that’s when the doorbell rings.
Post-amble
While “July” discusses dystopian possibilities that shiver with a sense of the too-close-for-comfort, it is not limited to imagining a possible future. Principally, I created this little tale in order to bring to life the ontological approach that my research follows. I draw this approach from Gilles Deleuze and his philosophy of difference. For Deleuze, there is a need to move away from thinking in terms of representation and identity in order to distinguish between difference that is defined by the characteristics of two distinct objects (“I know this is a cat because it is not a dog”), and pure difference, that is, affective intensities that escape identification. By working through this, it is possible—tentatively—to approach the idea that bodies are mobile and fluid, and should not be captured within illusions of fixity.
As such, “July” is an attempt to pay attention to moments that might otherwise be unheard, and to the in-between spaces of more easily recognised events, in order to make more visible the seemingly banal and ordinary forces of life. Think of the root that pushes through the tarmac, the tap that drips sporadically, or the moth that is panicking in the corner, and think of how these moments might lend texture and expressivity to the changing landscape of the story.
The stilted end to the story and the slightly jarring beginning are intentional, partly because “July” is one of many fabulation-vignettes that comprise my thesis. It is one fragmented moment in many moments; part of a patchwork of experiments with writing techniques.
Freya Johnson is a third year PhD candidate in Cultural Geography at the University of Bristol. Her research uses the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to explore the performativity and expressivity of creative writing, and to employ writing as a method for producing critically oriented, affective knowledges.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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This essay is the second in a “mini-series” of two essays on the critical potential of science fiction. The first essay considered how science fiction can function as social critique and discussed different literary techniques and devices. This second one will expand the story in reference to concrete examples—works by Enki Bilal and Aleksa Gajić, grounding the analysis in the Balkan context. (And if you continue reading to the end, there may be a surprise waiting for you there … )
In an article (“Vreme kao ključna odrednica SF žanra”) written in the midst of the Yugoslav Civil War (1991-1995), the Serbian science fiction (SF) writer Milovan Milovanović stated that most local SF stories seemed disconnected from the everyday situation of most people in the Balkan region at that time. According to him, in order for elements of novelty in SF stories to be accepted by readers, you need a realistic historical background and not just escapism. Even though SF imagines the future and diverges from the present, it always springs from specific places and histories (see also this chart of how historical trends in SF have changed over time):
For example, when the threat of nuclear war hung over the world during the 50s of this [20th] century, what else could the favorite topic for SF writers have been? Later on, at the beginning of the 70s, it was raising ecological awareness, due to the widespread knowledge that the world was mostly disappearing into a vortex of a biological catastrophe. This is not just related to the frequency of specific topics at specific times; it refers to a way of thinking that was totally different at the beginning of the [20th] century, the 40s, 60s, or today. The world today is not the same as it was five or ten years ago and that is strongly mirrored in SF literature.
Belgrade, as the capital of all versions of the union of South Slavs in the twentieth century, holds a prominent place in representations of state power and as a battleground for diverse imaginings of the future.
This is where Belgrade (and the Balkans in general) enters the story. Belgrade, as the capital of all versions of the union of South Slavs in the twentieth century, holds a prominent place in representations of state power and as a battleground for diverse imaginings of the future. This text will discuss its images and interpretations through two contemporary comic book authors working in the SF genre—Enki Bilal and Aleksa Gajić. Whilst the former has been based in France for a long time, with Yugoslav heritage, the latter lives in Serbia. Both feature Belgrade in their comics and films, and both work predominantly for the French market. The artworks in question are Bilal’s Bunker Palace Hôtel (1989) and Le Sommeil du monstre (The Dormant Beast in English, aka the Hatzfeld tetralogy, 1998-2007), and Gajić’s Technotise (comic, 2001) and Technotise: Edit & I (film, 2009).
The prominence of Belgrade as a setting in the authors’ works has been recognized by Gajić himself. In an interview with Deborah Husić from 2011 (in English), the use of Serbian language in the film Technotise: Edit & I was mentioned as one of the novelties (or what Darko Suvin would call novum), because, as the artist noted, “usually everything happens in Tokyo, Paris, Berlin or New York.” Aleksa Gajić responded that he did not want to make compromises for the market:
Usually, authors have this strong need to flatter the audience in order to be accepted. Meaning, they will answer to all ‘expected’ patterns from the public. As a matter of fact, most of the films we are watching today are made having these patterns in mind. I really wanted to run away from these things with Technotise. I wanted Belgrade to be like that, let them talk in Serbian, and let them express local jokes and natural urban expressions in an SF story (emphasis added).
Why are there no UFOs in Lajkovac?
SF was mostly associated with western geography and popular culture.
Zoran Živković, one of the pioneers of modern SF in Yugoslavia during the second half of the 20th century, famously stated that “leteći tanjiri ne sleću u Lajkovac”, meaning that UFOs do not come to a typical Serbian village. This came to be know among the sci-fi community as “Zoran’s law”. This metaphor indicates both that SF set in a local context was rare (or non existent) and that SF was mostly associated with western geography and popular culture (for a further discussion, check out Milovanović’s guide to SF, in Serbian). This, unfortunately, does not take into account contributions from the former USSR/Russia, or other non-western countries. In this geographical (or geopolitical) discussion the worlds of manga and anime, which originated in Japan but have spread to other parts of Asia, also play an important role today.
The world depicted and the context (reality) from which it departs (or reacts to) are tied together.
The lack of grounding in local history and settings—or the lack of UFOs in Lajkovac—pinpoints the escapist nature of many SF works of former Yugoslavia and Serbia. However, this “law” started to change in the late 1980s and early 1990s, simultaneous to the breakup of the SFR Yugoslavia (which is discussed in “Leteći tanjiri ipak sleću u Lajkovac” by Ivan Đorđević, and “American Science Fiction Literature and Serbian Science Fiction Film: When Worlds Don’t Even Collide” by Aleksandar B. Nedeljković). The example of UFOs in Lajkovac highlights two aspects of SF I consider relevant to this analysis. First, that SF narratives have their own internal structures and logic; and second, that there is a dynamic and productive connection to be made between a narrative and its author—and potentially between a narrative and its local historical and geographical origin as well. That is to say that the world depicted and the context (reality) from which it departs (or reacts to) are tied together.
This is closely related to the discussion in the previous essay, “Science fiction between utopia and critique,” of how authors can employ different perspectives and literary traditions—utopian, dystopian, alternative histories—to both imagine a different society and show a (critical) reflection of our own. With these concepts in mind, we will now look at the oeuvres of the two artists.
The dystopias of Enki Bilal
Enki Bilal’s work in general features darker SF topics and overtones, which could be identified as dystopian, often tackling issues such as totalitarian regimes (theocracy and fascism), colonialism, corruption, identity crisis, schizophrenia, and despair, but often with an ironic tone. A great source (in Serbian) on Bilal’s work is a special issue of the magazine Gradac, edited by Miroslav Marić; in the following, references to critical discussions and quotes from interviews with Bilal, unless specified differently, are derived from this special issue of Gradac.
Bunker Palace Hôtel (1989) is the first feature film Bilal directed, co-written with his long time collaborator Pierre Christin. It is set in Belgrade in an alternative reality, or the no-time of uchronia, with a combination of French and Yugoslav actors, but targeting the French market. Some commentators characterize this film as a critique of the socialist regime in Yugoslavia (which Bilal has denied), as well as an announcement of the overall breakup of the Eastern bloc in Europe. Initially, Bilal wanted the film to take place in the USSR, with Belgrade as his second option. In an interview from 1988, he clarifies his choice:
If you insist, the film talks about a [political] system that mostly resembles fascism. I wanted the film, where one cannot see which country or time is in question, to be filmed in a somewhat oriental, extraordinary setting for the French [audience]. To have a bit of exoticism. And I am very happy to film here, because the Yugoslav actors contribute to that exotic impression.
He also incorporates a fictional Slavic language, used by the rebel characters, in this “exotic” feeling. People’s names vary between western and Slavic (Holm, Clara, Nikolai, Zarka, etc) however, there is no explicit naming within the narrative of the film of the rebels, the state, the city, languages, ideologies, nationalities or time. The film follows the SF trend of alternative histories (uchronia), with dystopian elements and an exploration of the question: What if the Nazis had won the Second World War (WWII)? (a question echoing in SF since Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle). If we accept this line of thinking, using the image of (the then) socialist Yugoslavia as a mirror/reference society becomes more complex and troubled.
Everything is retro, or “retro-futuristic”, which is a familiar setting within certain SF subgenres.
We need to understand the alternative history setting of the Bunker Palace Hôtel itself. Any reference to the then contemporary society is mostly avoided—cars, technology, architecture, clothing. Everything is retro, or “retro-futuristic”, which is a familiar setting within certain SF subgenres. In the film we can see well-known buildings from the pre-WWII decades, such as eclectic, art nouveau and modernist architecture: mainly the French Embassy, Svetozara Radića street, Savamala’s train system, and the BIGZ and Geozavod buildings. Additionally, one can see anachronistic technological inventions, post-dating the actual society, one of which is humanoid androids. Researcher Jelena Smiljanić calls this vision an “(…) onirist post-socialistic Belgrade, intermingled with Bodriarian (sic) simulacrums (…) creating a simulated hyper-reality” (Onirism was a surrealist literary movement in Romania during the 1960s, while in psychiatry it refers to a mental state in which visual hallucinations occur while fully awake). All of this taken together creates the retro-futuristic and surrealist setting of Bunker Palace Hôtel.
Different visions are present in Le Sommeil du monstre, or The Dormant Beast in English, also known as the Hatzfeld Tetralogy, which is one of Bilal’s latest comic series produced between 1998 and 2007. Set in 2026, it portrays what seems to now be a near future with advanced technologies in a dystopian, global setting. The narrative is revealed through two intertwined processes. Three main protagonists—Nike Hatzfeld, Leyla Mirković-Zohary and Amir Fazlagić, all orphans from the Yugoslav civil war—are trying to reunite with each other. The second narrative is Nike’s recollection of his childhood, taking us from the day of his birth in 1993 to the midst of the siege of Sarajevo. Bilal’s position shifts from one of the insider to a broader cosmopolitan global perspective; but it is his portrayal of the Balkans that I will primarily address here.
Belgrade and Sarajevo are two of the dystopian locations featured in Le Sommeil du monstre, presented (as in Bunker Palace Hôtel) in a retro-futurist mix where the old and the new are messily joined together. All cities in the series have a strong feeling of decay; as comic book author Zoran Penevski said related to Bilal, “it is the world of a narrative apocalypse.” In an interview for Serbian magazine Vreme, Bilal stated that Belgrade had changed little since when he moved to Paris in 1960. When he was asked in another interview why he avoided presenting contemporary times (war scenes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina or the NATO bombing of Belgrade), he answered:
It is strange but when I’m portraying a brutal scene, I feel very uncomfortable placing it in the present. While if I position myself 20-30 years [into the future], then I can enjoy the creative process (…) I am visiting the future in order to come back to the past and the present. (emphasis added).
The narrative of a painful past and a not so optimistic future unwinds in the series, while the breakup of SFR Yugoslavia is still fresh.
The narrative of a painful past and a not so optimistic future unwinds in the series, while the breakup of SFR Yugoslavia is still fresh. Just after the Hatzfeld Tetralogy came out in 1998, Bilal said that his interest in Yugoslavia was triggered by the violent events of the war, the violence that triggered a “monster of remembrance”. The concept of reflective nostalgia coined by Svetlana Boym could be applied here, a nostalgia that does not tend to reconstruct the past but to instead be skeptical or critical of it, since the return to a imagined better past is impossible. In this case, it was the author’s creative way of purging the disturbances caused by the war.
A dystopian mode is prevalent in the Hatzfeld Tetralogy, where the future brings a continuation of conflicts, but there are also some utopian sparks. Among those, Bilal also plants a powerful image of human segregation according to religious affiliation (and nationalism). According to an essay by Aurélie Huz and Irène Langlet, the avoidance of national or religious categorization of the main heroes (storytellers) in this comic pinpoints not only a state of uncertainty about identities after the dissolution of the joint state, but also Bilal’s own critique of segregation. If one accepts the argument that those very divisions contributed to the violent dissolution of multicultural life and shared space in SFR Yugoslavia, embedding similar divisions into a future society, for example in Paris (“Catholics only”, “Salafists only” in the comic), Bilal voices concern and a warning that history may repeat itself. This is why the question “Are you Serb, Croat or Muslim?”, posed several times, remains unanswered in the story.
In contrast to Bilal, Gajić’s work has more humorous and light tones, a trademark of both his comics and animation work. He mostly works in the epic, fantasy, cyberpunk and SF genres, or something he calls “optimistična futuristika” (optimistic futuristic). These aspects of his work are discussed by Pavle Zelić and Anica Tucakov. Gajić’s bachelor degree project was a comic titled Technotise, with Darko Grkinić as a writer, and this later served as a starting point for Technotise: Edit & I (in Serbian: Tehnotajz: Edit i ja), which became known as the first Serbian feature-length animated film. In both works a utopian vision prevails, providing a predominant insider viewpoint of the portrayed societies.
The adolescents portrayed lead a hedonistic, middle-class life, centered around sex, drugs, hoverboard competitions and going out.
The Technotise comic (created in 1998, published in 2001) pays attention to two different time periods, both of which deviate from the present. At the very beginning there is a short episode from 1739, but most of the comic is set in 2074. It traces the adventures of a group of adolescents, led by Edit, in Belgrade. It is mostly set on the Great War Island (Veliko ratno ostrvo), a natural reserve between rivers Sava and Danube which are surrounding the city from two sides, and in Zemun, an old municipality where Gajić lives. The adolescents portrayed lead a hedonistic, middle-class life, centered around sex, drugs, hoverboard competitions and going out. Their names are a combination of foreign (Edit, Broni, Herb, Woo) and local (Sanja, Bojan), their looks and habits are seemingly typical of (western) teenagers but they are also contextualized through Serbian language, backgrounds and references. The film Technotise: Edit & I (2009) kept the main characters and semi-utopian quality with a more developed retro-futuristic, cyberpunk image of Belgrade. Real locations were shot and then futuristic details were added. In an interview (in Serbian) for B92 portal Gajić explains:
Belgrade 2074 is a city where the future came without an urban plan. Yes, the buses are floating above the streets, but also run late, so there are traffic jams. Facades are futuristic but also run down. The locations are altered, but still recognizable, so you cannot mix our capital with some other city. I made an effort to give this SF film a dose of plausibility, because I think that’s the way for the viewers to believe the story (…) That’s why the main hero is a regular girl with common problems that anybody can identify with and understand. At the same time, I haven’t given up my desires—I made a film I would like to see myself.
Recalling the different “gaze” positions I developed in the previous essay in this mini-series, the worldbuilding technique used in the film can be seen as an example of the present projecting itself directly into the future. A not-so-perfect setting reveals the social awareness of the film, pushed to another plane. Whilst it triggers humor, it can also remind viewers of the unresolved issues present in the Serbian and Belgrade society of 2009: Roma people collecting garbage in the city (here competing with robots), robots begging for new graphic cards, “eternal students” using tricks to pass exams (“bubice”), adolescents living with parents, telenovelas, old buses and police cars (Zastava 101 models), a rural grandfather yelling that children need to go back to the countryside and so on. Gajić draws attention to these references to the present in interviews by Sonja Ćirić and Ivana Matijević. Through its projection of present issues into the future, the film turns these present issues into a heritage that weighs down on the future and shows that the future does not automatically free itself from the problems of the present. However, optimistic tones are still prevalent, echoing a tendency in feature films of the New Belgrade School in post-2000 Serbian society, where authors are grasping the “(…) opportunity of this new start, constructing a virtual city made up of cultural and genre idioms”, as Nevena Daković shows in “Imagining Belgrade: The Cultural/Cinematic Identity of a City on European Fringes”.
Belgrade’s transformations triggered by the social upheavals of the 1990s and a feeling of a new start in the 2000s are most visible through film. Daković states that this cinematic cityscape is closely linked to space, time and matters of (transcultural) identity:
The cinematic cityscape is thus a complex identity performance. In the case of Belgrade, it presents a rich succession of identity conflicts and shifts, encompassing identities spanning from exotic Orientalism to virtual cosmopolitanism, with a nodal contrast articulated as Orient-rural-Balkan vs. Occident-urban-Europe. Belgrade’s city identity constantly vacillates between these poles, spilling over borders, moving between and among the times and spaces of the various identity constituents (emphasis added).
The cityscape changed from a socialist idyll, through the ghetto of the 1990s, to a “pure locus of the possible”—a cosmopolitan identity after the democratic elections in the 2000s.
In the context of post WWII Yugoslavia, and then Serbia, the cityscape changed from a socialist idyll, through the ghetto of the 1990s, to a “pure locus of the possible”—a cosmopolitan identity after the democratic elections in the 2000s. SF imaginings of Belgrade can therefore provide an understanding of contemporary positions and identities when the author’s projection is deeply grounded in the local context of Belgrade and Serbia, but also provide a means for temporary escape from the reader’s (or viewer’s) own body and society.
One of the major criticisms of Technotise in Serbia was that the film treated SF in a more humorous way, which was also a creative break with the majority of SF productions. Another critique was that it used youth slang and references to contemporary Serbian society. This situating of the film’s narrative, according to the author, was both a personal choice and a break from acknowledged patterns and habits of the genre, especially SF that is mostly set in highly developed technological societies in the West or Japan. A Serbian film critic, Dimitrije Vojnov, said in an interview that “in a (Serbian) cinematography so loaded with the past, the future rarely manages to reach the screen, and when it does, it is an ironic reflection of the present or past”, thus noting how Gajić diverged from a mainstream.
In preparation for his next film, Prophet 1.0 (Prorok 1.0), Gajić said that he wanted to present “the future in a Serbian, not American or Japanese, way.” And in explaining what is “Serbian” about Edit & I, he referred to the collaborators, financing, language, and topics. To this list, I would also add the Serbian locations. Curiously enough, this seemingly patriotic declaration does not include any loaded traditional or nationalist topics or statements within the artworks’ narratives. This mix between an international outlook and national (or local) grounding is connected to the affinity between SF and both “escapist” and critical situated knowledge, as I discussed in “Science fiction between utopia and critique.”
The identity of the (future) city—the identity of its ma(r)kers
These two dimensions of SF—the escapist and the critical—are present in the works of both Bilal and Gajić. Around two decades have passed between the UFOs that do not land in Lajkovac and the emergence of locally grounded SF in a Serbian context. In the cases of Bilal and Gajić, it is important to understand why they decided to contextualize their narratives in locations that they are physically and/or emotionally attached to. In both cases the topics were mostly a matter of personal preferences, which led to works that differ from the ones that the two artists do for the (mostly) French market. Bilal had already made a name for himself in the 1970s and 1980s, allowing him to treat contemporary, more politically engaged and personal topics with greater ease. But Gajić’s work for the French market differs from Technotise, which departs from and clashes with the market’s popular tropes, and this made him pause his international work during the film’s production. In facing many challenges while making the film, he said: “If the film doesn’t succeed, the repentant son will go back to France. After all, swords, magic, slaughter and the rest… it’s not so bad at all!” and “If I wanted money, I would have probably made a movie about little animals and wizards” (interviews with Peđa Popović and for Domino magazine, in Serbian).
Bilal and Gajić, in the narratives and messages of their artworks, have found ways to resist the official nationalist rhetoric that is so prominent in Serbian politics.
I would argue that both Bilal and Gajić, in the narratives and messages of their artworks, have found ways to resist the official nationalist rhetoric that is so prominent in Serbian politics. They are not, however, hiding their national identities in their work about Belgrade and the Balkans, into which they bring a strong sense of engagement and lack of concern for market pressure. The question then becomes: whose eyes are we looking through? What differentiates people from one another? The contextualization of stories takes place through specific characters, names, settings, cities, histories, and references, but at the same time avoids demonstrative national images, such as flags and other national symbols, religious affiliation of heroes and so on. In Bilal’s case, as already mentioned, characters refuse to identify with the causes of war, in protest, whilst Gajić finds politics overwhelming in Serbian society and prefers to find ways to create artworks that entertain and make people laugh. He views this as a more noble and honorable cause than being serious and scared.
Could this escapism embed in itself any Balkanism, as defined by Maria Todorova? In academia, the concept is defined as a discourse where the Balkans were (and sometimes still are) presented and constructed as the“other” of Europe, a negative stereotype, inverted mirror. In her book Imagining the Balkans, she states that creators of Balkan images from the Balkans itself are very self-conscious of the imposed discourse:
Unlike Western observers who, in constructing and replicating the Balkanist discourse, were (and are) little aware and even less interested in the thoughts and sensibilities of their objects, the Balkan architects of different self-images have been involved from the very outset in a complex and creative dynamic relationship with this discourse (…).
Another researcher, Maria Palacios Cruz states that “the Balkans seen from the Balkans” in film seem more concerned with being accepted than subverting the West’s images of the Balkans itself, thus reproducing criteria, stereotypes and divisions. Gajić’s escapism in the futuristic Technotise does not eliminate reality bites of SF Belgrade, nor does it avoid a sense of cosmopolitanism; after all, it provides a sort of hope. Bilal made a somewhat exotic Belgrade setting in Bunker Palace Hôtel, whilst in the comic series it is clear that the main characters are resisting nationalist narratives and paving an unstable road of their own, avoiding stereotypical media discourses. In Bilal’s own words:
I am not rejecting my own roots. When I say that it is dangerous to look inside oneself too much, in your own past, memories, remembrances, nation, religion, your territory, it is. That gaze is dangerous but I find it necessary. It is crucial to carry it with oneself and move with one’s own roots.
Conclusions: SF as cosmopolitanism?
Daković characterizes new film directors in post-2000 Serbia as employing escapism, cosmopolitanism and postmodernism. The cinematic cityscape of Belgrade is based on a “‘glocal’ identity [which] is made up of local elements with global appeal, local themes in a global expression and local events of inevitable global consequences”, quoting the definition by Paul Virilio. Or, as a beer ad in Serbia says: “global, but ours”.
Binarisms (local – global, national – international, patriot – cosmopolitan) come with a whole set of contextualized inclusions and exclusions. One’s attachment to a local stance might be seen as conforming to nationalism, even xenophobia, or as a resistance to the processes of globalization – or simply as staying faithful to the politics of location, as outlined by Donna Haraway in her theory of situated knowledge. Thus, one’s identification with a city might even be a means of resisting national identity (for more on this topic, see this study by Ivana Spasić in English). On the other side of an imagined pole stands cosmopolitanism, which is grounded in openness and universalism, criticized for being an elite stance associated with pro-Western and pro-European political ideologies in the Balkans.
In the Serbian context, after a global phase during socialist (or Tito’s) Yugoslavia, SF entered a (re-)traditionalist period grounded in nationalist political projects and imaginarium from the mid-1980s. This more traditional aspect of the genre contains many elements previously mentioned as characteristic of fantasy. Anthropologist Ivan Đorđević in his “Antropologija naučne fantastike: tradicija žanrovskoj književnosti” (Anthropology of Science Fiction: a Tradition in Genre Literature) says this production is in essence local, where certain traditional elements, taken selectively and strategically, create an image of how a culture sees itself at certain times (This perspective could be compared to Andrew Liptak’s article about nationalism in militaristic SF). Đorđević notes that a crucial distinction is made between Us and Them (Europe, the West, or the world in general), revealing the central gaze of traditional narratives as being nationally tailored. In this way, SF visions carry fears of losing one’s “roots”, or allowing cultural assimilation; that is, if the future is generally understood as cosmopolitan, with universal (most likely western) tendencies for humankind. This view of the imaginative role of SF echoes antiglobalization discourses.
The imagining of science-fiction Belgrade operates between tensions and opposites.
Overall, the imagining of science-fiction Belgrade operates between tensions and opposites. Just as in general SF, it provides universal knowledge claims about the future (and our global present), while at the same time situating the narratives in local history, social issues and geography. On a geopolitical level, it it susceptible both to Balkanism—accepting the Balkans as the “other” of Europe—and to Europeanism or Westernism—the construction of universalist global imaginaries. However, it is also a space for personal narratives and alternative visions, offering locally grounded stories, enriching the SF field. As such, it offers utopian and dystopian settings, escapism and social critique.
As Nevena Daković writes, “The transcultural identity and imaging of Belgrade is the result of a fusion of Balkanism and Europeanism, of local and global aspects in a city that is multi-layered and multi-faceted”. Which identity of the city will be used, in which setting and time (dystopian or utopian), heavily depends on the need to escape or construct alternatives in the present moment.
Illustrations:
Technotise and Technotise: Edit & I courtesy of Aleksa Gajić.
Bunker Palace Hôtel from Pinterest.com and WorldCinema.org.
The Hatzfeld Tetralogy from TapaTalk.com, JogLikesComics.blogspot.com, Passion-Estampes.com, and Pinterest.com.
For more info on SF in Serbia (and Yugoslavia) available online:
Project Rastko’s database on contemporary Serbian and South Slav fantasy literature (in Serbian).
Texts on SF by Zoran Živković (in Serbian and English).
APPENDIX
Belgrade Cooperative building—the center and mirror of city visions
Hey! (waving) Are you here for… HELLO! Are you guys here for the time travel tour?! Glad I found you so quickly, this place is crowded, follow me. Is it just you or are we expecting others to join us as well? Okay, good, we’ll have some extra space for us then, c’mon. Dobar dan – welcome to Experience Belgrade Through Time, the most popular time travel tour you can find in Serbia. As a promotional tour, we offer taking you to a selected point in the city and watch it how it changed during time. Once you book one of our full tours, you will be able to choose among other exciting programs going all the way back to the Roman times. Now please give me the vouchers, take a seat and put on the security bells. You learned a bit of Serbian already? Ah, rakija, of course. This tour will last for two hours and this time I’ll take you to a wonderful building you could find at Savamala district. Been there? Oh, it’s a must! Let’s go!
This is one of the city’s pearls, look at the beauty of it—decoration, monumentality, how it voluptuously imposes itself to the area, charming everyone. Let us have a glimpse inside… This building we usually call Geozavod, was actually made for the Belgrade Cooperative bank, by our famous architects Andra Stevanović and Nikola Nestorović, whose other works you could see in the area. It is one of the prime works of architecture in this period, mixing academic and Art Nouveau styles, Renaissance and Baroque decoration, and the first one using reinforced concrete in Serbia. Just move aside, izvinite… Saw these workers? The area was surrounded with new buildings, ponds and beaches, as one of the entry points where both merchandise and people arrived in Belgrade. Alas, after World War II, the cooperative bank was no more, the building had different and changing tenants, and underwent architectural changes. Luckily, it was never bombed! Speaking of bombs, let us go the our next stop
Stop 2: 1989
Source: Bac Films.
Čoveče, do you recognize this one? How could it be? The building really underwent a bit of a deterioration, like the whole Savamala district, becoming a place filled with old glory, noise, shady characters and almost forgotten. Or simply unpopular to hang out to. But this one is actually from a surreal movie by a French artist born in Belgrade, do you know who he is? I’ll give you a tip, he made comics… Nikopol? Immortel? (beep beep) What’s this? Nevermind, the movie Bunker Palace Hotel took place in an alternative reality, at the very end of socialism of Yugoslavia, Belgrade being its capital. In the movie, it’s a hotel, but actually a bunker for members of a ruling regime, hiding from a mysterious threat… I won’t tell you more, please do see the movie, and if you like film history, check out Kinoteka’s tours as well!
Stop 3: 2012
Source: Mapio.net
Look at the old lady, all run down, but still standing proudly. Nostalgic gem, memory of times passed, but not too long so nobody would remember its past glory. Ah, the building was used for rave and techno parties from the 1990s, imagine that – marble and electronic music, glass paintings and stroboscope. Somewhere from late 2000s, artists started coming to the area, making it present and interesting for Belgraders again. Do you hear the music? That’s one of the festivals, happening just behind the corner, do you see all the young people? Is the area coming back to life? I remember those times when I was young, thankfully nowadays we could live longer to testify about it. We were a bit afraid back then, afraid of the specter of gentrification, an army of yellow machines tearing down the area we we trying so much to nurture… Let us not interfere here, we need to follow the laws of time travel—stay unspotted, do not change anything.
Stop 4: 2016
Source: Dzodan
After years of being neglected, finally rise and shine! In 2014 the building underwent a major redevelopment as part of Belgrade Waterfront project, which has its seat there. What do you think, do you like the neglected charm or new life? During these years the area started changing drastically—many buildings were torn down and streets disappeared, while others, like Belgrade Cooperative gain a new chance, as part of the investment plan. These skyscrapers behind it are blocking the view towards the river, and many inhabitants found it very controversial—who would live here, when gentrification made it so expensive for all the local people? We… who? Security guard? Oh, do not pay much attention to that guy at the corner, there’s always a busybody at the corner… but we may still go further up the street a bit.
