We are very excited to present our first author feature! The phenomenal essay that follows was written for us by Alistair Mackay - author of the exceptional new book, It Doesn't Have to Be This Way.

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Writing My Way Out of Apocalypse Angst

It’s a strange thing, releasing a dystopian novel into a world that feels so dystopian already. A once-in-a-century pandemic. Unprecedented floods in KwaZulu-Natal. Rebooted fears of nuclear war. We’ve fallen a long way from the 1990s, when I was a child and then a young teenager. I came to consciousness in a wave of optimism and idealism that now seems naïve. Mandela was president. The Berlin Wall had fallen. I thought my generation was going to inherit a world ready for Utopia, and all we had to do was push it over the finish line. Outlast a few die-hard racists. Restore dignity to indigenous peoples and complete the project of decolonisation. Before we knew it, we could even get gay-married (And I did, much later, and I’m grateful for that.)

In the last fifteen years or so, the faith I had in the inevitability of progressive change has been eroded away. There has been a dramatic and frightening swing to the Right in many countries. Increasing incidents of intolerance and xenophobia all around the world and at home, inequality remains stubbornly high and poverty is rising. More frightening than all of this - when I read reports on climate change, I want to hide under my bed with a case of wine and drink until I black out. I can’t believe these climate predictions are not front page news every day. We’ve already destabilised the planet’s climate and the consequences of not changing course urgently and comprehensively are catastrophic.

But I found a strange thing happened to me when I was writing my debut novel It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way. The more I leaned in to the hellishness of some of these climate predictions, the more I felt like I had expunged some of my own anxiety. It made me feel less hopeless and powerless. To write about how dystopian our world might become is better than simply waiting for that dystopia to arrive, and observing the parts that are already dystopian. Writing, I think, is fundamentally optimistic. Why bother writing unless we think we can change something? Writers can change how people feel. They can change how people think about a topic. They can help others (and themselves) to reevaluate priorities and choices.

It makes me think of a quote by the late, great Ursula Le Guin:

Part of what emerged for me, while writing the novel, is that none of this is inevitable. The progressive change I had hoped for as a teenager is not inevitable, but nor is our decline into a world of searing temperatures, famine and violence. Writing helped me to regain a sense of agency. If we can imagine alternative futures, we can work to make them real. Writing can be a form of activism. A call to action. Giving voice to ideas is as important for social change as collective mobilisation.

For me, there’s nothing more frightening than the dread of waiting for some terrible outcome, and feeling like I have no control over it. I think that’s why so many of us just look away (or “don’t look up”), but that does nothing to quell the angst. We know it’s there. We distract ourselves with tech, but there’s doom on our screens however fast we scroll past it. I think writing can offer a way out of all this anxiety, back towards hope. Le Guin is right: It’s the duty of writers to help us imagine alternatives to how we live now. Once we can see those alternatives, we are no longer trapped in the same story.

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Alistair Mackay is a South African writer interested in exploring queerness, marginalisation, social justice and climate change. He writes a regular humour, dating and lifestyle column for LGBTQ+ news site mambaonline, and a branding column for marklives. His short fiction has been published in Commonwealth Writers’ adda magazine, Brittle Paper, New Contrast, The Kalahari Review, Kabaka Magazine, and Penny, as well as in the anthologies Queer Africa II, The Other, and Queer Africa: Selected Stories. It Doesn't Have to Be This Way is his first novel.

Find him online:

IG: @almackay | IG: @itdoesnthavetobethisway_book | alistaircharlesmackay.com