Hello, everyone! A heads up, to begin with: today's the final day for the #KidLit4Ceasefire auction. I'm offering signed and personalized copies of my Assassin's Creed novels, anywhere in the world. You've got a few hours to bid if you're interested! The money goes to good causes, including to helping displaced families in Gaza.
This week, I want to share some thoughts about why I'm not giving up hope despite the truly depressing onslaught of news every day.
If you're subscribed to this newsletter, you probably already know that writing fiction about moments of historical change is the main thing I do with my working hours.
The Chatelaine is set against the backdrop of the political, religious and economic ferment in 14th century Europe and the pressures that led to the Hundred Years' War.
The Embroidered Book is bookended by the Seven Years' War and the French Revolution.
The Valkyrie is about the transformations in the western Roman empire in the 5th century and the forced exile of a nation.
The Tapestry of Time is about the Second World War and the mid-20th century struggle against fascism (with a macguffin tied to Duke William's conquest of England in 1066).
My Assassin's Creed duology begins just after the revolutions of 1848 and stretches across several decades of dramatic changes in communications technology, the structures of global capitalism and imperialism, and conceptions of the state.
My Alice Payne duology is about time travellers selecting moments of change and trying to shift the outcomes; those books are explorations of the role of individual decisions in the web of causes and consequences that determine events.
This is why I often say in interviews that my career as a novelist is a continuation of the questions that occupied me when I was a newspaper columnist, and even, before that, when I was a student majoring in international and comparative political science.
If you look at any period, or even if you just live long enough to witness a bunch of history yourself, one thing becomes clear: things change. Sometimes, things change very quickly.
(I really do mean any period. There's a persistent tendency to flatten The Past and assume that things mostly just went along as usual until, say, our grandparents were born. This is really not the case; give me any year in a country whose history I know pretty well, such as England, France or Canada, and I'll give you at least three dramatic shifts likely to have a huge impact on the daily life of a person born there in that year.)
It's not only that change can happen; change must happen, of one kind or another. It is written on Octavia Butler's grave marker, in a cemetery that stayed just on the safe side of the Eaton Fire perimeter in Altadena, at least at the time I write this. "All that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is Change."
The constancy of change is a reason never to be complacent, never to succumb to the idea that the status quo has some kind of inevitability about it. History shows us that for most people, most of the time, things can get (even) worse. When governments shift further toward the authoritarian side of the spectrum, people who are already the worst off in those societies will be further marginalized and persecuted. Those of us not living in Gaza or Sudan are probably not yet living in the worst of all possible worlds. The getting worse doesn't come out of nowhere; the roots of evil are deep. But a fresh flourishing of the plant matters to people's lives all the same. The fight has to be against both root and branch.
I've been reading February 1933: The Winter of Literature, by Uwe Wittstock, translated by Daniel Bowles. I posted its opening paragraphs on Bluesky the other day, but I'll post part of what I posted there here as well, as this struck me as very timely.
"Everything happened in a frenzy. Four weeks and two days elapsed between Hitler's accession to power and the 'Emergency Decree for the Protection of People and State', which abrogated all fundamental civil rights. It took only this one month to transform a state under the rule of law into a violent dictatorship without scruples. Killing on a grand scale did not begin until later. But in February '33 it was decided who would be its target: who would fear for her life and be forced to flee and who would step forward to launch his career in the slipstream of the perpetrators."
Things can change unimaginably quickly. It has happened before, it's happening now, it will happen again.
But there's a flip side. The constancy of change is also a reason to keep hope. As long as there is the possibility of change–and there is–despair has no mastery over us.
In 1997, Nelson Mandela spoke at a tribute to Steve Biko on the 20th anniversary of his murder in custody. He said, “at each turn of history, apartheid was bound to spawn resistance; it was destined to bring to life the forces that would guarantee its death.”
History is full of examples of tyrannical regimes falling, or at least dismantling. (In much of the 20th century, the process of regimes rising and falling was frequently related to how much energy a given U.S. administration wanted to invest in propping up a given dictator.) Sometimes it's a bloodless internal change in control, where moderates or opposition figures take over and start shifting toward the democratic end of the spectrum, sometimes in response to economic pressure (either as a direct consequence of the tyrant class running the country into the ground as they enrich themselves, or as a consequence of external pressures like those that helped end the apartheid regime in South Africa, or both.) Sometimes it's a revolution. Sometimes it's a war. The causes are always complex, but the change can–will–happen.
And just as negative changes can happen quickly, so can positive ones. We can avert disasters. We can make things better. My favourite example of people making things better is the eradication of smallpox, which was absolutely not inevitable and depended on many political factors and interests aligning–and many people working hard. The factors for success came together over centuries, but the actual eradication effort only took 10 years. (A gripping and informative book about this is Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox by Jonathan B. Tucker.)
Change is complex, but that doesn't mean that nothing we do makes a difference. There are many, many moments when timing, luck and individual decisions create a tipping point, big or small. I was drawn to write the story of the Bayeux Tapestry in 1944 because I read about the day in August when two SS men showed up in Paris to take it to Germany, only to be told that the Resistance had taken back the Louvre, where it was housed, hours before. Bad timing and luck for the Nazis–but it wasn't luck; it was ordinary people rising up and taking back their city, well in advance of the Allies arriving.
One classic example of a tipping point in fairly recent history is the decision made by Stanislav Petrov not to report incoming U.S. missiles. Of course, no one person is ever wholly responsible for any event, and it's possible that even if someone else had been making the call that day, we would still have averted nuclear war. But it's also possible that we might not have. It never takes much for the unimaginable to happen.
If there's a point I was hoping to make with my Alice Payne novellas, it is that we are all time travellers saving the world and each other, every moment of every day. No one is coming to save us, but that's OK, because we can save each other. It's people, human beings, in uniform and out of uniform, who rose up, resisted, and rid Europe of the Nazis in the 1940s. Not alone–community is strength–but every one of them mattered to the fight.
It's a fallacy to assume that what did happen must have happened, and the same holds for the future as for the past. Nothing is inevitable; not for good and not for ill.
I'll end with a recommendation for two of the books that have given me the most hope in recent years: The Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice and The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed. (Both now have sequels, which I haven't yet read. They're on my stack.) They're not sugar-coated books by any means, but they left me with a useful sense of perspective. Indigenous literatures, especially, are key texts for this. Apocalypses happen; dystopias happen. They are already woven into the story of our past and of our present. And humans have responded by finding ways to connect, to relearn lost knowledge, to keep each other safe. Maybe the world won't ever be the same, but the world never is.