Compared to hard-nosed economic and political analysis, obviously fiction will always seem a bit juvenile. This is something that routinely tears me up inside: on the one hand, the self-important part of me wants to believe that fiction has a kind of usefulness and power, while the realistic current in my thinking wants to reject that and say that ultimately engaging in make-believe is in and of itself not producing anything in reality. If I wanted to engage in politics, if I cared, I should do so-- I should secure some quantities of military supplies and just actually kill a bunch of people that I think are deleterious to the world. Instead of just writing about them like they are sexy and have their own interiority.
I do love writing fiction though. I do believe in it. It's not only fun but *feels* so pregnant with possibility. And I do love myself some pregnancy--
Anyway.
Political and economic analysis comes from somewhere though. It comes from people with relevant skillsets who are engaged not just with themselves or the work of their forebears but with their peers in spaces of "knowledge production." These are not *necessarily* Academic spaces, which is why I say vague shit in quotes to sound cool-- I am a frequent enjoyer of Open Source Intelligence or OSINT, and there are guys out there doing fantastic work on global military developments and even some interesting guerilla reads on political currents, who are not academics. But I think part of it has to be access to resources and a community that is engaged in debate and critique, checking each other, and I guess hurling slurs sometimes, maybe even frequently.
I am not doing any of those things. I am one lady and I frequently avoid saying slurs. You could say I am fantastic, world class, at not saying slurs. I talk about politics with my wife, who is exceedingly well read, sharp, witty, highly sexually attractive-- but neither of us are like writing PHD theses on Latour or whatever. There is a difference in what I can accomplish in terms of educating people or uncovering novel understandings of present conditions. I can say at best what I can do is get people who don't read anything but fiction books to see how maybe the world is a little bit fucked. Just a tiny bit. And they might get curious and go look at the world and go oh dear. That is a little bit fucked at least. Is there a solution? And my writing gestures a little bit at a solution, maybe, if you think it does. But the thing is, art has its own concerns. If I was writing a story that just told people what it is about to their face and told them what to think it would be bad art and it would be ineffective politically also-- for better or worse if you are expressing yourself through art, there is an interpretative layer.
A thing that I struggle with in Unjust Depths is that I want to talk about the present in some way. Talking about the present feels useful, sharp, important, especially in this moment where the present feels like it goes off in front of you like a wildfire every day with chaos and circumstance. However, the present is always moving faster than you can capture it. However however, I also have to interrogate my own biases in this regard-- the present is so trapped in one's own personal experience, but the present does not belong to any single individual. Since Unjust Depths started, the United States has essentially witnessed the predictable and crushing defeat of the Democrats' "Nothing is fundamentally going to change" politics, and we now exist in this bizarre interregnum where some of us are awaiting painful but banal evil, others are awaiting a 1000 Year Trump Reich and The End Of Democracy, and still others believe that fundamentally nothing did change and nothing will change again, "nothing happens." These are interesting things you could write about, you could say something, you could capture in fiction, there are narratives to be told about populism, about the crisis in the liberal establishment who have confined themselves exclusively to managing decline. Unjust Depths, is about some of these things sometimes and not about these things at others-- however, the world at large is also not just about any of these things. In Syria, the government of Bashar Al-Assad has toppled over, perplexingly without a fight, and given way to a constellation of ruthlessly self-interested militant groups in an uneasy alliance, whose hard infrastructure was then largely destroyed by Israel in like 24 hours. The Ukraine-Russia war is still ongoing, despite fervent liberal narratives that Russia would be toppled by Christmas and the western world would be collectively sitting in Moscow in January 2023, and it has had vast global ramifications in numerous economies, in humanitarian tragedy, in the political circles of every major economic power in the globe, from US aid dynamics becoming part of its own domestic policy powderkeg, to German energy crises, to even the elections of Moldova and Georgia. China is at once the absolute major player in climate policy with enormously pro-social policies in this regard, while increasingly becoming the devil in the political narratives of numerous states that are inexorably economically linked to it, in self destructive and bizarre ways. This is not to say these are *definitive* narratives of these states, but they *are* narratives that are different than what I see as the "overriding narratives" of the present from a purely Americentric context-- when I think about "the present" I feel the uncertainty of my own future, but that's not the only thing worth writing about!
Things happen to people other than Americans. Other than to you.
Other than to me.
Things that are very worthy of thought, consideration, narrative. Things that form a larger "present" that you might have never even considered as such.
I've always striven not to the write the book that "an American" would write. This might seem impossible if you believe that all writing comes out of your personal context or something like that. As much as I am addicted to white women, and neither God nor the Devil will get me off this sauce; I have never striven to write a book that is just gesturing at whatever odious local politics I experience in America *exclusively*. Instead I wanted to write about both larger, more global things, and smaller things that that. About how identity does not presuppose ideology; about how the pressure cooker of racist exploitation and suppression interacts with and even shapes the politics of the oppressed groups; about how hegemonic ideology and practice continues even without the hegemon, and how chaos does not presuppose transformation, or how revolution does not presuppose the complete unraveling of former practices, former policies. These are vaguer things than the sharp and important things which happen in the present to people suffering all over the globe. I think my background in journalism just kind of fucks with me sometimes. So Unjust Depths did have underwater Joe Biden in it-- but it also has, well, underwater sunni/shia sectarian violence. And Violet Lehner. And lumineferous aether and thoughtforms and the Auric Egg and Agartha and other fucked up shit.
I am somebody who is steeped in reading and caring about politics, global conflicts, economic shifts, and history, past and present. When I think about what I've "accomplished" with my story, my mode is usually one of pessimism-- I've accomplished absolutely fucking nothing because you can't accomplish anything writing fiction. It is easy to get lost in the current of being less important than all this stuff that I bear witness to or am even part of-- because I am. I am exceedingly unimportant. However, unimportant is a far cry from useless or purposeless, both of which are things that I also am. Wait, what.
Anyway, merry unhappy 2024. Wow it has been terrible! I hope to keep writing fiction that is not engaged in witty repartee with current events in 2025.
And I think that's probably fine.