During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war in the U.S.; in Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan, a new Joan of Arc for a global-warming era battles fascist forces. Given the obvious real-world resonances of the three books (the admittedly more fantastical Borne tackles out-of-control capitalism via a futuristic desert city terrorized by a giant flying psychotic bear), VanderMeer organized a three-way conversation to examine what he calls their "parallel evolution"—as well as dicuss how to take on a troubling present reality in an meaningful and productive way.
When you're writing science fiction about alternate realities—or futures or pasts—what’s the relationship to the present day?
VanderMeer: I always trip over descriptors like “sci-fi." They feel like boundaries that mean less and less, attempts at containment or to say “this couldn’t possibly happen to anyone reading this now.” So much of my so-called science fiction is composed of first-hand facts or details from the world we inhabit now, just recombined in fictional ways. And that is in the service of trying to live in the moment of the future time, so to speak. Anyone can explain the future to us, but I want readers to feel it in their gut, at ground level. Lots of explanation often feels to me like a failure by the writer to internalize the present.
Yuknavitch: So. Much. Yes. None of the three of us seems interested in pitching forward into a future where the status quo holds. And I actually think literature is shifting in terms of representations of our current reality—which has me casting about for new forms and themes that are not limited by what has been called "sci-fi." In a sense I wonder if we are doing something more like infiltrating the present tense with the imagination in order to shake it loose from the status quo.
El Akkad: I can’t put it any better than Lidia just did—I’m trying to infiltrate the present. The term “science fiction” to me has always contained an element of mechanical correctness, an obligation to make the physics, geography, and general rule-set of the invented world functional and accurate. But when I write, that tends to be the least of my concerns. I want, most of all, to say something about now, not later.
“Dystopia” is another word used a lot. Do you think it’s time we came up something better?
Yuknavitch: We all understand that our work moves from literary traditions that have relied on that terminology, but increasingly I find the word itchy. The dystopias of the past seemed to be warning us about impending futures that we are currently living all over the world. If the dystopia is the present, what would we call the imagined futures or alternative pasts we conjure?
VanderMeer: One mistake is to think we’ve just now entered a dystopia. Many, many people have been living in a dystopia before this point. Trump just tends to lay it bare by the ways in which he is a caricature of a politician and human being. Take the U.S. airstrike on Syrian airbases. On my social media feeds, a fair number of people were shocked and protesting this action, even though, in this one instance, there was no difference between Trump’s action and the actions—and official foreign policy—of the U.S. over the past century. So we have to be more honest with ourselves about our own history, and part of that may mean redefining "dystopia." As for what we might call it, I think perhaps the answer is to look at how we define "utopia" and work back from there. We definitely need to redefine what utopia is, too: We're rapidly approaching a point of no return after which certain modes of being we take for granted now as part of daily life will be viewed as utopian.
El Akkad: I've always had a somewhat cold reaction to the term “dystopia,” because to me it always entailed an inherent implausibility—which, I suppose, is a comforting thing, to put a little breathing room between a fictional description of ruin and the likelihood of it actually happening. But as a result, the term tends to cast a lot of fiction in the wrong light. I’m not as interested in the question of whether the ideas at the root of my fiction could happen, so much as I am with the fact that, for many people in this world, they already have. I think of what I write less as dystopian and more as dislocative.
How do you decide how to engage with the current political situation in your work?
Yuknavitch: My own writing is always wrestling a kind of knot where the things I care about—the environment, gender and sexuality, art, capitalism and power—come to a crossroads. What the current American political debacle, as well as climate change, heightens for me is the sense that history isn't stuck in some static past: it's alive in our present tense, and it kind of ruptures up during moments of crisis to remind us how the myth of progress is endlessly fractured. Even in the darkest times—and the human race has seen some very dark times before now—storytelling holds open chance. Imagination. Change. A kind of radical hope that the story can turn. I think I zoom in on the question “How can the story turn?” as a form of hope in the face of despair.
