Make Shift Read online

  Make Shift

  In 2011 MIT Technology Review produced an anthology of science fiction short stories, TRSF. Over the next years MIT Technology Review produced three more volumes, renamed Twelve Tomorrows. Beginning in 2018, the MIT Press will publish an annual volume of Twelve Tomorrows in partnership with MIT Technology Review.

  TRSF, 2011

  TR Twelve Tomorrows 2013, edited by Stephen Cass

  TR Twelve Tomorrows 2014, edited by Bruce Sterling

  TR Twelve Tomorrows 2016, edited by Bruce Sterling

  Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush, 2018

  Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, edited by Sheila Williams, 2020

  Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, edited by Gideon Lichfield, 2021

  Make Shift

  Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

  Edited by Gideon Lichfield

  The MIT Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  London, England

  © 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book was set in Dante MT Pro and PF DIN pro by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lichfield, Gideon, editor.

  Title: Make shift : dispatches from the post-pandemic future / edited by Gideon Lichfield.

  Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2021] | Series: Twelve tomorrows

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020040801 | ISBN 9780262542401 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction—21st century.

  Classification: LCC PN6120.95.S33 M35 2021 | DDC 808.83/8762—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040801

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Gideon Lichfield

  1: “A Veil Was Broken”: Afrofuturist Ytasha L. Womack on the Work of Science Fiction in the 2020s

  Wade Roush

  2: Little Kowloon

  Adrian Hon

  3: Patriotic Canadians Will Not Hoard Food!

  Madeline Ashby

  4: Interviews of Importance

  Malka Older

  5: Jaunt

  Ken Liu

  6: Koronapárty

  Rich Larson

  7: Making Hay

  Cory Doctorow

  8: The Price of Attention

  Karl Schroeder

  9: Mixology for Humanity’s Sake

  D. A. Xiaolin Spires

  10: A Necessary Being

  Indrapramit Das

  11: Vaccine Season

  Hannu Rajaniemi

  Contributors

  Introduction

  Gideon Lichfield

  IF YOU LIVED THROUGH THE YEAR 2020, YOU’VE EXPERIENCED COVID TIME dilation—the phenomenon by which the immense gravity of a global pandemic distorts temporal reality, making events in its vicinity seem to last much longer than they actually did. When I first proposed this anthology to the MIT Press in early April, it was less than three weeks after the first US states had begun going into lockdown, and the presidential primaries that had dominated headlines in February already felt like last year’s news.

  As I write this a mere sixteen weeks later, the global death toll has climbed from some 65,000 to 650,000, the United States has spent weeks being roiled by protests over racism and police brutality, US-China tensions are at an all-time high, President Donald Trump is promoting the views of a physician who believes many diseases are caused by sex with incubi and succubi, and early spring feels like a different decade.

  By the time you read this, thanks to the schedules of book publishing, at least another six months will have passed. It feels almost incomprehensibly far off. Will the United States be tipping over into civil war over a flawed election? Will war have broken out somewhere else? Will there be millions dead from the virus; will a second, even deadlier pandemic have appeared? Am I being clear-eyed and rational, or feverishly apocalyptic? I really can’t tell.

  For perspective, it’s worth remembering that COVID-19 is still small on the scale of the past century’s tragedies—the 1918 flu, AIDS, the world wars, the Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s terror, and the countless other wars, genocides, massacres, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks that have wreaked far more destruction on the places they affected than this virus ever will. The coronavirus kills people and ravages economies, but it doesn’t flatten cities, dismember bodies, or leave its victims bleeding from every orifice.

  What makes it so unsettling is in part that it affects the entire planet at once, leaving nowhere safe to run to (and those places that are now safe are wisely not accepting visitors). Another reason is that the outbreak has laid bare the fragility of the so-called developed world’s economies and healthcare systems. The 2008 financial crisis, the subsequent resurgence of nationalism, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of China have all knocked chunks out of the West’s post-1991 narrative about the ultimate triumph of capitalist liberal democracy, but the coronavirus has ripped open a gaping hole in it that may never be closed up. We are fearful not so much of dying young and alone in an isolation ward as of growing old with absolutely no idea what kind of a world we will grow old in.

  That, of course, is where science fiction comes in. In early April, when it became clear that a long and painful pandemic journey was just beginning, it occurred to me that after a few months of scrambling to adapt to social isolation and economic upheaval, people would be ready to forget the present for a moment and start dreaming about the future.

  The world we live in now feels uncannily like a sci-fi dystopia, but there is also a strong tradition of inspirational (without being utopian) sci-fi about a world made better by technology. It runs all the way from the writings of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke to more recent projects like Neal Stephenson’s 2014 Hieroglyph collection—developed in deliberate opposition to the dystopian tendency—and Twelve Tomorrows, the series of anthologies from MIT Technology Review and the MIT Press of which this volume forms a part.

  In that spirit, I suggested, the MIT Press should commission an “emergency Twelve Tomorrows,” a set of stories plucked from the darkest hour of the pandemic that imagine we’ve come through it and out the other side. What, ideally, would we have learned about building a more resilient, more just society, and how might technology help us do it?

