– “Tomorrow is tomorrow. Over there is over there. And here and now is not a bad place and time to be, especially when so much of the unknown is beautiful.” – Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars
– “’It is demonstrable,’ said he, ‘that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end.’” – Voltaire, Candide
– “Oh, those sly stars. They always trick me. There is no other world than this one.” – Catherynne M. Valente, The Past is Red
What do we owe each other? We are currently in the midst of a world crumbling around us. Climate disaster claiming more flora and fauna, war claiming more children, diseases claiming our elderly and at-risk, and a myriad of other things being lost in the tumult. Where do we even begin to grapple with functioning in community as each of us struggles to keep it together? A better way to ask the question, how do we care for each other in a world that is on fire? This tumbles into a series of other questions such as what do we each need? How do I care for others when I don’t even have the capacity to care for myself? When we are each looking for some glimmer of hope in the smoke, where do we turn? “We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark (Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters)?” The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente is at its heart an exploration of this. In the short 150 page novella Valente is able to show us why, more than ever, we all need each other. Valente’s work asks us to hold one another, in this present moment, and love every bit of the garbage around us. We are asked not just to hope for something better but to dig in the rubble and salvage all we can. It asks us to give what we have leftover to make sure that those around us don’t sink. And maybe if we are lucky we can bail some of the water out and all get to see land on the horizon.
I remember picking up The Past is Red in 2021 right as I had started a new job at a burgeoning bookstore in town. The pandemic was not past us yet. We were all coming to terms with what this new world after could be. I picked up the book right before a trip to Columbus, OH to visit my then partner’s family and finished it in our three-hour drive. A menagerie of things drew me to the book in the first place. Reviews from Ken Liu and Hank Green on the cover, a new book from an author that I hadn’t read since I was still a kid, and lastly the arresting artwork depicting all the refuse. Days later, sitting in the car, I was proud of past me for the purchase. Finishing it, I turned to my then partner begging them to read what I had. To experience what I had just gone through. Somewhere in all the garbage of Tetley’s world, of our future world, I found a way forward. This proceeded to become an obsession of trying to hand sell this book to people at the bookstore. “It’s this incredibly hopeful book after the world has drowned due to climate change and all the humans live on a garbage island.” The looks and comments I would get from customers should have deterred me but I’m persistent and others walked out the door with this book. I hope that it affected them the way it did me. The Past is Red became a balm for all the confusion and pain as the world tumbled too fast around me. I knew that if I had the care of Tetley that I could at least find some good in the community around me even if only in small ways.
If you do decide to pick up the book, and I suggest heartily that you do, be warned Valente pulls no punches. She dumps us in the bleak landscape of Garbagetown. We are left on the unsteady rubble to deal with what our action or lack thereof has led the characters to. This is where we meet Tetley. Almost immediately we are shown how she views us. We are the “Fuckwits.” We are those that chose individualism and excess above all else. All else being those like Tetley who are now born into a continent consisting of every bit of trash that we couldn’t be bothered to take care of. Like a nightmare we are forced to look at our failure of the grand Litmus test. Tetley shows us a population living in the nostalgia of our destruction. A populous who dreams of living with even just the simple comforts we are afforded. “I eat, I perspire, I sleep, I excrete, I regret my choices, I yearn for the past. I have a very full schedule.” There doesn’t seem to be room left after just existing for the people of Tetley’s world to give themselves or others better care. “I want to have that much left over. I want to have enough left over that it matters to me who has the best smile at the volleyball tournament.” Tetley understands the want of excess and ease that the fuckwits had, but she doesn’t let those dreams mire the present for her. Like a future Candide, Tetley truly believes she is in the best of all possible worlds. Not from some place of cloying optimism but from an understanding that the world she was born into is the only one she can exist in. “They don’t understand. This is it. This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.” What moors Tetley to her ideals is doing the most she can so that those around and after her have support. In her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin I think succinctly states what Tetley knows in her heart. “It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
Valente crafts Tetley so deftly. She is optimistic, frequently stating how good life is. Even though her life ranges from “barely livable” to “I could not physically go on” for most of the book. Tetley lives the life that Voltaire praises in Candide: “What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms till he has gnawed into our hearts?” She is empathetic, taking every opportunity she has to ask others why they hurt, how things make them feel, and what they want to be when they grow up. She is steadfast. Tetley does not waver from her care for others nor her love of the world. This can not only be seen in the way she interacts with people but also the plants and animals she cares for. Objects she holds so dear. Even in the physical locations that are so excessively bleak and yet she still loves them. Damp, lumpy, melted, and with springs poking her, they are still the best places. The people who beat her, curse her name, treat her as other, are still the best people. Though the world she would be more comfortable in has drowned the one she is in still is beautiful to her. This jarring dissonance in one character was so compelling to me. I wanted to comfort Tetley and also on some level to be her. To live life with such love for all that is around me, in spite that all of it has gone to shit. Somewhere in all this mess Tetley chooses to find joy, and in most cases that finding is more of a making. Unlike her peers who hope for joy, happiness, and better things to come Tetley digs through the trash and unearths her joy. Tetley has come to understand what Ross Gay talks about in his book Inciting Joy:
[W]hat happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy” calls “the intolerable,” for its existence?
