Can you imagine what comes next?
On criticism, speculative fiction set in your own past, and hope
Sometimes, when someone makes an observation about the way things are going for me—the things I'm writing, for instance—to my surprise, the feedback can leave me hopeful and with a fresh vision. This happened a few years ago, a colleague said my writing sounded speculative. What a surprise! At the time, I wasn't intentionally writing about the future. My stories were woven out of memories of living in Hungary in the 2000s. The strange times just before the far-right party came into power. Skepticism about the European Union was rumbling through bars. Smoking wasn’t banned but there were murmurs that gender studies could be—a conversation that seemed to lend legitimacy to street violence. Those who could leave began to make their arrangements. Yet I couldn't imagine what would come next.
A decade later, I began writing a retrospective, externalizing myself. I wrote about a woman haunted by the pleasurable memories of her early adulthood in a beautiful foreign city. I wanted to see her from the outside. Because when I looked back, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by my parochial outlook.
She was in love! With a city! With lovers! With the future she was promised! And she was hopeful, awakened to her autonomy and her body. She wanted the world, and she wanted the world to bend to her. And who doesn’t, she thought. Who doesn’t?
Here’s the tough thing about putting words out there. You’ll likely be misunderstood at some point. More than once. There have been times, to my dismay, when I’ve bristled at feedback about my creative work—usually when the criticism torques what I believe I am doing.
You might not know this—or maybe you will because it has happened to you—but I can shape-shift from a generous writing friend into a cat, claws out.
Though I know to raise the administrative guardrails to keep me from falling off my perch, it happens. I apologize that I may cause harm. And then, sometimes, you feel seen. I keep sharing in hopes of reaching loving readers yet. I desperately want to be recognized in my complex, contradictory entirety. And who wouldn’t, I think. Who wouldn’t?
When I taught a climate fiction course with Hugo House last year, we talked about how to imagine the future in a hopeful way—it's difficult to get out of our heads. Which are too often colonized by the narratives around us. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” the oft-cited quote from Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson (2017 [1994]) resonates.1 We read these words in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020). We noted that, in an ironic twist, preparing for the apocalypse had become a business. Get a prepper kit on Instagram! Share tips! Though I didn’t tell my students explicitly, this scared me.
By the time I was teaching this class, I’d rewritten my novel and set it in the near future. I'd decided I was writing speculative fiction. Feedback had stoked my imagination. If I recast my character’s experiences into a feasible, if worrying, future, I could also shed light on her obliviousness in a way that was both damning and relatable. I wanted her to be understood as an imperfect person navigating a complex, contradictory time.
Though I'm reasonable enough not to believe I'm capable of conjecture, it feels morally risky to speculate because what we do now shapes what comes next.
Equally as tough as receiving criticism is giving it. How to not cause harm? How to see others? Not to mention, what happens when your words are turned against you?
For a couple of years, I was lucky to be a managing editor of Catalyst, a feminist journal of technoscience. On the journal's fifth birthday, feminist science studies philosopher Donna Haraway spoke about the failures of feminist STS critiques. “Damage was done in the Social Text moment that accused all of us of relativism and anti-science ideology, which has been taken up by the right with great skill. The things we’ve proposed have been weaponized against us.”
Meanwhile, I speculated about the dissolution of the E.U. in a Brexit-style fall-out, more climate and war-related migration, and water crises. Sure, the IPCC has forecast these futures, but I wasn't so sure I should be doing that, too. Imagining feels dangerous. And Russia actually had gone to war on Ukraine, while the university I’d attended in Hungary had moved to Vienna; gender studies was banned. In the United States, Roe was overturned and there was another mass shooting in an elementary school. Someone murdered 19 children and two teachers. I didn't want to inspire a dystopia; I wanted to make hope.
Ursula Le Guin, in The Lefthand of Darkness—which I read when I was living in Budapest, over a decade ago—makes hope by using speculation to reveal a truth about the present. Her story revolves around a civilization where neither sex nor gender is fixed, but expressed monthly, relationally. She wrote this in 1969. An incredible book. Part of me wants to shout that Le Guin foreshadowed—influenced?—the radical recasting of gender we’re experiencing today. But it’s unfair to suggest she was ahead of her time, or visionary, or whatever. Better to ask this. How does her exquisite portrait of fluidity show the rigid gender binaries of her time?
