SBWN x Book Week Scotland Response

Lately, I’ve been trying to understand how things work. 

In the Global North, it is easy to lose track of the seams and screws and systems that make our world. Our shops are stocked with stacks of plastic-wrapped, cardboard cut-out, pre-made things. 

I stand in Lidl with a bag of apples balanced in one hand and I think about how the fruit got from there to here: soil, tree, light, fertilizer, worker, factory, worker, truck, worker, crate, worker, store, worker, salary, worker. Speculated into existence by laboratory scientists and sales people for my pleasure and my taste, there is an unseen world that has delivered this apple, this thing, to me.

In the Futures and Freedom audio series, each writer reflected on a range of topics: games and comics, queerness and creativity. I was particularly struck by Arianne Maki’s interview, where they reflect on the systems that turn the raw into the processed, something that has been on my mind for some time: “When you’re eating your broccoli or your pasta or your bacon or whatever, really, just grappling with that, actually, like that was alive, that probably was transported from, like, a different country, across an ocean, and then you start to think about, well, this is like some kind of life form, and it probably is completely different to any kind of life that we’ve experienced. And then there’s also all the supply chains, the production processes and everything. And you begin to realize how complex the most everyday basic thing is and how interrelated everything is.”

The privileged world operates with a creation myth. As Maki says, everything is interrelated, yet Pret sandwiches, Ikea furniture, H&M jumpers, Apple iPhones just appear, as if born from the air. But what happens when we begin to ask where the flour, the wood, the wool, the cobalt came from?

The theme of this series is ‘writing hope in a dystopia,’ and Maki speaks of speculative worldbuilding as an exercise of history: “You can’t do that without looking at the past, about looking at the present and what’s around you,” Maki says of writing about the future. Speculative fiction can tell us more about our current moment, than the realist novel. Maki’s interview reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels which begin with Annihilation (2014). This dystopian series was inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, possibly the biggest petrol spill in history. How the oil changed the coast’s climate is transformed into the book’s strange, mutated Area X; an alien planet on Earth. The world that VanderMeer builds in his series is a history lesson, about what happens when the processes that make our buildings, our plastic, our way of life fall apart and are seen for the dystopia they are.

Maki likens worldbuilding to weaving a web of different times and worlds. The act of creative worldbuilding is not so different to the act of speculating on what makes the world around us. We are caught in a web of supply chains and processes that seems inescapable, no matter how ethical or moral one strives to be. Right now we are paying for choices that were made decades ago. A future was once speculated into existence by past corporations and global superpowers. 

How do we liberate ourselves out of this web that bridges our history and our future? 

“When I think about hope, I think about tenderness and grace,” says Maki in their interview. “[…] when we hope for things, we’re allowing ourselves to dream, and if we’re allowing ourselves to dream, we’re often giving ourselves the tenderness that we need to do it, because we can’t dream if we’re not treating ourselves with kindness.” 

Dreaming is a form of speculation, and speculative fiction contains dream worlds, places made of words where we can imagine a different way of living. 

When you begin to understand how things work, you can take them apart. An artist’s fictional world is crafted from metaphors, adjectives and characters. An apple is born from soil and sunlight and a parent tree. A cheap jumper can be unravelled until it is transformed into strands of yarn. Processes can be interrupted, and perhaps it is through the understanding of how something is made that we can learn how something can also be unmade. 

Perhaps liberation begins with the speculation of what can happen when a thing falls apart: one seam, one screw, one system at a time.