Arts of futuring
Reflecting on Catherine Leroux’s dystopian novel The Future
This essay on “futuring” and The Future by Catherine Leroux can also be read on Medium, where I will be publishing articles on the books we read and discuss together.
The future does not exist. It is imagined.
This is how the developing field of “futuring” conceptualises the future. It is not yet made, not inevitable. It is always in the making.
Transforming “the future” from a static noun into a fluid verb of possibility can be liberating, particularly in the context of climate change. Taking a futuring approach, the bleak climate-altered future portrayed in policymakers’ and scientists’ worst-case scenarios is not a fait accompli. Futuring refers to a way of thinking and behaving in the present that more thoughtfully considers the consequences of our actions for future generations. Futuring encapsulates some of the core elements that have long been part of environmentalist thought.
Futuring and futures literacy
Futures literacy — our ability to think about the future through our present actions — depends on our faculties of imagination, how well we can look forward and prepare for what is coming. It is an increasingly vital skill. According to the United Nations, futures literacy “helps people understand why and how we use the future to prepare, plan, and interact with the complexity and novelty of our societies.” It is part of how we become more resilient.
As we reckon with how to hone our futuring skills and develop futures literacy, turning towards art may be beneficial. Artists are expert at imagining what does not yet exist, what is possible. Imagination is essential to artistic practice. Specifically imagining the future is central to so much climate fiction literature, particularly those novels which fall under the canon of speculative fiction. Speculative fiction weaves narratives speculating what might happen and has spurred many sub-genres, including: Afrofuturism, feminist futurism, Indigenous futurism, and queer futurism. These sub-genres delve into the imagined futures of groups often marginalised in present societies. These speculative fictions can be optimistically hopeful, like the stories of solarpunk, but more often they are dystopian. Dystopian novels like The Future by French Canadian author Catherine Leroux can be distressing yet surprisingly hopeful, shining a light on the good that is possible even in the bleakest moments. The Future is a beautifully written novel that reverses the dystopian genre according to Canadian author Heather O’Neill, showing ways that we can come together in adversity.
The Future by Catherine Leroux
The Future by Catherine Leroux is simultaneously an alternate history and speculative future, situated in a time and place that is both familiar and disorienting: not Detroit, but Détroit. Never surrendered by the French, Détroit shares similarities with real cities in crisis. The author takes inspiration from Detroit and Montréal of the 1990s, capturing a vision of cities in the throes of economic decline. The citizens of this newly conjured Détroit hold onto the history and folklore of the French settlers from whom they inherited the city. They speak French as they grapple with pollution, poverty, racism, and social inequality.
In the dystopian atmospheres of this reimagined city, we meet Gloria. She has moved into the ghostly house of her recently deceased daughter. As Gloria navigates her grief, she also begins to explore the strange spaces of this new place. With the guidance of her neighbours, she sets out in search of her missing granddaughters Cassandra and Mathilda.
Not far from the banks of Détroit’s Rivière Rouge, she soon encounters a community of lost children who have built their own peculiar and magical society, independent of adult influence. Heather O’Neill writes that this “wild group of children show us a model for a new society where everyone’s dream life is equally important”. Amidst the chaos and the haunted spaces of this uncertain future, community still thrives signalling the possibility for new beginnings even at the end-of-times. According to its author, The Future is a meditation on the questions “how do we look towards the future, how do we go forward”.
Building community
Like many dystopian works, The Future demonstrates the importance of community during hardship, how resilience is dependent upon our relationships with each other. Community is built in different ways throughout the novel. As a new arrival to Détroit, we witness Gloria develop incrementally from outsider to part of the community. The adults build their community in the ruinous neighbourhoods of the city through growing food, making music, sharing knowledge, and supporting each other emotionally and physically.
The emancipated children forge their own bonds and society on the periphery. Their community has its own rules designed to ensure their independence and survival. The novel shows how community is built through individual relationships but also the importance of forging connections between communities, however conflicting their worldviews may be — and the worldviews of the adults and children are in discord despite their shared geography. Witnessing the ways these relationships develop, configure, solidify or disintegrate illustrates the necessity of communal care for survival.
