by Joanne Rixon
Joanne Rixon makes their Analog debut in our [May/June issue, on sale now] with “Methods of Remediation in Nearshore Ecologies.” In this thoughtful essay, Joanne discusses how they use science fiction to foster hope and envision a more tenable future
Do you believe in the future?
It’s not always easy to do. Every time I read the news these days, I go right to making contingency plans: if this, I am drawing a map across the border to a place that will give me asylum for being trans; if that, I add cash to my family’s emergency fund for an immigration lawyer if—when—we need one; if the other, I am taking a natural disaster/mass casualty first aid course and stockpiling bandages.
It is 2025. When I first sat down to write “Methods of Remediation in Nearshore Ecologies” and the dozen other stories I’ve written in the same future, set fifty years from now in my hometown of Tacoma, I wanted to write a utopia, a future where, against all odds, humans get our shit together and choose our own survival. But it’s 2025! How do I write about utopia when storm winds are blowing thick clouds down from the mountains, blocking out the sky?
There’s an appeal to dreaming about the apocalypse instead. If a comet is hitting Earth and we’re all crumbling into space dust, it doesn’t matter if there’s enough money in the immigration lawyer fund, or if I can even find a trustworthy lawyer who knows what they’re doing in a legal landscape where laws might not really exist anymore. If the dead have risen and are shambling toward my door, who cares that my medical coverage is a government program, which means the feds know I’m trans? I know there is a list out there somewhere, perhaps in the sweaty hands of an adult convert to Catholicism, with my name under a heading like “has used good American tax dollars for gender sins,” and I don’t know what to do about it. Fighting motorcycle wasteland warlords is so much more straightforward—so much more pure. Being handed a magical sword and a quest to defeat evil is terrifying, but at least it offers clarity and a sense of purpose.
But this is why despair, as Bujold would say, is a sin. There are no motorcycle wasteland warlords, no shuffling zombies, no monsters to shotgun or evil witchking to stab. If I let myself be hypnotized by fear of The Handmaid’s Tale or V for Vendetta, I’ll miss the chance to mount an effective defense against a here-and-now US government agency clawing back queerly-spent health insurance dollars or l.
Do I believe in the future?
The other side of despair is hope. Prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba says that an activist doesn’t need a complete blueprint for a better world to know that our current world is untenable. It’s enough to know “that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change.” Hope, she says, is a discipline: the daily practice of acting despite not having certainty.
If I let myself be hypnotized by fear of The Handmaid’s Tale or V for Vendetta, I’ll miss the chance to mount an effective defense against a here-and-now US government agency clawing back queerly-spent health insurance dollars or l
I’ve thought a lot about what that means for me as a writer. Kaba also says that it is the work of the activist to re-imagine the world. “Everything you see in the world—someone thought of it first,” before it ever existed. By telling stories we invent real possibilities that didn’t exist before. That’s how my Tacoma 2075 project found its legs: a collection of stories set in a future that does not yet exist, but could. A future that isn’t a utopia, just a timeline that’s better than I find it easy to believe in. A future full of people trying their best to make things work out okay.
I set these stories in Tacoma because I know this city. Like people, places are easier to love and to believe in when you know them well. In the process of writing, I walked and biked and bused and drove around town, marinating in the real streets and parks and shops and houses—and waterways—these imaginings map onto.
“Methods of Remediation in Nearshore Ecologies” takes place in the Hylebos Waterway, an estuarine branch of the Puyallup River where it meets the Salish Sea, which makes it part of the unceded territory of the Puyallup people, who have been living in an ongoing apocalypse of plague and invasion for centuries. Ethel’s path takes her on the water over an area that is, as the crow flies, in walking distance of the Northwest ICE Processing Facility, the largest immigration detention center in the Pacific Northwest and the facility my family members would most likely be sent to, in the possible near-future apocalypse where they are detained and deported. Commencement Bay has been the site of so many industrial accidents and industrial on-purpose-destruction-events that, beginning in 1983, it was designated a Superfund cleanup site; buying a house in this zone automatically comes with the warning not to grow food plants in the contaminated soil. It’s a strange kind of apocalypse: only flowers are allowed.
Two different local writers were able to offer me feedback on this story based on their own experiences working to cap the toxic sludge at the bottom of the Bay. Their work has held, and will likely hold, at least until Ethel’s time, fifty years from now, buying time for children to learn to kayak in the waterway while we develop better solutions for poisons that refuse to degrade. The Hylebos Bridge is not my favorite bridge to bike over—there are too many trucks moving cargo on and off ships—but in the summer the cottonwood trees along the water whisper in the wind, the most brilliant green.
I don’t know if a future where we still need to keep cleaning up the waterway is a hopeful one or not, and anyway I don’t know if I believe in the future, but I believe in remediation. I believe in doing the work of fixing one small thing, and then the next small thing. And then the next.
And I hope you can find your way to the same tiny sliver of belief. In fact, maybe you can imagine a future for your own hometown, fifty years from now. What if the world doesn’t end? What then?
*Quotations from Mariame Kaba’s collected essays, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice
The Astounding Analog Companion 