In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland speaks with writers and critics Octavia Cade and M. L. Clark about writing in hard times. How and why is speculative fiction written in contexts of defeat, despair, or decay? They discuss climate change and artificial intelligence, systems political, biological, and economic—and how SF might be, and yet sometimes isn’t, a key tool in opening up new modes of understanding during a time that Octavia suggests might best be termed the Necrocene.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 14

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the writers and critics Octavia Cade and M. L. Clark.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about writing in hard times. How and why is speculative fiction written in contexts of defeat, despair, or decay?

We’ll discuss climate change and artificial intelligence, systems political, biological, and economic, and how SF might be, and yet sometimes isn’t, a key tool in opening up new modes of understanding. But we began our conversation by discussing the two most recent reviews that Maggie and Octavia have published with Strange Horizons.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So Maggie, your recent review of the Ray Nayler book Where the Axe Is Buried was really—I mean, I’m gonna be honest here, I’ve simply plagiarized all your ideas for this episode of the podcast, because you start that review with a quote from the novel, and I can absolutely see why, it had all my bells ringing too. And the quote is:

She had believed that writing itself was an action. But she had stopped believing that: She had come to see her writing was nothing but empty words. A delaying tactic. Something to do to hide her own impotence in the face of unchanging, unconquerable, indifferent state power.

And you go on in the review to sort of meditate on that and talk about what it might mean to write and to read in a period where it feels as if you are losing, right? That something is wrong. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, whatever it is. And you talk about AI a lot in your review, but Octavia, in a recent review for Strange Horizons of The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders, talks about climate and there are many other fronts on which we could put our gaze to discuss, you know, writing in hard times.

So I really wanted to dig a bit deeper about, first of all, how you experienced that book as a reader and how you think Nayler was approaching writing that book, which is fundamentally—just as your review was—a meditation on the difficulty of creative endeavor at a time when it feels like the walls are closing in.

M. L. Clark: Terrific question, Dan. This reading was a distinct experience for me, perhaps, as opposed to other readers for whom this might be the first work of Nayler they experience. I have followed Nayler’s short stories, novella work, novel work for quite some time, and as a result, when I engage with a work that has embedded in it a sense of a writer reaching a breaking point, reaching a sense of futility with their own product, I can’t help but also think about the author behind it and their own long history of wrestling with a theme in ways that are more pragmatic and a little bit more on the side of … existential … I don’t wanna say despair, but certainly pause.

And that’s certainly what happens in many of Nayler’s stories is you have that existential pause. Here it is a heavier pause, I believe, than usual in his work. And that comes from the fact that the notion of AI that you mentioned in your introduction is not really the element causing the strain in the story. There are futures extending from the AI technologies that we currently have in place, but in the way that they are presented in Nayler’s work they’re simply an extension of a body of human creations that have served sometimes to uplift, but more often to oppress and isolate and estrange us from one another. And it is to that aspect of human behavior that Nayler seems to be speaking and in a way that he is wrestling with: A moment of defeat in the conversation, not the end of the conversation, but certainly there is a heaviness to this point in our history, even though it is obviously presented as being in the future.

We know that all science fiction is truly a commentary about the present. And so it does seem very much to be speaking to a present moment where we are in existential pause.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, you mention early on in the review that the book is a kind of question about whether writing can actually achieve anything in the face of, as you say, political systems that are accelerating our own ruin.

And I found this idea of a book that was uncertain of its own, if not value, then utility, you know, sort of agency in the world really interesting. And Octavia, I said at the beginning of the episode that I fully own up to just essentially stealing Maggie’s whole idea from their review for this episode. But equally, I don’t think I’d have got there if I hadn’t also at the same time read your piece, because it is a similar kind of meditation on a period in which defeat seems likely. And yet the novel is still written and the characters within the novel still fight.

The difference, I felt—and maybe you could talk a little bit about this—is that in Saunders’s The Flat Woman, there’s a sense … there’s almost a note of hope towards the end, where you say the main character of the novel starts to fight back, alongside nature. Because the focus in this novel isn’t AI. It’s climate, which of course you’ve written about more widely for Strange Horizons and elsewhere. I think also specifically of your review of The Mires recently, which has a hopeful note to end on because, in that novel, the community starts to rebuild itself too. So did you experience that sense of optimism in reading about difficult times?

Octavia Cade: Not so much, I’m afraid. Very much so in The Mires’ case—The Mires, I think, is fundamentally about connection, about building connection and resilience within a community. In The Flat Woman, that resilience comes almost from eschewing connection, at least with all the other human elements of the text. In The Flat Woman, this main character—and all of them are nameless, they’re referred to as, you know, the girl, the woman—identity is sort of stripped from. Most of these characters, they become cogs in this very industrial machine. And the only way to survive that really is by limiting the way that you connect with other people.

