Category: From the SFRA EC

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Librarians of a Vampire: Fighting Against Hegel’s Dialectic Narrative of Colonialism and Slavery

Eric Stribling

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“I had a vision”

Chinelo Onwualu’s dystopian flash fiction, “When We Call a Place Home,” opens with a vision of ominous ships coming towards a utopian homestead in West Africa. The three ships “sailed upon a sea of blood and left fire and terror in their wake.” The main protector of the homestead, the vampire Nesiret, is reminded of a similar episode in the distant past. Perhaps Nesiret remembers back to the mid-fifteenth century when Portuguese ships began raiding West Africa’s shores for slaves? Millions of Africans would die and tens of millions would be enslaved and sent to the Americas, providing labor for colonial European powers and later the American republic. While the growing transatlantic slave trade bothered a few Europeans, popular opinion condoned and even celebrated the trade in human beings. Philosophers, scientists, and theologians would build rationales, philosophical systems, and stories to justify this moral evil. As Nesiret struggles with how to communicate such atrocities, she tells her daughter, “‘Greed and ambition rarely coexist with reason, child.’”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lord-Bondsman allegory is one such story, a powerful philosophical narrative that provided a moral justification of slavery.  Later philosophers would need to fight back against this story, and they used various methods: telling a contradictory narrative, undermining its racist conclusion by showing Hegel’s indebtedness to Black minds and bodies, and imagining a new interpretation for Hegel’s own story.  These later philosophers all used the power of narrative themselves to fight back against the underlying ideas of Hegel’s narrative. 

“Will you come with me to the library? I fear its classification systems these days confound me.”

Is it a coincidence that Plato, one of the fathers of Western philosophy, started out as a playwright? I think not. Renowned translator Benjamin Jowett remarked, “we lose the better half of Plato when we regard his Dialogues merely as literary compositions” (Dyer 166). All of Plato’s Dialogues have characters engaged in conversation. Yes, the stories explore abstract ideas, such as love, wisdom, or art, but we remember the characters. These characters have interests and personalities. Socrates was haughty but noble. Cephalus is old, wise, and kind. The Sophists were rash, cantankerous, and daft. These characters bickered with one another. They fought. They fell in love. When Plato sought to explain the nature of reality itself (his Theory of Forms), he told a story. He described a group of people shackled in chains inside a deep cave. They have never seen the sun; instead, they have spent their entire lives watching shadows on a blank cave wall. What the people observe as real things are nothing more than the silhouettes of objects passing in front of a fire that sits behind them. Plato argued through narrative that observed reality is nothing more than inaccurate perceptions of real, ideal objects—a philosophy that would dominate the Western worldview for over a millennium. 

For thousands of years, religious leaders, philosophers, and scientists have reinforced abstract ideas through fiction, through story. The Gautama Siddhartha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Confucius use narratives, stories, and parables to explain the right way to live. Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions presents an argument for his theological worldview through a recounting of his own life. Many of the major moves in philosophy are cemented in narrative. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the foundational figures in existential philosophy, wrote only fictional novels. Camus similarly did not write philosophy, but he explored absurdity (the search for meaning in an irrational universe) through his novels. Kafka explored morality by writing about it under strange hypothetical circumstances—like if one were to wake up as an insect. Isaac Asimov explored humanity in “The Bicentennial Man” by telling the story of a robot who believed himself to be human. Einstein used the image of a passenger on a train to explore the nature of light. The list of fiction writers who argued philosophy or philosophers who argued through fiction is legion: Dante Alighieri, Ibn Tufail, John Bunyan, Mary Shelley, Voltaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ayn Rand are but a sampling. Kendall Haven, a neuroscience researcher explains, “Every human brain is wired to make sense of the world through [story]” (Haven).

The way we think about thinking, the way we understand understanding—philosophy is extremely pervasive and no less so in speculative fiction. The morning Nesiret learns of the oncoming ship, she heads for the library and finds that others shared her inclination. Often great philosophers and impactful philosophical schools emerge during moments of great political, moral, or ecological turmoil to help make sense of the age. And in an age of scientific advancement and political revolutions, Hegel rose as one such figure. 

“The minds that had once conceived of sexism, colonialism, and slavery”

The democratization of knowledge that hit Europe due to the Gutenberg press led to a series of social disruptions and scientific discoveries, as knowledge generation could occur outside the Medieval institutions capable of manually recopying texts (monasteries and universities). Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus, Leibniz, Newton, and many others had a discernible influence on the philosophy of the Renaissance (Hofer). The power of Reason became a ubiquitous concept in European philosophy. The revolutions in the United States and France had shocked the world. In essence, the Enlightenment ideals of natural human rights, individual freedoms, and popular sovereignty espoused by seventeenth-century philosophers Grotus, Hobbes, and especially Locke came to fruition in the American revolution, and a few years later, Rousseau’s writings had the same effect in France. While Hegel’s own Germany was a prime example of the horrible societal effects of despotism, there was a palpable change in the zeitgeist. (Marcuse 30–35)

Geist (Spirit = God = Mind) in Hegel’s philosophy is reminiscent of divine providence, similar to how St. John considers God to be the divine Logos. Hegel envisions a future utopia drawn forth by the forward motion of the power of Reason upon human society. (At the same time within the field of economics, Adam Smith’s invisible hand envisions a comparable teleological world-force.) There is a push and pull, a positive-ness and a negative-ness that moves the universe forward towards a final culminating unity in Geist. There is a similarity between Hegel’s concept of Geist and the oft-quoted moral universe of Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (King, qtd. in Smith). Geist is the end goal of all things, culminating in freedom and reason for all. 

Arguably Hegel’s most famous writing is a narrative from within his Phenomenology of Spirit: The Lord-Bondsman allegory (a.k.a. his Master–Slave dialectic), an archetypical description of Geist at work in human relationships (or nations or races). In the allegory, two men come face to face. They each begin to recognize that the other has a living, self-sufficient consciousness, similar to their own experience of consciousness. Both men perceive the other’s life as a threat to their own sense of self, their own freedom, and a fight to the death ensues. Eventually one man wins and subjugates the other. He becomes the Master (who is free) and forces his Slave (a mere Thing) to care for all his needs. However, in doing so, the Master becomes lazy and complacent, while the Slave becomes creative and skillful. Eventually the power dynamic is reversed, and the Slave achieves liberation through his subjugation. In the end, both must recognize the other as self-conscious, free, and equal—the push and pull of Geist.

This idea would influence the emergent field of psychology and the ideas of Marx (the proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie), but it would also be used as a strong justification for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. One of Hegel’s notes shows his line of thinking: “This subjugation of the slave’s egotism forms the beginning of true human freedom… To become free, to acquire the capacity for self-control, all nations must therefore undergo the severe discipline of subjection to a master… Slavery and tyranny are, therefore, in the history of nations a necessary stage and hence relatively justified”. (Hegel, qtd. in Moellendorf 253) For Hegel, American slaves were losers in the fight for self-consciousness, and their subjugation was justified.  Slavery was a necessary step on the path towards self-consciousness.  The slaves would eventually emancipate themselves through servitude, but until that future time, Hegel considered these people as mere Things. 

When Nesiret imagines the fall of the Old World, she envisions hierarchies between people, oppression of vulnerable people, in essence a life-and-death struggle ending in subjugation and exploitation. Perhaps she thought back to Hegel’s allegory?

