About the Book
The visionary new fantasy thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author Manda Scott.
Any Human Power (September Publishing, 2024)
As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. A decade later, her teenage granddaughter is caught up in an international storm of outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole, failed generation. For one shining fragment of time, the world is with her. But then the backlash begins, and soon she and her family are besieged by the press, facing the all-powerful wrath of the old establishment whose only understanding is power-over, not power-with. Watching over the growing chaos is Lan, who taught them all to think independently, approach power skeptically, and dream with clear intent. She knows that more than one generation’s hopes are on the line. Weaving together myth, technology, and radical compassion, this mytho-political novel breaks apart all we know of life, death, and the routes to hope, asking us all to dream deeply and act boldly.
Chat with the Author
Mary: Thanks so much, Manda, for taking the time to talk with Dragonfly. I got immersed into Any Human Power immediately; thanks so much for the wonderful story. For our readers, can you talk about the novel and what is going on in it?
Manda: This is a present day, thrutopian thriller—which is to say it is designed to craft a route map forward to a future we’d all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I believe quite strongly that dystopias are no longer useful (we all know how bad things will be if we run with the old paradigm that elevates the dark-triads of psychopathy, narcissism and cunning to the top of a hierarchical power tree) and utopias don’t help because, lovely though their worlds might be, we can’t see how to get there. A thrutopia shows us a viable, grounded, plausible way through from a recognisable present towards a future that feels exciting and inspiring. We so badly need these now: we know things are bad, but sinking ourselves with yet another really bad data point about human behaviour or the predatory nature of capitalism, or the accelerating breakdown of the biosphere is not useful: unless we have agency, unless we know that we can act and how to act, then we’re only going to sink into despair. So the book first and foremost wraps up all the ideas that I think will work—ideas that are already being pushed out around the world—and weaves them into one coherent thriller where people we care about are under threat and they are striving to build the new paradigm. It’s intergenerational and it’s buoyed up by the dreaming that infused the Boudica Dreaming series that I wrote 20 years ago (I’ve just been teaching the elder dreamer who started training with me two decades ago when those books first came out—it’s a joy to see people really grow and evolve over that time, really deepen their connections with the Web of Life). So we’re also calling it a mytho-political thriller. I believe we need a new mythology, one that is not predicated on the principles and practices of our trauma culture, so the book is the first edges of weaving a new mythos, too.
Mary: What experiences led you to write this novel?
Manda: In one sense, this was a lifetime’s practice—of shamanic spirituality and of political activism. I started out as a veterinary surgeon, but I read for a Masters in Regenerative Economics shortly before lockdown and came home to set up a podcast that aims to help us all move towards the emergent edge of possibility that will see the birth of a new system by showcasing all the many, many amazing people who are working to hospice modernity and allow something genuinely regenerative to emerge from the ashes.
Specifically, I was teaching a dreaming course online during lockdown and had a series of visions that led me to a particular place on our land (I live on a smallholding in the borderlands between England and Wales) to sit in a particular place in a particular frame of mind looking down the valley for at least an hour as the sun went down. The instruction was to do this ‘until further notice’. I thought I’d given up writing and had no idea how or why I should do this, but by the end of the first nine days, I had a solid sense of the first scene of the book, the three void-walks, and an instruction to write a novel that would should a potential way through to a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn. Then the instruction was to write the book and I could sit on the hill if I wanted, but I didn’t have to. (I do still do it, but not every evening.)
So that’s where the initial idea came from.
Mary: The perspective of Lan, from in a liminal space, is one of the most unique and refreshing ideas for character conveyance of ideas, and it works well for traversing the story’s timeline. Can you talk about these spaces, including dreams?
