coe122_coe7.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's cultures of energy in your ear buds, in your ear body, embodied in your ear, so plural ears. Welcome. We're really glad to be here with you and glad you're here too. Hey, everyone. Hi, everybody.

Speaker2: [00:00:40] Hello. It's an exciting week.

Speaker1: [00:00:42] Hello. It's a very exciting week is it's the week of the first super duper low carbon Society for Cultural Anthropology biennial meeting. Yes, which is called displacements. It's practically no carbon, but you know, server space. So but it's super, super low carbon because we don't have people flying all over the planet specifically to the United States, to some little small town like Ithaca to have a conference, which is a wonderful place to have a conference. But here we're having a conference online, and all of this has been so skillfully guided by our wonderful friend and colleague, Anand Pandian. Yeah, shout out who is at Johns Hopkins University and a friend of the pod and just a friend in general. And he and a team of people have been working really, really hard on putting together this great conference. And so it's available online and it's streaming live, and they're pre-prepared conversations and videos and cool mash ups of audio video material and the experimental cultural anthropology way in the CIA so famous for. And you can click into the conference and get registered for a very small number of dollars. I think it's like 10 bucks or something like that and listen to some really cool papers and it's going twenty four seven. It is not. There's no parochialism vis a vis time zones. It's just going, going, going. Yeah, so you can pop in whenever you feel like it. And there's all kinds of cool stuff on the program. So maybe you select something or maybe just pop it on and play it in the background on your computer as you're, you know, doing other things or on your phone or whatever and get some really cool intel. So look it up, displacements. Twenty eighteen and you can be part of the scene. How it's going to go on for what? Another day or two,

Speaker2: [00:02:26] 60 hours, 60 hours of content stream. They're going to stream every all of the papers twice over 60 hours in different time zones to make it easy for people to watch and engage. And there's a lot of activity on Twitter under hashtag displace 18 if you're interested in following it. And yeah, I mean, we were there at the beginning when this idea was born, and I have to say that my first reaction to it was like, But are people really going to engage, you know, if it makes all the sense in the world from an ecological perspective and it makes all the sense in the world from a kind of economic justice perspective, and that people from the global south can participate just as easily almost as people in the global north. But I have to say I thought that people wouldn't want to do it because they would forget about it. But honestly, I was totally wrong. People are getting very engaged with this, and I bet it's going to blow away all our previous records for attendance because already I think you said this morning, there are already 500 people that registered and ready to go and watch it on streaming.

Speaker1: [00:03:22] It's great, and I think that the ability of folks living in the global south to participate is really, really a central part of it to give papers in it without having to hassle around with, like flying on a jet plane someplace and getting visas and all that stuff to be able to participate and get that line on your CV and get that, get your work out there and also to, you know, to be an audience member, if that's if that's what you're up for two. So it really is a much more egalitarian way, as as well as a much more environmentally sensitive way to host a conference. And so I'm glad that honored has had the energy and the wherewithal to do it because when I first heard it, I was I was just like, Oh my God, like, how do you even organize something like that? It just

Speaker2: [00:04:07] Had to invent

Speaker1: [00:04:07] So much technical stuff and really getting all the ones and zeros and all.

Speaker2: [00:04:12] And let's let's also shout out Marcello Flam, who I think was like a hugely

Speaker1: [00:04:15] Insane yeah, I think he's done a lot. I think he

Speaker2: [00:04:17] Did a lot. He did a lot. And there's also a little video of us talking about why you should support open access publishing and that produced the tweet from Dick S. Pumpkins. I hope we get more videos of that. Dominic Boyer shit talking for profit publishers. That was one of the highlights of my

Speaker1: [00:04:32] Day was that

Speaker2: [00:04:34] Was that pumpkins one of the highlights of my day?

Speaker1: [00:04:37] Yeah. Well, God, that was like a humble brag to

Speaker2: [00:04:40] All day everyday. So anyway, we've got a lot to talk about. Let's move on. What next? Last day of teaching Simone how that went well. That was a poignant moment for you and of teaching. You get a little sad on these days. You start to mope around the house a little bit. I notice you kind of staring out the window and there's like a moisture in your eyes.

Speaker1: [00:04:57] And I'm like, I haven't even been back. I've been back for like 60 seconds.

Speaker2: [00:05:01] I'm just predicting what's going to happen next time you staring out the window? I'm going to wake up and you'll just be staring out the window and you,

Speaker1: [00:05:07] Oh, I thought it was a good end of day. It's just always that. Always kind of. The presentations were very good, but I don't think that's very exciting for our listeners to hear about.

Speaker2: [00:05:14] Let's see what else you got. Well, I was at the Rising Waters workshop in Philadelphia this week, and I just want to. Thank because we have a number of listeners there, and a lot of very folks very sweetly came up and said, how much, like the podcast, I want to thank all of those people I want to thank, especially Nicole Anand, for that invitation. He is a friend of the pod, as we know. And also Bethany Wiggins, who's the director of the Penn Environmental Humanities Lab, who's doing terrific work, and we hope to have her on the pod someday soon. So, Bethany, we're coming for you. But that was a great that was a great and very much we'll be talking more about it, but just the idea of how cities are coping with subsidence and rising waters, and these are themes that are very much going to be on our mind in the years to come. I feel like.

Speaker1: [00:05:58] I think so. I think rising waters is like a thing. It's actually I can almost feel it on the bottoms of my feet.

Speaker2: [00:06:05] Oh my god. This is a great presentation about and I wish I had the quotes right in front of me, but just about how it takes, you know, mapmakers and a kind of cartographic imperial imaginary to turn wetness into water. You know, it's about like putting lines on a page, right? And it was a great anecdote about, you know, I guess, one of the first projects of intense kind of development theory, you know, went back to like 800 B.C. when people were asking, like, how does the Nile flood? And, you know, they would talk to people in the Nile Valley who didn't really experience it as flood. They experience it as just the water going up and going down right. And the Greek philosophers were like, These people don't know what they're talking about it. So it was like, like an immediate global north global south underdevelopment argument like 800 BC. That's how old some of this stuff goes on. But also just this idea. A flood is, in a sense, a certain kind of imaginary, and that was really good to think about, especially in light of, you know, all this work on Hurricane Harvey and the experience of Hurricane Harvey.

Speaker1: [00:07:03] Right. Because the flood is all about kind of where you stand in it and what's affected by where

Speaker2: [00:07:07] Water is supposed to be.

Speaker1: [00:07:08] That's right. And then the truth is, it's sort of like that anthropology of disaster. Going back to the nineteen nineties, there are no natural disasters. Exactly. There are only natural occurrences that are disasters for humans and maybe for some animals in some cases or some plants in some cases. But do those animals and plants like register them as disasters? I'm not sure. I mean, their lives may be snuffed out and they may be displaced, so that would be disastrous.

Speaker2: [00:07:31] This is from Dilip Dukwana, Islamic scholar, who gave this presentation that he was talking about the the way people have been searching forever for the origins of the Nile. And you said this this child is search for origin points at the end of a line. Rivers begin everywhere. I love that idea of rivers being everywhere. Just true. True. You draw a line in the water, crosses it and you yell Flood, flood, flood.

Speaker3: [00:07:53] Right, right, right.

Speaker2: [00:07:55] Anyway, that was a great event. Thank you all for the invitation. We also had our own amazing event last week Cultures of Energy seven, and that's what we're bringing to you this week on the podcast. Not our usual kind of potpourri of short conversations. We thought we'd try something different. We are bringing to you our keynote presentation in its entirety, and you know who that keynote presentation features

Speaker1: [00:08:18] Featured Garcia and again, the artist Gan, the Egyptian Egyptian, which means chain. Yes, cool name. Or we can call them g to. So we could call them G. But I come them guns here. And then we got Jeff VanderMeer,

Speaker2: [00:08:31] Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy and Born and Our Very Own Simone. How on the keynote panel, talking about the work of making alternate worlds what it means to make alternate worlds in a variety of media today, really nice presentations, really interesting conversation moderated by our own virtuous vice president, Carolyn Bender. Yes. So that was fun. That's what you have coming up on this episode today, and I think you had a good time on that panel, did you not?

Speaker1: [00:09:01] Oh yeah, I thought it was great. I thought it was very, yeah, stimulating and it was good one.

Speaker2: [00:09:05] All right. So what else you want to say?