Source: Ne davimo Beograd
(beep beep) Why is this beeping again? Sranje, look at that mass of people, full trust upward… Huh, I’m sorry, I haven’t paid attention to what lies ahead. It seems I took us right in the middle of the protest against Belgrade Waterfront! These people are supporters of Don’t Drown Belgrade initiative. Yes, we’re safe on this altitude. And this was not a violent protest. You can find some data about it in the hand-outs. And that big yellow duck over there – that’s their symbol! “Duck” in Serbian could mean a joke, a scam. Let us move away from here, I can hear the helicopters approaching, and I need some space to maneuver to the next station.
Stop 5: 2074
Source: Black, White & Green studio
Huh, peaceful again. Watch out for the tram. You see, we’re in animated setting! Another artist, comic book author Aleksa Gajić, made a vision of Belgrade which is both old and new, with old-fashion, socialist trams, early 20th century architecture and futurist inventions. The trains are levitating, Belgrade Cooperative has a virtual reality dome, and the Belgrade looks… what do you think, familiar, nostalgic? Nicer than it really is? This was made in 2009, it is interesting to see how people back then imagined our times. (beep beep beep beep) Ok, this is it, the promo tour is ending, I wish to have spend more time with you, for that please do check our full tours, we’ll be able to travel for a whole day, there’s so much to tell about this city… If you have a half of minute of your time, check out the evaluation form and rate me as your guide… thank you, you too, vidimo se neki drugi put!
I would like to thank professor Nevena Daković at the University of Arts in Belgrade for her help in writing the original paper, Charlotte E. Whelan for proofreading and Rut Elliot Blomqvist for excellent editing.
Srđan Tunić is an art historian, freelance curator and cultural manager based in Belgrade, Serbia. A fan of science fiction, this is his first text about it. Contact: srdjan.tunic[at]gmail.com
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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This essay is the first in a “mini-series” of two essays on the critical potential of science fiction. The first part considers how science fiction can function as social critique and discusses different literary techniques and devices. The second part will expand the story in reference to concrete examples—works by Enki Bilal and Aleksa Gajić, grounding the analysis in the Balkan context.
Science fiction: offering critical possibilities or escape?
Science fiction (SF) as a genre of speculative fiction serves as a powerful tool in imagining different realities. Its creative potential lies in “estrangement and cognition”, creating a novum, in ideas and/or practical possibilities for the future, as defined by Darko Suvin. It also has potential to create narratives as mirror images and critique of our own societies, whether shaped as utopias, dystopias or alternative histories. It can trick us by thinking we went somewhere else in order to look back upon our own world with different eyes; therefore, this imagining is both real and contextualized. While many academics and writers, artists and critics have discussed the interconnectedness between our “real world” and (science) fiction, this text is primarily inspired by the works by Suvin, a prominent academic and critic, and the anthropologist Ljiljana Gavrilović.
According to Gavrilović, SF “worlds” talk about possibilities. In her book “Svi naši svetovi: o antropologiji, naučnoj fantastici i fantaziji” (All Our Worlds: About Anthropology, Science Fiction and Fantasy), she writes: “That is why observation of imagined worlds does not differ from observing ‘the real world’, the one that we live in. They may be even clearer, mirror all assurances, fears, hopes, dreams, constructions and prejudices which shape human behavior in the real world, their vision of that world, as well as that world itself”. What is real and what is imagined is connected in an interplay, demonstrating mutual dependence. Apprehension of the fiction often requires that the reader knows the context from which it came. One of the questions might then be: but why depart from the real world to begin with?
Fiction can offer both an escape to another world and inspire change in this world.
In a lecture, “Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming”, the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman suggests that fiction can offer both an escape to another world and inspire change in this world: “Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds (…) you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.”
On a different (but not faraway) note, Darko Suvin has defined the genre as characterized by “the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition” and the creation of “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment”. In other words, SF shows us something that is at the same time strange and feels real. SF, argues Suvin, needs to have a cognitive novum, a novelty that enables (scientifically plausible) innovations that also, I would add, provide grounds for curiosity. Therefore aliens, robots, different planets, time travel, genetics, and so on are central means for the creation of an alternative world—but should not be ends in themselves. A story with robots may philosophize on the limits of humanity or a future form of slavery, intergalactic travel could bear dangers of new colonialism, while dystopias tend to warn us about where we might find ourselves in the future if we continue with our current habitual ways.
Overall, much of SF aims to discuss alternatives and create a social critique, supporting (imaginary) escapism, quenching the thirst of our discontent and a desire for difference. Tom Moylan has explored this potential of SF labelling it “critical utopia”, standing somewhere between dreaming and criticizing the status quo, in Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. I would argue that the function of SF is twofold, as it transports the reader to other places while simultaneously grounding that same reader in a familiar context. In a restless neurosis, it both imagines and situates. In other words, by projecting itself into the future, it more or less visibly indicates what we are trying to depart from—contemporary society.
Imagining different realities—in this case, via SF—is never “objective”, ”universal”, but rather grounded in a certain context.
Whether we explore SF authors’ or their characters’ statements, here I find the feminist concept of situated knowledge useful in understanding a subject’s place in a more reflexive manner and with a better account of the world, avoiding claims of universality. In Donna Haraway’s words: “I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden”. Imagining different realities—in this case, via SF—is never “objective”, ”universal”, but rather grounded in a certain context (and author), which is reflected in the narrative itself. While there are of course also common elements in imaginings of the future through SF (AI, extraterrestrials, space travel, etc), I would emphasize that grounding SF can prove to be productive in social critique and prevent it from becoming mere escapism.
Grounding and contextualizing SF demonstrates that an imagined space is always a social space, meaning that space is a complex social product and construction. Philosopher Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space mentions that even technological utopias, simulations of the future or of the possible, are framed within existing modes of production: “The technological utopia [in question] is a common feature not just of many science-fiction novels, but also of all kinds of projects concerned with space, be they those of architecture, urbanism or social planning.” Architecture, urbanism and social planning in SF may be used as by-products of the story, but still visually and socially organize a given setting.
On literary techniques and perspectives
But not all SF stories mirror the real world in the same way; authors employ many different perspectives and literary techniques. One could understand some of the differences as built on different types of gazes, outlooks, or perspectives, commonly corresponding to the point of view of a story’s main characters (as storytellers) and contexts or settings in relation to the reader’s reality.
In film and visual studies, there has been a lot of theoretical discussion on spectator’s gazes. Gaze theory situates and provides critical edge towards how we see what we see, and how what is seen is presented to us and constructed visually. Through a museum or cinema as setting, a painter or director as our “eyes”, a film or photography camera as a tool, we as spectators are guided through the images in front of us. In SF, various gazes (or perspectives) provide starting points for fictional journeys and can help us ground and contextualize the story in question. I wish to propose three different “gazes” as structuring how SF worlds relate to the present. Two of these gazes occur in both utopian and dystopian stories, while the third is specifically related to alternative histories.
The utopian tradition has left a strong mark in the SF genre. Suvin finds SF and utopian fiction to share many key positions, stating that: “All imaginable intelligent life, including ours, can in the final instance only be organized more perfectly or less perfectly: there is no value-free wonder or knowledge. In that sense, utopia and anti-utopia are not only literary genres, but also horizons within which humanity and all its endeavours, including SF, is irrevocably collocated”. Utopia (Greek u-topos, no-place) although imagined, requires the construction of a believable community, space and laws, an “other world” immanent to the human one, but made more perfect.
The SF genre is still dominated not so much by utopias and visions of a better future as by a tendency to illustrate dark aspects of human futuristic ambitions.
Apart from Thomas More’s classical work Utopia which gave the genre its name, examples from SF include Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars trilogy”. An interesting current development is the solarpunk genre and movement, inspired by the idea that new utopias are needed in a time of ecological and political crisis. However, the SF genre is still dominated not so much by utopias and visions of a better future as by a tendency to illustrate dark aspects of human futuristic ambitions.
Dystopia (“bad place”)—a second variant of the literary template of utopia—is at the same time its polar opposite. Both words derive from Greek and follow the same structural assumptions. More critical viewpoints towards imagining utopias can take place in this “bad place”, like in the animated movie WALL-E by Walt Disney studios which builds on the thread of present ecological threats and people stupefied by technological comfort, clearly sending a warning to our present selves. Other examples include our problematic relations with machines/robots/cyborgs (the Matrix trilogy by the sisters Wachowski, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Bladerunner by Ridley Scott, the Ghost in the Shell media franchise, the Terminator series), space colonialism (The Word for World is Forest by LeGuin), the gaps between social classes and creating an ideal society (Elysium by Blomkamp, the Dispossessed by LeGuin, Divergent by Roth), among other. Dystopia is closely related to imaginings of our future downfall as humanity and apocalypse (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Studio Ghibli, etc).
Both utopia and dystopia can employ two different perspectives or “gazes”. It can be the present which is looking towards / imagining / projecting a certain future (were the utopian story template anticipates positive change and the dystopian one cautions the present about possible future consequences of present actions). Or it can be a future which is looking back at its past, our contemporaneity in a reversed gaze (criticizing the present for its flaws in relation to a possible utopia, or berating the present for leading to dystopia). I would argue that some of the best SF works are those that are based in the reader’s present and look forwards from there, often tricking the audience into believing that they have been transported somewhere else. Authors using this perspective often employ the mirror effect, juxtaposing imagined worlds with our own.
There is also a third variant of utopia, often taking the form of a kind of middle ground between utopia and dystopia, namely uchronia—meaning literally “(in) no time” and presenting a hypothetical parallel to our world and time. It corresponds to alternative histories. This perspective is based on “what if” assumptions from a certain point in time in the past. It often creates retro-futurist settings like for example in the steampunk genre, or cyberpunk which is situated in a more dystopian setting. Some examples are The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, District 9 by Neill Blomkamp, Laputa: Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki, Roadside Picnic by the brothers Strugatsky, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, etc.
This third literary technique can be related specifically to a third gaze position, which could be termed a hypothetical parallel to contemporary society. As such, it can however feature both utopian and dystopian themes. In most cases, it is easily recognized when anachronistic and technologically very advanced elements are present side by side – swords next to tanks, 1930s cars and cyborgs, 19th century Victorian age fashion and time travel machines, and so on.
SF as blank canvas of possibilities?
We would do well to remember that the worlds and perspectives presented in SF are situated knowledge springing from specific contexts, and that any escape—via fantasy or science fiction—can be a double-edged sword.
These different forms of SF could be said to be united by the way in which their imagined worlds are constructed, namely through cognitive estrangement, as I have previously suggested. In discussions of literary genres, SF is often seen as based on science and technology, in contrast to the fantasy genre which is seen as regressive, historical and myth-orientated, discussing questions of race, magic, destiny and gods. This division could be summarized as one where humans are at the mercy of supernatural agents outside of themselves (fantasy), vs. “everyone is the architect of their own fortune” (SF). Gavrilović argues that although seductive, this binary does not address how SF could replace old myths with new (technocratic) ones, or how technology becomes a new god. Even though it makes sense to some extent to view SF as united by the overall technique of cognitive estrangement, I therefore also have some reservations about this definition. We would do well to remember that the worlds and perspectives presented in SF are situated knowledge springing from specific contexts, and that any escape—via fantasy or science fiction—can be a double-edged sword.
From imagined to politically charged visions, SF, just as the media its authors use, is a global phenomenon and can have many different messages and usages. It provides grounds for imagining different realities, and sometimes also for discussing our own. This process of imagining other worlds and Others can’t be immune to politics (left or right, futuristic or retrograde). However, as Suvin contends, SF based on cognition has the potential to critique and clarify “mystified and obscured relationships”, “permit[ing] us a better orientation in our common world”. A given society (or city, as I will discuss in the next essay) provides a set of references and possibilities, serving as a canvas for projections of our own dissatisfactions and desires.
In relation to this discussion, my second text in this two-essay mini-series will consider the spatial and temporal dimensions of the artworks of two comic book authors from the Balkan region—Enki Bilal and Aleksa Gajić. While Gajić’s work constructs an optimistic future of a cosmopolitan, post 2000 Belgrade, less troubled with the past and very similar to the present, Bilal’s work takes both identity and past as its cornerstones. Their works will be used as regional examples that negotiate both the future and (g)local identities in a comparative analysis where I consider SF’s powerful potential in imagining futures and providing a critical lens for our present.
I would like to thank professor Nevena Daković at the University of Arts in Belgrade for her help in writing the original paper, Charlotte E. Whelan for proofreading and Rut Elliot Blomqvist for excellent editing.
Srđan Tunić is an art historian, freelance curator and cultural manager based in Belgrade, Serbia. A fan of science fiction, this is his first text about it. Contact: srdjan.tunic[at]gmail.com
I’m writing to you from a future. I’m doing this, because I don’t know any other way. I need to speak to someone who might understand.
You see, my grandfather wants to die. You might think “Oh no, that’s sad, but maybe he is old and tired, has lived enough and is ready to die.” Well you are not wrong about that. It is sad, and yes, he is old and tired and he has had a long life and he is ready to die. But being old and tired and dying don’t go together like that anymore. And that’s the problem.
In 2017 some researchers found a protein called TIMP-2 that stimulates body cells to rebuild and keep healthy.
The quest for endless life is an old one. In 2017 some researchers found a protein called TIMP-2 that stimulates body cells to rebuild and keep healthy. A protein which all humans have in their blood when they are young. Babies have a lot of it, but as we age, the production decreases. Having less and less of this protein allows us to age, but if you keep this protein at a consistently high-level, you stay young. In 2017, some newspapers reported this research for the first time, but it didn’t really cause much of a stir. By now, those results have changed humanity “for the better” – at least this is the conclusion that pours out of the mainstream.
Back to my grandfather: he is 130-years old now and thinks he has seen enough. He remembers how it was when old people just died. He told me a lot about it. Sounds quite nice, I have to say. Granddad started the protein treatment when he was already 60. I started when I was 21, which is the normal starting age now. It is considered the best physical age to stay in: one is fertile, has high-brain capacity, yet is physically fully grown and strong. It is considered the best age to stay in for work and reproduction. We call it “starting”. You are born and then, 21 years later, you “start”, almost like you hadn’t even lived before. As if you were maturing and then, when you are ripe, you get your preservatives. There are also early starters, some choose to do that as well. Looking like a teenager had been a trend some years ago. And there are all those who started later in their life, when the whole thing went mainstream. That was about 60 years ago.
Granddad was among the first to try the treatment. He had this panic, he says, that life would be over too soon and that there were so many things left undone. He wanted to travel and still be fit when he retired so he could go hiking and fishing with his grandchildren. At the time, he and grandma had well paid jobs and could afford trying this new, promising forever-young therapy that some companies had started to offer.
Things have gone wild since those days.
Back then, most people just went to a private hospital once a month for a transfusion. You remember, the TIMP-2 concentration in the blood is higher the younger you are, so people initially got blood transfusions from newborn, healthy babies. This blood was voluntarily donated in doses that would not harm the baby, or so it was said. But you can imagine the treatment being available only for a limited amount of people and at a high cost.
Granddad and grandma were real adventurous in those days, ready to try something radical. People around them thought it was a bit crazy, but many secretly wished they could afford it themselves. As time went on, it became more and more prominent and more affordable. It was especially popular among affluent people in their late fifties. The idea of “starting again” once the children had grown-up and moved-out sounded wonderful. Having more time to do all the things left undone. Having time to find yourself again. That was the mood back then, or so my granddad says.
It turned out that poor families in Latin America were being tricked to believe that their babies had died shortly after birth, when in reality, those babies had been farmed for blood.
Then the first scandals happened. It turned out that poor families in Latin America were being tricked to believe that their babies had died shortly after birth, when in reality, those babies had been farmed for blood. That was, of course, a huge controversy. The run for the treatment declined for a while. But the wish to live forever was too strong and such stories are easy to forget if forgetting is convenient. Similar crimes happened again and again, but nobody really wanted to know about it. They are very likely still there, the baby farms that is, just more well-hidden.
In Europe the whole thing took off much later. It was illegal for a long time. Some rich people traveled to the US or Asia for treatment, but in Europe it went mainstream only when laboratories could generate the protein. No babies involved. But even if available cruelty-free, the treatment remains expensive.
For granddad and grandma, it got expensive anyway. You can imagine the treatment like an addictive drug: it is not something you do once and pay for once, but you need to keep doing it again and again. It is easy to afford when you have a well-paid job, but it requires that you maintain your income in order to maintain your standard of living. So in the end, my grandparents needed to keep working in order to afford the treatment. The idea of a long retirement soon dissolved. Of course, having time had been the original promise. Live long enough to live all your dreams, or so the advertisements said. Reality is more of a nightmare. Work longer and harder and dream forever of those days spent traveling, playing with your grandchildren, having time for an endless bucket list. I actually grew up with my grandparents being fit and healthy, spending wonderful Sundays hiking. But during the week, they worked just like my parents.
One way to stop the cycle is to die. But that is not that easy either.
Many people take out loans nowadays to afford the treatment. Like my parents, they also took out a loan for me. It’s like investing in education: by keeping young, healthy and fit, you hope that you’ll earn enough to pay back the loans. Breaking out of that cycle should be possible, shouldn’t it? It’s actually very difficult. One way to stop the cycle is to die. But that is not that easy either. You will not just die after taking that stuff for ages, at least not of natural causes. Suicide is becoming an option, but doing that before you are debt-free is a huge taboo. I mean, you wouldn’t need to mind people talking once you’re dead, but you don’t want to leave your family with all that grief or all that debt.
For those who just can’t or don’t want to commit suicide, having a mortal accident is really the only other option for dying early. My grandmother died in a car accident on her way back from work, she was 118. Granddad retired the same day and stopped taking the medicine a couple of years later. It was a wakeup call. A bad one. He did some traveling without really enjoying it. But for the past 10 years he has wanted to die. He is fed up. It didn’t turn out like he had wanted. Killing himself is not an option for him though. And the strategy of taking high risks, doing things like rock-climbing without safety measures or driving into hurricanes and tornadoes, more often than not leaves people paralyzed or otherwise injured but not dead.
You might still be wondering what the fuss is about. Life is longer, you get more time to do stuff. Even if you have a longer working life, you still get more holidays more weekends and life’s rush-hour is stretched out over a longer period of time. All this is possibly true, but what if long life only equals longer drudgery, longer suffering? We live long, but for what?
Life is very, very stressful. You have endless to-do lists. Grandpa said back in the days you could always say “No I won’t do this now, I only got 24 hours every day, I can’t do everything”. That doesn’t work anymore. The day still has only 24 hours, but there are so very many 24 hours. People feel rushed, all the time, pressured to do all they can imagine doing. This is not how I wanted to live when I started the treatment at 21.
Competition is also very high. There are a lot of people who need to and are able to work. There is high unemployment and many homeless people as well as a panic not to end up in such a situation. Without a job, you can forget about the treatment, which means you’ll age, which means you are less likely to get a job. It’s a downward spiral. And consequently people do anything to keep their jobs, like working crazy hours for bad pay with almost no holiday. And the debt for the treatment is not the only financial burden many take on: people also take loans for education, houses, and cars. If you want a loan to buy a house, the bank will make you sign a document that you’ll take the treatment until you’ve paid off the loan.
Just imagine your life, but longer. A very long struggle of not getting worse.
Nowadays, life has become a struggle against things getting worse. How does that sound? Familiar? Just imagine your life, but longer. A very long struggle of not getting worse. I imagine, that when you know you’ll age, you might get to a point where you manage to change something. I imagine there might be a point when you realize that this is not how you want to spend the rest of your limited days. That must be so empowering. But now, there is always another day to start changing your life. And changing is uncomfortable, so most never change.
All that I have described so far concerns only the most affluent. A common belief is that those poorer countries need to develop and grow their national GDP so that more people can access health care and the endless-life treatment, which will further grow the economy. The same old song, just with another verse added. There is a company that got rich with an endless-life businesses that has since started a foundation that runs programmes in Africa to help people to afford the treatment. They call it charity and development aid. You could also call it a cruel investment.
Despite all of this madness, there are some who don’t take the treatment anymore or who never took it at all. They are called “oldies” and are treated like outcasts. Most of them live together in villages in the countryside. The oldies don’t make an effort to isolate themselves, but they end up quite isolated simply by the way they choose to live. I’ve thought about it myself, but it would require leaving my friends and family behind. And somehow, for some reason, I want to stay connected with what is going on, even if I don’t like it.
Back then you were fighting for a life within ecological and social limits. Now we are fighting to get limits to life itself.
I am part of a movement that calls itself STOP. We criticize the idea that life is all about longer and more, drawing ideas and inspiration from sources on post-development, degrowth, and social justice, which is what brought me to your blog. After all, the Internet doesn’t forget. Back then you were fighting for a life within ecological and social limits. Now we are fighting to get limits to life itself.
I have recently stopped the treatment myself. It is very new for me. I’m 54 now, but still have around seventy years to live, seventy years to dedicate myself to a world in which we can learn to die once again.
Yours,
Maya
Corinna Burkhart is a PhD candidate at the Department of Human Geography in Lund, Sweden. She is active around degrowth since 2012 and tries to think outside the box, sometimes through writing fiction.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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Officer Adkins puts the receiver back into its slot on the dashboard of his patrol car. He’s driving down a red dirt road with his windows down.
The air outside is arid. Desert dry. It’s sapping Officer Adkins’s sweat through his pores, causing it to pool in the crook between his nose and his glasses and around the bags under his eyes. Red dust clouds erupt in the wake of the patrol car, hanging in the air as long as possible. Some of the dust will blow over to the sides of the road, coating the otherwise hyper-green ditch weeds.
The heat plays tricks. Ahead of the car, Officer Adkins can see shimmering heat waves, making the dirt road ahead look like broken glass. In the rearview mirror, the reflection looks like the road’s closing in on itself like a tunnel, warped at the edges and pulling into itself.
The heat plays tricks. Ahead of the car, Officer Adkins can see shimmering heat waves, making the dirt road ahead look like broken glass. In the rearview mirror, the reflection looks like the road’s closing in on itself like a tunnel, warped at the edges and pulling into itself.
Not paying attention, he hears a sickening thump under the front passenger side tire. From the side mirror, he can see that he ran over a rattlesnake, at least six feet long and a few feet round. A huge one. In a few minutes it’ll be sucked dry by thirsty crows, which don’t ever seem to far away these days.
Officer Adkins reckons the snake won’t even be there on his way back. He reaches across the car’s center console, taking special care not to touch the cracked hot leather with his bare skin, and flips the lid off his small styrofoam cooler. He plunges his hand into the ice and pulls out a cube, which he quickly brings to his forehead before it melts. He draws little circles across his face, making especially sure to cool the bags under his eyes.
“Let’s see… 18 miles down this road. Then turn left at the oak with the branches that touch the ground. Go a few more miles and look for the patch of cattails on the right.”
It’s a ways more, so he starts humming old hymns to himself to still his beating heart.
Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!
*
No one wants the job. No one likes kicking people out of their homes. But he’s the newest one on the force, and he has to do it. He wouldn’t be as worried if he were going after a murderer or kidnapper. But these are just old women. Two old sisters. They used to be a part of the community, years ago. So long ago that people can only tell tales, and even those tales feel older than they should. Like memories of memories. Or like looking at pictures of old ancestors you’ve never met.
The two sisters – Odetta and Odessa – used to play music in town before Prohibition. They also used to skin and process venison. Some people used to buy cane syrup from them. No one remembers when really, just that they did those things.
Their music was especially well remembered. They’d post up at a local whiskey joint and play for hours, sometimes days, without stopping. Their songs would make people do strange things.
They played the blues faster and louder than anyone had heard before. One played the guitar, and the other played the trumpet. They’d take turns singing. Their voices were harrowing and unforgettable. They never made eye contact and sang to the floor. People’d stay at the joint the whole time they played. Then, they’d stumble back to their homes in the early morning. After playing, the sisters would disappear for months; maybe years. They’d go back to their cabin in the woods and into the backs of everyone’s minds.
No one really remembers the last time they were seen. It’s like someone mentions their names, and then their names are carried off by the wind. Lost in the woods. Simultaneously remembered and forgotten. Their tax record, however, was another story.
Thumbing through the records a few weeks back, Ms. Olive found their file. She asked around the office, but no one knew the file existed. It’s like it had always been in the filing cabinet, nestled neatly between other tax records. Ms. Olive read over the paper multiple times, forgetting what she was reading until it finally registered that there were no payment records. The sisters had never paid land taxes for their property. Ms. Olive called the police, and they sent out Officer Adkins the next day to investigate. He had no choice but to tell them that they needed to pay their land tax or be kicked out of their home.
*
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
That shadows a dry, thirsty land;
He hideth my life with the depths of His love,
And covers me there with His hand,
And covers me there with His hand.
Officer Adkins misses the turn by the cattails the first time. Then, he misses it a second time after turning around. He stops in the middle of the road, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel for a few minutes to collect his thoughts.
With his car at a standstill in the middle of the road, Officer Adkins racks his brain. He thinks about his wife at home. He thinks about the sticky buns she made earlier. He thinks about the children they’re going to have. It brings a smile to his face. He adjusts himself in his seat and rubs the crown of his nose between his index finger and thumb. One more time. He backs the car up and finds the path through the cattails only a few yards down the road.
The path is nothing more than ruts cutting through a nearly impenetrable wall of cattails. Officer Adkins lines his tires up with the ruts the best he can before proceeding, taking special care not to drive off the path and into the feverish swamp on either side. The tips of the cattails are fraying, as they beat against one another in a sudden gust of wind. White cottony seedpods are fluttering around the car, twirling downwards in perfect circular patterns.
The air outside is getting inexplicably wetter. Not cooler but definitely wetter. It feels heavier. Wiping his forehead with his sleeve, Officer Adkins can’t tell if the dampness is his sweat or condensation. Before he had a hard time breathing because of the dry heat, now he feels like he is drowning in the air around him. The pressure of the humidity pushes down on his skull, giving him a headache. He takes a sip of water from the cooler only to find out that it’s just as hot as the air in his car.
Inch by inch, he makes his way along the path through the cattails. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees bright flashes of color. He imagines them as brightly colored birds. He can’t quite focus on the colors, but he knows he sees something. It’s like the experience of the color is a memory, like something hiding just out of sight of his mind’s eye. He chalks up the colors to the heat. It’s just his mind playing tricks on him.
The path is getting more solid and a bit wider. Up ahead, he can see a clearing where the path ends. Officer Adkins pulls his car into the clearing and turns his car off, immediately pulling up his undershirt to wipe his face and eyes. He’s still having a hard time breathing and the headache is sinking further into his skull. Just up ahead, he can make out the warped outline of the sisters’ cabin.
He kicks open his door and slides his legs across the cracked leather bench seat of his patrol car. Heaving and out of breath, he adjusts himself again, pulling up his pants and patting down his sweat-stained shirt over his stomach.
The house is only a couple hundred feet ahead, but it feels impossibly far away. The sweet scent of blooming honeysuckles fills his nose, but it’s mixed with something sour. He looks around and sees rows of wild blackberries, burst open and rotting in the heat. The smell makes his stomach queasy and settles at the back of his throat. The grabby briars of the blackberry bushes wrap around his ankles as he makes his way towards the cabin.
Officer Adkins, after what might have been a few minutes or a few years, stops within yelling distance of the cabin’s front porch. The cabin itself is humble, made of graying pinewood. The roof is a little sunken and covered in brightly colored mosses and lichens. The vinyl lattice around the base of the home is slightly moldy at the bottom but bleach white at the top. One side of the home is blanketed in a honeysuckle blooms.
His words hang in the air like a fog. Maybe the sound never made it to their ears. It’s almost like the words are too saturated by the humidity to move past his lips.
The front porch is screened in, making it impossible to see inside. He can hear the porch creaking under the weight of some movement. After a few minutes, he can make out that the sound is a pair of rocking chairs, rocking slightly off-kilter from one another. Realizing that they’re home, and right in front of him, Officer Adkins nearly vomits in his mouth. After taking a few minutes to steady himself, he yells to the sisters on the porch.
“Mornin’ ladies… Can I have a word?”
No response. Just rocking.
“I’ve been sent by Town Hall on account of y’all not payin’ your land taxes… Seems like y’all haven’t paid up.”
No response. Just rocking, steady and off-kilter.
