A post by web developer Jeremy Keith (who, by coincidence, is also based in Brighton & Hove) came up in my RSS feeds today entitled After the end.

I follow his blog/journal primarily for CSS and web development stuff, so this was a bit of an unexpected crossover into some of the things I tend to write about more here (although I know I’ve been posting a few things about blogrolls and the web here recently).

Anyway, on his new post there’s a half-hour video of him talking about some of his favourite SF books.

I put it on to listen to while doing some less-demanding day-job tasks, and discovered that his taste in SF literature broadly overlaps with mine — we’re talking Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Ann Leckie, Emily St. John Mandell et al. — and so after work I decided to read the blog post, which is broadly concerned with some recommendations for post-apocalyptic science fiction, specifically the type which is considerably more thoughtful rather than the “survivalist man fights mutants” crap.

In it he references a previous post of his where he says about Mandel’s Station Eleven:

Part of the reason I think about Station Eleven is its refreshingly humanist take on a post-apocalyptic society. As I discussed on this podcast episode a few years back:

It’s interesting to see a push-back against the idea that if society is removed we are going to revert to life being nasty, brutish and short. Things aren’t good after this pandemic wipes out civilisation, but people are trying to put things back together and get along and rebuild.

Related to that, Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

And that got me back thinking about some of the things I’ve written here, particularly in Post-apocalyptic pastoral and post-industrial and Albion: utopianism and the post-apocalyptic pastoral, both of which came out of my need to:

…explore radical future(s) for England, to imagine promised lands and the turbulent journeys needed to get there from where we are now.

…as I wrote about in No one dreams of England’s future any more.

And all of this then forms a big part of the thinking behind my Acid Renaissance series of visual artwork (the online gallery is here and the blog posts about the series so far can be found here).

As I’ve mentioned here before, the impetus for Acid Renaissance is about using visual artwork to imagine an escape from Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, where he describes the mental constraints of the form of capitalism we’ve lived under during the last few decades making it near-impossible to imagine a world free from capitalism, and this also ties in with his sadly unrealised book Acid Communism, which I wrote a bit about back in 2021.

What chimed with me about Jeremy Keith’s post about Station Eleven was the line about there being a difference between surviving and living, and that in turn tangles in my mind with what Elvia Wilk said about Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation in Toward a Theory of the New Weird: If living in a new weird ontology is the only way for people to keep living, what do we want to keep of ourselves? (which I wrote about in the post New Weird Potential Futures).

There are things that we — collectively and individually — should hold on to as we try to imagine (and build) a new future, but there are also parts of us that we need to change.

I need to find the mental space during my time off from my day job over Christmas and New Year to find the last pieces of the jigsaw that I need to complete my Acid Renaissance series, and I think that previous sentence points in the direction I need to consider.