No One’s Rose by Emily Horn, Zac Thompson, Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque, Raúl Angulo and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou is an adventure story that explores ecology, utopia and life after calamity. I spoke with Horn and Thompson about the series and their perspectives on utopian fiction, climate change, destructive cycles, Waterworld and more.
The following transcription has been edited for space, grammar and clarity.
RS: Today I’m speaking with Emily Horn and Zac Thompson about No One’s Rose, an ecological science fiction utopia comic, which XavierFiles.com described as “inspir[ing hope that we could] find a way, not necessarily an easy one, but a way to take this world back and grow something better.” It’s been a long, long time since I first read Zachary Jenkins’ review of the first issue, but those words stick with me when I think about the series as a whole.
Let’s begin by talking about No One’s Rose’s genre before we get into specifics about the series. The book is science fiction as well as ecological fiction, and it shifts between utopia and dystopia. What interests you about the utopian and dystopian genres? And what are your major touchstones for those genres?
EH: When we started talking about the book, we were in this world culturally where everything was a dystopia. The question we were asking ourselves over and over was, “How do you write a utopia in a way that is both interesting/engaging and has a satisfying plot arc where stuff happens?” A utopia in itself is not particularly interesting to people because it doesn’t have a lot of conflict internally. So we wanted to write a utopia that was threatened. And I think that the dome created a really nice setting for that, where it was just really clear that a utopia existed, and then it was threatened at every turn by these dystopian qualities that we see a lot in fiction. I think that we mentioned [in a conversation prior to the interview] The Word for World Is Forest — that’s a really good reference. Ursula LeGuin is a really big influence of mine, because her work is science fiction, but a lot of it is about colonialism and resistance of colonialism. And so you see these seams run through the book. The Green Zone is a utopia, but we find out later through the story that it has really colonial roots and that it’s problematic, even though the people living there are happy and healthy.
ZT: We joked often about how we were creating like a fascist hoodwink on the book, because we thought it was really interesting to build these ideals of a [green] society that were really progressive and really amazing, but [then] show the political machinations behind why those decisions were made, and why those sorts of solutions to climate change are rooted in this very capitalist idea of inventing your way out of the problem. We thought it would be really interesting to present this utopia, and then as you get deeper and deeper into it, you’re like, “Hey, wait a second, that’s not really utopian at all.” And then, (spoilers for later issues), but you get to another society that very much has figured it out. And then the society that you’re with and rooting for destroys those people.
EH: We came to that conclusion throughout the course of the book as we did research, because originally we were like, “OK, a world where everything is renewable. Perfect, right?” And it’s the remains of human civilization. And it’s a feminist world, it’s post-racial, it’s just like, what would the world be like if we took a logical extension of today, the ideals that we hold today, and we put them into the future? And then through our research, we found that you can’t really have ecological justice based in colonialism or capitalism. So how do you envision a society that isn’t rooted in those things? It’s more communal — The Selvern is what I’m thinking of. I don’t want to give any spoilers away for anyone who’s reading, but you [eventually] encounter a society that isn’t rooted in those values. And I think that we came to that naturally through the course of the book. We were like, “Oh, this is actually quite problematic, even though it’s a utopia.”
RS: So colonialism seems to loom large in your ecological vision; let’s turn the conversation in that direction. I’ve got a quote here from a book that I’d planned to read in preparation for this interview, but I’m admitting not to have read, because it just arrived about 30 minutes ago, Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom. Again, I haven’t read it, but I think the most quoted passage from it sums up the attitude of No One’s Rose really well: “The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.” I think one of the great strengths of No One’s Rose is the way it avoids the gnostic attitude that a lot of environmental discussion seems to fall into, where you’ve got over here this material environment that we are either saving or destroying, and then over there, separately, we have these preternatural humans who have dominion over the land, etc., etc. Separate anthropology and ecology. Instead, in the words of the comic’s final issue, “we’re not saving the environment from humanity or for humanity. We are the environment.”
Could you speak a bit more about how, as you plotted the book, as you designed this narrative, you balanced those forces of anthropology and ecology in your work to make sure that this was addressing the full picture?
EH: Zac, you can speak to that one, because you did so much research on the philosophy.