Tetley has made Joy for herself in her world by deeply witnessing and caring for it.
The Past is Red often gets categorized into a subgenre lovingly called “hopepunk”. The definition of “hopepunk” ranges broadly but the term was coined by Alexandra Rowland in 2017. In a search for something uplifting she imaged the term as a contrast to the Grimdark subgenre. Though contested on what the true definition is, when I categorize books under this label in my head it’s often because of an immense amount of care. More specifically extremely hopeful characters who show that care. The world doesn’t have to be utopic or lacking in sorrow. But through all that there has to be care for others centralized. A great contemporary that almost always gets labeled as “hopepunk” is Becky Chambers. While many books have come before and after that fit the bill I saw the term explode in usage after we all got our hands on A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Where Valente’s world has drowned, Chamber’s world has flourished. Chambers like Valente tries to answer the question of what we all need: “We’re all just trying to be comfortable, and well fed, and unafraid.” (A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Chambers)
Chambers emphasizes action for good as well. “If we want change, or good fortune, or solace, we have to create it for ourselves.” I think though where we find the heart of “hopepunk,” the care, is in the experience that Dex tries to share with Mosscap. Mosscap, a robot who is trying to grasp what humans need, doesn’t think that striving to do more and caring for more than oneself is a base drive for humans. “Survival alone isn’t enough for most people. We’re more than surviving now. We’re thriving. We take care of each other, and the world takes care of us, and we take care of it, and around it goes.” While I love Mosscap, I think that I agree with Dex. This care I think is what puts the “hope” in “hopepunk.”
Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds, another book often lumped into the “hopepunk” category, tells the story of Reid. A young woman living in a small community that lives in the wake of climate change. Each member of the community has a role to fulfill to make sure that everyone is fed, housed, and safe. Reid, her mother, and others in this future also suffer from a fungal disease called Cad. It slowly wrests control of the humans it inhabits till they die. Reid writes an application for one of the only remaining colleges left in hopes of getting an education and coming back to improve the way of living for her community. The book grapples with the question again of “what do we owe each other?” What do we owe others in a family, in a community, in the world? Reid grapples with leaving her mother and community worried that she may unseat some of the security they have. Between her own worries, her mother’s fears, and the general chaos of the world outside of what she knows, the reader gets a front row seat watching Reid determine if making this choice in the hopes of bettering her world is selfish or selfless. Is “getting out” to return with something better worth it? Is it necessary to put that amount of responsibility for others onto ourselves as individuals? I think that just like Tetley, Reid is faced with an impossible choice. No matter which option she allows she risks something monumental. The book is hopeful without giving much in terms of that ethereal hope. The reader believes, like Reid, that the university stands and that they can help.
In The Barricade by Joyce Ch’ng, we meet Ida. We walk with her in a world after capitalism. A world where the oceans rose but we put barricades up along coastal regions. Humans and the Ocean are no longer able to cohabitate. We learn about the new landscape of the world and how people hold and care for each other and the planet. A few generations before Ida they decided to do better for each other. To no longer make living on earth a survival contest. As we uncover through small scrapbooks, structures in the world, and Ida’s parents’ recollections we learn how they wrested the world away from the claws of capitalism. Ida says “Life isn’t a competition or a contest. Competitions and contests had led to the almost-destruction of this planet they lived on, to a flagrant disregard for life in general.” Not only in this story do we see a large shift away from capitalism but we also see a world that is trying to save its relationship with nature. Whole groups of people working to share Terra Firma with the birds, bees, and the ocean that we have become separated from. In the story we are centered in a better, more equitable future. But also one that is still questioning how it can do better for those around it. Ch’ng highlights the sort of emergent strategy for repair that adrienne maree brown talks about in her text Emergent Strategy. This book lays out a path forward informed by feminist, black, queer, and science fiction perspectives that have shaped brown’s thoughts. She describes “good” emergent strategy as non-linear. “Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we can release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves- how do I learn from this?” Ida’s mother in conversation makes it clear that the struggle out of the wreck of capitalism was difficult and hard fought, but by no means fast or easy.
