Encounter of two SFs

By Hacer Gören, Sociology PhD Candidate, Koç University

Time: Unknown.

Place: Somewhere.

Event: In the wake of the last phase of abrupt thawing.

Language spoken: None. For you, the encounter is translated into English.

Survivors: String figures, critters, entanglements who have no names and exact shapes; it looks like no humans left.

What you will experience is the encounter of two string figures. One of them (String Figure A) had once existed as bacteria, who had been trapped for thousands of years in Siberian permafrost. It has been released with the Huge Ice Melt. The other one (String Figure B) had once existed as a virus and lied dormant for a while in Alaskan permafrost soils.

SF A: Hellooo, I didn’t know there is another species alive. Do you know where we are?

SF B: Hi! This place has no name.

SF A: Really? Hmmm… Hi! I am… I am just confused. What are you then?

SF B: Let me introduce myself. Once, some critters, -I mean humans, - had called me “new coronavirus”.  With my companions, we had once put our imprint on the whole planet. We drove humans mad by incessantly mutating. They had even assumed that they found a way to dethrone us, yet we had always found a way out. They had even supposed that we were eradicated from the earth. After a long journey, we met other companions, other viruses that had been trapped in Alaskan permafrost. They had only lied dormant up until the Huge Ice Melt.

SF A: Nice to have you here! Your story looks like mine, but you are younger than me. I am coming from a time called the nineteenth century.

SF B: Ah! Centuries! Ridiculous! Humans had once invented time and divided it into centuries, years, and days. They must have assumed that “time” was moving linearly. Past, present, future! It has been nothing but a simultaneous, plural, incessant, holistic flow. Sorry to interrupt. I am excited to meet you. Anyway, please go on with your story.

SF A: No problem, my friend. I am happy to meet you, too. Together with my companions, we, too, had led to a sweeping change over the great majority of the earth. We had reigned from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, under different names and at different places once called Europe, Asia, and, Near East. Humans gave us different names: endemic disease, black death, bubonic plague… We collaborated with harvest failures, cold, droughts, wars, famine, rebellions. We had never died, just mutated, and spent some more time on earth. Then we found ourselves in someplace called Siberia. As of then, we had been living in permafrost soils in Siberia until the Huge Ice Melt. 

SF B: How lucky you are! You had been dormant for longer years than me! At least you had not experienced those times when humans more and more divided, fought each other, most of them starving to death. Why? Because of their endless greed for more wealth, capital, and power! And to the detriment of other humans and non-humans! Some group of survivors had supposed that the Capital and Technology would be their salvation. It was nothing of the kind! Contrary to high expectations, it was 17 G technology and Industry 15.9 that had led to a peak in carbon emissions and created the starkest social differentiation. Since all the planets were sinking, thus was the capital.

SF A: You said planets, right?

SF B: Yes. Some humans had also discovered several other planets, yet these planets had not proven as habitable as the earth. In short, my friend, they had never realized the pleasure of how to ‘become with’, ‘make with’, and how to ‘live and die together.’ Anyway, how was your experience with the Huge Ice Melt?

SF A: We were like a fish out of water! Literally, in a second, we were afloat. The whole planet was afloat.

SF B: It did not happen all at once. Up until the Huge Ice Melt, there had been cycles of severe droughts, freeze, famines, diseases, and wars. Some humans had made their best to save the planet. But no such fixes had been long-lasting. A climate exodus erupted all around the world, from the periphery to the core and vice versa. Not only from the Global South to the Global North!

SF A: I had not heard about that… global thing… north, south, whatever. Quite puzzling! The earth was less complicated in my time.

SF B: Look at that complex earth! Can you see any of those divisions, binaries, dichotomies now?

SF A: This reminded me of my times. In the early seventeenth century, I remember that “the Thames river had frozen; Russians had frozen and starved in the “Time of Troubles!” But, sooner or later, empires, countries, geographies, had found a way to recover, resettle and to move on.

SF B: Yes, humans, later, called those centuries ‘Little Ice Age’. By the way, while you had been dormant, there came a short peace period for some places including Russia, as they called. Not a recovery, of course! Only… Only several years of peace... With warming temperatures, some inarable lands turned into farmlands, leading to a rise in crop production. But it did not last long, either.

SF A: Oo! Look at that! You see what I see?

SF A: I see other species coming towards us.

SF B: It looks like they are humans, as once called.

…

References:

Fabrizio Terranova, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival. (2016). Courtesy: the artist and Studio Graphoui, Brussels. Retrieved from https://www.frieze.com/article/books-50

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

White, S. (2011). The climate of rebellion in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Cambridge University Press.