Speaker1: [00:09:06] So some people will have heard about this because some people may also be listeners to the daily, which is the New York Times podcast, which is excellent. And so yesterday they had one on. I shout out my sources and it was a super interesting story that I wouldn't have thought I'd be interested in, but it was about the kind of like hashtag MeToo and the professional cheerleading for the NFL. And so it's like this weird like underworld that I didn't realize like how nefarious it is, in fact. I mean, obviously, from a feminist point of view, there's all kinds of critiques you can make about cheerleading, but this is just from a labor point of view. So apparently these cheerleaders like they have to try out and compete against hundreds and hundreds of others. And there's all kinds of ridiculous, sexist disciplinary acts like, you know, grabbing your belly to see if there's like any fat there and making them lose a lot of weight that they have to have their nails manicured in a certain way in which they must pay for it by themselves. You know, the franchise doesn't cover it. They have to come to work with a full spray tan every single time, which is expensive and also not covered by the franchise. In order to be out on the field doing their cheerleading once they've been inducted onto the into the group, the troupe or whatever it. Called this is for the same disturbances, yeah, well, singing like a dance troupe because they kind of identify as dancers like dancers and cheerleaders and. And so this is for the the New Orleans Saints.

Speaker2: [00:10:33] And so the team used to cheerlead for or was that the Seahawks?

Speaker1: [00:10:38] Oh God, you know, I I went to one football game once at Cal just to say that I would, you know, had been, Yeah, I am so not interested in football and it just gets worse every minute the more you hear about it. And this only adds to like besides the concussions and the brain damage like this is, you know, this really puts the cherry on top of them for

Speaker2: [00:10:58] The exploitation, stay for the concussions. That's what I see.

Speaker1: [00:11:00] So, yeah, so you know, you go through all this hell to become this cheerleading object thing. And then guess what? You don't even get paid a living wage these women are making. They start out at minimum wage.

Speaker2: [00:11:15] That is what

Speaker1: [00:11:16] Minimum wage to be out there on the field, kicking your heart out and jumping up and down and following these really like rigorous regimes of of exploitation for minimum fucking wage. And so some they, like a lot of them, can't afford to pay the rent. So they bartend and do other things on the side to try and make it, I guess, just for the glamour or maybe the exposure of becoming a cheerleader, being out there on TV. Here's the other thing in order to be on the field in order to go out and work and get paid, you have to sell calendars like the cheerleader calendars. So you're out there in your little skimpy outfit. Among all these drunken, probably mostly dudes during halftime trying to like, sell pictures of your own self and your fellow troopers. And then they have these super restrictive regulations about fraternizing with the players so you cannot be at a party with a player. So like if you're at a party and a player walks in, it's upon you, the woman to leave the room, to leave the party entirely. If they're in a restaurant and a player walks in, you have to leave the restaurant, including like leaving your food on the table. You have to depart immediately.

Speaker2: [00:12:22] Just flee. You have to leave, you know, and

Speaker1: [00:12:24] Just because and then the justification is

Speaker2: [00:12:26] What the second floor? You have to like jump onto a tree or something to escape.

Speaker1: [00:12:29] And it's a good thing you're really athletic because you can bounce well, because that's what you have to do.

Speaker2: [00:12:34] Yeah, it's good thing your spray tanned in case you get stuck in the tree, they can see you, you,

Speaker1: [00:12:38] They they can. Then they can ferret you out from the green. And because orange and green are actually opposite color,

Speaker2: [00:12:44] There's a contrastive. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:12:46] So then, yeah, so you can't like if a player tries to follow you on Twitter or Facebook, you must block them. So there's all these regulations about sort of creating this like illusion of chastity and separation. And and the storyline is like it's up to the women to do this because these players are predators and they'll prey on you. And you know, they're just going to they're going to take advantage of you and exploit you and like, they're just going to use you and they're predators. And then this woman, like, really brilliantly said, she's like, What the fuck? She's like, I'm out there getting paid minimum wage to cheer for these predators. Yeah, right? Like, where is where's the logic at all that like I

Speaker2: [00:13:27] Also kind of I, I don't understand is like, why?

Speaker1: [00:13:30] And it's totally racialized to, you know, like, Oh, they're predators. Or, you know,

Speaker2: [00:13:34] I don't understand why they didn't figure this out before they get the job offer. There must be stories. There must be some in the community of dancers that these jobs are terrible.

Speaker1: [00:13:43] I think it's something about again, I guess it's about the visibility, like they hope that they're going to get a dancing job like this. This woman who was on on this podcast, like her mother, had been a cheerleader for the same team and then had gotten jobs as like a backup dancer for these different like performers like musicians and stuff. So I, you know, maybe in some cases it can be a conduit to another job or something. Maybe you get some kind of modeling career or whatever. I don't know. I guess that's why they do it, but it's just sounds

Speaker2: [00:14:15] Anyway, horrible. You've heard if you didn't hear the news on NPR or The New York Times, it's not NPR, it's that other

Speaker1: [00:14:22] It's the new it's the New York Times.

Speaker2: [00:14:24] If you didn't hear the news, the

Speaker1: [00:14:25] Failing New York Times,

Speaker2: [00:14:26] We've broken the news now. I think of that as we break the news to everyone who doesn't listen to the daily. So that's cheerleading, folks, is not all you had hoped it to be. Don't do it.

Speaker1: [00:14:37] Don't digest and regurgitate the news for you. Yeah. Yes. Yes. If you're considering taking on a cheerleading career, especially with the New Orleans Saints, so many what are they called the Saints? So they're called the

Speaker2: [00:14:51] Cardinals terrible name to God. Every part of this job, since that's the the name. Yeah, most people in this podcast probably have either been cheerleaders or have contemplated in a serious way, become cheerleaders. I'm just telling you people, it's not worth it. Ok, stay humanists. I know and allies and

Speaker1: [00:15:08] Stay under a spray tan. It's probably toxic, you know? Yeah. If for no other reason than that, like, be

Speaker2: [00:15:13] Warned and listen, beware. Even if you miss cultures of energy. Seven Don't worry, there's going to be a culture of energy. Breaking news right here. That was not covered by the daily.

Speaker1: [00:15:23] Ok, that was another advertisement you've got in there.

Speaker2: [00:15:25] Somehow, I'm getting paid a lot of money by these academic conferences to like, Oh, there you go. Anyway, we should let it

Speaker1: [00:15:31] Zero dollars

Speaker2: [00:15:33] And you for once get to say your own name, so I'll let you do it.

Speaker1: [00:15:37] Oh OK, so go gowns here. Go Jeff and go Simone.

Speaker4: [00:16:01] Attorney network, you know? It's my great pleasure to introduce the mastermind behind the founding of the cultures that energy working through all those many years ago.

Speaker2: [00:16:11] Dr. Carolyn Beck, also professor in the humanities professor of English and Rice's newly minted. And this is, I think, a promotion. So we should give her a round of applause. Newly minted vice president for Digital and global strategy.

Speaker3: [00:16:31] So I begin begin this wonderful, wonderful experience by asking us to think towards the work of alternate worlds and a few words on this panel. It is meant to explore the craft and importance of inventing alternate worlds against the backdrop, as we've just so powerfully seen of mounting concern about the state of the worlds we actually are living in. So we have before us an all star panel of world makers in Egyptian muralist and graphic novelist Schanzer Phi Phi Phi Phi Phi writer Jeff VanderMeer and our own Simone Houle, who are going to collectively help us move the conversation forward. So I thought what I would do is just give a brief bio for each of them. You will each speak for about 10 minutes or so, and then there are a series of questions that the panel has come up with that might guide discussion, but also open it up to the floor. Great. So Simone, how is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice and Founding Faculty of since? She's the author of Intimate Activism in 2013 and Ecological Wind and Power in the Anthropocene? Twenty eighteen so very, very recent, which analyzes the social and environmental effects of renewable energy development in southern Mexico. She is co-editor of The Anthropocene Lexicon in Twenty Eighteen, a collection of keywords that speak to anthropogenic impacts on Earth's bio, litho, aqua and atmospheres and her current project Melt.