El Akkad: Since in my fiction I’m mostly concerned with the mechanics of injustice, and injustice is necessarily a concrete thing, I don’t have much of a choice but to wade into the political. That said, I’m not nearly talented enough a writer, nor so fully in control of my sense of outrage, that I can engage with these things in the instant of their happening. I need time. One day I’ll write something about the ugliness of the present situation, if only to exorcise the demons of having lived through it—but it won’t be now.
VanderMeer: That idea of distance, Omar, resonates quite a bit. I’m always trying to choose the right distance from which to operate, so to speak. Sometimes that means being very up-close and personal, but sometimes it means being farther away, or making certain elements vague or undetermined so that other things can be in focus. I’m more likely to be in-close and personal with the elements I feel most certain about because they’re the most personal. But when I'm speaking to radical environmentalism classes at colleges, a lot of students don’t want distance—they want to inject the right now into their fiction, stories that speak to the immediate present as it bleeds into the future. They in a sense want deeply didactic fiction.
What issues do you think are underrepresented in the media that are important for storytelling?
El Akkad: The straightforward answer involves the broad category of stories that, in this part of the world, don’t center or default to the experiences of white Westerners. And that’s doubly frustrating to me because America, of all countries, seems so uniquely well-suited to play the stage for the telling of other people’s stories.
But within this category, I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about something that I can only describe as the difference between the table and the tablecloth. Think of any James Bond or Jason Bourne story, for example—there’s almost always a scene or several scenes set in “exotic” locales: Moroccan bazaars, secluded Caribbean islands. But these places are merely the table, the platform on which the tablecloth—someone else’s story—is laid. I think there’s an underrepresentation of stories in which this part of the world serves the role of the table.
Yuknavitch: For me the most brutal blind spot of media representation is the failure to represent the people who are used as the raw material to build so-called successful societies: people of color, women, LGBT folks, indigenous people, and poor people. It is still true that the white Western experience dominates media and that disenfranchised people are only the topics of discussion as they relate to the success of white Western progress. America is founded on the slaughter of Native Americans and brutally built on the backs of African Americans, for instance, and we’re still telling stories about ourselves as if our patriotism doesn’t stink.
I truly believe that a tectonic shift needs to occur that rearranges the terms of storytelling so that different bodies and voices might emerge. I also continue to be outraged by how little the interdependence between biologic life and the importance of surrounding ecosystems is "news." I mean, what will it take? Water at the door? It’s already here.
VanderMeer: The de-linking of social justice and environmental issues is a big problem. The true complexity of these issues demands that much of the time the two things go hand in hand, in part because both are issues that remain unresolved in our culture. So separating out biologic life from the surrounding ecosystem is problematic, and then separating out our own societal issues from those ecosystems is also problematic—and doesn’t lead to the correct solutions.
Do you think all fiction needs to engage with climate change, given we’re now well into the middle of pretty monumental change?
Yuknavitch: No, but I do believe that climate change is challenging conventional notions of setting. To build a character who exists in the present would mean to admit the conditions of their existence are inextricably linked to their environment.
El Akkad: I do think it’s going to become more and more difficult to write about this world without writing about climate change. The consequences of this shift we’re experiencing, and which we seem so inept at addressing in any serious institutional way, will touch every facet of life. Books about refugees, war, the geography of memory, the very human trait of wanderlust—writing about any of these things will necessarily entail addressing the way in which the stage on which these stories take place is fundamentally changing.
Does the rapid changing of the planet’s climate turn the Earth itself into an unreliable narrator? And does irreversible change in the natural world in which memories take place have an impact on the solidity of those memories?
VanderMeer: The New Wave writer Michael Moorcock was describing the weather in one of his novels once and I joked that he was basically writing meteorological fiction. But the truth is that the notion of geologic time and the writer's awareness of the vastness of time and space is something you’ve seen in everything from William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderlands to Isaac Asimov’s more epic science fiction. What’s changed is that geologic time is showing its hand to us faster and faster, because processes that might take place over thousands or even millions of years are manifesting more swiftly. In that context, novelists do have to grapple with the idea of these forces as creators of disruption at the very least. Here in North Florida, I think a lot of us already take it seriously because of the rate of decay and renewal hardwired into the landscape normally. But then you add on top of that so much change in planetary ecology, and it’s hard not to see, for example, the little pink invasive geckos that have come to North Florida in the past five years as encoded with Ballardian DNA.
