Seed Beetle: Poems, a new collection of narrative speculative poetry by Mahaila Smith, explores a fascinating world that exists at the intersection of corporate greed and utopian community.

Framed as material written by Nebula (Nebby) Armis, a fictional poet in Ontario, Canada, these poems are set in a near future in which a corporation, Utopic Robotics, sets out to rebuild a landscape burned and destroyed by climate change. Their method is to create and set loose robotic beetles that will help to repair, terraform, and replant the world. Nebby’s mother works in the factory creating these beetles, and Nebby grows up in an environment of simultaneous hope and despair, since this corporate solution is, from the outset, deeply flawed.

The book is divided into three sections: “Part I: Gemma,” which focuses on Nebby’s mother; “Part II: Nebby,” which explores Nebby’s childhood and coming of age; and “Part III: Reunion,” which tells the story of Nebby’s return to her hometown and the process of reclaiming her mother, the landscape, and the community. Ultimately, the book is a lyrical portrait of these characters and their culture, using poetic techniques to explore agency, resistance, and hope.

In the first section, we hear about Utopic Robotics and how Gemma is drawn into working for the company. Many of these poems have Gemma as a speaker. The first poem, “Standardized Education,” gives us an early sense of the corporation’s slick and deceptive marketing: “We see your want, your lack, and we fill it” (p. 17). It’s a corporation specializing in making people feel like it has the answers that everyone lacks, suggesting that it alone can solve the crisis of the charred landscape. As another poem in this section, “The Gift,” says, “Utopic Robotics calls itself the New Savior” (p. 20), with its plans for automated beetles to “revitalize our local, cracking earth” (p. 20).

Utopic Robotics’ mission seems at first to be a noble enterprise, and it brings in workers from the fictional town of New Haywood, particularly those who see it as their duty to rebuild the destroyed world for the sake of their children. In “The Work of a Housewife,” Gemma, as the speaker, says, “I go back to work when the world says it needs me” (p. 24), in a kind of futuristic recreation of the Rosie the Riveter trope. And in “The New Job,” Gemma says that she takes the job because it would help her to provide for her partner, Celia, and her daughter, Nebby: “Doing something important. / That you would be proud of” (p. 25).

Soon, though, it’s evident that there’s a dark side to the work being done by Utopic Robotics. In particular, the company seeks to colonize the minds of its workers by implanting a Cortical Update, which seeks both to control their thoughts and to function as a surveillance mechanism. In “New UR Employee Benefits (shhh, it’s a secret!),” we hear in marketing-speak about this procedure:

UR Cortical Update can help U reshape
your unhealthy thoughts and behaviors
and make U into a better ECO citizen. (p. 26)

This “triumph of nanotechnology” (p. 27), as it’s called in “Software Update,” is soon implanted in Gemma’s mind. In “Remodeled,” we hear her tell us that “I became a cyborg / on the table at the company doctor’s office” (p. 28). As she says, “I let them colonize my mind with minute nanites” (p. 28). At this point, she still thinks it’s a good idea, and the project of Utopic Robotics is justified: “Utopic Robotics are doing the right thing, / I think” (p. 28). Soon, however, she realizes this implant is more about corporate control than it is about helping her in any way.

Before long, Gemma begins experiencing disjointed thoughts and insomnia. The Cortical Update even keeps her from being able to read or process her own thoughts and emotions, and she eventually wants to figure out a way to get rid of it. In “Insomniac,” she says, “I lie awake, planning how to undo it” (p. 32). Even as she carefully assembles the robotic beetles that will help to rebuild the earth, her mind is being disassembled from within. We hear, as well, that the same nanites worming their way through her brain are being dumped by Utopic Robotics into the river—an environmental catastrophe that eventually affects her own daughter, Nebby, as she swims with her friends in the polluted water.