Capitalism, like a vampire, refused to let go of the riches it has sunk its teeth into. It clung on, stubbornly, until the people, all the people revolted. All the villas and mansions – gone. Replaced by hospitals and infirmaries. By gardens and forests. By homes for the ones sleeping rough.
The Barricade presents a salvaged world slowly and fastidiously grown into something new. Something lush and green. Something that can exhale and draw in something fresh and new. Full of opportunity.
But genre and subgenres are a contentious thing for me as a book person. As a book seller and library worker I rub up against how we have historically segregated written works, especially fiction. The debate on what is or isn’t “literary” hurts my soul. Especially looking at most traditional breakdowns leaves women, BIPOC, and queer writers in genre and all the straight white dudes in the illustrious halls of “lit fic.” I run a book club based on genre. I find it hard to keep everyone on board when some books blend, defy, or change genres. As a writer I feel that trying to fit myself into a market based on what I write is sometimes more anxiety than it’s worth. At the end of a capitalistic day though you have to be able to market something. In this context as sub literary genres arrive on the scene I can’t help but be jaded as inevitably they will be the new hashtag or endcap theme. Half the time the words themselves are not helpful and confuse any ability to sort in or out of them.
Let’s look at “steampunk,” for example. Steam insinuates to the reader some sort of vintage cloud infused technology. It is real, definable, and allows us to sort books evenly between non steam based tech and steam based tech. How does “punk” fit into that? I had been frustrated reading most “steampunk” books as I found them lacking in any radical thought. Any dismantling of systems of oppression. I say I was frustrated in the past tense because I eventually found someone who had the same gripes as me and took it into his own hands. Maurice Broadduss’ Pimp My Airship is a lovely example of something with a good dose of “punk.” At the core of the “punk” affix is really two components. One component of these stories is a deviation point that leads to an exaggerated future. These can be ahistorical and choose a point that we have already gone past happening differently. They could also choose a point in the not too far future as that hard pivot. The second component is that “-punk” often centers on ideas of futurity. “Cyberpunk” is an imagined overly consumption based world where the CEO’s haven’t achieved a tech reliant world, but it becomes a capitalistic nightmare. “Biopunk” had the same idea, but instead bio science went HARD and humans integrated in wild ways with nature. These both also imagine a post-human world. These futures are often unrecognizable. In a lot of cases the variable changed beyond recognition is the technology. In others like The Past is Red it’s a large change to the environment. So how can we radically imagine a future that is unrecognizable or maybe a little ahistorical and centers around the idea of salvaging and futurity?
In Adam Turl’s 2020 essay Against Hopepunk,”they argue that “Hopepunk”’s insubstantial root word of “hope” as well as the discourse around the word leave it doing very little in the end. Defining it in opposition to the dark or hopeless leaves the term without any hold and thus everything under the sun can be lumped under the term. Turl’s defines a better version of hope that creates a more narrow idea of what it could be within leftist thought.
Hope for genuine emancipation, from a revolutionary Marxist perspective, comes from the reconciliation of individual human subjectivity with class-consciousness. In other words, hope comes from the existential condition of the worker aligning with the collective social reality, conditions, and interests of the class. When you stop being only “you” and become “you+.”
This definition functions within the realm of “hopepunk” but then also is specific enough in scope that it excludes a lot of the narrative that has been lumped under the larger term. Thus Turl’s defines the genre of “salvagepunk” and determines what they see as being the practical difference in the terms. “It is not within the invocation of a universal humanity that hope lies, but in the realization that there can be no universal humanity under prevailing social relation, and that those relations are changeable.” This term I think is where The Past is Red as well as its compatriots The Annual Migration of Clouds, Psalm for the Wild Built, and The Barricade fall. “Irrealist” pieces that ask us to decentralize our own selves for the collective good. Pieces that exist outside of the now as to allow those of us here to gaze with eyes unclouded and determine new ways to salvage what is left.
In all my frustration trying to wrap my head around these terms I do truly love what they do for the community of readers. As I have observed them used in the wild realms of tumblr, tiktok, etc. they function as almost a laymen’s literary analysis tool. Allowing readers to have conversations about theme, content, to compare texts, and have more nuanced ideas without having to have access to an often elitist and inaccessible vocabulary. While this function of these sub literary genres is beautiful to me I still yearn for the language we use in community to be coherent and functionally communicative. I would argue that this doesn’t require a complete scrapping of the use of sub literary genres, but instead more intentionally created terms. We are humans, and our brains love categorizing things, and while that sometimes has a negative impact in things like how we judge others, places, I would argue the use of categorization of texts into genre, when done with some purpose, helps us create a canon of thought to draw from. So practicing what I preach I think it is beneficial to define where I think the The Past is Red sits, and what texts are its peers. To start in crafting a conversation where we can find genuine discourse without hazy confusion. By defining The Past is Red as “salvagepunk,” I think we align ourselves more directly with Tetley’s thoughts and actions in the book. Not just a sense of hope about tomorrow but a radical call to do something about it. Tetley is frustrated by the unfounded hope of others. It forces Tetley’s hand. Tetley becomes a pariah but exchanges that sentencing for the humans who will have to live in the trash after her. She blows up the ethereal hope that those around her have to salvage something for those to come. In this world of “salvagepunk” and the others I have brought to the discussion here, we find a way to find solidarity with our fellow proletariat. In these worlds we find a call to save what we can. Not just for those of us living in the dystopia now, but for those who will still be fighting the bourgeois in the years to come.