Speaker3: [00:18:12] The Social Life of Ice at the top of the world aims to understand cryo human interrelations and the implications of rapidly warming conditions in the Arctic and beyond. The Melt project serves as the basis for a documentary film currently in production and eliciting a lot of interest across all kinds of different communities, which narrates the story of Iceland's first well-known glacier to disappear due to climate change. How also serves as co-editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Social Theory and co-host the Cultures of Energy podcast. She is followed by Glacier is a maker of Concept Pop, a brand of art he has exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, such as the V&A, the Greek State Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He's produced some of the most iconic murals of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, including the Martyr Mural series, and was one of the protagonists of the critically acclaimed documentary titled Art War by director Marco Wilmes. His current ongoing project is a sci fi graphic novel novel titled The Solar Grid, which has awarded him a Global Thinker Award from foreign policy in Twenty Sixteen.

Speaker3: [00:19:38] Last, definitely not least, is the New York Times best selling writer Jeff VanderMeer, who has been called and I Love This, The Weird Thoreau, as if the other one wasn't weird enough. The weird throw by The New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, The National Bestseller Born, received widespread critical acclaim, and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy, and that includes Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance. Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards and has been translated into 35 languages. It was made into a film from Paramount Pictures, directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The La Times, The Atlantic Slate Salon, The Washington Post. He is co-edited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonder Book The World's first fully illustrated creative writing guide. Vandermeer served as the Twenty Sixteen and 17 Try US writer in residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He's spoken at the Guggenheim Library of Congress, the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. Clearly, we have before us a panel of real luminaries and creative, unorthodox thinkers. So without further ado, let's hear what they have to say and then open the floor for questions.

Speaker4: [00:21:09] Ok.

Speaker5: [00:21:10] Ok, so the year. 1812. Mr Smith of Huddersfield walks into the premises of his new state of the art shearing factory and he arrives at the desk in his office. A letter awaits, sir! The letter reads. Information has just been given and that you are a holder of those detestable shearing frames, and I was designed by my men to write you and give you fair warning to pull them down. You will take notice that if they are not taken down by the end of next week, I will detach one of my lieutenants with at least 300 men to destroy them. Signed the general of the Army of Redresses Ned Lud. Nigella's actually did not really exist. He was just a name used by various sabotage groups. They can't just Smith a fiction, if you will. This is where the word Luddite comes from. Often used in reference to a person who has a backward aversion to technology. The word, however, is a little bit of a misnomer. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the Luddite rebellion was not really about technology. The Luddites were, in fact, quite happy to use machines. What got them, however, was the new logic of industrial capitalism, where the productivity gains from a new technology enriched only the machines owners and were not shared with the workers. Another thing that appalled that was the mediocre quality of industrial stockings forced into public acceptance solely by their sheer quantity. At the heart of the Luddite rebellion was a war of culture so dramatic with the cultural changes of the industrial revolution that by 18 30 going to work for 14 hour workdays five to six times a week was standard practice.

Speaker5: [00:23:29] This is especially nuts when you consider that only 30 years prior. Most people in that very same industry worked from the comfort of their homes and did so no more than three days a week. We are brought up to think that progress is inevitable, almost linear in nature. That science allows us to invent new things that are better than older things and thus must replace them. But such logic is flawed and fails to explain things like Why is vinyl making a comeback? Or How is it possible that in the age of the keyboard and the iPad and the stylus that some of us still prefer to write on paper? Culture is extremely powerful, more powerful than science sometimes. In fact, scientific development is often guided by culture. The invention of DDT, for example, and awarding its inventor a Nobel Prize was not an inevitable scientific develop. It is the result of a culture that seeks to dominate nature that sees the ecosystem as a hierarchy, with men asserting control from a high castle at the very top. Never would something like DDT ever emerge from, say, a Janus culture. For example, the key to saving our planet lies more in culture than science. This is evident by looking at the great law of the Iroquois, which urges us to consider whether the decisions we make today would benefit our children seven generations into the future, seven generations into the future. That's amazing. They do not need satellites or studies of the Earth's ozone layer to figure this out. Solar energy alone will not save our planet, nor will any other form of renewable energy. Not without a severe alteration of the culture

Speaker4: [00:25:52] That dominates us.

Speaker5: [00:25:54] I shudder to think how much absolutely pointless crap will flood our lives once factories have access to unlimited costless energy. Luckily, though, culture is not genetic and is susceptible to change. Myths and stories have been weaved. The act as blueprints for entire civilizations since the beginning of time, we are what we are missing today. A new guiding mythologies, stories, stories that are created not for capital times, not as entertainment and not to satisfy the author's ego, but something more something that will perhaps benefit our children and maybe even benefit our children seven generations into the future. Thanks for listening.

Speaker3: [00:27:02] So I wanted to begin by thinking through this concept of alternate worlds or world in alternate form or world as alternates. I think this raises a couple of questions. First of all, an alternate worlds, we have plural in the second form in the nominal form that is plural of worlds as multiple worlds. This is a potential to be entirely novel or unknown or ineffable, or difference is at the fulcrum. If we think of world alternates, then we have the plural and the adjectival sense of the equation as a world that we might recognize, but that might also be orthogonal to the world we actually occupy. Now I want to begin by talking about a couple of projects that I've been working on for the last year or so. And the first begins in a conference or a workshop called Energy Worlds that took place in Copenhagen. And in this workshop, we were tasked with working collaboratively to come up with an energy world and a product that we could place into an edited volume, very typical academic work. Our little collaborative of three decided that we wanted to do something different, that we didn't want to write yet another chapter. And so what we decided to do, which was exciting and challenging, and if we had known how long it would take us to complete would never have begun to embark upon it. But we decided to do instead of a chapter to create a graphic novel. So our graphic novel is called Unda.

Speaker3: [00:28:43] That's the name of the protagonist and our protagonist. Unda is what I would call a wave sign, literally a physical way of sign and also a sign of waves. So Unda is a woman in the world who is broken and destroyed by electromagnetic radiation and its waves. She is afflicted by these waves, which surround her day and night in every place on the planet that she seeks to go. She's a scientist, and in the beginning she thinks that it's only electric light that haunts her and causes her skin to boil and to drip from her muscles and her frame. But she realizes on her journey that all signals bring her down. It's not just electric light, but all of the electromagnetic energy and radiation that surrounds her. In working on this graphic novel, we wanted to bring the accuracy of science to play upon undoes world and her place of being in this world. And so we find over time through her as a scientist that she is afflicted in these different ways that this affects her debility. And here you can see the different waves of radiation that afflict her, so she embarks upon this journey to escape this toxicity that is accosting her. She set sail to be away, but being a scientist, she soon finds that there's no way to get away from everywhere she goes. She faces the same affliction. So as creators, we wanted to focus on the ubiquity of energy everywhere around us, its production, its consumption and its contemplative potentials.

Speaker3: [00:30:39] And we also wanted to be sure that Linda would reflect our respective research projects that we were working on as social scientists. So we wanted to be sure that she was attuned to wind power in this missive to one topic in Mexico. We wanted her to be attuned to the fact that wave power is created off the Orkney coast in Scotland, and we wanted her to be attuned to the fact that infrastructures of energy are surrounded surrounding us at all times. We also wanted to be sure that Unda was not forever victim. She suffers, but she finds her way and she heads towards the Orkney Islands in the northern part of the world, where she hopes to find a deep powered world and to find her own unique powers alive there. She passes through the North Atlantic Gyre of Plastic and in the North Atlantic Gyre. She makes a coat of many colors that is composed of plastic debris and refuse. Plastic is not conductive, and thus it provides a protection to her from the forces that haunt her physical form. So this is her cloak of plastic detritus. She arrives at Orkney. She begins to write her story, and she realizes that her sensitivity to the world's way. Is less affliction than that, it is a gift, an ability to attune to the world in ways that other humans cannot. Neil Ford was the artist who we hired to work on the graphic novel, and he did all of the illustrations here.

Speaker3: [00:32:16] So the second thing I wanted to reflect on in thinking about alternate worlds was, of course, that I taught a couple of years ago here at Rice called Speculative Futures. And in the syllabus, I described it as an exercise in the subjunctive, a lively possibility, a prospective and yet unknown condition of the might be. And in this course, I wanted to focus and for us to focus in the class on themes of the climate sublime. I wanted to bring clarify, which is a new literary, relatively new literary genre. The focus is on the consequences of environmental issues, brings them in to the narrative form of classic science fiction and to have classified meat with social side or social sciences to have that mash occurred. So in every class meeting, we read three different genres of literature of research and material simultaneously with and against each other. We read for every session, a piece or a part of text, speculative fiction, climate fiction in this case and Kay Jamieson's the fifth season, which takes place in a land called The Stillness. For those of you who haven't read it, the entire world undergoes apocalypses on a pretty regular basis as regular as weather patterns, thus the fifth season, and it has a multi-character point of view that highlights racial and social inequalities in politics throughout. This is Jensen's first in the series that she calls the Broken Earth in every class.