“Town Hall says you can’t live here anymore… Not unless you pay your taxes. They’ll be needing some sort of deposit next week or the banks’ll come demanding it.”
He thinks he can hear quiet coughing, but still no response. Just rocking.
His words hang in the air like a fog. Maybe the sound never made it to their ears. It almost like the words are too saturated by the humidity to move past his lips. He wonders if he is even speaking, if anything is coming out of his mouth at all. After another indiscriminate amount of time, Officer Adkins kicks his boots on the ground, knocking away some of the blackberry briars that seem to have crept up his leg.
“M’ams… I… I’ll have to come back next Tuesday for that deposit.”
No response.
“I hate to do it… I really do… but I’ve got no choice in the matter. My job depends on it. G’day to both of you.”
Officer Adkins turns and walks back to his car. He gets in and backs down the cattail path without looking back, keeping his eyes on the clearing ahead. In a few minutes, he is near town without any recollection of the minutes that passed between the cattail path and now. The air’s hot again and he reaches for another ice cube. He smiles to himself, thinking about his wife and unborn children. Twins.
*
They can hear the car coming from miles away. It’s an unusual, mechanical sound that cuts through the otherwise undisturbed swamp noise. A man’s driving, smiling to himself and humming songs. A happy man; a nice man. The sisters can hear every pebble crushing beneath his car like tiny explosions. He can’t come here.
They should’ve listened harder. They should’ve kept him from even finding the old oak tree that touches the ground. They’re getting forgetful and complacent in the summer heat. It’s been so long.
So they send out a snake, one of their pets. She’s large enough to be a distraction. She’ll at least slow him down for a few minutes while the sisters stitch the entrance to the cattail path closed.
She dies, crushed beneath his car. She hissed her last breath into the sisters’ ears. It echoed across the swamp, crashing through the trees like a cold wind. The man didn’t even notice her until after she had been killed. The sisters send crows to make the death swift and meaningful.
He’s still coming. Still singing. Still smiling. A nice man. The sisters don’t want to hurt him, but he can’t find them.
They begin to stitch the cattail path closed. Odessa grabs a handful of chicken knuckles and rattles them in her palm. She blows into her closed fist, causing a stout wind to blow through the cattails. They’ll fray at the tips, sending their seedpods through the air. When the pods land in the mud, new stalks will sprout, cloaking the path.
While Odessa rattles the chicken knuckles, Odetta grabs her tarnished brass trumpet. When she blows, it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. Instead, a deep, guttural whisper spreads from the horn’s mouth. It sneaks along the ground and will eventually catch up to the man. It’ll sneak into his ear, causing him to miss his turn while the path grows closed.
The two sisters get wrapped up in their work – Odessa rattling chicken knuckles in her palm, stitching the path closed, and Odetta whispering illusions through her trumpet to blind the man to their path. They don’t realize that he notices he’s missed the path and is trying to clear his head. They only realize he’s found their path when they hear his car breaking through the cattails.
Odessa grabs another handful of chicken knuckles, trying to close the path. Odetta plucks out on her hairs and pulls it taut across her lips and hisses with her teeth closed. The sound she creates is something between a whistle and a hum. Immediately, she can hear them crashing through the branches, coming to her aid. Birds of paradise, thousands of them. Some are cerulean. Some are candy red. No two are alike. She’ll send them to distract the man, keeping him occupied. It’ll give her enough time to come up with another illusion.
They don’t want to harm the man. They just don’t want to be found.
Odetta’s birds don’t tie him up long enough, and Odessa failed to stitch the path closed before the man reached the clearing. She drops the chicken knuckles and grabs a bottle of whiskey. She takes a long draught and spews it through her lips, creating a fine mist. The mist will create a drowsy humidity, making the man move slowly and unsurely. It’ll give him a headache, at least.
Odetta digs through a basket beside her chair. The basket is made from hair and contains dried weeds, branches, flowers, and leaves. She puts a plume of honeysuckle in her mouth, chewing them to a pulp before spitting them on the walls of their cabin. This’ll cloak the home in honeysuckle, making their cabin look like an overgrown thicket.
Still chewing and spitting honeysuckle onto the walls, Odetta stuffs a tuft of blackberry bramble into her right house slipper. She slides her foot back in, scratching the ball of her foot and drawing blood. She doesn’t want to hurt the man, but this should slow him down. She takes a few steps, the briars sticking her in between her toes. She winces while she continues to spit honeysuckle on the walls. Outside, blackberry bramble creeps towards the car. As he steps out of his car, it begins crawling up the back of his ankles. Combined with the whiskey humidity, the briars will slow him down.
The man is still determined and making his way to their porch. Odessa sprays more whiskey into the air, and Odetta starts stomping on the bramble in her slipper. She’s still stuffing honeysuckle into her mouth and spitting it onto the walls. He’s moving slower, but he’s still coming.
Just before he’s within yelling distance of the front porch, the two sisters drop what they’re doing and move into their rocking chairs. They begin rocking at a pattern that will stop the man in his tracks.
The sisters understand time. The further off-kilter they are from another while they’re rocking, the slower time becomes. They can’t stop time entirely; that’s too dangerous. But they can slow it to a grinding halt, making the atmosphere too heavy for the man to get any closer.
He’s yelling something. His words don’t travel through undulating time. They fall right out of his mouth and are ancient by the time they make it to the sisters’ ears. He seems panicked; uncomfortable.
Odetta and Odessa can barely make out the words, “I’ll be back next Tuesday… G’day to both you.”
A nice man, but he can’t come back next Tuesday.
The sisters slow their rocking and let the man walk back to his car. When he closes the door, the sisters look into each other’s eyes, and grasp each other’s gnarled root hands. Sadly, they know what has to be done to keep the man away.
As soon as the man bends his head to put the car in reverse, the sisters get up from their chairs. By the time the man starts to edge his car backwards, the sisters are already off the porch and winding their way up a creek bed. The bed is coated in a layer of slick mud, pockmarked by worm and snake trails.
The sisters keep their heads low in reverence. The creek bed empties into a gully, and on the other side there’s a perfectly circular pond, surrounded on all sides by a dense thicket of cypress trees. Their knobby roots tangle around one another, making an impenetrable wall. The sisters both reach out their left hands and touch the nearest root, causing it to unfurl into an opening to the water’s edge.
The pond is covered in a blanket of lime green algae. It looks solid enough to walk across. Odetta and Odessa slide out of their house slippers and hike their dresses above their knees before wading into the water, cutting a triangular wake into the pond’s algae-covered surface. The sisters walk carefully, taking small steps to not disturb the sediment on the bottom. The water is painfully cold and black beneath the shade of the algae. Its pitch surface curls like tar around the sisters’ legs, roiling up and over their knees.
By the time their up to their waste in water, nearly a quarter of the way to the middle of the pond, they let their dresses go. The ruffles of their dresses sit on the water a few minutes before sinking below the surface, algae closing in around them. Deep breaths. Steady breaths. He’s a nice man.
Odetta holds out her boney right hand, and Odessa grips it firmly in her left. Standing side by side, they raise their free hands into the sky just above their shoulders. In a few moments, a mosquito lands on the top of Odetta’s hand, digging into her skin and filling with her blood. A few moments later, a couple more mosquitos land on Odessa’s hand. Then, swarms of mosquitos land on their hands. Thousands, millions. The mosquitos make their way down the sisters’ arms to their shoulders.
When they get light headed from blood loss, the sisters submerge their raised arms into the water, pulling them back up slowly. There’s a large, blood-filled mosquito in each of their palms, still sucking. They close their fists, crushing the mosquito. Blood seeps through the spaces in between their fingers. It trails down their wrists. They release their clasped hands and turn towards one another. With their clean hands, they start tracing the lines in their bloody palm, making sure to get blood in every crease and wrinkle.
After tracing the lines in their hands with blood, the sisters put their palms together. With their other hands, they scoop some of the algae from the pond’s surface and put it into their mouths. They fill their mouths until they can hardly breathe and begin chewing, drinking down their saliva mixed with the algae’s juice. When the algae is dehydrated in their mouths, they spit it into their free hands and crush it into a poultice with their fists. Then, they place their algae covered palms together.
Now, standing face to face with their hands together and stretched above their heads, the sisters put their foreheads together and begin to sing one of their old songs.
Their voices don’t resonate; there’s no timbre. Instead, it sounds like dried leaves being crushed underfoot. It sounds like mud bubbling from a spring. Like the sound animals make when they’re mating. It vibrates, reverberating across the pond, sending long ripples beneath the algae. The sisters breathe in each other’s air, singing into each other’s chest. Their bloody palms feel like they’re on fire. Their eyes roll back in their heads, and they lean into each other’s weight.
The woods are getting louder. Around the pond, the cypress trees rattle against one another. Life and death blending together. Tears roll down the sisters’ cheeks from the pain in their hands, but this is the price they pay to be forgotten.
Then, the sound stops. The song ends. Odessa and Odetta release their hands and let them fall into the water. They look at each other. They’re both older. Their skin is looser, hanging like shingles from their boney cheeks. Their eyes are rheumy. Their hair is longer, whiter. They never wanted to hurt anyone. He is a nice man. They just need to be left alone.
After taking a few minutes to collect their breath, the sisters wade out of the pond. They pass through the hole in the cypress roots and find their way back down the creek bed. Their cabin is the same. Their porch is the same. They settle back into their rocking chairs and listen to the tune of the swamp, tapping their feet.
*
Would you be free from your passion and pride?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood;
Come for a cleansing to Calvary’s tide;
There’s wonderful power in the blood.
Rubbing the cool ice on his head, Officer Adkins starts humming hymns again. He’s wondering what he’ll have for lunch. It’s a little late for lunch. Maybe he’ll just grab some pie and a coffee. The diner next to the station will be open. It’s always open.
When he pulls into the parking lot, he notices that no one turns to see his car. When he walks to the counter, he can’t seem to get the waitress’s attention. She smiles and looks at him but doesn’t acknowledge him. He touches her shoulder and she smiles and shrugs it off. He chalks it up to a misunderstanding and walks across the street to the station.
The sisters slow their rocking and let the man walk back to his car. When he closes the door, the sisters look into each other’s eyes, and grasp each other’s gnarled root hands. Sadly, they know what has to be done to keep the man away.
The station is running business as usual. No one seems to pay him any attention. He’s new here, so he doesn’t mind. There’s a fresh pot of coffee boiling. Officer Adkins pours a cup and walks across the hall to the deputy’s office. Eager to prove himself, he walks up to his and slams down his hands.
“I seen the sisters. Told ‘em they had to pay up.”
No response. The deputy stares down at his desk, rustling through reports.
“I seen the sisters…”
No response.
Officer Adkins leaves the station. He’s got a sick feeling churning in the pit of his stomach. The world doesn’t feel right. He trots to his car and immediately drives home.
When he pulls into his yard, bouncing over the curb, he honks his horn twice. The sprinkler’s spraying his new garden. He gathers his things, secures the lid on the cooler, and opens his car door in one quick motion. He unlocks the white vinyl fence beside his home and makes his way through the backyard. From behind a wall of gardenias, he can see his wife sitting on the back patio. She’s staring off in the distance with a cigarette hanging limply between her lips.
The room looked like it had not been touched in a decade. Cobwebs danced lazily in the air blown by the air conditioning vents. The walls were dingy white, not sunshine yellow. There was no crib.
Officer Adkins didn’t know she smoked. She especially shouldn’t be smoking while she’s pregnant. In any case, he wants to sneak up behind her and kiss her on the neck. He quietly drops his things behind the bushes and makes his way to the wicker chair where she is sitting with her legs crossed.
He touches her shoulder lightly, running his fingers across the lower part of her neck just above her shirt collar. He leans in slow enough to hear his bones creaking. When he kisses her neck, she just shrugs it off like a mosquito. She shifts in her seat and sucks on her cigarette. He realized that he must’ve done something wrong. He decides he’ll go inside and make some coffee and a sandwich to bring out to her.
“Honey, I’ll be right back. You stay right there.”
No response.
He kicks off his shoes near the backdoor and notices that his other shoes have disappeared. His wife must have moved them earlier that day. He always was a little messy. Maybe that’s why she’s not talking to him. In the kitchen, he puts down his cooler and opens the refrigerator. There’s hardly anything to eat in there, so he puts on some coffee and makes his way back to the bedroom to change his clothes.
The bed’s unmade. The sheets are tangled in a rat’s nest, the blinds are drawn. Although the room’s dark, he notices that there are no photos of him around. There are no photos at all.
Unsettled, Officer Adkins walks across the hall to the nursery he and his wife spent so much painting and decorating. He carved the crib from the cedar tree out back. He spent so much time sanding and oiling the wood, delicately carving its corners often into the night. When pushing open the door, it got caught on something. He pushed harder, rustling paper and plastic and knocking over boxes. The room looked like it had not been touched in a decade. Cobwebs danced lazily in the air blown by the air conditioning vents. The walls were dingy white, not sunshine yellow. There was no crib.
His head began to pulse. The headache from earlier began to boil in the back of his skull. He walked back through the hallway and looked through the kitchen blinds onto the back patio. His wife had started a new cigarette. Her hair was limp, unwashed. She sat with her legs underneath her, staring across the backyard. He followed her gaze to the cedar tree he had cut for the crib. There it was, standing as tall as ever.
Head still pulsing, Officer Adkins grabs a cigarette from his wife’s box. No response. He walks into the yard and sits beneath the cedar tree. With his back against its gnarly bark, he leans his head back, watching as his cigarette smoke disappears in the dense canopy. He closes his eyes and listens. He can hear a tune and starts humming along.
Dylan M. Harris is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. He studies the stories we tell (and don’t tell) about climate change and comes up with his own stories from time to time.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness she called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
She sleeps fitfully. Every light creak of the cottage wakes her, her body in its semi-conscious state always uncomfortable no matter which way she turns. It is her first night out of the Build in months, and though she knows well to expect it now, the uncomfortable encumberment of physicality is always a shock to the system; particularly on the first night, after so long free of form.
She has never been patient with her body – one of the things that had most attracted her to Building in the first place – and when she wakes again not an hour later she slips frustrated out of bed and shuffles to the kitchen before her tired body can mount a protest. Teabag, water, a splash of milk, the plucking out of the teabag by the fingertips, hands curved soft around the cup – the ritual, she had to admit, had been missed in an incorporeal world where hands simply didn’t exist.
Stepping out into the tiny garden, she feels the light wind lift the hem of her nightgown and press soft fingers through the holes of the shawl around her shoulders. A sea black as tar reflects the almost-full moon like an oil slick, far off the edge of the cliff where she stands; the reflection is cut up by the ghostlike pillars of the turbines, tiny from this distance. Of course, she knows well their towering enormity from sea level – she had led her team in the design of their formation to ensure optimal wind-harvesting efficiency. It had been her first time as Lead Builder – she had been younger than many of the team, but her experiential knowledge of the area had swung the decision in her favour. She has lived on these cliffs, in the same small house, since her memory began. She knows the force of the waves and the flow of the wind like a mother knows the changing moods and caprices of her own child.
She’d often complained that their team neglected housing in favour of the more highly publicized, ‘sexier’ Builds like solar and wind farms.
The night is uncharacteristically calm, and she feels her mind slipping into retrospect, combing over the past month’s work as it always did in the first few days after a major Build. Her partner Jese had taken the lead: her speciality was tall housing structures, and she’d often complained that their team neglected housing in favour of the more highly publicized, ‘sexier’ Builds like solar and wind farms. She was right, of course, and under her direction they’d created a particularly beautiful enclave of houses near the coast, set in a titanium-alloy structure that descended the cliffs with elevator capsules flowing up and down its sides like cascading water.
She often tries to imagine how projects of this magnitude might have worked in the past. Of course, all Builders had studied the history of architecture – how the building process had been divided into so many groups, the designers and the constructors bizarrely separate from one another’s work, usually never even communicating – but it was almost impossible to imagine how it might have worked in practice, everything constructed by hand and constrained by the limitations of human labour. Their only constraints now were the limitations of imagination.
*
The scale and precision of the welding was beyond the scope of either human hands or the workshop’s capacity
It had been discovered by accident – quite out of the blue. Every Builder knew the story by heart: a junior architect at a small firm (in Iowa, of all places) working late one night on a complex model, hooked up to the industry-standard electrode set to promote clarity and transmission of thought between brain and design interface, had dozed off thinking about earthquake-proof structures. When she awoke minutes later from running through a forest of glinting skyscrapers waving in the breeze, there they were, scattered around her feet and thick on the desks of the lab: little foot-high models of the same structure she had seen in her dream. She had, understandably, concluded that she was going mad and, having convinced herself that it was an elaborate prank by some telepathically-gifted colleague, swept the models into the bin and left. But the next morning, when someone fished one of the things out of the bin and promptly discovered the scale and precision of the welding was beyond the scope of either human hands or the workshop’s capacity, it quickly became impossible to pretend that nothing had happened. From there, it had snowballed. Hundreds of thousands had been poured into studies trying to recreate what had happened that warm night in Iowa when something had defied every known law of physics to appear out of thin air. And the studies found two things: first, in a very specific dream state as hard to consciously maintain as hovering between two layers of the atmosphere whilst falling down through it to earth, there existed some kind of hugely powerful neurogenerative potential. And second, this potential was available uniquely to women.
The second part got just about as much attention as the first. The public, faced with one of the most unbelievable discoveries of human ability in the past millennium, chose to disbelieve primarily that a woman could do what a man couldn’t. On daytime TV and at scientific conferences, arguments raged about what this meant for feminism; whether political correctness had biased the studies into overlooking men with the same potential; if the whole thing was faked, somehow part of an engine to sway voters towards – nobody was quite sure, but definitely something. But by this time a handful of other women, designers and housewives and doctors, had come forward to report that sometimes when they woke up they’d find a piece of their dreams sitting incongruously on the bedside table. Some of them wanted it gone. Some wanted to know how they could make money. Most, though, wanted to know if, and how, they could help: do something bigger, change the world, the whole bit. Many apologized for being hopelessly idealistic. Few realised that, with a talent like theirs, idealism could stand to be desperately encouraged.
The world’s cities had needed something new, and they had needed it desperately
Because the world’s cities had needed something new, and they had needed it desperately. Urban populations were skyrocketing, and they were leaving energy and housing and food in the dust. It wasn’t about a lack of money so much as a lack of imagination – weather patterns were getting harsher, cities were growing fuller, and still buildings were being built in the same way as they always had been – only with more floors stacked on top of each other, each high-rise flimsier than the last. The world needed an architectural revolution. And, within ten years – the time it took to gather and rigorously train women from across the world in how to Build – it had one.
*
The moon is unusually bright tonight, hitting the blades of the turbines sharp and clear as they turn with regal stateliness out above the ocean. She remembers the building of them with a keen pleasure – working overnight, pulling the towers up and then the blades out, skating formlessly on the surface of the water like a dragonfly – it was one of her favourite Building memories. But the simulated moon in the Build hadn’t a patch on the pale glow of the real thing: piercingly soft, an eye gazing steady on its shadowed domain, patient.
*
Nobody – yet – has been able to understand how Building works. There are theories, accepted and contested; countless academic articles; even conferences, now, usually hugely oversubscribed. And still nobody knows; and still it works. How can a person enter an interface (the Build, a virtual platform with unlimited user capacity designed soon after the whole thing had begun) designed to mimic the real world, and make things inside it, and exit to find that those things now existed? It defies logic, people would argue, and she has to acquiesce that yes, it still – even to a Builder as experienced as herself – seems ridiculous. And yet, although she hardly knows how to articulate it to herself, there is a sense to Building that often overwhelms her. Creation is an urge so natural, so powerful, that she can scarcely believe it hasn’t been happening in the nooks and enclaves of human civilisation since the dawn of time. And as for why only women are capable of it – well, privately, that has always been for her the least mysterious element of the whole thing. To her, to be a woman is to be creative: to feel potentiality thrilling through one’s bones. Art, dance, song, science, new life – there is nothing a woman’s mind and body cannot fashion. So, in the disembodied world of the Build – entering, Builders are represented by the interface as small glowing shapes to allow them to move through and within their structures with ease – the last of the limitations slips away. Creation becomes infinite.
Nobody – yet – has been able to understand how Building works. There are theories, accepted and contested; countless academic articles; even conferences, now, usually hugely oversubscribed.
She had argued with Jese about this, not long after they’d met. Infinite creation is dangerous, Jese had said, because infinite anything is dangerous – ‘that’s why God made the world, because the nothing was infinite and she was scared’ – and she was shaking her head at the utter ridiculousness of the argument when Jese had said, eyes holding hers, ‘but dangerous doesn’t have to mean bad. Dangerous can be anything you want it to be.’ Had she known, then, that they would end up together, weaving their lives into a partnership of more than just work, of love – she could scarcely imagine the disbelief she would have felt at the idea. But that’s why they work, she thinks – the questioning and the surprises and the curiosity of them both, for each other, for the world. And they make a bloody good team, flowing around each other in the Build even more seamlessly than in real life, enhancing each others’ work subtly; neither’s style overpowering the other’s, but complementing it as sea complements sky. She often indulges a fantasy of sneaking into the Build late at night, meeting Jese under a night sky that would always be cloudless, and Building with nothing to stop them. They’d create towers of glass and gold and cover them with flowers, write their names in metals light as air and hang them from the sky, build galleon ships on dry land and palaces in the shallows of the sea, and when there was nothing left to create they’d run together to find what they had made, and marvel. They’d never leave. They’d run in the echoing halls of their creations forever.
*
It was a beautiful dream. But there was work to be done in the real world. The sky has been lightening as she has been dreaming, and now the edges of the sea glow as if lit from beneath by a flame, the moon hanging pale at the zenith. Above her she hears wings beat, the first gull of the morning cry sharp and wild, and she smiles, turning, hands curled around the still-warm mug; stepping back inside the house that waits behind her, will always wait. The world is moving, and they all must move with it.
Imogen Malpas is a 22 year old human. Recently graduated from University College London with a degree in literature and neuroscience, she lives and works in London but dreams of other times, places and realities frequently.
Image: Kid Acne, from an exhibition in Paris in 2017.
by Sabine Sharp
Feminist science fiction criticism emerged in the 1970s through the work of critics and fans exploring contributions to science fiction that reimagine and reconceptualise gender, sexuality and the body. Advocates of feminist science fiction have often sought to secure the legitimacy of these contributions to the genre by providing an account of their literary heritage, namely, their descent from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
Over time, feminist science fiction history-telling has gradually abandoned some of the detail and nuance of studies such as Pamela Sargent’s 1975 anthology introduction Women of Wonder. Instead such histories tend to favour generic shifts across decades, often repeating common narratives. By analysing how critics tell the history of feminist science fiction, I argue that a dominant story emerges. This origin story aligns the genre with a branch of late twentieth century feminism that carries uncomfortable echoes of the transphobia peddled by radical feminists such as Janice Raymond and Mary Daly.
Understanding the history of feminist science fiction is a useful project, which can give us an appreciation of undervalued authors or the development of key science fiction ideas. However, this particular narrative of the genre’s beginnings is problematic for a contemporary feminist politics engaging with transgender rights and reproductive justice.
Frankenstein versus Fantasy
Again and again, feminist science fiction critics have cited Frankenstein as the very first science fiction novel, with critics such as Debra Benita Shaw (2000), Robin Roberts (1993), and Jane Donawerth (1997) even referencing the novel in the titles of their works.[i] Texts produced earlier than Frankenstein that might be classified as science fiction – such as Lucian of Samosata’s A True History (1 AD), or Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) – are excluded as ‘ur-science fiction, fantastical rather than science fictional’.[ii] But this presumes a consensus on the boundary between science fiction and fantasy.
Such attempts to exclude other texts contending for the title of generic progenitor echo similar problematic moves by male critics to classify female-authored science fiction as fantasy because of a text’s ambiguity or use of magical realism.[iii] The arguments for the exclusion of works before Frankenstein are not elaborated, but instead the texts are simply dismissed, tarnished by the label ‘fantasy’.
We should remember that Shelley’s novel itself emerges out of the gothic literary tradition, inspired by ghost stories and the supernatural as much as by recent scientific experiments in galvanism.[iv] The novel’s eponymous protagonist Victor Frankenstein pursues an alternative, disparaged area of science, namely, the resurrection of the dead, in a way that critics such as Robin Roberts have linked to magic and witchcraft.[v]
Where science fiction is and is not allowed to blur genres thus appears inconsistent. The significance of the generic gerrymandering of science fiction for women and non-white science fiction writers demands further attention. Women writers may be dismissed for focussing on social rather than so-called ‘hard’ science. Writers of colour drawing on non-Western myth and folklore may find themselves excluded from the genre for handling magic or religion in their work.
Drawing specific boundaries around science fiction to position Frankenstein as the genre’s source also seems to neglect the historical specificity of the term ‘science fiction’, coined in 1929 by Hugo Gernsback, editor of the first science fiction magazine. Furthermore, this ignores the continuing debates around differences in terminology such as ‘scientific romance’, ‘speculative fiction’, and more recently ‘slipstream fiction’ and ‘feminist fabulation’.[vi] This matters because of the power dynamics behind generic categorisation: refusing the label can be read as a snub of ‘genre fiction’, while exclusion from the label has financial and social implications for the author.[vii]
The Gendering of Science Fiction
The tale of Frankenstein as science fiction’s first novel finds its earliest expression in Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (1973), a lengthy study of science fiction’s history.[viii] Eventually, Aldiss’s name stops appearing in citations though: critics begin describing Frankenstein’s status as simply ‘generally accepted’, or even ‘conventional’.[ix] The mythology of science fiction’s birth out of the mind of the daughter of renowned feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is gradually presented as common knowledge, an almost-but-not-quite indisputable fact.
As that last sentence might suggest, references to Frankenstein implicate Shelley’s work in a project of generic reproduction, sometimes even referring to this text as the mother or grandmother of the genre.[x] The significance of this is the implicit gendering of science fiction: through these descriptions, science fiction is endowed with woman’s power of reproduction, rather than a male patrilineage. The vocabulary of motherhood presents feminism, women and reproduction as central concerns of the genre from its outset, despite the focus on male characters in Shelley’s novel.[xi]
I don’t dispute that science fiction has proved a rich genre for creative experimentation with feminist ideas. However, we need to consider the implications of this generic gendering for future feminist study.
On the one hand, the claiming of Frankenstein as the origin of science fiction generates a sense of women – and especially feminists – belonging in the genre. In the 1970s and 1980s, this was an important move to secure the birth right of feminist science fiction authors and readers. During this period, female fans of science fiction broke new ground. Women authors won science fiction awards as they had never done before, while their readership fought for panels on women and science fiction at conventions and conferences.[xii]
On the other hand, this gendering of science fiction strengthens one particular reading of Shelley’s novel: as a prescient criticism of the masculine delusions of godlike power found in science. By positioning the novel as maternal, and a critique of masculinist science as its key thematic concern, this historically specific feminist critique appears as the heart of all science fiction. As I outline next, this dichotomy of reproductive/female and productive/male places feminist science fiction in uncomfortable alliance with transphobic feminist voices.
Frankenstein’s Monstrous Reproduction
The recognition awarded Frankenstein by feminist science fiction critics is often accompanied by readings of the text as a critique of science, technology and progress. As Anne Cranny-Francis writes:
Victor Frankenstein’s fault is not simply the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, but his failure to consider the consequences of his research, the dilemma faced by scientists in many areas of research today (for example nuclear technology, genetic manipulation, in vitro fertilization).[xiii]
Cranny-Francis connects Frankenstein’s thematic concerns to contemporary debates within feminism regarding the role of science in society, particularly with respect to the environment, the body and reproductive justice.
Beyond this criticism of the sciences’ myopic response to wider ethical and social consequences of research, feminist critics deploy readings of Frankenstein to explore ideas of male appropriation. These critics claim Shelley’s novel as a ‘critique of science as a form of male mastery’, ‘expos[ing] hierarchies of dominance embedded in the practice of science’.[xiv] Science fiction is shown to have a foundation in challenging not only the male dominance of literature – Mary Shelley being one of few women writers in her day – but also of science.
In one strand of feminist science fiction criticism claiming Frankenstein as science fiction’s mother, Shelley’s novel features as exemplary of the history of science fiction. According to Cranny-Francis:
In making his creature Frankenstein not only usurps the place of God, he also usurps the role of woman. Frankenstein’s creature therefore signifies the result of the masculinist attempt to appropriate and exploit this biological capability of women, which in a patriarchal society is their defining, and limiting, characteristic.[xv]
In this reading of the novel, Shelley launches a scathing attack on scientific production as the expression of male envy of women’s reproductive power. Likewise, Susan Gubar describes Frankenstein as a ‘satanic scientist who usurps female powers of procreation’.[xvi]
Frankenstein’s spawning of a new genre thus also bolsters a critical feminist position on reproduction and production. Just as Victor Frankenstein is seen to misappropriate the supposedly female reproductive role, so too are subsequent male science fiction writers seen to adopt and dominate the field of science fiction, failing to pay due respect to their maternal ancestry.