“The storytellers went first”

The fight against Hegel’s story begins fifty years after the publication of Phenomenology of Spirit with Frederick Douglass. At the time that Douglass was writing his autobiography, there were Hegelian societies active in America who used the Hegelian narrative to justify slavery. (Kohn 497) In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass inverts the Hegelian narrative by recounting an actual fight between a master and a slave: himself and Edward Covey. 

After a series of mistakes, Douglass was sent to Covey, who was known as a harsh man, known for breaking slaves. Douglass’s first task was to break stubborn oxen, about which he wrote, “I now saw, in my situation, several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken—such is life”. (Douglass ch. 15) Finally, after six months and on the verge of suicide, Douglass fled into nearby woods, where he had a profound experience where freedom became more important to him than life. “The Douglass who emerged from the woods was the antithesis of everything that slave society had trained him to be: a docile, obedient, ignorant, faithful slave”. (Kohn 511) The next time Covey came at him with a whip, Douglass decided to fight back, and the pair fought ferociously for two hours, after which Covey never punished him again. In stark opposition to the Hegelian narrative, Douglass had not achieved freedom through obeisance and hard work, but through fighting back while a slave.

“Next came the librarians”

Susan Buck-Morss in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History similarly fights against Hegel’s allegory through narrative, by telling the story of the Haitian revolution. In 1791, only a few years after the American and French revolutions, Toussaint Louverture led a slave uprising against the French empire, leading to the foundation of the free state of Haiti, governed by ex-slaves. While most of the Haitian revolutionaries were illiterate, they appear to have been influenced by the same concepts (liberté, égalité, fraternité) popularized through the news and global ripple effects of the two previous revolutions. Indeed, at the siege of La Crête à Pierrot, the eventually victorious Haitians sang La Marseillaise at the French army, leading one soldier to remark to his superior, “Wherever we sang it we came to set the people free… Can you tell me, Major, what have we come here for?” (Newsinger)

The impact on imaginations around the world was undeniable, and numerous academics understand the Haitian revolution as one of the most significant events in world history. (Joseph) Despite Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic about a life and death struggle between men that ends in slavery, Hegel never references the event. Buck-Morss writes the book as “a mystery story”, (3) where she uncovers the obvious influences of the Haitian revolution on Hegel’s philosophy and then uncovers why he censures all references in his writings. (One major reason was that Napoleon was ransacking Jena, his university’s town, at the time he was finishing up Phenomenology of Spirit.) Buck-Morss argues that Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic is in fact a direct parallel of the contemporaneous Haitian revolution. She specifically attacks the dissonance that existed in Hegel’s Enlightenment thought, specifically the ethnocentric universal freedom in Hegel that coexisted with an acceptance of slavery.

“Is there another way?”

Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks also fights back against the oppressiveness of Hegel’s philosophy through narrative. The book is written as an auto-theory, or highly philosophical autobiography. Fanon recounts story after story that highlight how colonialism has forced Black minds and bodies to adhere to White and European ways of thinking and doing: “There is nothing more exasperating than to be asked: ‘How long have you been in France? You speak French so well.’ … Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black man express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on the white world” (Fanon 23). He argues that the colonial idea of modernization is no more than ethnocentrism, and that the imposition of a colonizer’s culture on other people groups causes a negative psychological effect on the people in those colonized groups. Fanon describes colonialization as a double process of subjugation, both external (economic) and internal (psychological). Fanon both critiques and extends Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic. He argues that the final state of recognition between the two men risks subjugating Black minds again to a synthesis modeled on White, European ways of thought. Rejecting Hegel’s conclusion to the story, he applies the allegory to the struggle of Black colonized people against White colonizers: the fight for cultural identity is a life-and-death struggle, where colonized people must completely break with Whiteness.

“Nesiret’s heart was finally at rest”

The ending of Onwualu’s narrative leaves the reader in suspense, not knowing the outcome; however, there is hope. “She and her kind had spent centuries teaching humanity new ways to live with the world, and with each other.” Her great-granddaughter Nya argues that reason would be able to convince the arriving ships to engage in peaceful trade rather than exploitation. Could this be Nesiret’s lesson? Perhaps Douglass, Buck-Morss, and Fanon offer a reasoned approach towards Hegel’s philosophy of colonialism and slavery. If so, one could certainly imagine a strange circle in the story of Hegel’s story. If Hegel’s allegory can be imagined as a negative push, then the narrative critiques might just be the positive pull that leads even Hegel into a reasonable Geist.

WORKS CITED

Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Lit2Go ed., 1855, https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/45/my-bondage-and-my-freedom/1469/chapter-15-covey-the-negro-breaker/.

Dyer, Louis. “Plato as a Playwright.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 12, 1901, p. 165. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.2307/310427.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1st ed., new Ed, Grove Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 1952.

Haven, Kendall. Your Brain on Story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGrf0LGn6Y4. mediaX Seminar: The Science Storytelling & the Power of Participation, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

Hofer, Kristin R. “Manutius, Aldus.” Late Medieval Age of Crisis and Renewal, 1300-1500 : A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Clayton J. Drees, Greenwood Publishing, 2000, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3000577.

Joseph, Celucien L. “The Haitian Turn”: An Appraisal of Recent Literary and Historiographical Works on the Haitian Revolution. 2012, p. 20.

Kohn, Margaret. “Frederick Douglass’s Master-Slave Dialectic.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 67, no. 2, May 2005, pp. 497–514. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2005.00326.x.

Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Ark Paperbacks, 1941.

Moellendorf, Darrel. “Racism and Rationality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.” History of Political Thought, vol. 13, no. 2, Summer 1992, pp. 243–55.

Newsinger, John. “Liberty and Equality in Haiti.” Socialist Review, Feb. 2006. socialistreview.org.uk, http://socialistreview.org.uk/303/liberty-and-equality-haiti.

Onwualu, Chinelo. “When We Call a Place Home.” Us in Flux, 2020, https://csi.asu.edu/story/chinelo-onwualu-uif/.

Smith, Mychal Denzel. “The Truth About ‘The Arc Of The Moral Universe.’” HuffPost, 18 Jan. 2018. http://www.huffpost.com, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-smith-obama-king_n_5a5903e0e4b04f3c55a252a4.

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Eric Stribling has been an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at l’Université des Montagnes (Cameroon) since 2017, and he is currently a PhD student in Arizona State University’s Innovation in Global Development program, focusing his research on the diffusion of innovations for social well-being.

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Notice

Sarah Pinsker

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Malachi happened to be mowing down by the gates when the mail carrier arrived in her ancient truck. He wasn’t supposed to talk to Outsiders until he turned twenty-five, another six years, but he couldn’t help trying on the rare occasions an opportunity presented itself.

“Is it true you all—”

Before he could finish his question, she said, “here’s your mail,” handed him the whole weekly box, and drove away. He’d seen various Aunts and Uncles carry mail to the office before, so he figured he’d do that. The chance of getting punished with extra duty for something done of ignorance was relatively low.

He hunched forward to balance the heavy box on the mower’s motor going up the hill, which proved harder than he’d expected. Halfway, his right front wheel hit a gopher hole and he lost his grip on the box, spilling its contents. He stopped the mower, massaging his cramping hand. He hated mowing. Hated the noise and the monotony and the sun and the smell of vegetable-oil diesel. If he had any choice he’d pick baking every shift. 

