Women in SF&F Month 2026 officially starts today with a guest post by Lorraine Wilson! Her short fiction includes “Bathymetry” (winner of the British Fantasy Award) and “Mhairi Aird” (published in the British Fantasy Award–nominated anthology Nova Scotia: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Volume 2). Her first novel, This Is Our Undoing, won the SCKA for Best Debut and was a finalist for the Kavya Prize as well as the British Fantasy Awards for Best Novel and Best Newcomer. Her latest novels are the science fantasy books We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Oracle, the latter of which is a finalist for this year’s British Science Fiction Association Award and a Locus Recommended Reading List selection for Science Fiction. I’m thrilled she’s here today with her essay “Finding hope — writing in hard times, the ‘punk’, and envisioning better futures.”
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About We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Oracle:
The internet has collapsed, leaving the world haunted by digital ghosts that infect books, people and nature itself. Blending climate fiction, folklore, and a smidge of the spooky, these two critically acclaimed science fantasies are standalones in the same eerie future.
BSFA Longlisted WE ARE ALL GHOSTS IN THE FOREST follows a healer whose carefully solitary life on the edge of the woods is upturned when a scarred and silent teenage boy is left in her care, and a mysterious digital plague spreads unrest across the land.
Current BSFA finalist, THE SALT ORACLE, is a locked boat murder mystery with a dash of second chance romance and a post fall-of-civilisation dark academia. A giant floating college has been built around an uncanny girl who can commune with the digital ghosts of the sea, but is she a monster, or a victim?
Finding hope —
writing in hard times, the ‘punk’, and envisioning better futures
– Lorraine Wilson
This is a hard time to be a creative. The tech companies are stealing our work in order to burn the world faster while they line their pockets with economic lies. The publishing industry is starving its mid-list, investing in narrower and narrower genre-brackets, and stripping publishing houses for parts. And the world — oh the world — it is so full of darkness and hurt and injustice. How, amidst all that, do you sit at your computer and create beauty?
It feels frivolous to write about imaginary people having imaginary crises when there is just so much work to be done to fix everything that is broken, and we all (the non-politicians, non-millionaires) individually have so little ability to create that change. We are fiddling while Rome burns, or shouting our own name into an abyss filled with weeping. It feels self-indulgent if you are writing about anything other than world events, and futile if you are. And yet we have all seen the quotes from wiser women than me saying that in difficult times, writing matters.
‘Books are a form of political action,’ Toni Morrison said. ‘Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.’ Ursula Le Guin said, ‘Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words.’ She also said this: ‘I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.’
So who am I to disagree with such icons? And I don’t disagree, but I do think the gap between believing these statements to be true, and having the necessary creative energy to do the work is wide and hard to cross. Particularly for those of us writing around the socio-political issues that are so overwhelmingly in our news — far-right violence, the dismantling of democracy and human rights, the climate crisis — thus making our work not escapist, not something we can compartmentalise away from the real world. And it is particularly hard again for those of us who are struggling to stay afloat within publishing — financial hardship, insecurity and industry disinterest are not, funnily enough, conducive to creativity.
So how do we, as authors who are trying to speak to the hard times, and envisioning change, guard the flame of our creativity when the world seeks to blow it out?
I have always said to my daughter that whenever something terrible is happening, we must ask ourselves what is within our capacity to do, and then we must do it. Whether that’s donating, signing petitions, marching, uplifting other voices, or just being in community with others, there is almost always some small direct action we as normal citizens can do even for issues that are not on our doorstep. I think finding that small direct action frees up a lot of the mental energy consumed by powerlessness — it allows our brains to let out a breath of relief and say ‘right, I’ve done something, so now what else can I do?’ And it becomes easier for that next something to be art.
So then, once we come to the art, we can use that powerlessness we feel, along with the anger and the desperate hope, to fuel our writing. Having done something tangible, the intangibility of art-as-resistance feels more deeply nurtured and nurturing. With my most recent two books — We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, and The Salt Oracle — I was very consciously exploring the power of individual choices, and individual compassion. I was looking at community, and what it takes to build community and hold it together in the face of apocalyptic world events. That exploration was a way of reminding myself that I believe in community as the force that can resist the megalomaniac destructiveness we are surrounded by. I don’t believe in heroes or chosen ones, but I do believe in normal people – just look at the Twin Cities, and the awe-inspiring power of a community brought together against hate.
Recently though, I have taken a break from novel projects to focus on short fiction. Partly because publishing is brutal and I needed to step away from the fear of failure, but also partly because I wanted, with everything going on in the world, to take some time to focus on generating hope on the page. Not just hope within dystopian worlds, but actively hopeful futures.
Anger and catharsis for our fears are extremely important in our fiction, and I will die on the hill that we need those narratives just as much as we need escapism, hope or joy. But having written several books that contemplate those fears head on, I wanted to do something different. Genre-labels like ‘solar-punk’ and ‘hope-punk’ have been drifting around the SFF conversations for a while now, but intentionally diving into those narrative forms meant I had to have a good think about what they are really doing. The key word, to me, is the ‘punk’. We are fond of appending that word to pretty much anything that’s a bit edgy, but if this is me trying to do as the great Le Guin bid me — envisioning larger realities — then my stories need to be doing more than that.
Punk, to me, is a political stance. It is active movement against the status quo, a dismantling of hegemonic structures of power, ownership and personhood. And not just that — it isn’t enough to resist exploitative systems; to be truly envisioning freedom, we need to be creating something better. It is also not enough to be cosy or gentle or free from conflict — that is escapism, not hope, and it definitely isn’t punk. If I wanted to write ‘hope-punk’ then I needed to be saying ‘this is who we might be, this is how we’d get there, this is why it matters.’
This mini-project has taken me to speculative climate mitigation work, collective restoration and future folklores. It has been a powerful exercise in testing my storytelling skills, my imagination, and my capacity to dream better realities that are still tangibly linked to where we are now. But it has also done something unexpected — it’s made me better at looking for the light.
I thought I was already quite good at looking for the people doing the good work, at believing that there is always someone creating a light in any darkness. But in specifically seeking to create that light in my stories, I’ve found myself seeing it in more places than before. In some ways, that only adds to my general frustration at the people in power — the solutions are right there. It would, bluntly, be so damn easy to fix all of the horrors facing us, the only thing in our way is the greed of rich men.
But it has also been rejuvenating — this retraining to look for solutions rather than pending disaster. In remembering freedom, I have found it in more places than I thought, and I will be carrying that determined, eyes-wide-open hopefulness back into my novels. There is so much I cannot influence, but I can do this.
It is a hard time to be a creative. But we are creatures built on storytelling, and anyone who has hung on in publishing for any length of time is stubborn down to their bones. So we build community, we tell stories that shape hope out of ashes, and we don’t give up until that hope becomes truth.
 A conservation scientist and third culture Scot, Lorraine lives by the sea writing stories influenced by folklore and the wilderness. She has a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of several books, most recently the connected science fantasies We Are All Ghosts In The Forest and The Salt Oracle. Winner of two British Fantasy Awards and the Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize, her books have also been finalists for the BSFA, BFA, Kavya and Saltire Awards, and twice winners of the SCKAwards. Lorraine has been stalked by wolves, caught the bubonic plague, and befriended pythons, but she now sticks to herding cats. |
