Arcadia Scotland

Over the last two semesters, Arcadia Scotland has been delighted to host two award winning authors; Alice Thompson and Martin MacInnes. Both writers discussed their latest novels Chimera and In Ascension with our students. These works explore deep themes of challenging identity through, respectively: developing technologies; our relationship to an anthropocene world through climate crisis; and, the questioning of our fundamental nature as biological beings. 

Both authors write across genres in their other literary corpus but have turned, in these latest works, to what might best be described as ‘science fiction’, but both are keen to challenge genre identity in their pursuit of truth through fiction in increasingly anxious, current and dystopian near future worlds. Perhaps these novels are even better described as ‘anxiety fiction’ reflecting also the times in which they were written during a global pandemic.

Both novels send their characters out on voyages of exploration into the void at considerable speed in an attempt to solve a mystery.  Both novels have endings that will leave you gasping. Where their novels differ, though, is the focus of the themes and the differing questions their protagonists are trying to resolve concerning our identity and through a re-framing of our relationship to the world and the universe we inhabit. 

Martin MacInnes is striving to break down the categories of living and non-living in order to question the very biological basis and prejudices of our existence to shock us into a realization of who we are, the world we live in and the world that could be. He brings us to an uneasy sense of our living identity through increasing levels of discomfort and vulnerability as his heroine adventures first at sea to confront an abyss, and then into the void of space. Alice Thompson’s protagonist struggles with the nature of consciousness and the core of our creativity and our imagination. As AI develops and their outputs become increasingly indistinguishable from our outputs, at what point do boundaries and identities collapse at the point of dreaming and creating?

To learn more about their writing and their latest novels please see the below videos or listen as if a podcast as they take you into our uncertain future.