This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Mohamad Atif Slim, whose first story for us appeared back in  2011 and subsequently was featured in the Futures 2 anthology. In this latest tale, we get to meet Carusi — The man with the spider — who is having a really, really bad day. Here, we get a glimpse into what inspired Atif to write the piece — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The man with the spider

Reading this piece again after a few months, I’ve only just realized how very negative it is! Carusi is on a(n accidentally) self-imposed death row and is bawling his eyes out by the end when he realizes that he has no way out. This is dystopian fiction with emo tendencies — definitely no space opera! But perhaps that was the whole point — it is the distilled extract of a longer story I had meant to write, which began with the image of a man checking into a hotel that he knew he would never check out of. (I’ll admit that the idea randomly came halfway through watching Alfonso Cuarón’s film adapation of P.D. James’s The Children of Men, probably through a mouthful of masticated beef burger, inspired as I continue to be by the vast array of vile dystopian worlds the human mind is able to conjure and publish.)

There is a handful of references to lend dimension (all the drugs mentioned have real-life cognates, and an ‘Acute Stress Reaction’ is an actual diagnosis you can find in the DSM-IV), but The man with the spider itself, highly condensed, was simply born out of a desire to narrate. It’s a cogitation on nihilism in abbreviated prose, illustrated via a convenient and contracted arc — nihilism as a product of a detached political legacy, of social disenfranchisement, of economic depravity, of health inequities and a culture of doublespeak and paradoxes, of human spontaneity and vulnerability. It is linear and expository and vaguely existentialist in its invocation of sacrifice and meaning. Its form serves its purpose; it is self-serving. It is bleak, but what it isn’t is unsympathetic or hopeless. The natural human tendency is to seek and apply meaning to its pursuits — when nihilism consumes us, I think there’s a good argument for a systematic failure of social structures that could have buffered that fall.

I do enjoy fully fleshed dystopian fiction now and again — some people might say that there’s already too much of it, but I would argue that there can never be enough; it is sociopolitical discourse for those of us too lazy to craft impassioned essays or newspaper articles, relayed through illustration rather than listless lists. I enjoy it not to contemplate the fiction, but the slivers of non-fiction that always lie in a good story’s foundations.