Narrative features. How did the stories we tell shape how we think about the future, the present and the past?
What is speculation for? And how might we construct better narratives for a better future?
Narrative Futures is a podcast coming to you from Futures Thinking.
A research network housed in the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.
My name is Chelsea. I'm a doctoral researcher in the faculty of English here at the University of Oxford.
E.J. Swift joins us on this, the sixth episode of Narrative Futures to discuss climate fiction,
nested narratives for deep time speculation and how she negotiates the politics of form and content.
This podcast is interactive, following the interview,
you'll be treated to to writing prompts designed by novelist and creative writing tutor extraordinaire Louis Greenberg.
We invite you to share your response to these with us via email at Futures Thinking at torch dot o x, dot ac dot UK.
We'll share these on the blog where you'll also be able to find the full transcript of each episode with links to the books,
writers and ideas that we discuss as the world so radically changes.
We hope these conversations and ideas give you insight and inspiration to think about how else we might live and create collectively going forward.
E.J. Swift is the author of the climate fiction trilogy The Cyrus Project, featuring the novels.
Cyrus Katta Véro. And Tomorrow. Her short fiction has appeared in Interzone magazine and in anthologies from Salt Publishing,
Jurassic London, Newcomb Press and Solaris, and has been translated into Chinese and Polish.
Her short story, Saga's children were shortlisted for a B.A. ASFA award,
and the Spiders of Stockholm was long listed for the 2015 Sunday Times FFG Short Story Award.
Her latest novel, Paris Adrift, a speculative time travel tale,
is set in an apocalyptic City of lights and is another example of Swift's careful interweaving of politics and speculation in fiction.
What you're going to hear now is a short extract from Swift's novel Katta Vieira, the second in the Science Project trilogy.
This extract is an example of swift nested narrative style to produce deep time speculation.
Following this will launch into the interview.
I'm going to be a short extract from Carter or this particular extract is a radio story which is being broadcast to the city on the station about.
On a forgotten day, sometime between 200 and 300 years ago,
the musician who Liyana cut of that hour pulled her daughter's limp body from a
street flooded with the South Atlantic and carried her home through a hurricane.
The storms raged for three days. During that time early on, I sat in the attic of her house with her daughter and son to her.
On the first day, the South Atlantic plopped things from houses and boil them down the streets and strange floating processions.
On the second day, the wind took the roof or hoody on his house.
She did it to take the body of her child and it did not.
The child's turn blue and cold when the rain ceased and the sea fell flat and glimmered as though it had never stirred.
Never mind drowned souls in the hundreds Pityana captivated or burned.
Her daughter put the ashes in a tin and her guitar on her back.
Then came south, which was the only way to go. Cars and bikes have been swept away.
So she came on foot. She walked for a changing world.
But it did not matter to her because she had already changed. And the change was in the ashes on her back.
And it was not reversible. She walked through jungles that burned and cities that crumbled and slid.
One day she passed through starved, ghostly towns. The next she was ambushed by the warlords of water was.
She followed the rusting railway line south and no one stopped her. She said no words.
She sang no more songs. Those who saw her paws experienced a peculiar sensation.
Some said they saw their own deaths. Some snow angels, tiny shining ones, clustered about her back.
Others heard the voices of the unborn. Each time the lamb changed on account of it or stopped and felt the soil.
Each time she frowned and shook her head. No, not here.
No, not here. No, not here.
And so on, until she came to a valley with a cold running river and barren hills rising gold around at a bend in the river, Julianna stopped.
The riverbank was rough and muddy. Here, yes, here, she dug a hole with her hands a metre deep in it.
She buried the ashes of her little girl. She took out her guitar and she picked something sad and bittersweet on the strings, but she could not sing.
She scratched her daughter's name in the soil. She was ready to die. No.
A traveller passed through the valley, a trader or short soldier or an artist or a nurse, and asked who she was.
Viridiana had no words and could not answer the trader or the soldier or the artist or the nurse read the name of her daughter.
He looked at the valley and saw its potential. The river, the hills which encircled it.
He imagined trees and agriculture. He went on his way to helping others and bringing them back.
When he returns, mysterious woman was gone. Her guitar was on the riverbank, damp with the morning dew.
Her daughter's name was still there. Dug into the soil. And there it is today, lessness beneath the foundations of the city.
But if you look closely on a night with the stars in it, you can see it.
Or so they say. At 430 a.m. station Kotov that are broadcasting stories for children or old women who act like children.
The Alaskan is not listening, not creating only a little, maybe only with the periphery of her hearing.
She knows all the stories. It is absurd that they make her heart flutter.
