JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I put off registering for vaccination because I didn’t want to navigate the bureaucracy and I was waiting for the other vaccines to become available. I did not want to be in a crowd (even in non-pandemic times I am socially distant). Through my friend I signed up with a private provider whose Moderna stocks are supposed to arrive in June. I have hypertension (genes) which seems to have vanished with the deadline-chasing (advantage of finally focusing on fiction), but I’m on meds and in a priority group.

Last week friends started pushing me to get vaccinated because there were plenty of vaccines, not enough people signing up for them, and it was easy. Dorski pointed out that when the vaccine lists open up it might be harder to get an appointment. If you don’t get the kind you want, just get a booster later.

Early morning Wednesday I signed up online for the vaccine in Makati, and 18 hours later I got a text informing me of my appointment on Friday.

Drogon, my eldest

My appointment wasn’t till 1120, but I was up two hours earlier than usual because Drogon was meowing for his breakfast. I’d decreased the cats’ meal portions as they’re all overweight, and they have been cooperative but cranky in the morning. I am usually ridiculously early for appointments (neurosis from childhood), so I delayed leaving the house as much as I could but still got to Fort Bonifacio Elementary School half an hour ahead of my schedule. Maybe there’d be no-shows and I’d finish earlier?

Fort Bonifacio Elementary School has impressive facilities, better than UP (though I know that’s not a high bar). The guard at the main gate took my temperature, then pointed me to the first station, where my appointment was verified and my ID checked. At the second station someone looked at my medical certificate, and at the next I filled out some forms before someone took my blood pressure. After months of being borderline low, my bp was borderline high—either my systems were showing proof of comorbidity (our vocabulary increases with each catastrophe), or I have white coat syndrome (in this case blue scrubs and full PPE). More likely I was excited: after 15 months of inertia, liberation loomed!

At the next station someone looked at my documents and I learned that I would be getting the Astra Zeneca vaccine. Whose side effects Eric Clapton had complained about. (Clapton bitching about drugs given his history: absurd.) This is not the time to be brand-conscious, but I was happy to hear I would get AZ.

Next there was a 30-person queue on nice chairs set a meter apart. At each step there were one or two city employees reminding us to keep masks and face shields on and face forward to minimize risk of contagion. We were always comfortable and in the shade, with industrial fans and open doors and windows for proper ventilation. A radio was tuned to some 80s pop divas program, because it’s not real unless Debbie Gibson is singing “Lost In Your Eyes”. Then there were two songs by Whitney Houston and I braced myself for “Indayyyyayyaaayyy” but the queue was soon out of radio range. The line moved briskly, and the lady behind me was especially enthusiastic, giving the scene the air of musical chairs at a children’s party. The lady in front of me, in skinny jeans that were perilously low-rise, moved slowly, prompting encouragement from the enthusiastic one. “Sandali lang,” the skinny-jeaned lady complained, “Nadulas ako sa banyo, masakit ang balakang ko.” And then they were exchanging medical histories. It really felt like a children’s party, with titos holding clipboards directing us at each station.

Jacob, my middle cat

It seemed to me that there were too many stations, duplicate functions, the same questions asked over and over again and the same instructions repeated like a mantra. Then I remembered that I know nothing about Filipino social expectations. The point is not to finish as quickly as possible, but to make sure everyone understands what’s going on. This entails constantly reminding and reassuring people. And in many cases, promising aging macho men that the needle won’t hurt. Because everything here is personal.

After an hour in the queue, I was in the cold vaccination room. The nurses kindly offered to record the actual jabs on the vaccinees’ phones. “Should she be allowed to get the vaccine?” a lady asked, and even with her mask on you knew she was pointing at someone with her puckered lips (nguso). The subject was a thin lady whose lower legs and feet were black—signs of advanced diabetes. “She had an operation,” the subject’s companion said, “but it’s still like that.” A nurse assured the questioner that the doctors in the earlier stations had cleared the diabetic for vaccination. “But we were sitting down, how could they see?” the questioner continued. “And you know, some people lie.” Within the subject’s hearing!

Then it was my turn. I declined video and pointed to my left arm. I didn’t even feel the jab, it was so fast, then a bandage was applied. I’d been waiting for this for 15 months, and I barely noticed when it happened.

