After the Storm editor, Alex Mell-Taylor, chats with writer Rose Maxwell about their hope punk story about a radically better future in the wreckage of a massive war. Dive into their thought process in this epic story, and maybe even get one or two fantastic book recommendations while you are at it.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Alex
Okay, so today I have with me Rose Maxwell, who’s going to be talking about their story about a man in a less exploitative society than ours uncovering an old war robot. This discovery becomes the inciting incident that allows this character, Oliver, to process his trauma about the war. Just right off the bat, what was your inspiration for this story?
Rose
So I’ve been…observant of solar punk and the speculative fiction community, which has, I would say, blossomed in the past five to ten years on the internet, specifically for me on Tumblr. I was really interested in these stories of writing about a hopeful, post-apocalyptic future that is different from ours in a way that invokes a more egalitarian, a future where we survive. I saw a list of prompts, and there was one that was about an old man and a robot, and I meant to start writing just a little thing, under a thousand words, and then in this way that happens, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. To get to the place I wanted to go, I had to fill in more gaps. Sometimes, there are stories I’ve been mulling over for months and months, and this one came out of me all at once.
Alex
Wonderful. To you, what is solar punk?
Rose
Yeah, that’s a really great question. For me, it’s about telling stories about a future that is more environmentally and socially just, but in a way that’s inherently counter-cultural, so that’s kind of the punk suffix [part of it]…There’s a scrappiness to it, [again], a counter-cultural element. [In my story] there’s not an active conflict between external forces but that is something that still looms in the background and is kind of potentially out in the world. So there’s still a grittiness to it…It definitely engages with leftist themes pretty explicitly, and this idea of hope really focuses on environmental and social equality.
Alex
I have a question about that because you show a better society, but it’s more or less in the background of this story. I wanted to ask—you talked about the prompt being on Tumblr—but did you have an idea of what the society would look like from the onset, or did it evolve more organically from the writing process?
Rose
I think this is a world I’ve been thinking about a lot. This idea of this hopeful post-apocalypse world. Again, the details of it are not super explicitly written out, but it’s definitely inspired by what I would call this genre of leftist utopian fiction: The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These other books go really into the nitty-gritty of how this all works. What are the neighborhood councils like? How does food distribution [happen]?
I really wanted to drill in on the relationships and the interiority of the characters. So…I had in the background a vague idea of how it works. It’s something that I think about both in terms of fiction and also in terms of activist and organizing work. Having that vision of what the brighter future looks like is very important to me. So I could bring in a little bit when I needed the setting details, but I didn’t have the pressure to be like, “Oh, what does a more egalitarian society look like in the nitty-gritty?” which helped me definitely not have to figure out every detail of it but instead being able to think about and have this kind of general picture of it. It’s more localized. There are more sustainable ways of growing things. There’s more community bonding and community building, but yeah, I don’t know exactly what the governance looks like on a day-to-day level.
Alex
That’s completely fair. I noticed that there was a barter structure in your story. It’s a small scene in which Oliver interacts with the milkman, and he gives him something like tomatoes.
Rose
Yeah that’s something that is inspired by my own positive experiences. For the past several years, I worked at an urban farm. One of the great things about working at an urban farm is you build these connections with people. While we sold produce for money, you also have these community connections. At a previous farm I worked at, there was one guy, and every year we would give him tomatillos. And he would just come back with the salsa. It was this little kind of connection that we had, but it was this way of building community and looking out for each other. And so that was something that I wrote in to give this sense of these tight-knit communities in a world that is not structured around money and profit.
Alex
I really like that. It’s one of these small moments. I feel like sometimes you can get this utopian fiction that is very “hitting the hammer over the head.” You integrate it very well.
I want to sort of switch themes a little bit. I noticed in the story Oliver didn’t participate in the war. He has regret about how he survived while the idealists of his generation died out. I think you say, “he was in a city that had an increasingly smaller and smaller number of idealists” or something along those lines. I’m paraphrasing there. Could you speak more to this theme of idealists paving the way for a future that they will not see?
Rose
That’s a really beautiful way of putting it, and maybe not something that I was thinking about as explicitly. The idea that there are these people who are fighting for the future who died out. And then Oliver is the one who gets to live in it. I think that’s again something that comes up a lot in social justice spaces—this idea of building something for a future that you might not necessarily see. Even again if there isn’t war or catastrophe but just kind of in the human lifetime, [we age].
