From Sunday Times bestselling author Manda Scott comes a visionary new fantasy thriller f or the cli-fi generation, about a family at the centre of a global uprising.

As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. A decade later her teenage granddaughter is caught up in an international storm of outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole, failed generation. For one shining fragment of time, the world is with her. But then the backlash begins, and soon she and her family are besieged by the press, facing the all-powerful wrath of the old establishment, who deeply fear an empowered youth.

Watching over the growing chaos is Lan, who taught them all to think independently, approach power sceptically and dream with clear intent. She knows that more than one generation's hopes are on the line.

For readers of Claire North, Naomi Alderman and Neil Gaiman, Any Human Power weaves together myth, technology and radical compassion to create a world beyond dystopia. Gripping, genre-bending, grand in scope and rich in brave characters breathing new life into the old wisdoms, here is a dream of a better future: the story of a world we’d be proud to leave to our children.

It’s a bold book that kills its protagonist off in the first chapter, but Manda Scott’s challenging novel blends politically charged thriller with mystic influences from a sprawl of cultures in ways which keep the recently deceased Alanna Penhaligon (Lan to family and friends) deeply involved in the unfolding lives of those she left behind.

The story begins with Lan’s peaceful death in a hospital bed in Cambridge, England in 2008 and the rash but necessary promise that traps her dreaming soul in an “inbetween.” The promise leaves Lan unable to cross over to the full-service afterlife and the long-awaited reunion with her lost love. Instead she must remain in frustratingly ethereal orbit around her family as long as the promise binds her.

Her first call to act is a desperate but creative intervention to head off a tragedy in the immediate aftermath of her own death. That hard-won success earns Lan some respite and a chance to explore the hinterland she occupies between life and death while taking comfort from a crow companion with strong overtones of Norse mythos.

The story then jumps ahead to 2023 when Kaitlyn, a teenage granddaughter who Lan never met, sends a tweet that threatens to break the family or the world or possibly both. In the events that follow Scott delivers a fascinating but resonant story with an ensemble cast, brought together in many different ways and facing many different threats.

The Greek writer Horace wrote that literature had a twofold purpose, firstly to entertain with vivid prose, plots and characters and secondly to educate through delivering a moral lesson. A dual aim encapsulated in the phrase to be “dulce et utile” – sweet and useful.

There is much in Any Human Power that is challenging and educative, but a story’s first duty is to entertain as unread stories cannot educate anyone. So I will divide this review into

• a spoiler-free Dulce section (so you can decide if it sounds sweet enough to entertain you) followed by
• a potentially more spoilery Utile section (for there is much that is instructive in how this book depicts approaches to our contemporary social, political and environmental crisis)

Dulce

Scott’s writing has a breathless urgency to it leavened with many fine lines and descriptions.

Sometime in the sixties, the Farmhouse had been given Grade II listing which meant it drank money the way a tick drinks blood.

‘Lan!’ She bit her lip. Tears made diamonds of her eyes.

Kaitlyn said, ‘Mum, it’s not what you think.’

‘Oh, really?’

That tone would have sliced the balls off a charging bull.

‘You really want to talk to Matt and Jens before you get too carried away.’ Connor’s voice shouldered through the open door to the yard, startling them all. The rest of him stomped in behind.

The book delivers a large and varied ensemble cast, from the enigmatic grandfather Connor, to the pseudonym-ed IT genius Charm, to the Radical FM presenter Leah Koresh.  However, they swirl around the central core of Lan’s family and in particular three women, her daughter Maddie and her grandchildren Kaitlyn and Kirsten. As Lan often says there is a power in three – a power embraced by myths across the ages and the three women with their differing priorities and characters might bear a fleeting resemblance to the Maiden, Mother and Crone.

As clouds and crowds gather in the first half of the book, there is something of a false lull, as the disparate elements of Lan’s family come together co-operatively in support of Kaitlyn against the storm her tweet has unleashed. Part of Scott’s inspiration was a real controversial tweet by another teenager who met less familial support, such that their story faded unnoticed. Given Scott’s desire to imagine a different path, this may be why the initial level of conflict within the family appears low – and conflict is the engine of a good plot (it can be hard to make people agreeing with each other entertaining). However, there’s plenty of external conflict which reminded me of the demonisation Greta Thunberg has faced, attacked from so many self-contradictory angles it should have spun the online trolls and old white media men into self-induced nausea.

As events unfold, the family and the world face a fractured future with Lan at the centre of it. Scott’s narrative weaves together elements of political/environmental thriller and magical realism that is reminiscent of Helen Marshall’s Migration. Like Marshall, Scott shows us a world in crisis and a youth that is at once vilified and corralled by frightened adults, and yet also may have the answer to how the world needs to change. However, Marshall had her worlds collide with the youth struck by a strange affliction that heralded ascendancy into a very different way of living. Scott maintains a studious distinction between the mystic and the real-world aspects of her story. While Lan finds ways to intervene in the world she does so without making the world itself feel in any way unreal or uncanny. The settings and actions of the protagonists are reassuringly recognisable. They interact through named social media (Twitter – it will always be Twitter, Elon!), they play named MMPORPG games (World of Warcraft), the vast majority of the population, indeed of the wider cast, are oblivious to Lan’s touch. That keeps the thriller aspect of the story firmly grounded and untainted by overt magical intrusions.