Manda: The first scene that was given to me on the hill was of a woman in her 60s lying on a bed with her grandson, Finn, at her side and he asks her about what they can do together when they go home. She isn’t going home, she’s dying and he knows this. But in the ensuing conversation, he tells her he doesn’t want to live in a world with her not in it, and she realises he’s serious. They have a close bond, so she makes a promise that if he really needs her and he calls, she’ll do whatever is in her power to go to him. Then she dies (I swear this isn’t a spoiler, it’s pretty much on the back cover), and the rest of the novel is told from her perspective, caught in the Between place, between the Lands of Life and the Lands of Death. She also visits the Void three times and is taught to split the time lines to see the potential futures where she has not yet taken agency, with the implication that if she can take agency, she might create a new timeline that she hasn’t seen. She does this for Finn, for the wider family and the movement that arises around them and for the whole of humanity as we career in the on-rushing bus over the edge of the cliff of desolation and ruin. In each case, the visions she sees are appalling and she has to work out how she can take agency and what she might be able to do. I read a lot of books on near death experiences and on the experiences of those who have connected with the newly dead or have felt their presence in the time after their death, and agency does seem possible, though hard—and it seems likely that the degree of agency is greatest for the newly dead and quite hard later on. Lan dies in 2008 and we move swiftly to 2023, so Lan faces an increasing challenge to influence those whom she loves most. The key is that she has already trained as a dreamer though her life as an anthropologist and she passed some of this down the line to her daughter and her grandchildren, so they are more willing to listen to dreams that contain obviously relevant content than might otherwise be the case.
The key for me is that I know each of these places fairly well in a shamanic context, so it’s relatively straightforward to explore them in writing. As we said above, I think we need a new mythology, one that arises out of our old myths but weaves new ways of seeing the worlds, so part of the excitement of writing this was to weave these new myths—with Connor and Hail (the Hound), with the Crow and the Salmon and the She-Lion. It seems to me that many people are already well aware that the boundaries of the world are not as rigid as reductive Renaissance philosophy would have us believe—but, like finding the keys to get us out of the meta-crisis, we need templates to show us how to integrate our connectedness to the worlds of spirit and dreams into our 21st century lives. So this, too, is part of what I’m trying to do.
Mary: How did reading Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead prompt more exploration on your part that inspired this novel?
Manda: Each of these maps out a clear pathway from the Lands of Life to the Lands of the Dead. They’re not the same, but they’re close enough to make sense. And then part of the function of a shamanic practitioner is to help the newly dead find their way. This is not something I do often or particularly willingly—it’s hard and my skills lie elsewhere. Also, there’s a massive capacity for projection and it’s hard to verify and I prefer to live on the more readily verifiable side of the line, but it’s mappable and I was able to explore it and was already familiar with these spaces from other writing and other work. I could create a tangible sense of how we pass from life to death. All whole Indigenous cultures (what Francis Weller calls, ‘initiation cultures’ as opposed to the ‘trauma culture’ of the West) knows that death is a rite of passage, to be met with grace and great joy. It’s a going-home. It is, as Ram Dass said, like taking off a tight shoe. Our culture has lost sight of this, and it is the case that in frequent psychological studies, people’s tendency for climate denialism or right-wing political reaching tends to increase if they are subtly made aware of their own mortality—for instance, by filling in a questionnaire on a street outside a funeral parlour, or near a cemetery. If we’re going to make it through what’s coming, I think it would be good if we learn to embrace death and certainly learn not to panic when we’re reminded that it is going to happen.
Mary: I read on your website, in regards to more hope for our future, that social media technology doesn’t have to divide. How can we get it right?