But the difference, I think, in The Flat Woman is that increasingly other people just aren’t worth connecting with. It’s a very depressing way to look at things. But nearly everyone that the woman meets throughout her life is looking to exploit her in some way, or is entirely indifferent or even takes pleasure in her suffering.

I mean, when her mother, the university lecturer is, is taken away for a show trial and the girl is still very young, she has an aunt. The aunt is not particularly maternal, so the aunt stays living in her own house, and she comes along to see her little niece and brings groceries pretty much once a month and leaves this preteen to just get on with it.

And this disconnection goes through her life. And really, the only way that the woman manages to fight back after she grows up is by accepting that part of her is completely non-human—that if she wants sort of resilience and empathy and sympathy in her life, she has to look outside, almost, the human community to find it.

And as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the human relationship with the non-human, I find that particularly fascinating. Because in some ways it is a different version of looking at the human-AI relationship. You know, how do we connect with something that is so fundamentally unlike us? In The Flat Woman, there is hope for the main character. But not that much for the world around her.

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting because the ending you describe is not dissimilar to the ending, in some ways, of Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, in which the main character—and others, but we’ll stick with the main character—is transformed by, in this case, the DNA (for want of a better term) of alien life on a planet.

The particular alien life on this exoplanet has evolved to essentially be symbiotic with all other types of life on the planet, so it becomes part of him and then transforms him into something very other. He still has his memories from his human life, but he is no longer entirely human, he’s something different.

And at the end of the novel, they get in the spaceship and they’re off to transform all the other human societies in the galaxy, which are also broken and have defeated their own sense of humanity. It’s an interesting link there because, as you say, both of those are sort of hopeful in a very depressed and despairing way.

Maggie deliberately shied away from using the word despair about the Nayler, but it’s there, too, and I’m really interested in this. Is there no other hope left for us in either of these novels than, “OK, well, we just have to completely change into something basically non-human in order to get out of this bind we’ve found ourselves in”?

Octavia Cade: I don’t think we need to change. I think we need to realize that we are basically non-human. We have a collective delusion, the human race, that we exist sort of as individuals, that we are “homo sapiens”; but if you look at us on a biological level we are a collection. In our individual bodies, we are a collection of species. I think there is about ten times as many non-human cells as human cells in the human body. There is about a hundred times non-human DNA in the human body than there is human DNA. We are a microbiome. We are fundamentally more non-human than human, and we pretend that we aren’t.

I think we try and separate ourselves from the rest of the natural world as though we haven’t evolved here—as though, you know, every part of our biology and psychology isn’t fitted. To the world we have around us. And then we try and change that world in really fundamental ways. And we think that doesn’t have an effect on our biology and on our identity, and it really does.

So I think this idea of connection with the non-human. Is really a more, a reinterpretation of ourselves in some way.

M. L. Clark: In the other direction as well, Nayler’s work has routinely highlighted the fact that we are part of systems, deep, deep systems, and that there is the conceit—itself a very Westernized conceit, it might be the greatest science fictional element of literature in our time—this notion of the self, being somehow disconnected from the broader systems that shape their behaviors as well as their outcomes. And in which we are constantly, whether we mean to or not, doing violence to one another in a tremendously far-reaching way.

We often don’t fully understand the way that our existences do harm to quite a significant number of other organisms, other parts of the load that we inhabit. And so that does seem to be the one place where we can imagine pushing back on utter despair, because there’s that continuity—when we return to that continuity, not just with the rest of the world, but also with the vast majority of our history.

We are living in a moment that’s a little bit more exceptional in as much as it is hyper-fixated on this notion of our exceptionalism. If we can get past that, if we can return to a much deeper understanding of ourselves in relation to, uh, the broader systems of oppression and possible aid that we have always belonged to, we can perhaps start to eliminate the extraordinary factor in our current societies that is causing us to do so much accelerated harm.

We will still always do harm. We will still always be in a game of push and pull. I think Iris Murdoch actually has something to say about it in The Nice and The Good, this wonderful quote about how we are always going to be part of systems of harm. And the best we can do is to coax weakness and inspire strength and to bring ourselves back to a deeper kindness of a place in the world.

But to get there, we do have to get over this mythologizing self that does seem to consume current movement.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I’m so glad that you mentioned that the Nayler talks about systems, too, Maggie. Because I was gonna, I’m afraid, quote yourself back at you again. You’ve just mentioned Murdoch and you also talk about another philosopher in your review, Heidegger, and you talk about how the Nayler is a novel in the same way as, but in a different way as, The Flat Woman about escaping the system. But you kind of can’t, ’cause we are the system.

And I just wonder whether we’re tripping over here what we might be able to say in answer to the character that I quoted—or that you quoted and then I quoted you quoting in your review, Maggie—where she doubts the capacity of mere writing to achieve anything really. But we seem to be saying that actually we can write ourselves into different understandings, and that might be what we can achieve by doing this silly thing producing text. Rachel Cordasco, in the last episode of this podcast, talked about science fiction being a particularly systemic form of fiction, and I wonder whether that is also part of what writing a specifically science fiction novel might help us achieve?

