(2600 words)
As I write this (Sunday June 14th, June 2020) , I am sitting in a friend’s cabin, facing a porch with a tree-framed view of the lake, listening to birdsong and the atonal found melody of windchimes. I’ve been given a transient sliver of utopia.
Meanwhile, the world is burning metaphorically, literally, and necessarily.
When I am not finishing my read of A People’s Future Of The United States I have been trying to watch Angela Davis lectures with my minimal Internet. I began reading A People’s Future as part of Harmony Neal’s “Making The Future Irresistible” a class designed to get us thinking about what the future could look like once freed of biased expectations of who should be in the future, who should be centered, and who should shape it.
I am still wondering how to create an Irresistible Future.
(One thing about me is that if you ask me an interesting question, I will puzzle over it for years. A philosophy professor mentioned the Capability Approach once in 2009 or so and I’ve been puzzling over it since. My favorite people are those whose questions have lasted and lasted within me, teachers as well as fellow philosophy students and writers with unique visions. So thanks, Harmony for giving me something to puzzle on!)
The submission prompt for a People’s Future requested “...stories that explore new forms of freedom, love, and justice: narratives that release us from the chokehold of the history and mythology of the past … and writing that gives us new futures to believe in.” but most futures within the collection tend towards the dystopian. Several of the stories dreamed so close to now that Trump served as a looming presence or even a major character.
From a writerly perspective, it makes sense that most stories would utilize the intensity of dystopias to create conflict. But with four stories left to go, I feel as if the People’s Future is more a roadmap of how and why and when to fight, rather than a vision of a future worth fighting for.
It eats at me that even the writers and dreamers I admire don’t seem to know what should wait for us on the other side of the revolution.
***
Other things I have been working on during my sliver of utopia:
Making pancakes, grilling veggie burgers, and drinking tea;
Working on my desk-drawer portal fantasy novel that is, in part, an exploration of alternatives to cisheterocentric societies;
Reading up on police abolition, which I have only begun to full-hearted believe is possible within the last few weeks, despite writing police out of my stories as far back as I can remember;
Playing Animal Crossing in a loft bedroom as my friend plays Pokemon;
Sunbathing and napping;
And attending an Allied Media Project webinar titled Better Futures: Visioning In A Time of Crisis.
During Better Futures, the audience was invited to imagine what a police-free world would look like, feel like, taste like, smell like, sound like. Most of the answers were simple everyday things: the smell of grass, the taste of home cooking, the feel of sunlight, the sound of laughter. I could add aspects of my sliver of utopia to this list: the taste of pancakes, the smell of peppermint tea; the sound of windchimes and birdsong, the feel of sunlight as I nap on the deck…
Rather than asking for self-driving cars or automated kitchens or Luxury Gay Space Communism, we envisioned a future that was largely the best of what we already had. More of this, was the consensus: more of what we need, less of what harms us. More peace and freedom and safety, less surveillance and scarcity and violence. More of the slivers of perfection until they aren’t just slivers but the whole.
I had a similar revelation in the past. As someone who grew up poor, I thought I needed to work four times as hard, grind nonstop, and claw my way up the social ladder in order to someday become stable and valued. Maybe one day I’d have a lake cabin of my own.
I did a lot of damage beating myself up whenever I couldn’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. In therapy, I realized that I was a future-oriented child in part to escape the trauma of the Adverse Childhood Experiences that were around me. I didn’t want to be in the moment because the moment was often painful. But retreating to escapism so often weakened my ability to be present at all.
One way of bringing myself back to Now was to ask what I was looking forward to in that ideal future of financial stability. A full pantry? More time for hobbies? A home that was safe and enjoyable?
Next I would ask myself which of those small pleasures I could experience now. What would I do in my ideal world that I could also do now, regardless of income level? Were their parks I could visit whether I took the public transit or a rental car? Foods I could eat whether with with EBT or with a salary? Wasn’t the sun just as bright whether I was a billionaire or bankrupt? I was training myself to walk a balanced road between the far-sighted businessman and the near-sighted fisherman.
