Writing a Dystopian Epic Quest While We Live on the Verge
Author Mary Helen Specht discusses writing a dystopian epic quest while living in a time and age that feels on the verge.
I didn't start out with the aim of writing a dystopian epic quest. One day I found myself scribbling down a scene where a rock musician's daughter disappears while her mom is playing a set at Burning Man. But it wasn’t until several years later that I understood what sort of novel this scene might become.
By this point, global warming was happening around us in real time; I'd become a parent and was trying to imagine what kind of future my own daughter might encounter. I was drawn to the idea of beginning with Burning Man, which is a kind of idealistic apocalyptic landscape, and then contrasting it with a real, climate-driven apocalypse that takes place in the ensuing years.
My new novel Mudlark is a speculative story about a troubled rock star who goes missing in the wake of a hurricane that floods New York City. In a future timeline, her daughter, a "mudlark" salvaging art and supplies in the ruined city, discovers the original master recording of her mother's long-lost solo album and embarks on a journey to uncover the mysteries of her disappearance. After years of writing more "realistic" fiction, this novel is a return to the loves of my youth, the fantastical fiction of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Carl Sagan.
Does climate-fiction actually help us as a species or does it just make us more comfortable with what’s coming? Personally, I have to believe that the counter-factual experience can inspire us to resist but also to understand the complexities of our time. Even domestic suburban dramas are undergirded by a political point-of-view, reflections of their moment in human history. Nobody writes in a vacuum, and even a frothy romance or a family drama set today will inevitably exhibit the shadows of AI or ICE or Trump or the warming planet. And though I at first resisted setting yet another dystopian tale in New York City, it was the touchstone that the novel needed, a city that belongs to all of us in a way that no other city really does.
Some years ago my aunt, an artist, brought me back a clay pipe she found mudlarking along the Thames when she was visiting London. Mudlarking is scavenging, but a very specific type that occurs where water has hoarded the bits and bobs of civilization. But water is not thorough; things constantly slip from its grasp. The Thames is a rare high tidal river, so it's particularly good at churning and scouring up new items from, sometimes, hundreds of years before, preserved by the anaerobic mud: clay pipes, leather shoes, coins from the time of Henry the VIII. Anybody walking along the shoreline at the right time can find them.
In my novel, the East River in a flooded Manhattan creates similar conditions, but my characters mudlark for money and necessity. I've always liked to imagine the objects of today becoming the vintage artifacts of tomorrow, and I think there's something special about the type of history that you can hold in your hands. The real. The analog. And I use these objects in the book to connect my narrative timelines.
Check out Mary Helen Specht's Mudlark here:
When I teach creative writing, I often wear my “The Future is Handmade” shirt from Carla Fernández—as less of a statement and more of a prayer. I share this obsession with my character Neko, a woman who mudlarks at the edge of modern civilization, specializing in The Real in a time when it has become a rare (though maybe sacred) thing.
I've come to believe that there’s a lot in common between mudlarking and fiction writing. Mudlarking tells a story in objects, but so does fiction. The best stories come alive through the specificity of the world. As a writer, I've always worked from the outside in. I need to know what my character touches and eats and sees on the way to work before I can understand their motivations and desires.
My novel is interested in the analog, not just as Romantic or nostalgic, but as something that anchors our experiences as human in a different way. Ephemera as its own kind of storytelling. And I don't think I'm alone in this.
I see some of my Gen Z students wanting to connect beyond the chips and bits. I see them making 'zines in their free time or knitting scarves during lectures. I see them wanting to tell stories in all kinds of ways, stories that aren’t interrupted by a chatbot suggesting how their sentence should end. They are hungry for something they can hold, and I am hungry with them. Maybe we are the new mudlarks, and maybe this is our dystopian epic quest.