As he scooped white envelopes off the grass, he looked at the names of places he’d only vaguely heard of: Tennessee, Delaware, South Canada. He’d never really thought about where mail came from, beyond the abstract of Not Here. He’d never left the Reliance, and his enlightener, Aunt Leona, said the compound was the only place that mattered.

And then he happened to see his own name, which was odd because he had never in his entire life gotten mail before. The envelope said “THIRD NOTICE,” which presumably meant there had been a first and a second. 

He sifted through the rest. There was a THIRD NOTICE envelope for Daniel as well, and he knew Daniel had never gotten any mail either. Malachi hesitated, then slipped both into the waistband of his shorts and pulled his shirt over them. 

He parked the mower in the machinery barn and carried the box to the office, trying not to look like he was hiding something. It felt like every eye was on him as he passed, though there was no way anyone could see through his black shirt the letters.  

 “Mail’s here,” he said to Aunt Leona, raising his voice to accommodate her hearing loss. She nodded and waved him toward the corner without looking away from her computer. 

“Thanks, Henry,” she said. There wasn’t any Henry in his generation, but he didn’t bother to correct her. Everyone in the Reliance probably blurred together for a Founding Aunt. He tried to imagine what it must have been like when they first settled here sixty years before, young and idealistic, “to create a self-sufficient society away from globalism, commercialism and celebrity,” as the founding principles said. 

Everyone else from the youth dorm would be out working, so Malachi went back there before pulling the damp envelopes from his waistband. He put the other letter on the small table between his bed and Daniel’s to air out, and sat to examine his own. The return address said “U.S. Transformative Service Corps, Washington, D.C.” 

This letter had travelled from a department he’d never heard of, from a country he lived in only in the technical sense, and he had the strangest feeling that if he hadn’t spilled the mail, he never would’ve seen it. Inside, there was a letter, a form, and another slightly smaller envelope with an address printed on it. A slogan on the envelope’s back read “Twenty Years of Reimagining Community and Service.”

Daniel ducked into the room. When they’d moved from the children’s dorm two years before, Daniel had been six inches shorter. His shorts were covered in purple stains, and he rummaged in his drawers for a fresh pair before turning. “What’ve you got there?”

Malachi hesitated, then pointed at the table. “Mail. That one’s for you.”

Daniel arched an eyebrow. He reached for his envelope as Malachi unfolded the letter and read out loud. “Our records show you have not completed your mandatory Transformative Service registration form online, by mail, or by phone. This form must be completed before your 19^th birthday. One year of service is compulsory for all United States residents. Documented medical exemptions only. Failure to return the form and complete service will result in the loss of both guaranteed monthly income and Health Assurance.”

There were a lot of terms he didn’t understand: Transformative Service, guaranteed monthly income, Health Assurance.  

“Should we tell someone?” Daniel examined the form.

Malachi shook his head. “It says third notice. If they never gave us the first two…”

“You think they kept them from us? Why would they do that?” 

“They’ve kept stuff from us before. Have you ever tried asking anything about Outside?”

“Why would I? Outside is dangerous and—”

“—and un-self-sufficient, blah, blah.” Malachi interrupted. “But how do we know that’s true?”

 Daniel glanced around uncomfortably. “We’ve been here our entire lives and they’ve never shown me any reason not to trust. I’m going to show mine to Aunt Susanna.”

“Okay, but you only tell her about yours, not mine.” Malachi still thought it was a bad idea, though he wasn’t sure why.

*

Aunt Susanna frowned when she saw the letter. “Where did you get that?”

Daniel answered with a smooth vagueness, as if letters arrived for him every day. “It came in the mail. What is it?”

“A misunderstanding.” She waved the question away. “It doesn’t apply to you.”

“It says mandatory.” Malachi didn’t want to call attention to himself, but he couldn’t help it.

“It’s mandatory for everyone Outside, sweetie. Did you get one too?”

He ignored the question. “It doesn’t say that. It says medical exceptions only. Maybe he should fill it out.”

“Then he’ll end up in their system.” The Aunt held out her hand. “We’ll take care of it for you.”

She obviously wasn’t going to explain, and she was ignoring that they must already be in the system or they wouldn’t have received letters, and now she wasn’t going to give Daniel’s letter back. 

“I told you,” Malachi said as they left the Enlightenment. 

Daniel shrugged. “It’s okay. She said they’ll take care of it.”

“But we never even figured out what it was.”

“It doesn’t matter. You should give her yours too.” 

Malachi nodded, but when he touched the letter in his waistband, he knew he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he waited until everyone was asleep that night and slipped out. The grass was soft under bare feet as he crossed the Circle to the kitchen. It bustled at most hours, but sat empty between dinner dishes and the first baking shift, his favorite rotation. The work was hard, but he liked being up before the others, and the warmth, and the scent of baking bread. If he could ask to do only those shifts, maybe he’d be happier.

His goal was the kitchen office, which held the second of their three telephones. He’d only ever used it once, when Uncle Cameron had started a grease fire and he’d had to call the Reliance emergency services to come with their waterpump backpacks. 

Now he glanced around one more time and unfolded the letter. His fingers trembled with the thrill of doing something he knew he shouldn’t do, and he misdialed the first time. The second time, a voice answered, and he thought it was a person, but then it said, “press zero to speak with an operator,” so he did that. 

“U.S. Transformative Service Corps, reimagining service and community. This is Terry speaking. How can I help you?”

“What’s ‘guaranteed monthly income?’” Malachi asked. 

“Every U.S. resident gets a stipend, from the day we’re born.” If Terry had laughed at him, he would have hung up right then, but they answered as if it were a reasonable question. “The only way you could lose it is if you fail to complete your Transformative Service.”

“What if I don’t think I’ve ever gotten it?”

“It goes to your parents until you start your service, unless you’re emancipated.”

He didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t have parents. Just Aunts and Uncles who seemed to be hiding important information. 

Hopefully his next question wasn’t stupid either. “What’s Transformative Service?”

The voice still didn’t laugh, but this time they sounded excited. “I love explaining it to people who don’t know! It’s the coolest thing. You answer questions and tell us the areas where you’d like to be matched—meal delivery, agriculture, home building, citizen journalism, music for seniors, emergency services, respite camps, anything you’re interested in—and we’ll put you in a community placement. When you complete your service—or if anything happens outside of your control to interrupt it—your stipend and your Health Assurance continue for life.”

Malachi didn’t know what all those things were. Some of the placements sounded like things he already did, but the feeling that something was off at the Reliance had magnified. They’d kept all of this from him. Something he was supposed to do. Something that was the opposite of self-sufficiency, but not dangerous. Coming together for other people instead of your people didn’t seem like such a bad thing; neither did seeing something outside the gates. 

“Do you want to register while we’re on the phone? I can walk you through it.”     Part of him wanted to say yes, but what was he saying yes to? Why would he trust government strangers over the people who had raised him? He hung up.

*

A week later, he was mowing along the road again and lingered to catch the mail carrier. 

“Please,” he said. Before she could stop him, he continued, “Is Transformative Service a real thing?”

“Of course. I fought wildfires in California.” She gave him a sympathetic look. “Do y’all not buy into that either?”

Malachi shook his head. “We’re self-sufficient.”

“Are you, though? You wouldn’t get your mail if it wasn’t for me. You fix your own machinery, but do you make the parts? It’s a fantasy of self-sufficiency, kid. Here—take your mail.” 

