Interview with Andrew Benzinger
Imagining the next four years—let alone two hundred—often seems daunting and bleak; not so for novelist Jordan A. Rothacker, whose most recent work visualizes a far different distant future.
Jordan Rothacker is a writer based in Athens, Georgia, where he received his master’s degree in religion and PhD in comparative literature at the University of Georgia. His essays, short stories, poetry, and interviews have appeared in The Exquisite Corpse, Guernica, Bomb Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, and The Believer, among other literary nooks. His previous novel The Death of the Cyborg Oracle manifested in 2020 with Spaceboy Books. Jordan has a fresh sci-fi book out, The Shrieking of Nothing, also set in the domed Atlanta of The Death of the Cyborg Oracle.
One part sci-fi Sherlock Holmes, two parts primordial religion-infused futurism, The Shrieking of Nothing follows Sacred Detective Rabbi Jakob Rabbinowitz and Assistant Sacred Detective Edwina Casaubon on a trail of murder and discovery through the heart of 2220 Atlanta. With the Earth beyond the city’s smartglass dome rendered uninhabitable by climate Katastrophe, the two City Safety detectives are tasked with solving a tenuously linked missing-persons case and a horrific murder in the midst of a sacred space. A root strength of Rothacker’s story comes from the interplay between the detectives following their string of murder mystery pearls and the reader navigating the metro Atlanta superorganism alongside them—a social landscape at once primevally familiar and technologically (and spiritually) advanced beyond contemporary reckoning. While the uncanny certainly abounds in the form of Ego Death Fests and avatar arts, the world-philosophy of The Shrieking of Nothing is one of finding the familiar within the stranger to build collective reciprocity, benevolence, and hope—once again, concepts simultaneously recognizable, necessary, and all-too alien in the 21st century.
I managed to catch Jordan via email for a few questions about his fresh literary romp, The Shrieking of Nothing, and the implications it holds for contemporary and future social organization, climate change, and plain human connection.
ARB: In our contemporary world, which is by and large ambiguously agnostic, nihilistically postmodern, and facing climate catastrophe, it’s both intriguing and powerful to imagine future worlds in which sustainability, spirituality, and sincerity are given priority over profit. What’s your personal take or philosophy on futurisms like solarpunk and cli-fi that explore these ideas? How important is it to imagine the end of capitalism over and above the end of the world?
JAR: The first futurist movement, the one of Marinetti and others, was a direct precursor to fascism, so that was in my mind as something to twist and play with and distort in a socialist way. That period and its modernist futurism were mostly an aesthetic model instead of a philosophical one. I don’t know anything about solarpunk and cli-fi, but the second term seems like it might fit these books of mine. I’m happy that genres are building up around these themes and concerns. It is extremely important to imagine a world free of capitalism, to provide understanding that it is just ONE form of socio-political-economic structure for our world. We must envision realities without capitalism to fortify our consciousness—collectively—that there is a world beyond. Ultimately, capitalism is an obvious failure, and the US is the clearest depiction of this. The idea that we are “the richest nation on Earth” is laughable in the face of our extreme wealth disparity and prison population. We are rich in inequality. And while my books do have a sense of hope to them, I am eminently not optimistic about next year and beyond.
The futurism that does inspire me is Afro-Futurism and other BIPOC literatures rooted in struggle and hope.
ARB: “Our world is not perfect. I hope that the time in which you live, Dear Future, is better, that you have learned from us, and our mistakes.” The characters often appear in dialogue with our collective future at one and the same time as our presents and pasts. Honoring and embodying world religions play a core role in the society of 2220 Atlanta; Detective Casaubon often addresses a “Dear Future” in her musings. Would you say your book as a whole is a dialogue with the worlds to come (and/or past)?
JAR: Well, firstly, that was a narrative device that just made sense—to have the narrator, who is telling the story in her official report, address the future after her own time, which in turn explains things about the world of the novel to us now in 2025, as we read the book. But it serves other purposes too. One is to point out that no matter how much “better” the domed world of the book is than ours, it is still flawed and human. I didn’t reread Zamyatin’s We, but what I remember from my teenage reading was that his dystopia was a world of mathematical perfection, so I kind of put that perfection into the technologies and the basics of the social structure while leaving room for humans to still be messy. Even with the inherited epigenetic markers that keep us from greed in the books, we still have a difficult time agreeing on everything. One thing to your question of “a dialogue with worlds to come”: All of the dates and moon phases in the book are accurate to 200 years in the future, so if we humans are still around and reading books, if anyone reads these books, they will at least be accurate in those ways.
ARB: “‘There is a killer on the loose, Casaubon.’ (. . .) It was an expression from ancient horror stories of the world before the Katastrophe, and examples of social control and fearmongering.” In imagining the City Safety and its public security work free of modern policing’s social control and fear-mongering, how do you think we as a contemporary Georgia, United States, and/or world can move further away from institutions of manipulation and domination and more towards benevolent organization?