If we answer the question of what we owe each other with the simple word salvage we can find that framework in Tetley’s story and the other discussed here in this essay. What do we owe to each other to salvage? To salvage care by asking each other what we truly need to get by like Mosscap (and Tetley). A world of salvage in which we make sure others only have to do what they can and still receive what they need like the people in sibling Dex’s world. To salvage curiosity by being inquisitive about the world that you currently inhabit, looking at how we got to where we are in both the good and the bad in an effort to do better going forward like Ida. To not let that reflection turn into a nostalgia that prevents us from being able to live and salvage where we are. Tetley begs those around her to love the present. Most of all I think that if we are to truly embody what Tetley and all of her ilk in the world of salvaging do then we must work to make the world better for each other now and later. To push for radical change so that at the end of the day we have something leftover. To imagine a future for all of us where the day to day does not grind our bodies, minds, souls, and love to a pulp in the competitive capitalistic system. If we are to move forward we must love the mess we are in and continually nurture it into something that functions for every one of us. I think that some may read this and imagine it as naïve in itself, but I believe I am of the camp that wants to see humans as at our core caring beings that want to do better for each other. Ross Gay in his essay collection the Book of Delights argues this case better than I can:
I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.
I hope that you stumble on these speculative texts that teach us how to salvage. Find them in some independent bookstore near you and let them radicalize you. Learn from these transformative forms of care that Tetley and her salvaging peers models for us. Ask yourself what you owe to others if you are to be in community. How do we go forward caring in a world stumbling through the tremors of so many earth shakingly bad things. A pandemic that has left us broke but reaching out. A planet that’s thermostat is stuck on high. A political and economic framework that will kill all of us if we let it. The Care Collective in their text “The Care Manifesto” states “To bring our world back from the brink of catastrophe, care needs to be prioritized and worked through on all scales, levels and dimensions: from kinships to communities, from states to transnational strategies…” Let Tetley and friends be our guide in the coming days. Find something in the garbage heap we are currently living in and cherish it, repair it, hold and witness it. Listen to those around you. Really listen. Ask what others want to be when they grow up. Ask them what are things that they cannot live without. Assist each other in getting to those places and ideas. “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved (Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan).” Apply this to the humans and non-humans around you. Care for an animal or two or many. The beings that share this planet with us are so precious. Raise a plant, maybe even one that shares its fruits with you. Learn to care for the planet that is giving her body to us so that maybe we can salvage our relationship with her. Like Tetley “Let us cultivate our garden” (Voltaire, Candide) together that not just those of us here now, but those who come after can share in its bounty and live life to the fullest on this best of all possible worlds.
©2024 M.J. Woods
M.J. Woods is a lifelong writer and reader of the speculative as well as Editor in Chief at the Kismet Magazine. He is also a library worker, bookseller (at Morgenstern Books), and an armchair folklorist. His writing is speculative, fantastical and whimsical in nature, and centers on themes of family, food, Appalachia, queerness, belonging, and nostalgia. M.J. calls Bloomington, Indiana, home with his two cats.
Works Cited
Aoki, Ryka. Light from Uncommon Stars. Tor, 2022.
Brown, Adrienne M., and Adrienne Maree Brown. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2021.
The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto. Verso, 2020.
Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Tordotcom, a Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2021.
Ch’ng, Joyce. “The Barricade // Iz Digital.” IZ Digital, interzone.digital/the-barricade/. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.
Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy: Essays. Workman Publishing Co. Inc, 2022.
Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2022.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. VGSF, 1989.
Mohamed, Premee. The Annual Migration of Clouds. ECW Press, 2021.
Turl, Adam. “Against Hopepunk.” Locust Review, Locust Review, 26 Apr. 2024, http://www.locustreview.com/blogs/against-hopepunk.
Valente, Catherynne M. The Past Is Red. Tordotcom, a Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2021.
Voltaire. Candide and Other Stories. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1992.
Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan. Gollancz, 2023.
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