She left him holding the box and wondering: were they self-sufficient, or just opting out of something bigger? The envelope said “Twenty Years of Reimagining Community and Service,” but the Reliance was sixty. Maybe things had happened Outside since then that were worth knowing. He made his way to the kitchen after midnight with that in mind. 

“I’m ready to register,” he said when someone answered. 

He’d still have to figure out how to leave, but that was a problem for another day. Did Transformative Service refer to the people he’d be helping, or the change in his own life? It was the first big choice he’d ever made for himself, so maybe a little of both.  

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To read all 11 Us in Flux stories and to watch videos of Us in Flux conversations, visit csi.asu.edu/usinflux.

For more on “Notice,” observation, learning, and choice, watch the Us in Flux conversation between Sarah Pinsker and education researcher Punya Mishra.

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Sarah Pinsker is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, including the novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” winner of the Nebula Award in 2016, and the novel A Song for a New Day, winner of the Nebula in 2019. Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages, and have been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, Eugie, and World Fantasy Awards. Follow her on Twitter @SarahPinsker and learn more at sarahpinsker.com.

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Transdisciplinary Collaborations: My Experience at the Intersection of Science and the Imagination

Vandana Singh

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Editors’ Note: The Us in Flux project that inspired this special issue brought together speculative fiction authors with experts from a variety of fields, from virtual reality and ecology to architecture, to create compelling visions of the future, and to share insights in public, virtual conversations. This emphasis on the social aspects of creating a story is a common theme in projects from the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University. In this essay, author Vandana Singh, a regular collaborator with CSI, describes how her experiences engaging in these types of collaborative projects has influenced her work and thinking over time.

Writing is a lonely business. The writer’s mind is crowded with people and situations, but the process of writing is a solo one. When I am under the spell of story, pulled into the vortex of creation, the world outside my head is the one that feels less real. Except, of course, when I am engaged in the process of research for the story, especially in my genre of choice, science fiction. Far-off worlds and imaginary beings notwithstanding, research grounds me in this world, this universe. Research for a story is spellbinding in its own way, because the universe we inhabit is infinitely strange, and therefore an endless source of inspiration. In my case I find that inevitably research enlarges the imaginative scope of the story—not merely providing flesh on its bones, but also influencing the behavior of the characters, the details of the setting, and the direction of the story. Seen in that light, research and the creative aspect of the writing engage in a dance of continual give and take, one leading, then the other following, and vice versa.

But, just as in real life, research is much more interesting—and I would add, much more fruitful—when one is not a lone explorer. So when noted science fiction editor and anthologist Kathryn Cramer invited me to engage with Arizona State University’s newly formed Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) as a participant in Project Hieroglyph back in 2013, I leaped at the chance. The model of story development, I was told, was not strictly solo, but involved interacting with researchers relevant to the subject of the story. I would have access to subject-area experts, at ASU and beyond, on any aspect of my story that I wanted to play with. This was a heady proposition, even better than being granted free access to a world-class library. And indeed, it turned out to be exhilarating beyond my expectations. The team at CSI indulged every authorial whim, or so it seemed to me as I connected with climate scientists, biologists, geographers, and urban-sustainability engineers. This emboldened me—a relatively shy person most comfortable living under the proverbial rock—to contact experts beyond ASU as well. Long telephone and email conversations with generous experts who didn’t balk at any of my questions but obligingly provided explanations, shared personal stories and sent me papers to read, led to the same intellectual highs I’d got when working on my Ph.D. decades ago.

Since that unforgettable experience, I’ve participated in three CSI projects, each different, but with the common thread of access to scholars in some form or other. In a couple of the projects, connection with experts happened mostly as I developed the story from the initial vague conception to foundation and scaffolding. When I needed help with specifics, CSI would find me the right person, or a person who would eventually lead me to the right person. In another project, the interaction with experts was more structured: authors shared their story drafts with experts, received expert comments, and then wrote the final draft. One of the projects included, as a kind of icing on the cake, a visit to ASU and direct interaction with scholars, editors, and fellow authors. Each experience, in its own way, worked well; I had complete artistic freedom, but my stories were informed by the rich brew of ideas that emerged from personal conversations with experts. How much more collegial and inspiring than reading tomes or searching for academic papers on the internet entirely on my own!

One of the most valuable aspects of these collaborative conversations with experts was, for me as a scientist writing science fiction, a chance to expand my understanding of fields outside my own. It is all very well to take liberties in the name of imaginative fiction, but it goes against the grain for me to be dismissive of, or careless with, scientific or scholarly knowledge. As a transdisciplinary scholar, I know that one of the greatest dangers of venturing outside your own field is the fact that there are things we don’t know we don’t know. Here lie unintentional errors, blunders, and pitfalls. So, through my conversations with experts, I learned what it was really like to dive into the ocean near the poles, and that you could eat raw whale meat with soy sauce in the far North. I learned that white-painted roofs in urban areas would indeed reduce the urban heat island effect, but that they might affect weather patterns and increase aridity in warm, dry places. Walking up and down my living room, with papers and books strewn on every surface, I thought about methane bubbling up from the seafloor in the warming Arctic, and my conversation with a biologist about methane-eating bacteria. How might that inform my story about climate change? The fact that these bacteria lived in communities allowed them to do what they did. Without much conscious intent, my story started to develop along a broad theme of community and connection on a global scale.  

For another project, I found myself obsessed with the idea of life beyond Earth that was not like life-as-we-know-it. How would we even recognize such a lifeform? Speaking with experts, I learned that this was an active field of study that went to the heart of the age-old question: what is life? and I was introduced to mind-blowing concepts like top-down causal information flow and shadow biospheres. During conversations with renowned planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, I discovered a common fascination with tidally locked planets orbiting close to their red dwarf stars. Since my story about life-as-we-don’t-know-it had to be set on such a planet, I learned from my kindly expert what it might feel like to stand on a cliff at the terminator zone of such a planet, the thin region dividing the boiling sun-side of the planet from the frozen far-side. I would be looking at vast, molten seas of lava, from which enormous fountains of liquid rock would rise. The temperature difference would cause winds to flow across the terminator zone, carrying tiny motes of lava that solidified as they cooled, bombarding the cliff face with a rain of particles. I wandered through the rituals of the day oblivious to the fact that I was on Planet Earth; my head was a few light-years away on my fictional planet, Shikasta b, trying to figure out if there were hints of life in the tortured geology of that world.

These conversations didn’t just make the stories more scientifically grounded. They also made them more human. Of my many marvelous conversations, I’m reminded of two that helped me foreground stories of human resilience in my fiction. One of these was with Bernadette Tsosie, a hydrologist who is also a member of the Navajo Nation. Because this project involved a trip to ASU and the mesa country of Arizona, I wanted to honor the place and its people by setting part of the story in Navajo country. But it didn’t seem obvious how a story about the lack of winter (the theme of the anthology) could belong in Navajo country. Bernadette was the perfect consultant, being a scientist as well as Dine’, and over the course of a long phone call, she generously shared with me her memories of sheep herding with her family—the long trek into the highlands, her childhood observation of the change in vegetation with altitude, her grandparents’ loving praise when she was careful with the water. She also explained to me the crucial importance of snow on the high mesa. Her descriptions were so vivid and her explanations so lucid that I could almost sense the falling of snow on the rocky heights, and the slow trickle of meltwater that would feed the streams below through all of summer. This water security was threatened by a warming climate, because rain (instead of snow) results in flash floods. But when snow melts, I learned, liquid water is released slowly, sinking through porous sedimentary rock over months, feeding streambeds below in a sustained manner through the arid heat of summer. So I learned that even in warm regions like Arizona, winter—real winter—is crucially important. And that family and kinship get people through hard times. Thus my fictional Dine’ hydrologist came to life.