The more metaphysical aspects centre on the power of dreaming, and dream as being a potential excursion into the land between life and after-life. The 1998 Robin Williams’ film What Dreams May Come explored a powerful, dreamlike and potentially turbulent fantasy afterlife. Alice Seebold’s The Lovely Bones (adapted for film in 2009) also tackled the newly dead’s entanglement in the travails of the still living. Scott captures that same powerful imagery of a rolling fertile landscape of the afterlife, although she draws on wider ranging theology – including Norse and shaolin beliefs. Lan’s ability to communicate comes mainly through dreams, but she faces danger in trespassing into other people’s dreams. She also finds other inventive ways to appear through the co-operation of both species and semi-conductors, redolent of the way Hopkirk from the 1970s TV show Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) had to find ways to convey desperately important messages.

Lan is not entirely safe in the afterlife. She faces potential annihilation when she explores a myriad of possible futures in the search for the safe paths for her family and the wider world. Like Dr Strange in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Lan sees many futures (perhaps not quite 14,000,605) and like Lan the number with positive outcomes can be counted on a single digit. So Lan’s influence on the future is a matter of teasing out a thin thread of hope and opportunity and weaving it into something thicker and stronger.

Events converge on a critical UK general election in 2023 (Oh if only), with Lan’s diverse family members dodging intrigue, garnering allies and finding some solace in each other, as they strive to effect a paradigm shift in how politics works and how the future is shaped. The mixture of politics and activism is reminiscent of the kind of intrigue and infighting in Michael Dobbs House of Cards.

There is much in the book’s later sections that feels both horrifically and hopefully prescient. The book is now slated for publication in the middle of a real UK General Election with just as high stakes as the fictional one Scott set in 2023. Our unfit system of politics needs to be broken before it breaks us, but how far and how Lan’s extended family and friends achieve that – well you’ll go have to buy the book (and VOTE).

Any Human Power is due for release 30th May, you can order your copy HERE

Utile

(spoilers)

Scott sets out an “utile” intention in the book’s front matter – firstly with an Ursula le Guin quote from which the book draws its title

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inevitable – but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. (Ursula K le Guin, Speech to the National Book Awards, 2014)

And secondly with a dedication

The book is dedicated to generations who lived before and to those yet unborn, that the wisdom of both may inform the present.

Scott peppers the narrative with references to being a Good Ancestor – a case made by Roman Krznaric in The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World (2020) which raises valid questions about what future generations will think of us and what debt we already owe to them in terms of how our activities have borrowed (stolen?) shamelessly from their futures.

In the thin thread of hope that Scott has Lan tease out, she echoes Professor Michael Mann’s observations about Our Fragile Moment  and the fact that faced with narratives of doomism (there is nothing we can do) and denial (there is nothing that needs to be done) the outcome risks being catastrophic apathy – a world too paralysed to even rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, let alone steer a course away from the iceberg. Scott’s vision of the future has its fair share of challenges and tragedies, but it is not without that essential hope – the desire from so many to seize the fragile moment. (Carpe momentum fragili – if you will)

This is a point, indeed a necessity for climate change fiction, that writers like Matthew Schnider-Mayerson, Adrienne Johns-Putra and even Kim Stanley Robinson have highlighted in urging that climate change fiction must eschew the “pornography of despair” (2017) that early cli-fi dystopias embraced with perhaps too much fervour.

The obstacles that Lan’s family face are as real-life as the social media platforms, TV panel discussions, and online games that Scott populates the setting with. A media owned by and serving the interests of the billionaire class, pushing narratives of hate, misdirection and misinformation and encouraging a climate that denigrates not just simple compassion but the hard-fought progress civilisation has achieved.

Connor mouthed, ‘Incel?’ at Maddie.

Finn answered. ‘Involuntarily celibate. A bunch of toxic losers from Reddit and 4Chan who think every woman on the planet exists to serve them sex on a stick and the fact that they’re not getting laid ten times a day is evidence of a vile conspiracy by woman-kind, not because they’re unwashed. Acne ridden, keyboard warriors with the charisma of a tend-day-old dog turd.”   

Through the clear sight of her young protagonists and the oh so sadly recognisable contemporary setting, Scott gives the reader a vision of the world as it is, teetering on the brink of catastrophe.

We know the evils of the world in theory, but Kaitlyn was right, its different to see millions upon millions of small acts of unkindness stack up and up and up, to see them multiply and spread like a stain across the heart-mind of humanity.