The language of ‘appropriation’ and ‘usurpation’ that these critics use echoes the transphobia peddled by radical feminists such as Robin Morgan, Janice Raymond and Mary Daly. Raymond (1979) infamously declared ‘all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves’, while Daly (1978) described transsexualism as an example of the ‘Frankenstein Phenomenon’, an attempt by the male-dominated medical establishment to replace ‘real’ women with surgically produced Stepford Wives (Ira Levin, 1972).[xvii]
This reading of Frankenstein also consolidates the view of science as an inherently masculine realm, a false and shallow substitute for pregnancy and birth. As Sargent points out, this has problematic consequences for women’s engagement in science, technology and science fiction.[xviii] While Cranny-Francis suggests that it is patriarchy that reduces women to their procreative capacity, the language of appropriation in this context gives the impression of something women ought to feel has been wrongly stolen from them.
These feminist critics present women as inherently reproductive, and men as merely productive. In the current context of trans and non-trans women’s infertility, reproductive technologies such as IVF, trans men’s pregnancies, as well as intersex and non-binary identifications, this dichotomy poses difficulties for contemporary trans-inclusive feminism.
Our understandings of the relationship between reproduction and production may be even further complicated with the potential realisation of artificial wombs on the horizon, a technology that prominent feminist Shulasmith Firestone dreamed of liberating women from oppression and ending sexual difference.[xix] As feminist science fiction ideas become reality, we need to rethink how we conceptualise gender both within and without science fiction.
Conclusion
The supposed tainting of science – and consequently science fiction – by male desire to assume a role deemed proper only to women might suggest a contamination so strong that women cannot or should not participate. As Russ points out in her comic essay ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’ (1985), predominantly male science fiction authors have populated science fiction with bizarre and sexist tropes, often about reproduction.[xx] Certainly these clichés have dissuaded many women from participating in reading and writing science fiction, although as Sarah Lefanu highlights,
There have always been women readers of science fiction […] it would be simplistic to assume that a lack of female characters in the science fiction of the time automatically excluded a female readership […] why and how we read books is a more complicated business.[xxi]
How and why we read books as feminist science fiction is a complicated business too, irreducible to a linear genealogy or a single precursor. Thomas Bredehoft provides an alternative origin story which places C. L. Moore’s ‘Shambleau’ (1933) as a foremother of the feminist science fiction genre. He argues, ‘the contesting of origin stories through their revision and re-narration […] is a central feature of feminist sf [science fiction] in general’.[xxii] Rather than construct a singular origin myth, we might instead produce multiple contesting narratives that speak to the shifting boundaries and definitions of science fiction.
A key problem with the mythology of Frankenstein as feminist science fiction’s origin text is the use of (heterosexual) reproduction as a metaphor to describe the development of the genre. Rather than viewing science fiction’s history as a hereditary line, complete with black sheep and honoured ancestors, we might opt for something messier. Such a diverse genre whose authors often strongly disagree on its purpose, qualities and limits requires an alternative vocabulary. Perhaps like Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, science fiction has no origin myth.[xxiii]
The significance of different feminist science fiction works may unexpectedly change as feminist theory and practice develops in new directions. Nowadays, claiming reproduction as a power only available or suitable for women is a problematic stance, particularly if as feminists we acknowledge trans men and women, and non-binary people, as their self-identified genders.
In 1975, Pamela Sargent argued that better, more thoughtful science fiction pays attention to the social and personal consequences of scientific developments or imagined alternative worlds.[xxiv] If we are to pay attention to the societal, medical and technological developments over the past fifty or so years, then maybe feminist science fiction will demand a different kind of criticism. Maybe there are other histories to tell.
[i] Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 39; Eric S. Rabkin, ‘Science Fiction Women Before Liberation’, in Future Females: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Marleen S. Barr (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981), pp. 9–25 (p. 9); Debra Benita Shaw, Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance, 2000, pp. 10–11; Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), p. 2; Robin Roberts, ‘Post-Modernism and Feminist Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 17.2 (1990), 136–52 (p. 139); Veronica Hollinger, ‘Contemporary Trends in Science Fiction Criticism, 1980-1999’, Science Fiction Studies, 26.2 (1999), 232–62 (pp. 235–36); Susan Gubar, ‘C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 7.1 (1980), 16–27 (p. 16); Robin Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 1; Jane Donawerth, Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. xiii; Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu, ‘Introduction’, in Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, ed. by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), pp. 1–8 (p. 3); Pamela Sargent, ‘Introduction’, in Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women, ed. by Pamela Sargent (New York, NY: Vintage, 1975), pp. xiii–lxiv (pp. xvi–xvii).
[ii] Lefanu, p. 3. Sargent, for example, mentions authors such as Rhoda Broughton who blur the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy. Sargent, pp. xvii–xviii.
[iii] See for example: John Quill, David Ketterer, and Charles Heber Clark, ‘The Women’s Millennium’, Science Fiction Studies, 15.1 (1988), 82–87 (p. 83).
[iv] Maurice Hindle, ‘Introduction’, in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. xi–l (p. xx).
[v] Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction, pp. 6–7.
[vi] Shaw, p. 3; Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination (London: Virago, 2011), pp. 1–8; Marleen Barr, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 11; Robin Roberts, ‘It’s Still Science Fiction: Strategies of Feminist Science Fiction Criticism’, Extrapolation1, 36.3 (1995), 184–97 (p. 193).
[vii] Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood’, Guardian, 29 August 2009 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/29/margaret-atwood-year-of-flood>.
[viii] Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York, NY: Antheneum, 1973).
[ix] Cranny-Francis, p. 39; Thomas A Bredehoft, ‘Origin Stories: Feminist Science Fiction and C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau”’, Science Fiction Studies, 24.3 (1997), 369–86 (p. 369).
[xix] Aarathi Prasad, ‘How Artificial Wombs Will Change Our Ideas of Gender, Family and Equality’, Guardian, 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/01/artificial-womb-gender-family-equality-lamb>; Shulasmith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 11.
[xx] Joanna Russ, ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’, in Dispatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, ed. by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), pp. 27–34. See also: Susan Wood, ‘Women and Science Fiction’, Algol/Starship, 16.1 (1978), 9–18.
[xxiii] Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81.
Cavendish, Margaret, The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. by Kate Lilley (London: Penguin, 1992)
Lucian of Samosata, True History, ed. by David Lear (Firestone Books, 2013)
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, ed. by Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 2003)
The Stepford Wives, dir. by Bryan Forbes (Columbia Pictures, 1975)
Secondary Literature
Aldiss, Brian W., and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York, NY: Antheneum, 1973)
Atwood, Margaret, In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination (London: Virago, 2011)
Barr, Marleen, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
Bredehoft, Thomas A, ‘Origin Stories: Feminist Science Fiction and C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau”’, Science Fiction Studies, 24 (1997), 369–86
Cranny-Francis, Anne, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990)
Donawerth, Jane, Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997)
Firestone, Shulasmith, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1972)
Green, Jen, and Sarah Lefanu, ‘Introduction’, in Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, ed. by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), pp. 1–8
Gubar, Susan, ‘C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies, 7 (1980), 16–27
Le Guin, Ursula K., ‘The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood’, The Guardian, 29 August 2009 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/29/margaret-atwood-year-of-flood>
Haraway, Donna, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81
Hindle, Maurice, ‘Introduction’, in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. xi–l
Lefanu, Sarah, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: The Women’s Press, 1988)
Prasad, Aarathi, ‘How Artificial Wombs Will Change Our Ideas of Gender, Family and Equality’, Guardian, 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/01/artificial-womb-gender-family-equality-lamb>
Quill, John, David Ketterer, and Charles Heber Clark, ‘The Women’s Millennium’, 1Science Fiction Studies, 15 (1988), 82–87
Rabkin, Eric S., ‘Science Fiction Women Before Liberation’, in Future Females: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Marleen S. Barr (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981), pp. 9–25
Raymond, Janice, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (London: Teacher’s College Press, 1994)
Roberts, Robin, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993)
———, ‘It’s Still Science Fiction: Strategies of Feminist Science Fiction Criticism’, Extrapolation1, 36 (1995), 184–97
Russ, Joanna, ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’, in Dispatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, ed. by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), pp. 27–34
Sargent, Pamela, ‘Introduction’, in Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women, ed. by Pamela Sargent (New York, NY: Vintage, 1975), pp. xiii–lxiv
Shaw, Debra Benita, Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance, 2000
Wood, Susan, ‘Women and Science Fiction’, Algol/Starship, 16 (1978), 9–18
Sabine Sharp is a second year PhD Candidate in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. Their research maps the emergence of the category ‘trans’ through feminist science fiction film and literature.
Originally published in Edge Effects on February 22, 2018
“It’s like they’re stuck in continuous mutation… making something new,” Natalie Portman’s character realizes in the new ecological thriller, Annihilation. If the film adaptation is anything like Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi novel of the same name, audiences will leave the theater wondering if the next squirrel or snail they spot is not what it seems but instead “something new,” something alien.
Drawn from his walks in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in southern Florida, VanderMeer’s Annihilation embeds an alien invasion in a kind of ecological Twilight Zone, where aliens appear not as friendly suburban neighbors but in the guise of outlandish plants and animals making their home in a “pristine” stretch of wilderness.
A biologist, anthropologist, surveyor, and psychologist are dispatched as an expedition team—the twelfth, they’re told—to study what government agencies refer to as Area X. At first glance, Area X seems like a few miles of uninhabited, unassuming coastline. The expedition’s members soon realize that though humans have left the area, that does not mean it is uninhabited. There are warblers, flickers, herons, cormorants, black ibises, banana spiders, damselflies, velvet ants, emerald beetles, tree frogs, fiddler crabs, wild boars, bears, coyotes, deer, raccoons, and fungi among the scrub grass, moss, pine and cypress trees, and salt marshes. (And that’s all in the first chapter.)
But there’s also something else. A boar with a strangely human face. Words on the side of a wall inexplicably made of fruiting bodies. A gastropod surrounded by a nimbus of whirling light.
Representing unfamiliar plants and animals as alien invaders is not the sole province of science fiction. Conservation biologists have long debated whether to resist or embrace the aliens who live among us. In an influential 1958 book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, Charles Elton described the movement of animals, plants, and other living things around the globe as a series of “ecological explosions” spurred by “invaders” like the European Starling. As environmental historian Libby Robin puts it: “Elton’s imaginative leap was to reconceptualise biota as invaders, to give them agency, and to construct them as a worthy enemy to be managed.” Deploying militaristic language and likening himself to a “war correspondent,” Elton outlined only three possible approaches to an invasive, alien species: “You can tackle them before they get in or while they are trying, so to speak, to pass through the guard—this is quarantine. You can destroy their first small bridgeheads—that is eradication. … Usually, if an invasion has got really going it can only be dealt with by keeping the numbers within bounds, that is by control.”
More recently, ecologists have come to terms with the idea that aliens may already live among us and may be here to stay. As nineteen ecologists argue in a co-authored 2011 Nature article, “Don’t judge species on their origins,” “increasingly, the practical value of the native-versus-alien species dichotomy in conservation is declining, and even becoming counterproductive.” They go on to suggest that “we must embrace the fact of ‘novel ecosystems’ and incorporate many alien species into management plans, rather than try to achieve the often impossible goal of eradicating them.” Though this idea of embracing novel ecosystems may seem “largely innocuous,” Paul Robbins and Sarah Moore point out that the intensity of the debates about what to do with alien species reveals the ongoing “anxiety, discomfort, conflict, and ambivalence experienced by research scientists in fields confronting ecological novelty in a quickly-changing world.”
“We were scientists, trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny.”
Annihilation both diagnoses this problem and models a solution in a one-two punch that shows just how useful the genre of science fiction can be. When first confronted with undeniably alien phenomena, the members of the expedition team turn to their disciplines and their training for answers: taking notes, “adding detail and nuance to the maps our superiors had given us,” examining the remains of nearby cabins, and “observing a tiny red-and-green tree frog.” Yet the biologist soon comes to believe that these collective attempts to “catalogue the biological reality” are forms of “misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making others invisible?” Though the biologist values her research, she also concludes that “sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscopes.”
Her approaches to the environments around her are at once intuitive and immersive as well as data-driven, which helps her better understand and adapt to the alien presences she begins to notice in the pristine wilderness of Area X. As the biologist explains, “we were scientists, trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny.” Between government-imposed secrecy and Area X’s unfamiliar flora and fauna, the expedition team is left to wonder if their tools and training can provide any answers at all.
The borders between us and the unknown only seem clear in a certain light. Boundaries only exist at the right scale. Zoom out, and humans share an ecosystem, a continent, a hemisphere, and a globe with all manner of extreme forms of life.
Academics are wondering this, too. A recent special issue of the journal Environmental Humanities, “Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien,” explores how the “extraterrestrial” now haunts unexpected disciplines like anthropology, philosophy, history, geography, and psychology, as well as fields like science and technology studies. The borders between us and the unknown only seem clear in a certain light. Boundaries only exist at the right scale. Zoom out, and humans share an ecosystem, a continent, a hemisphere, and a globe with all manner of extreme forms of life. Zoom in to the microscopic scale, and as Juan Francisco Salazar points out in his study of microbial geographies, we realize that our guts share a biome with the oceans and we are all hosts to an abundance of aliens, invisible to the eye.
This is where science fiction offers a roadmap to understanding and living with aliens and other unsettling forms of life. As the issue’s editors point out, any “theory of the universe includes poetic leaps; any scientific representation is based on some kind of artistic choice. But these leaps and choices typically remain unnoticed. They stay under the radar because we lack the appropriate tools to spot them.”
The boundary-pushing poetic leaps that make Annihilation such a thrilling read also make it a useful tool for those of us who are looking for new ways of living with neighboring nonhumans. If scientists need training in the uncanny, what better way than a crash course in science fiction? As Ursula Heise, Fredric Jameson, and other literary scholars suggest, by imagining alternate worlds and futures science fiction can “make readers see the present anew.” Science fiction can offer us a language to describe the uncanny that we discover and a model for living in an environment that offers more truths than can be measured by microscopes.
What if we were the invaders, even in our own home? What if invasion, contamination, and their companions, pristine and untouched, were inadequate words to explain what is happening to the world around us? What if trying to explain, measure, or define what phenomena move in and shape our world is a fundamentally fruitless exercise with our existing tools and epistemologies? What if language could be a plant, a missing husband an owl, a stretch of coastline a universe?
Laura Perry is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a graduate associate at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, and a member of the Edge Effects editorial board. Her research focuses on species and suburban development in twentieth-century American literature. She is currently a Mellon-Morgridge Graduate Fellow as well as a Public Humanities Exchange (HEX) Fellow. She also hosts Amplify, a weekly radio show on WSUM 91.7 FM Madison. Twitter. Contact.
A Craven is a floating island which, as some readers may know, is made up of debris and organic matter, largely held together by trees. Each Craven is home to about 200-600 Craveners, though there are some that house up to 5,000. The Craven Confederacy is made up of hundreds of thousands of floating islands dotting the Atlantic. Cravens breed fish, grow algae for ethanol, and harvest crops. They have an extensive trading network, being innovators in preserved foods, recycled microchips, and peer-to-peer wireless technology. The first Cravens were constructed—or rather, grown—about 300 years ago, in the first decades of the Climate Crisis. Named after an enigmatic figure referred to simply as ‘Craven’, it started as a politically-oriented, experimental farm on the Mains, close to what remained of New York City. It was then brought out to sea following a military crackdown on dissent. Since then, they have multiplied slowly, largely out of sight of global events. Today, while they may not rival the economic force of the Global Free Trade Company, or the military might of the Sino-Japanese, American, and Saudi empires, they represent a growing and significant power block in the world system.
And yet, for a first-time visitor, a Craven looks like a messy, unstructured place. There are barely any straight lines, nor does there seem to be much logic in where things are placed, or why. Plants grow all over, there isn’t too much coordination of who does what work, everything is incoherently cobbled together—not unlike a shantytown. In other words, there is no plan.
This was certainly my assessment when I first set foot on a Craven thirty years ago. I worked as an assistant on a trading skipper, dealing mostly in scavenged chips and rare metals. I had never grown my own vegetables, nor did I have any understanding of ecology—what Craveners refer to as ‘common knowledge.’
Trained as an engineer, I could only understand systems that approached order—inputs, outputs, scale, closed or open systems. My experience had told me the most productive industries were organized, clean, and depended on an economy of scale. What I saw on the island did not look like any of the models I had learned about, so I assumed Craveners knew very little about science, efficiency, or industrial design. Theirs was an undeveloped society, I thought, and their success over the past centuries has been largely accidental.
Despite my patronizing attitude, I found that, in business, Craveners were reliable, fair, and delivered quality products. So when I had saved up enough money to start my own skipping business I kept coming back. And as I got to deal with Craveners more I started seeing patterns. I got curious about what they were actually doing. Craveners aren’t very guarded, so I also learned to ask lots of questions.
This is how the conversation often went: I’d point at something, say, one of the many towers dotting one island, and they’d say, ‘That? It’s a pigeon tower.’ ‘What does it do?’ I’d ask. ‘The pigeons feed the soil.’ ‘They feed the soil?’ I’d ask, waiting for more explanation. The Cravener would pause, look at me, confused that this wasn’t self-explanatory. ‘Their dung has nitrogen and phosphorus, doesn’t it?’ they’d respond, ‘but that’s common knowledge,’ they’d add. I soon found that Craveners don’t really see what they are doing as complicated or requiring ‘expertise’. From their perspective, they aren’t doing anything special.
The difficulty of trying to describe Cravener production methods is that each Craven is so different. While many anthropologists have spent lifetimes living on a Craven, doing so does not provide a broad understanding of what techniques they use. Further, knowledge transfer is notoriously decentralized—they may host gatherings and conferences to exchange information, and there may be wikis on different technologies and practices, but there is no central repository, as far as I know at least, about all the practices and technologies that are actually in use. The problem is similar to that of being an Internet historian: you can’t know what is worth reading without some kind of wider knowledge of the Internet era; some theoretical framework by which to assess what is factual, what is useless, or what amounts to a conspiracy theory.
What’s more, Cravener production techniques don’t involve much prior planning. Many practices seem to require highly technical implementation and maintenance, an understanding of wider systems. And yet, construction seems to happen in a very hodge-podge manner, with no clear moment of decision-making. I have rarely witnessed a Cravener creating a model of what they wanted to build. Rather, Cravener infrastructure, with some exceptions, seems to be guided by a kind of vernacular ‘know-how’, instilled into a Cravener from the moment that they’re born.
For example, I’ll often see Cravener children touring the island with an adult, and they’ll stop by some kind of structure. The children will ask questions, and if the adult doesn’t know, they might ask someone working nearby. Children, even when young, might be asked to help build something—and so they learn how it works through practice. As they grow up, they engage in play where they build small versions of these technologies—the same way children on the Mains might build high-risers on the beach. When whole Cravens come together for a festival or a conference, children will travel with their parents to visit relatives and then learn about other Cravener practices. At these conferences, teenage Craveners are organized into teams and asked to come up with an invention, and those that come up with a creative design will be presented with an award. However, the models are not taught in a single ‘course’, the participants in the competitions base them on what they already know from a lifetime of experience. These experiences are not categorized into ‘fields’ but drawn from a kind of general understanding of ecology, design, or even their own society—necessary for knowing the extent to which a new technical practice can be reasonably adopted by their peers.
Of course, many Craveners do specialize as they get older, joining, for example, breeding and genetic modification labs, or spending years building and experimenting with new structures as part of what they call a ‘technical committee’. As many other researchers have documented, Craveners will also participate in a kind of ‘internal participatory ethnography’, where they move to another Craven known for a particular craft and learn from other specialists. And as goes without saying, their conferences can themselves be quite specialized, often focusing on a specific technology or even minutiae like the most ideal water dripping rate needed to grow tomatoes in an aquaponic system. But what they discuss at the conference is rarely implemented at scale or even adopted widely–and so the conferences cannot be seen as representative of Cravener means of production. They constitute more of a ‘best practices’ of what really happens ‘on the ground.’
Only repeated visits to multiple Cravens over a long time period, as well as multiple interviews of Craveners, can allow a researcher to deduce, from general visible patterns, the Cravener mode of production and the specific technologies that power it. I have been a Craven-approved merchant over three decades, which has allowed me to visit over 400 Cravens with a total of about 2,200 unique visits. I’ve also attended 43 Craven conferences. These experiences have provided me with valuable insight into Craven production processes, and the differences and similarities between Cravens. In fact, my research method can be seen as a kind of statistical ethnography, as my accumulated experience is somewhat representative of Cravener society as a whole.
In this book, I describe and catalogue the unique technologies that I believe represent the foundation of the Craven mode of production. I focus largely on specific techniques used in production that make up what Craveners call ‘island ecology’. Technologies can be seen as general ‘types’ that are somewhat isomorphic across Cravens. I hope that this book is useful for anyone who is interested in Craven society, or (even better) wants to start their own Craven society and is curious how they could do so. Further, I believe that understanding these technologies will help readers understand why Cravens have become so successful in a world dominated by insecurity, violence, and ecological collapse.
From a Cravener perspective, of course, ‘technologies’ barely exist. Tools, constructions, and techniques are embedded within their day-to-day lives, rituals, and even political system. They are, as such, indistinguishable from their society as a whole, in the same way that it is difficult to tell the difference between ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ in many other societies. For this reason, one might instead use the term ‘practices’.
Further, it is difficult to formalize these practices into a coherent field of study such as ecology, agriculture, engineering, or sociology. Following previous scholars in the field of Craven studies, I prefer to use the Craven term, ‘common knowledge’, connoting the scientific-social-ecological know-how that allows them to maintain their mode of production and has driven their success over time.
In any case, the reader should keep in mind that these practices are indistinguishable from Craven society as a whole—without their social norms, rituals, and political system, they would certainly not have come close to the kind of astonishing economic success that they enjoy today.
Of course, it’s impossible to write a book about all of Craven society, so I have chosen to focus on the technologies that drive their political economy. However, I hope that the reader will get a sense of how these technologies are integrated within an organic, but holistic, political system. Despite the seemingly disorganized nature of Craven production methods, underlying it is a coherent political system that ensures democratic, and open, economic participation.
As it turns out, what at first appeared to me to be an inefficient and unruly production method, with little centralized direction, is in fact a hyper-productive economic system that encourages constant innovation and experimentation. In other words, a society predicated on the natural abundance of the air, sun, water, and soil—rather than one that has regulated everyone into scarcity. Instead of an economy of scale, a political ecology of scale. The technologies highlighted in this book are an essential part of that ecology.
All photos by Aaron Vansintjan
Aaron Vansintjan is a co-editor at Uneven Earth and is currently pursuing a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. He writes about gentrification, food politics, environmental justice, and contemporary politics.
Most technocenters and settled asteroids of the inner verse have at one time or another been found to harbor this enigmatic parasite. First documented on the trash moons of the Antillean arc, it appears to propagate through the dispersal of microscopic spores, light enough to waft on interstellar currents and armored against the vacuums of deep space and the heat of the inner atmosphere.
The metal-molds are an overlooked group of pioneering bioforms, commonly found embedded on the non-motive components of robionic organisms. Similar to the lichens of Old Earth, they often form symbiotic bonds with air-borne algae or other bioforms, exchanging the one’s ability to photosynthesize with the other’s capacity for synthesizing caustic acids. Protomunculus appears to represent a divergence from the typically benign metal-mold clan due to its startling adaptability and potential for destructive growth.
Initial stages of infection by Protomunculus closely resemble those of other metal-molds: surficial growths characterized by circular discolouration, yellowish-green if the symbiont is of the Old Earth orders or reddish-violet if it originates from beyond the Promethean Divide. During this stage it can only be differentiated from the traditional metal-molds by its preference for colonizing the motive joints and hinges of robionic shells, especially those proximal to the great electrovenic channels of the system.
After a period of time, the length of which is dependent on resource availability and light, Protomunculus sheds its habit for horizontal growth and delves deeply into the robionic host, seeking out the functional heart of the organism. As it begins to tap the host’s electrovenic channels, associations with the external bioform are cut, and all visible signs of parasitism disappear. Detection at this phase is dependent on meticulous analysis of the suspected host’s energetic budget to seek out the most minute of functional anomalies. Infected organisms will display increasing divergence from programmatic tasks and a phenomenon known as ‘feedback static.’ Even at this stage, all but the most wary of systemic administration units will likely attribute the anomalies to overdue maintenance or expected obsolescence.
Long before these external signs become visible, Protomunculus will have crept along the electrovenic channels to whatever constitutes the host’s nexus of power, as the grain of pollen grows slowly downward toward the waiting ovary. Once embedded, the mold begins to subvert the operative principles of the organism, utilizing its own power source to erode and reform its physical components. Using whatever plastico-silicate or metallic materials might be available, Protomunculus begins to fashion and armor the spores that will bring about its next generation.
After a significant portion of the host has been subverted and transformed, the mold fully overrides the organism’s programming and issues its final commands. To facilitate the widest possible dispersal of its spores, the parasite directs its host into a position that will bring it into contact with a strong fluid current. Depending on the physical capabilities of the host’s robionic body, this final command may take the form of an injunction to launch itself into or past atmospheric rotation, to scale and cling to a starscraper, or even to plunge itself into a pelagic stream. Once proximity to the desired current is achieved, total dissolution of the host’s body occurs as Protomunculus sporulates, sending millions or perhaps billions of fragments of itself to replicate this process in new and fertile ground.
The nature of the protomunculean parasite is such that an infection can quickly spread throughout and overcome even the most well-defended of technocenters. Its arrival has necessitated the abandonment of entire stellar bodies, and catastrophes have followed its trail through the stars. If an infected robionic is discovered at any stage, universal mandate requires its immediate incineration. Regional guidelines often recommend the incineration or quarantine of any other robionics it may have been in contact with. The spores have proven difficult to isolate and destroy, but they are large enough to be apprehended by the standard regulation air filtration systems of domed cities.
Given its viral nature, most of the prospective cures developed for Protomunculus infections have resulted in even more virulent strains of the mold, so attempts to combat it have resorted largely to preventative measures. We recommend regular physical examinations for all robionics and the application of certain oil-gels that inhibit the initial growth of metal-molds. Luckily for the robionic community of inhabited stellar bodies, the incidence of Protomunculus is rare and erratic, as it tends to rapidly burn through potential hosts and then mysteriously subside. To aid in visual detection of Protomunculus, study the attached illustrations carefully. For questions, observations or more specific information about analysis and detection, contact your regional consul of RIDO, the Robionic Infectious Disease Office.
NOT FOR GENERAL DISTRIBUTION
Alex Greene grew up hoping to become a 19th century naturalist. Finding that this vocation has gone extinct, he has turned to field biology, environmental education, organic farming and anthropology to make a living. Foraging wild plants, watching birds and hiking in the wilderness are his ways of participating in the great mystery of being.
James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2009), to which four sequels have been announced, was generally praised for its cutting-edge special effects yet criticized for the simplistic narrative by both film reviewers and scholars. Sukhdev Sandhu, reviewer for The Telegraph, puts it effectively when he writes, “It’s an achievement to make 3D look as good as it does here, but that counts for little if the characters are all in 1D. The film is a triumph of effects over affect” (Dec 2009). It is a rather formulaic take on the histories of western colonialism and environmental destruction. The alien Na’vi on planet Pandora are meant to mimic the pre-industrial Native Americans, who worship the Goddess Eywa and live in harmony with their environment until the mechanized human colonizers arrive to extract “unobtanium” and obliterate everything in their way. The main protagonist Jake Sully joins the Na’vi and forms a romantic bond with the native princess Neytiri, and ultimately discards his paraplegic, ex-Marine, white body to become a non-white, feminine-coded, abled, environmentally attuned Na’vi body. The scenario rehearses two of the most powerful American frontier myths: the Pocahontas and Mohican stories, adapting them to the 21st century where they no longer function only “as an exercise in romantic regret, but to expiate guilt over the genocidal nation building” (Howe 2016, 125). The seeming postcolonialism and ecofeminism of Avatar can be read as a symptom of white guilt: one that reinforces the ultimate stereotype of a heroic white warrior leading through the justified violence the oppressed to freedom, which remains very problematic in terms of race, gender, ability, and the idealized version of nature.