Still. With her level of memory, she could probably quit the debate in.
This one is an old favourite of the city storytellers. This is the story told in the tango clubs, the romantic one told by guitarists and flautists.
This was the story the Alaskan heard first, but her favourites of the darker tales.
She likes the dark. That is where the interesting things dwell, the dark spaces and yawning gaps in time.
The Alaskan should have lived in the blackout years. They would have suited her well.
Instead, she is bed bound in a hot, airless attic in a crumbling old district of cattle that are in a country that is not her own.
Luckily, something with someone is always arriving in Canada.
And the Alaskan is usually the first to know. It's really, really beautiful.
Let's try to find something quickly that would work. So, no. So gorgeous.
I think it's really emblematic of the lyricism in your will, in your work.
So we first met in February, twenty nineteen in Oxford,
where you've been invited to contribute to a panel on feminist science fiction that I was chairing.
And I recall your reading of the White Fox in the red. And that was so beautiful.
The room full of eager undergraduates listening intently, the snow drifting gently outside the window.
And that was my first introduction to your work, which I have now since discovered varies quite widely across genres,
but sort of within the speculative, fantastic space.
And the white fox. And the red is a climate fiction short and so is the science project trilogy climate fiction.
But they engage with these kind of ecological concerns in very different ways.
And when you're plotting a story or novel, what kind of concerns of form do you take into consideration?
When I'm thinking about fiction? For me, it tends to come from either the character or concept or of a place or an idea of place.
And it's those things that really influence then what kind of form I'm going to take.
I think with this last projects trilogy. I'd always conceived just as the three books,
but I think what was quite important to me was the way the voices within across the novels widened as the perspective of the novels widened.
So in the first book, you've got very much a sort of star crossed lovers scenario.
And the two perspectives are limited to those of Adelaide and that crime on either side of the city.
The haves and the have not. When we moved on to Category two and Turmeric, the third novel, I introduced gradually more voices throughout those.
So they had a slightly different feel in terms of their structure and that kind of correlated with the perspective on the world widening.
So you saw these these these different nations and cultures as the trilogy expanded.
So I think it does tend to come from the character for me. I really love that.
And I think it's kind of part of what we're seeing in the kind of growing renaissance of science fiction, perhaps,
or of speculative fiction, where stories are focussed around characters rather than about worldbuilding.
But you build your world so perfectly into your characters experiences of it.
I think it's an incredible feat, given that this is your first trilogy. Thank you.
I mean, I yeah, it's it's it was very challenging to work out where to go from Cyrus, I think.
But it was really driven by the geography and the geopolitics of the world.
And I think once I had a sense of what that world looked like, there were so many different stories I could have told within that space.
It was almost trickier to decide how I would limit those stories, in a sense.
There's other ways, or I think I could have done stuff differently looking back,
and it's very much a classic trilogy in the way it expands and is set up and I think.
In another life, I might have done something different with the third book. But but there it is.
Yeah, I mean, let's talk a little bit about those geopolitics when you will sort of worldbuilding the SARS project through the,
I suppose, the multi vocality of the AM of the vocalising characters.
What kind of research did you did you do to build the various locales?
I have images of you trudging around Chile. Oh, I would have loved to go to South America.
I couldn't make it there. Mainly. Mainly due to funding.
That's one of the things certainly for the second novel is as it as you say, it's set in South America, moving from Patagonia,
where in the trilogy, the majority of civilisation in South America is located there across the belt of the Amazon,
which is now a desert up to the Panama Exchange point,
which is the kind of point between the powers of the north and south in this radically altered world.
One of the things I did at the time was read a huge amount of South American fiction as much as I could.
And really just to try and sort of soak up some of those amazing writers,
not consciously trying to emulate what they were doing, but just to sort of absorb something.
And I'd hope that might feed into the work in some ways.
And I remember being hugely influenced at the time by Angelica Gora Dishes Kalpa Imperium, which is these sort of nested stories.
Extraordinary work. Beautiful lyrical that in times this crazy flights of fancy as well.
And I think books like that sort of fed into that storytelling culture that I tried to imbue in category.
So you have the stories on the radio. I also did quite a lot of research for that book into the Nasca jihadists of which has so many theories.
But one of the theories is that they were part of a network for conservation and they were linked to the conservation of water.
And in this world, which is set three, 400 years from from our world,
those geoglyph have become a new kind of not so much religion, but sort of tenants of living.
Of which the first principle is the conservation of water.
So I was taking inspiration from, again, those geographical features of a RAICES so broadly for the trilogy.
I was looking at climate writers such as Mark Linus's Six Degrees, which was hugely influential.