Meanwhile, the beetles themselves continue doing their work of rebuilding the land and spreading seeds—and, despite the less-than-ethical approaches of Utopic Robotics, that work actually is helping the earth to recover. The beetles even begin to develop a kind of consciousness—one that’s ultimately connected to those who created them. In “A Young Automated Beetle Writing Home,” for instance, we hear from the point of view of one of the seed beetles talking reverently about its “mummy,” who “put my solar-powered energy-cell / in my core” (p. 49). “I am happy when I work because I think of her,” the seed beetle says (p. 49), demonstrating the empathy that these mechanical creatures have with their human creators. Both the assembly workers and the beetles manage to find a sense of agency extending beyond the corporation that initiated the process in the first place, and this agency will become the basis for a true utopia after the eventual fall of Utopic Robotics.

In the second section of the book, we hear from Nebby’s point of view about what it was like to grow up in this fraught environment. In “Networked II,” Nebby talks about swimming in the river with her friends and starting to worry about what was in the water. In “Sharing a Snack,” she says, “We began to suspect we were / pulling on connected threads of memory” (p. 65), one of the first indications that the river polluted with nanites has caused them to have connected thoughts and feelings in a kind of unintended empathy: “our psyches had become entangled / in this mediated lace” (p. 66).

Later, Nebby participates in an “International Space Station Writers’ Retreat,” and several poems explore her experience with writing while on the space station, looking down on earth. On the one hand, it’s a chance for her to develop perspective on a childhood shaped and traumatized by Utopic Robotics, and on the other, it’s an experience rife with irony, since, as she says, “we are relying on UR’s spacecrafts / to keep us fully stocked” (p. 82).

The third section of the book follows Nebby as she returns to her hometown, helps her mother break free from the influence of Utopic Robotics, and works with others to bring about a truly utopian community in the wake of the corporation’s downfall. Upon her return, we hear in “Making a Plan” that she “thought expansively about the need to gather,” to form a new community, “[r]eaching out to colleagues and friends and family / who had been contaminated by the Cortical Update” (p. 95). Gemma has the Cortical Update surgically removed in a poem called “Procedure,” and at the same time, in “Seed Beetle Diary,” we hear that there’s a general strike at Utopic Robotics, the company’s stock plunges, and the seed beetles lead the workers to a world replanted, rebuilt, and refashioned not for the corporation but for them: “We showed them this special place / we’ve been making just for them!” (p. 96). In the end, the company shuts down, and the people—with the help of the seed beetles—create their own utopia in the remade landscape.

The poem “Making Up” celebrates this new era: “A community built around consensus / and free sharing of food, of resources and information” (p. 102). This world is home to people who know the dark past and are consciously building a brighter future. This utopian vision involves taking what worked from the Utopic Robotics era but refashioning it into something that serves both the people and the newly recreated earth. Many of the residents “communicate telepathically” (p. 103), we hear, as a remnant of the old world: “Those who chose to keep the Cortical Update / now manipulate it for their own devices” (p. 103). This new world also uses scientific advances like “wind-powered / hydraulic tubes” (p. 102) that draw up river water for the plants, and “[s]ome of the elders are close with solar-powered / nanny-bots and surrogate body androids” (p. 104).

In this post-Utopic Robotics era, there’s a sense of intention, power, and agency. It’s not the faux utopia envisioned by the corporation, but rather a true one built upon community involvement and compassion. Ultimately, the collection explores how even flawed corporate attempts to remake the world can be transformed into an actual utopia.

The collection also reimagines what a new “natural” world might look like in the wake of an Anthropocene apocalypse. The newly fashioned environment is certainly not the same as the one that originally existed, since it’s based almost entirely on human and mechanical intervention. It is, however, a terraformed reality built on compassion and sustainability, and in this sense it’s perhaps even stronger and more resilient than the world that came before.

In the collection’s last poem, “Offerings to Save the World,” the speaker says, “I swim to the sun-shaped hole in outer-space / and peer over the edge at the mirrored universe” (p. 111). It’s a moment of realization that the struggle and eventual rebuilding that’s taken place in this corner of earth might well happen on a grander scale, across the universe, in any places where humans and the environment might interact—even on the edge of space itself.