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Rivers Solomon on colonialism, the apocalypse, and fascinating fungus

Rivers Solomon on colonialism, the apocalypse, and fascinating fungus

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Our Q&A with the author of St. Juju from Better Worlds, our sci-fi project about hope

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Illustration by Allen Laseter

In Rivers Solomon’s story for Better Worlds, “St. Juju,” two lovers contend with the different lives they lead, and the diverging paths where those lives will take them, in a future where life on Earth is drastically different.

Solomon is an acclaimed author whose first novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, hit bookstores in 2017. It follows life aboard a generation ship where society has become stratified along racial lines. Solomon is part of the writing team for Serial Box’s upcoming space opera series The Vela (coming out in March) and their next novel is an adaptation ofThe Deep,” an Afrofuturist song by Clipping. The song was written for This American Life’s episode about the subgenre, “We Are In the Future,” and it was nominated for a Hugo Award last year. The Deep is due in stores on June 4th, 2019.

The Verge spoke with Solomon about communities and the stories they tell as well as their fascination with futuristic fungus.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

“St. Juju” /

An original story by Rivers Solomon for Better Worlds, The Verge’s sci-fi project about hope.

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What was the inspiration for this story, and what about fungus attracted you to this world, in particular?

Lately, I’ve been really intrigued by the idea of the end of the world — how it’s never really real, though it may feel like it is to us living in the midst of climate change as we are. Except on the scale of billions of years, according to the kind of timeline where suns birth and die and so on, worlds are quite adaptive creatures. Earth has had five or so ice ages. Dinosaurs have come and gone, many dying, others living on as birds. Mass extinction is par for the planet’s course.

I talk about this not to downplay the part capitalism and settler colonialism, specifically, have wreaked havoc on ecosystems, disrupted necessary balances, and killed off glorious, wondrous creatures with all the consideration of swatting a fly, but as a way to hold on to a bit of hope. This world is resilient and moldable. It can take myriad shapes, even when it looks like there is nothing beautiful to hold on to. 

“What a wild, wild thing fungus is!”

Fungus is my current obsession. What a wild, wild thing it is! And I think there’s a future in it, a path toward reshaping our world. There’s a lot of exciting research into its possibilities, in the ways discussed in my story, and in other ways as well. 

I’m fascinated by trash, the weird human stain of it, but I like to think it’s natural in its own way. It’s a human product. Animals make waste. So much rhetoric surrounding environmental justice focuses on the way humankind has made the world ugly. We have this obsession with beauty. Landfills are ugly. Urban centers are ugly. Litter is ugly. It’s counterproductive to paint humans as a foreign toxin ruining what is pure and good. We’re part of it. We’re in it. We’re the earth, and we’re neutral. Our existence isn’t a blight. And in this age of crisis, we must innovate ways to rejoin the whole Terran drama, rather than see humans as overseers of it. 

Author Rivers Solomon.
Author Rivers Solomon.

Enid is a hound-mutant, someone who eats things that aren’t exactly food. What was the idea behind her?

I’m always writing about people who feel more kindred with animals than is perhaps socially acceptable. A lot of this has to do with my own history as a Black agender woman, as a disabled and intersex person, as a queer person, the ways in which I’ve been otherized and animalized, my body made equal parts spectacle and beast of burden. 

And goodness, what child didn’t have a horse or dog or wolf phase? Who hasn’t dressed in fake fur hoods with bear ears or lain with a cat under a patch of vibrant sun? 

There was another layer of what if? What if humans could process trash and turn it into usable waste, compost? What if we were one possible solution to our own mess? How could this be revolutionary and beautiful? Alternately, what are its potentials for exploitation? In the earliest versions of this story, hound-mutants were specifically bred in a lab, but I wanted to nod to all the odd, quirky, but helpful adaptations that have made living creatures what they are today, all on their own, through invisible systems of selection. 

“Trash-eaters? Kind of makes you shiver. But there’s something exciting there, too.”

This is one of those inspirations, which came from a multitude of directions because I was also drawn to the incredible skill sets of dogs and how humankind has used that skill set to better the lives of so many people and aid our survival. A beautiful symbiosis. 

Scent and taste are such powerful, visceral senses. Trash-eaters? Kind of makes you shiver. But there’s something exciting there, too, the idea of catching a scent, following it, then making a new world. 