Speaker3: [00:33:50] We also read journalistic accounts where we read stories from the New York Times, from the BBC, The Guardian on desertification and on food shortages, on drought, on inundation, on disease and vector expansion. Mining mega-projects all contemporary events that are happening around the world that are significantly influenced by climate changes. And in every class, we read anthropological works to take social science as a rather slower form of journalism, if you will, that thinks through events and theorizes their importance and their consequences. So where the novelist has the freedom to write the world she wishes, the journalist must write the world that she sees. The social scientists must also write the world that she sees, but also the world as she thinks it, as with Cliffie. I would suggest there is an argument here, so students were asked to work again collaboratively and to create a world of their own, making a few requirements I put into place. It needed to be set at any future date. Pick one. It needed to have a space time dimension, in other words, and it must have. It must exist somewhere could be a city and off world site or in another body. Each world needed to have 10 elements a setting and ecosphere, several kinds of beings that populate this world a history, technological apparatuses, forms of subsistence, how beings survive and a political order or forms of governance principles of exchange, a communicative system, forms of relationship and ceremonial forms.

Speaker3: [00:35:32] So I wanted to emphasize here that sociality is involved in world making and that really rationality is key and thus the elements of relational ideal. So as students were building in their collaborative worlds, there are alternate worlds, speculative worlds as we move through the semester. We had a couple of monkey wrenches that needed to be added to the world as they were in progress. One was a plague or a pathogen. One was a disaster of some kind or a mutation of one or more of the beings. So to come up with ideas about what those kinds of monkey wrench mutations might look like. We did a lot of brainstorming exercises, so this is one contagion that we came up with. As you see, it's both ominous and overwhelming and yet very focused in the sense that it has so many complex parameters to it. Students came up with really amazing world projects, including some creatures that lived under the crust of the Moon and communicated through olfactory senses. So these are just a couple of experiments in alternate worlds, or what in some of the social sciences and anthropology we're calling world making or worldin. Katie Stewart, for example, is thinking of worldin as collective living or sensing out ways of a tuning differently to the world. And so these are part of the experiments. These are some of the experiments that I think we can imagine undertaking in places like the university.

Speaker6: [00:37:07] First of all, I'm not the weird Thoreau. Thoreau was the weird Thoreau. Secondly, I have neither Mike nor visuals. So if you can't hear me in the back? Shout out the word orca and I will immediately project even better. Can you hear me in the back? All right, I'm just going to briefly go through a few of the various things that I've been thinking about and in conversation with other writers about, based in part on the fact that as a writer, I've been working simultaneously on a couple of different novels and a different short stories and novellas, all of which takes a slightly different approach to this. I've actually been writing about climate change global warming since the 80s, which is why it's been a little frustrating that that it's only the later work where there seems to have been an urgency to to looking at over for four ways that it can kind of communicate with, with the problems that are occurring in the world that we've caused. I also feel like I exist in a context where even a lot of progressive fiction falls back on old, foundational ideas about the environment. And the way I put it is most of the science fiction writers that I know are happy to spend months basically researching physics, but not a lot of time, unlike animal behavior science. So they wind up with great science fiction concepts, but any time they have a non-human entity in their fiction is based on really old information that that speaks to something foundational about what we value.

Speaker6: [00:38:40] You can find some of the ideas I'm going to talk about right now in in kind of more expansive form in an essay called The Slow Apocalypse on Electric Lit. And there's another essay at The Guardian. There's also a video of a lecture I gave on storytelling and climate change and University of Houston. But some of the things I've been exploring. One of them is to redefine utopia versus dystopia. And part of this is the public discourse about fiction, because too often the word dystopia is used by a reviewer to basically cast aspersions on the legitimacy of what you're doing as to whether it's actually a balanced approach or a worst case scenario. And I think also in terms of our own survival, we have to redefine what utopia is because we have to push back hard against some of the elements that you mentioned which tell us utopia is a bunch of shiny plastic things that we need to endlessly buy. So my personal view as a novelist and a human being is that it's not necessary to go back to Neanderthal times, as some have suggested, but simply that we have acted too long and too forcefully in ways that work against the way the world works with a lot of hard tech that's actually incredibly stupid.

Speaker6: [00:39:53] So that's reflected in my work as well. Another thing that is beginning to differentiate writers of climate fiction into two groups is the group where they write post-apocalyptic novel that's based on a premise about climate change disaster, and you can hand it to a current climate change refugee, whether they're from this country or anywhere else. And they read the novel and they say, that sounds pretty nice. That's when you know that writers living in a bubble. And whereas that's perfectly OK, if you're writing about puppy dogs or something, I find it is becoming personally harder for me to be polite about those scenarios when I encounter them, because this subject is so serious. Another thing I would say is that ownership of the word climate change has been climate fiction has been quite interesting because at first the science fiction community rejected it, thinking that this is an unnecessary subset of science fiction. But in actual fact, climate fiction is not science fiction. It can be any kind of fiction because we are currently in the science fiction moment of climate change. That means more and more in contemporary literary novels. You are finding references to climate change. You are finding characters interacting in such a way that they are irrevocably changed by the climate change that's occurring around us.

Speaker6: [00:41:10] And so I find that an incredibly valuable moment because it creates a channels of communication that might not otherwise occur between two groups where there's sometimes a boundary. And it also is kind of like an expression of generosity in terms of saying this is not just one thing that one group controls or owns, which I find also personally onerous. You'll find that as well different people trying to one up to themselves as to whether they're better at this or communities. And that's very unhelpful. Going back to animal portrayals and other thing I've been trying very hard to do is to write from non-human perspectives in ways that are not experimental in fiction because there's a balance you have to have. If you write experimental fiction, you're going to have an audience of two or three hundred people or readers. And yet if you go too far onto the commercial side, you lose the essential essence of the strange thing you're trying to do. And so trying to. Find those narrative experiments where the experiment is largely invisible, there's something that the reader can be anchored by, but they can still be pulled into something that is very much non normative is the challenge that faces a lot of us is getting that balance right because of the fact that we do want our fiction to speak more widely than to just capture that experience.

Speaker6: [00:42:27] We do want there to be a receiving reader who may be in some way changed by it. Contamination is also a big thing that I personally been dealing with, because I think it's important to this discussion in the form of collapsing the distance between inside and outside in terms of the human body. Given what we know about microorganisms that exist within and on us and how there is always a transaction between our bodies in the world that we move through, and I feel like when this is made manifest in fiction, it can better make readers feel more grounded in the world and more attached to it. I think this is also something about how certain societies have become disconnected from the so-called natural world in the first place and have put too much of a distance between nature and culture. And then finally, the other thing I've been pursuing is how uncanny tropes can better convey climate change by using those tropes to do with haunting and events that project effects everywhere and nowhere to render human endeavors in a traditional sense, useless or antithetical to survival and applying that in a climate change scenario. So those are some of the areas that have been trying to explore in my fiction in a non didactic way. So they're just kind of organically infused with it.

Speaker3: [00:43:51] So I hope that this is a provocation, a springboard for much conversation and questions, and certainly want to open it to the floor first. Yes, please.

[00:44:04] Hi, Bourdillon. This question is actually for me. So I actually want to ask about your graphic novel.

Speaker4: [00:44:12] Well, first of all, everybody's presentation fascinating, but let's start there the things that make the character of humor. I couldn't help but look at the visual of also being a graphic novel format and think of how these traditional stories of superhero power kind of emerge from some some radiation exposure or some kind of something, you know, something that was considered abnormal but then allows

[00:44:43] Somebody to grow superhuman power drain. And I guess I would. I want to hear from you if that came up in the way

Speaker4: [00:44:51] You guys were developing that story and how well, specifically, it seems like responding to her super

[00:44:59] Healing power is actually. Yeah. What the Earth is

Speaker4: [00:45:07] Giving, right?