M. L. Clark: I might want to speak first to the Heidegger because it’s an allusion here, but many people might not be leaping immediately to reading my review for context. But there is something that I tried to highlight in this piece and then other people have discussed as well.

Heidegger, in the essay that’s referenced, establishes a notion of technology that both was a beginning and an end to conversation. So when we talk about ends of conversations, it’s actually quite potent to think about how, from Heidegger on, some people have loosely used one interpretation of technology in that essay to determine how we talk about technology today.

And yet, if you do read the essay, you see that there are many ways to talk about technology, and some of them are more likely to give us pathways forward. If we only think about technology in a very limited modern sense—the computer technology of the industrial complex—we have only a certain view of our relationship to the revealed world. That is possible. If we go back to the other meanings of technology discussed in that text, there are ones in which I also put Ray Nayler’s work as a body of writing—because that’s a kind of artificial intelligence as well. We have been doing the work of technology and we have been using technology to serve deeper ends as a species for a very long time.

If we were to return to the other half of that conversation, if we were to not see technology in that one way that has been locked in in some ways since Heidegger’s essay, but to move into other ways of thinking and being, that might be the out. And so that’s where we have that opportunity to think about an endpoint as also an inevitable invitation to think about other pathways we could have taken and could take now.

Octavia Cade: Yeah. When you’re talking about sort of definitions there of what technology is, it reminds me of something I’ve been looking at a lot lately with some of my academic work: looking at how we see the time period that we are living in. I think the term that has come into most use at the moment is the Anthropocene. But increasingly I’ve been looking at the different ways of describing that. And I think my favorite one at the moment, the one that catches my imagination most, is the Necrocene. You know, the age of death, how we have developed this, and the connection between, I think, politics and the environment—which has always been there, this is not a new thing—and how the two interact with each other and how we engage with this idea of the Necrocene.

Because there is so much to it of blame, of responsibility, and it’s no wonder really we chose the Anthropocene. Because that is a concept that is far easier in a way to deal with. Beccause it promotes that idea of, you know, the humans as a separate influential species somehow disconnected from the rest of the world. It’s so much less confronting than this idea of the age of death which we have ushered in. So the problem of definition, and the opportunities of definition, are something that I find really interesting because they shape the way we think, they shape the way we approach problems.

If we talk about life in the Anthropocene, it is very different from life in the Necrocene, even though they are really both referring to the same time period. That’s something that I increasingly look for in I think the speculative fiction that I read. Many of the authors don’t exactly define it in that way because they’re, you know, they’re working in their own separate universes. But this engaging with the idea of a transformative world in practice and in definition, I think that’s something that works like The Flat Woman and again The Mires do particularly well.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And you mentioned in both of those reviews, Octavia, but in particular in the review of The Flat Woman, that the way in which the texts are engaging in genre is interesting. The Flat Woman, you mentioned, fuses magic realism with science fiction to take both in a slightly different direction. And I mentioned that because it strikes me that in order to imagine our way into sort of different understandings of the ills that ail us, science fiction must reimagine itself.

I’m thinking here of Niall Harrison’s All These Worlds, which opens with this idea that “once upon a time in the west,” he writes, “there was a genre.” And that genre kind of knew what the future was gonna look like. It was gonna be spaceships and it was gonna be astronauts, and it was gonna be, you know, square-jawed men solving things, MacGyverishly.

And sometime around he thinks—I’m not sure this is right, but he thinks—sometime around the 1990s, everyone looks around and thinks, “Well, that didn’t happen.” Ever since, the genre has kind of been, “Well, what do we do with this stuff? We don’t got jet packs!” Both of these novels—and others as well, which maybe we can get on talking about—have to try to retool the genre that they are sort of in dialogue with, if not inhabiting, in order to do the work that they want to do—because science fiction itself is part of these systems that we are attempting to quote-unquote escape, right?

M. L. Clark: I do want to quote—because this is only fair, Octavia: Dan read a piece from my review, and I’d love to read a piece from your review—because this absolutely sang to me when I was reading it.

Liminality can be illuminating. It can also be untrustworthy; so much of climate change is linked with the existence and transgression of boundaries. How far can this water rise, how reliable is this coastline, what borders do we have to cross if we can’t live here? There are often no certain answers to questions like these, which can make the conversation more frustrating—especially as the answers to these questions are often couched in terms of threat and loss. No wonder there are those who are tempted not to have the conversation at all.

And so that speaks, I think, to the fact that science fiction—however we define it as well, speculative fiction perhaps more broadly—does provide the same kind of threat, to many people in our world, as discussion about many of these extremely important challenges. And in that way it is sometimes the most realistic aspect of our existence, because we are surrounded by those kinds of uncertainties.