  The authors who responded to our invitation are all well-established, known for their ability to imagine a plausible future in realistic detail. Most write about a post-COVID-19 world, but they vary in how far in the future it is set; some, like Karl Schroeder in “The Price of Attention,” treat the current pandemic as just the first of several, while in Rich Larson’s sweet and melancholy “Koronapárty,” the disease is still raging. In “Little Kowloon,” Adrian Hon deftly plays out the consequences of two present-day disasters, the pandemic and the Chinese crackdown on civil rights in Hong Kong, while Cory Doctorow’s “Making Hay” is a climate-change story. Fans of Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief trilogy will enjoy “Vaccine Season,” which is set in that same universe. In addition, there are terrific, imaginative stories from Madeline Ashby, D. A. Xiaolin Spires, Ken Liu, Indrapramit Das, and Malka Older.

  A shortcoming of this collection is that none of the stories focuses directly on how a post-pandemic society might also become less racially unjust. It’s a shortcoming because the protests that spread across the United States after a white police officer, Derek Ch
auvin, murdered a Black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, are directly related to COVID-19. Black Americans have, up to this point, been 2.5 times as likely to die of the disease as white Americans, because they are more likely to be poor, lack good healthcare, and work in jobs that require contact with a lot of people. Though it’s a coincidence that Floyd was killed just as the United States was about to cross the threshold of 100,000 COVID deaths in late May, it cannot be entirely happenstance that the protests took off as they did. Magnified by that grim statistic, the Trump administration’s clear indifference to the racial disparities of the pandemic surely played a part in driving people to the streets.

  Those events came too late for us to commission a story explicitly looking at racial justice. But we were able to touch on the topic by including an interview, “A Veil Was Broken,” with Ytasha Womack, one of the leading experts on Afrofuturism, about the potential science fiction has to reshape cultural assumptions and the increasingly diverse range of writers who now form part of the contemporary canon. The interviewer is Wade Roush, who edited a previous edition of Twelve Tomorrows.

  In mid-March, just as the lockdowns in the United States were beginning, I wrote an article in MIT Technology Review titled “We’re not going back to normal.” It argued that not only would the pandemic last much longer than most people at that point realized, but also that even after it was over, some of our social norms and structures would be permanently changed. At the time, some readers criticized me for fearmongering. Within a few weeks, the piece seemed prescient. Now it seems blindingly obvious. All the stories in this collection predict that the future will be very far from “normal,” but that the new normal, though forged in pain and suffering, could be a healthier, more robust, and in some ways more creative society. May you enjoy them and take some solace from them in these dark times—if, that is, the times are still dark when you read this, which I sincerely hope they won’t be.

  1

  “A Veil Was Broken”: Afrofuturist Ytasha L. Womack on the Work of Science Fiction in the 2020s

  Wade Roush

  ONE TASK OF SCIENCE FICTION IS TO KNOCK US OFF-KILTER—TO TRANSPORT US TO altered times and places, the better to question our own world. But sci-fi has renewed competition in that department from reality itself. The quickening storm of events in America in the last half-decade, culminating in 2020 in the COVID-19 pandemic, the uprisings against systemic racism, and (as I write this) the strangest and most divisive presidential election in memory, has unmoored us from old norms and expectations with a suddenness that societies witness perhaps once or twice per century. The future is upon us in its full uncontrolled ferocity, and it takes all our resilience just to adapt from week to week and keep steering toward hope.

  But at least one movement within sci-fi may be equal to this moment, in part because it grows out of a history of displacement, atrocity, and instability. It’s Afrofuturism, the effort to explore technological and social change from the point of view of people of African descent and members of the African diaspora.

  Ytasha L. Womack, a Chicago-based author, filmmaker, scholar, and dance therapist, helped explain and popularize the genre in her widely cited 2013 volume Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture. And she explores and expands it in her own fiction, including the “Rayla Universe” series, about a resistance fighter on a future Earth colony that’s fallen into dictatorship. She is a former reporter for the Chicago Defender, the nation’s oldest Black-owned daily newspaper, and in 2010, she wrote Post Black, which celebrated the huge range of African American cultural, social, and political identities overlooked by mainstream media portrayals.

  In an email interview in late July 2020, Womack told me she believes the year’s tumultuous events are finally awakening white Americans to the ways they consciously or inadvertently contribute to the invented hierarchies that overlook or oppress people of color. In one sense, therefore, the pandemic, the resulting economic upheaval, and the explosion of resistance to violence by the state against private citizens are more material for the kinds of social change that Black people have struggled to promote for centuries. And from this larger perspective, Womack says, Afrofuturism is simply one modern manifestation of the age-old “resilience tools” that help Black communities enact and navigate that change.

  WR: It’s been five months since the coronavirus pandemic exploded in the United States, and two months since police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, and I think it’s fair to say these are difficult times. So I wanted to ask first: how have you been coping with 2020?