I’m interested in themes of guilt and regret. Not everyone in the utopic future, if it exists, is going to be a firebrand. What does it mean to be one of those other people? What does it mean to feel left behind or feel like you could have done more? I think that there is a beautiful theme that you pulled out that I wasn’t even thinking about about how there are these idealists who died off but then the thing they’re fighting for did happen. And so there is a success story in that as well.
Alex
There’s like this tension between Oliver and his [deceased partner Elijah]. There’s almost this resentment that he feels towards his partner that he’s working through. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Rose
One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how a lot of fiction is about big ideas in society and what the future looks like. Ultimately, the stories that I find myself drawn to are often about people having really complicated interpersonal relationships, and this is one of them. I was interested in this idea of how many of us have people in our lives who we feel are living their lives more truly and expressively and able to take more risks or commit further, more fully to things than we are. That can be a complicated feeling, and it’s definitely one that I’ve had in communities.
That was something I wanted to explore. [It would have been] very easy [for Oliver to have] this beautiful lost lover and that relationship to be utterly uncomplicated until it was marred by tragedy, but I wanted to get the messy, complicated bits of that. Your memories of these people are never going to be 100% positive or 100% any one emotion. They’re always going to be complicated. That relationship ended up really illuminating the story for me in a way that a lot of it is about these parallel relationships of the past and then this present relationship with the robot and how the bigger themes of society and ideals and war end up just like complicating the inner lives of these people.
Alex
I found it very beautiful. It made it more of an interesting story to read through, parsing through the complicated emotions, and it didn’t seem to be just Oliver. This character never speaks, but the war robot seems to have complicated emotions as well if you can call them that. What did you think the robot’s perspective was in this story?
Rose
That’s a really interesting question. The robot was also a character where it felt like there was an easy trap for me to fall into…of [the robot] just being pure and naive. He shows up, and he’s like a blank slate. He just wants to grow vegetables, which definitely is part of it. There’s a parallel story that both Oliver and the robot are on of “how do you live after war? How do you live after tragedy? How do you live with these dark things that you’ve done in your past?” For Oliver, that’s about passivity and the things he didn’t do. For the robot, it’s about what he did do, although that is complicated by how much of that is in your control if you’re a machine. The robot is, like Oliver, very desperately reaching for a community and maybe in a way that’s more honest [than Oliver]. Oliver is a character who does want people in his life but can’t admit that to himself and has a hard time making those connections. Where I think the robot is, in a way, a more open character about wanting these connections, and they kind of find each other together.
Alex
Oliver is definitely, from my perspective, a little bit of a curmudgeon, and it’s always refreshing to see the curmudgeon with a character that is a bit more pure —it feels weird to say pure of a robot that killed people. But someone whose intentions are a little bit more clear. I love this conversation about regret. Do you have any other points that you want to talk about [concerning storytelling]?
Rose
I think that there can be a tension when writing utopian futures or solar punk fiction of what the conflict is. In this mode of storytelling that we’re all part of, there has to be an animating conflict. A lot of times, it’s that there’s a bad society and a good society, or the conflict is someone traveling to the good society and learning more about it. I’m drawn more to those more interior conflicts. Even if we reach this utopian future, it will be complicated. There will be people who are [living in] the past, and what does it mean to be from the past and to feel a little alien in this world that’s so much better than the world you grew up in? That was a lot of what ended up being the question I was working through for this story and that I found really interesting. I just generally find guilt a pretty compelling and rich topic, so it worked well in this setting.
Alex
Guilt and shame are pretty powerful motivators, and they make great story vehicles because they often propel characters towards not-great decisions that are very interesting in a literary sense. Like a reader doesn’t want to follow an unproblematic person with a non-external threat, right?
So, I want to talk about collapse. In your story, some sort of great war happened. It’s over, but it seems to have completely torn asunder our current society. There is no internet, for example. There’s all of these ruins. There seems to be this theme in Solar Punk more broadly, as well as in your story, about a better world emerging from collapse. What are your thought processes on that theme?
Rose
I now want to plug like my favorite book of all time, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, which is a book about the fact that when disasters happen, there’s [a form of] disaster communism where people come together and share things, and there are these moments of really beautiful community building. And for me, that’s inspirational as a storyteller imagining these futures, and [imagining] if we were able to do it more permanently… As a person, it really animates my beliefs that people, when faced with danger, will turn toward each other and turn toward community. I think that there is a lot of the inspiration for these kinds of stories from these structures that were built up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquakes that happened in the early 20th century.