I go back to the fact that speculative fiction is as long and storied an experience for us as the literature and storytelling. If we go back to perhaps the first science fiction story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh walks into a long darkness. Some people have interpreted it as him walking through the stars or the depths of space, the dark unknown, or to find the afterlife and to be reconnected with Enkidu.

And so we can imagine people of that era also experiencing the liminality of the space in front of them, and the space they could see, but not quite reaching too fully and telling stories about it. So in some ways we talk about yes, needing to be … to reform this moment. But in some ways too, we are returning science fiction to what it was. We are returning to a deeper well of speculative discourse and language that has perhaps been more part of the human experience than this tiny window in which we’ve had science fiction as a commercial genre.

Octavia Cade: Yeah, and I think, too—looking back to what Dan was saying about Niall’s description of that so-called golden age of science fiction as, you know, astronauts and space jets and so on—there’s something almost comforting about that depiction of the future, the idea that technology will fix everything, that it will solve poverty and oppression, even if the stories in which it supposedly does this are quite limited in their applications. You’re talking about the square-jawed male character compared to the people these stories weren’t being written about. But that sense of certainty I think is comforting, but it’s also not very practical.

There is this idea that “in the future it will be like this.” But we have to get to that future. And the negotiations and the compromises that it takes to get there is something that it is difficult for people to deal with, because a lot of those compromises come with the prospect of giving something up. You know, if we do this, we can’t do that. Everything has opportunity cost. And I think that there’s something off-putting about that. We don’t like to deal with it.

The idea of that liminal environment as something untrustworthy, as something that is difficult to navigate, is something that has been with the human understanding of environment for millennia. You’ve just got to look at the history of how, say, wetlands have been understood and interpreted throughout the history of human dealings with nature. You know, they’re not land, they’re not water. They shift about, you go exploring in them. You lose your way all the time. They’re places of confusion and often disease and contagion. And that spreads into our understanding of the liminal.

There are, from a biological and ecological perspective, some really strong advantages to living on the liminal. Life there is exciting. It evolves in new and interesting ways. It’s often extremely biodiverse and so on. Which, you know, goes back to my tendency to make everything about ecology. This idea of living in the liminal, which so many of us are … it has opportunity as well as cost. It’s not just compromise, although that compromise never leaves.

There is the opportunity to insert the science fiction staple that is the sense of wonder into this element of an environment of confusion. And I think that’s something that the magical realist mash-ups with science fiction do particularly well. The Flat Woman does this, The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, as an Indigenous Australian author, very much does this as well. And that has some, I think I said in my review, some similarity to, The Mires as well: This idea that magical realism inserts liminality and confusion into the science fiction certainty, it critiques the genre in a way that it has not had enough of in its native form, I think. And I find that just really particularly interesting.

Dan Hartland: I just co-sign all of that. And I think both of you have touched on this idea that some of what we’re discussing here isn’t at all new. That literature has, since there was literature, been dealing with some of these questions. I think of the critic Edith Hall, who has recently written a book about the Iliad. She reads it in the—this is a quote from the subtitle of the book—in “the light of a dying world.” So any text sufficiently rich will be able to be read in this kind of context—and indeed was in some senses, in the Iliad’s case, written in an elegiac tone in the first place. You know, we have the ubi sunt that finds its way into genre of course mostly via Tolkien—where’s the horse and the rider and all that stuff.

But there’s something specific, I think, about the present moment, which is a little bit different: This idea of the Necrocene as you say, Octavia, or Maggie, as you say, the kind of AI moment (and I agree that term is so lazily applied!) that makes special demands on science fiction to kind of hopefully rethink itself in ways that then enable us to rethink ourselves.

I was reading recently—and maybe we could talk about a few other books that we feel might be in conversation with the ones we’ve sort of focused this conversation on so far—I was reading recently Julia, which is Sandra Newman’s 1984 retelling from the perspective of the titular character, Julia. And what I found so interesting about that first and foremost is that it works and it shouldn’t! You know, when I saw someone was writing 1984 again, I was like, “Please, please don’t, just don’t do that.” But what’s so interesting about it is that it contains room for hope in a way that 1984 doesn’t. Not in a facile way—effectively, the novel ends on a … it ends on a bum note, guys! It’s not a happy ending.

But it’s on a different kind of bum note that is somewhat more cyclical or somewhat more open to systemic change than the original. And I just felt that’s so now. That novel is written that way because it’s written now, and we just need to have that sense of systemic change. Because we’re so aware that it’s necessary, that Orwell was writing in a completely different context where he was essentially warning against a different type of change, a change to that sort of Stalinsit thing that he saw as such a threat. This one is aware that we are trapped in a system that means maybe Orwell was wrong. We got trapped anyway.

And I find this very interesting in present science fiction, because Julia isn’t really doing what Octavia’s talking about it. It’s not being liminal in any way, I mean, it’s so fixed. It’s basically a rewrite of a novel that already existed! But it’s still finding room for that escape hatch, that generic escape hatch, that systemic escape hatch.