  YW: 2020 has been revelatory, insightful, and I found myself thinking on resilience, particularly in the content of Afrofuturism. In December 2019, I had the deep urge to complete the draft of a graphic novel I was writing before March 2020. I had the very strong feeling that spring 2020 would be fluid. I had a lot of speaking engagement requests for that period and some other possible work, and I just felt like I had to finish this first draft of Blak Kube, my story about Egyptian gods and creativity, before March or else. I wasn’t aware that this ethereal nudging was speaking to a greater societal shift.

  Nevertheless, the day I finished the draft was the same day I led a live dance and music improvisation experience at the Adler Planetarium to bring the Rayla 2212 utopia to life for “A Night in the Afrofuture.” I coordinated freestyle interplay between DJ/sound healer Shannon Harris; Leon Q, my cousin and a trumpet player; Kenneth “Djedi” Russell, a tap and West African dancer; Discopoet Khari B, a poet and a house music dancer; another conga player; and myself. I was a space dance conductor of sorts and we did these interactive shows utilizing call and response dance with an unsuspecting audience in a 360-degree visual dome usually reserved for sky shows. I led audiences in dance movement with an array of Afrobeat, Chicago house, samba, and South African house music as our music of the new utopia.

  The event felt like a vortex of energy. I like using music and dance to create multidimensional spaces as a metaphor for exploring both inner and outer space. African/African diasporic dance at its core has functioned as interdimensional. People were so happy. It felt like the beginning of one thing and the end of something else.

  The following morning I flew to Atlanta to speak at Planet Deep South, a conference on Afrofuturism. The conference is designed to highlight southern voices and works in Afrofuturism. The conference took place at the Atlanta University Center, an amalgamation of historically Black colleges. I’m a Clark Atlanta University alumna and my initial experiences with Afrofuturism took place on that campus. The conference was organized by Dr. Rico Wade and Clinton Fluker. I gave a keynote speech on Afrofuturism literally at noon the day after the “Night in the Afrofuture.” Ruha Benjamin spoke that evening on discrimination in computer applications and algorithms.

  Dr. Wade gave me a tour of the rampant gentrification in Atlanta. Within two or three days I was in New York City for an event for Kehinde Wiley. As soon as I landed I learned the event was canceled. The next few days, I was in New York going to the Brooklyn Museum for Kehinde’s show with my friend Ravi. Talk of the virus was mounting. Then South by Southwest was canceled and it felt as if a door was shutting and I had to slide through a window of time to get back home.

  Three days later, I was back home in Chicago buying bags of nonperishable groceries, reading how to survive the apocalypse guides, and hunkering down for the Illinois stay-at-home order that was in effect. Somewhere in those moments before lockdown, I remember being in a health food store with mostly African American patrons. People were stocking up on garlic, ginger, echinacea, and every herb or vitamin people knew of to build their immune systems. People were walking around with lists of supplements and teas that family members gave them to buy. In that moment, I grew angry.

  Simultaneously, my stepdad was trying to schedule appointments with his doctor. He believed he had the virus. His physician wouldn’t see him. When he went to [the] emergency [room], he was told he had acid reflux. In ord
er to get a COVID-19 test in the early weeks, one had to have a letter from their physician. We tried to get other physicians to meet with him. None returned calls. By the time we got him to a clinic with a physician who would give him a test, he had to be rushed to the hospital and placed on a ventilator immediately. My mother had to go into self-quarantine. We couldn’t see my stepdad. I was quarantined because I spent time with both in the previous day. For the next two days, I’m reading nothing but news from futurists posting dire scientific information for the world. During the period I’m thinking, outside of the information that’s recommending masks and cleaning processes, where are the tools of resilience?

  Where is the inspiration to keep one fed and their soul enriched during tough times? I literally found myself thinking on spirituality, food, family. Who are the people I talk to to keep my consciousness vibrating highly? What music has the ideal lyrics and frequencies to keep me uplifted? What combinations of food are best to enhance my immune system? What candles do I light? What scents and colors keep me feeling vibrant? How do you hold a healing consciousness for others? What dances keep me refreshed? Am I engaging with nature enough? I was so thankful for all the people who wrote books, created music, and made movies in the past that I could engage in during that bizarre period. I was so thankful for deejays like DJ D-Nice, Questlove, and others who claimed the role of the deejay as a musical shaman.

  Within two weeks my stepdad was off the ventilator and back home. The experience was a miracle and I had a very transformative experience putting to practice basics around spiritual grounding, food, and consciousness. The following week, at my brother’s urging, I started a weekly Instagram Live called Utopia Talks.

  These epiphanies were, literally, my month of March. When the atrocities with George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and later Rayshard Brooks took place I had a conscious awareness of tools to work with around resilience. I had an uncle who was murdered by a police officer in New Orleans in the 1970s before I was born, so my family has created practices of remembrance and healing around such atrocities. I spent a great deal of time in May and June devoted to a daily processing of the politicization of the daily shifts, some of which were in line with incidents of the past, others of which were not.