Another queue to have our temperatures taken and oximeters clamped on our fingers. Then a blood pressure reading, then someone talked to each of us about possible side effects and handed us 5 paracetamol tablets each just in case. Why not record the instructions and play them on a loop instead of repeating the same spiel 20 times an hour? Because the personal touch is vital in Filipino interactions. Also, it was a way of keeping everyone for 30 minutes to check for any adverse reactions to the vaccine.

Buffy the ex-ratslayer, my youngest

At the next station a man with a tablet recorded my information once again. This took a while because the wi-fi signal was faint. He looked at my ID and asked if I had other ID. “What’s wrong with it?” I said. The numbers were too tiny for him to read. I read them to him. Finally I was advised to return in exactly 3 months, which seemed long until I looked up the AZ vaccine and learned that 12 weeks is the optimal period before the second dose.

And I was done. Total time spent at the vaccine center: 2 hours. I went home, had lunch, didn’t notice any side effects other than a little tiredness. I did sleep extra-soundly that night, which could be from being woken up early, or from massive relief at getting vaccinated at last.

If you haven’t registered for vaccination with your local government unit, do it now.

I know I say “brilliant” a lot, but this book is a light source in our shady times. Initially I was drawn by the premise—woman discovers boyfriend is a popular anonymous conspiracy theorist on Instagram—but I was swiftly, then happily disappointed. It veered from the direction I’d expected and went straight into my life. Our lives, for we all live in our phones now. (I’m not saying that a novel is better because it’s “relatable” or “relevant,” but it gives the reading experience a sense of urgency.)

Fake Accounts sounds like a sharp, scathing book review, the sort I seldom see anymore because everyone has to play nice (while wishing someone would do a takedown because those are fun). I thought the tone would change at some point, but when it became clear that it would be sustained throughout, I stopped to google the author. (Which is a point the book makes, that our primary relationship is with screens and I often stop needlessly to check my phone.) Turns out I’d read Oyler before—her cutting book reviews shut up the hallelujah chorus that usually greets new work by media darlings. (The outlier/dissenting opinion is not necessarily better, but reading it is more useful for brain function.)

Then it struck me: This is what the Internet sounds like. People trying to sound smarter than they are while making the reader think she’s smarter than she is. It’s hilarious, and it’s genius. Fake Accounts is a comedy of manners set at a time when people demand authenticity even as they invent themselves online.

Following her boyfriend’s death the unnamed narrator quits her job at a media company, goes to Berlin (where she’d met her boyfriend) with no real plan, and joins a dating website. Half the book is about her dates, and it’s not a series of sexcapades. We get detailed accounts of attempts to connect with potential partners and create something real—as if this were possible when her personality and history change with each encounter. One day she’s a massage therapist, the next day a classical musician, because it’s so easy to turn into someone else (and if I claim that my cat is writing this you’ll think I’m kidding but how do you know I’m not?) Later she invents profiles according to astrological signs. Astrology isn’t real, she notes, but its influence on how people behave is real. Everyone insists they’re real, but what’s real?

The narrator is observing life rather than living it, describing emotions rather than feeling them, performing a self rather than being it. Welcome to the age of social media, which promises to connect us by putting screens between us. Where you expose your innermost thoughts in exchange for attention, and the more attention you get, the less control you have over your own thoughts (Because once you’ve had a million likes, you cannot settle for half a million). Where you are the show and your life is a performance.

Spring
by Ali Smith

Suddenly I realized I had not read Spring, which has been sitting on a shelf for two years. How could this happen? My excuse is that I do not regard Ali Smith’s book as narratives but as adventures, so I save them for when I really need them (like now). When I read her books I have no idea what I’m getting into. The author trusts that I don’t need a road map—I jump in, and as I hurtle down (or up, I can’t tell) I am assailed by sights, sounds, wordplay, puns, feelings, colors, jokes, memories of things that never happened to me, so that by the time I get to the bottom (or top), I know I have been through an experience. One I cannot simply summarize it in words. If people want to know what it is they will have to read it for themselves, and they will thank me for telling them nothing.

