In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland is joined by the outgoing editor of Foundation, Paul March-Russell, and the founding editor of the Harare Review of Books, Jacqueline Nyathi. They discuss speculative fiction’s approach to hope and optimism. Where has it gone? How do writers express it? And what are its pitfalls?

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 17: On Imagining Hopefully

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the outgoing editor of Foundation, Paul March-Russell, and the founding editor of the Harare Review of Books, Jacqueline Nyathi.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: What it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about speculative fiction’s approach to hope and optimism. Where has it gone? How do writers express it? And what are its pitfalls?

We address the perils of realism, define the dystopian aesthetic, and discuss both revolution and reform. In particular, we discuss E. J. Swift’s new novel, When There Are Wolves Again, and Jacqui’s recent piece for us on Tim Weed’s The Afterlife Project, as well as her essay for our criticism special, “Collective Dreaming.”

But we began our conversation by establishing some context. What kind of mood is specfic in right now? And why?

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: We are here to talk about, I don’t know, hope or optimism, or the absence of pessimism, or whatever else within science fiction and fantasy. And you’ve both written for Strange Horizons recently on this topic, and I want to get to those reviews. But before we do, I wondered whether we could talk a little bit about the wider context: Where we’re at within the genre, but not just the genre—like, you know, speculative literature or the culture in general writ more widely—in terms of this dystopia/utopia spectrum. How pessimistic are we at the moment and how optimistic are we at the moment? Where are we on that line right now?

Paul March-Russell: I’ll jump in only because of my experience having been a Clarke Award judge—so, back in 2017, 2018, we had a huge slew of dystopian fictions. And certainly … I mean, some of which made their way onto the shortlists. So Emma Newman’s After Atlas in 2017, and Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters in 2018. And El Akkad’s *American War *probably should be chucked in as well. We couldn’t sort of keep them off. But I think collectively—I think especially the 2018 judges, but I think all of us—got pretty tired of using yet another dystopian fiction.

But if we take the Clarke Award as a kind of … some kind of measure, some kind of standard, yeah, there does seem to be like a huge glut of dystopian fictions, a lot of which I think have also been influenced by TV shows like Black Mirror. And I think that kind of popularization of dystopian has really kind of pervaded the whole culture. And of course we can think about franchises**—The Hunger Games** and so forth—and it’s just got so tired to me, that I can begin to predict those kinds of narratives, where those narratives are going to go. I’ve never been a huge fan of dystopian fiction, you know, cards on the table: I don’t like 1984, I don’t like Brave New World; We, yes I do, but I’ve never liked the classics of dystopian fiction, particularly. But I do feel that we’ve got this kinda glut of dystopian fiction and a general kind of dystopian sensibility, a dystopian way of looking at things.

Whether that’s a particular kind of Global North preoccupation, as opposed to a Global South, I think is something we need to think about in this conversation. But it does seem to be that we’re in a really very annoying and very irritating (!) sort of dystopian phase, it feels to me.

Jacqueline Nyathi: I have to agree. I come to it as a reader, and unlike you, Paul, I’m actually really into dystopian section.

Paul March-Russell: Oh, good! [laughs]

Jacqueline Nyathi: I like the idea of it. I mean, I wouldn’t want to … I have lived through dystopia, I’ll explain that, but I like the idea of kind of looking at what could go wrong and kind of coming at problem-solving from that direction: If everything’s falling apart, what are we going to do about it? I like that. I find it sort of mentally challenging to think about what could happen.

And I do tend to find the other side of things, the sort of hopeful side of science fiction, tends to go a little too hopeful; it’s out there, it’s unrealistic. It does tend to be that way. But having said that, we do live in a world that’s very bleak. I mean, if you turn on the news, there’s so much bad news going on. So in that sense, I feel like if we’re going to be thinking about the future, then let’s think about solutions. Let’s be more hopeful. I know it sounds like I’m contradicting myself, but I enjoy dystopia; I just don’t think, if we’re thinking about the future, we should be focusing only on the sad stories, the bleak stories.

But then the thing is, like you say, in the last six years, but especially since the pandemic, it’s all dystopia now. I think of the I-don’t-know-how-many books I’ve read in that time—maybe a handful, like I can count on one hand, have been actually thinking about the future hopefully.

