Narrative futures. 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 Haith, I'm a doctoral researcher in the faculty of English here at the University of Oxford.
This podcast was recorded entirely during lockdown under the working from home conditions that that entails.
It's also an interactive podcast.
Each episode features an interview followed by two prompts or writing exercises designed by novelist and creative writing tutor Louis Greenberg.
We invite you to share your responses to these with us via email at Fut.
Thinking at Torch Dot X Dicy 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's 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.
In this first episode, I chat to Lauren Bugis about subjective reading,
community action and how storytelling goes some way to challenging capital structures.
Lauren Beukes is the multi award winning author of five novels, including The Shining Girls, Sioux City and After Land.
In the last decade, she has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the University of Johannesburg PRISE.
The Kitchen's Red Tentacle. The August Alef Prise Arty Thriller of the Year.
And the prestigious Mikoto Award for Women in the Creative Arts from South Africa's Department of Arts and Culture.
Because his work has been translated into 24 languages and I work in other media, including writing, comics, television and journalism,
have under awards such as the best LGBTI film at the Atlanta Black Film Festival and a spot in the New York Times bestseller lists.
Her third novel, The Shining Girls,
is currently in development as a major TV series starring Elisabeth Moss and her fifth and most recent novel, After Land, published in 2020.
Asks what would happen if a pandemic wiped out ninety nine point nine percent of the male population?
Biggs is not prescient, of course, but she pays careful and critical attention to the world and is deeply invested in social justice movements.
What follows now is an extract from Zoo City. Her second novel, following, which will launch straight into the interview.
Enjoy. In Zoo City, it's impolite to ask.
Morning light. The cell phone colour of the mind dumb seeps across Johannesburg, skyline and seers through my window.
My own personal bat signal or a reminder that I really need to get curtains shielding my eyes.
Morning has broken and there is no picking up the pieces. I yank back the sheets and peel out of bed.
Then why does it so much as star with only as callused feet sticking out from under the duvet like knots of driftwood?
Feed like that, they tell a story. They say he walked all the way from Kinshasa with his mongoose strapped to his chest.
The mongoose in question is curled up like a furry comment on my laptop.
The glow of the LCD throbbing under his nose like he doesn't know my computer is out of bounds.
Let's just say I'm precious about my work. Let's just say it's not entirely legal.
I take hold of the laptop, but I decide and gently tilt it over the edge of my desk at 30 degrees.
The mongoose starts sliding down the front of the laptop. He waits to the start, tikki tavi claws scrabbling for purchase.
As he starts to fall, he can talk to air a man, just land feetfirst hunching his stripy shoulders, he hisses at me, teeth bared his back.
The mothers realises he has urgent flights to attend to.
Leaving the Mungo's to scrawl that its flag, a duck under one of the loops of rope hanging from the ceiling.
The closest I can get to providing authentic Amazon jungle vines and a pad over the rotten linoleum to the cupboard.
Calling it a cupboard is a tad optimistic, like calling this dank room with its precariously canted floor and intermittent plumbing.
An apartment is optimistic.
The cupboard is not much more than an open box with a piece of fabric pinned across it to keep the dust off my clothes and Sloss of course.
As I pull back, the gouty sunflower friend sluffed blinks up at me sleepily from his roost like a misshapen fur coat between the wire hangers.
He's not good at mornings. There's a massive reak that clings to his fur and his claws.
But it's earthy and clean compared to the choke of stewing garbage and black mould flooding up the stairwell.
Elision Heights was condemned years ago.
Are each person to pull out of vintage Navy dress with a white collar matched up with jeans and slops and finish off
with a lime green scarf over the little dreadlock twist that conveniently hide the mangled wreckage of my left ear?
Let's call it race. Kelly, does Sailor Moon. This is not so much a comment on my style as a comment on my budget.
I was always more of an outrageously expensive indie boutique kind of girl.
But that was F.L. former life. Come on, buddy.
I said, Asla, do want to keep the clients waiting. Sluffed gives a shops sneeze of disapproval and extends his long downy arms.
Clambers onto my back. Fussing and shifting before he finally settles.
I used to get impatient, but this has become an old routine for the pair of us.
It's because I haven't had my caffeine fix yet that it takes a little while for the repetitive screeching sound to penetrate.
The Mungo's is pulling at the front door with a single minded devotion.
I oblige, shunting back the double deadbolt and clicking open the padlock, which is engraved with magic,
supposedly designed to keep out those with a shabby foot slipping through locked doors.