JAR: There was this feeling in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered that was weirdly hopeful, as if the lie behind policing and all the Dick Wolf Copaganda was finally bared on a mass scale, that more people than I ever thought or hoped possible were in the streets and finally understood we don’t have to live with this bullshit. That the Supreme Court had made very clear that the police have no legal mandate to protect or serve. That we don’t need violence workers who protect capital pretending they are here to protect us. And protect us from whom? Look at wage theft compared to street crime, and we see how clearly crime is a social construct. I support defunding the police as a step on the way towards abolition. And then prison abolition along with it. But it feels insurmountable, like getting the service industry off the slave-based tipping paradigm. In the micro, by way of beginning, we must defund the cops in our own heads and social interactions. Difference should be approached with tenderness and understanding, not scolding and judgement. We must make “sonder”—according to Wikionary, “the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it”—a less mysterious word, we must live openly and honestly without shame and truly acknowledge that we are all in it together. Let go of ideas of hierarchy. Let go of divisive judgement. I might have just voted “against Trump,” but I didn’t vote against his supporters. We are all in it together. I believe in humans and humanity. I believe people can change their minds and I don’t want to hate anybody.
I’m putting this all into a small book called What to Respect When You’re Respecting: A How-to Guide for Radical Empathy, because that is what we need, an imperative of radical empathy and connection and an emphasis on our shared humanity and struggle. The radical part is that empathy should be extended to everyone. EVERYONE!
ARB: Hope permeates your work. Entire festivals and customs in 2220 Atlanta are dedicated to collective hope as well as atonement. So how would you define hope for the future, especially “Somber-Hope” or “true hope,” as included in the line, “The love I felt in their [Burt and Kung’s] home was the literal opposite of nothingness. I was happy for them and felt true hope.”
JAR: The hope in that scene is love, and the home and life that love can build, especially for characters who once believed in nothing (nihilists) and now believe in their own little domestic bliss. I was also thinking of the lovers in Bowie’s “Heroes” who kiss at the Wall like nothing could fall . . .
ARB: Haha, Bowie’s influence runs deep. I also couldn’t help but think of punk’s first wave in the late ’70s and ’80s when reading about the gang of nihilists, like something straight out of the Decline of Western Civilization documentaries. It’s always difficult to imagine any kind of future for punks and avowed nihilists, so it’s heartwarming to think of Burt and Kung having found their slice of love and home.
JAR: That association makes sense. I ripped off the name of the nihilists in this book (and the last) from Richard Hell’s band in the ’70s, the Voidoids. And Joe Strummer once said, “punk means exemplary manners to your fellow human being.” That’s what I’m here for.
ARB: On the subject of influences, Sherlock Holmes is a clear inspiration for Detective Rabbinowitz’s personality, encyclopedic memory, and methods of negative deduction. Are there any Sherlock Holmes stories in particular that helped inspire the narrative or characters in The Shrieking of Nothing?
JAR: I know I’ve read all of the Holmes stories Doyle wrote at some point in my life. For these books I went straight to the first one, and then the second, which is aware of being a sequel. So that is “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Sign of Four.” While you are correct on the influence of Holmes, Moses Maimonides was also part of the model for the character, as he was a brilliant polymath and a rabbi, of course. My return to the Sherlock Holmes stories was mostly to get an influence of the Watson voice in the narrator here, Edwina Casaubon.
ARB: Would you describe your sci-fi writing as “ambiguous utopia,” to borrow Ursula K. Le Guin’s phrase? How might your work be understood as—or as dodging—dystopia or utopia?
JAR: Ambiguous utopia certainly fits. My goal wasn’t to create a dystopia or utopia in these books, but to tell a story in which aspects of that story involve human perseverance and how possible that might be, given the deep awfulness facing us with climate change.
ARB: The Shrieking of Nothing references writers across human history from Aristotle to Paul Lafargue to Mariame Kaba in building visions of a better world in progress. Where would you direct readers interested in learning or doing more on the broad subject of positive social change?
JAR: Ah, if only there was one book to turn to, right? Reading Kaba is a good place to start. The whole oeuvre of bell hooks is also a great foundational place to orient around how overlapping or intersectional social change needs to be while starting to understand how widely capitalism and hierarchical thinking permeate everything. Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin is also a handy introduction to thinking outside of competition and reaffirming that we are all in it together.
ARB: Can you drop any clues as to what case you see Detectives Thinkowitz and Casaubon taking on next?
JAR: I’m sad to say, for audiences who really connect to these two books, that I’m not returning to this world any time soon. But the audiobook of The Shrieking of Nothing is forthcoming, and I will be touring and reading from both books. If some film or television production types were interested in visiting these stories in a different medium, that might be fun. I’m deep into a few nonfiction books right now and working on a long maximalist novel called The Impact and the Intent, a Dostoevskian reckoning with the ’90s that follows a group of friends not unlike my own of that era, up the 30 years to the present. Like The Brothers Karamazov meets Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and a few other disparate influences that will hopefully all come together. As we’ve established, I’m hopeful.
ARB: Finally, what music would you melt into liminal space to at an Ego Death Fest?
JAR: To go with a guiding Profane Prophet of the whole project here in these two books, I’d have to say the second side of Bowie’s album Low.
xxx