Paul March-Russell: Yeah, I mean, I’ll put my hand up as well: I’m complacent in this. At Gold SF we’ve published dystopian fiction—M. J. Maloney’s The Ghostwriters, The Disinformation War by S. J. Groenewegen—so I’m involved, I’m not an innocent bystander! And I mean, there are certainly great dystopia. I don’t want to, you know, rubbish the dystopian genre. You know, obviously we think of Octavia Butler and the Parable novels. When I was judging, I absolutely loved Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun. I loved Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY, which won the Goldsmiths Prize. So I think there are great dystopias and which do interesting things. But I think very often, you know where it’s going to go. That’s the problem.

And I think what bothers me is that narrative trajectory of, shall we say, the generic or the formulaic dystopian fiction. That is what bothers me. And the fact that, as Jacqui was saying, we do seem to have wall-to-wall dystopian fictions since the pandemic, and that really bothers me for the state of science fiction.

Dan Hartland: When Jacqui talks about thinking about the future, it strikes me that a lot of dystopia don’t. Because there are dystopias, right? And then there’s the dystopian aesthetic, right? And a lot of these kind of sad novels about how it’s all gonna get worse and worse and worse—you know, that old John Le Carré line, isn’t it, which is, “There is no future, it’s just the present getting worse and worse all the time” or something.

The dystopian aesthetic, all it wants to achieve—because that’s its stylistic sort of bent—is to lay up on top of each other examples of how bad things could get. And that kind of problem-solving that Jacqui is looking for isn’t there. It’s not a dystopia that’s a kind of experiment to see, “Well, what would happen, like if this stuff happened?” It’s kind of … I mean, some of them become subtypes of horror fiction more than of SFF because the effect that is being aimed at is just, “Oh, I feel really bad about all of this.” Right?

Jacqui, you wrote, in an essay for the Criticism Special in January called “Collective Dreaming,” that thinking about the future is meant to be a sign of our intelligence. And I just wonder, especially—and I do think the whole point of your essay was to say, “Well, there are alternatives to how we imagine the future and they exist in the Global South, a set of traditions that Anglo-American SF has for a long time marginalized,” and we can talk about that—I do think that there is something about how we are thinking about the future in the Global North right now which is very limited and narrow.

And this is one of the things that’s behind this profusion of dystopias, you know, this idea that we’ve got a problem in terms of how we are imagining futures right now.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Yeah. So I’ve actually read more SF outside of the Anglo-Western side of fiction, and I agree with myself that it tends to be much more thoughtful about the future and hopeful about what we can do for the future. But I maybe possibly went a little bit … I was a little bit too hard on Western SF. Because you do come across some hopeful stories in Western SF.

I think what you say about the aesthetic is the big thing. So even when I’m watching on Apple TV *For All Mankind *or Foundation—you know, that kind of thing—there are ways of looking at that sort of fiction and thinking about it as, “OK, maybe humans will find ways to deal with things,” and so on. So that is not aesthetically as dark as Black Mirror, let’s say. So it’s there! It’s just that you have to look for it.

I think I find a lot of the short fiction that comes out of the West is very dystopian, whereas, when people are writing kind of novel-length works, there’s a lot more thought about what they’re trying to put out. People are thinking about how humans will progress and it’s probably … In other words, I think I was a little bit too harsh, because I think, if you read a bit more of the longer fiction, you’ll find a little bit more thought has gone into thinking about the future and thinking about ways that we can solve problems.

But I do still think if you read outside of the Western, you’ll find a lot more about how humanity can survive. I don’t know if that’s when I should bring up The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed. That book is perhaps not really dystopian, but kind of extrapolating from where we are today: The climate crisis singularity happens, what comes next? And it goes into geo-engineering and so on. I won’t give you a summary just now, but that actually brings up something I really don’t like in Western SF, which is that you have the one person who survives. The one hero, that kind of thing.

And, in this case, this man doesn’t have any special qualities, but usually that hero has all of the qualities that make humans great and so on. And that hero may not save a day—because everything has gone and we’ve destroyed the planet and so on—but that one person that we’re all looking to, to maybe carry humanity forward or take maybe our knowledge into the future (which is what happens with this guy), is not a concept that we have in the Global South. We are not about the one hero. What is it? Neo in The Matrix or whatever. We’re not about that. We’re about how a community can go forward.

And I find that that’s not simply a … I’m talking about it from the African traditions, but I find it’s in Aboriginal or native Australian traditions and Native American traditions, that it’s more about how the community survives together and how we go forward together. So that’s the thing that I really dislike in Western SF: When everything gets so negative, and then it’s about the one person, the individualism, one person who survives, or the one person who tries to save the world. That’s the thing that I still find nags me.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And in your review of The Afterlife Project, you do sort of pause over the fact that there’s this white guy in the future and, you know, everything is on him—and surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work! And I’m thinking about the work of Rasheedah Phillips or the work of Joy Sanchez-Taylor, all of whom have sort of looked at Global South traditions of fantastic literature and said, “look!” And shown us where the community exists.

