Joanna Kavenna: 'We all make fictions about the future'

After hearing from Helga Schubert, Ben Sorgiovanni, Julian George and Rachida Lamrabet, we bring this Winter series of podcasts to a close with Joanna Kavenna and her short story Notes on the Future.

Kavenna tells us how this story was born from an obsession with patterns and a robust detachment from her characters.

"I like to have quite questing narrators," she says, "who are desperately trying to find meaning in a world that keeps depriving them of meaning. Which is probably quite autobiographical."

When you’re writing, Kavenna continues, you’re constantly forced up against the gap between language and the world. But it’s a question that none of us can avoid.

"All of us are in this," she explains, "whether we like to be or not. And it’s this strange illogic logic that we’re all existing within."

While the characters in Kavenna’s novel A Field Guide to Reality are in pursuit of a book that will answer all their questions, Notes on the Future begins when a book which promises to reveal the future is found. But according to Kavenna the future is "a massive area of complete, unknowable fiction" for us all.

"There’s something quite powerful about the predictions of the future that we all make," she says, "because we’re more likely – potentially – to unravel things towards them."

Even if we could conjure a world in which we know everything, it’s not clear that we would want to take that path.

"Would we want to know the full remit of the future," Kavenna asks, "or would that be actually the most horrifying nightmare of all?"

The AI-driven future imagined in the author’s novel Zed takes her characters dangerously close to that precipice.

"I felt really sorry for them," she admits, "because I put them in this dystopia, which seemed really unfair after spending so long with them."

Five years after Zed hit the shelves, that future is coming down the track with alarming speed.

"If you’re going to be compelled to live in a certain reality," Kavenna says, "it would be nice to be asked. And I think that’s the major political question that we now have."

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