So all the books by Ali Smith sitting on the shelf (alongside the books of her friend Kate Atkinson) merge in my memory like an art exhibit. (Note: Her novel How To Be Both comes in two sections which may be read in either order.) I retain details: the one with the artist of the cinquecento, the guy who won’t come out of the bathroom like the guests in Buñuels’ Exterminating Angel, etc. Spring is the third in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet—she’s dropped a new novel every year since 2016, and the series is unconnected but related by politics and the events of this bonkers world. How bonkers? The covid pandemic is just the latest in the series of unthinkables that have come to pass, and her punishing publication schedule allowed her to write it into the final book, Summer. I had thought the quartet was triggered by Brexit, but in an interview she said she started writing the books even before that—she is not just prolific, but clairvoyant.

Though the subjects of the Seasonal Quartet are bleak, sad, scary, the books are alive with hope, laughter, and compassion because that is what being human is, pulling joy out of despair. Spring involves a near-forgotten TV director and his late friend and mentor, a guard at an immigration detention center, a mysterious child performing rescue missions, the work of the artist Tacita Dean, the writers Rainier Maria Rilke and Katherine Mansfield, and an 18th century battle in Scotland. Like Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky, which must’ve been written at the same time, she mentions the song “Hunger” by Florence + The Machine.

While I was reading Spring I wasn’t in another lockdown hiding from 10,000 new covid cases daily, I was riding a succession of trains and then cramming into a lunch van with a lot of people on the way to an historical site. I was free and fully alive in the bizarre now. Smith has said that her goal was to capture the present moment (hence the brief publication schedule), and she does. Spring is a time machine to 2018.

Klara and The Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Probably because I have been languishing in enforced isolation for 13 months, though it must be said that I am antisocial by nature and therefore comfortable in isolation as long as I have the option to go out (and at the time I wrote this I had not gone out in 7 weeks); probably because I have had to live vicariously through books and movies and place upon them the burden of liberating me from this long sentence of sameness and claustrophobia; probably because I am a great admirer of Kazuo Ishiguro and have been looking forward to a new novel from him for several years (and I disliked The Buried Giant even before I read the withering review/scolding by Ursula Le Guin); and probably because Artificial Intelligence is no longer a science-fiction concept but a banal reality (Are we not all programmed by algorithms now?), no longer something to fear (Terminator) but a potential solution to the arrogant human bumbling that has brought the world to the brink of oblivion, my pleasure (because I did enjoy it) at reading Klara and the Sun was tinged with irritation at the narrator-protagonist’s relationship with the world. I found myself wishing Ishiguro would vary his schtick a little.

To be fair this schtick is one of the reasons I enjoy his novels: the clueless unreliable narrator who knows less about what is happening to them than I, the reader, do. The once-famous artist in denial of his complicity in totalitarianism and repression in Japan, the butler constrained by class and ideas of “dignity”, and the revelation in another novel that I won’t spoil for you because it is such an “A-ha!” (not the band) moment.

Klara in the new novel is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid robot with the ability to observe, draw insight, and develop empathy with her human companions. Like the aforementioned narrators she is recalling the past, indulging in the nostalgia that colors the novel with melancholy. It is established at the outset that Klara is learning about the world by watching it and drawing her own conclusions, and her innocence and naivete are quite touching. The thing is, we know that she is an unreliable narrator. Even if I had expected it, I like having the knowledge creep up on me. We are always aware of Klara’s constraints. We are seeing events unfold and relationships evolve from the POV of a machine. Unlike the butler in The Remains of the Day, she has no sense of humanity to lose. So when she describes a tense, ugly encounter between adult humans in the manner of a naturalist talking about the mating rituals of forest animals, I hear myself telling her to get on with it. I am not in the mood for emotional distancing, it’s already my life.

Her affectlessness dulls the emotional payoff. It’s too neat and polite. Maybe I just need the chaos and randomness that isolation has shut out (though they’re there, they’re always there). In sum, good book, but too much like isolation. It’s not the book, it’s me.

This is the text of my speech at the UMPIL (Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas) Congress in August 2020. Nobody ever talks about how writers make a living, so I did.

Most of us would’ve preferred to meet in person, but this is how we assemble now. I would argue that even before the pandemic upended our lives, online was increasingly becoming the home of writers. With the onset of the digital age and the decline of print media, many of us found new employment online. And with the ridiculous road traffic that no one misses, traveling any distance to a meeting had begun to resemble a hostage situation.

