“How do you help the people you love create a future you're proud to leave behind?” Manda Scott’s forthcoming eco-political epic Any Human Power has the answers

From the time our founder/co-initator Indra Adnan appeared on her Accidental Gods podcast - we’ve been excited to see what fantasy author Manda Scott comes up with next. Scott describes Accidental Gods as four years of “speaking every week to the very people at the leading edge of our emergence into a new system”.

She’s poured the ideas and personalities that she explored in her podcast into a forthcoming new novel, Any Human Power, which sounds like it’s on the level of ambition of Ministry For The Future. Read on…

From the Amazon blurb:

How do you help the people you love create a future you're proud to leave behind? From acclaimed author Manda Scott comes a visionary thriller of a lifetime.

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 sceptically 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 visionary novel breaks apart all we know of life, death and the routes to hope, asking us all to dream deeply and act boldly.

From the Bookseller:

Any Human Power, Manda Scott’s 16th book, is described as a "visionary, myth-infused tour-de force about a grandmother and her family who find themselves at the centre of a global uprising".

MacDonald said: "Any Human Power is a mythic novel in the best sense – grand in scope, rich in brave characters that are breathing new life into the old wisdoms, dreaming their way into a better future. For readers of Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age, as well as Naomi Alderman and Neil Gaiman, the novel offers a world beyond dystopia; in the tradition of the great Ursula K Le Guin, it offers a storyline to a world we’d be proud to leave to our children."

Manda gives more context to the novel in this extract from her blog:

I genuinely believed I’d stopped writing novels. I’d become a podcaster instead, a smallholder, a holder-of-courses where people could learn in real time the things that might yet still turn us away from the multi-polar cliff edge to which our dysfunctional culture is hurtling us with such terrifying speed.

…Through a process I cannot begin to unpick, I had the basic premise for a new book: the idea of a woman on the edge of death who makes a binding promise and has to honour it.

With a narrative arc following her after death, she is shown how to split the timelines and, in the end, can see the one (or perhaps a one) where humanity reaches forward to a flourishing future - one that we would be proud to leave to the generations that follow us.

That set of actions and ideas and ways of being that would leave our grandchildren’s grandchildren saying, Heck, they left it way, way too late, but when it really mattered, enough people pulled together in a direction that changed the whole trajectory of history…

And this is not something that I could do in an hour’s podcast on a Monday afternoon… Though if I hadn’t spent nearly three years hosting the podcast and talking to people about exactly these ideas, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to start. Even so, the journey has taken me to places, and ways of being, I’d never encountered before.

I am not going to pretend that the result is the only way forward. If nothing else, the political landscape became particularly fluid as the writing progressed. I’d originally set the whole narrative in 2024 and it became clear that this wasn’t viable, if only because the changes were too rapid and too great to predict. What mattered more than anything was that this book feel more like ‘this is happening’ than ‘this might have happened in a fantasy future.’

So it’s set at a particular fork in time that was the future when I began to write and is now the past. This exact fork hasn’t happened in any reality I inhabit, but the concepts, the mind-sets, the ways-of-being…these are all still possible. They’re necessary, too.

The detail might be different if other people pick up this Thrutopian baton, but there’s a universal core to how humanity needs to work, for us to flourish. We need to find connection, compassion, clarity and self-coherence.

As Jon Alexander says in his outstanding nonfiction work Citizens, we need to stop being consumers and start seeing ourselves as part of a different, more connected web. We need to find good faith again and a common truth.

Above all, we need ways of arranging local, national and international governance and economics so that each of these is in service to the flourishing future our hearts know is possible.

More here. We are so looking forward to this reading this, when it appears in May 2024 - if you’re the same, you can pre-order it here.