Are there other texts we’ve been reading that we think might be doing the same sorts of things?

M. L. Clark: Oh, absolutely. While you were speaking immediately, I thought of Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, and I think that might be a perfect … I was thinking to myself, it’s the same year. It came out the same year as Julia. So, they’re both really … obviously the writing happens at its own pace, but they came out in a very similar moment. And in some ways when I was reading Some Desperate Glory, I was thinking about how it was pushing back on a few different audiences within genre. There is a pushback on a modality that emerges in Young Adult literature, even though it’s not intrinsically Young Adult. There are elements of it that push back on the kinds of stories that you get within YA, within a Western science fiction context. And at the same time there are elements of the first half of the story it’s telling.

For folks who maybe haven’t read it, the piece begins with a certitude. You are in a character perspective. She has been raised one way to see life in a certain way. She’s been given a certain story of herself and her culture, and then there is a turning point. And what really makes the work special is that there’s then another turning point. And another one. And so it’s not simply a story like The Secret History, in which you go up to a halfway point and then suddenly you get to see everything a second way. There are a multiplicity of stories that will emerge, or different inflection points that will emerge, in this character’s journey as they try to resolve or address all of the harm caused by having lived in the first story.

So there is both what you’re talking about with Julia, the idea of it’s coming from a rigid background, even though the rigid background is internal to this world, and yet the highly fascistic society that she grew up in is not one that can be fixed with a single turn in perspective, a single change in character. It instead involves work that continues. It involves recognizing that she herself will never be able to atone for or correct all of the mistakes that she has made, and there’s no saccharine, easy gloss on that aspect of her character as well. She simply has to live with the knowledge that, whether or not she was aware of it, she was a participant in a very harmful society. She caused harm. And many elements of harm that continue to exist in the world will be beyond her ability to solve or for anyone else to solve in the course for a lifetime.

So, even though it has many elements that you would find within a Young Adult story of a girl learning that her world is not what it was supposed to be or that she was promised, it has depth. Because it doesn’t stop, a little bit like Nayler’s work. It has a forever argument that keeps going, long after the individual character’s story.

Octavia Cade: There’s one that I read a few years ago, Always North by Vicki Jarrett, which really sort of engages in this idea of, of liminality, of pushback between two different types of thinking.

It follows the same character and … how do I say this without spoiling things? Isobel works basically for an oil company. She is part of the science that is actively engaged in ways of making the world worse, shall we say. She has no real ethical understanding of the work that she is doing and no interest in developing it and climate change impacts on the text in quite a significant way. And Isobel finds herself living in the crap-sack world that she created—which is on the one hand, you know, there is some justice there. But on the other, she’s quite an unpleasant character. She really never … she’s never actually really sorry for what she’s done. I think if she was to be able to go back in time in her own form, she probably wouldn’t act, you know, much differently.

But there is a second character, a polar bear—I think Snowball is its name—and poor old Snowball ends up being part of this sort of vivisection experiment. And it’s something very interesting about Always North that it is always interrogating the way that science exploits the non-human and also humans that it considers to be sort of lesser. You know, we see it all the time. Climate change may have an impact on this world, but some parts of it will be impacted more than others. Some populations will be impacted more than others, but they’re not “us,” so it somehow matters less.

I think it was Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything—I think I was, I’m pretty sure it was that book of hers that I was reading. She talks about attending this geoengineering conference about possible ways to start. Engineering the planet in which to limit the effects of climate change. But it was very much limiting the effects in specific places. It’s like, “OK, we can potentially mitigate the effects of climate change on places like Europe and North America, but the consequences of this is that it probably will get worse in places like Sub-Saharan Africa.” And the scientists are just, you know, merely going along. It’s just … “This isn’t some sort of really horrifying compromise!” And that is very much part of what is going on in Always North.

But through part of this experiment on Snowball, the polar bear, Isobel’s consciousness and the polar bear’s become overlapped and there is a sense of time travel when Isobel-within-the-polar-bear goes back in time to try and affect the things that Isobel is doing. And the polar bear is quite insane by this point. There’s some really fantastic creature-horror as it goes—you know, slaughtering everything in its path. And I’m all for that: Go the polar bear. But the way that the book engages with this idea of responsibility and blame and violent response and how sometimes it can possibly be justified, and how to live with yourself in the world that you’ve created, how to either take responsibility or how to completely eschew it.