At the first crack, amongst his nudges up to my ankles and trots down the passage towards the communalist tray,
it's easy to find it's the smelliest place in the building. You should really get a cat flap.
Then why is Weigert lost, propped up on one elbow,
squinting at me from under the shade of his fingers because the glare bouncing off Punti tower has shifted across to his side of the bed.
Why I say propping the door up with my foot for the mongooses imminent return.
You moving in? Is that an invitation? Don't get comfortable, is all I'm saying.
But is that all you're saying? And don't get smart either.
Don't worry, Sherry, none. Guy, your bed is far too love for you to get comfortable.
Ben was stretches lazily revealing the map worth of scars over his shoulders.
The plastic Plastiki burned skin that runs down his throat in his chest.
He only ever calls me my love in Mangala, which makes it easier to disregard.
Lauren, I love those opening lines of those opening pages of Zoo City,
the moment where you evoke the mind domes of Johannesburg and the light shining off Ponti Tower.
And I think one of the most beautiful things about Zoo City and the kind of play with genre that
that novel does is this sort of quality of existential proximity that the world of the novel is,
as we know it, recognisable, but not quite.
And that's the first kind of the first moments of the animals of mongoose and sloth and the human interaction with them.
And I wanted to kind of talk about what your impetus is to write worlds that are, shall we say, skewed.
I think it's like a distorting mirror that we can use to see things more clearly.
Mm hmm. Yeah. I can take this slight shift in reality.
So it's still recognisable. And and it still resonates.
But just putting a weird twist on things allows me to talk about big issues in a way that hopefully feels
fresh and interesting and can engage people in a way that is a straight crime novel or strait's kind of,
you know, social novel wouldn't necessarily. Absolutely.
I think there's a trend towards kind of using dystopian elements or fantasy elements in what are
otherwise kind of critical realist texts to think through kind of socio political problems.
And your novels do that really brilliantly. Thank you. Johannesburg is so carefully described in ZEW City as Cape Town in Moxey Land,
Chicago and Shining Girls, Detroit and Broken Monsters, and then at the end of often land Miami.
And you do extraordinarily careful research for all of your novels, I think really capturing much of the essence of the cities in which they are set.
But what is it about those cities that are particularly evocative for you?
I think. I mean, Cape Town's obviously where I've lived for the last 20 years,
although I grew up in Johannesburg, so that's why I'm kind of myself and was reflected in Cape Town.
But I think Johannesburg is kind of my. The city of my heart.
If I had an animal, it would be Johannesburg and Detroit and Chicago felt very familiar in that way.
That very kind of vital alive, but also just.
Desperate in so many ways and crime ridden and corruption saturated and suffocated and
really it allowed me to kind of play with these themes that I'm really interested in,
in which is intersectionality and oppression across race and gender and sexuality and class of hos and.
Both Chicago and Detroit are kind of shadow cities of Johannesburg for me in my writing and Hillbrow in particular in Detroit,
because Detroit is seen as this very deeply broken place. And but actually, when I was there, there was so much vitality.
The arts scene was exploding.
And I think there is definitely a friction which occurs, which obviously J.G. Ballard talks about a lot between arts and.
Very dark times or desperation or brokenness.
And a lot of really interesting autists come out of that friction. So I think that's what kind of spoke to me about Detroit with Miami.
It just felt like somewhere. That I haven't seen a lot of in a really interesting way.
I had thought about setting the kind of denominate in New York, but I've seen you so many times and it's really boring,
even though there are aspects to New York which are very real and strange and interesting
and gritty and much more texture of the city that we don't see depicted a lot.
But I just I just couldn't do it. I just didn't want to write about New York.
And I felt like New Yorkers should write about that kind of, you know, sub aspect in a more interesting way.
For me, it was Miami just seemed like an electric place. But also this really interesting place, again, with crime and corruption,
but also this vitality and this kind of brightness and this very dark shadow self,
but also a lot of kind of mixed race politics and vibrancy and just just a very kind of alive, vital city.
It really appeals me. And it causes great art scene there with Miami Art Basel.
And yeah, I can never resist. Your dad seemed. Yeah, absolutely.
I completely identify with that sense of Johannesburg as this kind of this hot city and the vibrancy of the place.
You can never really get away from it. And that's one of the reasons I So Loves the City was one of the first novels that Johannesburg featured.