But the onus on the cli-fi author is not just to share a vision of the world, but to show a path out of it. Schneider-Mayerson applauded the novelistic efforts of Daniel Kramb in From Here (2012) in portraying collective action to change minds (Schneider-Mayerson, The Slightest Bit of Difference: Regret and Radicalism in Climate Futures, 2014) – although Kramb’s hopeful ending still relies on a small cast and a widespread damascene conversion by a TV audience witnessing a House of Commons sit in.

Toby Litt, in his online book How to Tell a Story to Save the World (2021), emphasised the need to move away from the notion of the Hero With a Thousand Faces, and to embrace collective action, rather than reliance on salvation through a seventh cavalry style protagonist, in short to begin telling stories of a Thousand Faces without a Hero.

Schneider-Mayerson, in critiquing a climate change related episode of the TV show Ted Lasso, emphasised the success of the programme’s vision and message through its portrayal of action that was collective, hopeful, joyous and successful (2021).

Scott in Any Human Power shows a truly global cast of activists working together to deliver change. Some would argue that the power of the realist novel lies in the empathy engendered by the reader for the protagonist and that this empathy might become more diffuse with an overly large cast. However, the character of Lan flitting in and out of people’s dreams and experiences, renders the large cast in vivid and empathic detail. It is a nice conceit that Lan thus becomes a personified omniscient narrator (well not quite omniscient, and certainly not omnipotent, possibly just omnipresent – sometimes).

However, it is one thing to engage a large cast to energise a readership, to make them feel potentially a participant in this story rather than an admiring spectator of some Hero (with a thousand faces)’s success. It is something more to show them what to do.

Ursula McTaggart, writing about Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) explained how Abbey’s book was both polemic and a manual for environmental action, with its emotive prose, and almost handbook style exposition about how to steal and start up a mechanical digger (McTaggart, 2020).  Scott offers something of that handbook approach too, in explaining how those who would change the world must change social media, manage and redirect the trends, combat the psyops of the petro-state funded fossil fuel trolls and get the truths out there. Above all else Scott writes about wielding the axe of democracy in ways that sever the links between wealth and power. As we approach another UK election, with barely a cigarette paper’s width between the policies of the two main parties, there is much in Any Human Power that might guide us.

My own Creative writing PhD thesis considered many of the questions that Scott has addressed through Any Human Power. Somewhat ironically my creative piece – a novel called Turning the Tide – also made some allusions to Norse Mythology, with crows and Yggdrasil and the information war making appearances. My argument, in novel and thesis is that Capitalism is like Fenris the wolf. As a tamed, trained and regulated canine companion it may yet be of service to humanity, but as an unregulated, unfettered, avaricious monster it will in all probability bring about the effective end of human civilisation – our own version of Ragnorak.

There are many highlights in my kindle copy of Any Human Power, many moments where Scott speared the zeitgeist of our currently flawed politics, not least when she wrote how “triggered people are easy to control” – which is why we see so many deliberately triggering narratives about Rwanda, Trans people and immigrants. The book is a product of its time, completed in 2023 and coming to market in the critical year for democracy of 2024.

I will leave you with one quote from a teenage cast member called Prune. It resonated with me not least for its oblique reference to an odious ex prime-minister who in any sane state would have been investigated multiple times for malfeasance in public office.

Prune gave a short sigh that wasn’t really aimed at anyone else and said, ‘We’re the people you’re fighting for. If they call an election tomorrow, not a single one of us will be old enough to vote. It’s our future that’s being spaffed up against a wall.’

References

Abbey, E. (1975). The Monkey Wrench Gang. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Kramb, D. (2012). From Here. London: Lonely Coot.

Krznaric, R. (2020). The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-term world. Reading: Virgin Digital.

Litt, T. (2021, December). How to tell a Story to Save the World. Retrieved from Writersrebel.com: https://writersrebel.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/How-to-Tell-a-Story-to-Save-the-World-by-Toby-Litt-for-Writers-Rebel.pdf

McTaggart, U. (2020). Literature that Prompts Action: Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang and the Formation of Earth First! ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 27(2), 307-326. doi:10.1093/isle/isz120

Robinson, K. S. (2017, July &). Mr. On The Media. (B. Gladstone, Interviewer) Retrieved from https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-2017-07-07

Robinson, K. S. (2017, July 7). Our Future Cities. On The Media. (B. Gladstone, Interviewer) Retrieved from https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-2017-07-07

Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2014). The Slightest Bit of Difference: Regret and Radicalism in Climate Futures. American Comparative Literature Association’s meeting. New York.

Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2021, September 17). Ted Lasso Is an Unexpected Masterclass in Environmental Storytelling. Retrieved from gzimodo.com: https://gizmodo.com/ted-lasso-is-an-unexpected-masterclass-in-environmental-1847695754

Any Human Power is due for release 30th May, you can order your copy HERE