And I wonder whether part of SF in the Global North’s problem is a crisis of the rugged individualism that has informed it, that these problems that we now face cannot be solved by the lantern-jawed omnicompetent man, just can’t be solved by one guy, however brilliant he is. Right? And so the texts that we are producing within this culture, within this tradition that has always had that assumption, are kind of really pessimistic—because they’re like, “The thing doesn’t work!!” Right? And we don’t know what to do with that.

Which does bring us, Paul, I suppose, to your most recent review for *Strange Horizons *of When There Are Wolves Again, which has this community thing built into it. And you were really struck by this book.

Paul March-Russell: Yeah, I was. I was actually chatting to Andrew M. Butler, the other day, and I was saying, absolutely, I could see ways in which my review could be shot down. I could see ways in which this book could be shot down. I still defend it! And I think I defend it because, as I think was saying earlier, and as Jacqui was saying earlier, there was a tendency—again, let’s think about Western science fiction, Global North science fiction—to be overoptimistic. You know, that kind of Asimovian, Heinlein, we-can-conquer-problems rugged individualism, yadda yadda. And I don’t think this book is. I think it’s a book which is cautiously optimistic. It knows parameters.

So there’s great bits where the character of Hester Moore reflects upon the current situation at that point of the narrative, or reflects upon their own life-story, and says, “Well, actually, all this could have been completely different, you know, if I take a different turning an entire set of other events could have followed.” So there’s always a constant awareness in the book that this is just one hopeful outcome, but it could have easily gone in a totally different direction with other kinds of repercussions. And there’s also that lovely sense of in the book that this is what we can do within these prescribed parameters. It’s not all about gloom and doom. But you know what? The polar ice caps are still melting. There’s still the sixth extinction there, there’s still this kind of colony of tech bros living somewhere in the South Pacific.

So the book never says, “OK, everything’s now sorted and everything’s now gonna be fine.” There’s a sense there’s a series of conflicts are staged throughout the course of the narrative, and those conflicts will continue after the narrative is over. This is an enduring process. But I think what’s important about the book is that it commits itself to the idea of process, that things can change, things can develop, things can go in different directions. It’s not about the given product, which I think is what dystopian fiction in its kind of generic, formulaic form tends to deliver. “This is how it is.” Winston Smith, he can have his little petty struggle, but you know what? He’s still gonna end up loving Big Brother.

That’s just not how history works! We know that, you know? We know that. So it seems to me that I would defend this book because it commits itself to the idea of process.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: I do wonder though, if—as we’re talking about this sort of focus on process—if there’s also something else going on. Because, Jacqui, in your review of The Afterlife Project, you were like, “Yeah, well, I can understand why Tim Weed, the author, wants to write a book about how we appear to be absolutely bent on the planet’s destruction.” But what is absent in the novel is any idea of, I think you used the word redemption. Which struck me as a really interesting word to think about, because it’s a lot more … it’s more emotive, but it carries more weight, than mere process. So the Swift book is absolutely about that, but it’s also about redemption. I dunno whether you wanted to talk a bit about how that absence of redemption in *The Afterlife Project *struck you, because that seems key to me to how you were reacting to that book. You were like, “There’s nothing here!”

Jacqueline Nyathi: It goes a little bit back to the single solitary man who’s going to carry humanity’s genes into the future. He is literally the only person who survives on the whole planet. So, I’m like, is there no way to make the story a little more hopeful, by bringing along a group of people, a community of people into the future? It’s like writing off all of humanity. And that’s the way I felt throughout the book, that Tim Weed was writing off humans completely. You know, there’s nothing we can do to save the planet or to save ourselves. It feels so much like he’s actually saying there is no need to save humans.

At the end of the story, there is a hint that other species—because now we’re so far into the future that there’s been evolution in the species that have survived—there are species that are on the verge of sapience. So a crow is sitting on the tree watching this man, and it’s intelligent, he has the impression that it’s intelligent. So the implication is that this man will die, crows will rise up and occupy our ecological niche, I suppose.

Why are we writing off humans to that degree? I don’t fully understand. Is there no redemption for us? Is there no way that we can speak up for … I know we’ve destroyed the planet. I understand this, you know, and I completely understand why he feels this way about humans. But I also find that this is more of a … I don’t wanna say Western, but more people who think in a scientific way are very quick to write off humans very quickly. It’s just humans, you know? They can disappear. It really doesn’t matter.

