Novelist Manda Scott joins me today to chat about her new Thrutopian political thriller, Any Human Power.
Bio:
Manda Scott is an award-winning novelist and host of the acclaimed Accidental Gods podcast. Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, her previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards and won the McIllvanney Prize. Her latest novel Any Human Power is a Mytho-Political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian road map to a flourishing future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. With degrees in veterinary medicine and a Masters in Regenerative Economics, Manda’s life is oriented towards creating radical new narratives that will pave the way to the total systemic change our culture – and our world – needs.
Welcome, Manda. Please tell us about your current release.
My new novel Any Human Power is a Thrutopian Political Thriller aimed to craft a path through from exactly where we are to a flourishing future that we’d be proud to leave behind to the generations that come after us and for those who will inherit the planet after we die.
How do you help the people you love create a future you’re proud to leave behind?
From a bestselling storyteller who brings together myths and speculative futures with a radical compassion, comes the story of a family at the heart of a political crisis and the ensuing uprising of a disenfranchised generation. A family that harnesses the skills and stories needed for real change, if they can choose the right path, before it is too late …
As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. Fifteen years later, her teenage granddaughter, Kaitlyn, triggers an international storm of outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole betrayed generation. For one shining fragment of time, the world is with her. But then the backlash begins and soon she and those closest to her find themselves facing the wrath of the old establishment, who will use every dirty trick in the book to fight them off.
Watching over the growing chaos is Lan, who taught them all to think independently, approach power sceptically and dream with clear intent. She knows more than one generation’s hopes are on the line. Nothing less than the future of humanity stands in the balance.
Grand in scope, rich in courageous characters who breathe new life into ancient wisdom, here is a dream of a better future: a world we’d be proud to leave to our children and their children and on, generations down the line.
What inspired you to write this book?
A few years ago, I studied for a Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College and realized first that we’re really close to the edge of biophysical collapse, second that it’s not all about the carbon, or even all about the climate: we’re part of a hyper-complex system where our predatory economic model and our disintegrating democratic systems and our failures of trust in ourselves and each other are as important – if not moreso – than the havoc we’re wreaking with the pollution we throw out: there are PFAs (Forever Chemicals) in the rain and microplastics dissolved in mothers’ breast milk and dead zones in the oceans that will all join up to create a dead planet if we don’t act.
But the realisation that came along with this is that Amitav Ghosh is absolutely right when he says in the Great Derangement that future generations will blame politicians and bureaucrats for their failure to act…but more, they’ll blame creatives, and particularly, I would say, fiction writers, because it’s not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine different futures.
I’d been writing historical thrillers on the basis that if we could see the iniquities promulgated in our name, we’d turn to a different way of being. It manifestly wasn’t working. So I understood that we need a whole body of fiction in our novels, our TV, our movies, our songs, our short stories…everything, that would be based on the premise that our current system is not fit for purpose and yet there is still time to build a reality we’d be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn. This is what we’re here for. But we need the road maps. So Any Human Power is one road map of so many potential others.
Excerpt from Any Human Power:
[This excerpt is a speech by Kaitlyn, a fourteen year old girl, speaking to her half-sister. They share the same Glaswegian mother, but Kaitlyn’s father was Moroccan while Kirsten’s was an alcoholic Swede. I wrote this after talking to my friend Louis Weinstock who is a child psychologist who used to specialize in complex childhood trauma and is finding himself increasingly working with young people who are deeply angry at the ways we in the older generation are destroying their futures in real time. Kaitlyn gives vent to her anger in ways we all need to hear. And then we need to work out ways to show that there is still a window of opportunity within which we can all agree on our common values – integrity, compassion, community – and what we want to feel: safe, confident, cared-for (in essence, we want to feel felt. And then we want to discover our own sense of being, becoming and belonging). So this is the hard part of realization. Then the task is to work out how we divert the bus from the edge of the cliff.]