Because some people do. I mean, many people do. Most of us do. We live, I think all three of us, in societies where we take up more than our fair share of carbon footprint per capita. And yet we still go along doing it. Because, to change, we would have to give up a lot of our standard of living. And are we willing to do this? To some minor extent, possibly, yes. But then we continue, we make bargains with ourselves. You know, I would very much love to visit the Great Barrier Reef, for example, before it dies—because it is one of the fantastic structures on Earth, one of the places of real marvel that is left in this world. And I’m aware that if I get on a plane to go and see the Great Barrier Reef, I’m contributing to its destruction, so I should not do it. But I find myself bargaining. You know, I don’t have children, I don’t have a car. Is that enough for me to cause this extra harm? Objectively, no. Probably not. Subjectively, I would probably, you know, if someone gave me a plane ticket tomorrow, I’d get on the plane, I would find a way to justify it to myself.

And I think the justification in science fiction at the moment is one of the really fascinating elements of the genre as it’s working today. This idea of negotiation, of justification. What are we willing to look away from? And the honest answer is quite a lot! And so I think that’s how we end up a lot of times with these really difficult characters who are often unpleasant to grapple with. That makes them really compelling in my mind, because they are, as you say, reflections of ourselves. We are existing in this liminal space, connecting with these often quite awful people. And I’ve been reading the Nayler, and some of these characters are not good people, most of them, in fact—you would not want to be friends with them. But you recognize their actions, you recognize what they’re doing. You think, in the same way, “I might probably be convinced to act as they are.” And it wouldn’t take much.

M. L. Clark: It is interesting. I might have a slightly different perspective because I did leave Canada to live in a space that would not be considered one of the greatest polluters, and yet it gives me that lens into how human beings are very much subject to the context in which they live. A lot of times I will encounter folks here in Colombia who will say, “Oh, Colombians don’t care about trying to pollute less with the traffic, the number of vehicles here. They’re gonna cause problems. They just, they just don’t care.” They’re saying this about their fellow citizens. And as a Canadian, I’ll say, “Well, Canadians didn’t really care either until there was a little bit of a reframing on a legal level to encourage people to use certain lanes or to incentivize certain kinds of other systems.”

So as much as we sometimes do have reason to castigate ourselves as individuals, it does require a deeper systemic uplift. Colombia is very special in many ways because it is definitely one of the few countries that is trying to disconnect from its oil regime at a time when even places like my country of birth, Canada, is still moving in another direction—despite the fact that there are horrific impacts on our environment every summer, well throughout the year, but we have very clear studies that are showing the direct connection between emissions and world outcomes.

But it’s not easy because there are many other human factors. So, for instance, changing the extraction economy means disrupting a tremendous number of people’s livelihoods. And if you don’t have a plan as a system collectively to address the number of people who need to be moved into different sectors and to have different outcomes, you’re going to be met with a very human struggle. And Colombia is more involved in that struggle than many others at this present moment. But it’s fascinating to see how hard that struggle remains. So we do have a lot to do to create a deeper, more systemic body of discourse around that. And there is a place, there’s absolutely a place for literature to be part of that conversation.

We can be creating narratives that allow us to move through the next problem and the next problem. I think it was Frederik Pohl who said that science fiction isn’t imagining the invention of the car, it’s imagining the invention of traffic. And so—I’m loosely paraphrasing—you have to imagine two problems out in science fiction.

And so here I live in a space that’s two problems out: Colombia is aggressively trying to shift to different green energy futures; and it’s not easy because there’s a lot of pushback, even when you start the process from a number of actors. But the gift of that is that, as Columbia and other places as well try to have those conversations, we can use those stories to help other countries when they decide to finally catch up and start working on this as well. They can anticipate these problems perhaps a little bit better and come up with solutions faster.

Octavia Cade: There is something interesting going on in Colombia at the moment, which has a correlation to New Zealand. There is a similarity there. In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament declared the Whanganui River as a legal person here. I think a couple of months later, the same thing happened to the Rio Atrato in Colombia. And again, the same thing happened about the same time to the Yamuna and Ganges River in India. And so this idea of giving rivers legal personhood—and it’s also happened in New Zealand to a mountain as well—is something, I don’t wanna say science fictional, but it’s something that recognizes that, you know, human values and human identity can be applied on a much broader non-human scale.

And I have yet to see, I think, really a science fiction that engages with the idea of the environment as a legal person. I think there have been many similar attempts in other countries of the world that have just been knocked right over while companies are still given the status of legal human beings. But this idea of story, I think is, is fundamental to that because humans are creatures made up of stories.

And when we recognize the stories associated with places as well as people, when those stories are so linked to the identity of those places, then it becomes easier to see them as, you know, deserving that legal status of personhood as well. And this idea of environmental personhood is something I find absolutely fascinating.

It seems like the science fiction concept: Not only are we granting this ecosystem personhood, but I think it also reflects in a way the growing understanding that as individuals we are ecosystems as well. The way that it reflects the idea between individual and ecosystem, between human and non-human is I think something that science fiction is going to, probably in the next decade or two, really begin to focus on.

M. L. Clark: One would hope. There’s a legal concept that emerges in a lot of South American discourse, so not just Colombia—I don’t want to fetishize any one nation-state in this context—but the notion of “Buen Vivir” is a legal concept that emerges quite a bit, the idea of a sort of holistic wellness that emerges.