It may not be true that the best things in life are free—no, our world is so imbalanced by structural and environmental oppression that even fresh air, clean water, or a view of the stars can be unaffordable—but the important things in life should be free.
Sometimes I think that the core of my activism is to fight for those shoulds, what should be universal or what should be a given or what should be a true.
***
In Harmony’s class, I brought up the idea that the world of Pokemon is very close to an utopia. I know that idea sounds silly—nobody responded in class—but I can explain.
First, let’s go back to 1516, when Thomas More wrote a book about Utopia, an island title means “No place” as much as it means “Good place.” The humans can only ever extrapolate from experience, so Utopia’s laws and mores stemmed from Renaissance-era Catholic Britain as seen through More’s eyes. More rejected some elements, accepted others, and let even more slip into his perfect world unquestioned. Research reveals that slaves are a feature of the island of Utopia. They appear to be criminals who are occasionally freed, but it’s still telling that Mores’s ideal world contained subjugation.
More’s original Utopia colors our expectations of other possible future worlds.
Following More’s lead, many utopias involve societal changes so extreme that many readers will reject them as abhorrent. Rather than envisioning a nation where everyone has access to clean air and water, many utopia creators dream lands where all members must dress identically or share spouses or switch houses every three months in order to ensure equality. This leads to utopias that are perfect in the eye of the beholder, paradises with dark underbellies, someone’s heaven and someone else’s hell.
I have seen it written that every utopia is a dystopia when examined through the right lens. Perhaps this is why the Utopian Literature in English seamlessly lists both.
More’s utopia has also created the expectation that creative work about an ideal world should explicitly state that it is the story of a utopia, expounding on the ways in which the setting has improved on the world.
I want to argue that this view misses the many implicit utopian works out there. In an implicit utopia, characters live roughly peaceful lives that are nonetheless different from our own. Children’s media is more likely to take place in these implicit utopias: diversity and equality can be taken for granted, and the things we wish our children would believe are reflected and embedded in how the world works.
This is why I brought up Pokemon. There is something utopian about a world where you can send your ten-year-old out into the world to tame animals, without fearing their death or disappearance. There are villains, yes, the mafia and the police. But the children are some kind of being that can withstand fire and thunder. The villains are some kind of feckless and declawed, incapable of too much harm. The moms are often single but unjudged for it. They are never so wary of the presence of villains to let fear dictate their lives. Their vocabulary lacks words like “genocide,” “famine,” or “rape.” Their children return from a brush with evil with a scar on their cheek, otherwise unscathed.
(According to one of the games, humans in the Pokemon world share a common ancestor with Pokemon. If the humans of the world of Pokemon are closer to Pokemon than the homo sapiens we know, that explains their safe and happy recklessness.)
That leads me to the last expectation created by More’s utopia: there seems to be the expectation that all conflict must be solved by society. I disagree that this should be a goal for most ideal worlds, both the worlds I write and the futures I wish to see. Humans are not creatures without conflict. Attempting to eliminate conflict in a fictional world often requires mandatory medication, oppressive laws, invasive technologies, or other dystopian decisions.
Instead, why not start with the understanding that small conflicts are natural and necessary?
We can dream of a future where women and femmes are treated as full humans, yes. But even in that ideal future, there will be endless everyday conflicts between friends and family and the world and the self. What if we wrote more of those quotidian conflicts in speculative futures?
There is the possibility that these lower-stakes stories may be boring, but I think that indicates a lack of imagination on our part. Everyday conflict is common in literary and realistic fiction and it can be more popular in speculative work. High-concept settings with low-stakes conflicts are the perfect vehicle for positive possible futures.
Speculative fiction would also benefit from more stories where the speculative setting is not the source of the conflict. In addition to the story of a young Black boy exploring his talent for creating holograms in a world where holograms are banned and no one can be trusted, we must also be open to the story of the story of a young Black boy exploring his talent for creating holograms in a world that is more egalitarian but just as complex as our own.