The film remains a worthwhile cultural phenomenon to examine for its particular staging of post/modernity that underlies environmentalist politics.
Considering these controversial assumptions of the narrative, the massive box office success and the widespread fascination with the film’s CGI effects, as well as the announced four sequels in the upcoming years, is it worth revisiting Avatar and with what aim? I wish to suggest yes; the film remains a worthwhile cultural phenomenon to examine for its particular staging of post/modernity that underlies environmentalist politics. This has so far generated an interesting scholarly discussion to which I would like to contribute in this essay. Bruno Latour, well known for his view that the European modernity in the 17th century installed what he calls the Great Divide(s)–between nature and culture, self and other, human and nonhuman–surprisingly reads the film in a rather positive way (Latour 2010), although we could argue that Avatar continues to enact precisely these divides. More recently, ecocritical scholar Timothy Morton has argued that the film gestures towards non-binary postmodernity, but it is unable to actually take us there (Morton 2014). That is, the environmentalist message that celebrates the pure, organic, pre-technological Nature on Pandora is undermined at the level of the film medium, which glaringly speaks to us through the luminescent screen images its reliance on the highly advanced digital technology. In this paper I wish to build further on these scholarly readings of Avatar and, following Morton, argue that the film does not seem to take its own propositions seriously enough. It not only unconsciously undermines its ideology through the level of the medium, but also on the level on the narrative itself. Through a close reading of a dialogue from the film I will show that, if taken seriously from a postcolonial anthropological lens, the dialogue signals a decolonization of the hierarchical divide between western sciences and Indigenous knowledges, which the film overall remains unable to articulate.
For Latour, Avatar “is the first popular description of what happens when modernist humans meet Gaia. And it’s not pretty” (Latour 2010, 471). As he argues, since the 17th century nature has been understood as no longer spirited and actively interfering with human affairs, but in terms of passive objects to be demystified through scientific knowledge. All those living on the wrong side of the epistemological divide were considered irrational because they believed in a world animated by all sorts of entities rather than reducing materiality to the cause and effect relations. A model of mechanism was posited as a paradigmatic model, within which the Christian God was reinterpreted as a clock maker who had created the world and then left it to unfold by itself according to mechanical laws. (Carolyn Merchant in The Death Of Nature (1980) explicated this scientific model in detail, and showed has it was entangled with the histories of patriarchal colonialism and capitalism.) For Latour, this model can no longer be upheld (if it ever was) as it becomes ever more visible in the current age of climate change that nonhuman materiality has agency and that effects exceed their causes. Both humans and nonhumans are actants, and their agencies are much more evenly distributed, which means that we need to consider “the tricky question of animism anew” without the usual scorn that has been poured onto the concept: “Consider Lovelock, for instance, with his ‘absurd idea’ of the Earth as a quasi organism – or the Na’vis with their ‘prescientific’ connections to Eywa” (Latour, 2010, 481). Latour aligns James Lovelock’s Gaia theory of the Earth as a living super-organism, which in the past was criticized for being unscientific by the scientific community, and the animist beliefs of non-western Indigenous peoples as they are staged in Avatar. He suggests that both should be taken much more seriously by us “moderns”. In fact, in recent decades Lovelock’s theory has been revalued considerably in the environmentalist movement, while the indigenous models of sustainability have been increasingly explored in anthropological scholarship. Instead of constantly policing the epistemological border of what proper science and what pseudo or non-science is, it is necessary to look carefully into how well a certain model is assembled, how efficient of a “handle” to stage nature it is (Latour 2010, 483).
The film’s gesturing towards postmodernity crucially entails a gesturing towards decolonizing epistemology.
It seems that Latour casts Avatar in a rather positive light despite its clichéd narrative and very controversial take on colonialism. Bruce Clarke notes that the film resonates for Latour with his agenda of deconstructing the nature-culture divides and redistributing the worldly agencies in a “nonmodernist fashion” (Clarke 2014, 160), yet for Clarke, “At every level, Avatar is self-contradictory and wrapped up in its own paradoxes” (Ibid, 177). This really captures well the film’s modus operandi, which is, I suggest, that of failing to take seriously its own propositions. It is this ambiguity that enables us to interpret certain moments in the film as possibly questioning the Great Divides between western sciences and indigenous knowledges, while understanding the film on the whole as enforcing these divides by privileging the spiritual belief over the scientific-technological outlook. While the biology and neurology of the Pandoran/Gaian living system are shown to resonate well with the animist forest spirits, yet at the same time, the nature on Pandora is strangely purified from the contamination by capitalist technology. Morton approaches the ambiguity of Avatar by arguing that the narrative of the purification of Nature from modern technology fails at the level of film medium, which heavily relies on the advanced digital technology. For him, “What Avatar gestures toward, then, is a genuine ‘postmodernity,’ a historical moment after modernity,” where no extrication of the organic from the technological is possible, “without ever being able to tell us to go there, or even wanting with all its heart to push us there” (Morton 2014, 222). I wish to push Morton’s idea further and argue that the film’s gesturing towards postmodernity crucially entails a gesturing towards decolonizing epistemology: questioning the hierarchical divide between western sciences and indigenous knowledges, which unfolds at the level of the narrative. An intriguing dialogue along these lines develops between the Na’vi-friendly scientist Grace, played by the sci-fi heroine Sigourney Weaver, and the merciless corporate manager named Parker, played by Giovanni Ribisi:
Grace: Those trees were sacred to the Omaticaya in a way you can’t imagine.
Parker: You know what? You throw a stick in the air around here it falls on some sacred fern, for Christ’s sake!
Grace: I’m not talking about pagan voodoo here – I’m talking about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest.
Parker: Which is what exactly?
Grace: What we think we know is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora.
Parker: That’s a lot, I’m guessing.
Grace: That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network – a global network. And the Na’vi can access it – they can upload and download data – memories – at sites like the one you just destroyed.
What is at stake is not to rebrand non-western knowledges as scientific, but rather to make us think how and what discourses and practices, and not others, get to be authorized and legitimized as scientific in the first place.
The animist Na’vi view that trees are imbued with the spirit of Eywa is presented crucially as compatible with, and not opposed to, the biological and neurological constructions of synapses and neurons in living organisms. One way to understand Eywa is in terms of Gaia, or as Clarke suggests, in the neocybernetic terms of “a self-referential cognitive system producing self-maintaining regulatory dynamics without having to assume the agency or anima of a conscious system” (Clarke 2014, 162). This does not mean, however, that Grace’s aim is to simply translate the spiritual belief into the scientific idiom in order to legitimize it. Importantly, she respects both the animist and neurological worldviews, unlike Parker for whom the translation between the two is needed. Grace’s perspective encourages us to think how both models, each on its own terms, successfully stage materiality, and though for Clarke this “conveys the perennial Western muddle between science and spirituality, physics and metaphysics, energy and anima” (Ibid, 170), I suggest that it also gestures towards a decolonisation of knowledge. In the above quote the borders that police the temporality–primitive vs. modern–as well as seriousness–superstition vs. truth–of the two ways of knowing are put in question. Why would we not think of shamanic practices as scientific, or of the concept of the neuron as animist? What is at stake is not to rebrand non-western knowledges as scientific, but rather to make us think how and what discourses and practices, and not others, get to be authorized and legitimized as scientific in the first place. “Muddling” this border would mean to inhabit epistemologically the space which Gloria Anzaldúa terms “borderlands”, an undetermined and vague state created through the deconstruction of a historically enforced border (Anzaldua 1987, 3).
Recent postcolonial anthropological research in the Amazon region can take us further into decolonial directions. Jeremy Narby publishes in popular rather than academic media, but some of his insights can precisely shed more light on the quote above. (In comparison, Eduardo Kohn’s research of the Amazon in How Forests Think (2013) is more rigoruosly academic, but his conclusion to understand the Amazon forest spirits as semiotic actors resonates strongly with Narby’s view.) Based on his research with both Ashaninca shamans and biologists, he argues for a striking compatibility between the shamans’ and the biologists’ understanding of life. Intriguingly, he suggests that what the Amazonian shamans see in their hallucinogenic visions induced by plant brews, which is the images of giant fluorescent serpents, corresponds to what biologists see as the double helix structure of DNA through their instruments. A he puts it: “My hypothesis suggests that what scientists call DNA corresponds to the animate essences that shamans say communicate with them and animate all life forms” (Narby 1999, 132). As in Avatar, the spirits in the Amazon forest correspond to the scientific model of reality; the hallucinogenic plants are an equally good method to approach nature as the scientific instruments; and the shamans use their vision-induced knowledge to heal people same as the medical doctors use the knowledge of molecular biology. In the film, both the scientific and spiritual forms of knowledge are imagined to not only theorize life, but also construct it successfully on a practical level. While the human scientists use advanced biotechnology to construct avatar bodies, which are then operated through a psionic link with the genetically matching human minds, the Na’vi at the end of the film transport the mind of a human completely into his avatar body by using shamanic techniques. Such staging makes it hard to delineate science from non-science, or indeed faith from science, in the way that Narby argues: “…it is of utmost importance to respect the faith of others, no matter how strange, whether it is shamans who believe plants communicate or biologists who believe nature is inanimate” (Narby 1999, 145). Whether or not we subscribe to Narby’s conclusion that the visions of serpents and the DNA double helix correspond on the ontological level, what his approach foregrounds is that both shamans’ and biologists’ models of life are equally efficient handles to stage nature, and therefore should be equally respected.
Traditional ecological knowledge is based on collaboration rather than appropriation, spiritual interconnectedness rather than a taxonomic set of categories and facts.
Equal respect towards western and non-western epistemologies would mean to speak of what Grace Dillon terms “indigenous scientific literacies” (Dillon 2007), as the ways in which indigenous sustainable practices constitute indeed a Native science despite the lack of resemblance to taxonomic western knowledges. As she writes, traditional ecological knowledge is based on collaboration rather than appropriation, spiritual interconnectedness rather than a taxonomic set of categories and facts. In the contemporary context of climate change, indigenous scientific literacies seem to be finally “discovered” widely by the mainstream science, and Dillon sees precisely the mode of science fiction as a space in which this already has been, and can be productively engaged and developed further (Dillon 2016). Within this framework, Avatar both speaks and fails to speak of the indigenous scientific literacies. It gestures towards such understanding, yet overall it fails to engage this potential explicitly: it gestures towards postmodernity while not being able to extricate itself from the modernist divides. In Morton’s reading, the celebration of pre-technological Nature is unconsciously undermined at the level of the vibrant, computer-generated screen imagery: “The very attempt to force viewers to accept an ecological view of interconnectedness results in pushing humans to accept the proximity of a more-than-human-world of uncanny strangers” (Morton 2014, 221). Morton’s uncanny strangers are the glowing, weird creatures and the immersive environment on the screen, which cannot but not reveal the technology that made them possible. But if this is so, these luminescent uncanny strangers also unconsciously reveal to us and embody the hallucinatory method that shamans use to communicate with and gain knowledge from their plant teachers. As we, the film’s audience, immerse ourselves in the astonishing living world of the screen, are we not “hallucinating” about ecological knowledge? I suggest that the gesture towards postmodernity that Morton detects in the film crucially entails a gesture towards decolonising epistemologies, yet this move fails to be articulated explicitly. What the announced sequels make of decolonising the epistemological borders is to be seen, but so far the historical understanding of post/modernity in Avatar has generated an important scholarly discussion to which this essay contributes.
Bibliography
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company.
Avatar. 2009. Directed by James Cameron. Los Angeles: Lightstorm Entertainment.
Clarke, Bruce. 2014. Neocybernetics and Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dillon, Grace L. 2007. “Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Nalo Hopkinson’s Ceremonial Worlds.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 18, No. 1 (69): 23-41.
Dillon, Grace L. 2016. “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, Bimaashi Biidaas Mose, Flying and Walking towards You.” Extrapolation, Vol. 57, Issue 1-2: 1-6.
Howe, Andrew. 2016. “The Post-9/11 Mohican: Avatar and the Transformation of the ‘Manifest Apology’.” In The New Western: Critical Essays on the Genre since 9/11, edited by Scott F. Sttodart, 116-136. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Klassen, Chris. 2013. “Becoming the ‘Noble Savage’: Nature Religion and the ‘Other’ in Avatar.“ In Avatar and Nature Spirituality, edited by Bron Taylor, 143-160. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2010. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” New Literary History, Vol. 41, No. 3: 471-490.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How To Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Morton, Timothy. 2014. “Avatar, Ecology, Thought.” In Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, 206-225. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Narby, Jeremy. 1999. The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Narby, Jeremy. 2005. Intelligence in Nature: an Inquiry into Knowledge. New York: The Penguin Group.
Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2009. “Avatar, full review.” The Telegraph.
Fani Cettl holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the Central European University in Budapest. Her fields of interest are science fiction, Gothic fiction, science and literature, biopolitical theory and posthumanism.
Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: things you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental and social justice, cities, science fiction, current events, and political theory.
We’ll try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
February is the shortest month, but holy crap we do have a lot of cool links for you. This month, we cover some new research about the limits of the good life, the impact of companies like AirBnB and Amazon on our cities, the changing Latin American politics, and the importance of Indigenous ways of seeing the world. The work of Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson has also triggered a new series of discussions on the importance of science and its links to colonialism and racism. In the sci-fi department, we’ve got a whole new slew of fiction for you, analysis from writers like China Miéville and Kim Stanley Robinson, and a feature on black science-fiction writers.
Uneven Earth updates
La Barceloneta’s Struggle Against (Environmental) Gentrification | Link
“A city-wide urban struggle that evolved in defense of the needs and rights of residents over capital and profit.”
The Transition: towards a psycho-social history | Link
“The facts revealed in the historical record are clear: most people were terrified of their neighbours.”
“After the Division, Avon split from Greater Thames and declared a matriarchy”
You might’ve missed…
Turns out that carbon capture is a pipe dream. Not many know that the fine print of the Paris Treaty relied on a dirty little secret: the advent of carbon capture technology. But it turns out that this is a pipe dream. The unavoidable fact is, we just have to make less stuff, burn less oil, and grow more trees. Read the stories from Wired, The Guardian, and the original report from EASAC.
You may have heard of Route 66, “the main street of America”, but Highway BR-163 in Brazil may be just as epic. This beautiful photo essay about this single highway tells the story of the complex political ecology of rainforest deforestation.
The Samarco dam collapse in 2015 was Brazil’s worst environmental disaster. What’s happened since, and who’s to blame? This investigative piece gives us the update.
Is it possible for everyone to live well? This study mapped indicators of well-being along with every country’s environmental impact. Turns out most don’t make the cut, and Vietnam comes closest to balancing the good life and environmental impacts. Though these numbers just tell part of the story, the study has had international impact, starting a much-needed discussion on what it means to live well today.
It’s behind the scenes, as always, but new rounds of trade negotiations are happening and they will affect the world for generations to come. Here’s an article dishing it out about the CEPA trade deal (EU-Indonesia), a perspective from Kenya by Justus Lavi Mwololo, a representative of small farmers, and an explainer about how the new NAFTA negotiations affect Mexican workers.
We’re over one month into Turkey’s invasion of the Kurdish canton Afrin in Syria, and since then, there’s been an international outcry. This piece in Jacobin lays out the stakes behind the attack, here’s an op-ed by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in the Wall Street Journal, another opinion piece by Rahila Gupta on CNN’s website, and a piece by David Graeber asking why world leaders are backing Turkey’s invasion. And here’s a piece on the ecological initiatives happening right now in Rojava.
Here’s a letter from Evin Jiyan Kisanak, the daughter of Gultan Kisanak, telling the story of the Kurdish political movement in Turkey and their oppression: “My mom, who still has traces on her body from the torture she suffered, always sees light in the face of profound despair. Today she is in prison again, but her belief in peace and equality is unrelenting. Her will is unyielding.”
In the face of our climate crisis, a group of five activists known asthe Valve Turners decided not to wait for the law to catch up and took matters into their own hands. This is a story on their direct action.
A striking piece in New York Magazine linking loneliness and the opioid epidemic: “This nation pioneered modern life. Now epic numbers of Americans are killing themselves with opioids to escape it.”
Another photo essay, this time an intricate story about industrial farming in California, the migrant workers who toil the fields and processing plants, and how it intersects with climate change.
New politics
Introducing vTaiwan: Citizens are pioneering new public participation methods through online civic involvement. They’ve become so successful that the government has been forced to listen.
What happened in Catalonia? This article explores how the roots of the independence movement was in based in the fight for neighborhood, not nationhood—and this is what most outside observers don’t seem to get.
Socialist organizing was never just about striking in the workplace. This article explores the vibrant dance halls, social clubs, Sunday schools, and film screenings of socialist movements, and why they declined starting in the 1950s. Today, as young people are once again becoming interested in socialism, they can stand to learn a lot from the block-by-block initiatives of the past.
Environmentalists are often caricatured as hippy-dippy young people, removed from common people’s interests. In this beautiful photo essay, we’re guided through the diversity of people resisting fracking in one village in North England.
Indigenous activism is seeing a resurgence, and, finally, growing interest amongst non-Indigenous and settler communities. What can the white left learn from Indigenous movements, and how can it build better alliances? This article explores what decolonization would mean in today’s context.
What’s wrong with the financial system? If you ask a banker or a politician, their ignorance of how money works, and how debt powers the whole system, will become immediately apparent. The organization Positive Money has been putting a lot of work into battling misconceptions and putting forward alternatives. They recently came out with a report on how we can escape the growth dependency that our money system forces us into. Here’s a summary of the report in The Independent.
The local initiatives happening around the world can be a bit overwhelming. How can we think of them all together, understand them as part of one big movement? In this report, titled Libertarian Municipalism, Networked Cities as Resilient Platforms for Post-Capitalist Transition, Kevin Carson highlights the diverse movements in cities globally and the theories that can help us understand them.
Have you heard of Cooperation Jackson? It’s a worker-owned cooperative in Jackson, Mississippi, but so much more. Through their efforts, they’ve successfully kick-started a movement led by black folks that eventually took over city hall. This video explains what’s going on and why it’s so important.
The new housing rights movements in the US have the real estate industry running scared. The Nation reports.
Have you heard of the Preston model? It’s helping to start a new conversation about the role of local government in locally-driven economic revitalization and transforming ownership towards democratic alternatives.
A new series was launched in the Guardian, ‘The alternatives’, in which Aditya Chakrabortty looks at ways to make the economy work for everyone.
Jason Hickel on why, by removing the walls that separate the causes and consequences of climate change, we can encourage constructive action.
“This is real politics. It’s personal. It’s a lived experience that you are a part of and implicated in, whether you had asked to be or not.” The staff strikes at Cambridge inspired Alice Hawkins to reflect on political engagement.
Where we’re at: analysis
Different perspectives on human history, the Anthropocene, and climate change
David Graeber and David Wengrow rethink world history as we know it: contrary to the popular narrative which conflates the origin of social inequality with the agricultural revolution, egalitarian cities and regional confederacies are historically quite commonplace, and inequalities first emerged within families and households (it’s worth mentioning that feminist scholars and other marginal voices have worked on stories of micro-scale inequalities for a long time). In an interview from 2016, Nancy Fraser discusses how the work involved in social reproduction is severely undervalued and taken for granted as ‘gifts’ in capitalist societies. This article highlights the need for thought on the Anthropocene to include African perspectives and scholarship, and a recent World Bank report provides new evidence of the massive ongoing extraction of the continent’s wealth by the rest of the word.
The fact that young people are opting out of having children because of climate change is an urgent call for action, and so is the alarming research on how it is worsening public health problems. During these times of crisis we’re facing, art can help us process what’s going on, intellectually and emotionally.
An analysis of Latin American politics.Against the backdrop of state and gang violence, some of Latin America’s most affected communities have taken radical measures to defend themselves and build new social counter-powers from below. Arturo Escobar discusses post-development and the fight for justice and pluralism in Latin America. “As inequality and environmental degradation worsen, the search is on not only for alternative development models but also for alternatives to development itself.” Elsewhere, Pablo Solón discusses the cosmovisions emerging from Latin America’s Indigenous movements, and Miriam Lang and Edgardo Lander talk about the slow demise of Latin America’s “pink tide”.
Just think about it…
“This exploitation by powerful men of women and girls in the most abject of circumstances has been misleadingly framed broadly in terms of “sex work” and “sex parties” in dominant narratives in the Western press.” Some good points and context on the Oxfam scandal and its aftermath.
A thought-provoking read from 2015 on the complex history and effects of humanitarian appeals.
A history of gun manufacturing and colonization, and the resulting underdevelopment it led to.
The logic of consumerism has come to infect what we mean by gentrification. “The poor are still gentrification’s victims, but in this new meaning, the harm is not rent increases and displacement — it’s something psychic, a theft of pride.” When ‘Gentrification’ isn’t about housing.
Technology and the new economy
The capitalist work ethic and the fear of leisure
The conversation about how human work is impacted by new forms of industrial technology continues. Here is a podcast from the Guardianwhich introduces different ideas about alternatives to work as we know it.
As Silicon Valley entrepreneurs turn “the end of work” and basic income into their new hobbyhorses, one article instead suggests a new public sector to guarantee both jobs and leisure time. Another article says “the end of work” is a sham—since new technologies in industrial production are driven by controlling labour and not liberating it. Others focus on a critique of work: on the capitalist work ethic which makes people too busy to think and (conveniently for capital) to be engaged in politics; on working less as a solution to everything and the long history of elites fearing the leisure time of the poor; and on how Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers can help industrial societies rethink work.
For a historical perspective on the discussion and on different ways of looking at new technologies, Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 essay on Luddism is a must-read.
This past month, David Wachsmuth and his team at McGill University have come out with a hard-hitting new study on the impact of AirBnB on rents, and the way that it drives disruption in our cities. Here’s the report itself, here’s a feature in New York Magazine, and another at The Atlantic.
What Amazon does to poor cities: The debate over Amazon’s new headquarters obscures the company’s rapid expansion of warehouses in low-income areas.
Is energy efficiency a good thing? Not especially. This feature in The Tyee takes us through some of the thinkers and researchers like Jacques Ellul, Stanley Jevons, and Elizabeth Shove on the problems with efficiency in an economy that just keeps growing.
What are “Western values”, really? Peter Harrison argues that the potential of a Western tradition lies “in the preservation of a rich and varied past that can continue to serve as on ongoing challenge to the priorities and “values” of the present.”
Part of the Zapatistas’ project of resisting indigenous genocide, capitalism, and political repression is their struggle to decolonize knowledge. This is an article on the discussions between Zapatistas and leading left-wing scientists during the second iteration of the ConCiencias conference in December 2017.
Indigenous knowledge is finally being recognized as a valuable source of information by Western archaeologists, ecologists, biologists, climatologists and others.
Even so, the relationship between traditional ecological knowledge and Western science remains problematic.
Massimo Pigliucci tackles scientism: “when scientistic thinkers pretend that any human activity that has to do with reasoning about facts is “science” they are attempting a bold move of naked cultural colonization, defining everything else either out of existence or into irrelevance.”
“Current environmental policy textbooks are all stuck in a liberal narrative of environmental progress through political consent.” Melanie DuPuis elaborates on the concepts that are missing from this narrative.
Race science—that we can prove the superiority of one race over another through science—is rearing its ugly head again, with Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker playing some unwelcome roles. But as Gavin Evans shows in this Guardian article, it’s still as bogus as ever.
“The utopia of togetherness is a lie. Environmental justice means acknowledging that there is no whole earth, no ‘we’, without a ‘them’. That we are not all in this together… There is hope. But for it to be real, and barbed, and tempered into a weapon, we cannot just default to it. We have to test it, subject it to the strain of appropriate near-despair. We need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can’t afford.”
Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation has been turned into eco-thriller movie, and people are pretty stoked. For Laura Perry, it “offers a roadmap to understanding and living with aliens and other unsettling forms of life”. And there’s a feature in Macleans on Jeff VanderMeer and his “new weird”.
The future is now? Five science fiction writers speculate on what science fiction can do when the present seems more and more like a science fiction story. On the genre as social critique, an ethics of science, and a place to consider questions of meaning and value.
An interview with climate fiction and utopian science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson on the roles of science, fiction, and science fiction today, the limits of tech-only solutions to environmental problems, and sci-fi as the realism of our time.
And, speaking of reality merging with science fiction: Silicon Valley’s vision of a future of oligarchical “smart cities” could be a dystopian story by Aldous Huxley.
In The progress of this storm, Andreas Malm both criticizes the increasingly popular environmentalist idea of the “death of nature” and imagines political change through an ecologically class-conscious popular movement. This interview covers the latter point and this review covers both.
A review of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper at Jacobin.
“Most resistance does not speak its name”: James C. Scott, author of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, talks about his work.
“How will we have enough resources to support those people sustainably and equitably? Should we develop new technologies to respond to those challenges? Or should we focus instead on trying to limit growth and develop more of a harmony with the nature around us?” Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet is a testimonial to the art of the possible.
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[…] The neighbour then is a lens through which to view this strange and doubly petrified society. As reported by Wei Chen in his magisterial social history of the Channel Earthquake, many victims of the disaster spoke to their neighbours for the first time on that fateful day. The mental ill-health, the impossibility of freedom, the denial of self-management encoded in this chosen isolation is so clear to us now, seems so literally insane, that we must remind ourselves to reach for a position of empathy. This was a world struggling with institutions entirely unsuited to large, complex societies. The damage from these poorly-adapted institutions reached into the human mind itself. Mental ill-health was the norm, and extended well beyond the high rate of diagnosis.
The subject of this chapter is truly difficult to grasp for the student of this period, but the facts revealed in the historical record are clear: most people were terrified of their neighbours. This must be qualified, for it is also true that many people might chat with their neighbour over the garden fence (examples of such boundary demarcation artefacts can be found in historical theme parks around the Western European Isles, and are still in use in parts of East Anglia afflicted by wind and conservatism). However, such informal contact rarely went further. Not one in a hundred engaged in any sort of joint project with their neighbour. Precisely what people were terrified of was working with their neighbour, being with their neighbour in any sustained way. What is more, we must reach further into the alien historical consciousness and admit that this fear was not entirely unfounded.
Such a bold statement requires justification, for in our era we see it as common sense that control over our environment requires the ability to work with our neighbour. Yet the entire notion and practice of liberation as bound up with a convivial working-together had not yet been born, stymied as it was by the economic structures of society and by the corresponding culture of isolation. The status quo was such that the fear of working with others could be justified by the lack of experience in working with others. Thus we must approach at the same time both the absurdity of the fear in which people lived, and the unavoidable logic underlying the frightened state of the early twenty-first century mind.
Firstly we must understand this state of mind as self-reinforcing: the en-cultured isolation created the fear, the fear created the isolation. ‘Common sense’ prior to the Transition stated that one’s neighbours were selfish, grasping and controlling, that their win would be your loss. Without getting to know one’s neighbour, it was difficult to challenge this ‘common sense’. It would take a disaster greater than the Channel Earthquake to escape this simple yet steely trap.
It is also important to understand that if one did accidentally get to know one’s neighbour, it was likely that one’s misanthropic view of them would merely be confirmed. Accounts of meetings of the time are full of tales of how the rare attempts at neighbourly working-together would break down in outbursts of anger, irresolvable feuds, how one or two people would dominate the debates, while others would say nothing, how frequently they were abandoned in frustration. The curious thing about the domination by particular individuals—one of the most common complaints—is that it could only happen because people allowed it. The dominance/subservience complex of the time will be the subject of several chapters in its own right, its undoing being of vital importance in the Transition. Here we will simply note that, being created both by forced education and the workplace, this complex was almost ubiquitous, and as a result it was almost impossible for any person to view another as truly an equal. This was the insoluble labyrinth within which the trap of fearing the neighbour lay.
This hints at another self-reinforcing problem the culture had created: isolation from the neighbour was actually debilitating to the ability to work together. Understanding this is key if the contemporary mind is to grasp why the only means of gaining control of one’s life—to meet and work together with others—was so consistently rejected prior to the Transition. It is true that the general fear of the neighbour was very much strengthened by specific prejudices: racism, sexism, phobia of the poor and so on. Yet these factors are often exaggerated in popular histories, in part because they strike us as so foolish. In reality, even given an entirely homogeneous neighbourhood, most people still understood neither the value of escaping the isolation-fear trap, nor the paths out of it that appear so clear to ourselves.