It’s a legal concept. It’s integrated into thoughts about how do we develop policy without including overall wellness for ourselves as the society, as a community, as a culture. And that’s something that doesn’t necessarily exist in the vocabulary of a lot of Western policy making.

But it does exist in other discourses. So, when we also talk about the future of science fiction, I might go back to Gibson, who suggested that, the future is here, just not equally distributed. But in some ways that means that a lot of spaces outside the usual places in which we look for science fictional futures might actually be a little bit further along in some of these conversations. We have a tremendous amount to learn, not in a fetishistic way, but just from the fact that many conversations are going on concurrently.

And to go back to your point about violence and literature, Octavia, obviously it brought to mind a conversation that happened after The Ministry of the Future came out, when so many Western reviews were so fascinated, almost excited, almost frothing at the mouth that the idea of, “Oh, terrorism might be necessary. We might be able to shoot down planes because it will lead to greater good.” But a lot of the discourse tended to overlook the other kinds of violence when it was enacted by other countries.

So, for instance, when you’re talking about the possibility of protecting Europe and North America with certain treatments at cost to other parts of the world: That two-thirds world in Ministry of the Future after the heat wave—the horrific, really stunningly written heat wave in the opening scene for Ministry of the Future—India decides, “The rest of the world’s not going to help us. We are just going to go forth and do what we need to do, even if it means that when we protect our skies, we’re going to impact crops in other spaces.”

The idea of other countries doing the things that we take for granted as necessary in our own world is not part of the conversation. Even when we’re talking about violence, even when you have a lot of people who are excited about these possibilities, it’s still so narrow in scope. We still are so fixated by some of our cultural boundaries, and we need to be thinking just a little bit more holistically about the whole world being engaged in concurrent conversations, concurrent speculative thinking about how to go forward.

Octavia Cade: There’s a lot of, I think, continental versus island thinking in science fiction. Yes. And I say that as someone who was raised and who lives on an island, quite a remote one, relatively. There is a tendency in science fiction for New Zealand to be seen as this, you know, refuger at the bottom of the world: “When the apocalypse comes, let’s all go to the bunkers in New Zealand,” that sort of thing.

And it is quite easy to feel that sense of isolation, as an advantage. And so it impacts the ways that I think we look at the rest of the world. In some ways it allows us to be very selfish, because we don’t have to address some of the consequences of living on a continent in ways that other people do. We don’t have the land borders. I don’t want to sort of really underline that sense of refuge, but the horrible truth is that, you know, if climate change really ramped up tomorrow, we have a relatively small population and a relatively high level of food production. We could probably survive in many ways, in ways that a lot of continental countries could not.

There is that sense of not just of isolation, but of insulation that makes it hard, I think, in some ways to look at the compromises that continental countries have to make and not judge them, or at least judge them by different standards, I think.

Dan Hartland: That’s such an interesting point to make in this conversation. Because I, I speak from the UK, which I mean functionally has a long, long history of, particularly the English, thinking of themselves as an island state, which is of course absurd.

Octavia Cade: Because you can swim the English channel! Well, maybe not you and I. We couldn’t. But, you know, it’s ... it’s, yeah. Build a raft!

Dan Hartland: Exactly! Nevertheless, that channel may as well be a chasm, according to some Anglo-chauvinist thinking. And as you were speaking, I was thinking of, and this is somewhat unfair to the book, but I was thinking of a book that was recently on the Clarke Award shortlist, Extremophile by Ian Green.

It’s very interesting to me that most of the books we’ve been talking about today—about, you know, sort of writing in this time of death—aren’t really dystopias, they’re not like that sort of really … even the Julia book that I was talking about sort of undoes some of the dystopian elements of 1984. They’re not really dystopias in that sort of classic sense. They’re something else.

Extremophile is a pretty much a dystopia. It’s a future England—really a future London. Climate change has ravaged the country. And it’s a kind of attempt to make cyberpunk into some sort of … I don’t know, ecopunk or something. It’s not entirely successful in any of that. It’s a very good work of ventriloquism, it has that cyberpunk aesthetic and tone, but to what effect, I’m not sure. But it cannot escape—because, you know, it’s an island-thinking kind of book—it cannot escape a technological solution at the end. It’s a very slim chance of a technological solution. But nevertheless, it is a technological, “Oh, this might work.” It’s not a square-jawed man that does it. But nevertheless!

Then I was comparing that in my head as you were speaking, Octavia, with another book I recently reviewed for Strange Horizons, Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada, which is this wonderfully strange book that also takes place in a near-future, climate-ravaged Europe and very much is continental. The characters spend most of their time on a boat, on a ship—on a cruise ship, really—trying to get between the various countries. And the coastlines have changed and people aren’t sure whether the countries are where they used to be. And all of the characters in this liminality, this uncertainty, this adriftness, start to rethink their identities and they start to even rethink the languages in which they speak. And it does something with the time of death which Extremophile does not, almost because it is a novel in transit.