Dan Hartland: You’re absolutely right. I’m thinking right now of Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who recently interviewed Peter Thiel in his Ross Talks To Weirdos series of podcasts. And, he just asked Thiel. He said, “Well. We should save humanity, right? Like, we should make sure we carry on living, right?” Thiel tried to find every possible way he could to not answer this question, because his answer is basically, “Nah.” Fundamentally, as you say, Jacqui, there’s just this sense that … “Nah.”

And there’s a sense that it’s a zero sum game, right? You can either have the humans or you can have the crows. They can’t coexist—I mean, heaven forfend, right?

Jacqueline Nyathi: I don’t know if you’ve read Speculative Whiteness. I think that’s a very important book. So the people with money are making movies and Peter Thiel’s in the White House influencing American policy. And, you know, these people have a worldview, a complete worldview that they claim is based in science fiction. And it’s a certain kind of science fiction that they appeal to. It’s racist, it’s sexist, it’s ableist, you know, all those things. So this, this book is very revealing. It’s a monograph really. It’s a very short book. But I think everyone should read it, to help think through why our stories right now are as bleak as they are.

Paul March-Russell: I’d add into that David Higgins’s work on the alt-right and victimhood. I think that’s a really important book as well, a companion piece to Jordan.

Dan Hartland: The reason I think it’s so critical as well is because—I find myself saying this a lot in these episodes, but—I keep trying to center the material contexts of all these texts because, if we’re asking in this episode, “Should we be being more optimistic?” I think Carrol would say, “Yeah!” Because, unless we are, then the bad actors are going to take the other kind of SF and they’re going to use it to extremely bad ends … like, really bad, guys!

And that’s why a book like the Swift, Paul, seems so important to me, and why you argue in the piece … You start the piece with The Citadel, Gollancz’s kind of most-read book ever, which you say in part was responsible for the establishment of the NHS, right? Books can have an effect, and if we don’t write hopeful ones, then we won’t *be *hopeful.

Paul March-Russell: I mean, we go back to Said, in The World, The Text and The Critic, and Said emphasized that books are events in the world. They’re not just things describing the world. They intervene, and I think that’s the really important facet. Everything that Swift demonstrates in the novel is based upon real-world proposals now. There’s nothing made up here. You know, these are all proposals that are being written, being discussed. And she just says, “Look, let’s imagine a series of configurations.”

As I say, there are two what ifs, neither of which are totally implausible. And because of that we have a series of configurations and these don’t happen overnight, you know, it takes at least thirty years for these things be to begin to come together in the course of the narrative. And she goes, “Look, if you have these convergences, it is possible to take these proposals now and actually begin to enact them.”

And even though the narrative then travels another twenty years, by the time we get to 2070 they’re only still beginning. You know, it’s that they’re not completed. The process isn’t over. And I think that’s the thing. I think what she does is to show I think two things.

One is to show how things could be enacted bit by bit. There’s no grand master scheme necessarily. It’s just how things begin to slot into place based upon the immediacy of events, the contingency of events. And at the same time, I think it’s really important, as Jacqui said, we talk about the communities that come together in this kind of positive, transformative way. But she also looks at the communities that are also trying to preserve their current way of life, who don’t want to make that change. And she treats them sympathetically, it’s never a simple kind of, “We are right, they’re wrong.” And that is another feature I love about this book. It’s not a polarizing novel. It reaches out.

Jacqueline Nyathi: It’s interesting, because I just finished another novel, Forfeiture by J. P. Nebra. So I don’t know anything about the author—you know, where he’s from or anything—but in this novel, same thing: You know, we’ve destroyed the planet and so on. And then what happens is that in Indigenous cultures around the world—all kinds of places—send out a signal to aliens who have been here before and saw this planet and were completely amazed by how alive it was and how beautiful—so many species here and so on—and left a way for us to contact them if we need help. So these Indigenous peoples send this message to the aliens, and the aliens come.

They give us time, they give us a year or whatever it is to try and get things back in order or at least put things in place to clean up the planet, clean up the Pacific garbage patch and so on: Do this and do that, put in laws. Of course we don’t do anything. We fight. We find ways not to do it. We fight amongst ourselves and so on. And so, at the end of that time, the aliens decide to remove everybody from the planet. They have the means, they encircle every city, major city, on the planet and go and take everybody away.