Speaker3: [00:45:09] Well, you keyed into something very fundamental and that was the topic of many, many, many, many, many hours of conversation, and the beginning of the graphic novel now begins, I didn't show you this particular plate. It begins with her experiment. She's an engineer, so she's experimenting with electricity, and she decides to quote, put the energy into the human right. So some of these conversations in science and technology are all about like, how do we get humans into these energy infrastructures? So she kind of does the inverse and literally injects herself with with electricity. Two of us in the collaborative had some pushback on that concept because it is such a trope and so many superhero novels. But that's that's what we ended up with. We agreed to that the original imaginary for we. We were tasked with coming up with a character that would walk through and experience. So Lynda was my character, and she ended up becoming central to the story and we didn't really have. We have a hawk and we have her ship, but those are the only other characters. It's really about her and my original imaginary of her, which is kind of this weird, dreamlike character who came to me somehow. Was that she was afflicted by electric light, and it caused it caused her essentially her skin to fill with water, and she would drown from the inside like she was drowning inside her own skin.

Speaker3: [00:46:38] That was the idea working with my collaborators. We went through a lot of different phases and stages. I mean, to me originally was an 11 year old girl who was put on the ship to try and escape electric light by her parents. I didn't know how she would end up, but her condition was different than what she ended up being. This is much more scientifically accurate in terms of the representation, and we've got lots of footnotes that backs that up and we try and bring that in. And I think rightly my collaborators and really pushed for the notion that at the end, she's not a victim and she doesn't end up suffering on the island alone somewhere, but is empowered by this particular affliction or power that she has like. It begins as an affliction. It ends as maybe not superpower, but a power of atonement. And so the story kind of ends with her throwing. She writes her story, puts it in a bottle and casts it out to sea so that others can come and manage and learn the powers that she embodies as how it ends.

Speaker3: [00:47:47] So but I appreciate that question, and as you can see, it was really a kind of a key one throughout. And I think one of the big lessons that I learned, you know, working on the graphic novel is that that it's really difficult, I think, for academics to move into that genre and to, you know, working with the artist was great, but we we didn't know how to kind of give good feedback. It took us a long time to learn that it took us a long time to learn how to work together creatively. It was much harder to edit a graphic novel in every way than it is to edit an essay, in my opinion. So it was it was challenging but exciting, and it'll be out soon. Ish, so. So maybe following up on that great lead question, one of the questions that I think resonated with all three of you was, you know, the question around creative antecedents, right? And the imagining of alternative worlds is certainly not new. It's been around for a long time, but as we have a growing recognition of of our anthropocentric moment is the imagining of alternative worlds creatively taking on different questions or different issues. How might it look different at this moment

Speaker6: [00:49:05] Than long ago? Well, I mean, it's interesting to me, for example, that that scientists back in the 17 and 18 hundreds used to deliver their findings in the form of of dream journeys that were basically pieces of fiction with their findings embedded in them or even in the form of poetry. And I, I find that kind of intermixing kind of interesting and something that I see in the impulse when I talked to science departments in finding new ways of storytelling for their findings, like new delivery systems. So in a sense, there's a way that that boundaries potentially being bridged from from the other side, even though it's not the other side, but but a different creative discipline. And I've even been asked to create fiction writing modules like that, that team of writers and scientists so they can both create fiction and nonfiction at the same time and kind of share each other's point of view. So I think that that impulse, I think is is new. The the nature of publishing is such that there's a weirdness in that post-apocalyptic fiction is hot right now in terms of sales, right? So that has two effects. First of all, a lot of it gets published regardless of whether it's because it's urgent to publish every piece of it or not. But then also because it's a commercial entity, a lot of very strange and interesting stuff has cover, so to speak, because it can be slotted into a category.

Speaker6: [00:50:32] So there's the weird aspect of the marketing protecting the strange in terms of a lot of readers seeing it. This the jury is still out, in my opinion, as to whether this what kind of effect this has. And even when I when I go out and speak about environmental issues, I wonder if the fact that the novels give me the opportunity to speak about those issues is more important than what the novels themselves have as an effect. But this is very cyclical. I mean, you had Ballard and a number of other writers in the 70s who were doing very dark, very deep stuff about climate change, basically and the environment and then that petered out. What you got instead is you've got a bunch of kind of nostalgic dystopias. So what I'm waiting for is the next wave of nostalgic dystopia, some of which have already occurred. The nostalgic dystopia is usually a white only future by someone who would be horrified if you pointed out to them because they're ostensibly liberal that they've created an all white future and it usually has some kind of nostalgia for SUVs and other things that can't possibly exist in a sustainable future, which again, is about the bubble. So when we say dystopia, we don't automatically mean non escapist, and it's something that really needs to be discussed and kind of mediated when we think about climate fiction.

Speaker5: [00:51:49] I have a little something to add to that. The epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving story in written history, and the story and part of the story involves Gilgamesh going to the cedar forests likely in Lebanon to slaughter the giant that protects the forest. So Gilgamesh himself is kind of a representative of civilization itself because it came from the Kingdom of City of Iraq, which was like one of the first, you know, civilizations in history. So he's a representative civilization itself, and he goes to to slaughter protector of nature. Essentially, the reason he sought to do that was for for his own glory, which is the glory of civilization. So I mean, it has meanings there, but part of it also includes actual information, important scientific information, actually, which is like so after you slaughtered the giant, he chops down the highest trees in the forest to build a huge ark book so you could transport the head of the giant, as well as a new gate for the kingdom, for the city of Earth. We're talking like huge boat, right? And the fact that the boat is made out of cedar isn't a coincidence, because within that is information that if you want a great boat or a great gate, even for your city that will survive the test of time, then cedarwood is the best way to use. And there's truth to that because there is actually a boat in Egypt, a silver ship that was buried under the right next to the pyramid, the Great Pyramid, and that is still intact today, has survived for five thousand years and is made entirely out of Lebanese cedar. So I would say that story since the beginning of time, especially the mythologies. Part of their purpose is the passing on of actual, important scientific information. So when people tell this to each other, they know drop down cedar forest, that's the best word you could use for a book. You know, Gilgamesh Easter, you know? Mm hmm. So I think it's like as old as time itself, and it's part of the purpose of telling stories, not just to entertain, you know?

Speaker3: [00:54:06] The other thing I love about that example is that there's history captured in the wood itself, right? Right in the wood itself. You have a history of the particular climatological events of the time when the wood itself was growing. Of course, right? We're kind of biotic life that it was exposed to the amount of sun that it was able to water, that it was able to absorb. So it's like it's like history is all the way down.

Speaker5: [00:54:29] Absolutely. And it is actually a story. It is a lesson. And it is about civilization versus nature. At the end of the day, because it ends with Gilgamesh poking his eyes out, going blind so civilization is unable to see anymore and wandering aimlessly like a barbarian. So that is what the story tells us, is that it will be the outcome of civilization if you abuse nature.

Speaker3: [00:54:52] So why did you choose to set your story at 18 twelve?

Speaker5: [00:54:58] Oh, you mean this? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well. It stemmed from from the structure for the graphic novel, I'm working on this for the graphic novel I. I wanted to kind of highlight that the struggle against, I guess, have to say a little bit about the story. So the story involves there is a network of satellites that orbit the planet that keep it and eternal daylight. And this is to power these factories on Earth that run twenty four seven on solar energy in order to export the goods to Mars. So most people still live on it. Of course, most of them are people of color. So the story involves two orphans who basically at some point set out to destroy the Solar System, the network of satellites. So I wanted to kind of. So these are the most unlikely characters that you would think would be able to succeed. You know, they're they're the Earthlings, they're orphans, they're children, so on. So like, all of the odds are against them. So for them to go out into space and be able to destroy this, this this massive manmade network of satellites basically seems like really unlikely. But I wanted to also highlight that they the struggle against the solar grid is actually a very old struggle. So I go back in time at certain points in the story. And then so there's a part when the the idea of the solar grid is still being suggested, and then there are people who are resisting that. And then I go back in time some more and then people are resisting this or that. And then so I found myself going back in time at several points. And then I had to end at a certain point in time. And then it seemed like the Luddite rebellion was I mean, I could have gone further back because again, it says oldest religion itself, right? Right. But I felt like the Luddite rebellion is a good point to highlight like that. The struggle is old. It starts with didn't start there, but I mean, that's a very important point in time where when the industrial revolution?

Speaker3: [00:56:57] Yeah. So I'm so I'm hearing that this is a origin story in some ways, right? And Jeff, I think you're suggesting that the imagining of alternative worlds very sick like you referenced the seventies, right, that there's a kind of market cycle to it, opportunities in the in the market at times. So let me ask then the question is there something about our current moment that creates new opportunities for art's making of alternative worlds? Or is that an exceptionalist fantasy that now we have a new set of challenges and creative opportunities in the

Speaker4: [00:57:38] Moment of the Anthropocene?

