#40: Imagining a Future of Mutual Aid

Rebecca Solnit, The Last of Us, Cormac McCarthy, N.K. Jemisin, Jonathan Lethem, Diane Cook, Ander Monson, Kerry Howley, Victor LaValle, John Cotter.

Hi friends,

I turned my grades in on Friday, which means my academic year is over, minus a few last meetings and a couple dozen emails to write. But I should wrap up most of that in the next week or so, and then I’m hoping to sink back into my novel revision full-time. I’m usually pretty good about working on whatever book I’m writing through the semester, but the last month has been particularly travel heavy, on top of some other writing assignments, and so I feel I’ve been “slacking.” Which is just to say that today I’m rereading my draft, getting excited about the story and the characters all over again, a necessary step before sitting down to work. I said this on Twitter recently, but I’ll repeat it here: One reason for me to write consistently is that the longer I’m away from an unfinished project, the surer I become that it isn’t very good. But reading my way back in and getting to work usually fixes the fear. Nothing leaves me encouraged like sustained engagement.

Finishing this semester also meant wrapping up the first semester of activity by my new Worldbuilding Initiative at Arizona State. We put on four workshops with speakers drawn from the ASU Humanities community, and hosted our first Distinguished Lecturer, the novelist Arkady Martine, all of which I thin turned out great. Thanks so much to everyone who participated with the worldbuilding exercises or otherwise attended one of our talks. It’s been a joy to find so many people interested in this work, and I look forward to continuing it next year. For those of you who haven’t participated yet, this month’s essay and exercise comes from my own part of our fourth workshop, on “Democracy, Consensus, and Community,” where I talked about imagining futures characterized not by apocalypse and survival of the fittest but my mutual aid and communal action. Hopefully it’s a window into the Initiative and some of the imaginative thinking we hope to foster.

As always, I hope your writing is going well, and that you and yours are happy and healthy. Be safe, be kind, and have fun with your reading and writing!

Yours,
Matt

What I’m Reading:

Predator by Ander Monson. I’ve only seen the movie Predator once, but I loved Ander Monson’s memoir, which uses his many many viewings of the movie as a lens through which to think about masculinity in his own life and in the broader American culture. Like Monson, I grew up in rural Michigan, and so much of this book resonated with me, especially his writing about growing up in the 80s in the Midwest: “What is happiness to a kid? We did well in school. We read a ton. Blew some stuff up. Messed around in the woods. Nobody fell into an abandoned mine or died in snow, at least not anyone we knew well.”

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley. I loved Kerry Howley’s debut Thrown so much—I have a promo magnet from it on my fridge still, years after it came out—and I'm so glad to have another of her books in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. A smart, insightful book about the secrecy of the American surveillance state, suffused an enviable moral clarity about what such secrecy costs. “There will never be a state from which there is no good reason to hide. The radical transparency we have accepted... is a bet we have made that we & the people with the guns & the cages will stay on good terms.”

Lone Women by Victor LaValle. Another fantastic novel by LaValle! So tightly plotted, so quick moving. There might not be a sentence’s worth of waste here. “There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who live with shame and those who die from it. Could there be a third kind of person? One who overcomes the shame?”

Losing Music by John Cotter. A fantastic memoir by a writer I’ve long admired. Smart, deeply moving, and spectacularly written, with an audiobook beautifully performed by the writer. Don’t miss this one. “Random acts of self-pity had always been an arrow in my quiver. I carefully extracted one and set it.”

#40: Imagining a Future of Mutual Aid

If you persist long enough in writing speculative fiction or sci-fi, you may eventually field a lot of questions about dystopias and apocalypses, and about their relationship to hope and hoped-for utopias. In fact, one of the questions I was continually asked during my two years of book events for my novel Appleseed—which takes a thousand-year view of climate change, past, present, and future—was about what gave me hope for the future, in the face of our many ongoing crises. (As one sign of what a pessimistic age we live in, many readers have reported finding Appleseed a hopeful novel, a curious label for a book partly about the unintended extinction of the human race as we know it.) I always had some answer prepared, but whatever I said often led to the same joking/not-joking final statement, a self-realization I’d made while finishing Appleseed and thinking about what I might write next.