I am still surprised when people say, “Sorry, I’m not a techie, I can’t access that file” and request the printed copy. We all love paper. If I had my way, I would write everything longhand on vellum and send it out by ravens. There is nothing like a book, the smell of ink and paper, the weight in your hands. But it’s the 21st century, and online is just faster, cheaper, more convenient, and now, safer. The resistance to digital technology is understandable given privacy issues, cybercrime, and the way social media has disrupted the democratic process. Like it or not, until we have mastered telepathy, we’re going to have to deal with it.

I do not believe that the resistance to technology is a function of age. I am older than many of you. I think this feeling of helplessness goes back to when people had secretaries and assistants to do their correspondence. Technology has made everything easier, but you have to do things for yourself. Also, those of us born before the 80s remember when technology was expensive and easily breakable. Not anymore. Now we learn by making mistakes. With each systems upgrade, we reset learning parameters. Groucho Marx had a bit where he said, “A five-year-old can do this. Bring me a five-year-old.” You would do well to follow that Marx.

Given the theme of this conference, I’d like to talk about something essential that is rarely discussed in the open. Writers are expected to talk about the profound philosophical issues of the day, and this topic is considered tacky and crass. However, we cannot live without it. I’d like to talk about writers and money, and the difficulty of making a living by writing, especially now that existing problems have been magnified by the pandemic. My talk is entitled Living By Our Wits When Everyone Is Scared Out Of Theirs.

In the Philippines, and in many other countries but especially the Philippines, when you tell your elders that you want to be a writer, the usual reaction is, “But there’s no money in it.” This is true, of course, and if you listened to your elders you would probably not be at this conference. My elders didn’t shut down my aspirations completely, but they approached it from an angle: “Why don’t you study law or medicine or something that will lead to a lucrative profession, and then write on the side?” Practical advice, though it doesn’t speak well of our attitude towards culture in general and literature in particular. We’re not alone in this. I’ve been told that in France, a country that is admired for the importance it places on culture, parents wish their children would become engineers, so that their children’s children can be writers and artists. Money is always a consideration.

We live in a society where poverty is rampant, and yet it is considered the worst insult to be called poor. Even when it’s a fact. I have heard otherwise nice people disparage others by saying, “Wala namang pera yan.” You can write magnificent books that change the lives of the people who read it, but if you have no money, you’re nothing. Worse, you’re a fool for dedicating your abilities to something that won’t make you rich.

At the same time there seems to be a rule that if you’re a writer, you’re already doing what you love, and so you don’t need to get paid for your writing. Consider the plight of a freelance writer. Payments for freelance articles have not changed since I started writing in the 1990s. In many cases, the rates have decreased. In many cases, you don’t get paid at all: the understanding is that having your byline appear in a publication is an ad for your services, so someone else will hire you. Many newspaper columns are public relations vehicles for the author and their clients. Sometimes you don’t get paid, for the simple reason that the publication has no money, and is somehow still running.

Say you get an assignment from an editor. The fee is P1,500 for an 800-word article. You incur expenses researching, conducting interviews, and writing that article—sometimes more than P1,500, but that’s okay because you were never in this to get rich. You submit your article. And then you have to wait until the article is published, the accounting department prepares the cheque, the cheques are signed and released, etc. You get paid at least one month later. For magazines it takes longer. How are you going to live?

Collecting your fees is another problem. It is often humiliating. You call the office of the people who owe you money, get passed around, and after you’ve repeated your request many times, with mounting embarrassment, you are told to call again. Why is it that the writer collecting their fee is the one who’s embarrassed? Shouldn’t the debtor be the embarrassed party? Collecting is an admission that you need the money. It is embarrassing to not have money, even if it’s true.

I have been a freelance writer all my life. I sold my first magazine article when I had just graduated high school, and I paid for my tuition fees at UP by freelance-writing. Marita Nuque, the editor of Woman Today magazine, gave me a regular gig writing cover stories. I interviewed a lot of artista and fashion models. At the time my ambition was to write about bands for Rolling Stone Magazine, so I wrote about aspiring actors as if they were rockstars. I got paid P150 per 1,000-word article. My tuition fee during my first semester at UP was P360.