Speaker6: [00:57:41] Oh, I personally find that more and more people are reaching out to one another across disciplines. With regard to this, I get invited to a lot of conferences that bring musicians together with scientists and writers and whatnot. And so there seems to be a more and more collaborative element and less of a kind of hoarding of ideas and more of a sense of just how can we best express this moment in a way that's true and as positive as it can be at a moment when you know certain kinds of fiction, I feel are becoming extinct because of climate change, they become so frivolous, or they become so not of the moment that they're hard to read and other fictions are becoming more relevant, relevant and more seen. You know, one thing about, even like AMC's miniseries The Terror, is that maybe 20 years ago, if it had been made, it wouldn't have been seen as about colonialism and about climate change and our current situation. So I find that really interesting, too, is that there are these reclaimed books that come to the surface. You hear a lot more indigenous voices, which I think is really, really important. So I do think it is a unique moment again feared that it might pass us by. But um, but it is interesting.

Speaker3: [00:59:02] I mean, I think it's a symptom of your own modernity to always believe that we're living in epochal times. There's a certain conceit to that, and it's not hard to find evidence of that. If we just look at the news in a daily way that even to that, we see around questions of climate and sea level rise and toxicity and exposure. There's always another dramatic report about how this is occurring, and that's not to say that it's not, but I think it's important to also remember that there's a way in which that can be fetishized and to be cautious and moving forward through that to to kind of really interrogate that sort of exceptionalism. That said, I agree with Jeff that there's a lot of opportunities and part of those opportunities are in media and technology based. I mean, the truth of the matter is, is that we have much more access to really interesting media technologies that I can put on, you know, my personal laptop that I never could have done in 10 or 20 years. Though, so while working with Neil Ford, who's a hand artist who draws and, you know, does art in that way, I appreciate that level of artistry and creativity. At the same time, there's there's so much technology that makes it possible for even common academics to be able to do something and take up, take up new creative forms that would have been very difficult in the past. I will make a final note on that, though, too. This work does not count in terms of the register of the academy. You know, when I to be banal about it, you know, on my CV, if I've got a graphic novel, the process doesn't really care about that. Like that that does not accrue to my status as an academic person. So this work always happens in parallel to other quote unquote academic work that actually

Speaker4: [01:00:52] Counts in

Speaker3: [01:00:54] The university and in the academic world. And that's a shame and something that I think should change as well. Yeah, I think you can or cannot respond to any of this.

Speaker5: [01:01:04] No. Ok.

Speaker3: [01:01:05] Yeah. So so I want to ask, are there any questions erupting from the floor and light of some of this conversation? Yeah, I have. I have a question about, I guess, what

Speaker4: [01:01:18] I think about alternate world. I think about how close it is to new worlds and the danger in a lot of these discussions and the something that I see come up in a lot of environmental fiction and nonfiction of looking for a kind of utopia that is an uninhabited place that turns out to be inhabited. And how easy it is to slip into a narrative that's about escape and into the same colonial search for the new world as we've been in the whole time. So I guess I'm just deeply skeptical of white people world. And I just wonder how how you maybe asking all three of you, how you grapple with that in your work?

Speaker5: [01:02:06] Well, I mean, my story is particularly the protagonists are Ethiopian orphan and the North African kid who destroy a large manmade structure that was created a long, long time ago by white people growing up white people. And then, of course, it kind of destroys the marginally that Mars has on Earth. This story? And that is the imagining of white people are people who are not white. I mean, so it is also essentially as much as it's a story about the environment. It's a story about race as well. But I don't think you could detach either. It's kind of go hand in hand, almost right. So I mean, that's how I deal with it in this story.

Speaker3: [01:02:47] And I mean, to your question, and maybe that's why books like Nick Johnson's novel and her, I mean, her other works too are really important because she takes very, very seriously the politics of race and class that we would recognize in the present. But that's taking place in another world and another time. But the kind of the qualities of inequality that she finds in her world is a kind of caste system. The racist systems are not lost on any readers in a contemporary setting like the United States. It's all it's very apparent. And so I think that there are ways that you can create an alternate world like she has, but also surface the very real politics of our present actual world if if done well. And I think she did it very well. And I guess the Hugo Nebula people did too, because she got a lot of she's gotten a lot of recognition for that work. And I think it's important that part of what's important about that work is very explicit focus on racial and class dynamics in her world.

Speaker6: [01:03:50] I think it's a really, really important question and it's a question that goes back to the idea of what becomes visible and what doesn't, because even more than the effect of something that's positive, the visibility is something that's again portraying foundational ideas that are really flawed in this area. It's really something that is dangerous from my own part. I don't really write books with many white people in them, and I don't really want my novels to not look like the way the world works or looks. But Warren is set in the city of the future with really no white people at all because of the area it's in in part. And what's been kind of frustrating about that, even though this is explicit, it's not like it's a subtle undercurrent. The amount of fan art by people rendering the main character as white as opposed to a black woman is is just astounding. It gives me just a small taste of of what non-white creators go through a lot. I think this is also explicit in the language around the discovery of other planets by astronomers, because we get basically the language of Manifest Destiny without any kind of interrogation of it whatsoever. We're just going to go and colonize another planet without any any any idea of what we're actually talking about or that we're carrying forward these ideas.

Speaker6: [01:05:12] And that is a thread running through science fiction of the past and the present, even today of not understanding that you're carrying forward certain foundational ideas that are very political and very regressive. So I would just say that I try to interrogate my own texts. I listen to what people say about the texts. I, of course, correct. Based on those, I incorporate new ideas based on on what readers tell me about that those subjects to hopefully be more complex next time around. And I do think one advantage of social media is that more people are aware of of some of these concepts than you do see more awareness in the fiction. But we desperately still need more non-white voices. We need more indigenous voices. We need, you know, in science fiction, 15 years ago was was pretty white, and now it's it's not nearly as white, but the process is still ongoing. It's still a transitional period. And one thing I would like to add about that is that it's not just a matter of representation, it's a matter that the narratives actually change. You get more interesting stories often and you get stories that because they're not based on the same foundational stuff, a more original. And so it's enriching the entire genre kind of narrative potential in a way.

Speaker3: [01:06:33] This might be a good time, I think based on that wonderful question to ask about your creative process, what kind of processes do you go through to create

Speaker5: [01:06:44] These alternate worlds? Ok, I'll go first. My process, it's like my process. I remember how it started at first was I was thinking I was first thinking of doing a story based in like just now based in Egypt. And there was a neighborhood in Cairo popularly referred to as the garbage city. And this is where all of the city's trash ends up and the population that lives there recycled it. Old school stuff, they separate plastics and listen, and they put the plastics and machines that brought them back. So they do like, like really old school kind of recycling. And actually the recycling levels are comparable to European levels, but it's all done like old school style. So but they live in the waste they don't trash. It's not a very pleasant place to do it. So, so, so initially I was thinking, maybe I can have a story with two kids from this garbage city. And you know, they they see that what happened with the parents and their grandparents and they realize like, so nothing's going to change for us, no matter what we do, how we have to change the way things are dramatically. So my initial thinking that they would destroy the Usf1 hideout, which is a big dam in the south of Egypt on the Nile River.

Speaker5: [01:08:09] And and of course, by destroying it one, it would flood the entire country basically. And to it would it would bring back the agricultural glory, if you will, of all Egypt, because it's one dam keeps all of the fertile soil that comes from Ethiopia essentially and blocks it behind the dam. So since the dam's construction, the agricultural land has been shrinking on the banks of the Nile and desert desertification has increased. So that was my initial idea. But then like, I definitely get in a lot of trouble if I did this story. But for other reasons, I wanted it to be less specific to Egyptians, right? Because I wanted it to be applicable to everyone. I mean, the story, the core of the story is the same. Like, it's a industry versus nature kind of story, right? And so I was like, All right. So the Nile is the most important natural resource for this land in the region. What is the most important resource for the entire planet, The Sun? All right. So we need a structure that will utilize the Sun for industry. And then so basically that that's how the idea of all for me anyway.