In one sense, the reason people could not work together is transparently obvious: they had not been trained in how to work together. It would take many decades to understand that meeting together required training, that it should start when young and never stop. Over time schooling came to be understood as it is today: as preparation for working together and making decisions together. The key to the puzzlingly long evasion of this—to us—self-evidently reasonable path lies partly in the fact that it was never overtly rejected: the average mind of the era simply shied away from the very thought of working with the neighbour. Its entire training and sense of self pointed in the opposite direction. ’Freedom’ consisted of doing as one wished, and the contradictions inherent in billions of individuals doing as they wished were glossed over using the trite notion of ‘rights’, and never mind that people would commonly give a hundred different versions of what they considered their rights to be.
To understand why it was not clear to the pre-Transition mind that freedom also required other people, we must delve further into the fears that haunted it. Chats over the garden fence notwithstanding, the fear of the neighbour imbued the very culture in which people lived. As already mentioned, one aspect of the terror concerned the lived practicalities of working together with others. The meeting itself was regarded with horror. It consumed time better spent on one’s own pursuits. It spoke of boredom, of poorly managed debates between battling egos. Above all one would have tolerate the people one had constructed one’s atomised life specifically in order to avoid. Difference, often lauded in word, was usually felt as an onerous burden.
And it is in discussing meetings of the time that we can finally understand why some of this fear was justified. In the absence of training, meetings truly could be an odious experience. One must imagine a meeting as a convergence of loneliness, fear, competitiveness, dominance/subservience, mental ill-health, and ignorance. To create a sense of the very genuine tedium and dysfunctionality this could create, we can try to imagine a group of deeply traumatised people entering a room with relative strangers and attempting to get all their emotional needs met in that space, within a few hours.
We have not yet touched upon another aspect of the everyday terror: the fear of being subsumed into a mass. This was a learned fear, in part deliberately taught, in part inculcated in the institutions of forced education, where it was a very real danger. To examine the extent of this fear, I put it to you that a reader from the early twenty-first century, learning that we no longer have fences between houses, would immediately leap to the conclusion that we instead have between our homes a sort of undifferentiated parkland without boundaries. To the damaged mind of the time, the simple expedient of separately controlled plots, each with an individual character, yet open on all sides to allow entry by agreement, simply would not have occurred. As a result neighbours could not even walk directly between homes when visiting neighbours on streets backing onto theirs. To remove the fence would be to court the total loss of one’s personality.
The true depths of the deleterious effects of the terror of the neighbour can only be understood through a psychological lens. Lack of self-respect is a corollary of seeing others as unequal, for one cannot help but become obsessed with the inequalities and hierarchies within one’s own self. It is this failure of valuing of the self—and the twisted conception of the self as fully autonomous—that did so much to inhibit the Transition. Consider: if two members of a household had such different visions for their garden that they struggled to work together, at no point would either of them (or their neighbours) have considered that one of them might instead work on a neighbour’s plot, with someone whose vision they did share. It’s not that this would have been considered and rejected. The historical record shows that it could not be conceptualised. The constant measurement of one’s neighbour and oneself within a framework of competition and inequality ensured that people could not reach out to each other. The fences were strongest in the mind.
[…]
Jake Stanning is a public sector worker, occasional journalist and constant blogger. His interests are trees and radical politics, which sometimes converge in thinking about commons. He is currently helping to launch London Renters Union.
“Encyclopedia of the Mad Gardener” takes place in a fictional future where the equatorial line has thickened to become a zone, forcing mass migrations to the ends of the planet. This equatorial zone is the dampscape, where things are irremediably hybrid and contaminated (human/nonhuman, virtual/real, organic/inorganic) and the boundary-edges of solids are fuzzy, mushy, and moist. The zone undecipherable of the equator stands in contrast to the Garden, which is an inhabitable heterotopia, a site of purification, albeit precarious. Desperate for resources in this hollowed-out planet, the Department’s priority is to create a new classification system to determine ‘pure rubbish’, elements from which no further value can be extracted. The narrative focus is on “this Clarice”, who is tasked to draft this taxonomy, but reaches a point of saturation where she herself melts into the humid dampscape.
This piece was developed in a writing workshop, Post Super Future Asia, organized by Jason Wee, founder of Grey Projects in Singapore, and Esther Lu, director of Taiwan Contemporary Art Centre.
.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT2
Things that provide humans with energy
Things that provide humans with energy that are not edible
Construction materials with a five-year life-span
Construction materials with a ten-year life-span
Organic matter
Inert matter
Plastics with origins in inorganic compounds
Plastics with origins in organometallic compounds
Plastics with origins in organic compounds
Solids that look like solids
Solids that look like solids but are actually
Gases
Bio-aggregates
Things with bio-traces
Ambivalent things that could be considered human with further research
Sluices and foams
Databytes
Incomprehensible databytes
Things that appear to be useful (but are not)
Things that appear to be useless (but are not)
Things that are very useful
Things that are very useless
Etcetera.
They need to hear its airless breathing, ozone skin and metal spines heaving in and out.
Words weigh on this Clarice with their inclusions and exclusions, non-sequiturs and false dichotomies, mistakes lodge themselves into their windpipe, air thinning out. Walking out into the labyrinth has turned into a nightly habit. They need to hear its airless breathing, ozone skin and metal spines heaving in and out. Under the genteel face of the pink moon, the orchids appear to droop slightly, providing no compensation. They are no longer the verdant and beautiful, immortal stalks standing erect and sitting out of time. Only the sweet smell of smouldering plastic and aircon refrigerant, perhaps, already leaking through the pores of the triple-layered glass.
They feel the smells seep into their nasal channels, dioxins boiled under the pink moon, flooding neural pathways, gases slowly encrusting, lining the PVC walls of veins and arteries.[1] This Clarice would then become rock, an eternal orchid.
Other projects were lighter, more definite, like the implementation of picture-windows onto every edge of the garden, the first of many ingenious contributions by this Clarice for the Department. The message of the picture-windows were simple: lookat what’soutsideandlookatyourself. The outside would be burnished into the day-to-day lives of the garden’s inhabitants, instilling gratitude, and more importantly, keeping the outside within a frame, as an image, an undesirable horizon, to be viewed from a comfortable distance.[2]
.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT1
Construction materials
Plastics/Non-Plastics
Solid/Liquid/Gas
Metals
Organic compounds/Inorganic compounds
Biomatter
Vibrant/Inert matter
Databytes
Pure Rubbish
Et cetera
This project was like slime, neither fluid nor solid, categories sliding past one another, sticking and mixing like weekday adulterers under warm neon. These were words for contaminated things and the boundaries drawn drew no blood. From past experiences, the Department’s campaigns with compounding, hyphenation and other terminological transplants were unviable options. Surgical as they were, these words quickly dissolved into obsolescence.
The Department, tired from the Babel-like confusion in the administration of the tropics, placed the renovation of existing classification systems as its top priority.
Et cetera was the other problem. The problem was equatorial, a line thickened from a hairline to a stroke to a wet stain: zone undecipherable. Three planets and a fraction already exhausted, causing in a mass migration from the maladies and mercurial weather of the yawning tropics. The Department, tired from the Babel-like confusion in the administration of the tropics, placed the renovation of existing classification systems as its top priority. The most urgent was to delimit pure rubbish, waste for which no value could be extracted. But this Clarice began from nowhere, the agglutinating mush offering neither entry nor exit, fleeing from definition, by definition, this Clarice could not dissect and examine its pieces.[3] It was an admission of defeat.
.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT3
Things that belong to the Department
Things with tentacles
…
This evening that Clarice, letting their feet navigate the sinews of the labyrinth, find themselves in another pavilion. One could tell that not many have visited the Pavilion of Benevolent Knowledge, with its carbonfibre seats splintered and frayed, the onceluminescent orange of its pillars now off-colour, browned by the moon.[4] Cloaks of dust settled on the miniaturized Banyan. The eyes direct themselves, contouring along the tangents and angles of the pavilion, all lines leading towards the picture window. Towards the outside, an anachronistic dampscape, wetland and swamp. Perhaps from the affliction of the wandering mind, in this sweltering evening, the glass surface of the window saturates itself, as though looking back at this Clarice were the lace of hairline cracks, the undulating light that breaks apart, dappled and dappling layers of dust, rainwater stains, and their reflection onto the uneven glass coming together and torn asunder, one of thousand other countenances sunken into the mush, tangled with gossamer plastic and sewer-lalang floating in deadwater, rafflesian rot blooming with silicon-sand particles of circuitboard, eroded, haunted by the great drift of spectral vibrations from databytes, undeletable. What remains of wet banana leaves, crushed, a halo of flies starving for polyethylene.[5]
.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT3
Things that belong to the Department
Tentacled Ones
Slimes and other aggregates
Pdf. documents
Those that look more human with your eyes squinted
Unnamed names
Et cetera
[1] “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Karl Marx, ManifestooftheCommunistParty (1848)
[2] “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).” Michel Foucault, OfOtherSpaces:UtopiasandHeterotopia, 1967
[3] “The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitolocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.” Donna Haraway, StayingwiththeTrouble, 2016
[4] “I leave to the various futures (not at all) my garden of forking paths.” Ts’ui Pen quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941
[5] “What matters is through this daily gesture I confirm the need to separate myself from a part of what was once mine, the slough of chrysalis or squeezed lemon of living, so that its substance might remain, so that tomorrow I can identify completely (without residues) with what I am and have. Only by throwing something away can I be sure that something of myself has not been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future.” Italo Calvino, La Poubelle Agréée, 1977
Marcus Yee is an artist and writer working at the intersections of waste cultures, infrastructure, and new materialism. He recently presented his first solo exhibition,Altars for Four Silly Planets in soft/WALL/studs, Singapore.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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In the not-so-distant future, when Artificial Intelligence controls almost all facets of human life, Maleika begins to question her relationship with one of the only friends she’s ever known. She is faced with an ethical dilemma between her professional work as a dream collector and her newfound discovery about the implications of that work. In this, the first chapter of a longer story called The collector, the role of creativity, AI, consciousness, and dreams are explored. Characters are robots and humans. AI, through its attempts to understand humanity, is slowly leaching our creativity. In so doing, the earth itself is being leached of its lushness and its green. This story is inspired by my own questioning of the growing technological influences over our lives, and how seemingly progressive forms of technology like AI may end up stripping us of that which makes us truly human.
In the dream pull, I’m only sense. No logic. No boundaries. I was a child the first time it happened. My mother thought I was sleepwalking. She followed as I walked barefoot out of the flat, along the streets, and into the forest. She called to me, “Maleika, Maleika darling, where are you going?”
“I am going to listen,” I said automatically.
“Listen to who?” she asked.
“I don’t know her.”
Waking up to all of the sounds I’m used to through my window: the jarring screech of crashers, the high-pitched gliders, I feel alienated. There’s a hollow in my stomach, and it feels like it’ll carry me up into space. The city feels unfamiliar again today.
Dematra’s my contact. She reels me in when I’m too far into a pull. She sleeps on my cream-coloured living room slat. Her eyes are more beautiful closed. She opens them, “How’d you sleep bumblebee?” She asks.
“Like always. In one side out the other.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Dematra’s my inspiration. She’s perpetually on. In the aluminum light, she’s charcoal, skin soft as shadow. None of the turquoise hints I love so much but her glowing eyes are always the same bright, unflinching enigma. She moves the small sphere over me. It detects whether or not I still have content.
“Clean!” she says giggling. “Good thing we don’t have to give bio samples!” Both of us remembering last night’s substance. Contacts aren’t scanned because they can’t collect. They’re just our anchors. They bring us back when we go too far.
On the glider, I breathe in deep and slow feeling the familiar and grounding rumble through my body. Grey flits by. Endless grey-ness. Green’s become more of a concept. I look at my reflection in the bus window. Those purple hues from my mom. She used to call me her little amethyst.
“She used to, she used to…”
The Agency called and they think they’ve found a pull. Time to check it out. I step off the glider in front of what used to be a factory for personnel vehicles. I can already see her past the rusting fence, sitting on the bench, napping. Usually The Agency’s pulls are reliable. The closer I get, the more I feel.
Loud wind rushes around a distant cliff. The beginning of a moan, a woman’s moan? … There she is in the distance running toward me with her arms outstretched. No. She’s pointing at something. There’s something behind me. I turn to look and suddenly I’m falling. I hit ground. I’m winded but I can feel long grass in my grip as I dig my fingers into the earth. I can’t breathe. Something strangling me, ropes around my throat, vines, I can’t tell. It hurts.
“Maleika! Maleika!!” Dematra made it. Her touch pulled me out. “It’s lucky I found you, bumblebee!”
I’m panting, “Where am I?”
“We’re still here,” she says.
“It was different this time,” I tell her. “It’s like it wanted to strangle me.”
I look around and see the woman’s still napping on the bench. Is something changing with the pulls, I wonder. “Well, you know nothing can touch you. Right?” Dematra says looking deeper into my eyes, her clear, unwavering gaze grounding me. “The next time will probably be back to normal, maybe this lady’s just not well.”
“Anyhow, I have it and they were right about the location,” I say, trying to hide my anxiety. “I’ll just upload it to the system and then we can go grab a drink.”
“Are you gonna upload all of it?” She asks.
“Of course,” I tell her.
At The Agency, the upload appears on the cleandome. Jamy watches as the image sparks to life. A woman runs towards the viewer, crying out, pointing to something behind. As the angle changes, the viewer begins to fall for what seems like a long time. The viewer lands in a patch of green.
Jake’s Apartment is tricky to get to. It’s in an alleyway between two big squashers and you have to know how to slide the pattern properly. The last bar and first speak-easy in what, 100 years? In any case, this place makes me happy. Maybe it’s the danger of losing my ability to substance? Most of the faces are familiar. There’s that guy Rick, Nick? Not all good kissers make good lovers. I give him a wave.
“Hey you two! Come on over, I’ve got two seats at the bar,” says Antar, the apt burley man behind the bar.
The bar is almost empty, but we take the seats as if it was full. Antar’s got the type of smile that makes you feel like he’s just done something bad and he wants to tell you about it. I mean, he has done something bad. Selling substance is against code. The Collective would report him. They would take it all. And Antar is convinced they’d do worse.
Plant. That’s what we all call it. I know that it must have had a name, like Lilly, Anthurium, Aloe… But no one knows the names of plants anymore.
But selling substance isn’t as bad, as keeping a plant alive without reporting it to The Agency. Green has to be reported or uploaded to The Agency for their ongoing efforts to solve lack of green, or “the drought” problem, as it is known.
Plant. That’s what we all call it. I know that it must have had a name, like Lilly, Anthurium, Aloe… But no one knows the names of plants anymore. I doubt anyone born after me even knows what a real plant looks or feels like—especially this plant with its long tentacle-like stems that curl out purple hued leaves. Up close you can see there’s this soft fur framing the moist leaves. The mix of emerald green and purple makes them effervescent, its many tentacles reach for the light spilling out of the small cut-out window in the wall.
Come to me, come closer come … Not now! This isn’t an assignment. I shoot back substance to numb the pull. The bar clicks under my ring as I tap for another, and another. This is the shortcut.
“So what’s my favourite collector been up to these days?”
“I’ve been trying to deny that this is my job by refusing contracts, going in late, giving them poor uploads,” I say ironically. “This society is so obsessively punctual, you know? Not me right? Not you and me, hey Ant.”
“What? That’s a change,” Antar says, surprised. “you always loved your job.”
“Tsk tsk,” Dematra wags the finger using just her voice, looking at me and Antar. “You both know that’s a lie! This bumblebee loves it! And they love you! I mean they need you, it’s so obvious…”
“At least you got a job with the collective,” he replies, “You should be happy, we should all be so lucky.” Antar gestures with his left hand to show me all of the other miserable people out there.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I say as the substance finally kicks in.
And then it goes dark, if only for a moment. It’s what I’ve been waiting for. This cold unthinking and unreceptive state.
I don’t know how long I’ve been gone. Dematra is talking about The Agency. “It’s so great!” She shrieks. “They keep on saying that they’re working on a prototype to bring back the green. That the collectors will help.” I laugh like I’ve been here the whole time. Then we all look at the plant in the room.
“So, Antar,” says Dematra, a barely perceptible edge in her voice. “How is it that you keep this one alive?”
Antar never answers this question. We never tell The Agency because there is this unsaid agreement between us three. We keep each other’s little secrets.
It’s midnight, and I’m tired. I left Dematra at Jake’s, and I’m on my way home. Walking is rare for us. There are the relayers but I choose to be old fashioned. The air is clear, and gliders are the only thing up at this hour. It’s off-time for shipping deliveries to the Collective. Some people are still in a phase of work-related transit. I sense the penumbra in the distance. It can’t be a pull, though, because I’m full of substance.
It seizes me, I’m in it, and I mount a relayer. There are fewer and fewer people in the streets. After a while, I find myself on another part of the grid where stand-alone homes are sparse. I dismount and the pull gets stronger, unstoppable. I know I should contact The Agency, that I should get my contact, but this is elating and I’m losing logic.
I know I should contact The Agency, that I should get my contact, but this is elating and I’m losing logic.
An ancient looking woman opens the door standing alone, her long hair reaching down to her waist. There’s a look in her eyes that I’ve never seen. It’s unguarded and warm. Memories start to flood my mind, the jingle of someone’s bracelets, the smell of apples, sunshine illuminating my mother’s smile. She hugs me and whispers in my ear, “You must feel, my child, you must feel it all.”
The main room is large and the walls are covered in vines and pictures… They aren’t pictures, they’re something else that show people. A young girl putting her fingers in different colours and making marks on walls, someone my age throwing their hands with grace, hips thrust to the side. I’m pulled up the wooden stairs of the old house—moonlight seeps through the windows and fills the rooms. On a bed, there’s someone dreaming.
A little boy speaking to an old woman. In front of the boy, a multi-faced sculpture of faces. The faces are singing. The boy asks the older woman about the music, she looks at him with pride.
“All you have to do is listen, to be. All you have to do is dance, to be.”
“But what if I don’t want to listen?” asks the boy.
“Then you will become like them,”
She points behind the boy. I turn to look at a large sphere pulsating like the dream detectors.
I come to, by myself and unusually unconfused, like when I’m with Dematra. The boy is awake and staring at me. His black hair is almost invisible in the dark room. He looks disappointed. I’ve never spoken with one of the dreamers after collecting.
“They always said that this would happen.” He says with a blank expression.
“Um, what?”
“That a collector would come to steal my dreams.”
I explain to him that I don’t steal dreams, I just upload individual ones. Despite being younger than me, it’s clear that I am speaking with someone more familiar with the pull. He gives me a sad smile, “Is that what you’ve been told?”
“What do you mean, what I ‘ve ‘been told?’ I work for The Agency, my work is official, Collective sanctified,” I reassure him. He smiles sadly. As he uncrosses his graceful arms, I see they’re covered in symbols I don’t recognize.
“Have you sent it?” he asks.
“No, not yet. It doesn’t take long though.”
“If I tell you, will you promise not to send it?”
“That’s against–”
“Protocol?” He interrupts. “Who’s protocol? Why is there a protocol in the first place?” He’s not angry, just sadly amused, “do you ever ask yourself these questions?”
“No, I don’t need to. I’m doing good work…” I question myself as I say it.
“You don’t sound convinced,” he’s so calm and gentle that I can’t help but be curious. As he tells me the story, the room comes alive. His name is Nilo. Nilo’s hair dances around his face, undulating like dark water. His hands illuminated at moments by moonbeams tracing what was once “a magical world.”
“You see, Maleika, when you upload the dream, I cease to be a dreamer…” He looks at the paintings and I follow his gaze. Painted in a larger piece, is a lithe man with long hair, “dancing.”
“Why are you the only Creative I’ve ever met?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Mom thinks the Collective is threatened by Creatives so they collect. Worse, actually. Look at her paintings.”
The boy takes her downstairs to the paintings:
People wearing standard issue gear are zipping and beating people dressed like Nilo and his mom. Behind the people like him are colourful pieces of furniture, plants, flowers.
As Nilo explains “art”, behind Maleika and the endless grey, an oddly familiar glance pierces her thoughts.
A woman’s soothing voice, singing into her ear, crying… A classroom with three colourfully dressed children lined up against a wall. The cold touch of the instructor’s fingers against her forehead; her metallic gaze, unwavering, grounding, staring at her over and over again.
“Do you believe me?” he asks.
“Yes.” I say, feeling lightning.
Walking back by the last of the supposedly abandoned old homes, each with unusually-painted window frames, barely perceptible lights are on in the rooms. The shifting lace curtains reveal something else. There is something ancient inside of me. Colourful, greyless, loud… it is awake.
It’s 2AM, I’ve only been to Dematra’s commonblock once before and I have more questions than ever. Her building’s recom scans my voice and utters an approving “Authorized“. I knock on her door, it creeks open.
“Dematra, I know it’s late, I need to talk!”
Her flat is minimal. The light from the street spills through the kitchen window, like mercury. A single upturned glass sits on the counter next to the sink in the empty kitchen.
I move through the living room toward the bedroom. There’s a soft pulsing light coming from the darkness. I push the door open and take a seat on the metal bench. Her body is there, limp, head over one shoulder pulsing with a cold, soft glow. Her hair, usually a deep oak brown, is off. Scalp entirely exposed, a labyrinth of metallic threads running through her skin. Her eyes are open but instead of the warmth I’m used to, they’re off.
“Come on, come on, I’ve got something I need to talk about!” I say hoping this will quicken lumibration.
I reach out and touch her shoulder. It’s a cold object but slowly the pulsing glow subsides and the brushed silicone softness I’m so fond of returns to her skin. I grab her hair and place it back onto her head, brushing it to the side in the style she likes.
Her eyes blink once and there. “It took you long enough!” I shout.
“Whatcha doin’ here honey?” She asks, visibly surprised.
Seated side by side, I recount the events of my evening. The boy, the art, the homes, and the horrible revelation.
“Am I a thief?”
In the subsiding glow of Dematra’s lumibration, she looks at me with something new. I think that I see her pupils dilate, that grounding gaze opens up to me and reaches out like a plant to light.
“I don’t know, bumble bee. I understand that you perform for The Agency, and for the good of us all,” Dematra’s neck twitches and voice distorts, “T-that’s all, al…” Her voice trails off into her empty room, her empty kitchen, her grey flat.
“You can’t just keep telling me to perform and collect. It’s not enough anymore. I really need you to be my friend right now.”
I turn toward her as she shudders spastically.
“Look.” She says.
All of a sudden I see my mother’s eyes in hers and I’m taken over by a pull.
A small child appears sleeping in a garden. She is being watched by another small, perfect child. I’m my mother watching the children.
Fire surrounds us as those eyes that don’t belong to her look deeper into mine and ask, “Why can’t they dream, Maleika?
Dematra snaps back, the fire is gone. “”Whatcha doin’ here, bumble bee?”
Vera-Maria Zissis is a soon-to-be first-time mom, avid science fiction reader, nurse, and creator. She has a BFA in Sculpture from Concordia University and has always written poetry and short stories.
The Government has concluded that it does not see a strategic case to bring forward a tidal energy scheme in the Severn estuary at this time, but wishes to keep the option open for future consideration
– British government, 2010
The project anticipates that the Bristol area will likely experience a sea level rise of 7m by the year 2275
– Alfie Hope, Sea Rise City art project in collaboration with the UN department of Water and Climate Change, 2015
One of the most urgent tasks that we mortal critters have is making kin, not babies
– Donna Haraway, 2016
Were I a man, or had I a woman as partner, I might have made very different choices about marriage and children
– Rebecca Solnit, 2016
The rain was light, but effective in its endeavour. The unwaxed fabric of the marquee roof was starting to give in to the pressure above, and beads of liquid formed and dropped on the sombre faces of the huddled gathering like teardrops. Oh well, thought Esta. Water is a core element of the ceremony.
Esta loosed her attention from the preparatory notes that Mera, the officiant, was delivering to her friends, family and colleagues. Although attentive, they were more focused on playing their parts in this just-familiar ritual than they were on what this might mean for Esta herself, the initiate. Had her mother been honest when she described this as a happy day for all the family, or was she merely playing a new role? Esta wondered if her choice was really worthy of this hub of support and celebration.
She looked over the valley at Avon, both town and river of the same name. For half the year the town was the river and the river was the town, for the bounds of the waters surged dramatically from the dry to wet seasons. With the season of Iver finally drawing to a close, the waters were due to subside, and Esta had hoped today might offer the first signs of Estate, the season for which she was named, and with it, some sun. But no, hopefulness and horizons were not to be hers today it seemed. Instead a weary grief flowed from the clouds.
Where Avon’s waters brought power and plenty, they also continually took more land and homes.
In the years since the Division, Esta found hope and loss to be increasingly contingent: avenues explored and dead-ended. Possibilities denied and resolve found only in their void. Where Avon’s waters brought power and plenty, they also continually took more land and homes, making stilt-house residents keen to reach ever-higher ground, and making all citizens cautious of the transient valley. Her own boat-home sufficed whatever the shoreline level, but the waters calmed the lower they flowed.
Mera now stepped closer, drawing Esta’s gaze away from the skyline of boat-decks and rooftops above the waters and back to the fountain at the centre of the marquee.
“It is now. The moon has come through. The meeting of light and dark begins.”
Mera offered Esta and the others glasses of the red wine that poured from the fountain, imported from the neighbouring country of Greater Thames no doubt. It was meant to signify the last blood tasted and lost. Esta’s parents were given chocolates, a condolence of sorts, for where the ceremony was meant to be celebratory for her and the many other women who underwent the Commitment, there was no forced suppression of the grief at the loss of a matrilineage that is felt by many parents when their daughter’s time comes. Esta’s own mother had not been offered this opportunity to choose between having or not having children, and Esta had so far failed to ask how she might have considered it.
Mera pressed her forehead to Esta’s, and she awakened to her own presence in the ritual. She felt herself surfacing from below water, from the darks of a river pool into the light of a bright moon. She had chosen this path, and now it was carrying her forward into territories unknown. Mera poured water over their hands and faces from a silver pewter jug engraved with Sheela-na-gigs, a sexuality goddess mistaken as fertility queen from millennia past in the region. Together they began the incantation:
Of fruit that bears seed
Will now the tender corn yield
Of fruit that may flower
Comes now the greater power
All men now find femme
Parental duality within them
For my country’s greater need
I shall not breed.
Hearing her friends speak the words before had half-shocked half-thrilled Esta. It was as if the women became more powerful in rejection of their natural potential to bear offspring than in its enactment, like lionesses refusing to eat a kill. Power withheld is more potent than strength spent. Yet in this moment, giddy with the first alcohol she’d tasted in months, a deeper pain stabbed her from inside, and she didn’t find herself exuding the empowered grace she’d been told to expect.
She glanced at Yannick, once her lover, who was at that moment tending to his belligerent toddler alongside his partner Khalil.
She glanced at Yannick, once her lover, who was at that moment tending to his belligerent toddler alongside his partner Khalil, a cooing calamity erupting from the warm glow of their familial cocoon. Esta wondered whether the sharp pang she felt high in her chest was for Yannick himself or for what he shared with Khalil and their son. Ever since the Division which split Greater Thames, Avon, Mercia and Cumbria into separate countries, Avon and its shires had been declared formal matriarchies. In practice, however, it was wealth not gender that determined power and influence at the very top, just as before.
The reformation into a matriarchal society came in defiance of the further entrenchment of patriarchy in Greater Thames. When the richer, more powerful Greater Thames cast the rest of the island off from its financial prosperity, the regions-turned-countries sought to define themselves in the negative image of their former ruler. Mercia and Cumbria were now ruled by farmers and miners; Avon was ruled by women, who were mainly engineers. In this matriarchy, the decree that men must nurture and bear full responsibility for child rearing had initially been seen as a rebalancing of respect for care work, one which suited men like Yannick and Khalil who were already partnered in the eyes of the state under the old systems. But Esta, who had not partnered in that way but navigated brief intimacies with women she met through work, or men who lived around her moorings, increasingly felt the men basked in a greater glory for their parenting than ever afforded to women in the past.
Her own parents embraced the change willingly but not wholeheartedly, happy that their only daughter would rise in the ranks of her profession. The decision to employ only women in all areas of public works had proved successful for the recovering economy, post-Division. The female workers remained more efficient, even on better pay, and productivity was unprecedented. Esta was proud of the contributions she had made to the overhaul of energy production following the total destruction of their offshore renewable power infrastructure in the 24 hour military attack by the States some twelve years ago as punishment for Avon’s refusal to sign a trade deal. The ten years since Esta had graduated as an engineer at the age of 17 had scattered around like leaves in a gust of wind, butterflying her from homestead power to geo-thermal projects across the city.