There was a particular story in New Scientist about sort of Earth one hundred with this map that I remember looking at and thinking,
guess that's sort of how the world must look. And so I was working on climate science at the time.
Obviously, that has hugely moved on even in the last 10 years.
So it's interesting to consider if I was writing the trilogy now, how it might look different.
Based on the new knowledge that is publicly available. Yeah, absolutely.
I think climate fiction has been growing in popularity in recent years.
But there's also kind of the realities of climate change, as you say, in the last decade, have changed drastically.
So I think if I think about your own trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 21 40 and the three Californias trilogy of loopy novels,
Claire Vaye Watkins, gold, fame, citrus, et cetera. What do you think is is happening in that genre of space?
What you think is the intention?
I think there a zine, guys, given the looming climate disaster or or I suppose and or is there something I'm kind of more political going on?
I think if you're a writer grossing speculative fiction in at least the near future,
it feels to me that it's almost impossible to ignore climate breakdown.
I don't really see how you can write anything set sort of near to now and not acknowledge it in some way, even if it's very much in the background.
And it's not the sort of main thrust of your of your story and your narrative.
And so I'm not surprised that we're seeing it more thematically across literature,
both within speculative fiction, but that also what we might refer to as mainstream fiction.
One of the things I do find really interesting about all of these novels is
this There's often a tendency towards a sort of destructive narrative form.
And I think that's partly because the whole concept of climate change is so huge and it can feel so paralysing the immensity of scale,
both in terms of scope and in terms of time, that the sort of perhaps more fragmented narratives.
I'm thinking of novels like played by James Bradley, a novel like The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, An Average.
Australian author, which takes a completely different approach to time.
But there's something interesting going on there.
Normally, I think in some of these works, I think the deep time approach, particularly for someone like Alexis Wright,
who is kind of pushing back against the terra nullius sense of Australia.
And I think that I mean, some of that is is represented in the theory about indigenous future isms by someone like Grace Dylan, for example.
But then I think about your short story. I'm going I'm gonna go back to it because it just it struck me and it stuck with me, obviously, for years.
The white folks and the red. And that is a kind of human climate fiction kind of hybrid.
And the really small it's a small story, but a really, really powerful one.
Yeah. And I'm kind of wondering about about where that came from, I suppose, and how that feeds into the broader kind of grand narratives of unit.
But, you know, the world is under water and never one has had to move south.
You know, living on Antarctica, for example.
And yet there's, you know, in in your world building, there is the there is a smaller story, I suppose, character driven like so much of your work.
Yeah, I think with the the white folks in the red that was inspired by a just by photograph.
It was one of the wildlife photography, the year finalist, sorry, possibly even the winter that year.
And it's a photo of a red fox holding a dead white folks, which is the result of environmental change.
Essentially, the red foxes are moving further north. The Arctic Fox territory is shrinking.
And it's it's utterly tragic that these red foxes predate on on the white because they're smaller and.
And I think I've always had a huge love of the natural world, a love of animals in particular.
And more recently become more more interested in how we look at animal intelligence, how an animal intelligence differs from ours.
And new science is being scientific studies that are exploring this area.
I guess I'm interested in that sort of concept of animism and how we relate to other non-human beings.
I guess is as a sort of concept of how we look at these people in the world.
And I think the story was was perhaps tapping into that that area of interest.
So taking the perspective of not just the people living there,
but the those of the other beings that we shared world with and and thinking about how interconnected we are.
And I think, again, that's we're gaining more and more of an understanding of how our own future is inextricably connected with with these
other non-human beings that we can't separate out the two and how we think about how we address climate breakdown.
We can't look at climate breakdown without also looking at, you know, rewilding, for example.
Mm hmm. It's a really interesting kind of sectional representation of kind of what's happening in academic theory about
non-human animals or human animals can theorised by someone like Almatov Ghosh and the Great Derangement,
thinking about how when we when we think about climate change.
And these concerns, as you say, we cannot ignore questions of rewilding and, you know, creating alternative ecologies.
And I'm thinking a little bit now about characters that function as a sort of political or politically
engaged vehicles for for different kind of political narrative or alternative political narratives.
Your characters are all kind of politically engaged.
And I would argue that the Red Fox and the White are equally kind of representations of Pernot, perhaps political with a capital P.
But let's call it the small lowercase P political viewpoints.
And, you know, they are all forced into some kind of political engagement.
But as with the Red Fox and the White and with so many of your so many of the characters in the Cyrus trilogy,
and they tend to work outside of the systems they're in,
which seems to seems to be a kind of position that that I suppose my I as a reader, I'm assuming on your part as the author.