Speaker3: [01:09:23] That's a hard question. Yeah, I think it's a hard question in the sense that I want to think about it across different projects. So if I had to break it down, I think one important thing is being with people and talking to people. And so becoming exposed to different ideas, different conversations. And this is a kind of anthropological ethnographic practice that has been part of my life for decades now. But it really is about listening carefully to what people say and how they react to respond to things in the world. So that's one of the gifts of being an anthropologist is that we get to go and. Talk to people and hear from them, and I think that's critically important. And then this sort of came up before. I'm a big fan of that kind of liminal in between wake and sleep state where I'm sure there's a name for it in terms of brain chemistry and psychiatry. And I'm sure Freud has something to say about it as well. But it's that kind of not really alert, not really conscious, but allowing your brain to kind of come into a nebulous space of possibility and speculative ness. I think that's a really cool, generative, dusky moment. And I think the other piece is just doing it. I mean, at some point you have to sit down at the piece of paper or at the computer or with your collaborators and do the work because it's a process. And all of the things we've been talking about take many hours and a lot of care. That's very real.

Speaker6: [01:10:55] There tends to be a long gestation period for me, and the advantage of that is that I usually know years in advance before I'm going to start something. And so if I need an expert opinion, so to speak on something or I need to do research, I do that years before I write the thing because I don't want the research to get in the way of me being able to see the piece of fiction I'm going to write and I don't want it to replace something just because I did the research. So hopefully it's organically kind of coming out of me in some way into the text by the time I sit down to write. And I do believe very firmly in conscious prompts for the subconscious. So about a year before I started to write Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, I had been telling my subconscious I want to write about Florida. I want to write about the wilderness of Florida somehow, and because I tend to reward my subconscious by writing down everything it gives me and using it. Eventually, it gave me annihilation. But then there too, it has to have some kind of personal link. So for me, that's a connection to the Florida wilderness because it's really the only place that I I think of as something that I know because I when I was growing up, we traveled a lot, so I didn't really have a place. So there's no detail in all three books of the natural world. That's second hand. All of it is firsthand experience from being in that landscape, which I think is really important.

Speaker6: [01:12:21] And then the environmental message comes out of that connection. But then there's also the overlay of history to that landscape. So it's not just existing in that moment, but it's also existing in different moments and phases, which is really important when you talk about things like, you know, a trail in Florida, which is also a trail that someone who's indigenous traveled through, you know, hundreds of years ago and things like that. And then the whole Spanish incursion and things like that, you have to kind of like even if you're not going to directly put that in your fiction, I feel like knowing that about the place is incredibly important to any scenes that you set there, that some kind of echo of that at least comes through. And then that, of course, is filtered through or comes out through the character's viewpoint. So, for example, the biologist and annihilation doesn't really care about human relationships. She just cares about the natural world, so to speak. And so that's what the focus is and what the tone and texture is. And the second book you have the director of this secret agency that's exploring this, this strange wilderness as the main character, and he doesn't care at all about that. He's much more part of the the so-called material world or the the instrumentality of the same old thing, so to speak. And so he wouldn't know the type of bird from whatever. So, so those are the challenges and in knowing what you know, but then making sure that it's it comes out organically through the character questions.

Speaker3: [01:13:49] Yes.

Speaker4: [01:13:51] Question mark In regards to the works of fiction,

[01:13:57] You mentioned the that of. Contraception. Just walk, and I just.

Speaker5: [01:14:11] So I mean, this this whole grid for me came to me as a graphic novel, mainly because I could see it and actually even I mean, there are like significant scenes that are completely silent, like there's not even that you're observing. It's not a sign of Gosnell. There's lots of words, but like there are some, some significant seeing, you know? So I mean, it just it just struck me as a very visual story. And visually challenging as well, because up until I mean, I, I never drawn anything kind of I know, quote unquote science fiction, although probably like hardcore science fiction fans would be like, Look at it, and it's all science fiction, because like, maybe there used to be to like, where are the spaceships or something? Or like, you know, crazy aliens or a some things pure later. But anyway, so the idea the challenge of drawing kind of some imaginary things, things that don't actually exist in the world was was part of a challenge that I wanted to also give myself a drawing line. And yeah, it just presented that sell itself that way. There are other things, you know, like I was. I was asked recently to contribute to this book Who will speak for America for its coming from Temple University press. And they said to be drawings, it could be writing, it could be comics can be anything you want. And I think they suspected it would likely be drawing because I'm an artist. But then what came out was text, textual and fiction. And for me, it seemed like a story that I didn't want to show anything really as much as I wanted to paint with words for it and allow other your figure more out for themselves. And I know, so it depends on the thing, I guess.

Speaker3: [01:15:58] I mean, I think the utopian imaginary that we had in mind with the graphic novel is that it would reach a wider, different audience than a typical academic chapter. That may be fantasy, but that was that was the idea. I do know that different, if they have access to it, different people might pick up that object than would pick up an academic volume. And so maybe there is real potential there. I think, especially when you have someone very talented who's doing the art and thinking of the story, there's incredible potential to get a different message out to different groups of people. And you know, frankly, I was, I think myself and the two people I was working with. We're kind of tired of writing words all the time, like we write a lot of words. And it was challenging to not have control over the art in the way that I might if I were able to do it myself. And it was an interesting process because I used to know how to draw, and then I became a word a word rearrange her and I've been a word, rearrange her since about age 20 or so and it becomes habit. Right? And so to me, it was an interesting process to both work with some words in the text and then the idea and the narrative, but to to cede control of the images to someone else was challenging but also exciting, and I certainly couldn't have done it myself.

Speaker3: [01:17:22] So it was a kind of a creative process. And I think, you know, in terms. And Jeff can say more about film, I'm sure, but something I realized last night at dinner, something I have never thought of before in my life. So that's always a fun thing, is that when you're writing a play or a movie, you are implicitly writing for an audience that will experience that work together. So when we're writing, if I'm writing a poem or a novel or an article, I can imagine that my reader is just sitting there in their office or in their bedroom reading it. But you can never really quite imagine that for a play or a film. And so it's a the genre itself is very, very different because the audience is fundamentally collective. It has to be. I mean, I guess you could perform a play for one, but that would be pretty weird. Right? So there's a there's a collective audience out there that we imagine to. That's always part of the process, too, I think,

Speaker6: [01:18:19] Yeah, I mean, two thoughts. The first about the movie is that the movie stripped out most of the environmental message, so it was kind of irrelevant. But that also kind of spurred me to the first time around. You'd never have any kind of control or input, but if if you can observe and understand the process, then you can't after. So that was one of the things that spurred me to have more control going forward. But I would say that that I do think about the difference between what should be fiction and what should be not. I have another series where I'm waiting for the right collaborator because I am the world's crappiest artist, crappiest actor and crappiest singer. So that's why I'm a writer. But but the right collaborator to do the sequel to this book that I wrote because the sequel has like 12 viewpoint characters, and that's just really difficult to do in fiction and the camera, so to speak, kind of ROVs. And that works. For a graphic novel or a film, and then part of the story is about seeing kind of the ecstatic and the mundane, so a character is walking down the street and they see the pheromones left by insects and they see the pesticide trails and they see all of that stuff. We can't it's not visible to us. And that expressed in fiction would be actually probably pretty, very experimental, whereas in an image, it might not be, it might be more accessible. Even this novel I wrote Bourne, which is set in this ruined city of the future and has a flying bear in it. It's much more accessible to someone who has watched anime or read a lot of comics because there's all kinds of explicable flying creatures in those things, whereas in fiction, it's not as much, though there's a greater burden to to make the words make the bear fly than to just make the image do it.