And for me, I'm alongside. Welcome to our Hillbrow. I want to compare an obvious one as other Slavitt, his novels.
I want to talk a little bit about the engagement with horror and goal that a lot of your novels do and also, of course, your graphic novel work.
I'm thinking particularly about broken months as an awful land with regards to a kind of horror and go.
But these often reference art and film. And I was thinking about speculation,
what you've just said now about the dark times evoking really interesting art and thinking about how things might otherwise be,
which I think is a huge kind of part of the work that you do,
articulating the way things might otherwise be, kind of asking always, what if I wanted to ask you,
what do you think each of these forms sort of art, literature and film bring to the table politically in their asking of what if?
I was talking to my 11 year old daughter about this the other day,
and it's it's not just opposable thumbs or our kind of overactive, deeply anxious brains that make us separate from other animals.
I think we're the because because some other animals have four forms of language.
But as far as I know, we're the only storytelling.
And an odd is a kind of a story because it's an interaction between what's happening in you and what you're seeing.
And it's you're kind of creating meaning. So all of these things allow us to create meaning.
And we live in a deeply cruel and senseless and meaningless world.
We're just terrible things happen all the time outside of global pandemics and, you know,
Black Lives Matter protest marches and the way that's being ruthlessly suppressed and people
being killed in South Africa and gender based violence or you're in America by the police.
And it's just I think it gives us a light. It gives us a light in the darkness.
It gives us a way of imagining another world, of engaging with another world, of finding some meaning for ourselves.
And that's not necessarily a global meaning.
I think that's why arts and literature and film is so very interesting, because it's how it's such a subjective process.
It's how we receive it. It's how we bring it into ourselves and make that meaning inside ourselves.
Which is why I often talk about. How books are a conversation between the reader and the books.
And it's not a conversation between the reader and the author, because once St John's world, it actually has nothing to do with me anymore.
It's entirely the resonances which happen inside your own head when you're reading it.
And I think that's what makes it so magical. Yeah, that that sense of magic and the kind of co creation, lots of narrative suggests.
Write about that and talk about that idea. And it's kind of it's interesting when people label authors like yourself,
like Margaret Atwood does, as prophets or somehow prescient of the contemporary period.
Right. And, you know, as you say, your book goes out to the world.
And then there's a moment and after land where coal is thinking about violence in America and violence in South Africa and people commenting on,
well, how can you live in Johannesburg? And she said, how can you live here? Referring to America?
And there's a line in her black kids get shot in America. And then and I'm reading that while Black Lives Matter is happening,
and while the protests against the awful murder of George Floyd are taking place and and my
engagement with a novel that you wrote in the last year is so charged by my experience of,
you know, of witnessing these these atrocities, obviously online.
I mean, how do you respond when people talk about this kind of profit aspect of being a writer who responds so vividly and so carefully to,
as you say,
problems of gender based violence in South Africa, police violence in in the states and patriarchy and hierarchical power structures generally?
I think. I mean, obviously, I'm not a prophet. I do wish I did patented some stuff in Moxey land.
But it's just it's looking at society. It's really just being kind of very sensitive to what is happening in our current moment, because,
of course, police killings and shooting black kids in America has been going on for years.
So it's not it's not prophetic for me to say that.
It's it's you know, that was when I started writing this book five years ago, that that was absolutely what was happening already.
And it's just being aware of that. It's kind of like tugging on a thread and watching how things unravel and then weaving in and something else.
So, you know, it's these self-evident truths of contemporary life. Absolutely.
You tap into it so well. Yeah. And I think as a writer or an artist or creative, you are very, very sensitive and attuned to those things.
And I think in my daily life, it's something which is really important to me. And of course, it's going to leak through in my writing.
And I think, you know, I've spoken about this before, about having grown up under the apartheid state in South Africa and having been so privileged
and having grown up with in this utopia for white people with such a terrible cost,
with, you know, assassination hit squads and torture units and people being disappeared and going into exile and.
Just the most horrifying acts. It's really made me socially aware and and I really want to kind of put that through and I want to play out those
things in my novels and and really kind of use them as a way of examining that and trying to imagine something else.
And, of course, you know,
as I've also spoken about with The Shining Girls and my own personal experience with a young woman I knew who was murdered by her boyfriend.
At least in fiction, you can have justice. And that's not the way it works in the real world.
That's really interesting that you talk about having justice or creating a sense of justice.