I guess I don't sort of think consciously about that. And it's really interesting that that's something you've picked up.
But I suppose in terms of characters, I am drawn to characters who are outsiders,
perhaps purely because that's instantly a source of friction there in terms of the sort of
plots that you're trying to create in the and the power dynamics that you're looking at.
Someone's operating outside the system. But I think I will say.
The way I see so speculative fiction in this sort of small people's school census is really is a sort of false experiment angle.
You know, the idea that fiction can sort of pose a blueprint, can ask questions,
can put forward possible futures or ideas, can ask questions of the reader.
I don't see fiction as being there to give answers. But I think you can, you know, in creating a sort of dissonance with our own world,
it can offer ideas that might otherwise seem inaccessible or impossible in some ways.
Perhaps that's why they're they're operating outside of recognisable systems.
Yes. I love that. You know, your characters, much like the form in which they're represented, are operating outside of a recognised system.
I'm thinking, I think a lot about what we what we do when we when we pretend that art is not political.
Small p political. And I've been thinking a fair bit about H.G. Wells and Henry James is argument in
1915 by Henry James said the literature is art and art is art for art's sake.
And H.G. Wells said, no, it has to be for something higher. Literature is like architecture.
What do you think about the implications or what do you think all the implications of treating a novel like a piece of political philosophy?
I think fiction is is both. And I think there's an opportunity for fiction to put forward ideas, for discussion, for consideration.
But I also think there's a danger in treating fiction is as pure philosophy.
You know, any any novel, once it's out there is open to the interpretation of the reader.
And that could be interpreted in so many different ways. I think it needs to be considered as a sort of open.
An open hand, in a sense, an open question rather than a dogma.
If that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Dialogic as opposed to prescriptive.
Exactly. And when you were writing dystopia, when you are writing dystopia,
which I suppose is kind of what what writers tend to do at the moment when they're thinking about the future,
no more of the 1970s feminist utopias writing a dystopia.
You're making kind particular formal choices, which we've discussed. But what what draws you to the dystopic or as opposed to the speculative?
I think it's quite interesting. I mean, thinking has changed brownness in a way.
I think at the time I was writing this saw as project dystopia did very much feel like the way to go.
It felt like the way to express these ideas.
I think there's a huge attraction in the idea of the beautiful Rooy and I think trying to be a close race on this.
That sort of sense of something that's broken and gone but retains its beauty
somehow is the sort of lone wanderer making their way through this world.
And in a sense, that's that's how Ramona is operating.
I think since writing that that trilogy, I want to move my work in a direction where it both recognises the stakes of climate breakdown.
And what we stand to lose was also presenting a future narrative that identifies where we could get to.
And that's certainly the approach I've taken in the novel that I'm looking to place at the moment, which is based on the Great Barrier Reef.
I think dystopia is weirdly comforting in some ways because it's got that focus on the lone survivor in that sense of individualism.
It doesn't really ask us to think collectively or find solutions.
And I think that's something that, for example, Kim Stanley Robinson's work very much does.
It looks well, you know, this is these terrible things are going to happen.
But how do we how do we work from there? What? How do we get back to to a better way of living?
Yeah. Robinson loves the committee. He does. Yeah.
I mean, I'm equally kind of more and more interested in the individual experiences of of larger thing.
I mean, it's the great question of, you know, of Western identity. How do we get back to collective living?
And I think that the pandemic is forcing us to think really seriously about that and to think about local living
and community living rather than look like slightly more individualise but global experience of of the world.
But I wanted to talk a little bit more about your latest published novel, Paris The Draught, which is also very political.
But a city novel, an ode to the City of Lights, Paris and a time travel novel.
And those are really, I mean, novels about Paris and time travel.
There's a kind of really important traditions in 20th and 21st century literature.
And you bring those those traditions together, really interestingly.
And it's kind of a departure from the Cyrus project and some of your short fiction, though, not all.
Yes. It's one of those novels that is a bit of an anomaly, I think, from the rest of my work.
It was a novel that I just felt I had to write. I think everyone has one of those.
You have to get Eco-System. I lived in Paris for about 18 months.
I worked the night shift in a bar for most of that.
There's something very surreal, slightly dissonant about working the opposite time of the day to everyone else.
In that sense,
it's kind of emerging into the day after a long shift and seeing everyone on their way to work and smelling fresh bread in the bakeries.
And I think I just saw something in that experience that could be linked to the speculative, you know,
what happens if you expand that experience further, if the world literally turns upside down, if you literally find yourself falling through time.
So I think it was pulling something out of that particular sort of atmosphere or feeling that led to the idea of introducing time travel.