Speaker4: [01:20:01] So that's cool. Other questions? Yes. Yeah, I had a question for you having to do with it seemed to me that your model had to do with you in a way rethinking the object. And in other words, you're saying, and I think we're all in agreement with this, one of the sort of imperatives is to rethink our relation to objects. And the Luddites were doing that and. You were obviously linking this to our current in our current civilizations patterns of production, consumption of objects. And I wonder, I mean, if we were on the boat this morning, we were talking about sacred objects, right? These ancient Greek cults, like in Alexandria, where the statues weren't just statues of the divinity. They were, if only momentarily in divinity. So you could have divine statues, then who would marry? And there were infinite possibilities. Some of them were mechanized. But to get back to it, I wonder if the radical cultural change that you're thinking of might have to do with rethinking the nature of the object, an object that inevitably would have a certain kind of well, when you have maybe one of those divinity, but some kind of charge that the objects Spanish by the Luddites don't have. I mean, they are just stuff to produce, to use and to throw away in our current civilization. I guess the more stuff that you accumulate, then the better you are or the winner at the end of your life or what, you know, whatever it is. But it seems to me that you're suggesting we need to rethink about the thinking in ways not only the ways in which we relate to the object, but the cultural worlds of the objects. And maybe if the object has some other

Speaker5: [01:22:00] Kind of life, I think I think you're right. I mean, I'm sure I'm sure there were many mundane tools used, you know, throughout ancient Egypt. But what struck me and in my readings and going to museums and things like so, for example, jewelry, for example, so one of the very popular pendants was the eye of Horus. So as of course, it protected and right and that but but it ties directly to the myth of Horus, right, which is an important myth, mythical story that was shared amongst people. And part of the lessons of kind of the instruction manual of how to go about living, go about your life is kind of embedded in these stories, all these myths. And that was a huge, important part of their function. Right? And what made something a myth more than just another story, I would say, is that it it finds its influences in all aspects of life, right? So you find statues of Horus and you'd find the eye of Horus, which Horus lost in his battle when he was in fighting, so pulled the eye out. So now everyone wears the eye in honor of this fictional character that does not exist, right? So in a way, these objects, yeah, if you're saying that, have kind of meaning to them is likely something we are missing today. Unfortunately, the only the only methodology and in our current system of capitalism and copyright and whatnot is that these things find their way into onto clothes and whatever just by way of branding.

Speaker5: [01:23:47] So again, just for profit did become really become trademarks. It's not about the meaning or not really doesn't really mean anything to our super nature. Doesn't doesn't mean the same way. The same thing when you're wearing the amulet. You know what I'm saying? And then also, of course, all these stories that are being perpetuated, not really for any meaning behind the stories as much as their own because they're owned by companies and they want to make money. So it's everything has become cheapened, right? So in a way, I think there probably is some value. And if there were like less strict kind of inhibitions on online stories being taken and adapted to other art forms by other people, so, so kind of less restrictive copyright laws and things where sure someone gets an artist gets inspired by this and then you make something of it and then it has meaning, and then it's passed down in a different form. And also what makes the McSmith is it wasn't like one person's story that they kind of held on to. It has a life right for. So I mean, it ties into capitalism at the end of the day and copyright wanting to sell things. It's all part of the package.

Speaker3: [01:24:53] Do either of you want to add anything to that?

Speaker6: [01:24:55] We're just that we accept without question how whole ideologies and system of thought it seems every day and even the you know, even if if someone used something like Scrivener for for writing, they're imposing a system and someone else's thought patterns on their own creativity, you know, so I'm very careful about that, and I agree that that there are ways that copyright should be less restrictive in order to to kind of pursue a certain kind of vision so long as people can still make a living, even if it is, you know, in this kind of flawed system.

Speaker4: [01:25:28] I think it's very interesting. Trying to visualize, though, you're all taken great outside the box approach to trying to give shelter to the wall. In a certain sense, the graphic novel and hiding a message inside a relatively mainstream lesbian published science fiction, but I'm wondering if you see that way of pushing beyond a little room for improvement. If that is the only path or if that are more basic, trying to see how does the fact that people have a really profound way or something more or less work on the way acknowledge the fact?

Speaker6: [01:26:06] Well, I mean, first of all, it has to be non cynical. I mean, I wrote a book that I didn't even know if it was a novel. I didn't even know if I was going to send it to my agent. It just happened to be imbued with what I love and what's personal to me. It just happened to sell. I mean, there's another universe in which there's a haunted lighthouse dark cover on the book, and it's sold 100 copies and no one has ever heard of it. You know, so there was a lot of luck involved. It hit it. Probably the right moment, you know, you guard against also the fact that even though you know this creates opportunities, there's also the possibility that, you know, post-apocalyptic climate change fiction just becomes this commodified entity that entertains people, but has absolutely no agency whatsoever. So there's all this stuff that you think about and and you just try to keep zigging when people think you're going to zag. And I don't think you can really predict it. I think you just have to do what's personal to you with regard to these topics and what you're good at. I mean, if I was good at art, I'd be doing art instead of the writing. Maybe someone has a better answer than I do.

Speaker5: [01:27:09] I think it's great. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:27:13] Well, the role of one. Yeah, no. I think that's right. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think in response to the because one of our questions that we had was, why is it important to produce or create or think through alternate worlds? And then of course, the contrarian in me wants to say, like, can we even think through create produce alternate alternative worlds? Where are we such creatures of habit and conditioning that we can maybe imagine worlds that are slightly askance or slightly orthogonal to what we experience in a daily way? You know that the human mind has an incredible ability for conceit, and human beings are very anthropomorphic oriented towards their own heroism in terms of creativity. And so while I think it's there, I do also think that we need to question our abilities to really think outside the box or to really break through the envelope. That's that's a cynical response. But I think it's it's the flip side of the the true, the real authenticity and the real optimism that needs to be there too. But I think I want to push us humans to challenge ourselves even more to to wonder whether we are capable of coming up with alternative worlds because we seem to keep doing the same thing over and over, like there's a kind of a death drive here that seems to be reproducing itself. So that's where the challenge law is, I think is breaking through that.

Speaker5: [01:28:43] And actually, that's why I purposely created a solo dystopia. Yeah, I don't feel a utopia because to avoid latching on that to that idea of like, Oh, if we only just had solar power, everything will be great.

Speaker4: [01:28:56] Yeah, well, come down. I think it's true. Yeah, it could be worse.

Speaker5: [01:29:02] What if we use it this way? Oh, you know, and so this idea that because it's happened before, we always tend to be like, think that this particular thing is the solution? And then eventually it turns out all of a sudden the solution, we're screwed.

Speaker6: [01:29:16] Well, there's a there's a good example of that, too, with regard to solar panels, which is to say, proposals to do solar panels in the desert that basically will destroy everything underneath them and and ironically achieve some of the same things that environmentally that Trump's wall will create. So you have people ideologically opposed to one another, they were still in a way thinking in old systems. Exactly. And can't break free. One very conscious thing that I have done. I just wanted to mention, because you were talking about that, that was your question is the next novel is set about 10 seconds into the future. And I was thinking, how can I be more direct and deal with issues that might be didactic otherwise? And it's basically about a woman who's never really thought about environmental issues, who for various reasons goes down a rabbit hole of having to explore eco terrorism and things like that. And that's where a novel can be a real laboratory for exploration, because in the real world, you can't even talk about that stuff and stuff that used to be legal. Or at least you wouldn't, you know, be put into a black site for the rest of your life in terms of environmental activism is off the table, so the only place you can explore it is in, you know, for the most part, something that's a fictional laboratory of it.

Speaker5: [01:30:24] So and actually, to add to that, it's my understanding that the the batteries that store solar energy are made possible as a result of a mineral that is mined out of the Congo. And and of course, there's a, you know, environmental destruction in that. So it's like, all right, to reach this kind of environmental utopia with these machines. Let's destroy that environment over there. So it ties very closely to what we were talking about in class, right, which is oftentimes one people's idea of a utopia could very possibly be other people's idea of a dystopia and an energized us is what you are saying, which is like how dystopia is often means your your stories on balance, when in fact, the only way to write a balanced story is for it is the dystopia of truthful.

Speaker3: [01:31:10] Yeah, yeah. So I think we have time for one more question. One is the graphic novel coming out?

Speaker4: [01:31:15] Oh dear. Yeah, I

Speaker5: [01:31:18] Was hoping no one would ask me about that. Well, my dysfunctional crystal ball estimates mid-2019

Speaker3: [01:31:30] For a year.

Speaker4: [01:31:32] Oh dear. Yes.

Speaker3: [01:31:36] And your eco

Speaker6: [01:31:36] Terrorist? That's that's actually something where a movie. I'm going to finish it this summer. And there's a movie that's going to come from Netflix that I'm going to be very heavily involved with, because that's going to be a very sensitive kind of thing to get right. But the latest thing is a revised version of my writing book wonder book, which is fairly unusual in that it's also about general creativity, and it's in full color. And a lot of diagrams and illustrations replace text. But I mention it because what I added this time with the revised edition is about 30 pages that basically are environmental writing module, both for people who are fiction writers and people who are not who want to explore that way of storytelling in a way that's deeply connected to the landscape that they inhabit.

Speaker4: [01:32:22] So great.

Speaker3: [01:32:24] Well, thank you so much. I think there is a reception

Speaker2: [01:32:27] Is almost ready to go

[01:32:28] In the first round of applause. Thank you to our

Speaker2: [01:32:36] Panelists, thank you to our moderator. It was a terrific session, a great way to keep consulting.