Speculative Fiction: Dear Mum
A letter from a speculative world
A few days ago, I shared a speculative flash fiction that I wrote titled ‘The Tree’. This story is part of The Xtended Anthology - an in-world artefact from a future marked by ubiquitous mixed reality technology; technology that allows digital realities to be remotely sensed and overlaid seamlessly onto the physical world.
I like the story of The Tree. To me, it is a story about different types of reality that are no more or less ‘real’ than each other.
The historical fiction writer Hilary Mantel often said that she writes stories about real people who happen to be dead.
This is less of a weird segue than it may seem.
Bear with me - for when I think about realities that are no less real for their being digital and difficult to perceive without the aid of sense-extending technologies (like infrasonic microphones, or infrared detectors, or futuristic XR contact lenses that are essentially little light projectors that you stick into your eyes) - I also often think of people who are no less active and present in my life for their being dead.
Digital realities and death. Death and digital life. It’s a frequent coupling in my life, like coffee and oat milk.
A year or so after I wrote The Tree, Inferstudio, my creative practice, was invited by a gallery in Spain to produce a CGI art installation.
The piece that we created - which is now on exhibition as part of a show called ‘Windows to the Future’ at Espacio Fundación Telefónica - is a narrative journey through a speculative world where digital twins of vulnerable landscapes are projected in realtime into human environments. They are entangled together, the human and the non-human, the intimate surrounds of urban life, and distant landscapes on which our current existence in so many ways depends. The piece is titled ‘Entangled Atlas’.
To accompany the exhibition, I wrote the following text. It is a written speculative fiction to go alongside the digital one…words and images, digital and physical, alive and dead.
I think what I am exploring with these thematic groupings is spectrum thinking.
I’m a person who likes boxes. I like categories. I put my husband’s keys in the key box because that is where keys go, not left randomly on the kitchen bench or above the toilet when one comes in the door.
Boxes are not always helpful. I think a part of my mind acknowledges the need for more categorical elision, more bleeding and seepage. So I write about it.
Below are some still images from Inferstudio’s film’ Entangled Atlas’ and a letter from a speculative world, titled ‘Dear Mum’.
Dear Mum,
I thought about you today as we got ready for the party. It's entanglement day! Never heard of it? Not surprising; we invented the holiday. But I've got a feeling it's going to catch on.
We've entangled our living room with your favorite tree; a ghost gum, this one still just a sapling, growing near the spot in the desert where you showed me how to walk without crushing all the plants in my path.
I remember you moved across the landscape like you were part of it. You said; some people think they own the Earth. We forget that we come from it.
I couldn't be further away from that place, now. I'm raising my baby on the other side of the world, in a city built from a millennia of human lives. They will grow up together though, my child and this tree. Two new beings that I will watch over and do my utmost to keep safe. Our attention is a currency. I don't think you would have put it like that but you did used to say: we make things important by looking at them.
I've heard that entanglements with the Amazon are now worth more than logging rights. That has to be good news for our planet.
In the few years since Entangled Atlas came online, our sensors have sent above every continent and every ocean. They are eyes with no feet. Silent, floating sentinels. They make for an unfamiliar sight, perhaps, but I think there's a beauty there; agents of us, humans, bearing witness to the world that we depend on, that we owe a debt to, that we are part of.
You would love this tree, Mum. I'm watching the leaves stir in the Australian breeze and there's a little bird hopping across the red soil. Its song is chiming along with voices of people passing on the street outside.
My body is thousands of miles away but the cluster of tiny cares and thoughts and actions that make up the thing that is me is also there, in the desert, under the ghost gum, with you.
So happy entanglement day Mum. May you rest joyfully and feed the Earth and grow gradually upwards into the canopy that waves at me in my living room. I'm waving back.