But what they do—so here’s the redemption part—is that someone speaks to them and says, “But you know, are you writing off all of humanity? Is it possible to … because it’s not everybody who agreed with everything that was going on.” And then they’re like, “OK”; the aliens say, “Maybe we can kind of train up the next generation to value the planet and look after the planet.” So everyone’s going to go away and be put on an empty planet where they’re not destroying all the species. And then we’ll kind of teach the young people how to value and look after the planet and they can come back.

So there’s the redemption. I thought that was interesting. It’s also like, “Oh, all of humanity,” you know, but there’s something there.

Paul March-Russell: And again, I think it’s that difference between, again, the Global North and Global South, like you were saying earlier. And I think, you know, when I think of something like a subgenre like solar punk, I think of that’s very much as a Latin American movement in most respects. You know, when I think about it. And it does seem to me that immediately you do get a much more hopeful take because it’s coming from a totally different cultural outlook, which is also much more communal in its orientation.

Jacqueline Nyathi: And that’s with Asian fiction as well. Southeast Asian particularly I think is what I’ve read, and you get a lot of the same thing as well. You get—because they’re also thinking about not just humans, but other species—so how will they survive a alongside us, you know? So it’s much broader in its, um, outlook.

There are peoples who know how to live alongside other species. How about they teach the rest of us how to do that, or we find ways into the future that way.

Dan Hartland: And that’s what I like about the novel you just mentioned, Jacqui. There’s this idea that it’s not inherent to the human species that we behave in this way. It’s just a cul-de-sac that some of us have decided to get stuck down. Octavia Cade a couple of episodes ago was talking about how humans don’t have to change to not destroy the planet; we just have to accept that we’re like everything else on the planet, right? We just have to live in harmony—to use a terrible cliché—with everything else.

And that is what the Swift novel is very good at, which is it talks about human and non-human animals very often. Some of the most moving passages in the book—and some of the passages in the book I found very moving—were about animals and were about the natural world. She writes really well and I think that’s one of the ways in which it models what we could be doing differently. It kind of respects that, teaches us—a little bit like the aliens!—how to respect the world.

But what the Swift isn’t—and even Paul accepts this in his review—is radical. You say, Paul, it is radical because it sets its face against what we’ve been talking about, which is this kind of dystopian aesthetic that so much SF is inhabiting right now. But it’s not something like august clarke’s Metal from Heaven, which is like explicitly kind of leftist radicalism, right? It is much more a sort of … I won’t say it’s a centrist liberalism, but it’s definitely a liberalism, right? The way in which things change is they are reformed. The way in which laws are passed is, well, parliament does it. The society isn’t getting destroyed or there is no revolution. The system fundamentally kind of works. We have to correct it a little bit, but ultimately it finds the solutions itself. This too is fairly unfashionable in a lot of SFF and I just wondered whether we wanted to talk a little bit about that really. Is … is that good?

Paul March-Russell: I remember back in the late eighties, Terry Eagleton writing a review of David Lodge’s novel, Nice Work, and absolutely hating it and saying, “This is dreadful. Why are you not talking about capital and labor and so on?” And David Lodge is saying—who again is a liberal, centrist kind of writer, not un not unlike, I think, E. J. Swift—“That’s not the novel I can write, I’m not that person.” You know, I can write what I can write, you know, so there are definitely limits—limits that E. J. Swift imposes upon herself and, and there are limits I think that’s a kind of worldview the problem.

I would say it’s not so much … you know, we get this old line about, “Oh, it’s so much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, yadda, yadda, yadda.” But actually the real problem to me is actually how do we imagine ways to actually radically reform or revolutionize the world without actually ending up killing a whole bunch of people in the process, you know? And that seems to be the problem. Or destroying other people’s environments or destroying other species and so on and so on.

If you look at kind of standard sort of science fiction tropes—and this is true from H. G. Wells through to Kim Stanley Robinson—we often have this idea of, “Oh, don’t worry, there’ll be a scientific elite. They’ll appoint themselves, they’ll impose some kind of worldview. It will be fine.” You know what I mean? And that is, you know … folks, we’ve got a bunch of tech bros who’ve absolutely fed into that way of thinking and hey, look at the mess they’re making, you know?

I would come back to the idea that if we’re looking at a current political situation, for very good reasons—again, I’m thinking about the Global North, because unfortunately Global North is where I am—we’ve had a series of political disasters where people have lost faith in legal, constitutional politics. It actually becomes radical to say, “No, hold on a minute. The system can work if you act. If we can actually reenergize those institutions and those commitments.”