I suppose the reader will will experience that, particularly at the at the end of off the land and the the idea that you're
kind of working from a place of having of having experienced to an atrocious,
as you say, like utopian utopia, kind of in the same senses, you know, Stalin ism was a kind of utopia there.
And I think that that invocation of of of justice in a dystopian world as a utopian impulses, Frederick Jamieson theorise it,
I think is is quite profound and quite there is something about it for the kind of contemporary moment
of literature that sort of critical realist styles seem to seem to be drawn to seem to evoke really,
really interestingly. Is there anything that you are kind of looking at or reading or thinking about that you think is particularly
important right now with regards to this kind of thinking through alternative justices or justice,
through fiction? And how else we might imagine the present, but also the future?
I found actually listen to the audio book this couple of years ago when I was when I was
writing after land and doing research on society's legal pots and what does happen in crisis.
And Sabeg consultant's book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which really kind of explores.
How so? Very often in times of crisis, people actually rally and they come together and yes, sometimes there is looting,
but there is also community action and people starting soup kitchens and people creating housing and actually creating their own solutions.
And I'm not a libertarian and I'm not saying we should we don't need government.
I think we need a strong, enforced, democratically elected government that is not corrupted by capitalism.
But with with, you know, like a lot of kind of ways to restrict corporations and proper taxation and all the rest of it.
But I do feel like there's a lot to be said for communities rising.
And it's been so inspiring to see what's been happening in Cape Town through, you know, honestly, just the beginning days of Korona,
because I think it is going to get a lot worse with the Community Action Network,
that of formed especially in Cape Town, where like white communities.
Well, majority white communities and kind of the nice suburbs.
So Cape Town is still segregated across geographical lines because of the way the apartheid
government really ripped apart communities and physically removed people and shunted them out.
So like the Cape Flats, which is this kind of very barren and dusty marshland.
But what's been so interesting is to see people in the suburbs really rallying to try and help people in the townships,
which are typically poverty stricken.
People are living in shacks and create ways of those communities kind of working together and Twyning up with the community.
So the place I loved him was both his twinned with Swahili Chai, which is a neighbourhood of Kyly two, which is one of our biggest townships,
and seeing what the community needs,
like creating like electricity vouchers or having fundraisers to buy people food or sandwiches and that kind of thing.
And I just I wish we'd had that before. I wish we'd had that kind of community engagement before.
And that's why I think the Solnit's book is so very relevant and so interesting,
because we are capable of reaching out and we are capable of great compassion and that empathy.
And major corporations in South Africa have donated a couple of billion. I think as I was up before.
And why weren't you paying your taxes before and why weren't we able to come to this level of compassion and engagement before?
Why did we need a crisis for this to happen? I absolutely agree, that's kind of the sense that we were in crisis before this.
The status quo in South Africa is one of perpetual almost crisis sort of living on the edge all the time.
And, you know, very often bubbles over with, you know, instances of gender based violence, responses to that.
I'm thinking here also of, you know, the Marikana massacre.
And these these moments were where the press responds, where, yeah, you've got you've got major responses from across the.
The very socially and class divided society of South Africa.
And yet that is that is something that needs to be addressed perpetually.
Yes. Absolutely. And it's just ongoing.
And I think that's I think that's why we have been able to adapt to a crisis, because suddenly it feels urgent.
And and it's one thing that we're fighting. And I think that's why apartheid's activism was really interesting,
because you had a clear enemy and the enemy was the apartheid government and this racist, oppressive regime.
But if you look at inequality in South Africa and of course, we're one of the highest in the world,
the Gini coefficient here, I believe, is the highest, although I've also heard that said about Brazil.
And how do you what's the enemy there? It's capitalism. But of course, we all, like, profit from capitalism.
And, you know, it's a system which we're all deeply, deeply and literally invested in.
And I don't know. I don't know how to change that.
And I think that's why the response to Covered 19 has been so interesting, because we suddenly have a clear enemy.
Is the enemy. Here's how to deal with it. It's not gender based violence. It's it's not these all these problems which have a deep societal.
Rot and roots that you can't fix by throwing money at it.
You can't, like, donate a couple of billion and then be like, cool, we like, you know, build some field hospitals.
It's I don't know how to fix that kind of systemic stuff. And I think it's out after we've come so near to it.
And I think the so the construction of the world and off the land is a really interesting avocation of how that systemic kind of
power and how those systemic inequalities are so comfortable and how and how hard they are to work against and to restructure.
So the world without man of the world run by women. And you've said before, you know, you said that only three years after 2020.