There are also ways in which communities that have been in more permanent crisis have come up with ways to support each other throughout history. I’m drawn to the idea of “okay if all we have is each other, what can we build?” And so maybe you can’t have a fully functioning internet, which would be a huge loss. I don’t want to sugarcoat the loss of a lot of modern technology, but I think I drive a lot of hope and organizing energy from the idea that “okay, if all we have is each other, we can still build something.” That’s what we’re talking about with these solar punk worlds.
Alex
It reminds me of that quote about ruins…actually, I think I have it right here. I just googled it: “For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities…We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins.” It’s from a Spanish-born anarchist, Buenaventura Durruti. Your description of people coming together had me think of it.
So, I have a little bit of a confession. I love Rebecca Solnit, particularly the book A Paradise Built in Hell, and if I remember correctly, she also talks about elites panicking over what workers will do in the face of, for lack of a better phrase, capitalism going away momentarily during disasters. You see that sort of in your story as well in the form of these robots. You can argue that these robots are elite panic in a way. Was that what you were thinking about, or was it more general?
Rose
Not as specifically. Although I love that. I liked the idea that a robot is a machine that looks and interacts like a human. More creative and imaginative people than me have been able to pull that in further places about what is this line between machine and human. Mine just kind of physically looks like a human, but I think that it relates to how we all are manufactured by the societies and the culture that we’re in to work in certain ways.
With a robot, it’s a little more direct as there’s less free will, which is the trap I got into at the end of the story because I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile that right [with their violent actions]. I think it can only be reconciled for me on a moral level if these machines truly were not in control of their own programming in the way that humans are. We do have free will. [This robot didn’t]. That is a way to talk directly about machines and machine-driven violence, which is a lot of the violence that we’re seeing around the world today, in a way that makes it more [understandable].
Alex
So we’re we’re coming to the end of our interview. This has been fantastic. I like to close these out with the question, of what are some of your favorite pieces of futurist media? It doesn’t just have to be a book, although books are perfect. I will say that if you mention Star Trek, you have to mention your favorite Trek.
Rose
Okay, in terms of left-wing utopian fiction, which I think is an underplumbed genre, there’s a lot of stuff there that’s pretty interesting. One I’ve read in the past couple of years is called Everything for Everyone: an Oral History of the New York Commune 2052 to 2072, and its two authors are M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. It is a fake oral history of the collapse and then rebuilding of New York City as a left-wing commune. And so each chapter is a different interview with someone who was involved in a different part of it. So there’s a part about family structures. There’s a part about agriculture. There’s a part about the wars and the violence that took place to kind of protect it. I just think it’s so cool. They really commit to it. There’s a whole anthropologist introduction to it. My housemate gave it to me as a gift, and it made us both cry a little bit. That is how detailed this description of this future was, so I definitely would recommend that.
In terms of fiction that mixes the speculative with social movements, Margaret Killjoy’s work We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow has some near future stuff, but it’s a short story collection, so there’s a lot there. I love her work. I think she is amazing. My go-to utopian book is The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is subtitled “An Ambivalent Utopia.” It’s about two planets—one of which is anarchist and one of which is a mix but predominantly capitalist—interacting for the first time in a thousand years. Also, shout out to Parable of the Sower, another classic of the genre. Octavia Butler is someone who’s interested in the future, power, relationships, and how power manifests itself in ways that are both horrifying and beautiful.
Alex
Perfect. As we close up, do you have any plugs?
Rose
This is a great question because I don’t, and this is a thing I’ve been thinking about now that Bluesky exists. So, currently, no. I think my one plug would be I volunteer with the Massachusetts Bail Fund. If you live in Massachusetts, donate to them. If you don’t live in Massachusetts, you have a local bail fund. You should donate to them or volunteer with them, depending on what they need. Hopefully, in the future, I will have an actual website, but I don’t, so that’s my one plug
Alex
And readers can find us at afterthestormmagazine.com where we are quarterly publishing speculative fiction that is trying to be hopeful and optimistic about what a better world can look like. We also have a recent novella that was published by one of our contributors called Bone Rush, which is about a PhD student in space trying to prove their thesis about an old Earth colony. So buy it today.
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