Over and over, what I finally said was, “I’ve got a utopian heart and a dystopian brain”—which always got a laugh, but was also utterly true. I want to be a person who’s always thinking about better futures, real and imagined, but I have produced more dystopian, apocalyptic stories than anything else. Relatedly, one of my critiques of my own fiction might also be that it has generally been too much about isolated individuals, rather than people seeking out community—and what is an individual isolated from others but a dystopia of one?

Luckily, one of the best reasons to write another book is to find a way to do new work that the last book couldn’t. In the novel I’m writing now, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to tell stories of community, mutual aid, and other ways people move toward each other in times of crisis, instead of being put into constant winner-takes-all conflict.

The world of my novel-in-progress is a fraught, difficult place that—by design—requires individuals to act in community and collaboration in order to survive. Or, if characters can for a time survive on their own, they can’t fully thrive in such isolation. It’s only by coming together with others that the problems of this book’s particular scenario might be solved. So as I strengthen the worldbuilding in the novel, I’ve tried to consider what structures and mindsets that would encourage community between characters instead of competition and conflict.

Thinking about this topic over the past year or so, what’s become ever more interesting to me is how many pop culture depictions of disasters or apocalypses depict instances of mutual aid or collaboration as exceptions. For instance, in HBO’s The Last of Us (and the video game it was based on), most survivors of the global cordyceps virus are depicted as fearful, violent, opportunistic hoarders, raiders, or fascists. It’s only our heroes—and their few assorted friends—who show kindness or offer a helping hand to others. (And even then, friendship and collaboration often end in tragedy.) In both the game and the show, we get a glimpse of a “good guy” community forming in Jackson, Wyoming, but even there the leaders manipulate and control the members of their walled city, showing suspicion and distrust of newcomers. It’s always Us vs. Them, wherever Joel and Ellie might go.

Similarly, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the literary fiction apocalypse that paved the way for a thousand others, the protagonist is a father who will stop at nothing to protect his son’s life and his innocence. (McCarthy writes: “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.” And: “He knew only that his child was his warrant.” A bleak, brutal world.) Every violent action that follows is justified by this worldview, in a journey where the nameless other characters are almost entirely murderers, slavers, cannibals, rapists, and worse. When the son begs the father to show kindness—when the father very rarely consents to do, under pressure from his son—this is enough to set them apart from nearly everyone else left in this world.

Perhaps because I have consumed untold hours of novels, films and television shows, and video games depicting such scenarios, it’s always been easiest to imagine that what would happen in the wake of a real natural disaster or societal breakdown is what The Last of Us or The Road suggests. But it turns out there’s plenty of evidence that this isn’t wholly true, or even mostly.

What if the reality is that most people really do try to help others once disaster strikes, at least in the most immediate aftermath? What if it isn’t human nature that produces any ensuing trouble, but institutional or elite failure to imagine or encourage better outcomes?

In her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit investigates the aftermath of five disasters, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the events of 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. In each case, Solnit argues that while institutions often fail or are simply too slow to respond to large-scale tragedies, many ordinary people immediately spring to each other’s aid, sharing resources, rescuing neighbors from danger, and otherwise forming effective temporary communities defined by mutual assistance. For a moment, neighbors are not competing for space or resources or power or attention, instead sharing what they can with those around them. (COVID happened after A Paradise Built in Hell was written, but I’d argue that many of its observations hold especially true for the months immediately after its initial outbreak.)

Of her emergent mutual aid communities, Solnit says, “This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies.” For many ordinary persons, it’s an exciting, even invigorating time, in which different possibilities for how we might live and dwell with others emerge.