It does pull together a lot of different strands. And I think it's one of those books that even works for readers or doesn't.
It's a bit of a Marmite line, I think. And looking forward, what kind of narratives about the future do you hope to see?
All right. You said you've you're currently looking to place a novel. Any any hints about what that's about, as in the novel?
I'm hoping to places set on the Great Barrier Reef. It's has three storylines.
A 19th century strand, a present day strand and a future strand.
And that's kind of exploring some of the ideas I've talked about so very much.
A climate breakdown novel focussing on the impact of time to down on the reef.
And I'm very interested in those different intelligences. I think in terms of what I'm reading about future, I love usual no Harare's work.
I find that incredibly just easy to. With very clear sighted and so many different ideas and then to think about.
I'm reading a lot of environmental works again, thinking about rewilding.
Izabella Trees non-fiction book Wilding about the project at the Knepper stage in Sussex
is it feels like a sort of blueprint for the future in terms of fiction and reading.
I was recently really inspired by reading This Is How You Lose the Time more by Amal Belmokhtar and Max Gladstone.
And that presents in a really beautiful, stylistic, illusory sort of way to possible pathways for humanity.
I think that type of fiction, it's it doesn't have that sort of it's not taking that grounded, realistic approach of Kim Stanley Robinson.
It's taking a much more evocative sort of way of conceptualising future.
I think both those approaches are fascinating and kind of picking up where we might be going.
I'm really interested in that idea about where we might be going as a as the sort of springboard from speculation.
Some of my researchers suggested to me that the word speculation through very many roundabout etymological links, comes from Thera's for theory.
And so we're theorising about what might come, which is about storytelling,
essentially, which goes back to these kind of smaller stories, the personal stories.
I mean, this is how people communicate their their experiences.
They're going as far back as the Decameron, which is a moment of shaping what comes after the black plague and what you know,
what the rest of European renaissance is going to look like when you think about about narrative.
I mean, how how am I suppose as a fairly leading question?
But how how do you see the role of narrative when we think about the future and what
kind of narratives of dominate for you as potentially influential or dangerous?
It's a question you both types of narratives. I think narrative is something we have to be very careful in how we're using.
I think it's hugely important that you remember me, remember the power of words of what a single word or single tweet or a single image can do.
I'm thinking most recent about, for example,
the kind of horrific narrative we're seeing around migrants arriving in the UK and acknowledging why and how those narratives are being used.
Why are we suddenly having stories about this on the front page of them to detract from everything else that is that is breaking down right now?
So I think as Reuters, we have a responsibility to think about.
How we're using narrative, what we're trying to say, how it could be.
Interpreted and co-opted. And at the same time, I think we we have a responsibility to be true to ourselves,
to talk about the things that we're passionate about and not to feel constrained as writers whilst also
taking the respect and the responsibility that we owe to the treatment of the subject we're addressing.
Narrative features. For those writers and speculators listening,
stay with us now for writing prompts and exercises designed to encourage putting pen to paper or hands to keyboard,
as well as a reflection on the writing process. This section is designed and presented by Lewyn Greenberg.
Our first exercise this time is a technical one. E.J. Swift says that in her practise, the characters or sitting in forms form.
In other words, we can shape and structure our writing. According to the content.
Let's play with this idea a little merging into with a few techniques we've tried in other episodes.
Start by writing a couple of paragraphs about a busy market square in a place you've never been to.
It might even be on a different planet. Described the sights and smells and sounds.
Describe the activity, include some dialogue. Pause now and write.
Suddenly, an unexpected event happens. A troupe of dancing elephants might come through and maybe a loud noise and attack.
There may be an apparition of some sort posed now.
And right. Now, make all the characters human, alien, animal disappear.
Pause. Right. And then come back. Describe the scene.
Is it silent and still or is something still moving? Have the tension and pace increased or decreased?
From whose perspective are we seeing the scene?
Is it first or second or third person, omniscient director who is fleeing the scene if there is no one there?
Reread passages from some of your favourite books and consider how the form matches content.
Like other writers in the series, E.J. Swift plays with temporal structure.
She bends time and lists narratives in an ecological context to experiment with this technique, outline a story with nested timelines.
Not just any story needs to have an animal as a central protagonist describing how they build their nest.
Consider the onion layers of the story.
You might go backwards or forwards in time or generation, going one layer deeper each time and then coming out again.
That's it for this episode of Narrative Futures. Thanks to E.J. Swift for the brilliant discussion.
And as always, Tillawi Greenberg for his thought provoking prompts in the next and penultimate episode.
I'll be chatting to Ken Loof about realism, alternative technologies and imagining a future we might not be around for.
Narrative features.