ZT: So I’ve been quite obsessed with the philosopher Timothy Morton. He writes some sort of Marxist interpretations of environmentalism. The idea behind most of his work is that — it’s more of a collectivist approach to how we look at climate change and issues surrounding climate change. Climate change is often viewed as this huge problem that is put on the individual to solve through individual actions, but in reality, it’s this large, complicated web that is predicated on symbiosis between so many things, and if you alter one thing, you alter all things that are part of that life network. I think it was pretty early on, when we were working on the book, that we came to it from that capitalist perspective of “How do you envision a future where technology solved the problems and moved us out of it?” But as we kept interrogating that viewpoint, it became pretty clear early on that that was only one piece of the puzzle, and it was this inherently flawed perspective that didn’t address the fact that — you know, interference in nature, if you introduce a species to get rid of invasive species, like you put frogs in to get rid of certain flies, well, then those frogs start overpopulating. And then you have to bring in a wolf to eat that frog. Before you know it, the whole system has cascaded in this different direction. And I think that people don’t think about that, because climate change is this huge, holistic problem that it takes the village to solve. And I think that that was the big crux of the book: starting it with a very individualistic perspective, or, “How do I implement change?” And as the series goes further and deeper, you start to see these groups that understand that there’s more at play than just the individual, and [you see] this responsibility to think about all things and how they interact with one another.
EH: Timothy Morton talks about the “symbiotic real,” that comes up quite a bit. And Seren keeps bringing up the symbiotic real, because he becomes — I guess you could call it “brainwashed” by this guerrilla group inside of the dome. The idea of “the symbiotic real” is actually not very complex; the idea is that we are part of nature, which is something that’s just so alien to the monolithic Western history of the idea of the individual, and man being above nature. After writing it, and after digesting it, it feels quite normal [to say] that we are part of nature, right?
ZT: Yeah.
EH: And yet we feel so separate from it. And I think we have fictions about the human world, and how the human world is so different from the natural world, and it’s really just, without getting too deep into it, imaginary constructs that separate us from the natural world. What I see as the major problem with tackling climate change, or any problems involving environmentalism, (which should concern us all, because we would like to live on planet Earth, I’m guessing), is this feeling that we live in a separate, isolated place from the natural world, when in fact — and Zac has brought this up quite often, in our discussions, we are part of the natural world. We are covered in bacteria, and we rely on bacteria inside of us; we’re symbiotic. We have a symbiotic relationship with a lot of foods, and animals, and biota. We are part of the environment.
(And if you can’t tell, we may have done a lot of mushrooms as well while writing this).
ZT: You’re not supposed to tell!
EH: But I think that that also brings home that sense of interconnectedness, which people are exploring a lot in psychedelics. It works as a metaphor, the Dome and the Outside.
ZT: And I think there’s also that [false] distinction of the inside and outside where we have this idea that, like, you’re “inside” because there’s four walls and a roof around you, and then you’re like, “How did this mouse get inside my house? He belongs outside,” and it’s like, nah man, your house is in his environment, and he just wandered in. Don’t kill him for being there.
I think about how much of our bodies is, like you were saying, microscopic bacteria. I don’t know what the number is, but there’s a vast part of our biological processes that exist outside of our bodies, and we don’t think about that very often. We don’t think about the fact that, when we sweat, we have bacteria in there, when we sneeze, something leaves your body, air comes from outside into your body; there’s all these symbiotic processes that happen all the time, but for colonialism reasons, and for capitalist reasons, there’s a very clear separation between Man and Nature, because Man must be able to manipulate Nature in order to grow, and that’s not necessarily true anymore. Or at least we’re trying to unravel that.
RS: This is an aside — boy, gut bacteria is really having a moment right now. There is a John Green novel that really dived into it, which is the most bizarre thing, and there’s a good number of nonfiction books, pop biology diving into it. Headlines of ground-breaking research. Gut bacteria.
Anyway.
So you were talking about Timothy Morton and his integrative approach to these issues. To put his ideas in the context of fiction rather than philosophy, It feels like Ursula LeGuin is doing the same thing in her work, right? (Before this interview, I did get a chance to read The Word for World Is Forest, which was a tremendous two hours of my time. Just absolutely delightful). But my impression of her, given everything I’ve read of hers, is that her approach to science fiction really isn’t single-minded in the way most SFF is. Where lots of science fiction is about picking one speculative idea from a hard science and extrapolating, she rejects ever isolating one idea. Her attitude is that you need to consider context, and you need to integrate these fields, these perspectives. If you take only one perspective, or you take only one idea, you’re going to lose everything important. I don’t know if I have a question there. There’s a philosophical tradition, but also there’s this literary tradition of, you know, sociological science fiction you both seem to be interested in.