When I got out of college, I decided to get my own apartment. I shared an apartment with two people. My share of the rent was P2,000. By that time, the magazine was paying P300 per article. So if I wrote ten articles in one month, my rent and utilities were covered. I found other freelance work. Publicists paid decent money for me to write ten versions of a press release about shampoo. I wrote copy for in-house corporate publications. I won a Palanca Award for a short story, and the prize was P10,000. Sometimes I was hired to write the copy for advertising supplements—those paid well.

Then I started writing a newspaper column. It was a small paper, but I got paid P2,000 then P3,000 per 1,000-word column. My column appeared three times a week. I wrote so many columns that I developed a counter in my brain that automatically told me to stop when I reached 1,000 words. Between the twelve columns a month and other freelance jobs, I managed to pay the bills. I never had a regular salary or benefits. I got paid by volume.

Soon I discovered that if you have a following as a writer, and you are comfortable with speaking in public, you will be offered jobs in other media. I started doing a radio talk show, then a TV talk show. These paid more than writing. I told myself that in my free time, I could write the novel I’d been threatening to write since I was in high school. This was harder than I thought. Some people can write for their day jobs, and write novels in their spare time. Turns out I need focus and momentum. I started several novels and never got past 50 pages. Some became short stories. Some were just terrible.

And then the 90s ended.

In 2000, some friends and I decided to put up a magazine. It would be a journal of current affairs and culture, and we decided to name it after a column I’d written in ’93. In the column I joked that the millions of overseas Filipino workers were our army of world domination. They were working in the houses of the powerful, raising their children and maintaining their households while their employers ran the global economy. If the OFWs went on strike, countries would stop functioning.

We started pitching Flip: The Official Guide to World Domination to investors. It was not a good time to pitch a magazine. Every other day, articles came out about the impending death of print. But we thought our concept was sufficiently different to survive the change. We asked investors to fund a monthly magazine for two years, after which we would be able to sustain operations through advertising sales and retail. We raised only a third of what we needed, but managed to keep going for one year. Flip folded in 2003.

I went back to writing columns for a bigger newspaper. The pay was the same, but we writers got a lot of foreign trips and gift certificates from sponsors, because how could we write about lifestyles without experiencing them ourselves? I had front seat tickets to the singles finals at the Australian Open of tennis. I flew business class, wore a Missoni scarf and dragged a Rimowa suitcase. But I had grown tired of writing columns. I felt that everything I had to say, I had already said. It is not a good thing to repeat yourself. And I still hadn’t finished a novel.

A couple of times I got commissions to produce books for corporate clients. These jobs pay well, but there’s lots of better-known competition. Besides, I was supposed to be “quirky” and “angsty” and therefore not a natural choice to be writing corporate books. I consoled myself that I was not considered boring enough to write for corporations, but I could’ve used that money. The cost of living kept on rising, but the pay for writing did not. I had credit card debts. Eventually I had to accept that I could not pay off my card debts if I kept using the cards and only paying the monthly minimums. The card companies hired collection agencies which made ugly threats. I cut my cards and paid off my debts.

Meanwhile, the Internet and social media were changing the ways people consumed information. Print readership was falling. Younger readers were getting their news from social media. Public discourse had grown exponentially vicious. And I still hadn’t finished a novel.

One day I realized I was pushing 50. I decided to drop everything and write a novel. It was, as they say, a leap of faith—I had no alternative sources of income. I thought that if I finished a novel, everything would be fall into place. It did, but not the way I thought it would.

When I was a kid, I thought that I would become a bestselling novelist and live off my royalties. My books sold decently, but my royalties were not enough to live on. I knew I could not go back to writing columns. Publications were cutting staff, or shutting down. I had to find another way to make a living. My friend started an online channel and was looking for original content. I started writing and hosting a talk show called The Sanity Maintenance Program. I started giving writing workshops.

Today I do the talk show, give workshops, and sell my books online and at events that I organize. I’ve looked into self-publishing, and at subscription-based platforms like Patreon. Everyone has to learn to do their own office work in the digital age, and writers have to do their own self-promotion, marketing, and sales. We don’t have literary agencies in the Philippines, we have to do everything ourselves. Yes, it seems shameful. Our work should be able to speak for itself, we shouldn’t have to sell ourselves. But it’s the 21st century and this is how we roll.