But eventually, in every case Solnit cites, certain “elites”—among them presidents and governors and mayors, military and police leaders, and the wealthiest citizens—panic and intervene, usually for the worse:

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones... But belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism.

This is the post-disaster phase where the military or vigilantes or some other police force step in, often theoretically to stop “looting”; it’s also where false or mostly false stories of widespread savagery or property damage tend to circulate, as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Often enough, these fears originate far from the disaster itself, in other parts of the city or region or country. As Solnit reports, Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney termed this phenomenon “elite panic,” which Tierney describes as “fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.”

As I read Solnit’s book, I thought about how many of the disaster stories and apocalyptic narratives I’ve read or watched or played take for granted the fears inherent in this “elite panic” as the most likely outcome for every individual in any kind of societal collapse, whether temporary or permanent… but why? If art is about speaking truth to power, why does so much art in our speculative genres accept the panicked worldview of the powerful as its starting point, instead of offering a more altruistic vision of our potential, one that might have the benefit of being closer to the truth?

Solnit suggests one possible answer. “My own impression,” she writes, “is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image. In a society based on competition, the least altruistic often rise highest…. Those in power themselves are often capable of being as savage and self-serving as the mobs of their worst fears. They also believe that they are preventing crime when they commit it.”

All of this is to say that I’m increasingly interested in writing and reading and watching stories that interrogate or rebut the “elite panic” narrative of disaster. (I’m not the only one, obviously, as shown by emerging subgenres of SFF like hopepunk and solarpunk.) If I’m permanently saddled with my “dystopian plot-brain,” as I seem to be, that doesn’t mean I have to keep recreating the most prevalent strains of apocalypse I see in the media. There are other kinds of stories to tell, and I’m cheered by some recent novels I can think of in which people form new kinds of communities in apocalyptic times, such as N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest, and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, among others.

One final reason to write such stories, at least for me, is to interrogate why, if mutual aid comes naturally to many of us during a disaster, it doesn’t already characterize more of our everyday interactions with others. As Solnit says, in perhaps the most memorable sentence of A Paradise Built in Hell:

It's tempting to ask why, if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.

It’s a good question, one worth exploring further in story. Let’s give it a go.

Your exercise this month is to write a scene or a story featuring communal decision-making or mutual aid in the wake of a disaster:

1. Begin in media res, by imagining the immediate aftermath of an unfolding crisis with no clear antagonist. Natural disasters work well, but more speculative disasters work too: for example, perhaps one day all electricity-based technology mysteriously stops working worldwide. What do we do next?

2. Identify the aid people might desire most after your invented disaster. What resources would people need? How could those needs be met, and by whom? What’s one struggle that can best be overcome communally?

3. Search for the drama in this imagined scenario not in the zero-sum competition of humans vs. humans, but in collaboration, communication, & consensus against shared trouble. How might people come together as a group? Who shares? Who assists? Who protects and rescues? Who needs to be convinced to do their part?

4. Write scenes in which people work together solve a single problem in this changed world. One problem per scene, perhaps many problems in sequence to make a story.

Still not sure where to start with your exploration of group dynamics? Try these two scenarios, either of which should produce ample drama while also letting you expose communal decision-making in action:

• A group of strangers comes to the edge of your town and respectfully asks for help. Post-disaster, your community is struggling—but you know you have some resources to spare. How do you greet the strangers? What do you do in response to their request for aid? What do you convince others to do or not do?

• In a time of struggle, a property crime is committed in your town, by a member of the community. The member confesses immediately, so there’s no question about responsibility. What happens next? Whose job is to decide? What kinds of remedies does your community have available to address the wrongdoing and the harm it did?

Good luck! I’ll see you next month!

P.S. In the time since I taught the workshop where this essay originated, I had the pleasure of hearing Rebecca Solnit speak at Arizona State University, where she read another essay that included a great quote about hope, one which feels related to all of the above. Certainly I’ll be thinking about it for a long time:

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

Hope is an axe. Yes!

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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable book) was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

His website can be found at www.mattbell.com.