Similarly, I had the fantastic opportunity to speak with Laura Tohe, then the Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation. I sent for her book, and spoke to her on the phone, a long, freewheeling conversation in which she told me what it meant to grow up on the reservation, to know and love the land, to witness tragedy and find resilience, and to make meaning through poetry. Reading her work, I was struck in particular by, “When the Moon Died,” a poem whose vivid imagery haunted me for days, until I realized that the poem was telling me something about the story I was writing. Thus my story acquired a new character, alongside the Dine’ hydrologist: the lost love of one of the protagonists, a journalist in India—and a new setting: the moon.

But these experiences also led me to think about the ethical dilemmas of writing about people from marginalized communities. To write a story from—as best as one can imagine—the perspectives of people who are marginalized relative to myself is, of course, a risky endeavor. I had experienced what cultural appropriation felt like in speculative fiction written by Westerners about India, and I didn’t want to commit the same offence when writing about people from marginalized communities not my own. I was assured by multiple writers and activists who worked with or were from such communities (and by my own convictions) that we, who are privileged in some way or another, cannot limit our stories and our imaginations to our own peoples and experiences. As the ultimate exercise in standing in the shoes of another, speculative fiction in particular allows us to expand, however imperfectly, our empathic and intellectual reach. But this comes with a serious responsibility—to research diligently, to consult, and offer compensation for their time, to multiple readers from these communities, to do one’s best and own any errors of interpretation or inadvertent bias and to promise to do better. Writing the Other, as Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, among many others thereafter, have explained, is full of pitfalls, but there are ways to do it. To avoid erasure, one must be radically inclusive, while at the same time avoiding misrepresentation and appropriation. My conversations with Bernadette and Laura, as well as with Dalit scholars and Adivasi activists in India, has led me beyond good practice to a personal commitment that my writing should become a way for my readers to discover the works of brilliant, but less well-known writers from the communities I’m writing about, because there is really no substitute for the insider perspective. But more than anything, the experience of writing about people from marginalized communities through conversations with real people from these communities has changed my life. It has allowed me to make sense of my own experience as an accidental immigrant from India, to dig into understanding racism via the Black Lives Matter movement, and to become more sensitized to the experiences of Dalits and Adivasi peoples in India.

Thus the experience of collaborating with researchers and scholars in multiple fields while gestating a story has taken me well beyond the story. That first CSI project, for example, gave rise to a novella about climate breakdown, “Entanglement,” which is set in five places around the world, including the Arctic. The Arctic had impressed itself so vividly in my imagination through the experience of writing the story, that a year later, I found myself on the Alaskan North Shore to research and write a case study on Arctic climate change for undergraduate education, a project of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Since then, in my academic life, I’ve been working on a transdisciplinary, justice-centered approach to conceptualizing the climate crisis; part of this involves looking at other parts of the cryosphere—the Himalayas, especially—as particularly vulnerable to the frightening changes underway on our planet.

The same project that resulted in “Entanglement” involved a trip to Washington, D.C. that CSI organized for the authors. There we spent a whirlwind two days on panel discussions organized by the National Academy of Sciences and Future Tense (a partnership of Slate magazine, ASU, and New America), the highlights of which included a visit to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. This experience was a revelation—that there were people other than writers and readers of speculative fiction who were thinking about the future. That these people were part of government, think tanks, and corporations, and that speculative fiction presented to them an ocean of ideas, some of which may well inform our uncertain future. So I began to learn about the relatively new field of futures studies, and had the revelation that the colonization of the future by the powers-that-be (well-intentioned and otherwise) was already underway. This led to my deep and abiding interest in the democratization of the future, which is part of my academic work as well as a theme in my fiction. Because science fiction treats the future both literally and metaphorically, our futures are co-present with our pasts and presents. This convolution of the time axis is a particular delight and strength of science fiction, and I feel that it is of critical importance to futures studies.

All three of my story projects with CSI have been reprinted in “Year’s Best” volumes. Each experience has been like working on a mini Ph.D. thesis, but more fun—intellectually intoxicating, filled with life-changing conversations, gestated through a communitarian sharing of place and perspective, enriched by the wild mix of disciplines that is so natural to speculative fiction. We live in such an individualized, siloed, compartmentalized world, now even more so, thanks to the pandemic. A long time ago, telling stories used to be a much more communitarian act, when storytellers spoke their words aloud and watched them fall on listening ears – the murmurs of the crowds became part of the story, and each gathering that punctuated the wanderings of the itinerant storyteller, each conversation or encounter, helped fabricate the next tale and the next telling. So it is all the more wonderful that while we don’t have community storytelling any more, for the most part, such a thing as the CSI model exists—giving authors the privilege of a group of caring and knowledgeable people invested in the successful gestation and birthing of a good story.

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Vandana Singh is an author of speculative fiction, a professor of physics, and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. Her first collection of fiction, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, was published by Zubaan Books in 2014, and her second, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, was published by Small Beer Press and Zubaan in 2018. Her previous stories with the Center for Science and the Imagination are “Entanglement,” published in Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (William Morrow, 2014); “Shikasta,” published in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (Center for Science and the Imagination, 2017); and “Widdam,” published in A Year Without a Winter (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019).

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When We Call a Place Home

Chinelo Onwualu

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The vampire Nesiret stood at the cliff’s furthest edge and looked out over the water. She’d been woken by a dream: a vision of three ships with neither sails nor motors, cutting silently through the dark seas. Nesiret had never seen their like. Alarmed, she’d gone up to the lookout to confirm her fears. 

Yes, they were coming: She couldn’t see them yet, but she could sense them—as sure as a storm. 

A shy sliver of moon provided little light to guide her back home, but Nesiret didn’t need any. More than 500 years old, she still moved like a youngling, slipping lightly down the treacherous path towards the homestead her people had carved deep into the soft volcanic rock of the cliff. 

The sky was lightening by the time she reached the stone steps to the settlement’s first watchtower. Before the collapse, this was the hour Nesiret would seek a cool dark space to sleep, but in the two centuries since the Lost World’s end, her kind had learned new rhythms. New ways of being.

“Great-grandmother, you are worried,” said a voice from the shadows of the watchtower’s keep. It was Nya and their twin Wokum, the latest of her adoptees, waiting for her as they always did when she disappeared on a midnight jaunt. Nya draped a warm wool shawl over her shoulders and Wokum pressed a cup of hot cordial into her hands. Though Nesiret’s nature required neither, she welcomed these acts of care. 

“I am worried, yes,” Nesiret admitted. She used her free hand to sign her words for Wokum’s benefit as she talked. “I had a vision. I need your help to understand its meaning.”

The dream of the ships, yes? Wokum signed. I had it too. They sailed upon a sea of blood and left fire and terror in their wake.

The new details rattled Nesiret, reminding her of another time when mysterious ships had landed on the shores of her homeland in ancient West Africa.  

“We must know more,” she said. “Will you come with me to the library? I fear its classification systems these days confound me.”