Water-power had its season, and solar likewise, and it was her designs that helped bridge the transition from the lifestyle and rhythms of energy use that went with one generative source to the next. Still, getting power to the outer reaches of the shires was hard outside the protections of the town. In the shires, local transmission was not an option and infrastructure had to be imported, risking theft en route by the smugglers feeding the insatiable hunger of the elites in Greater Thames. Having spurned the regions lack of economic contribution it was joylessly ironic to see what was once a self-sufficient capital city rely on the resources of neighbouring countries via the smuggler’s market.
Esta swallowed the last blood-red drops in her tin cup. A cloying aftertaste remained, sticky as bloodied knickers and used condoms, the trappings of which she’d now have no need. Women still took male lovers, although many men chose to parent. Those men that did not had no prospect of public work since parenting was only an option supported by the state if within a long-term partnership with another man. The ones that chose not to parent lived productively, but quietly, hosting events for workers, tending to small-scale farming and other arts. Theirs was a quiet masculinity which neither translated to Avon’s new traditions nor maintained power in the old ways.
With a façade of the initiate’s readiness for change, Esta mimicked Mera moving along the line of guests echoing the codes of the republic with each of three kisses on the left cheek, “Independence. Productivity. Sisterhood.” The same words screamed at political rallies in years past, now hollow with repetition instead of bursting with resistance. When she reached Yannick in the line, the flushing weight of the wine in her face forced a pause and she accepted his steady gaze.
“You’re scared Est. It’s ok.”
His squeeze of her shoulder was too tempting a warmth in the cool air, which was drawing heat from her skin as the evening closed in and the rain crescendoed.
“It’s not the operation…it’s the expectation. Like I’ve got to fill this supposed void with a thousand other achievements.”
“You’d do everything you do either way. This should be about what you want, not what’s expected of you.”
She thought of all she’d worked for over the past decade of political upheaval.
“All I expect is another surprise.”
Mera had reached the end of the line, her eyes calling Esta onwards, closer into her new self. Her mother’s kiss, the last in line, was simple and forgiving, unquestioning of any choice Esta made with the body she had birthed to her. Suddenly Esta longed to more fully understand the gift her mother had given her. The carriage, effort and majestic trauma necessary to create her own being. This would be an appreciation she could never truly know without sharing in its drama. From a frail emptiness at the base of her spine came a new determination, like a resurgent kite striking high in the sky on a fresh wind. The incantation Mera began breathed into this space inside her.
A new role
A new body
A new meaning
The female eunuch revisited
In sexless, seedless, flowerless power
From milk and honey to muscle and mind
We loose the limits of your body
Upon you.
Elsewhere in Greater Thames at this very moment, women her age would be celebrating pregnancies and embracing the charms and challenges of a life involuntarily devoted to motherhood.
Elsewhere in Greater Thames at this very moment, women her age would be celebrating pregnancies and embracing the charms and challenges of a life involuntarily devoted to motherhood, prohibited them from any other form of work until the children were 17. Where in Avon parenting was a male duty, in Greater Thames women bore the labour alone, but without glory or credit, simply out of custom and expectation.
Esta recalled the look of condescension and disbelief in the eyes of her colleague’s father during the only ever trade visit to Greater Thames when she told him her and her friends were not, nor did they intend to become mothers. In that moment she held his first grandson at six weeks, his latent fear that her inexperience might at best hurt the child and at worst curse him. She herself was sure the baby quieted like a trusting puppy at her lack of panic about being perceived as a failed woman, palpable in the new mothers present. There was so much expectation on them, yet no emergence in success. Could it be that women on both sides of the border, whether esteemed as mothers or matriarchs were doomed to feelings of perpetual insufficiency? She looked to her own mother once more, and felt the familiar reassurance of her knowing gaze: neither route provided assurances.
The rain had begun in earnest now, and pounded on and through the cloth roof, already soaked and heavy with uncertainty and expectation of waters breaking. Esta’s eyes set on the red tent awaiting her across the hilltop where they stood. Mera’s slender fingers were holding back the curtain from within. It was time to wave goodbye to the possibility of an unworkable surprise. She hugged Yannick one last time, absently kissed his baby’s forehead, and headed down the slope towards the red tent’s opening.
Mel Evans is an artist and activist. Mel has written one non-fiction book (Artwash, Pluto, 2015), contributed to various academic journals and books, and had several pieces of creative writing published (A Woman Alone, with The Dangerous Women Project and poetry in the Poppies edition of Brain of Forgetting).
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: things you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental and social justice, cities, science fiction, current events, and political theory.
We’ll try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
Uneven Earth updates
We’ve launched our series on sci-fi, near-futures, utopias, and dystopias, Not afraid of the ruins. The first three stories are now online! Expect a new piece every Friday.
Borne on a damaged planet | Link | Two books that do the hard work of thinking through the Anthropocene
The naked eyes | Link | “Keith’s livelihood was sandwiched between an ocean of algorithms and a ceiling of decision-making programs.”
Why the left needs Elinor Ostrom | Link | An interview with Derek Wall, author of Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, on the need to think beyond market and state.
Our printing press’ first paperback, In defense of degrowth, is hot off the press! You can order it at indefenseofdegrowth.com.
Turkey, commanding the second-largest NATO army, has attacked the predominantly Kurdish region in Syria building a feminist & democratic governance system. The region under attack, Afrin, has gone the furthest in institutionalizing women’s liberation. You can follow any updates or find local protests via #DefendAfrin.
The “Environmental Warriors” series from the LA Times chronicles stories from around the world, showing why and how increasingly more environmental activists are faced with repression and violence.
While many threats to the Amazon remain, indigenous and environmental groups celebrated this victory which can be partly attributed to their resistance.
This is important. The International Organisation’s dealings often don’t get much scrutiny, but their reports can make or break a country. An informative Twitter thread here.
A victory for the movement against airports?
The Zone à défendre (ZAD) achieved a victory this month: France announced that it would no longer build the airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. But for ZADistas, it is a half-victory: “While we are trying to prevent the construction of an airport, more than 400 others are being planned or built around the world.”
Where we’re at: analysis
Happy new year! Essays on loneliness, happiness, and an accelerating world
We’re more lonely now than ever: an article on the science of loneliness. To ramble: an ode to the stroll and loitering. An investigation into the new culture of mindfulness in the corporate world. A New Yorker article on the happiness industry. And a Jacobin piece on ‘neoliberal perfectionism’ and how it stands in the way of solidarity and a collective agency.
Smart cities, green urbanism, livable cities. The catchy terms keep proliferating, but does it come with better policies? Maria Kaika, foremost theorist on cities, opens up a bag of worms in this interview.
Charles Eisenstein widens the frame on the GMO discussion. “If you believe that society’s main institutions are basically sound, then it is indeed irrational to oppose GMOs.”
Last month we shared an interview with Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore about their new book: A history of the world in seven cheap things. This is a critical review by Ian Angus at Climate and Capitalism.
“often current events are analyzed in a vacuum that almost never includes the context or history necessary to understand what is new, what is old and how we got to where we are.”
New politics
Two years of radical municipalism in Barcelona
A documentary about what happened in Barcelona and why it matters, including resources for discussing the video with your local group. An inspiring interview on the new politics in Spain, and how people have used the internet in creative ways. Eight lessons from the last two years of radical municipalism. A report on the first Fearless Cities conference last year held in Barcelona, and another report on the Catalan Integral Cooperative, which is experimenting with a new economic system in the shell of the old.
“Today’s tenant organizers confront a highly fragmented and individualized rental sector. The challenge, then, is not just to mobilize tenants but to create a shared sense of being a tenant.”
Editorial from the seventh issue of ROAR magazine, which examines the social and political nature of climate change. The issue also features an explainer on the relevance of Murray Bookchin’s work for today’s climate crisis.
“If we can resist the age-old impulse to define binary oppositions between ways of knowing—scientific versus humanistic, expert versus popular—we will be in a better position to join forces across those divides towards understanding and action”, argues Deborah Cohen.
“Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the Age of Revolution.” In light of President Trump’s recent ‘shithole’ comments, this article from 2016 on Haiti’s revolutionary history is worth revisiting.
Aaron kicks off a new series of articles on the ENTITLE blog which questions the foundations of ‘eco-modernist socialism’ and ‘communist futurism’ as proposed in Jacobin’s climate change issue Earth, Wind, and Fire.
With increasing natural disasters and the retreat of the state, more and more people are getting involved with grassroots disaster response movements. Movement Generation has put out a document with a guiding framework for how to do people-based recovery. PDF here.
“It is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.” Ursula K. Le Guin has died, and there are so many more worlds to explore. We’ll build them with her in our hearts. This is one of our favorite pieces by her, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”
“Entire landscapes, replete with designer insects and subscription seed stock, will have the potential to be recognised as protected intellectual property. The proprietary ecosystem will emerge, financially and biologically controlled by a particular hotel chain, property developer or private homeowner.”
Climate gentrification? Welcome to the future: climate change will mean a new math for real estate investment.
“with looming climate change and the decline of cheap oil, I couldn’t shake the question of what would power all these gadgets, and none of the futurists seemed to bring it up.”
then a desk still intact. She grills any scrap of flesh
the sea hacks up—bull kelp, moon
jellies, three-eyed eels. Eats them with succulent
stems of glasswort growing in the sand.
When evening comes, she flings each newly
sorted net upon the ocean like a bedsheet
for each is a piece of the planetary genome.
She is waiting for the nets to find
one another, reconnect end-to-end, spiral
beneath the waves. Replicate.
But each net returns alone, an enfolded mass
of knots, bone, chitinous exoskeletons, bloated
elongate bodies of the unknown.
Written June 2, 2017, the morning after US President Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Kim Goldberg is the author of seven books of poetry and nonfiction. She lives close to the sea in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where she wanders, wonders, and watches birds.
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
To receive our next article by mailing list, subscribe here.
The streets around the station had caught a glitter from the early morning rain, and as sunlight poured between the towers, every surface sparkled. In the puddles between the tracks, the city was shattered into shards of the 21st century ambition that built it.
Stillness prevailed—a coiled anticipation. The only permanent denizens idled, ready to serve: law enforcement drones hovered at the end and beginning of their patrols; auto-kiosks stood, shutters open, steam curling from espresso bays; city-roombas lurked in alleys ready to suck up litter; adverts lay ready to broadcast targeted pitches to the coming rush. Behind every wall, floor, and pillar programs and machinery hummed in neutral—an orchestra held by the raised hands of its conductor.
Keith watched the city swell to engulf the train, staring out as the avenue of towers rose around the tracks. His morning music—slow sitar overlain by a duet in Hindi and Portuguese—played languidly, barely drowning out the murmur of the carriage behind him. Normally, this was his favourite part of the day—a meditative peace that washed from his commute through his day, providing him deep, enduring comfort—but, today, it was little comfort. He twisted at his hair and gnawed at his nails.
Marriage, he thought. It was a terribly old-fashioned idea, but it felt right. He wanted to commit—to declare his intention publicly amongst his friends and family. To tell his truth. But before that lay the question, and the answer. That morning, something had fallen away within him and he’d realized he was unsure what Surinder would say. Surinder, his Surinder: the man who ate tangerines without peeling them and always got juice everywhere; who talked about chemistry the way others talk about movies; who he’d whisked away to Zanzibar for a beach holiday just four months into their relationship only to find him driving them into Stone Town to explore the old slave markets. Surinder with his cross-eyed grins and his irritating way of turning every dinner party into a political brawl. Surinder who was out of his league; Surinder who might say No.
The train jerked to a halt, pulling Keith from his thoughts.
Shimmying and sidling between his fellow commuters as they extracted bags from overhead compartments, he stepped out into the full-bodied petrichor.
The plaza beyond the station was a labyrinth of queues for coffee, dappled by the shadows of drones overhead. Keith walked with purpose, tuning out the adverts that squeezed in between songs and scuttled over every flat surface declaring promises of weekend escapes, resorts, cleaner shaves, and fragrances that might seduce impossibly handsome men.
Faces surfaced briefly from the crowd, throwing up snatches of public profiles—recent Facebook photos, instagram posts, dating, and hook-up profiles. But, caught in his head, Keith avoided eye contact, paying just enough attention to avoid collisions, and headed for the subway.
He clicked through the turnstiles, stepped onto the escalators, and let the ground swallow him. As he stood through his descent, his contact lenses expanded to seize his peripheries. A moment of darkness ensued. Then he was somewhere else. Immersed in an advert—one of his—promoting the newest dating app.
Before him, a full moon hung over mountains bristling with stone pines. He could almost feel the warm summer breeze. A restaurant enfolded him—Italian, Spanish, maybe Greek. Across the table sat a well-muscled white man, slight stubble grazing a square jaw. His new companion laughed inaudibly, biceps tensing as he slapped the table, and a woman’s voice whispered over the pantomime ‘Find your bliss.’
Keith’s feet found solid ground; the advert dissipated, his contacts shrinking back into transparence. Standing at the base of the escalator, he found himself smiling; it was oddly comforting that the targeting systems hadn’t picked up his intentions, hadn’t known. He’d heard so many stories of the algorithms turning prophet, informing people of their pregnancies, impending breakups, and firings. But what if it knows he’ll refuse, a rogue thought like a bull through the streets, could it know?
He got off the subway a stop early to visit the retail district. Mind still stuck in Surinder, he emerged into sunlight onto a broad boulevard cut by stripes of lush vegetation. Ranks of restaurants lined the street. Suited servers hovered around the breakfast crowd, ready to swoop in to replenish any emptying glass. Artisanal bakeries bustled with personal shoppers of the wealthy, homemakers returning from dropping off the kids, and others— foot tapping, heads cocked or on their phones checking their feeds, email, the time—treating themselves before work. Above them hung a haze of reviews, posts, selfies and pictures, each set in a colour-coded square and sized by their influence, likes, and reach. They formed a digital smog that vaulted from eve to eve, and roiled as new posts puffed up to join the old.
No adverts pestered him. And, if he looked down, he could pretend he was in a city of old. Still the spreads behind the glass were whispered temptations—a seduction that he feared his diet would not survive. So he kept his eyes down or ahead, looking at the plants and the drying tarmac, tunnel-gaze only flickering as the shadows of drones blinked over the street.
Gradually, the delis, bakeries, and restaurants gave way to boutiques selling reconditioned vintage clothes, artisanal crockery, and antique furniture. Still, he kept his eyes down until his destination towered over him: a four-story building with sleek black walls and gaping displays of white silk and scattered with red pillows. A single piece of jewelry was draped over each pillow, each was a statement of simple, elegant, opulence.
Keith tried the door. It was locked. Shit, he hadn’t checked. Of course he hadn’t; too wrapped up in his doubts as always. He winced to himself, imagining Surinder’s sardonic smile—the smile that would wrap itself around his man’s face if—when—he told him. Sheepishly, he looked for opening hours on the storefront. There were none displayed on the door, or on the windows: just a simple logo in gold. Keith pulled his phone from his pocket, and searched for the hours: 11:30, guess I’m coming back at lunch.
Gripped by his mistake, he paused, looking at the windows full of jewels and up over the edifice—camera-bulbs, gold skirting, water stains on the black-clad wall. Gradually, he became aware of a presence beside him.
A man stood to his right, hunched, head down. He was dressed—anachronistically—in the loose coveralls of the city’s old waste management service, a department that had been given over to machines a little over a decade before. He noticed the splitting, ragged rubber of the man’s boots, and the dirt beneath his nails before he averted his gaze, frowning. Homeless, he thought, I thought they shipped them all off. Guilt guttered in him. Still, he studiously ignored the man as he struck off to work.
****
Keith found his intern, Ndidiamaka, in their shared office. She was standing perfectly still in the middle of the room, back to the door. A detached camera-bulb, its cords looping up into the ceiling socket, lay on his desk like a gouged-out eyeball.
Amused and more than a little curious, he lingered by the doorway, watching her.
Alongside her work as his intern, Ndidiamaka was an engineer and a masters student in the sociology of technology; in exchange for her seemingly inexhaustible labour, his firm—AdSight—provided her the data she needed for her thesis project on automation in advertising. Over the months she’d shared his office, he’d seen her devise dozens of bizarre side-projects. More often than not, they failed.
After a minute stood stock still, she checked a tablet beside the camera. Whatever it showed elicited a stream of frustrated muttering.
Keith cleared his throat; Ndidiamaka jumped.
“Shit! Sorry, sorry—I expected to have this mess cleared up long before you came in!”
“It’s quite alright Ndidi, I didn’t mean to startle you… but what, exactly, are you doing?”
“Well, uh, I stayed late last night crunching data for my thesis—it’s due in two weeks can you believe it? And the lights kept on going out—I’d have to jump around every ten minutes to keep them on! So I tried to fix it, and it kind of spiralled from there…”
“…Oh-kay,” Keith stepped around her to slide his briefcase onto the other side of his desk, “well, I’m going to need my desk back at some point.”
“Right, of course—this camera is refusing to see me when I stand still anyways, something to do with the contrast settings. I can’t seem to get around the firmware, been trying for the last three hours—”
“Ndidi, did you go home last night?” At this question, her face became a rictus of guilt, “Ndidi! We talked about this! Am I going to need to start kicking you out of the office when I leave? It’s not healthy!”
“Right, right… I’m sorry, mum. I won’t do it again…” she rubbed the bridge of her nose, “could you help me get the camera back into the ceiling?”
He sighed, “Alright.”
He had to stand on a chair to feed the wires back into the gut of the ceiling. It took several attempts to get it to loop just right and, all the while, Ndidiamaka stood behind him, nervously holding the chair and occasionally giving him ‘helpful’ directions. Finally, with a satisfying click, it twisted in. He clambered down to solid ground and, installing himself at his desk, pulled on a VR headset.
Keith’s livelihood was sandwiched between an ocean of algorithms and a ceiling of decision-making programs. Beneath him, programs ran through a century of footage shot on phones, cameras, and whatever other recording equipment. They pulled out anything relevant, trying to find anything that might go viral or enhance the immersive advertising experience. The way the light hit a building, a fragment of graffiti, the sunset over Mount Cameroon, the ranks of cans at a supermarket: everything would be spliced together.
But the programs were not perfect. They did not, for instance, understand the unspoken rules of society, and what rules they did understand they applied mercilessly. For instance, early in his career, Keith had had to press refresh on an entire campaign for Cutesie, a makeup manufacturer’s new line of products for high-school children when the software started spitting out nothing but hardcore porn. Similarly, he’d had to press reset on the campaign for Gladiator Razors after their request for a ‘martial aesthetic’ caused some rogue element to make SS officers the protagonists of every clip.
Thankfully, those extremes were exceptions. Mostly he dealt with the ten percent of adverts that were jumbled mishmashes that made no sense and the other ten percent that, while coherent, accidentally undermined the clients’ brands. When forced to discuss his job at parties, Keith would tell people that the most interesting part of his job was the subtle art of negotiating the borders of offense. Many of the best advertisements pressed right up against the lines: they threatened transgression. The rules were of marketing were a morass of contradictions that few programs could untangle, none efficiently. Which was lucky, because that was why Keith still had a job. So he sat, VR glasses on, flickering from ad to ad, pushing some through to the automated decision-making processes above him and deleting others.
Most days he felt as though he was trapped between rising flood waters and an impermeable ceiling.
That morning, Keith was faced with a raft of adverts prepared for his agency’s newest client: Saber Security Solutions, a provider of anti-crime systems for supermarkets, homes, and corner stores. He fell into the first ad.
A woman stood before a rack of diapers, grainy in the ancient footage. The scene resolved itself, shedding a century’s baggage to become crisp. It was as though he was there, looking over her shoulder, pondering her choice. She looked a little over forty; a slight grey had snuck into her undyed hair. Hefting a large handbag, she held a box in her hand—a hypoallergenic brand—scrutinising the price. Keith could almost see the calculations writ over her lined face. She sighed, and slid the box back onto the shelf and turned to leave. Then, as though seized by some invisible force, she hesitated. She turned back, lifted the box from the shelf, slipped it into her bag, and walked towards the doors. Alarms blared. Lights flashed. A black tube, terminating in two prongs snaked from the ceiling. Tzack. It jabbed the woman. She collapsed, juddered by the surge of an electric shock. The interlinked triple ‘S’ of Saber Security Solutions descended over the scene, ‘Saber Security Solutions: Presenting the Integrated Anti-Theft System,’ said a stern, male voice.
Not a chance, thought Keith as he emerged from the advert, who wants to see someone’s mother get tased?
The next advert wasn’t much better though it skewed in a different direction. This time the thief was a young, black man dressed in what could only be described as a pastiche of late-20th century ‘urban’ gangster. Wayyy too racist, thought Keith. He nixed it three seconds in.
Of the three ads that followed, only one passed—a gang of rubber-Nixon-masked thieves shaking on a tiled floor.
“Uh, Keith?” He pulled off his goggles. Ndidiamaka stood beside his desk holding two grease-stained paper bags, “my data analysis just finished and it’s given me results that support my thesis so I bought some treats to celebrate.”
“Ndidi! You know I’m on a diet!”
“Hey, I’m not going to eat donuts alone! I got you a dumpling from that Jamaican place, that one you say makes the food better than your grandfather.”
Keith took the paper bag with a smile, “you are such a bad influence.”
“Someone’s got to be—everyone else around here eats like birds.”
She sat on the edge of his desk, pulled down the paper, took a bite of her donut, and released a satisfied sigh. She didn’t bring up her results until they were both halfway through their respective pastries.
“So, Keith, my analysis raises some questions.
“Questions?”
“Yeah, you know I was looking at bias in advertising, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Well I’ve been applying Implicit Bias testing methods—” he shot her a blank look, “—they were originally used to demonstrate unconscious biases in humans—on the adverts this agency produces. Well, I inverted the test and…”
“Yes?”
“And it shows that darker skin is strongly linked to more negative images and subjects in this agency’s adverts and lighter skin has a slightly weaker association with positive images and subjects.”
“So the programs are racist?”
“That’s what I thought… but…”
“But?” he said, trying to keep the frost from his voice.
“Well, when I looked at each step of the process, I found bias in the programs but the skew gets slightly worse—not better—after it passes your desk. The average, I mean. You do cut out the worst of it, the outliers.”
“I see,” Keith tried his best not to sound offended; Ndidi’s only real devotion was to pure data, “What about the decision-making levels above me?”
“They’re much, much worse—they account for over a third of the skew alone. I don’t mean to cause offense—”
“No, Ndidi. You didn’t do anything wrong—the data is the data. I guess I have some work to do on myself.” he smiled but knew it looked hollow, “I’m a black man—a gay man—even in this day and age, I’ve had to face prejudice.”
“Right. I, uh, just thought you should have a heads up before I submit my thesis.”
“Good call… Could you send me your results so I can review them?”
“Sure.”
They finished their food in silence, disturbed only by the passing drones and the mutter of the city.
Afterwards, she sent him her results—a mess of tables and statistics. His first instinct was to prove her wrong. But, try as he might, he couldn’t find anything to undermine her results. When he eventually plunged back into his work, her words pursued him. As he passed through advert after advert, he began to question himself, seeing bias in every decision.
Gradually, he started acting against his instinct, letting ads through which he’d normally delete and deleting some he’d have let go. He let two white children get sprayed with mace for fiddling with the window of a suburban home; allowed an elderly woman get doused with restraint foam for stealing a bag of skittles; approved a gaggle of twenty-something women being tased for shoplifting. The elderly south asian man stealing beer no longer had to suffer a light dusting of pepper spray; the light-skinned black youth avoided getting blasted by a noise cannon. Finally, he deleted a video of a black man in a balaclava shoving jewels into a bag only to be shocked again and again as he struggled towards the open door.
His second job for the day was sorting through adverts made for Matcher, a dating app. Here, his fight began to get interesting. His adversary was his own aesthetic and as such he experimented with its opposite. He waged war on defined muscles, manicured hands, crisp hairlines, and well-groomed beards; he fought youngness, smooth skin, smouldering looks, and his predilection for hooked noses. Out went the elegant plates, cocktails, romantic vistas, and foreign-language films. He cut and cut. Reaching down within his decisions to tear out any remnants of his biases.
The adverts that survived were ungainly, pockmarked by awkward silences and the hubbub of shabby joints. Two women haltingly discussed tax policy over plates of congealing curry. A woman tried to convince her date that the dilapidated dive they sat in ‘wasn’t always like this’ as an ever-expanding bar fight threatened to engulf them. A series of stand up comedians in a small, smokey club threw terrible jokes into deepening silence and then at jeers. Hugs met crossed arms. Drinks spilled. Teeth collided. But still, there were smiles, genuine smiles, fake smiles, laughter—nervous, pitying, and redemptive—conversations about nothing, coy flirtation, long-suffering weariness, moments of profound joy.
By lunchtime, Keith felt triumphant.
On his way back to the jewellery shop, Keith called Surinder, as was his habit. Though as the phone rang, he hoped that the man he had already begun to label as his fiance would not answer. Therefore, it was a slight disappointment when Surinder picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hey babe,” came his deep, calm voice, “perfect timing. Just sat down in the staff room… Claire’s here, she says hey!” Someone said something faint in the background as Keith tried to remember exactly who Claire was. Then he heard Surinder shift and he knew he was getting up to go to the window and stare out onto the road and do what Surinder always did when he was on the phone with someone he cared about: pace unendingly.
“I missed you this morning,” Surinder said, “you were shifting about all night, and then out of bed like a shot when your alarm went off. Is something wrong?”
“Just stressed about work,” Keith lied, “I… uh… well you know how it is.”
“Yeah…” Surinder did not sound convinced, “But you owe me cuddles!”
Despite himself, Keith smiled. It was the exact kind of cutesy behaviour he’d have told anyone he hated, but, coming from Surinder, he felt nothing but delight. Not least because it was a side of the man that few ever saw; no, no-one who knew the grave, sincere professional Surinder would believe just how much of a softie he could be in private.
“So, how’s your day going?” Keith asked, “How was remedial Chem?”
“Oh, fantastic,” Surinder’s voice dripped with sarcasm, “just how I wanted to spend two hours of my life. Today there was almost a fight, so at least something happened to break the monotony of re-teaching kids a bunch of stuff they don’t want to know and will never use—little fuckers will probably all end up on basic.”
“Hey—”
“I know, I know: I shouldn’t say that,” Surinder interrupted before Keith could get out his criticisms, “it’s just so frustrating. But I hear that Gregson is finally retiring this year, so there might be a spot teaching the advanced placement program…”
“Yeah,” Keith grimaced, the principal had been dangling advanced placement in front of Surinder for three years; Gregson, a flinty-eyed octogenarian and the teachers union rep had showed no interest in ever stopping. Keith half expected her to pass away giving some high-strung overachiever the B minus that would define their personality for a decade. His mind digested what Surinder had said previously, “Wait, did you say a fight?”
“Wow, you really are distracted today,” Surinder chuckled, “Yeah, the Chen twins were picking on Gus Ramotar again and I guess he’d had it. He flipped his table—”
“Gus the bus flipped a table.”
“Hey, don’t call him that… and it was a mistake, I think, they were poking him, calling him Gus the bus and he flipped out, had enough, stood up… and you know how big he is and how small those ancient desk-chair combos are. Almost took half a row with him.”
“Oof,” Keith winced, “I’m guessing that only encouraged them.”
“Everyone started laughing.”
“Oh no.”
“He was halfway down the hallway before I caught up,” Surinder sounded unusually bitter—irritatingly but brittly superior despite his terrible grades, Gus was far from Surinder’s favourite student, “He was crying Keith. I asked him what was going on—even if everyone knows he hates them, he’s generally controlled enough not to give the Chens a show. He showed me his news feed using that app—you know that one that lets you share your stream—”
“StreamPorter?”
“Yeah, that. Well, he showed me his stream. It was all dieting supplements, workout tapes, fitbits. Every advert.”
“Fuck. That’s horrible. They’re not meant to be able to market that stuff to kids.”
“Yeah, well, they do…”
Keith had ground to a halt on a corner a few blocks from the jewellery store. In the silence, he became aware of his surroundings for the first time. Across the road, a blank expanse of concrete had been overtaken by a view out onto a white sand beach. Waves lapped and, in the midground, two men faced each other under an awning—a South Asian man with a heavy beard who looked nothing like Surinder and a black man who looked creepily like Keith.
Keith flinched. Immediately, he tried to suppress his reaction. The anxiety that had subsided during his chat with Surinder washed back up his throat and quite suddenly, the last thing he wanted to be doing was be talking to Surinder.
“Listen,” he said, “I should go…”
“I wasn’t criticising your work… it wasn’t your stuff—”
“I know, I’m not hanging up because of that,” Keith said, “I just got back to the office…”
“Ah… well… thanks for calling and listening to me rant. I’ll see you this evening?”
“Can’t wait! Love you.”