Returning to Pokemon, the franchise contains many epic stories of fighting gods, traveling dimensions, and toppling evil organizations. Of course it does; heightened drama makes for good storytelling. But when thinking about writing speculative futures; I am less interested in its stories of saving, restoring, or defending the broken parts of its world than I am interested in its core story of self-actualization. This core story is that Ash is passionate about a competitive sport and seeks to improve and win major titles. A protagonist’s dedication to a competitive pastime can drive a story regardless of the level of utopianism of the setting society, just as tea is tea regardless of your financial stability.
I believe that the everyday utopianism is also one of the draws of my other escapist hobby, Animal Crossing. The game’s objectives are as vague as our own human goals: make friends, make things, grow things, be happy. The addictiveness of the game may not translate into a thrilling story, but it is still worth unpack what implicit rules this ideal society runs on: that capitalism can be softened, that there is always enough to go around (and that there are always more islands to pillage), and that deepening friendships is one of the most important things in life.
I do think that whatever privilege is required to develop a deserted island into a commune of friends or chase your dreams as a private zookeeper should be acknowledged in these everyday work. It doesn’t need to take the form of an infodump explaining how and when world hunger was defeated in the Kanto region, but the protagonist or audience needs a deep enough understanding of the world to know if the story covers a usual experience or an exclusive one. Unless we’re intentional about it, what doesn’t exist in a fictional world can come across as what is ignored, and vice versa. We need to know enough to erase suspicions of the underbelly that we have been trained to suspect.
Pokemon, Animal Crossing, and many other implicit utopias do develop their worlds in part by creating societies of individuals who are just so kind to each other that major tragedies simply don’t happen. It’s a kind of handwave that glosses over the reality of human nature.
However, acknowledging that handwave can serve as a writing prompt: how would you behave in a calm world like those? Especially if you are a queer person or a person of color—wouldn’t you still have conflicts to address, however enjoyable or small? Is there anything you still fear? Baggage you may bring? Or do you find peace too boring to pursue?
Looking at the worlds of childlike franchise with an eye towards worldbuilding has inspired me to deconstruct and reconstruct them with stronger internal consistency. It leads me to imagine ways in which we could build something real, even if that's a neighborhood of tiny houses for a chosen family or the field trip for Black kids to learn about animal conservation.
Circling back to A People’s Future Of The United States, one of the most optimistic stories in the collection is No Algorithms In The World by Hugh Howey. The core conflict of this story is a disagreement between a father and a son on the role technology should play in human lives. The father is a businessman who thinks everyone should work and looks down on those who don’t. But because of universal basic income, most people don’t need to work—including his son. This post-scarcity future world, with its GoDegas offering free food on every corner, is a believable possible future in which members must still work to find meaning, love, and fulfillment.
The story surprised me with its quietude and normalcy. After reading about armed Black people avoiding surveillance, queer folks altering their bodies for acceptance, and queer Brown couples on the run; here was this quietly optimistic story with a white-reading protagonist in straightest couple I’d seen so far.
I crave more quiet stories like this but with queer and Black and Brown and otherwise marginalized protagonists. I want our happiness to be a given, for our conflicts to be as aspirational as wanting to be the very best at a sport rather than needing to be recognized as a person by the state. Sometimes I want a break from the trauma the world casts upon me, at least in fiction, at least in the future, at least in my imagination. I don’t want the domestic, quotidian, and everyday to be a privilege beyond people like me.
And yet, I feel as if it’s a losing battle to want everyday speculative fiction. Most audiences prefer life and death battles, Ragnaroks and Infinity Wars. I watch superhero movies too, yes, and I do appreciate when folks like me get to save the world. But I balance that with “healing” slice-of-life anime like Flying Witch or Mokke that encourage me to slow down and marvel and be grateful. I want more Black girls to be healing, to heal, to experience the smallest kinds of magic. I shouldn’t have to have to save the world to be interesting. I want my people to turn into a dragonfly to cause mischief or travel to the stars to sing to roses and for the audience to be on the edge of their seat just the same.
I am still wondering how to create an Irresistible Future. But maybe tomorrow, I will return to the deck to sun myself. I will nap and dream of more of this, all kinds of more for me as well as everyone who wants it: more pancakes, birdsong, peppermint tea, air and light and trees and home and…