“Kaitlyn said, ‘It’s not that you’re too old, or too white. Not even that you care too much. It’s that you’re too good.’ Silence. Maddie made a small ‘keep going’ motion with her hand. Kaitlyn dragged her fingers through her hair, exactly as Finn did. ‘You still think there’s hope. You grew up in a world where there was still a possibility that you’d get to old age and everything you cared about’ – she made the same sweeping motion with her hand that Kirsten had done – ‘would still be there, still working. If Nye had his way, it would be working better, would be more equitable, more sustainable, more just. You still believe this because it’s what you’ve always believed. In your world, this is possible.’ She leaned back on the wall. For the first time, she looked tired. ‘My world’s not like that. I don’t have hope that we’ll all find our best selves and make everything alright. I know we’re screwed. Everyone who can use Google for more than about five minutes knows we’re screwed. The climate’s in meltdown. The oceans are turning acid and the rain is full of forever toxins. Democracy is broken. As Niall never grows bored of reminding us, we’ve only ever had a kleptocracy calling itself democracy, but even that’s being destroyed in real-time by the sociopaths who’ve stolen control. The economy is running out over a canyon like Wile E. Coyote, but gravity’s going to bite soon and we’ll all smash to tiny pieces when it hits the floor. Social media companies are feasting on the young and AI just went feral so you don’t even have to know how to code to make bad stuff happen: any ten-year-old with a grudge can stitch together bio-weapons that could take us all out, and if the kid doesn’t do it, the sentient AI will.’ She paused to push a swathe of hair back from her face. In the gap she left, Kirsten said, ‘If there’s no point, why are you fighting?’ ‘Because I’m tired of this. I’m tired of being gaslit. I’m tired of turning on the TV or walking into the village shop and seeing the papers lined up from a world that’s dying and the headlines scream about total trivia because their whole world would collapse if they actually let themselves know the truth. Because when the bus that is humanity goes over the last edge of the last cliff, I don’t want the old, white men who drove us here to have their fossilised fucking fingers still clamped on the wheel. I want some agency: just a fraction of time to feel like I can live my life outside the toxic, stinking shadow they’ve made. I want to breathe air that feels clean even if it’s full of sulphur. I want to drink water they haven’t poisoned and eat food that’s not giving me diabetes. I just want the world to be sane for five minutes before the end.’
Scott, Manda. Any Human Power (pp. 143-145). September Publishing. Kindle Edition.
What exciting project are you working on next?
I’m exploring the potential for an anthology of Thrutopian writing – we need so many more people to be engaged with this concept of imagining ways forward to a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m also 10,000 words into the sequel for Any Human Power. More than either of these, I’m exploring the concept of Plurality that is expanded in the book of this name by Gleny Weyl and Audrey Tang, the former digital minister of Taiwan. They are exploring ideas of how we could shape a far more liquid democracy, which seems to me one of the keys to a future that works.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
At the turn of the millennium when I made the shift from writing contemporary crime to writing the Boudica: Dreaming series which was set in the islands of Britain at the time of the Roman invasion in the first century. I changed publishers and was able to give up my day job as a veterinary surgeon and I remember being at a friend’s birthday dinner and someone asked me what I did for a living and I said, ‘I’m a novelist’ and my friend got up and came round the table to give me a huge hug. It felt like a real crossing-point from one way of being to another.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Technically my main job is writing. In practice, I live on a smallholding and I run a podcast and a membership program that takes up phenomenal amounts of time. I loathe admin and periodically have fantasies of running away to an off-grid cottage in the middle of nowhere with just me and the dog and having time only to write. In reality, I endeavour to spend no more than 3 hours a day on admin and the rest writing – but I’ve written precisely nothing since the book came out in the UK at the end of May, so this is an aspiration rather than a timetable. Whatever else I’m doing, we are on an organic regenerative farm and there’s always work to do outside, to see how we can sequester more carbon, increase the water uptake and enhance the biodiversity.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I almost always include dreaming – the shamanic version, where it has full meaning – in my writing.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a novelist. I also wanted to be a veterinary surgeon. So I am well aware that I’m incredibly lucky to have been able to be both in one lifetime.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
The physicist Ilya Prigogine says that “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have a capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
We can be these small islands of coherence. There is still time to act. There is time for us to find the still point inside where we can put aside our tribal differences and find what matters to all of us. And then we can bring the entire astonishing, magical creativity of humanity to bear on creating a future we’d be proud to leave as our legacy.
What does it take to be a Good Ancestor? Finding the answer to this is the path to a flourishing future. So let’s do it!
Links:
Any Human Power is available for sale on Amazon.
Readers can connect with Manda on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
To learn more, visit https://mandascott.co.uk/ and https://accidentalgods.life.