There are deep waters there that we, you know, I would love to plumb further—particularly as I think, when we are talking about giving personhood to rivers and mountains and elements of the natural world (natural world in scare quotes!), we come full-circle in the conversation back to where we started, which was with Ray Nayler. That book is so interested in a corporatized world, and of course we’ve long since accepted for some reason that corporations are, as you say, Octavia, are people. And yet if we’re talking about escaping anything, surely we wanna escape from corporations are people to rivers might be—actually, it might be better to say that (!).

Octavia Cade: I mean, I have not accepted that corporations are people.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I’m still with you on the barricades! Yeah.

Octavia Cade: I have not! I find it extremely easy to accept that mountains and rivers are people.

Well, you were talking before about this idea of a novel spent in transit, through islands and continents. Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day, published in I think the late 1990s, does that extremely well. The earth is a crap-sack—in the future, the earth is a crap-sack world, you know. Dust bowls and everything. And this group of Quakers decide to set out on a colony space mission to another planet, because they exist as an island in the North American continent. Basically, this small community of people whose land and way of life is consistently being encroached on, they see themselves being sort of overwhelmed by the continent around them, and they know that it’s not sustainable. So they set out on this generation-long journey to find another world.

And of course, as they travel in this generational ship, they are an island in space. But at the end, when they get to this planet and they are terraforming it to their own requirements, they are colonizing it with plants and animals from New Zealand. They have become the continent by the end because there is no island on that planet that is capable of opposing them.

I think there’s something quite fascinating about that, about how transition works in the way that we approach environment and that sense of ourselves as belonging to an isolated community versus belonging to a global one, the balance between that. She does it really well.

M. L. Clark: I haven’t read that one, but it does seem to tie into another thread that we’ve been carrying through this conversation.

With respect to certain tropes in science fiction and fantasy, there has been a longstanding desire to sort of clear out other people to sort of bring things back to a smaller society or smaller community—as if that would somehow give us more agency and a better path forward, as if the problems that we face could be managed if we just happened to be a lot fewer.

And it does sound like that kind of work is bridging and maybe pushing past a little bit the tremendous weaknesses of that trope, especially when it talks about our capacity for moral courage and moral imagination. Because if we’re thinking on that scale, we cannot come to solutions that are going to serve the world in which we actually operate.

I do think that what our role as a critic is, in terms of opening up that conversation—I think we’ve done some of that here—I would encourage maybe in thinking about all of these works, which are themselves trying to carry the argument forward, to just be cautious in ensuring that when we review them, when we talk about them, we are doing precisely that in the way that we speak of them.

So, if it is a work that is trying to carry conversation forward, it would be I think quite dangerous for a critic to come along and try to close or solve the conversation. To be able to carry forward the best of the argument that is presented in the book is maybe the best that we can do for our audience in general.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I would say certainly that one of the concerns that I have about genre criticism—literary criticism in general, but since we’re talking about, spec fiction and science fiction and fantasy—is this sense that, “OK, I need to figure out how this book is science fiction, right? So I need to be able to fit it in to the framework and I might have to file an edge off here or, or, or create a precedent there.” I would plead with critics to yes, be more open to the idea that this is all very fuzzy and they are …

M. L. Clark: Liminal, I think somebody used that word!

Dan Hartland: That’s right! And there are related literatures and there is all kinds of play between them that doesn’t need to fit into this kind of progression, this sort of heritage, this idea of a family tree. We don’t need that, we just need the conversation.

Octavia Cade: When science fiction is open to these sorts of discussions, is open to the argument, is looking at stories that are open-ended, that envelop a number of range of perspectives, it becomes a much more lively and interesting debate. It becomes one which is more resilient, which helps us to understand the future and the present in a much more constructive and productive way. So yeah, the idea of the argument as necessary not only to genre, but to existing in the Necrocene is I think something that needs to be prioritized.

[musical sting]

Octavia Cade: Well, thank you to Strange Horizons as well. It is, I think, the only review outlet that allows me to blather on for two thousand words about a book and never says, “You have to stop here!”

M. L. Clark: I got to throw in Heidegger. How many places would let me throw in Heidegger?!?

[laughter]

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our theme music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

And while I’m here, a note on last episode, which you’ll remember was about SF in translation from small presses based in the US currently faced with an immediate funding crisis as a result of … well, shall we say, changes at the National Endowment for the Arts.

We were glad to see the episode prompt some discussion. In particular, a few kind souls got in touch to note that SFT is reviewed regularly by a number of folks at Locus. This of course is good! In the episode, Rachel Cordasco especially was expressing the need for features and essays, and a concern that recently those have dwindled. We hope to see more of that stuff. But it’s very good that stuff of other kinds is very much available. Stay critical, friends!

See you next time.