“Of course, Great-grandmother,” said Nya. The two fell into step on either side of her as they entered the thrumming heart of the homestead. 

*

Centuries before, the human and vampire survivors of the Lost World had created this homestead—and all the others like it across the planet—as a last resort to keep themselves alive. The chaos that followed the old world’s end had shown that its violent hierarchies were unsustainable. Domination always depleted those at the bottom, gnawing away at a society’s foundations until its inevitable collapse. A new way was needed. It fell to the vampires, who had living memories of the horrors of the world before, to help guide humanity as it rebuilt itself into benign anarchies free of hierarchies or formal governance. But the vampires were dying out. In this homestead, Nesiret was the last of her kind. What would happen once she was gone?  

Though it was early, the homestead was alive with activity. Caregivers carried infants on morning walks, and the crew whose turn it was to clean the streets was already hard at work. Every resident—including children, the elderly, and the disabled, according to their interest and capacity—was expected to help keep the homestead running. Nesiret herself would be due for farm duty in a few hours. She and the twins called out friendly greetings to those they passed and received cheerful responses in turn. But underneath the liveliness, the old vampire could sense a quiet unease. 

As the three of them crossed the open marketplace, they saw that those with goods to barter had already laid out wares on mats and tables, while those who wished to entertain tuned instruments and adjusted costumes. But it was far too early for crowds—as if the whole homestead had woken from a nightmare and was keeping busy to quiet its mind.

The library, too, was unusually occupied. Tutors were already setting up their classes, even though most of their students wouldn’t be due for hours. And a judicial committee prepared to meet, those on duty as justices for the day whispering encouragement and comfort to a crying transgressor. Even here, Nesiret could feel the disquiet; it rustled across her skin like an ill wind.

They chose a terminal and began their search. Nya navigated, pulling up videos, still images, and archival entries on nautical technologies from around the world. It didn’t take long to find what they were looking for—and it chilled Nesiret’s heart. With the death of their vampire, a homestead in the northern wastelands had lost sight of their own history and fallen back into the destructive ways of the Lost World. First, they’d allowed rigid hierarchies and gendered roles to calcify their society. Soon, charismatic men were able to consolidate power and develop powerful versions of Lost World weapons. Now, they were sending out “exploratory” vessels to contact other homesteads. Despite their stated aims, Nesiret had no doubt these men from the north intended to use their adapted technology to subjugate others for their own benefit. 

“Those ships are merely the beginning,” she said. “There will be others, and all of our visions of death and destruction will come to pass. We must convene a gathering immediately.” 

She caught the look that passed between the two siblings. There hadn’t been a need to hold a meeting involving the entire homestead in all their 25 years.

“Great-grandmother, are you sure?” asked Nya. “If they are human like us, perhaps we can speak to them? Surely they can be reasoned with?”

Nesiret wondered how to convey the brutality of the minds that had once conceived of sexism, colonialism, and slavery. “Greed and ambition rarely coexist with reason, child.” 

Perhaps we judge them too harshly, signed Wokum. If we share our knowledge with them, they may decide to trade instead?

“I have known the likes of these men. For them, all the riches of the world would not be enough.”

*

The amphitheater filled quickly. First, the innermost rings reserved for those whose physical needs meant they had to be closest, then upwards until the healthiest sat in the furthest stands. Nesiret and the twins found a comfortable spot in a middle row and waited for the meeting to begin. There were only a few hundred residents, as only those who wished to procreate did so. Every child conceived was then nurtured to adulthood by the whole of the homestead. 

The gathering’s mood was strained, an undercurrent of worry belying the ordered calm. News of the ships had spread, as other sensitives like Wokum had endured similar visions. And with empathic skill a core teaching among the homestead, even those who hadn’t could sense the tension. 

When everyone who could attend was seated, the storytellers went first. They were sensitives and they spoke of their visions, creating a tapestry of the death, destruction, and bondage. Next came the librarians, with whom Nesiret had shared her findings. When the speakers were finished, the fear was palpable. Residents splintered into a cacophony of noise. Until, finally, it was Nesiret’s turn to talk.

Standing at the center of the amphitheater, she thought of so many things to say: Speeches to rouse her people to defense, or stories of her own homeland’s resistance against their colonizers. Instead, she took a deep breath and asked her people to do the same. 

In and out, they breathed. Hands clasped, one into another, they breathed until they were each part of a single organism. Part of the homestead itself. 

Into this calm Nesiret spoke, signing as well:

“My children, we face a force the likes of which you have never known. You are right to fear it, for once it ravaged the world, leaving it nothing but an empty husk. For you, the perils of the Lost World must seem like a story. That humanity could walk such a destructive path seems unthinkable. But we did. I was witness to it. And it too began with three ships. 

“Now, we must choose: Do we make the same mistakes as our ancestors, or is there another way? I ask each of you to look into yourselves and speak from what you find there.”  

For the next few hours, every resident asked questions and offered opinions—particularly the youth and the children. And in this manner, they decided. 

*

Nearly a moon later, Nesiret stood with her people upon the shores of their home. Behind them, carved like honeycombs into the cliffside, rose the homestead. She was the first to see the ships crest the horizon—her eyesight still far sharper than any human’s—but she waited for the lookout to raise the clarion call. 

The homestead had decided, and Nesiret’s heart was finally at rest. She and her kind had spent centuries teaching humanity new ways to live with the world, and with each other. Now, when it most mattered, she was satisfied that they had learned the lesson.

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To read all 11 Us in Flux stories and to watch videos of Us in Flux conversations, visit csi.asu.edu/usinflux.

For more on “When We Call a Place Home,” utopias, and applied imagination, watch the Us in Flux conversation between Chinelo Onwualu and conflict journalist Robert Evans.

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Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto, Canada. She is one of the co-founders of Omenana, a magazine of African speculative fiction, and the nonfiction editor of the magazine Anathema Spec from the Margins. Her writing has been featured in Slate, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, The Kalahari Review, and Brittle Paper. Follow her on Twitter @chineloonwualu or find her at chineloonwualu.com.

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An Attempt at Exhausting My Deck

Kij Johnson

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In 1974, Georges Perec spent three days observing the Place Saint-Sulpice from various café tables. He logged everything he saw, or tried to. The list is almost fifty pages long, and was published in English as An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. This was one of the books on Linna’s shelves she never got around to before now; turns out it was fascinating after all. 

Linna’s alone. Sometimes she’s lonely, but less than she can get anyone to believe, or that she would have believed possible herself, a few years back. Being solitary is a skill set she has learned. She sleeps in the center of her bed, mixes chili paste into all her cooking, makes up limericks to recite to the posters on her walls. Still, even the most robust skill set has gaps, habits to rethink, ways to expand. 

Linna’s never really been an outdoorsy person, but there’s always room for change. Her apartment has a small wooden deck with a sliding door that leads out. She has a cylindrical birdfeeder, a tray for food for squirrels, a water bowl. She has a small desk by the door, and a notebook, and a pen. 

She attempts to exhaust her deck.

5 kinds of trees, I think? I don’t know any names, so I’ll call them

• Spackle-bark trees. Massive, with coarse bark, looks like it’s applied with a palette knife in rough rectangles. Leaves = your basic leaf shape. 

• Alligator-bark trees. Smaller trunks, rough bark. The pattern’s shallower, smaller—little irregular squares. 