So 2023 and the choice to sustain the hierarchies and patriarchal structures isn't explicit and quite politically charged one.
And I think that that really that also that invokes that that kind of sense that it's it's so hard to
work against these systems because so many people benefit from them acknowledging those privileges.
But do you want to talk? Talk us through a little bit about the kind of the sense of a world run by women and the
the the proximity to to the world that we know that you that you describe in off the land?
Absolutely. I think there's a line in the book, which is that the patriarchy is very comfortable.
Pair of shoes. You can just slip them on. And it was I was interested in like not having any kind of a far future where
the men have died out and it's been this woman led society for centuries.
I want to again parallel reality.
It was really interesting talking to people when I was designing the book and thinking about, like what the world would look like.
And even someone who is incredibly feminist, who's a leading scholar on gender based violence in South Africa was like,
oh, I wonder what we'll do with the stadiums. And I said, well, maybe the women's teams would actually get to play.
And this idea of like what being a woman is and of course, a big communal gardens. And that's what's also been really interesting about this.
Community action networks in Cape Town is that the majority woman led and woman volunteers and woman involvement.
So, yes, of course, it's going to be that. But also women are people. And it seems like quite a radical idea.
I always switch that around and be like feminism is the radical idea that men are people, too, and we expect you to act like it.
We're just as capable of being corrupt, of being power hungry, of being losers, of being violent.
But we're capable of atrocity just as easily. This kind of motherhood, GM is like that can also be justify terrible things.
You know, speaking as a mom who would probably kill someone if they hurt my kid.
Yeah. So. So it's just kind of exploring this idea of like kind of female fantasy in the system and how actually it will amandine tomorrow,
which I hope does not happen for the record. That's.
We wouldn't we would struggle to, like, overthrow the existing systems.
Yeah, and I know I Harman, but he said it might have been maybe an arsehole, Glenn.
Octavia Butler, but somebody said something about how feudalism seemed like, yeah, it's the Gwen Gwen.
And maybe you like a place, I quote. But like how feudalism seemed like it would always be around and impossible to overthrow.
But I just don't. I don't. And I know people say this in my capitalism that maybe we can imagine a way to overthrow it.
I just don't know what that would look like and how. Well, I do know what that would look like.
You know, more certainly more socialism, universal basic income. And I just don't know how we would get people to give up power to make that happen.
Yeah. Your novels deal really well with this kind of the sense of shifting power and shifting world structures.
So I think that that kind of that storytelling goes some way to kind of reimagine what what would be necessary.
Right. And off to Landers is a particularly interesting one.
It's it's really you know, it's deeply troubling that major shifts are usually caused by wars or plagues.
You know, the feminism movement comes out of women working in factories, you know, in during the Second World War.
Obviously, that's that's kind of abrogated in white feminist narratives.
Obviously, feminism, matriarchal societies were prevalent and dominance across the African continent in that period.
And I'm sure the same is true of other societies there.
My context is, of course, Europe and Africa. And I think that there's yeah,
there's there's something really interesting in the kind of the the the push that I think is occurring at the moment in social justice movements
towards how do we think about what the world off to this pandemic will look like and how do we how do we work together to reimagine that?
Because it is a it is a mode of storytelling. We have to tell us selves a new story about the future.
Absolutely. Definitely. And of course,
the problem is that some people are telling themselves another story and pushing us further towards fascism and the far right and authoritarianism.
You know, there's a strong history of woman being pushed back into kind of more traditionally feminine
roles of having to give up school and having to stay home and clean house in times of plague.
And I think we saw that most recently during the Ebola outbreak where so I think
says I don't have easy access with something I think was in the Atlantic,
something like 70 percent of women who gave up their jobs to go back home and look after the
home and to feed their families and tend to the dying and the dead never went back to work.
And some girls never went back to school. And that's the other imagining memory frighten.
And I think maybe we need to have to imagine brighter and hotter. And then also act on this and to try and put things into my.
But again, you know, our current system of government and democracy,
it really feels like we don't have individual voices except on Twitter where we can link maybe, you know, shame some racist.
I just don't know. I just don't know how to. I don't know how to bring about that change.
And and of course, every civil rights movement has always had a hard pushback from the authoritarian rights historically.
So that's also kind of a huge fear. And I'm worried about us losing women's rights and I'm worried about us tipping like Hoder and fascism.
And I'm not really worried about people acting out of fear.