Not perfectly. I mean, there’s no idea this is a paradise by the end of this novel, in no shape or form is this grandiosely utopian or something. But it seems to me that to simply abandon legal, constitutional, democratic institutions and say, “Oh, don’t worry, folks, the scientist will sort it out … that ain’t gonna work, folks.”

From a kind of Marxist revolutionary position, this book will really annoy you. But actually it is reaffirming a faith in legal, constitutional, democratic institutions—that they can actually work, with a lot of nudging it has to be said, but it can work. And that I think is important.

Dan Hartland: One of the things that the interests me about the Swift kind of what we were talking about. Its perspective is very particular. We hear that China’s built a base on the moon, we hear that the US has “finally”—the word is “finally”!—split into three separate states. But we don’t get a lot about anywhere else that isn’t Britain. We hear a bit more about Europe, because one of the novel’s sadnesses is that Britain is still separate from Europe even in 2070. But it is very much a British solution to a kind of global problem, which is probably where I would … the shooting down thing that Paul keeps saying we could do if we wanted to, that’s probably where I would aim if I were seeking to shoot it down. Because it’s not a complete solution.

But on the other hand, as I’ve said, one of the things I really like about it is how kind of slim and economical it is as a book. And it wouldn’t be that if it had to do with the same thing for every country on the planet. It’s decided to do a particular thing. And what it does is, as Paul says, it says, “OK, this is the system we’ve got. This is the history we have. How do you get somewhere more positive without completely breaking everything.”

And that’s fine. But one of the things you wrote about, Jacqui, in your essay in the—which I reread for this episode, and you know, although you’re in the room, I’m going to embarrass you anyway by saying everyone should go and read the essay, it’s so good, I, loved going back to it.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Thank you!

Dan Hartland: Again, it’s called “Collective Dreaming.” It’s all about how we might imagine futures differently. But there, there was a line which really struck me—because I was reading it for the purpose of this episode—which was where you wrote, “For post-colonial societies, the apocalypse has happened.”

“How did we respond?” is your kind of rhetorical question. And it strikes me that Swift is saying, “How will we respond?” and saying, “Well, within a system.” But what do you make of that from a Global South perspective, Jacqui? Like, how did the post-colonial societies that experienced those apocalypses … How did they respond? You mentioned already, I think, that you’ve lived through an apocalypse, right? You’ve lived through a dystopia. So is that systemic response it, or are there other things as well?

Jacqueline Nyathi: So I am very much a “burn the entire thing down” kind of person. Because, first of all, what you’re saying about the Swift book, so you’re solving the British problem, but we’re on the same planet. And there are, I don’t know what the population of the UK is, but you know, there are billions of other people on the same planet. And I think that’s the mistake we have been making since we started talking about climate change. Which is that we can’t seem to—and the same thing with the pandemic, you know, it was, “This country has vaccines and we’re fine, you know, or we’re going to solve our problem.” The virus is literally traveling around the world on planes or whatever. It’s going from person to person! We are on the same planet, we have the same destiny in the end. So our little systems are not going to fix this problem.

The US doing whatever they’re going to do, or Peter Thiel, or the tech bros solving their little problem, you know, it’s not going to fix what’s wrong with us. And so I think probably, if I’m going to be a revolutionary about this, I think the time for that kind of solution is long past. And this is why we are where we are today.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that you can’t use the same systems to solve the problem that was created by the systems. So if we’re—I know I always talk about capitalism, you know—so your tech bros are trying to do green capitalism and you know, let’s have Bill Gates saying, “Let’s have all these technical solutions, let’s take carbon out of the atmosphere.” And, you know, all these things are just going to create more problems.

So in the same way, I think political systems are not … I understand the impulse to kind of want to find a solution that doesn’t kill everybody or cause starvation and so on. I fully understand that. But I also think that, for those who don’t believe in a future for all of humanity, they’re not playing by the rules. So if you are going to try and play by the rules, you’re not going to get anywhere. They have the power, they have the money, and they’re thinking about themselves.

You know, a lot of the solutions that are proposed are—now I’m talking from the Global South perspective—are going to solve certain problems in the Global North. People are already dying from flooding in Pakistan and Bangladesh and Mozambique and Malawi. We’re already getting these ferocious storms every rainy season. All this chatter that’s going on in the Global North about fifty years from now, that’s not the reality that we’re living through.