This leans heavily into the work of Audrey Tang, former Digital Minister of Taiwan, who is now touring the globe, talking to pro-democracy activists all round the world. She and others have written a book called Plurality, which is well worth a read if anyone is interested in this. Her contention is that we can use democracy as a social technology and social media as a tool to give people agency, to spread trust between communities and to better structure our governance at local, national, and global levels. Audrey was also involved in the creation of Pol.is, which is open-source software designed to help large groups of people come to consensus on ideas and to generate new ideas. Finally, Audrey created a state-funded social media system that helped to elevate the comments and ideas that crossed divides and brought people together. She understood that if social media companies were freed from the base level need to make stupid amounts of money for men who are already stupidly rich, they could be used to enhance consensus in communities rather than driving us all down the race to the bottom of the brainstem that inevitably divides us. This is key, I think. We’re in a multi-systemic crisis and there is no one-hit solution. Social media is predatory because it’s driven by the predatory model of capital that would rather destroy people and the planet than stop economic growth. But we can’t simply press the stop button without also addressing the value systems underlying it. If we still live in a paradigm of zero-sum games where who dies with the most toys wins, where the ends justify the means, and where those with power are fully justified in using it to destroy all life on the planet, then just sorting out our social media ecosystems so they’re not predicated on systems of increasing conflict will not be enough. It’s a start though. And it’s undoubtedly possible.
Mary: Lan’s grandaughter, 15-yeard-old Kaitlyn, stands up for a betrayed generation and, in doing so, fights a corrupt world; Kaitlyn has a strong warrior spirit but also gets some backlash for her stances on broken systems, from political to environmental, which are entwined. Kaitlyn reminds me of some teens and young adults from our world, such as those who participate in Fridays for Future. What are some of the threads among Lan and Kaitlyn, including some other characters like Finn?
Manda: The threads that join all of those who become the #changemakers is, as we’ve said, an understanding that the old system is dying, that we need to hospice modernity, and that something much better, more resilient, equitable, and engaging can arise to take its place. They understand that to do this, they need to be living the change, not just talking about it, and that this is hard when we’re all immersed in the death cult of predatory capitalism, that our attempts will be imperfect. But if we can hold to our core values of compassion, courage, integrity, trust, honesty, and accountability; if we can find trust amongst those who deal in bad faith; if we can, above all, hold to peaceful, generative ideals and not waver, then anything is possible. Humanity is an astonishing force for good, and we are better than what we currently see reflected back in the tainted mirrors of our legacy media.
Mary: I’ve already asked so many questions, but the powerful concept of this story drew me in as well as some of the smaller aspects, like Lan playing World of Warcraft, which I did for years. I also have a young grandson named Finn. Do you get much feedback from readers about how they were drawn to this novel?
So glad there are other people out there who played WoW. I was a disc healer in RBGs for years, then shifted to mistweaver monk, and I still dream with disturbing regularity of healing the tank while capping a flag. Anyway—yes, different people are drawn to different bits: to the dreaming/between or to the technology (quadratic voting on the blockchain—yay!), or the family dynamics, or the sense of a global political movement, or the ideas of how to restructure our existing democracy to make it more fit for purpose. What seems to spark everyone is the clear statement that the current system is not working and has to be put aside, and that we can bring all our creativity to bear on something much, much better.
Mary: In WoW, I used always played a druid healer, being one who felt balance with nature. I’ve long since moved to Baldur’s Gate 3, where I still like the druid class best—but I’m also currently playing an open-hand monk.
Also, you went through these questions, the election hadn’t happened yet, but I think we saw the writing on the wall. Reading your book and your answers now gives me a better feeling about the future. Anything else you would like to add?
Manda: I’ve been talking with literary festival audiences through the summer and taking people on a guided visualisation tours, back along the ancestral lines to the beginning and then returning to our current life and stepping seven generations on and looking into the eyes of a future young person in their 20s, and asking ‘Did we make it? Are you proud of us?’. I so badly want this answer to be a resounding, ‘Yes! You left it way too late, and you made some pretty spectacular mistakes along the way, but when it really mattered, you found the best of yourselves and got together and laid the foundations for my life, and it’s wonderful. I am entirely in love with the process of living and you made this possible.’ I want this. I believe we can still do it, but time is tight and it’ll take all of us. So let’s make it happen.
Mary: Beautiful idea, and—another thing in common that I have with your novel is that I have a grandson named Finn (and another one, Wyatt). They are both aged three and under. I look at the world they’re inheriting and do worry, but I agree that we still have the capacity and love to make it good for them. We just can’t give up.
About the Author