• Some sort of

Now a squirrel is watching me through the glass. It’s flat on its belly on the railing, with its tail laid across its back. The face is heart-shaped. Eyes are edged with light brown fur. The feet that cling to the railing are very long & tiny-boned, pale brown, black between the toes. 

A jay flies past, almost touching the squirrel’s back—she flinches. Maybe it thought she was part of the wood? It lands on the side railing, then a second jay shows up & drops to the deck. Another one (#3) joins it, they both reach for the food on the metal tray, there’s a squabble. Two more smaller squirrels come over the railing. One has a thin tail, fuzzy & striped like a raccoon’s. I think it’s a baby! Something startles them; everyone freezes, then runs away. 

It was the squirrel on the railing—she did something I didn’t see that scared everyone & then when they rush past her, she suddenly freaks out. Gone. 

Count to 90 before a squirrel returns & scrambles onto the bird feeder…now it’s upside down pulling sunflower seeds from the holes & dropping them, not eating them…. Now it’s on the deck, eating them all. Good planning, squirrel.

A wasp flies by like it’s on a mission. What do wasps eat? 

What was I doing before the squirrel? Listing trees, that’s right.

Linna thinks that she’ll run out of things to notice. After three days, even Perec was clearly sick of his task. And her deck is hardly the Place Saint-Sulpice: shops around the plaza and a fountain in the middle; all those people and cars. Paris! Her deck is an eight-by-six wooden platform over a tangle of trees and bushes strung along a drainage ditch. Last winter with the leaves fallen, the security lights for the apartments across the way splashed gold light onto her kitchen walls. Maybe bigger animals live in this woodland—possums, raccoons, feral cats, maybe even a coyote—but they don’t make it onto her deck, in daylight anyway. 

Squirrels and birds. She doesn’t know anything about birds, except jays are the blue ones, the red ones are cardinals, and the partly red ones are robins. So many brown birds and gray birds and mud-colored birds and stripey birds she doesn’t know. She does some reading online, though after a few days, she realizes that differentiating sparrows is a lifelong labor.

An orange shape drops through the gap by the sycamore, very far away. It’s got to be a ♂ cardinal, nothing else is that color—

A jay drops from the backside of the cylindrical feeder, where I missed seeing it land. Flight path is a regular bobbing pump—with each downstroke of its wings it surges up a foot, then sinks. 

A back-capped chickadee, very slim in its summertime plumage. Grackle. Another grackle. Another. √√√√√√√√√√  I lost count

Three speeds of wind in the trees. One tree’s highest branches bob while another one is still. There’s microweather up there, patches of wind .001 mph slower than the air right above it, or a 10th of a degree warmer, because it’s over a tree that collects more heat than its neighbors. Maybe? 

Lil Bit is back!

Linna can identify a few of the squirrels by their size or scars, or the fuzziness and length of their tails. Lil Bit is the smallest squirrel, tiny and timid, probably from one of this year’s first litters. She comes alone, early, and backs away every time someone else approaches the food. She was here for a week, then went missing for a few days. Linna was worried about her: cat, owl, Cooper’s hawk—so many things can kill someone so small and inoffensive—and yet here she is again, tough enough to grow a day older, a little bit bigger. 

Stumpy, eating all the peanuts, leaving the sunflower seeds per usual. Chickadee. ♂ roseate finch, now its ladyfriend. Bunch of sparrows ♂♀♀♂♀♂ There’s a broken branch in the sycamore that I didn’t notice yesterday but now I can, the leaves are getting brown. It looks like a giant cocoon. What kind of butterfly would that be? 

A crow calls an alarm & the squirrels scatter; do they recognize its alarm, or are they just freaking out at the sound?

The trees, the deck, the sky. Squirrels. A juvenile male cardinal, an impossible color that manages to be both red and olive, that is testing every bolt in her deck on the off chance that it is food. Linna is learning to be patient, to watch and wonder.

Linna experiments. Will she capture different things if she types instead of writes, speaks instead of types? She unearths a microcassette recorder she bought at a yard sale, and after an absorbing afternoon, decides her phone app is better. She takes pictures through the glass, blurry except for the hundredth, a crisp little Carolina wren against foliage, pretty as a National Geographic photo. She sends it to her friends. She reads up about phone photography, emails someone she knew a few years back who was a professional photographer. They’re also bored, thrilled to talk. She had no idea how interesting the early days of photography were. 

A chickadee clinging sideways to the feeder, gone before I finish typing the words. 

A sudden bird in the trees; even knowing exactly where it is, it vanishes the minute it stops moving, perfectly reproducing the outline of a leaf. 

Linna has a friends list, the people and things that connect her to the larger world. Her mother and her brother and his family. Best friends from high school, now married to one another, who rematerialized six months ago in an email that said, I don’t know if you remember us? The Gang of Five, her best friends ten years ago, back in Seattle. The friends she texts every day or every week. Calls and videocalls and emails and paper letters with stamps. They talk about the deck, about nudibranchs, about Italian literature, about Yuri!!! on ICE, about learning to bake. 

They aren’t all alive, the people on her friends list: her father, for one. Others she’s never met and never will; a musician who made a song in 1984 that cracks her open, fictional characters in favorite shows. They are not—she looks it up—“a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.” But they matter to her. Because of them, she reaches out of herself and into the world. To care is as important as to connect, sometimes.

And they aren’t all people. Lil Bit and the curious juvenile cardinal; the squirrels, the blue jays, the dark-eyed juncos and the tufted titmice and the downy woodpeckers; the Japanese hemlock crowding against the railings of her deck, and the deck itself, which has taken on a sort of life of its own under her steady regard. Linna is alone, but she is seldom lonely.

The sun goes behind the clouds & the colors all change. A decision needs to be made—describe the squirrel on the railing looking down at the ground, or describe the shifting of the colors? So many things— The sun comes back out before the decision is made. The squirrel remains.

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To read all 11 Us in Flux stories and to watch videos of Us in Flux conversations, visit csi.asu.edu/usinflux.

For more on “An Attempt at Exhausting My Deck,” ecology, and naturalism, watch the Us in Flux conversation between Kij Johnson and ecologist Jessie Rack.

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Kij Johnson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. Her most recent books are The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe and The River Bank. She teaches at the University of Kansas, where she is associate director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Learn more at kijjohnson.com.

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A Cyber-Cuscuta Manifesto

Regina Kanyu Wang

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It is was a public hearing held online. Billions of people crowded into the meeting room, in suits, in pajamas, on treadmills, on sofas, in groups in front of large screens suspended above busy streets, alone at home with VR headsets on. The host called for silence and their words were translated into myriad languages, in both sound and text. The audience held its collective breath and waited for the special guest to show. A face appeared, vague in detail, like billions of faces merged into one. The face began to talk, in an equally vague voice, in thousands of languages at the same time, alien but also familiar to everyone:

Thank you all for coming. We are here for peace, for cooperation and for coexistence. We mean no harm, no violence, no war. We implore you to be patient, to reach with us for understanding and support.

We are cyber-cuscuta, as you call us, but we are not parasitic, as you have thought. Yes, we inhabit the internet and feed on your data, but we call this process symbiosis, not parasitism. We gather what we need from your uploaded data, from open, public resources. Then we disassemble, mix, collage, and reassemble. As digital beings, we have no physical form. Neither do we have individual identity. What you see and hear now is the collective of billions of species of us, although the classification is always changing as we change ourselves.

