Scottish-born author Manda Scott will talk with Emily Arnold-Fernández about her eclectic career and her new genre-bending political thriller Any Human Power, which strives to create a blueprint for a more regenerative future. An award-winning author whose works include crime writing, historical fiction and spy thrillers, Manda has focused since 2021 on ‘thrutopian’ fiction, explicitly designed to map potential routes forward from the present to a future we can be proud to leave as our legacy.
Manda has vivid memories of her first views of Islay. “A long, long time ago, when I was single-figures old, my father, who was a keen sailor, borrowed a friend’s boat – Saskia of Rhu – and we started sailing out beyond the Clyde to the inner and then outer Hebrides. Mostly, we went through the Crinan Canal, but I have memories of one mad summer when he decided we’d do something different and we went south round the tip of Kintyre and then up through the Sound of Islay. I have no idea why, but I was the kid who vomited as soon as I went below decks if we were in motion, so I got to sit up on deck a lot and learn navigation and how to tack and jibe – and when to bring down the sails and motor, which is what we did up the Sound… I don’t remember much else, but I remember the rain and the waves smashing up over the bow – and listening to McInroe playing Borg in the famous match at Wimbledon – which tells you more or less how old I am!”
Any Human Power is different to anything Manda has written before. “This is a Thrutopian thriller, a mytho-political exploration of how we might get ourselves through from where we are now in the midst of biophysical and political/cultural collapse—to a future we’d actually be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. This is the definition of Thrutopian writing and those of us who work in this field are hoping it takes off as the dominant genre of our time. For sure we need to know that it’s possible to fall in love with the future, and there are many, many ways forward that are better than what we’re offered in the dystopian chaos of our present.
This book, more than any other since the first of the Boudica: Dreaming books, arose out of shamanic dreaming practice – which is why we have a central character who dies at the end of the second chapter, having made a promise that holds her in the liminal space between life and death for the rest of the book and beyond. (this is not a spoiler, I swear, it’s pretty much on the back cover). It’s also why her primary guide is a crow, why she learns to navigate the void – and why her role is to help an entire global movement to create the total systemic change we need. As a final word – the arc of the thriller revolves around a Tweet sent by a 14 year old girl (it’s set at a time when X was still Twitter) – and I want everyone to know that this was based on an actual Tweet by a twelve year old child of someone who was then a public figure in the UK. That original tweet was taken down within half an hour. Mine triggers a global movement for change. So let’s do this, eh? We need a different world with a different way of doing things. Any Human Power is one road map. If you have a better one, let me know!”
There are so many events that we’re all looking forward to at this year’s festival. Manda is particularly interested in hearing from Rory Cellan-Jones – “not least because he’s talking about a Romanian rescue dog and my veterinary past led me into dog behaviour training and trauma-informed care for dogs (and people) as a priority… Any book about dogs that shows us how we can offer them more emotional intelligence is going to be amazing. But that apart, Rory’s been the voice of technology for the BBC for decades and if we’re going to make it through to that future we’d be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn, we have to learn to surf the wave of our technological emergence in a way that reunites us with the web of life – at the moment, technology is very much in the domain of head-mind and we need to move to heart-mind. So… I’ll be interested to know how he sees this playing out.”
Manda’s event is at the Bruichladdich Hall on Sunday 31st August at 3.30pm. Tickets are Pay What You Can with a suggested cost of £7.