ZT: Yeah. And I feel like Ursula really excels in that anthropological sci-fi, where it’s like, here’s two societies, clashing with one another, and their ideals color their worldview, and that creates conflict in and of itself. Neither group of people is inherently 100% right in many of her stories, but you get that sort of middle ground, where you start to explore like, these people got fucked in this way, and now they have a certain skewed perspective. And I think in keeping with that, that was one of the reasons that we have that dual narrative with Tenn and Seren, to show how two ideological poles can exist within the same society, and someone who believes [that society] is just can be related or living in the same house as someone who believes it’s unjust. And, you know, the whole book is predicated on like, they just sat down and had a conversation, they had all the tools to sort of figure out the plot conflict between the two of them, but they couldn’t get their own heads out of their asses to come together and team up.
I don’t think anything like that’s happening right now, is it?
RS: A practical connection I see between LeGuin and No One’s Rose is, in both stories there is an attention to language, and language as insight to setting and society and world building. And I’m wondering how you went about creating the vocabulary of No One’s Rose, and ensuring that it was smooth, not alienating for readers, while still being informative?
EH: We both agreed that there needed to be slang, but whether that slang was going to be based in English, or in some future language, we needed to work out. My perspective was, I personally hate when you have too much jargon in a text that you’re not familiar with, because it pulls you out of the story. So thank you for saying that it didn’t pull you out of the story. I think there was a lot of discussion between the two of us on how to do that. I think it was limiting it to certain characters — Seren uses a lot of slang — and it was also using it repetitively. So it wasn’t like every time they use a different term; “Fore’floors or “fee it” are two terms that are used quite a bit, and when the reader is introduced to them, they have enough context to determine what that means. And then they repeat throughout, so there’s not too much language. And I know that there are like, high fantasy hard sci fi fans who might be really into learning, you know, Elvish or something, but we didn’t feel like we had the page space to build that out.
ZT: It was also to keep the world feeling lived in. I think that was a big thing that we were having discussions about, because Emily and I are crazy people, and we have, like, a timeline of 400 years for what this world looks like, and how language progressed, and things that we never even got to discuss. Like, we developed an entire church that sits in the background of the story; there’s a hint of it in the first issue with the fountain with the Sister of Renewal, but we never got to actually explore that just by virtue of limited space. But through that discovery process together, where we built up this world, we started to realize that there would be slang that would emerge, and there would be use cases for people to start developing their own shorthand with one another. And to Adrian’s credit, (Adrian Wessel, the editor on it), he was really helpful in pinpointing those areas where slang could be used or slang could be pulled back. Emily and I had been living in this world for three years at that point, and after you get so acquainted with it, you need someone from the outside to go, “Hey, you know what, we need to dial it back here a little bit, because you guys understand how this works, but maybe not the casual reader.”
EH: To Adrian’s credit, he was good at guiding us on using the language as a tool to signify character change. Later in the series, you start to see Tenn use a little more of the slang that Seren used earlier, signaling that she has adopted some of his values, and that she’s moved closer to where he is ideologically.
RS: I think the one the one moment that really stands out to me is the first time we hear the word “Ka’nop,” because if that throws you out of the narrative, it’s really useful to be thrown out of the narrative to consider that word, right? Because if you stop and you go, “Why are they talking about canopies?” I think that encapsulates the whole problem of this society; this society appears to be organized around something natural, natural forest layers, but then you realize, oh no, we’re just imposing our class hierarchy on this way of looking at the forest where the canopy is now the people both literally and figuratively at the top. So a reader goes, “OK, here’s how the society sees itself. But also, here are some deep flaws in that society.” Whenever you’re thrown out of a story for a moment to think about something specific, and then that moment of questioning tells you something useful about the narrative? I feel like, as a reader, that can be a rewarding experience, too.
So I want to turn the conversation toward that society and its structures. Your goal seems to have been to create a society that is somewhat anti-anthropocentric, but is subtly still very anthropocentric in the things that it has created. And so I’m just wondering if you could speak to how you fleshed out the details of that society, how you found that line? Really, you’re imagining the society that is so alien from us, until you peel back a layer, and beneath, surprise! Here’s capitalism and colonialism again!
EH: I feel like we wanted to build something where it was pretty clear from the get-go that there are some injustices that are [just] common to the human condition. An influence that I didn’t mention before is Star Trek. And Star Trek: The Next Generation specifically is something that I find really influences my sensibilities when it comes to science fiction. It’s pseudo-utopian: You still have issues, and they come across conflict all the time, but they’ve come to peace. Generally, the universe is at peace, and every once in a while something comes up and causes some disturbance and then they settle down. But: It is still hierarchical, right? It’s a very hierarchical society. And you even see that on a ship. Everyone has different positions. And so I think that when we think about what the future would look like, and what it would look like in a really positive way, we still bring a lot of our problems with us. One of the things that we wanted to bring to the table is this [problem where] our ideas of a future world still bring some of the baggage of the problems of the present day. How do you tackle those [remaining problems] in a meaningful way? And I think later, you see that you burn everything to the ground and start afresh, right?
