Kyogle Readers and Writers Festival was wonderful fun, and Byron Book Room with Donna M Cameron. But the best of all was the Bellingen Library talk, with Donna, about writing the future. It was pitched as “a wild conversation about hope in this rapid cusp of change. It was full of interesting takes on the importance of imagination in making the future, and I’m only just now digesting it all.
If you haven’t read “The Rewilding” is a hard-to-put-down thriller, adventure story, nuanced exploration of activism, a delve into values and what is truly valuable. I won’t give too much away for fear of spoilers, but if you are thinking about what makes a life full of meaning and hope in this “cusp of change”, it’s a novel that will stay with you.
There are so many layers to writing a novel, but the most important of them, I think, is radical empathy. Novel writing requires that you to really live inside another person’s reality, and the fact that that other person is entirely imagined doesn’t mean you get to control them. Characters respond to the situations you put them in in their own way. If you try to make them puppets delivering a sermon, it’s almost as if they deliberately jack up and refuse to play the part. Stand there with arms folded waiting for you to get out of the way.
You get a little bit of control over the situation you put them in, but again if you make it unrealistic, your characters look at you as if to say “What do you expect me to do with this?” Writing the future means writing a future that feels real, that is extrapolated from the present in a way that rings true. No wild jumps or magic solutions or heroes to the rescue, no ancient prophesies or alien interventions. In these times, it means putting characters in some pretty dire situations. So where is the hopepunk?
What we both found is that our characters found a way. The research about “hope” defines two kinds: “passive hope”, which is close your eyes and cross your fingers, wishful thinking, and “active hope”, which is what ecologist David Orr: defined as “a verb with its sleeves rolled up”. And this is what emerged from Donna and my discussions – we’ve both written novels about hope as a verb, with its sleeves rolled up. She defines “The Rewilding” as hopepunk, but if we’re putting genre labels on them, I think “470” sits closer to solarpunk.
Bill Mollison has a famous permaculture saying too, about permaculture as “protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor”. If I put Bill Mollison and David Orr together, what I get is that rolling up your sleeves and getting on with hope is all very well, but unless it is cleverly designed, there’s an awful lot of wasted effort, and we’ve run out of time to waste effort. Design is work of the imagination, and solarpunk is design on that kind of scale.
If you’ve read (or listened to) “470“, I’d love to hear what you think.
