Not Now, But Soon
Why do disasters happen? How do we rebuild after a disaster? What lessons can we learn from them? Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.
In this trailer episode, Lisa Margonelli introduces miniseries host Malka Older, an author, humanitarian aid worker, and disaster researcher. Older explains how she became involved in disaster work, and what disasters can teach us about society and our values.
Not Now, But Soon premieres on September 16. This miniseries is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a collaboration between Issues and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination.
Resources
- Rethink disasters by reading Malka Older’s Issues piece, “Disasters.”
- Check out Older’s Future Tense Fiction story, “Actually Naneen.”
- Find more of Older’s publications on her website including Infomocracy, a cyberpunk political thriller, and …and Other Disasters, a collection of short fiction and poetry centered around disasters.
- Watch Older discuss how speculative fiction can be used to create better policies in the Issues event, “How Can Science Fiction Help Design Better Science and Tech Policies?”
Transcript
Lisa Margonelli: Hi listeners, this is Lisa. This fall, we’re debuting a new miniseries called, Not Now, But Soon, part of our Future Tense Fiction project. It features stories about surviving disasters, finding agency, and how we can use speculative fiction to help create better futures and policies. It’s hosted by speculative fiction author Malka Older. You might know her book, Infomocracy. I’m a huge fan of it. But, she also has more than a decade of experience in working on humanitarian aid, and I’m delighted to introduce her to you and hope that you really enjoy our new series.
Hi, Malka. How are you?
Malka Older: Good, thanks.
Margonelli: What percentage of time do you spend thinking about disasters versus speculative fiction?
Older: It varies a lot. I often spend a ton of times thinking about my speculative fiction ideas and plots and characters, and they often encounter disasters because that’s also something that’s not really far from my mind. And so they interact in this way. And there’s also absolutely times when I’m thinking about disasters, thinking about organization around disaster preparedness and response, looking at things that are happening in the world and thinking about what we can do to organize it better or to have more mutuality, have more compassion, have stronger processes around the way that we deal with disaster in the world. That becomes speculative, because I’m thinking about how it might be if we did it differently.
Margonelli: On the podcast, we’ll be talking to some of the many people that you’ve met in your career as a disaster responder and researcher, and they’re from all over the world, from Afghanistan to Myanmar to Puerto Rico and beyond. But first, I want to learn more about you. How did disasters become your calling?
It was a very powerful experience working with the people who had been directly affected and were trying to struggle back.
Older: One of my careers is as a disaster researcher, but I only got there because first I was a disaster responder, and the way that I became a disaster responder was by living in a place where disaster happened. I had gone to school to do a master’s program on international development and economics, thinking that I wanted to be involved in learning about how the world works in different places, about how we can do better together. I remember at the time there was this kind of division between people who are studying for development and people who are studying for disaster response. I had this idea that development would be more interesting and challenging and have these economic questions baked into it—which it does—and that disaster response was sort of about lifting things off the back of a truck and putting them somewhere.
So I was, just after I finished my master’s, I was in Sri Lanka working for a local NGO and doing things like microfinance and supporting some peace building work and writing proposals. And that was in 2004. And on December 26th, the South Asian tsunami hit. I was in the country at the time. It took us actually quite a long time to figure out what had happened, because being in the middle of the country, it was not clear. I was actually in an area with no cell phone signal when it happened. So the whole day, I was kind of hearing these rumors from people who had heard stuff on the radio. And then at the end of the day, sort of starting to see some TV footage and then getting out and my phone just absolutely blowing up with people who were worried about me. At the time, there was not a great early warning system in that basin, so although it took several hours for it to get from the almost immediate hit that it had on Aceh in the north of Indonesia to Sri Lanka, there was very little warning. There were cities and parts of towns that were just gone.
So that really took over, I was going to say my working life, but really my life for a month or two at least after that, and had a huge impact on me in terms of both being more aware of the devastation that these things can cause, but also seeing what kind of work was being done to respond to it, and how powerful it could be to work with communities to figure out what they needed, try to build things back up again, try to think about how to make things better, looking at the tensions that emerged in the aftermath of a disaster like this. There was so much. It was a very powerful experience working with the people who had been directly affected and were trying to struggle back, the people in neighboring communities who hadn’t been affected but had seen it and were the first people on the scene to assist.
Margonelli: Sounds like it really changed your life. Where did you go from there?
It’s not really about the tsunami, it’s about the way we build, where we build, how we arrange our society, who gets educated, and how much, who has the resources to evacuate, who has an outlet for their frustration, and who doesn’t?
Older: After that, I did a fair amount of disaster work, kind of interspersing it with development work. So I worked in Darfur for a little over a year, which is considered a sort of long-term, complex emergency. It’s not a disaster in the same sense as a tsunami that hits suddenly. But the ongoing conflict was causing a lot of the same harms to people and had a lot of the same dynamics and difficulties in terms of dealing with it and figuring out how and where to deliver aid, what kinds of things were most needed, how to balance what the government might want and what the people might need, what foreign governments who were offering the aid might want, and what people needed.
And in all of these situations, I was meeting people, interacting with people, whether they were on the ground, trying to figure out what to do, whether they were journalists who came in to cover the disaster, and try to figure out how to make the connection between people on the other side of the world and what was happening. And how to make that feel like something that wasn’t just a disaster movie, but an actual disaster happening to real people.
And that meant looking at frameworks and thinking about the theories and the ways that we understand how disasters happen, how we incorporate them into our lives, how we think about them as exceptions to the rule or as regular occurrences. And to me, it also means a really broader definition of what disasters are. It’s not really about the tsunami, it’s about the way we build, where we build, how we arrange our society, who gets educated, and how much, who has the resources to evacuate, who has an outlet for their frustration, and who doesn’t? Who has public transportation or a way to walk to get their groceries and who doesn’t? And so all of these things come into disasters, and I’ve ended up with this very expansive view of it.
Margonelli: So one of the things that you’re saying really is that recovering from a disaster is not just about unloading things off a truck or rebuilding a house. It’s about figuring out how you tell the story of the disaster so that other people can understand what happened, and you can understand what happened to yourself, but it’s also about imagining the future after the disaster, because you have to imagine what you want to build. You have to imagine who you want to be, where you want to be. And that’s, I think the space of this podcast is about that intersection between storytelling and having some agency over the future and figuring out what we can do together.
Disasters tend to illuminate the things that we care about and the things that we don’t care about.
Older: Absolutely, and I would even go farther than that to say that we can tell stories about disasters that are actually stories about our societies, because disasters tend to illuminate the things that we care about and the things that we don’t care about. They tend to compress our processes and our relationships and our decisions about what we value into a very short space and time that’s also often highly documented. And so because of that, I find that studying disasters is often a way to study governance, society, democracy, what these things are doing for us and how we live. One thing that we know about disasters is that they’re going to keep happening, maybe not now, but soon. Accepting that, knowing that gives us the opportunity to really think about how we want those futures to play out, how we want to be prepared for disasters, how we want to rebuild after them into something better.
Margonelli: Build something better with us. Listen to Not Now, But Soon, debuting on September 16th.
Thanks to our audio engineer, Angelina Mazza, and our podcast producers, Kimberly Quach and Mia Armstrong-López. Music for this series was created by Stuart Leach. Not Now, But Soon is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a collaboration between Issues and ASU’s Center for Science in the Imagination. Additional editors on the Future Tense Fiction project include Joey Eschrich, Andrés Martinez, and Ed Finn.