In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, Ā鶹Ćā·Ń°ęĻĀŌŲBoulderās Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds
Nathan Alexander Moore was thinking about the end of the worldānot how to survive the apocalypse or overcome it, necessarily, or even how to fix it, but rather the decisions we make when the world collapses around us.
āWho do you become?ā asks Moore, an assistant professor in the Ā鶹Ćā·Ń°ęĻĀŌŲ Department of Women and Gender Studies. āWhat choices do we make in this new world? How do we understand ourselves, and understand ourselves in community, in the larger context of a world that is ending or starting anew?
āFor me, as someone who loves all things speculative fiction, dystopias are so interesting because these worlds become dystopic because of who the events are happening to. And the largest impacts, in fiction and real life, often happen to people who are marginalized. Dystopia largely impacts people who are Black or Brown, in places that are underdeveloped and underfunded.ā
From that endāor beginningāof the world was born , Mooreās newly published story collection. Touted by publisher Hajar Press as āsupernatural stories of life in the fissures of disaster,ā Mooreās tales actually plunge deeper into the ruined Earth, with Black and queer and trans characters exploring who they are and who they might become.
āIām very aware of all of the history and the many cultural representations that have shaped Black people, and specifically Black queer people,ā Moore explains. āI feel so much in our culture and in representations in film and television and literature, that Black characters and Black queer characters either become paragons or, on the opposite end, theyāre kind of the worst of the worst, the villains, the despicable ones.
āFor me, itās about telling a story about a person who is nuanced. Some will see them as the hero, some as the villain, but at the core they are a person who is learning and growing and struggling. I want to show themāto show usāas beautiful, nuanced, complex characters, and that whatever their experience is, itās a real experience. To try to be universal would strip us of what makes it interesting.ā
Becoming a writer
Moore, who identifies as Black and trans, was a reader before she was a writer, finding motivation to finish her homework so she could crack open an Anne Rice novel. One of the first stories she wrote and shared with other people was called āMidnight and NocturnesāāāI was using big words,ā Moore recalls, āI thought I was so cute in high schoolāāabout a vampire who was turned in ancient Egypt.
The vampire wakes at dusk āand sheās like, āIām gonna go eat some people, Iām hungry.ā Then she runs into a vampire hunter, and for the first time she pauses at killing because he has the exact eyes of someone she knew in life. She says, āI remember when I was human, I loved you. You broke my heart, and I loved youā and it ends with her making a big choice whether sheās going to live or die.ā
Moore wrote it when she was 16 or 17 and submitted to a contest on Facebook and ended up winning third place. āIt was the first story where I very much remember writing it and thinking, āOK, I think Iām writing, I think I might be a writer.ā And then when I came in third, I was like, āOh, sheās on her way!ā It also helped that I wrote that story when Twilight/True Blood/Vampire Diaries was of the moment, and I was reading all of those books.ā
Through graduate school, she focused on creative writing and Black literature and cultures, delving deeper into speculative fiction through a lens of feminism and collective memory. , earned at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on contingency and Black temporal imaginations, and included a chapter titled āFrom Catastrophe to the Cataclysm: Black Speculations on the Limits of the Anthropocene & the Temporality of Disasters.ā
In fact, writing The Rupture Files wasnāt completely Moore's idea. An editor at Hajar Press saw about writing Black geopolitics through speculative fiction and asked Moore if she wrote her own speculative fiction.
As it happened, there were some people sheād been living with for a whileā¦
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āThe world weāre living inā
āThe first story (in The Rupture Files) is called āSequela,ā and itās about this far-future dystopia where the world is mostly ocean and everything is transient,ā Moore says. āThere were portions (of that story) I had written as series of prose poems, and they had been kind of living in my head. With the other stories, I had characters who werenāt fully realizedāI had a snapshot, a photograph, they were peering over the fence and I was like, āHmm, what are you doing?ā For a long time, they were thought experiments, and in writing them they became real.ā
The story āSequelaā is about a woman named Shalomar, who lives in one of a series of stations in this new ocean worldāāI imagine the stations like metallic squids, though I never said it in the story, and they kind of hunker on land and then jump around,ā Moore explainsāand whose job is station archivist. Whatever the station pulls out of the ocean, itās her job to analyze it and think about its historical value. As a Black woman, Shalomar had been trying to document Black history before the apocalypse, and after it she discovered that the water wanted her to tell a different story, as did the mermaids.
In a story called āAshes for Your Beauty,ā Moore tells the story of a woman who is the consort (read: food source) of a vampire in a bombed-out, post-nuclear world, who discovers that she has power, and she can make power. āSo, she has to decide, āAm I going to stay in this life thatās very scary and terrible but stable, or burn shit down?āā Moore says.
Writing the four stories in The Rupture Files was a different experience from the novel manuscript Moore wrote while earning her masterās.
āI was thinking about narrative arcs, about character development, who is the main person, whose perspective feels the most interesting,ā Moore says. āI was balancing the expansiveness of living in a brand-new world that even I didnāt know all the rules of and also making it containable in short form. It was a steep learning curve but really fun.ā
It also, she says, allowed her to more deeply consider the world as it currently is: āWhatās always interesting about dystopias is they are projected as far futures, but any time someoneās writing a dystopia, theyāre writing about the presentāexpanded and intensified, but the present. Dystopic writing is really about looking out at the world weāre living in today.ā
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