Shifting perspectives
Generational divides are strong in this story. Immersing the reader in the self-governing society of children, The Future reminds us that youth are typically excluded from decision-making that disproportionally impacts their futures. The children’s community that Cathrine Leroux conjures is reminiscent of other tales where disaster brings children together. William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is an obvious link, while more recent connections can be made with Olivia E. Butler’s Afrofuturist work Parable of the Sower and the Indigenous futurism of Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves. Other works of climate fiction which meditate on generational divides include A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet and Yoko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo (also published under the title The Emissary). The stories of Heather O’Neill, who championed The Future (and won) on CBC Radio’s Canada Reads competition share some similarities too, as children and young adults feature prominently in her writing. Her latest novel The Capital of Dreams tells a a kindred tale of children’s survival in the forest.
Reading literature is an exercise in empathy for we are thrust into another view of the world by the author. In The Future, we are privileged to a chorus of narratives as we move between the inner worlds of various characters, young and old, human and non-human. What is it like to see the changing world through the eyes of a child? Or through a grieving mother? Or a philosophical pit-bull? Catherine Leroux invites the reader to see a singular world in multiple ways; the world becoming increasingly complex and whole through each subsequent narration from Détroit’s varied characters.
Imagining the impossible
In playing with notions of time, The Future prompts us to reflect on inevitability and possibility. Literature is a gift for the ways it imagines what could be, for how it pushes beyond the limits of the “rational” boundaries of everyday life. In The Future, magic and mysticism abounds. Elements of magical realism are present throughout the book, appearing at crucial, symbolic moments but also in the mundane and quotidian.
There is a magic, both spoken and unspoken in the children’s world. We are not always certain what is real, what is fact, what is fiction. This magical realism upends our ideas on the possible, making magic unquestionably commonplace. This magical realism seems perfectly in place in the children’s world, where of course trees and animals and the water can speak and be heard. Mysticism permeates this story too, but more so among the adults. Casual mentions of divination and spiritual practices akin to futuring are part of the adult’s daily lives. Such references include horoscopes, séances, tarot cards, tea leaf reading, and ghostly visions. This is grown-up magic, perhaps. As the story progresses and the worldviews begin to meet, clash, coalesce, and coexist, so does this magic and mysticism. The lives of the children and adults begin to mingle and culminate in events that unite them and their magical worlds.
Does the future exist?
Whether the future exists or not is as much a philosophical matter as it is a question of physics. How one answers the question depends on cultural and personal understandings of time and how well one is acquainted with the theories of quantum physics. It depends on your worldview. Catherine Leroux proclaims that the future is all around us. In all its uncertainty. She writes: “We know nothing till we know. We cannot understaand until we can. The future invites itself in, tiny, almost mute in our hands, then takes up all space.”
In thoughtful and poetic prose, The Future ruminates on the lives of children, how we build community, on culture and language, racism, settler-colonialism, on our shared histories and the uncertain urban futures of the climate-changed city. The Future and the future are about how we relate to one another and to the natural environment, how we nurture those relationships, how we build resillience through community, and all the myriad ways there are to see and experience our worlds. The Future is a story of community and “a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love — together”, says Heather O’Neill who connects the catastrophes of the novel to global current events, noting that the novel reminds the reader that “disaster can actually herald change”.
Whether you believe it exists or not, reflecting on the future through literature is one of the inevitabilities of reading climate fiction. It is not the sole reason to write or read climate fiction, of course, but speculative novels may assist the reader in developing their futures literacy. Climate fiction is as much a way of reading as it is a genre of writing. To read novels in new ways, through the lens of climate change and futuring, can serve to deepen our experience of literature and the world around us. ☁︎
The Future was the first read in the LAX LAB 2.0 school of climate fiction book club. This article was written with input from the LAX LAB 2.0 community and also features excerpts from a forthcoming article for the journal Education in the North. Affiliate links are used in this article and the author may receive a small commission from book purchases made at bookshop.org.