Yuknavitch: This is why I love writing about worms and oilbirds and olms! The lowest creatures on the planet, those underground or digging through actual dirt and debris, are fascinating case studies with regard to the question, What relationship do we want to have to the planet? Who are we in relation to our environment, and might we reimagine our relationship? One of the ideas I was scratching at in Joan was the idea that the trope of the love story as well as the tropes of the war story and the so-called god story are in dire need of radical revision. What if we loved the planet the way that we claim we love our spouses, or children, or lovers? If we are learning anything from the speed with which climate change and our knowledges and discoveries about the natural world are barreling forward, in part it's this: the Earth was never an object for humans to own, nor was anything on it.
How do you go about keeping the fragile things—your characters’ most delicate desires—from getting lost among all the big overarching concerns?
VanderMeer: I try to accomplish this by thinking of setting as coming out of character point of view, even in third-person narratives. Are the details I’m conveying things that the character, given their background and experience, notice or not? Are they things that are important to the character? How can the elements of setting be imbued in an organic way with the character’s emotional life? That’s my baseline in most of my novels, with the caveat that sometimes you want the characters to get a little lost in the landscape, because that’s the point. In the Southern Reach trilogy, I wanted the characters to be made claustrophobic by the setting around them, for their emotional lives, and their physical selves, to more or less peer out from a vast jungle of vegetation, so to speak. But I do think this tension between the epic and the personal is where you can most easily lose the thread and get lost in spectacle.
Yuknavitch: I identify mightily with what you say there, Jeff, about the tension between the epic and the personal. I honestly believe that a narrative shift is taking place with regard to setting and theme that first seemed apparent in works that marked “ye olde postmodern” turn. Novels where setting bled through the emotional realities of the characters so much that there really wasn't a definitive line between background and foreground: the works of Don DeLillo, Stephen Erickson, Philip K. Dick. Similarly, the overarching themes from the great tradition of sociopolitical fiction in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Margaret Atwood could result in didacticism—but they don't. My feeling is that the reason is the body. How to keep the fragile things, the smallest of human details, the most delicate desires of the character alive, is to go back to the body. One of the many reasons I am engaged by both Borne and American War is that I can feel it in my body when I read.
"Hope" can seem like a commodified term, a literary code word for "please read this dystopia, it’s not that depressing." What does real hope look like, in your opinion?
VanderMeer: I always think of hope in fiction as relative to the situation and character. If you inject an unrealistic hope, by novel’s end you’ve betrayed your protagonist—and, in a sense, the reader. So you find the hope that feels earned, lived-in, that’s bought with sacrifice and struggle.
Yuknavitch: I’ve come to believe that real hope comes from the ground up—from the mud and good dirt, for one thing, but also from a refusal to look up toward a savior or ideology or power figure, and to instead look at the person next to you and ask how might we ease suffering. How might help one another rather than serve a system devoted to empowering itself. I think to radicalize our hope, we need to stop waiting for someone to save us. Hope involves us taking our labor back and doing something different with it besides feeding power systems. Hope is messy and raw and vulnerable and laborious. Ask refugees. Survivors of war or poverty. Ex-cons. Rape victims who stood up and walked away from their own victimhood and into selves. Hope is loving into the otherness and across fear.
El Akkad: Hope is a function of necessity, and as such often entirely at odds with the way it is used as an optimistic selling point for so much popular literature. Because it is intangible, hope is what remains when all tangible things—wealth, societal support, a safe place to call home—are taken away. It involves the exhausting work of believing, against all evidence, that what comes will be better than what currently is—because to believe otherwise is to accept a world in which the agents and institutions of power would rather you simply not exist. Hope, I think, belongs first and foremost to the hopeless.