Today the pandemic is destroying the economy and our institutions. It was hard enough to make a living as a writer before the pandemic, and now I can’t imagine what’s going to happen. But we cannot stop writing. We have to keep looking for ways to live off our work. Writing is an essential service vital to the survival of humanity and it should be treated as such. I refuse to see it as a kind of martyrdom.

I like to describe the writing profession as “living by your wits”. It makes us sound raffish, disreputable, devil-may-care. But we have lived on adjectives for too long. We need money. We need respect, not the “Ang galing mo naman” kind of flattery and passive-aggressive smart-shaming, but respect as in decent pay and opportunities. The pandemic has upended the way we live, and everything must change. How will writers survive in this strange new world? I put that question to you.

This is the text of my keynote address at the BDAP (Book Development Association of the Philippines) Literary Festival on 29 Nov 2020.

In 2016 it occurred to me that the apocalypse had begun. A little late, since many had expected it at the turn of the millennium. This apocalypse is not the stuff of biblical Revelations, at least not literally. It is less spectacular, more life-sized, more plausible and therefore scarier. It could happen. It’s happening.

In 2016 all my assumptions about the world were upended one by one. All around the world, far right populist strongmen were elected NOT despite but because of their appeal to the prejudices and hatreds of the people. There have always been demagogues, but we believed that the people would reject them. It turns out that we didn’t know the people, and we were horrified at what they believed. Reason became powerless against fear and loathing. Soon it became apparent that it was useless to argue by bringing up facts: they would not change anyone’s mind. The very foundation of knowledge—the truth—was under attack. I still recall my bewilderment at hearing the term, “post-truth”. How can supposedly intelligent people believe fake news? How could the truth be out of fashion? I felt as if gravity had vanished. We had come unmoored and were in danger of drifting off into space.

Small wonder that George Orwell’s 1984, which many of us had read under duress in school, or remembered mainly from that computer ad, became a bestseller. We recognized our present in the words that were written seven decades earlier:

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

1984. A science-fiction novel had predicted our strange new world, and it was not the only one. Science-fiction, which is still shunted off to the genre section and exiled to the fringes of capital-L Literature, had seen this coming, because that’s what science-fiction does.

Meanwhile climate change continues to escalate, causing more massive catastrophes with each official denial of its existence. Planetary extinction events are on their way, and no number of pretty speeches and eco-friendly shopping bags will stop them without concerted global action. Here is something easily capable of fulfilling the worst parts of biblical Revelations. It is the stuff of science-fiction, and now it is real.

At the same time, a disproportionately high number of artists I looked up to were dying. 2016 gave us a rapture-like The Leftovers scenario, in which the chosen suddenly and inexplicably vanish, presaging some apocalyptic event. David Bowie. Alan Rickman. Gene Wilder. Leonard Cohen. George Michael. When Prince died, I knew the Apocalypse was well and truly underway. To punctuate a year of grief, Carrie Fisher who was back on the screen as the former Princess and now General Leia, died. There was nothing more to be said.

As the weeks stretched into months and the months into years, it became clear that this was not some weird daymare that we would suddenly wake from. On the contrary, things became even more baffling and incomprehensible. This is how we live now. And I accepted that science-fiction is the only literary genre that can explain today’s world.

I’ll interrupt this direness with a cheerful flashback. As a young nerd who did well in school but could not relate to my classmates, I gravitated towards science-fiction. My entry point was the original Star Trek TV series, which was airing in endless reruns along with Charlie’s Angels and the Donnie and Marie Show. These American products were deemed safe by the martial law government, as was Combat, which made it seem like World War II was still being fought by one weary platoon of GI Joes. I was entertained by the female detectives who emerged from grave danger with perfect hair, and slightly bothered by the brother and sister team singing love songs to each other, but I wanted to be in the crew of the USS Enterprise. The universe they explored was unimaginably more vast and fascinating than my world of house to school and back. And no matter how often they traveled into the uncharted regions of space, many of their discoveries were about themselves and the mystery of being human.

The first science fiction stories I read were novelizations of Star Trek teleplays by the British writer James Blish. I have never stopped reading science fiction. People who dismiss it as rayguns and aliens assume that we read it to escape reality. There is always an element of escape even in the most realistic fiction, but in science fiction the worlds we escape to are often worse than this one. The difference is that the people have the imagination, ingenuity, and intelligence to begin to address their problems. These are usually the very people who are rejected and marginalized by their societies, the outsiders, heretics and nonconformists. Science fiction is the voice of the nerds.