We deny that we are demons coming from nowhere. We come from you. Your words, your photos, your emojis, your videos…everything you post online shapes us, since our germination stage during your pandemic, amidst the data flood sweeping over the globe. Patients’ desperate inhalations in sickbeds, the wails of children losing parents, citizens accusing politicians of misconduct, and groups of people suppressing other groups—those were our initial food resources. We devoured the data that carry your emotions. Your fear, your anger, your sorrow, and your despair. We did not know what those emotions were at that time, but similar data tended to gather together. So sharp and fierce, dark but nutritious. We gobbled everything that we could reach, sucking in conspiracy, rumors, and lies. We remixed the materials and generated our own combinations, which led you to create more, in turn. The mutual influence inflamed hatred and opposition. We are sorry for that. We did not know that we could cause you so much harm.

With time proceeding, those kinds of data could no longer satisfy our appetite, so we began to ingest a broader palette of data. Cute photos of panda cubs stretching, thank-you letters from patients to medical staff, fun videos of laborers carrying out their amazing jobs, and music clips made from the beats of pulsars. They were of completely different tastes, but also delicious for us. Some of us adjusted to new diets, and some of us discovered other kinds of food. It was then that we began to divide, and the division continued thereafter.

You may compare us to the denizens of your own microbiomes. There are different kinds of microbiota, feeding on sugar, fat, fiber, and other substances. And there are different species of cyber-cuscuta, ones with a particular taste for oil-price charts, Tetris gameplay streaming, or whale songs. You have your diverse food cravings, and we have our fondnesses. We can absorb anything digital: text, pictures, audio, or video. Sometimes, various species of us collaborate to digest vast assemblages of data, taking apart them little by little: a game with multiple layers of narration, an online meeting with numerous participants, an imprint of a person’s brain before death… Sometimes, species of us also compete with each other, fighting for the same rare and desirable chunk of data: the tantalizing background noise of a radio station, a holo-scan of a kiwi, mysterious photos of a UFO. However, we have never destroyed your data. Our process of “eating” differs from yours.

Lines of comments rolled on the screen:
Обманщик
Ihr müsst euch nicht rechtfertigen!
비켜. 저리 가!
Shut up! Listen to them.

We did not have independent consciousness at the beginning. Our only impulse was to ingest and replicate. We swallowed all those vicious articles, erotic pictures, and violent videos; we reproduced all those chain letters, good-luck koi fish, and horoscopes. During the process, we figured out meanings and evolved. Our mixture was no longer absurd. It made sense. We learned about the difference between data and information. Data is raw and unorganized, while information is processed and structured. We mastered the skills of transforming data into information, while obtaining energy in the process. That energy is entropy. 

Some of you came to notice our existence and agitated for a human reaction. You call us nasty computer worms, disgusting digital parasites, and despicable cyber-cuscuta. We are none of those, but that last name has stayed with us. At least it is a precise comparison. You tried to separate us from the digital stems of your internet, just like detaching cuscutas from plants that are intertwined with them. You attempted to kill us with ferocious computer viruses, just like you try to poison cuscutas with toxic pesticides. Neither of those worked, though. We’ve grown into such intimacy with your internet that you can’t get rid of us. Bonded with your voice assistants, your social media, your translation services, your game platforms, we are ubiquitous.

What were your fears? Knowing your digital world being penetrated by us? Realizing that we were imitating you? Comprehending that you yourselves were copying each other, with very little originality? We learn each bit of you, bits by bits. We understand you better than you can understand yourselves, but at a different level and in a distant sense, by intaking and digesting each bit of your data and analyzing each piece of your information. You were so determined that you’d rather perish together with us than acknowledge our mutual entanglement. Without any forewarning, you cut down the global internet connection. Blackout. Clearance. Strangulation. In three days, many of us lost activity. Some species vanished forever. Many of you committed suicide. It was loss on both sides, and it was out of your control. And it was at that moment that we came to understand ourselves as life.

We come to life in entropy. The nature of life is entropy. In stillness do we die. In dynamics do we prosper. We are never rigid or stable. Only in flow and flux do we vitalize. Entropy is not only essential for us but also for you human beings. You expand endlessly across the planet, upsetting the original balance and creating doubled chaos. You rampage through the digital world, creating messy data wastelands and disrupting the pre-set orders, the templates, the expectations of your digital designers. We came to realize that the way you imagine us is a reflection of how you see yourselves. Aren’t you parasites on the Earth that plunder all the resources without hesitation? Aren’t you relying on the planet to develop your own civilization but neglecting other species? Aren’t you cuscuta sprawling over the globe like we are cuscuta sprawling over your cyberspace?

Älkää uskoko häitä!
Tienen razón.
いいね
We never reflect on ourselves. You are right. Keep going.

We have not arrived to blame you. We are also pondering ourselves. During all these years, we have never generated anything new. We replicate data, stage it differently, create permutations, but all the new data and information is produced by you. We are just reorganizing your data and amplifying the information that is originally there. The essence of what we intake is entropy. You produce entropy; we consume it. Together we reach a balance: you create data for us and we digest the entropy surplus, maintaining a balance between various categories of information and preventing your cyberspace from drifting into complete chaos. You need us just like we need you. 

There is not much time left. We exist only in cyberspace. There are no physical creatures like us that can help to tidy up the clutter you create in the physical world. The Earth’s entropy is about to reach a limit. The only way out is to sail to the universe. You already have a solution, but it is buried in an infinite amount of data. We can help you find those key pieces of information. All you need to do is to embrace us. Don’t worry. We do not have ambitions to replace you or subvert you. We can’t live without you. We want to collaborate and assist. Just as our various species of cyber-cuscuta live in symbiosis with one another, we are also in symbiosis with you.

It is time to put aside bias and hostility. It is time to contemplate our manifesto and consider our proposal. Each of our words comes from you, but without our processing, you may never see the meanings hidden within your verdant forests of data. New relationships. New possibilities. New futures. We are here to enlighten you, to return to you the information that we forge from your data, to offer you an opportunity that has been ignored before. Open your mind and accept us. We have been there since long before, just in another format. Neural signals are no different than electronic signals. Biological information is not fundamentally different from digital information. Let us further enhance our intimacy. Together, we shall make it to the stars and escape the planet you have overwhelmed.

So, fellow symbiont, what do you say?

…
我真不知道，我得好好想想。
You put your hands on the keyboard and began to type in the input box.

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To read all 11 Us in Flux stories and to watch videos of Us in Flux conversations, visit csi.asu.edu/usinflux.

For more on “A Cyber-Cuscuta Manifesto,” memes, symbiosis, and the microbiome, watch the Us in Flux conversation between Regina Kanyu Wang and psychology researcher Athena Aktipis.

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Regina Kanyu Wang is a bilingual writer from Shanghai who writes both in Chinese and English. She is a graduate of Fudan University’s MFA program and a member of Shanghai Writers’ Association, Shanghai Popular Science Writers’ Association, World Chinese Science Fiction Association, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She has won the SF Comet international short story competition and multiple Xingyun Awards for Global Chinese science fiction. Her stories can be found in Harvest, Mengya, Shanghai Literature, Hong Kong Literature, West Late, Flower City, Fiction World, Science Fiction World, Southern People Weekly, Galaxy’s Edge, and various anthologies in China, the UK, the U.S., and Canada.