“Love you too babe.”
Keith hung up and stood staring at everything except the beach. He hoped his stifled reaction had not been captured, logged as one of the thousands of factors that made his profile. But he’d been too slow and, as he strode towards the store, ads for suits, registries, ministries supplanted the normal barrage of food, beverages, sex, phones, and cologne. He felt naked. He sweated, picking up his pace—head down—even as the auto-ads gave way to the pitches of the well-dressed, beautiful men and women proffering plates of free samples from doorways. An overwhelming awkwardness pressed at him as they tried to appeal to him—it was best not to make eye contact. He kept his focus ahead, at the plants. He cranked up the music, and tried to ignore the promotional messages that shoved themselves between the songs which told him: book now and save 50 percent.
He fled to the jewelers’.
Bam. Someone jerked away from him, falling back. Keith reached out to steady the man. Calloused hands rasped across his. He caught him before he fell, pulling him upright.
“Are you okay?! I’m so sorry!” he blurted, looking earnestly at the man only to find his gaze avoided, “I wasn’t looking—I’m sorry.
“It’s okay,” mumbled the man, straightening his shabby suit. Before Keith could say another word, the man was off, limping into the rising lunch rush. Shaking his head and feeling a little embarrassed, Keith turned back to the door.
The interior of the jewelers’ was a large, low-lit room with an archipelago of glowing display cases scattered across it. A man in a suit stood behind one these cases, waiting patiently a few feet away from two women—who were looking at the displays the way one might look into a cage at the zoo. The clerk turned to Keith with a calculating look, glanced down at the tablet in front of him, and did an approximation of a smile — it looked as though some puppeteer had tugged on strings hooked to the edges of his mouth.
“Good afternoon.”
Keith nodded at the man and then looked down at the display cases, skimming over them.
“This way, sir” said the clerk, motioning towards a large bank of glass in the middle of the room.
Keith frowned and walked over, skimming the contents of each display case. The one the clerk had indicated was full of rings. How did he know, Keith thought and then; he probably bought some sort of consumer-information package.
Innumerable jewels glittered back at him; yellow, red, blue, pink, lines of diamonds, rubies, and other stones, stones that he did not recognize; square, oval, hexagon, rectangular; bevelled, smooth, a few rough. The metal of the rings were a whole other phylum: plain bands; metal like knotted rope; chains of circles and squares; gold, platinum, silver in all their shades. Panic seized him. He felt as though he was staring down at an ocean of eyes.
“Do you know what kind of ring you are looking for?” said the clerk softly, “Does the lucky man have a stated preference?”
“No diamonds,” Keith replied, trying to shake his shock at being so unceremoniously outed. Pushing aside one part of his anxiety, Keith looked down at the rings once more, “I think he’d prefer rubies—it’s his birthstone. He also says he’s allergic to gold…”
“I see,” the clerk unlocked a drawer behind the display, pulled out a black felt tray, and pushed it across the top of the display case. Ranks and columns of silvery rings set with red stones glimmered in the dim light, “this is our selection of rubies set in platinum.”
Keith peered down at the rings, reached towards them, and then hesitated, “may I?
“Feel free.”
He left the store empty handed, though his visit had not been in vain. Of the multitudes of rings, he’d found three or four that he thought Surinder would love, though their price tags gave him pause, despite the clerk’s insistence that the payment plans were affordable. He excused himself, telling the clerk he had to think, and left for his office.
Outside, the midday sun had thickened the air. Sluggish currents shuffled through the streets, disturbed only by the buzz of passing drones. Sweating in his suit, Keith paid for a reprieve from the audio-adverts and tried to focus on his music. Still, the logos of department stores offering discounts on registry as well as sweeping shots of fridges, blenders, tables, stoves, and microwaves called out from bus-stops and billboards, crowding his peripheries. He ignored them until he reached the intersection in front of his office. There, he stood looking up at the collage of videos above, massive images that rippled down the sheets of glass and concrete, a salesman’s rain.
In a way, he supposed, they were good omens.
****
Back in his office, he found Ndidi trying to fit the camera bulb back into the ceiling. He wondered, vaguely, how she’d managed to get it down again, before taking over from her. This time, it only took three attempts before it clicked back into the socket.
“Sorry,” she said as he sat down behind his desk, “It’s been bothering me all day.”
“It’s fixed?”
“Well, kind of?” she looked at him guiltily, “I confirmed that the problem is contrast; it has problems recognising stationary black hair and skin as a living person rather than an inanimate object. I found that I could trick the camera into thinking the room was darker than it is so that it registers my skin as lighter. I don’t understand why they didn’t just program this thing to focus on temperature—you only need like 2 degrees either side of 37.5 to detect every single living human.”
Lacking a response, Keith shook his head sympathetically. The few times he’d stayed late at work, he’d often removed his VR goggles to find himself sitting in darkness. It was irritating, but his work hardly required the light, which buzzed on if he got up to stretch his legs or visit the toilets. It hadn’t occurred to him that the problem was fixable, much less that its cause might lie in the colour of his skin. Still, it seemed a minor problem—not worth the effort Ndidi had put into the solution.
He picked up his VR goggles but a message from his aunt appeared in his vision, projected on his contacts:
Can I see you in my office?
With a sigh, he put down the goggles.
His aunt’s office was down the hall from his. It was a sizeable room—easily twice the size of his—with an arresting view of the city subsiding into the suburbs, farmland, and then mountains. Framed prints of late 20th century adverts crowded the walls, an audience for the single desk and the elliptical the room contained. There was only one chair: his aunt’s.
His aunt was running on her elliptical, sweat glistening on her freckled skin and her unruly red-frizz pulled back, straining against elastics. He stood, waiting for her to finish. It was a long five minutes before she hopped off the machine, pulled a large tablet off the display and, towel handing over her neck, slid into the seat across the desk.
“Keith!” she said, brightly, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Nothing happened recently?” He noticed a slight edge in her voice, “this morning, perhaps?”
“Not that I can think of,” he kept his voice neutral.
“Well then,” she smiled, “can you account for the precipitous fall in your stats this morning?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Please do not interrupt.” she swivelled her tablet to face Keith revealing his name atop a column of numbers, “until about eleven this morning, you were among my top-performing employees with over seventy percent of your approved ads moving onto at least the final stage of production. Then, after a break of about ten minutes, you fall to thirty percent. What’s more, when I reviewed your reject feed there were a number of adverts that were clear winners. So you can understand my concern that something might have happened.”
“I’m sorry, Siobhan. I—”
“Don’t be sorry, be better. I’m not going to lie; your mother’s pestering helped you get this job but you are a talented, reliable, and competent person, which is as much why I hired you over the thousands of other qualified applicants. We all have bad days but you need to communicate if there’s a problem…” she looked at him expectantly.
“I… well…” he fidgeted with his trouser pocket and tried to work out whether telling her about Ndidi’s findings would help—whether she’d do anything about it.
“Listen Kee,” she said sweetly, “communication is really important…”
“Ndidi showed me her results,” he blurted, “they showed racial bias in our advertisements.”
“I see,” she sat back, looking unsurprised, “I thought that might be it. Listen, Kee, I’m not going to sit here and tell you there’s no problem, but we’re not the problem. We are subject to the realities of the market and, quite frankly, people’s biases affect their desire to buy. In the end, we only reflect our culture’s issues.” She pulled out her phone and jabbed at it for a few seconds.
“Our only aim is to help our clients show their product in the best possible light. Sometimes, that task is going to come with some cultural baggage.”
The door opened behind him. Keith turned to see Ndidiamaka sidle into the room. She looked nervous. Sorry, he mouthed at her. Her eyes narrowed.
“Ah Deedee,” continued Siobhan, “Keith was telling me you have some results from your study.”
“Yes,” Ndidiamaka replied timidly, “but they’re only preliminary.”
“I understand,” Siobhan replied sympathetically, “but you can understand how results such as those Keith described might put this agency in an awkward position.”
“I’m not going to name the agency in my thesis.”
“Yes, but you will in your resume and, with me as one of your references, it’s not going to be that hard to put two-and-two together—”
“What are you asking me to do? I can’t change my results.”
A silence unspooled; Siobhan’s jaw clenched. Keith could almost hear her calming herself down.
“The last thing I want to do is tell you what to write in your thesis,” Siobhan said in a brittle, sugary tone, “but aren’t there a lot of ways this data could be interpreted?”
“Not really.”
“So your results are infallible—no uncertainty?”
“Well… there’s always some uncertainty.”
“Exactly,” Siobhan smiled and it was genuine this time, “You’d be remiss not to mention that uncertainty. For instance is the racial bias worse than that in our society? How do you measure bias? Are there problems with such measurements? How does this agency compare with others? Is there data for that? See, those are just off the top of my head and I’ve never studied sociology.”
“But my thesis—”
“Listen, Deedee” Siobhan’s good humour evaporated, “over half of this agency’s employees are women and a full third are people of colour. I can tell you that no other agency comes close to matching our levels of diversity. Smearing us will only result in us losing clients to other agencies and may force us to lay people off. I would never tell you what to write, but think carefully about the potential impacts of your work. Don’t make us pay for systemic problems.”
****
“I’m sorry,” Keith said as soon as they left the room but Ndidiamaka hurried down the hallway ahead of him, barely acknowledging he’d said anything. He jogged after her, catching up just as she turned into their office, “wait, I’m sorry… you know how she is—she bullied it out of me.”
“I’m not angry at you, Keith. I’m frustrated that months of work is going down the drain for PR reasons.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, “how did she even find out?”
“I tried to be less biased and it tanked my numbers; my aunt figured something happened.”
Ndidiamaka stared at him for a few seconds.
“To be honest,” she said eventually, “I’m surprised you changed your behaviour so quickly. I expected you to do something… But I thought I’d have weeks—enough time to have already submitted my thesis. By then, even if your aunt complained, it would have been out of my hands. ”
She sat at her desk and stared blankly at her computer, lost in thought. Similarly silenced, Keith sat down at his own desk, pulled on his goggles, and found himself immersed in a series of adverts for electric razors. Square-jawed men with rippling abs stood in hyper-modern bathrooms, shaving foam slathered on hairless faces. Waiflike women caressed faces, rubbing chins, cheeks, necks with perfectly manicured hands. He flipped through the ads, allowing his instincts to take over. It was easier than he’d ever admit.
****
After several torturous hours listening to gravelly voices describe at length just how close a shave could be, Keith stepped out of the office into a cool evening. The package holidays had returned in force, packing the buildings with glimpses of silhouetted palms, densely forested mountains, and vineyards. Though the sky was a pale blue, the dusk in the adverts gave him the impression of gathering clouds. He hunched over as he wove through the rising commuter rush.
As he approached the jewellery store, the package holidays gave way to adverts for credit cards and banks. Men and women smiled from the walls, gold watches peeked from the cuffs of immaculate suits, children frolicked around sleek kitchen islands. Skies were a cloudless blue; the grass was green.
By the time he walked into the cool, dimness of the shop, he felt calmed and assured. His smile returned by the clerk, he strode over to the display of rings, and asked for the three most likely wedding bands. The clerk—who had set them aside for him—slid them over the glass on individual white satin pillows.
One was a simple circle of platinum with a large, bevelled-rectangle ruby, its deep red glittered ostentatiously even in the low light. It was beautiful but, seeing it again, Keith realized that it was far too showy for Surinder’s tastes.
Tiny rubies snaked around the second ring, oscillating across a broader band of platinum. He picked it up and slipped it onto his left hand. He thought the rubies caught the light beautifully, but the broadness of the metal felt cumbersome; he liked the idea of Surinder forgetting he was wearing the ring, of the admiration of others drawing his attention. He wanted the compliments to be a trail of gifts in the days ahead like petals leading to a bedroom.
The third was perfect—as thirds are wont to be. The ring itself was made of four thin strands of bright platinum twisted together. The metal half-swallowed the stones. They peeked from within as though the metal swaddled a ring of pure ruby. He slipped it on. It was surprisingly light, almost gossamer. He raised his hand peering at it in the gloom. The door behind him opened and the ring caught the flood of evening light, sparkling. This is it, he thought, this—
“Get down on the ground!” yelled a hoarse voice.
He turned, confused and found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol. He froze. His world turned on that point of darkness. At its edge, he had a dull awareness of chaotic motion—the clerk scrambling back towards the cash.
The barrel turned away. Panic overtook him. He dived sideways, landing on a display case. Glass shattered.
“Don’t try anything!” yelled the voice.
But Keith was already stumbling towards the door.
“Put it in the bag!”
A familiar hum awoke the air. Tendrils unfurled from the ceiling. The door was just a few feet away.
“I’m warning you”.
His hands felt the cool glass of the door. Something moved in his peripheries.
“No—”
Two things happened at once; there was a loud bang and Keith felt a force course through him. Propelled forwards, he spilled from the shop and out onto the street. He fell, the pavement thwacking into his palms. An acrid stench—burning hair—filled everything. Another gunshot resounded behind him. Help, he tried to say, but he could barely croak.
“Citizen, halt. Surrender yourself.” buzzed a voice from above.
Keith struggled to his feet, stumbling forwards, pushing himself away from the store. The world seemed distant. His heart pounded. He collided with someone, and then someone else. Then suddenly, it seemed the street was clear. He tried to catch his breath. He forced himself to keep moving.
“Citizen, this is your final warning.”
The approaching sirens were a salve to his panic. They promised salvation—an end to the madness that had overrun his evening. How could anyone possibly think they’d get away with such a brazen robbery, he thought, his first clear thought since it had all started.
A shadow flicked over him. There was an crackle of electricity. He looked up. There was barely time to register the taser-barbs lancing from the wasp-like form of the law enforcement drone, before a surging current pushed him into darkness.
****
His face was pressed against cold metal, its bitter smell mingled with the pungency of saliva. His legs and arse felt leaden, asleep. He tried to push himself up, to get comfortable and found he was handcuffed to a bar in the middle of the metal table.
The walls surrounding him were featureless expanses of brushed metal. On the other side of the table, two empty chairs faced him. A camera bulb sat next to the lone light on the ceiling. Confusion. He had a vague recollection of a jerking passage in a van; of rough hands pushing him through a brief outside into another darkness; of hands taking his phone, his watch, even his contacts; of a flash as he stared dazed; of questions answered automatically; and then of a silent room and the return of the all-embracing darkness.
“Hello?” In the echoes he felt a stab of panic, “hello?”
An outline of a door appeared on the wall across from him. Silently, it slid back and then sideways, revealing two figures silhouetted by the harsh light of a hallway. Sounds of walking feet, typing, and indistinct conversations spilled into the room.
“I think there’s been a mistake—” Keith began
“Keith Higgins,” rumbled a baritone, “of 32 Pineview Drive?”
“Yes that’s me, but I think there’s—”
“You’ve been read your rights,” said the other figure in a flinty, peremptory tone, “you are facing charges of armed robbery, grievous bodily harm—escalating to first degree murder, if the clerk does not survive surgery.”
The two of them stepped into the room, revealing themselves.
The first voice belonged to a large—but not fat—man. The arms of his suit ended prematurely, revealing shirt cuffs and a hint of a tattoo on his forearm. Stubble speckled his face around a ragged blonde goatee, merging into a crew cut that was about a week overdue for a haircut.
The owner of the second voice was a tall, thin woman wearing a charcoal grey suit, and a blue shirt with a yellow stain on it. Her hair was pulled back into cornrows ending in blue beads that, Keith noted, were the same colour as her shirt. She was holding a tablet under left arm. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
“Mr. Higgins,” continued the woman, “I am Detective Beckford and this is Detective Strauss.”
Detective Strauss sat heavily in the seat across from Keith. Detective Beckford leant on the back of the other chair.
“Please, there’s been a mistake, I didn’t do anything!”
Detective Beckford’s jaw clenched. She leaned over and slid the tablet towards Keith, “Mr. Higgins, we have your accomplice in custody. He’s being questioned in the next room.”
“Accomplice? I didn’t have anything to do with the robbery, please believe me.”
“If that’s the case,” said Strauss gently, “I’m sure things will be cleared up soon. But it will be cleared up more quickly if you work with us.”
Detective Beckford tapped on the tablet. The screen flickered and displayed an aerial shot of a street. Two men stood staring at a window display filled with jewellry. With a rising sense of dread, Keith recognised himself.
“Is this you?” asked Detective Beckford
“Yes, but—”
“Standing outside the scene of the crime this morning.”
“Yes, but—”
“Why did you go to the store before opening hours.”
“I made a mistake, I wanted to buy an engagement ring—”
“You went to buy an engagement ring but didn’t check the opening hours of the store?”
“It was a mistake.”
“Right. And the man standing next to you, who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You had never met him before?”
“No. I didn’t even talk to him.”
Detective Beckford’s eyes glinted and her mouth curled up into a sneering smile, “Mr. Higgins this will be easier if you tell us the truth,” she flicked the screen, changing the display to footage of the store. Keith, head down except for occasional furtive glances, collided with a man, pulled him back to his feet, and then said a few words to him, “here we have you talking to that same man—”
“That’s just a coincidence—I didn’t even realise that was the same person. Maybe he was staking out the store.”
“Yet, he looks at none of the cameras and you look at every single one and then…” she flipped to another set of footage—a man, his face hidden by a cap, walking into a store,“he avoids every single camera on his entry. Do you know a man named Quentin Jones?”
“No…wait, maybe… the name sounds familiar.”
“It should, you went to highschool with him. You were both on the Rugby team.”
Detective Beckford tapped on the tablet and a yearbook photo popped up. Beneath it was the name Quentin Jones, a few words and a signature which, with a sinking heart, Keith recognised as his own. “Now, Mr. Higgins, we can place you both at the store on three occasions today. Your agency works with Saber Security Systems, so you have the knowledge necessary to identify the alarm. You also have the technical background to disable the system. You pulled the clerk away from the silent alarm, but Mr. Jones came in before you had a chance to disable the system.”
“I did not!” Keith protested, “I was not involved in any way. I only went to the store to buy an engagement ring. Ask the clerk.”
“We would, but he is currently undergoing surgery due to the fact that your accomplice shot him.” retorted Detective Beckford, “You’re looking at 15 years in prison, you understand that? 25 minimum if the clerk dies. Longer, if your friend testifies against you. Ask yourself: how much do you trust Quentin?”
“Mr. Higgins,” Detective Strauss’ voice was calm and reasonable, “you left the store with a ring during the robbery, a $20,000 ring—six month’s wages for you, right? We’ve run your financials and there’s no way you could afford that ring. Hell, the cheapest rings in the store would be a stretch with your outgoings, even with generous financing. Now, I don’t think you expected Mr. Jones to shoot the clerk and, when he did, you ran. We have footage of the two of you; we have footage of you running; we have footage of you disobeying lawful commands from a law enforcement drone. We have predictive data that flagged your behavior as suspicious, evasive, and conspiratorial from the start of the day. You’ve been caught Mr. Higgins; you’re going to jail. But, if you work with us, we might be able to get you a deal, particularly if you cooperate before the clerk passes. After all, you did not pull the trigger; is it fair for you to face the consequences of Mr. Jones’ actions?”
Keith stared at the two detectives. For a moment, he was convinced, caught in a web of circumstances that reeled him towards the deal. A future hunched over him like a gargantuan spider, mandibles distended. Then it all vanished under the pure heat of the truth; he was not guilty. He had done nothing but flee danger. It seemed impossible that a jury would convict, that anyone would believe this story. He knew all about reasonable doubt.
“No,” he said flatly, “I was not involved in any way. I want a lawyer.”
Detective Beckford clenched her jaw and snatched up her tablet; Detective Strauss gave him a look a pure disgust and stood. As a unit they walked to the door, which slid open as they approached. At the door, Detective Strauss paused and looked back at Keith.
“A lawyer won’t help you.” he spat, “your accomplice has already confessed to everything.”
The door closed, leaving Keith alone in the sterile light of the interrogation room. He tried to remember Quentin Jones, his teammate twenty years before, but could not recall anything except a few fragments—the motions of play, the feeling of a rugby ball in his arms, the smell of mud and turf. Quentin was a vague shape—a blur at the peripheries of his memory. He didn’t even remember having a five minute conversation with him. He had no idea where the man had been for the past two decades. He tried to imagine what he would do if, with one, small lie, he could claw back a decade of life from the threat of incarceration. He shuddered. There’s still the trial, bail—it’s not all lost. It was a glimmer of hope. But, as the incessant buzz and inscrutable walls stretched the minutes, that hope faded like the mouth of a well above a falling child.
Time dissolved. The slight and random flicker of the light, the only change except Keith’s shifting: hunched, slouched, upright and expectant, arms crossed, slumped back. His legs crossed and uncrossed—up and down—sliding back under the chair and forward under the table. He tried to think of anything but his predicament. But it sat, a black hole at his centre, no matter what he turned his mind to to escape it, to skirt its edges, the gravity of his anxiety made every orbit a decaying one. The room seemed to tighten. It crushed the breath from him. His jaw locked. Fingernails broke as he raked the table. He tasted blood.
The door slid open, revealing two figures—Detective Strauss and Detective Beckford. They strode across the room towards him. Detective Strauss rumbled something, but Keith could not make out his words.
“Please,” he managed to croak, “I didn’t…”
Detective Beckford came to a halt beside the table. She did not meet his gaze. He tried to catch Detective Strauss’s eye, but the man seemed just as unwilling to look him in the eye. Detective Beckford leant towards him. He flinched. She grabbed his hands, pulled them towards her and fiddled with the handcuffs.
Suddenly, he was free. They pulled him to his feet and shepherded him down a hallway, through a bullpen thronging with uniformed officers, and out to a desk where they handed back his phone, keys, wallet, and contacts.
“Again, Mr. Higgins,” said Detective Strauss, “We were acting on the information we had available. We released you as soon as the clerk confirmed that you were a customer, and we verified there had been no electronic communication between Mr. Jones and yourself.” he hesitated and seemed to be selecting his words carefully, “I hope this experience has not affected you adversely.” he said, eventually.
Keith stared at them, both looked away, down at their boots. With a grim, sarcastic laugh, he turned away from them. This seemed to release them from whatever duty they felt to him and they bustled away. Alone beside the desk, he pushed his keys and phone into his pocket and then put in his contacts. That done, he felt less naked. But still tears welled in his eyes. He wanted to be home.
“Keith!” he turned. A familiar figured strode across the atrium beyond the desk. A tall, broad shouldered man whose stubble was edging on unkempt and whose cross-eyed smile was weighed on by anxious hours of wait and anger. Wordlessly, he walked to Surinder and let his arms pull him in, enfolding in the smell of tangerines and home. Against that chest, he began to sob, “It’s okay,” Surinder said, “you’re safe…come on, let’s go home.”
Outside, the mid morning sun had just begun to dry the rain. The few cars in the car park glittered like damp beetles. The adverts had not yet loaded. Expanses of empty rain-stained wall stared down, a crowd of impassive faces. Then, in unison, they flickered. A horde of men and women in suits strolled into view. Arms crossed, they stared down at him with fierce, determined gaze. Most he did not recognize, but a few were clients—the towering figure of Margaret Anderson of Anderson Litigation smiled reassuringly, Venance Owuor of Mendelson, Ramirez & Owuor stood straight faced. Make a Claim, demanded one advert, Don’t Pay Unless We Win, Fast Case Review, Experience You Can Trust, Personal Injury Litigation, No Win No Fee, Reclaim your Life… The city screamed at him silently, I know; I see.
He fumbled at his eyes—at his contacts. Circuitry tore between his fingers. Shreds of tiny machines falling away, disappearing into the dirt beneath his feet. He blinked back his tears and looked out over a quieted city with naked eyes. Traffic throbbed; trains rattled; indistinct shouts, tone, and alarms rose into the air: it all combined into a threatening mutter.
With a sigh, Keith opened the car door, swung in, and pulled on his seatbelt. Surinder keyed in their home address and sat back as it rumbled to life. They sat in a heavy silence as it pulled out of the car park and struck along a route towards the motorway, Keith staring out at the city as it swept past; Surinder watching Keith, probingly.
“I got a call from your aunt—your phone is off—” said Surinder eventually, “I told her now’s not a good time—I said you were sick—but I thought you should know.”
“I’ll call her back.”
“Babe, you don’t have to—take a break…”
“No,” Keith said, “I need to focus on something else, I need to do something, I need—”
“Okay,” Surinder handed him a phone, “but you’re not going into work today. Today I get you to myself. We’re going to drive to the mountains and go for a good long hike”
“That sounds perfect,” they shared a smile and Keith felt as though he was sloughing off a brittle layer of anxiety. He dialed his aunt’s number, she picked up on the third ring.
“Ah, Kee! Just who I wanted to talk to!” Though slightly out of breath, she seemed unusually chipper, “I heard you were sick. Well, get well soon because I have a lot more work for you! You’re a genius, you know that?”
“Genius?”
“Your ads—those god-awful ads—went viral!”
“The security ones?”
“No, those were a trainwreck—nothing we could do—the ones for Matcher! Those awkward, awful dates. Well, eight of the ten that made it through final review have over 30 million hits—30 million in less than a day! Holy shit Kee, you’re getting a bonus this year, shit we all are. So get well!”
She hung up.
“Good news, I take it?” asked Surinder.
“Yeah,” said Keith, staring out the window—the towers had given way to strip malls and parking lots, “some ads I chose went viral.”
“That’s amazing, Babe! Really exciting!”
“I guess.” Keith shifted uncomfortably. They lapsed into silence again.
“Keith?” Surinder looked over at him carefully, “I know why you were at that shop.”
“Oh.”
“Well,” Surinder’s smile was the sun rising on a new day, “the answer’s yes.”
I would like to thank Dylan, Hannah, Lauren, and Solomon for making this story better and more comprehensible than I could have done alone.
Nathaniel McKenzie is a proud citizen of nowhere seeking to turn his writing compulsion into an effective means of stealing time from other people. He enjoys avocados, paying rent, the smell of books new and old, trailing off in the middle of sentences, and
This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.
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Utopian dreamers, other-worldly explorers and psychonautic adventurers, scholars, activists, students, and critics: we are officially inviting submissions for a new collaborative writing project that combines critical perspectives and creative possibilities. Drawing inspiration from Uneven Earth, an online magazine for political ecology established in 2015, we are excited to announce the launch of a new section, called Not afraid of the ruins, dedicated to science-fiction and utopian imaginings. The goal of this new section will be to regularly showcase new, original, creative and critical reflections to foster intimate and productive conversations across the intellectual and creative arts.
The fertile ground between science fiction and social/environmental justice has long been an arena for speculation and exploration by academics, activists, and creative writers. From the academy to the field and beyond, the works of science fiction writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood (among many, many others) have presented unique corollaries to the diverse worlds and experiences we encounter in political ecology and social/environmental justice research and activism. Our goal with this project is to create a space explicitly open to exploring such convergences, a space that is neither formally academic nor wholly creative fiction, but instead, in the true spirit of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, seeks to tap the potential that exists in the liminal space between these otherwise isolated worlds of thought. We hope that such an endeavor will produce seeds for imagining that will go forward and populate unexpected places both far and near.
Submission Criteria
There are no strict guidelines for submission in regards to content, format or length although we will maintain editorial oversight of submissions. While shorter pieces up to 2,500 words may be most suitable, we are happy to consider longer pieces, especially as they explore the creative possibilities of such a genre-melding forum. We are particularly interested in pieces that engage with the themes of:
Examples of pieces that we would ideally consider include, but are not limited to:
Utopian dreams and/or dystopian nightmares: explorations of queer, feminist, decolonial, afro-futurist, anarchist, luxury communist, degrowth, and post-capitalist ecologies.
Conversations between science fiction and political ecology, social, environmental and climatic justice.
Critical analysis of academic and science fiction literature, either old or new.
Thought pieces blending science fiction and contemporary social, economic, and political struggles.
Fictional renderings of field experiences and/or relevant research topics.
While the short term aim of this project is to develop a space for cross-cutting collaboration and conversation, we are also hoping to create the possibility for publication opportunities beyond the blog. We regret that we cannot currently offer financial remuneration for submissions to this section, however, Uneven Earth does offer a writing grantfor non-fiction pieces.
In order to submit a piece, please send us an email to ruins[at]unevenearth.org which includes:
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Deadline: Friday, September 22 (Autumn Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere)
Deadline: Friday, September 29
In an age of unprecedented climatic, social and political change, we believe that such a project is as important and urgent as ever. We feel compelled, as academics and activists and human beings, to not only critically reflect upon our shared human and ecological condition, but to dare to dream otherwise, to imagine things not only as they are, but to reimagine them as they could be. It is our hope that this blog will provide both space and motivation for doing just that.
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