So I’m very much of the opinion that trying to work through the systems that we already had is not going to work for the planet. I understand it may work for a country or a certain community, but it won’t work for the planet, and we’re supposed to be thinking, I think at this point, about all of humanity. We should have a much bigger perspective when we’re thinking about how to get to the future.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: And is that where, again, the “Collective Dreaming” essay comes in? Because where can we learn what these alternative imaginings of the future are or might be? Well, it’s in literatures which are not embedded within the assumptions that got us here in the first place.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Colonialism came to my country and destroyed a way of life. There’s so much to say about that, but it took almost a hundred years for us to finally get back on track. I’ll explain why I don’t really like the term post-colonial. It boxes us into a certain definition. We are more than post-colonial. There’s a long history before that. And then after that, of course, we had our dictator, and we have a long story to do with that.

So we had that apocalypse in terms of all the ways of living that we had, our ways of being. And then we then had this political destruction. I could tell you so many stories about living in Zim when there’s no power, no fuel, no water supply, no, you know, no food in the shops. You know, that’s another kind of apocalypse that we’ve lived through.

But here’s the thing: when we tell our story as Zimbabweans, we’re not there anymore. You know? We moved past that thing because humanity has a way of solving problems. So in Zim we have this saying that you always make a plan. Make a plan, make a plan. You always find a solution somehow, if you need to find a solution.

The thing is how to come up with that solution. So, as Dan is saying, in my essay I was saying one of the main things is not to think so narrowly. The tendency with Western SF is to think in Western ways, which is fine because that’s where they’re coming from, but that dominant way of thinking really narrows. And if we’re talking about power dynamics, the power is with Western people, the Global North. If everyone is thinking in that narrow way about the future of humanity, then you know, we’re not actually going to come up with the solutions we need for the entire planet. So how about we all kind of think outside of that or be exposed to other stories, other ways of living.

Let’s talk to native Australians, one of the oldest cultures in the world. How have they got to where they are today? You know what knowledge do they have about living with the land that could save us from oil spills and all the other things we do and so on. So those ways of knowing and traditional knowledge is what we can get a lot of ideas from: What are other people saying could happen? What other solutions could there be? Let’s let everyone participate in being a human on this planet. You know, let’s listen to each other.

Paul March-Russell: I find that deeply inspiring, actually. You know, I’m gonna have to think through a lot of that and I find that very, very inspiring.

I think, I think it’s worth to note that obviously E. J. Swift’s last novel, The Coral Bones, did have that kind of global perspective. So The Coral Bones is obviously a novel which is set in three different time periods, from the nineteenth century to about three hundred years into the future. It’s all set around the Australian coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef, and with, again, a very strong input from Indigenous cultures in there. So I think Swift is a very good example of a white Western author who will think globally about this. Here, she’s just trying to focus on one particular bit. I don’t think she’s in any shape or form inimical to that kind of global perspective, that global way of thinking.

There’s so much to what Jacqui just said, but one thing I’ll take away from it is that it does pose very direct questions about science fiction, and speculative fiction, and science fiction studies. It reaffirms to me that the current direction of travel in science fiction is not the Global North or Anglophone tradition. It is very much about science fictions, speculative fictions, from around the world.

You know, if I just think about foundation of the journal that I edit, the current issue—which will hopefully be in people’s laps!—starts off with an article on Chinese science fiction. The issue itself is a special issue about women in the Black fantastic. We have had special issues in the last five years about Indigenous science fictions. So it just seems to me that science fiction itself has to learn from these other cultures, and if science fiction is—we go back to the point I mentioned earlier—a literature of change or literature of process, then for it to be, you know, a change, full process, full literature, it has to learn from those other cultures. It has to. An Anglophone tradition that doesn’t learn from around the world, it ain’t much of a tradition ultimately, and it’s certainly not gonna have much of a future.

Dan Hartland: I think one of the challenges for science fiction will be that a lot of what … you know, Foundation was very kind to publish my review of Vajra Chandrasekera’s *Rakesfall, *which happily just won the Ursula K. Le Guin Award, and the point I make about that novel is, “It’s coming for you, science fiction.” This book, it’s going to dissolve all of the bonds that you think are holding your genre together.

And science fiction—or the Anglophone version of it, because we won’t get into that, the Anglophone thing that calls itself science fiction—has to be okay with that. Because if it wants to learn, because some of the things that those literatures are gonna teach us as, as Paul says, they’re gonna ask questions that require complete reconstitution of things.