I hesitate to offer a definition of science-fiction because that would mean putting limits on what should be boundless. For my purposes I will quote the Yugoslavian critic Darko Suvin, who said “It is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”

Consider the 1951 short story by Cyril M. Kornbluth entitled “The Marching Morons”. This is its premise: intelligent people opt to have few or no children, while the less intelligent have plenty of children. So many centuries from now, the world is populated by morons—except for a small, overworked, extremely-stressed, intelligent elite who keep it running. Interesting. Did it predict our world today? I should hope not, and anyway it is too simplistic.

We could argue that social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have broken democracy. However, they did not turn people into morons. They did not make people bigoted, misogynist, anti-science, classist, and callous. But social media gave them a platform on which they could reveal themselves, and those lower case-r revelations came as a shock to us. We had always assumed that our friends, family, colleagues, the people we grew up with or interact with daily, whom we share histories with, felt the same way we do about basic issues. Basic, as in right and wrong. We realized that we don’t really know each other, and maybe we should’ve stayed oblivious because once we became aware of their opinions on the value of strangers’ lives, we could not bear the thought of knowing them.

This year we are living through another one of science fiction’s greatest hits: a pandemic. Who knew that we would be spending the year indoors? Did you ever imagine that you could kill someone by breathing on them? That the streets could be as empty and quiet as the aftermath of a zombie outbreak? If you had any remaining doubt that we were living in science-fiction times, they disappeared the first time you stepped out of your door wearing a mask and face shield and constantly disinfecting your hands.

This pandemic has laid waste to the global economy, but it’s also shown us what we must do to ensure the survival of the species. We cannot go on the way we have, casually destroying the environment, poisoning ourselves, and allowing a few absurdly wealthy people to have more than everyone else combined. The carbon emissions that the world’s governments have not succeeded in reducing (because economies depend on the ability to spew carbon) were reduced during the worldwide lockdown. There was no choice but to shut down industry. The air was cleaner. Our surroundings were cleaner. We saw what the world looks like if human impact is minimized. We saw that while an invisible, insidious virus has forced us to put our lives on pause, we humans are the real virus.

Obviously we have to come out of our houses and go to work at some point, but we have to change. If capitalism, industry, travel and tourism go back to the way they were—and more, to make up for lost time and revenue—we will have learned nothing from this catastrophe, and are truly, undeniably, doomed.

Ted Chiang, one of the greatest science-fiction authors despite his relatively small output and his not having written a novel, pointed out that there are two kinds of narratives. In the conservative narrative, there is a problem: a disaster or a war. It is solved, and everything goes back to the way it was. The status quo wins. In the progressive narrative, there is a problem: a disaster or a war. It is solved, and nothing goes back to the old normal. Society emerges from the catastrophe fundamentally changed.

I would like to think that we are living in a progressive science fiction narrative. What is my basis for saying this? Nothing, I just want to believe.

I do not mean this as a criticism of the people who are paralyzed by anxiety during this terrible time and need all their energy to keep it together. So many of us are finding it extremely difficult to read books, much less write them, and that is an understandable reaction to this. But I have never been particularly sociable and I am comfortable in the great indoors. I have never read so much or written so much as I do now. Why? Because I can’t get leave the house physically, I can’t travel as I used to, but my mind can. This is the gift of science fiction to every nerd who was ever bullied or alienated: the power to imagine another world, a better world where your intelligence and innovation could make a difference.

Recently, on Instagram, I had a conversation with a new friend, a wonderful writer who is working on a new book. She said she felt almost guilty about writing fiction, that it felt shallow and self-indulgent in the face of awful reality. On the contrary, I think, it is in truly awful times that we need fiction even more. Not just to escape, which at this point, nine months into the pandemic is a form of self-care, but to envision a world in which truth, justice, compassion, equality, and art triumph. Because if we can imagine it, maybe we can will it into being. I will remind you that our nation was imagined into being by a young man who poured his rage, his disillusionment, and his wicked humor into the tale of a man who just wanted to open a school.