Hope and hard work
“If this is the world’s problem, it’s on everyone to fix it. And even if it were just your problem, your friends would still want to help. You can’t stop us.”
I’m not American. My country has its own issues with conservative politics, and Europe as a whole feels like it's on a rollercoaster towards fascism, but I can’t pretend to know how my US friends and readers are feeling today.
It feels trite to post about space spiders and necromancer lawyers today, but I’m a writer so I feel called to write. Perhaps this may resonate with at least one person out there. I’m not going to attempt to dissect what happened, how to look after yourself, or how to organise. More qualified people than I (and many less qualified) are already doing that all over the internet. Gladstone himself has written something here.
In honour of books and art that have comforted me, enraged me, and reflected reality to me when I needed it, this piece is about both this current moment and, quelle surprise, the Craft Sequence.
For all its focus on gods and necromancers and demons from the depths, the Craft Sequence is fundamentally about hope. Hope that we can build something better. Hope that we can work together against injustice and the end of the world. The Craft Sequence is a reflection of our world in all its wonder and its horror. It literalises mortgaging one’s soul to a corporation to survive; it illustrates the failures of post-industrial neoliberal capitalism with debt zombies, tortured gods, and power-hungry skeleton kings and billionaires draining life and resources. Our characters start out complicit in systems of oppression that are in many ways genuinely better than what came before, but which are destroying lives and the planet in new, exciting ways. The end of the world is barrelling towards them in the guise of monstrous skazzerai from the stars, but ultimately they’re feeling the same way we do: helpless in the face of systems that feel too big to tear down. Systems that feel inevitable.
Yet, they hope. Hope for that better world, for a more equitable society, one that doesn’t sacrifice the poor and the displaced and the powerless. Hope for a sustainable future of opportunity without draining the planet.
But this hope comes hand in hand with hard work. This starts at the individual and local level. Tara choosing to turn down a lucrative career to build up Alt Coulumb and fix the mistakes of the past. Caleb using powers he never asked for to build a complex coalition of stakeholders to mend war damage and fix the world’s wounds piece by piece. Kai uncovering truth at the heart of her world, and refusing to take the safe and comfortable route in lockstep with her superiors. Izza slowly building a religion that centres the forgotten and discarded peoples of the world. Elayne working within the system to make the world just that bit safer for strange girls on beaches.
They are up against seemingly insurmountable odds, but even within the grip of fear they have hope. but they maintain hope with their fear. They know there is no easy solution, but they go for the longshot, the edge play. And they work together. Sure they don’t always want to - see Tara’s attempts to sneak off alone and sacrifice herself, Kai and Caleb’s sniping, Elayne keeping her cards so close to her chest that even when reading her POV you have no idea what she’s really doing - but they do know that they alone can’t solve every problem.
This is what we can all hold true. Feel the fear, but hold onto that kernel of hope rather than despair. Think about what you can do. Not everyone can be at the front of the march with the loudspeaker. Somebody has to build the website that coordinates action. Somebody needs to bring forward a lawsuit. Somebody needs to stand for election to city council. Somebody needs to pick up a prescription for their neighbour. Somebody has to create art that makes life brighter.
Find hope in your community, whether that's your neighbourhood, an activist network, a crochet circle, or those fellow SFF fans you connected with online. And find hope in the people who are doing the work. Maybe that's you. Maybe you can be the support team.
The world has ended before and it will end again. We need hope, and we need to do the hard work, together.
“We wait, and we rise; we move, and the earth trembles”