But it does strike me again that the Swift kind of … Paul, you talk about it’s realism, right? And realism is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Because on one level, we don’t want to go … Jackie was saying earlier, some SF is so hopeful that it’s not convincing. You know, Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn’t seem like a viable future for we are not gonna get there easily, certainly not by, what is it? Twenty-fourth century? No chance! But on the other hand, realism can be captured by all the assumptions that we’ve just been talking about, right? What is realism really? Is it just what is easily doable?

That question of realism seems to me key. But if books are an intervention in the world, Swift’s book is intervening at a point in British letters where even as limited a future as the book is building is necessary, because we’ve completely lost sight of every … you know, we began this episode with the dystopian aesthetic, which is baked into SF. And to be led out of that may require a kind of quite a narrow book, on one level.

I do want to talk a little bit—because I think we should, if we’re talking about hope and optimism—about hopepunk. Jacqui, you’ve, I think—I don’t know whether it was in the essay or in your review of the Weed—you say, “I love to read hopepunk, it’s great!” Paul, you say, and I quote, that hopepunk is associated with—quote—“moral platitudes and glib sentiments.” So I just wondered whether we could put these two together, because I instinctively feel that hopepunk is very vague a collection of texts, right? Like, I’ve heard Lord of the Rings describe as hopepunk. So I mean, at that point the kind of word becomes a bit meaningless.

On the other hand, it began with a call similar to the one we’re making in this episode, right? Which is that we’ve gotta think a bit more positively in many ways. Do we have any thoughts about that? Paul, do you want to defend yourself?

Paul March-Russell: Yeah. I mean, for me, the term hopepunk is actually … I never really knew what it really meant, you know? That people said, I say it, talk about it being platitudinous and whatever because when I’ve read pieces, that were talking about hopepunk they just seem to talk in very general terms. And I’m going, “Yeah, OK. What are you actually referring to here?” You know? And I think it’s tricky.

I’ll give an example. I remember—again, going back to my days of being a Clarke judge, you know—I absolutely loved Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit. And I had conversations with Maureen Speller and Paul Kincaid who were like, “Why, what? How can you even like this book?” You know, they were like, “What? What’s he doing!?” But, you know, I found it emotionally engrossing. It actually moved me to tears at one point. And it felt that Becky Chambers is very much a kind of, doyenne of hopepunk in a way, a kind of emblem of it.

But then you look at Becky Chambers’s more recent novels and it may not quite be working out quite as hopefully as we hoped, when she’s gone into issues around population control and stuff like that. This … dodgy, shall we say? To say the least. So it feels to me that I don’t fully know what hopepunk’s really meaning. I can see it’s gesturing after exactly the kind of quality we’ve been talking about in this conversation, but I don’t think it really sufficiently captures it. And to be a little bit cynical, it’s not enough just to stick the suffix of “punk” onto something and then it suddenly becomes okay, you know?

But, Jacqui, you probably know more about hopepunk than I do. So how do you respond to Dan’s question?

Jacqueline Nyathi: Yeah, so I think you’re right, both of you, about it. It’s not very well defined, is it? Anything with hope in it becomes hopepunk, which doesn’t make sense because punk is about social disruption, right? So how is it … where’s the punk?

But the reason I have enjoyed reading hopepunk is because of the absolute obsession with dystopia. I’ve been looking for something that will give me hope for the future, that sort of reminds me that humanity’s worth saving, that kind of thing. So that is the literal reason why I’ll read hopepunk when it comes across my desk. It has not been important enough for me to say, “Oh, yes, this is the book that everyone should read. This is Good Hopepunk.”

The closest thing to it has been a book called Multispecies Cities, which I refer to in in the essay, because all of those stories are quite hopeful, and they’re about communities and about all the different species surviving into the future and so on. I consider that hopepunk, even though there isn’t any talk of revolution or, you know, how the world has got to that place. It’s just maybe the punk is the idea of dreaming outside of what we see in front of our eyes right now. Maybe that’s the punk part. I don’t want to be reading about the end of humanity all the time. I would like to think about what could, what else could happen.

[Musical Outro]

Paul March-Russell: This is from the very end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.

He said, “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

So there you go.

Dan Hartland: I’m never against some bonus Italo Calvino, to be honest. [laughter]

[Musical Outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-up” by Lost Cosmonauts. Listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last episode on form and length, William Henry Morris offered some further thoughts on novellas. In particular, he encouraged SFF publishers to re-embrace the short novel. All for those, and WHM’s newsletter is worth a follow. Although with novella, novelette, and nouvelle we’re already rich in terms of art.

Dave Hutchinson, he of the [Europe in Autumn](h