In my book, the protagonist is obsessed with the future she was promised as a child. She is so obsessed that when she's thrust into circumstances where that story is no longer possible, she struggles. To survive, she tells herself new stories, nonsensical stories, like a Scheherazade, to influence the future anyway. I won't spoil the plot, but let's just say things don't go entirely to plan.
At Catalyst's birthday party, Banu Subramaniam asks Donna Haraway: “How do we stay with the trouble in apocalyptic times?”
DH: “Mass death is a reality. It might well grow. How to live with that? Learn to feel with those who have lived in world destructions. This is not new. There’s much to be learned from those who have lived this. With a vital refusal to stop playing. It’s a spiritual struggle.
“The work is now. We’re in now. Practice love for each other. Give each other forgiveness. Deep kindness.”
“I can get prickly and combative if I’m just called a sci-fi writer,” said Le Guin in an interview with The Paris Review. “[…] Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”
Tentacles in all directions! When I turn into a cat, my world has briefly ended. Until I get on my feet again. What is happening when a well-resourced writer such as Elizabeth Gilbert gives in to administrative guardrails and cancels her book publication because of criticism. Is it to keep her professional perch? I don't have such a perch, so I'm not sure, but I'm sure it's not easy.
Things do not always go entirely to plan. It's hard to practice forgiveness and kindness when you're scared.
It's the solstice in the northern hemisphere. I tell my children that I am still finishing my essay for this newsletter. It's getting late. They ask what I am writing about.
“Doing things, kind things, even when we're scared,” I say slowly. “I'm trying to understand my world, to imagine what comes next.”
“That's being brave,” one says, hopping on one foot.
“I think so too,” I reply.
“It's the presence” they exclaim, wisely, peering at me with hazel, starling eyes. And I entertain the passing thought that my child is clairvoyant, seeing things that are beyond me. The presence.
OMG.
Then I get it.
“You mean the name of my newsletter—the present! It's actually The Gift,” I chuckle. “But you are right. The present is the gift.”
I hadn't noticed the wordplay until now. But another small piece of feedback and I'm hopeful with fresh vision. That's how to imagine what comes next. Meow.
Until next time,
~Monika
Footnotes
[1] "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations” (Jameson, xiii).
Book recommendation
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An unsentimental reckoning. Class, privilege, circumstance, and ambition are all examined in time.
An unflinching retrospective. The experience of loving someone over decades and then. Betrayal.
Budapest after the war.
“Whenever I could, I would rush back to my old village to seek out what had gone, what could never be brought back, the shadows that the family house had once cast on my face, my long-lost former home. And I found nothing, for where has the river wandered whose waters carried away the shards of my early life? Emerence knew better than to attempt the impossible.” — Magda Szabo, pg. 7.
Works cited
Haraway, Donna, and Banu Subramaniam. 2021. “Foundations and Futures of Feminist Technosciences.” Presented at Catalyst 5-year Anniversary, Live, online, April 22. https://techfutures.lmc.gatech.edu/feminist-technoscience.
Jameson, Fredric. 2017 [1994] . The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lang, Cady. 2023. “Elizabeth Gilbert Delayed Her Novel After Protests. Some Worry It Sets a Dangerous Precedent.” Time, June 12, 2023. https://time.com/6286486/elizabeth-gilbert-the-snow-forest-russia-controversy/.
Le Guin, Ursula K. [1962019. The Left Hand of Darkness. 50th anniversary edition. New York: Ace Books.
Le Guin, Ursula, and John Wray. 2013. “The Art of Fiction No. 221.” The Paris Review, Fall 2013. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2021. The Ministry for the Future. First paperback edition. New York, NY: Orbit.
Szabó, Magda. 2005. The Door. Translated by Len Rix. London: Vintage Books.
Beautifully expressed! I didn’t know you lived in Hungary! This is all becoming so clear…Cannot wait to read more of your book! I love your description of it in this essay.