Nick Wood
Nick Wood is a disabled South African-British clinical psychologist and Science Fiction writer, with a collection of short stories (alongside essays and new stories) in Learning Monkey and Crocodile (Luna Press, 2019). Following Azanian Bridges (2016), Nick’s latest novel is the British Science Fiction Association Award-shortlisted Water Must Fall (NewCon Press, 2020).
Speculative Fiction (SF) models potential scenarios for the future of humanity by proposing alternative visions of the future that evoke different ways of inhabiting the world. But such templates can threaten the status quo: during apartheid in South Africa, several SF novels were banned, and the current right-wing book-bans in the United States show that the suppression of books continues to this day.
One of the earliest and most quintessential SF evocations of climate change was Octavia Butler’s 1993 series The Parable of the Sower, and its successor, The Parable of the Talents; the third volume of the trilogy was never finished, due to Butler’s death in 2006. Presciently, the two novels depict a burning California in the mid 2020s, where a white demagogue US President is pursuing a ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda. Both stories highlight the need for adaptability and building sustainable communities of mutual aid, which Butler presents as being unified by a new, enlightened, and inclusive belief system known as Earthseed.
Further challenging the colonising Western mindset, it establishes a post-oil, post-capitalist society in Nigeria, where a better world is built after ‘aliens’ have made contact – and have simultaneously awoken the old gods and spirits of the earth. A new world emerges where indigenous belief systems are married with technology, a process coined by Ian McDonald as ‘jujutech’. This reclamation of indigenous (with Okorafor, African) belief systems, constitutes a narrative pushback against the coloniz]sing role of materialistic science and much early white Western science fiction. This (and other models of indigenous SF – see also the editorial work of Grace Dillon, in Walking the Clouds, for example) further serves to ‘re-spirit’ the natural world with its own essences, intrinsic value and ethical rights – see Amitav Ghosh’s argument for the return of ‘animism’ in The Nutmeg’s Curse.
As the SF author William Gibson was reputed to have said, towards the end of the last century: “The future has arrived – it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” So, too, the climate story, where the emissions of the Global North (and the richest) have exerted devastating impacts, particularly on the Global South, where resources to both survive and manage this are considerably less, due in no small part to long histories of colonial exploitation. Neo-colonial style extractions persist within international corporations and financial systems, prompting the United Nations News to report in 2019: ‘World Faces Climate Apartheid Risk.’
Given this burning inequality, climate change and climate justice are clearly both intertwined concepts. But where are the voices and stories from those most impacted, the ‘climate precariat,’ in the Global South? There is a form of narrative inequality at work, in terms of whose voices and stories are heard – and under what conditions, by those with the power to either amplify or censor. Conservation and climate activism within Africa, for example, has been operating long before Greta Thunberg, with Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement being the most significant (yet largely ignored) forerunner in twentieth century Kenya and beyond. Ugandan youth activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of a news picture of young climate activists alongside Thunberg, leaving only white participants in view, as she stated: ‘as if I wasn’t there.’
International corporations, allied by degrees of state capture, act with increasing neo-colonial impunity too. Eco-activists and indigenous ‘protectors’ have a history of being murdered, particularly in the Global South, which is now reaching levels akin to war zones. As the world burns, from Canada, California, Siberia, and the Arctic, to the Amazon and the east coast of Australia, it is quite clear that the days of reckoning for our planet are right here, right now.
As Andrew McKay points out in It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way – a powerful Southern African challenge to climate inequities in a near future Cape Town – we can have a more just and fair global future – but provided we act. Now.
Under such a climate justice rubric there is a need for reparations, rematriation, allowed mobility/migration and land and water access, in a future which embraces all – and where no one is expendable. In the SF anthology Octavia’s Brood, Adrienne Maree Brown stated: “This is why I write science fiction (after spending so long in social justice work). To cultivate radical imagination… All organizing is science fiction, all efforts to bend the arc of the future towards justice, is science fictional behaviour. How we do that work really matters. We are all interconnected. Denying that, we die. Surrendering to that, we live. Let us all live.”
The future is already here.
Let us all live.
CALL TO ACTION:
Nick has compiled a shortlist of science fiction books by African authors: read it here.
Nick Wood is a disabled South African-British clinical psychologist and Science Fiction writer, with a collection of short stories (alongside essays and new stories) in Learning Monkey and Crocodile (Luna Press, 2019). Following Azanian Bridges (2016), Nick’s latest novel is the British Science Fiction Association Award-shortlisted Water Must Fall (NewCon Press, 2020).