'Hope always has a place in literature': Premee Mohamed on writing post-apocalyptic fiction

The Next Chapter11:25This compelling narrative is set in the future in the climate-crisis-stricken wilderness of Alberta's Rocky Mountains

Ryan B. Patrick interviews Premee Mohamed about her latest speculative fiction work, We Speak Through the Mountain. Its the follow-up to the Aurora Award-winning novella The Annual Migration of Clouds.

The literary phenomenon known as "hopepunk" is often attributed to the work of speculative fiction writer, Premee Mohamed. As a subgenre which caught on as a response to catastrophizing stories, her latest novella, We Speak Through the Mountain turns away from the expected doom and gloom of dystopian fiction.

We Speak Through the Mountain is a sequel novella to the post-apocalyptic Albertan book The Annual Migration of Clouds. Reid Graham is 19 years old and fighting against both the climate crisis-affected Rocky Mountains and her own chronic illness to make her way to Howse University, a supposed safe haven.

When she arrives she finds it more and more difficult to forge connections and leave behind the guilt of leaving her community. When she is sent word from home, Reid is faced with an impossible decision and a crumbling reality.

• 45 Canadian books to read this season

Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction writer based in Edmonton. Her series Beneath the Rising received nominations for the Crawford Award, British Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards and Aurora Awards. Her book The Annual Migration of Clouds won the 2022 Aurora Award for best novella. Her other books include The Butcher of the Forest and No One Will Come Back for Us.

She spoke to The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about returning to fictional post-apocalypses.

What I liked about this book is the stakes climate change [is] happening, you have the disease happening. Can you talk about the disease that Reid has?

I love talking about this because the first book actually came out of this disease but in the story, what I intended to look into was more how this would change society. What would be the unexpected knock on effects of a disease that shows up late in life, that causes disabling pain, disfigurement, death and cognitive effects and you may have passed it on to your children without even knowing?

Would people simply be afraid to have kids, would they stop having kids?

I really wanted to write a story about that but then I sat back and thought, well why wouldn't we just cure it? So I thought, okay let's set it in the future, but in a future where we have lost the ability to study and cure it because basically industrialized society has fundamentally collapsed. We've lost industrialization, we've lost electricity, we've lost things like refrigeration and fossil fuel extraction so now we just have to live with it and what does that look like?

You capture nature in terms of what's left of it in this book nature endures, but in a new way. Can you tell me about the flora and fauna of this world?

That was a hard choice to make. I don't want to write heavy, "message-y", doomy stories about the future of climate change. But I think it does have to be acknowledged, especially in stories like this, even if it's only acknowledged in passing. I thought it had to be mentioned that we're down to kind of the survivors. Humans, definitely, and magpies, very much in the first book.

I can't imagine a future in Alberta without magpies somehow managing to hang on they're the cockroaches of the bird world. And in this book I really liked the idea of incorporating the Whiskey Jacks somehow, because they're also corvids.

They're very resilient and persistent, as people know from camping anywhere in the Rocky Mountains and just trying to eat your breakfast and discovering that they are up to attempting to steal, say, something as large as a pancake.

I don't want to write heavy, "message-y", doomy stories about the future of climate change.- Premee Mohamed

Let's talk about the human element again. Ultimately, it's shown the more things change, the more things stay the same How do these characters feel about this new normal?

The people at the university, the locals, are very much the result of the worst remnants of a world that was stumbling over the abyss. The people who thought that their money would make them safe from what was happening and it sort of did, but it didn't stop what was happening to the rest of the world.

So that brings up the idea to Reid that this is profoundly immoral, and what's bothering her is that this is, for her, a huge profound cognitive dissonance, and for the others there doesn't seem to be a problem.

You depict that this civilization isn't learning from its past. It seems to be a conscious decision from certain members of society. What's the situation here?What's the connection here between intentionally not knowing your past to kind of live in the present?

This is a long running tradition with fictional dystopias, not that I was trying to write one. But if you look at kind of the big three: 1984, Brave New World and We, the whole goal there is the control of truth and the expectation that if you can change what people remembered about the past, that will shape how they think of the future. Those are the people that are going to design the kind of future that you want, the kind of future that supports people like you and assimilates people that are not like you in an efficient fashion.

The whole goal there is the control of truth.- Premee Mohamed

Reid is really bucking the trend here because she wants to know about the past and back home, the past isn't something that they're trying to erase or redefine or correct or that they are ashamed of or frightened of.

She's really come in there with ideas that are not popular about memory and about history.

I've seen your work described as "hopepunk". How do you see things like hope and optimism when we're talking about such heavy topics?

Hope always has a place in literature, at the very least, even the bleakest, grimest story allows us to close the book and feel hope for our own life, I think. But to me, hope isn't unfounded optimism, it's not the belief that things will eventually turn out okay. I think the punk part of the sub genre of hopepunk might be that the hope comes from work.

Hope comes from us knowing that the work we are doing to make a better future is valuable and meaningful in and of itself even if it doesn't end up with the result we had maybe expected, or the result that would have been beneficial for everybody.

It's the work itself that is worth doing and that can continue to give us hope teaching the next generations to do the work and showing that we are doing the work.We're not shying away from it and sort of expecting to be either doomed or saved by some outside force.

Hope comes from us knowing that the work we are doing to make a better future is valuable and meaningful in and of itself.- Premee Mohamed

This interview has been edited for clarity and length