ZT: Also, to go back to the planning stage, one of the things that we talked about a lot was, how do you present something as utopic, and then as [the reader] starts to learn more about it, they realize that it’s rooted in these old tendencies. But that also came from — when we were developing the world, we were like, “OK, if this dome was founded, let’s say 400 years ago, that would be people in 2020, or whatever, imagining their way out of a climate crisis.” And that [imaginative process] in and of itself, right now, is rooted in capitalism. When you hear people talk about how to solve climate change, it’s rooted in the right now. We wanted to present this utopic, wonderful vision, and then you start to go, “Oh, but wait a second, it was founded on the ideals of 2020. Therefore, that injustice, we’ve been able to ignore it for several hundred years, but it’s actually simmering in the background,” which is very much what we’re going through right now, right? Climate change has been pushed on to so many different people that are actually not inherently responsible for it. So we have this idea that individuals are responsible for solving climate change, but no! It’s such a huge corporate problem; it starts there and moves all the way down. But to [solve these problems], like Emily said, you would have to burn society to the ground and reformat the systems in which we all participate.
EH: I want to bring Waterworld in, OK? Let me tell you about Waterworld!
The reason why we jokingly reference Waterworld as an influence is because I think it is the first rollicking adventure story about climate change! It is probably the first and the only one that we have. And when you’re talking about how we envision the future and things like that, I think one of the major problems is that we have siloed off climate change into this category where it’s not cool, it’s not fun, there’s no adventure. It’s just the end of the world. And I think that with No One’s Rose, we talk a lot about post-colonialism, capitalism and anarchism, and all these ideologies are a large part of the book. But I think the vessel of the book, what we really wanted to do: Let’s engage with the reality of problems in the environment in a way that is fun, interesting and adventurous, because I feel like that’s the attitude you need to take into the future. Waterworld is hilarious, and it’s deeply problematic, but I love that it’s an adventure. It’s basically a pirate story, and it’s a pirate story that addresses climate change, not in a way really at the forefront — it’s sort of the adventures of — what’s his name, Kevin …?
ZT: Kevin Costner!
EH: Kevin Costner!
ZT: But I don’t know what the character’s name is in the movie.
EH: Well, Kevin Costner’s character is basically an adventurous solo pirate fish-man in the future! Honestly, it’s terribly handled, but I think those are the stories that we should be telling moving forward. How do we engage with really scary ideas, really complicated ideas, and welcome ourselves into that in a way that is engaging? Where maybe kids can read it and be like, “Hey, maybe there’s an alternate future that isn’t just the Earth burning to a crisp.”
ZT: And, to add to that, to rewire narratives and narrative tropes that inherently eliminate any mention of the natural world or the environment. I think that that was a huge thing [writing this series]; thinking about ways to be like, “Hey, there’s this specific set of trees in the background,” or “we see honeybees here in this scene,” just to remind people that the natural world exists. If you look around most modern science fiction, you don’t see a fucking tree or a living animal most of the time. Maybe you’ll get like a weird sci-fi monster in Star Wars, but that’s more in a fantasy realm. I think that sci-fi inherently has eliminated the natural environment from its narratives. We’re trying really hard to push back against that and say, we need to rethink the ways that we tell ourselves stories, because if we keep eliminating nature from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves or about our future, we will just keep on the same path.
RS: It’s weird that it seems like horror is more open to that, right, because you have stuff like Jeff VanderMeer’s work right now.
ZT: Yeah.
RS: And I can think of a number of films and novels that are comfortable depicting the natural world, but yeah, it seems like we’re OK with addressing the environment when we’re terrified of it, but not when we want to actually work with it, which is interesting.
ZT: I think that’s more reflective of the cultural moment we’re in currently, because climate change is such an existential threat, and so looming, that it really connects — like with VanderMeer in particular — connects with cosmic horror in that way, right? The unknowable thing infects your mind, and then you lose your grip on reality. And Emily and I have both been there: If you think about climate change too much, you do lose your grip on reality, and then you go, “Holy shit, we are all fucked.” And then you just want to go to bed and never think about climate change again.
RS: And so we need adventure stories.
ZT: Yeah!
