no one can predict the future

not even Margaret Atwood

my Margaret Atwood fangirl sweatshirt that my dear friend gifted me about 10 years ago; this Substack could have easily been named “Margaret Fan Club”

Ten years ago, a friend in DC gave me a copy of Oryx and Crake. I was a big reader as a kid but had fallen out of the practice after college while I settled into adult life. I read maybe a dozen books a year. Ironically, I was writing more than I ever had—short stories and a now-defunct food blog. I was also surrounding myself with books like companions, spending late weeknights in the fiction and occult sections of Lost City Books, the used bookstore in Adams Morgan. On my lunch break, I made the rounds of the giveaway shelves at NPR headquarters, where I worked, for the chance to score an unreleased proof of the latest from Sheila Heti or Jonathan Franzen. Lots of contemporary fiction. Lots of white male writers. The only speculative and dystopian fiction I remember reading was Hunger Games and The Road. And then came along Margaret Atwood.

At the time, I remember thinking Oryx and Crake was slow and strange. But I was intrigued, too, by the Crakers, by names like HelthWyzer, BlyssPluss, and RejoovenEsense. In her painting of a dark, doomed world, Margaret Atwood was surprisingly, laugh-out-loud funny. I read The Year of the Flood. And then, MaddAddam. Eventually, I read The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood opened up the door for me on what sci-fi could be. Octavia Butler opened the door even more. Then, Ursula K. Le Guin. Now, Louise Erdrich, Marge Piercy, Mary Shelley, Doris Lessing, Cherie Dimaline, Jeanette Winterson, Naomi Alderman, Michelle Min Sterling, Suzette Haden Elgin, Becky Chambers, Emily St. John Mandel, Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz. I’m likely forgetting half a dozen more. But these writers have been my friends, teachers, and soothsayers as I moved through my thirties, found my way back to writing, and digested the politics, pandemics, and crises of the last decade.

Maybe no writer more than Octavia Butler has been lauded recently for her visions of the future—predicting MAGA before MAGA, predicting climate change, predicting the corporatization of space travel. Her essay, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” is available to read online and has been published into a lovely little book. But Margaret Atwood isn’t far behind, with The Handmaid’s Tale holding a remarkable place in public consciousness and discourse as our reproductive rights are ripped away. The day after the U.S. election, sales of Handmaid rose nearly 7000% from its ranking of no. 209 to no. 2 on the Amazon bestseller list (after Melania’s “autobiography” lolz).

This week, Margaret Atwood published her first Substack since the election. In it, she looks into her water mirror like Pythia of the Delphic Oracle, doing her best to divine the future. It’s scathing and hilarious, and like anything she writes, it’s absolutely worth reading. But I was left unsatisfied by her predictions, finding them flimsy or loosely articulated. To be fair, this is her version of a prediction listicle, not a full-fledged story or novel bringing each one to life. But still—why do we expect our writers to accurately predict the future?

In the scene I’m drafting this week, one character says to another:

“I didn’t want to leave. I’ll start there. I didn’t plan on it. Things just happened very fast and became unsafe. For many others besides me, but eventually, me too. I also felt like I couldn’t affect change anymore, and I wanted to go somewhere where that wasn’t the case. But I left when you were just about six months old. The spring of 2030, after the president seized power for another term, ended term limits, and the massacres of July 4^th in 2029. After that, the resistance went underground. 

This is a sketch, something I will change a hundred times before I settle on a timeline and a backstory I’m satisfied with. Even so, I found myself self-censoring as I wrote the words down, questioning whether this is what will actually happen or if it would spoil the entire thing if I got it “wrong.”

But it’s not a writer’s job to predict the future or outpace technological development. I think of Charlie Jane Ander’s TED Talk, and watched it again this morning. Her opening words have stuck with me ever since I watched it.

“Every science fiction writer has a story about a time when the future arrived too soon. […] Years ago, I was writing a story where the government starts using drones to kill people. I thought that this was a really intense, futuristic idea. But by the time the story was published, the government was already using drones to kill people.

I recognize myself in that statement and if you write future worlds you likely do, too. But what if we took the pressure off our shoulders as writers to accurately predict anything? What if we imagine possible futures as a lens for better seeing our present, rather than a yardstick for measuring our cleverness? What if our job as writers is to just tell the best stories we can?

What I’m writing

A scene in my book.

What I’m reading

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler and really eager to read his forthcoming novel next spring, Where the Axe is Buried. His bits about writing on his website are truly lovely. About SF being predictive (relevant for this post!), he writes:

"For me, SF is not predictive, it is predicative. SF uses the raw materials of science not as a set of facts, necessarily, but as grounds for a shift in the world upon which it predicates (founds or bases something on) a set of events, often using that predication in a parallel manner as commentary upon the present world.

A BIG thank you as well to Debbie Urbanski, who sent me a copy of her book, After World, to read!

What I read

No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy