Creating the Appalachian Fantastic Part 2: Appalachian Futurism

As I explore Appalachia in my work, I’m beginning to get a solid understanding of my beliefs regarding what it is that makes a piece uniquely Appalachian. Perhaps uniquely is the wrong word. Maybe instead I should say specifically or archetypally; the elements that make a story Appalachian could, perhaps, also be said to make it Welsh or Kazakhstani. Perhaps the themes are the same wherever a smaller power is subjected to extraction by a larger that claims ownership of the land’s resources without providing its people any meaningful civic and social support. Stripping away the surface level aesthetic considerations (perhaps piling them into a valley fill, if we want to get bitter about it), when I look at Appalachian speculative fiction, I see a few underlying patterns. As I laid out in part one of this series, Appalachian spec-fic is about private, extraction-based colonization of underrepresented regions, and the identity that springs up among the people pushed to that edge of the majority civilization by ethnic, economic, and political factors.

When I view it this way, I see Appalachian influence everywhere in science fiction. Every Belter in The Expanse, books and television series alike, is an Appalachian archetype. The comically-indebted everyman employee of an immense galactic conglomerate in several different indie video games, who must pay resurrection fees (in the case of Hardspace: Shipbreaker and Journey to the Savage Planet) so they can get back to work, is only a step removed from an Appalachian miner given a curse of reincarnation. In Subnautica, you escape the planet 4546B and return to settled space, only to be told that before you can land, you’ll need to settle your trillion-credit debt to your employer. A perverse shop-rights policy within the Alterra corporation means that all the tools, materials, and technology that you used to survive and escape were legally the property of the Alterra corporation. These characters are locked into a company ecosystem that forces them sometimes to die and be repeatedly resurrected, sometimes to pay for every plant they cut down with a knife built by a company fabricator kit. Sometimes, they must make a choice between suffering the rest of their lives imprisoned on a far-flung world or destroying ancient cultural artifacts, melting down allegorical Etruscan statuary for wiring to make a better laser gun. On practical, moral, and spiritual levels alike, they must sell their souls to the company store just to live another day. It extends even to the most mainstream-appeal media; The Hunger Games’ dystopian future, where a father teaches his daughter to forage for marsh tubers to feed their impoverished family before dying in a mining explosion, isn’t even trying to hide it. District 12 is Appalachia, serial numbers and all.

Rarely do we see a version of Appalachian themes that feels positive. At best, we play the debt for laughs or separate ourselves from the hazardous working conditions with a layer of satirical absurdism. More often, sci-fi frames Appalachian-inspired locations as exploited backwaters full of uneducated hicks who have to be motivated into freeing themselves from the Company by religious fervor, or perhaps by learning to read (looking at you, Joss Whedon). Because the canon of tropes uses Appalachia as shorthand for “doomed lifestyle based on an untenable system,” any allusion to Appalachian aesthetics and themes has to have an undercurrent of impending collapse. I take issue with this, of course, because it sucks.

The experience of those who live in and love the region is different in several key, important ways. Especially in the last decade with the precipitous decline of the coal industry, Appalachians are developing concepts of regional identity that, while not denying the influence of extraction and colonization, don’t rely entirely on that influence to shape the narrative. It would be irresponsible to ignore the disadvantages that Appalachian people have when compared with their neighbors in other regions, but those disadvantages have become more a fact of life than an insurmountable challenge. It’s similar in some ways to discussions around endangered species or the ticking clock of climate change; viewing it as an inevitability or a ponderous slide into a fail-state is tempting, but unhelpful. So we come to the same question here that we did with fantasy: what is or ought to be the central theme of Appalachian sci-fi and futuristic fiction? How do we incorporate our own experience into our work in a way that’s recognizable without succumbing to the externally-imposed hopelessness that usually defines our identity in sci-fi media?

I argue that it requires us to select the themes that resonate with us in our own lives, specifically those that give us hope. I tend to assume people know more about Appalachia than they really do, which means I’m frustrated when they continually retread the same path from the Hatfield-McCoy feud to the Silver Bridge collapse to Charles Manson’s brief childhood tenure in West Virginia. Ignorance, of course, isn’t an excuse to uncharitably misrepresent an entire region and its demographic, but it is an explanation. I should preemptively clarify that I’m not advocating we attempt respectability politics in speculative fiction about Appalachia. I don’t believe that attempting to frame our culture and tradition as the same as flatlanders’, actually, is a good idea. No matter how important environmentalism or labor rights or affordable healthcare become in our minds, we still aren’t flatlanders with a layer of Mossy Oak on top. We’re Appalachians.

The rise of Y’allternative subculture and other intra-regional artistic movements has made me a bit more optimistic about our chances of reshaping our story. But these movements are too unfocused and ultimately too exclusive of too broad a set of Appalachians to be our only strategy. We’re not going to stop being hicks. Subsistence hunting doesn’t go away in the far-flung future of Appalachian sci-fi. Solarpunk hillbillies haven’t stopped skipping stones and riding four-wheelers and doing redneck repairs. I don’t believe we’ll give up our accents or our heritage or our stubbornness just because we farm the wind or sun or biomass, rather than digging coal out of the ground.

I want to write a future where Appalachians are the same people we’ve always been, but we’re not viewed as sub-social creatures. I want a version of our region that knows its contributions to national and global (or even galactic) society, and is proud of them without resting on its laurels. I want our ingenuity to make us the sought-after factotum or the straight-talking negotiator who gets hyperfuel for a better price than anyone else. I want our pragmatism to make us leaders, our daring to make us heroes. I want our contributions to be seen, understood, and honored in the futures I write. That’s what our region deserves in fiction, as in reality.