Your world here is broken into smaller communities called enclaves, each with their own rigid social structures and beliefs. How do you see these communities functioning in this larger world? How do you see the divide between their rules and how they allow people to live or exist? 

Enclaves are more or less independent nations, ranging in size from very small to very large, though never anything on the scale of a modern-day country or an old-world kingdom. Most land in what we currently think of as North America is under the sovereignty of indigenous populations and leased to settlers and people not indigenous to the continent. The enclaves are these leased lands, and while somewhat like an intentional community or an eco-village, they also typically have some sort of constitution or contract one must adhere to in exchange for living there and for its protection. Enclaves are where people of shared values come together, and I imagine interaction between different enclaves is not non-existent but varies widely. 

The world outside the enclaves is for the people who’ve never made sense of how to fit themselves into this structure, who cannot for the life of them cede any power over themselves to others. While it’s pleasant to think societies and cultures will progress beyond systematized oppression, in many ways, I also think it’s a necessary part of how so much of society functions, capitalism particularly. So undoing that would take, I don’t know, years and years. We all inherit the drama, you know? Therefore the enclaves aren’t perfect. The people in them aren’t perfect. And as we see in the story, many exploit their inherently closed-off nature to perpetuate pain and harm. The world outside the enclaves is for people who’ve been hurt by communities that were supposed to protect them, or for people who never got along because they’re just too strange, too brainweird, too disabled, too fucked by the things that have happened to them, too questioning, too unwilling to ever settle on any answer. They want a chance to see the world and question it and explore it on their own terms.

Our narrator, Juju, is about to undergo her Coming of Age Rites, which you describe as making a “moral argument to the enclave so they can decide if you’re ready to handle the intense questioning of the tribunal.” What about this practice is important to society here? Do you see a place for that sort of practice today? 

Lately, I can’t stop brooding over why so many people are so very awful, people who have had a chance to change, to be kind, to be good, to progress. Why are there Nazis and other white supremacists? Why are there people who cling life and death to hatefulness? Why are there people who, despite every evidence to the contrary, think there are people who aren’t people? 

The people in the enclave where our protagonists live worry over this, too, and they believe shielding against this badness is a matter of philosophical rigor. It’s the kind of Chidi approach to ethics and moral aptitude, if you’ll pardon a Good Place reference. It’s about knowledge. It’s about sitting in front of a blackboard and thinking out the issues. 

I do think moral reasoning and relations of power are influenced by our culture and upbringing. Of course they are. Many of the world’s ills exist in a larger context of specific, sad histories. So maybe there is a future far enough removed from these contexts that will mean we’ll never have to think about these things, but likely there won’t be. (Of course, that’s just my take!) This enclave understands that, so they want a citizenry who is educated, who is prepared to hold on to goodness, who can defend rightness against whatever those forces that bring plagues like genocide.

As far as how this could function in our own world? You know, I’m not sure we’re at a place for it yet. Too often I’ve had “moral debates” in educational contexts where in reality, it’s very real people, sitting in the classroom, queer people and / or women and so on, having their lives picked apart by an educated person who thinks, well, sure, we should tolerate gays, but Biologically and Evolutionarily, it’s definitely not natural, et cetera. We’re too in a place steeped with prejudices and biases, where the people in power have all the power! So their arguments reign and truth dies.

I like how Juju imagines her life as a small part in a larger story, almost a mythology. How important is that type of storytelling for guidance in this world? 

I can only say that it’s important to me, and it’s probably important to other people who struggle to understand their part in this grand puppet show. Fitting myself into narratives is one of the only ways I’ve been able to get by lately. I’m compelled by the figure of the wanderer without a home, by the orphan (though I have loving parents myself). I reach out to history a lot for hope. Of course, that can be painful because sometimes there’s not a lot of hope to be found, but it’s surprising what endures. The revolutionary fervor of medieval peasants who refused to give into wealthy landowners, of enslaved persons in revolt — marooners building their own enclaves out of the clothes on their back — lesbian nuns who ran convents where women could become learned in Latin and herbal medicine, peoples who’ve read the stars. There’s a lot to love, to hold on to. There is such endless beauty, and so much of that beauty survives in stories, in the ways we make sense of our role in this universe.