And maybe that's where this kind of storytelling is for this kind of imagining a better future or imagining a different future from where we are now.
It's come at fear because I think fear is very insular and I think fear shuts you down and you're just so closed.
And what we need is more imagination to open up. That's really beautiful, Lauren.
It's so hard to work through the kind of the fear and the paralysing quality of this.
And to keep working for it. I mean that I think that's one of the things that I most admire about your work,
that you push back against the paralysis that that things like gender based violence
in South Africa produce and the paralysis of of these kinds of capitalist systems,
because it can feel can feel that way. But, you know, paralysis is a cop out.
I don't know. I don't know how useful writing books actually is as as kind of a motive action.
It's the thing I can do. Yeah. Yeah. And I honestly feel like art is the only thing we can hold onto right now.
Narrative feature. 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 reflection on the writing process. The section is designed and presented by Louis Greenberg.
Louis is an editor, writing tutor and author. Born and bred in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Apart from his own genre, confused novels and short stories, he's co-written five horror novels and a handful of stories as SL Grey.
Collaborating with Sara Lotz, a time bookseller.
He's been working as a freelance editor and writing tutor for over 10 years.
He currently teaches creative writing and drama writing courses for the University of Oxford's Continuing Education Department.
Over the eight episodes of Narrative Futures, I'll be presenting a series of writing prompts and exercises linked to the interviews.
We hope they'll help inspire you to create and make you feel connected in these isolated times.
What is the point? Darren Buker says, I don't know how useful writing books is as a mode of action.
I'd like to start off with that question that many writers face at least 20 times a day.
What is the point? Why bother? Some writers like Buke is in.
Many of the writers in the series find fuel in addressing social issues and reimagining futures.
Some writers want to entertain. Some writers want to express themselves.
You can often find a blend of various motivations. Whatever the reason you do it, writing is hard.
It's an awkwardly slow process in a fast world. It's a lot of hard work and a lot of self-doubt for very little reward or acknowledgement.
Your rewards are most often self generated a brief sense of satisfaction or contentment.
You might argue that the publishing industry thrives on keeping creators insecure, disconnected and disempowered.
My opinion is that the slow depth of writing creates empathy, art, creative, transcendent communication,
storytelling meaning making with the ideas are challenging and subversive or comforting.
Entertainment or both is profoundly important, especially in times like these.
That's my opinion. What's yours? What brings you to your notebook or your desk?
When there are so many easier things to do? What brings you to this segment of this podcast?
Why do you want to write? It's not essential to know the answer to this question, but it can help on those more difficult days.
It can also go some way to giving our work a central theme or identity as a first exercise.
Write a note to your future self or your past self, or an imagined or real writer who is struggling with motivation.
List the reasons why you write why you bother. Keep this note.
We'd love to see all any of your exercises. You'd like to share.
So please email them to fut. thinking at torch dot o x dot ac dot UK and we'll post them on the blog.
We have second prompt.
I'd like to pick up on Lauren Beukes, whose idea of a world without men and off to land and turn them into a technical exercise.
Here's a scene from a book you've read on a film you've watched recently on from something you've written yourself.
The characters should include men and women now reimagine it with men.
You could approach this in various ways.
You could write a brief synopsis of a longer work outlining how the characters and scenario have changed without men.
You could write a passage of dialogue and action, changing the male characters to women.
You might be erratic up the pages of the script, removing or changing the men.
Feel free not to pause the recording, write the piece and then come back.
You might find it beneficial to do the exercises with the discussion in mind.
Consider how you approach the task. What work did you choose?
Why did the male characters disappear altogether or were they transformed if they disappeared?
What, if anything, filled the spaces they left? What does this new world look like?
Is it better? Worse? The same?
Buker says the patriarchy is a comfortable pair of shoes and that women are people too, just as capable of being losers, corrupt or violent as men.
Consider your vision. Do you think it's achievable? Has your writing been useful?
And that concludes episode one of Narrative Futures.
If you have any comments or would like to submit work to be featured on our blog, please e-mail us at fut.
Thinking at torch dot o x dot ac dot UK.
You can also follow us on Twitter at Think Fut. Now, your host on this podcast is Chelsea Hayes and you can tweet me at Chelsy Underscore Haith.
And Louis Greenberg is also on Twitter at the Greenberg. Thanks to Loren Vehicles for joining us on this episode.
Next week, I'll be speaking to Mohie Machiko about affer Futurism and who South Africa's first black superhero really is.