RS: We need that feeling you’re describing, Emily. I don’t know if you guys have a sense of this, but when those first preview pages hit, of the first issue without dialogue, those pages of that guy, with a wacky mask and outfit, running along this broken landscape — it really did evoke that kind of excitement among people. At least in my corner of the internet, the way people were passing it around, was like, “Look at this wild adventure.” So I feel like opening the book with those specific pages — even acknowledging all of the complexities that arise later on in the narrative — yeah, that feeling did actually emerge. At least for me, and at least for, you know, the Twitter talk I saw, of people passing around GamesRadar previews, or whatever.
EH: That’s good to hear. I think the book has a lot of heart in its core. It’s a relationship of a brother and a sister battling forces that are bigger than them. And yeah, you can read a lot of this really ideological stuff into it, but we wanted it to function as both like something you can read through and be like, “Wow, that was a great adventure story. Maybe I know a little bit more about trees!” And then also you can read it and engage with it on a level where it’s like, “Oh, should we move past our capitalist-colonialist roots and move into a state of eco-anarchy maybe?” [The goal was to] have it function in both regards.
ZT: I think the touchstone for us always — we talked about this frequently — was, let’s write a book for our 15-year-old selves. If we found this when we were 15, and we saw the natural environment and all these political machinations coming to a head at the same time — we wanted to write something for people who are coming of age in this world, who maybe don’t see themselves or can’t identify with some of the narratives that are actually going on, and give them something that would — our sincerest hope with this book is that someone younger than us reads it, and it inspires them to do something in a similar vein. Our hope was to put those ideas out into the world and help spread them.
EH: I think it’s tough to write something like this because in some senses it’s “an eat your greens.” “Let’s think about the environment. Let’s think about the way we impact the environment.” And that’s really hard. I get it. I understand that people are exhausted with that kind of information. One of the things I was thinking about is how through nature films and through nature shows, we’ve done a really good job of conveying, “Hey, isn’t nature amusing? Isn’t it beautiful? Don’t you want to protect it?” But at the end of every single episode, it’s like, “This species is endangered. Humans are awful. You should feel bad about yourself. There are no solutions.” You know what I mean?
ZT: “Look at this bird in the eyes, because it’s not going to be alive by the time this airs!”
RS: “Maybe donate to our NGO. That’s all you can do.”
EH: I think that people are rightfully exhausted with that narrative of “Hey, there’s nothing you can do. You are inherently terrible because you’re a human being, and you’re enacting injustices in the world.” It’s hard to break into the space and want to write something that has a sense of adventure and that has a sense of excitement to it, and to rekindle a sense of excitement about what it would be like to live in the future, even [in a future] involving environmental collapse. So yeah, it’s a tough problem. To Zac’s point, wouldn’t it be wonderful if somebody read this and thought, “You know, I’d also like to write a story of adventure in the coming challenges of climate change,” because it’s coming whether we want it to or not. So let’s engage with it like we do anything else.
ZT: This is sort of related. What I find very interesting is, after having written this book, I’ve pitched a variety of different stories in similar veins, and almost no one is interested. Publishers very much don’t know what to do about climate change or how to talk about it. And to Vault’s credit, they championed this book very early on. We pitched this, I’m going to say at the end of 2018, it was greenlit in 2018, and we started working on it in 2019 proper, but very early on they were on board. Two years later, after writing one that successfully achieved its goal, people are like, “I don’t know who wants to read this.” And I’m like, “I promise you people are out there.” This is important now, but it feels like it’s a little bit ahead of where we are culturally to have these conversations yet.
EH: I think Zac’s right. The books that we related it to were V for Vendetta, Black Orchid. It’s hard in this climate today because I think that there was a conversation about climate change happening; Greta thunberg was really big, and there was a lot of energy behind tackling it. And then we’ve moved into the space where it’s like, all of our resources are going towards tackling present-day issues. And so I don’t really blame people for not wanting to take on climate change, because probably the last thing people want to think about realistically [right now] is runaway climate change, but it’s still an issue that’s worth talking about. I do hope that we see more Waterworlds (with a full caveat that Waterworld is trash). But with that spirit behind it.
ZT: I think we jokingly pitched this book as Waterworld meets V for Vendetta. Legitimately, that’s how we pitched it to Vault, and they were just like, “Well, we gotta open this email! This is insane.”
EH: Lot’s of credit goes to Vault for picking up this book.
Stay tuned next week for Part II, where Robert, Emily and Zac talk more about V for Vendetta, the last season of Game of Thrones and Walt Whitman.
Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.
