BOOK EXCERPT: The Seeker Effect imagines an African dystopia shaped by climate chaos and control

When Anne Schlebusch sat down to write The Seeker Effect, she wanted to find out whether a writer could dig into dark tropes and “draw out hope and schemes that could make the world work better”.“Could I, a now 74-year-old writer, create a book with street appeal – that could engage readers and encourage them to join hands to make our world better?” she tells Daily Maverick.The idea for The Seeker Effect – a speculative fiction imagining a dystopian future in which Earth’s orbit has shifted – came from the appeal of writing without constraints.“This was a playing field, and I would kick down genre boundaries and rules. I wanted something dark, dramatic and universal,” she says. “Once I got into it, I realised that what was really at stake was an exploration of what’s going on with the business of being human.”Schlebusch cites a spectrum of authors as inspiration: Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Asimov and HG Wells, who all “dominated” her shelves at home while growing up.“When I was quite young I was captivated by a David Severn post-apocalyptic book called The Future Took Us... The films Soylent Green and Back to the Future intrigued and stayed with me.”For Schlebusch it’s important that readers see The Seeker Effect as an African book, and gain a sense of curiosity after reading it.“I’d love people to finish the book with a pile of key questions about how the big themes of the book relate to their own lives and spheres of influence,” she says. “A Seeker role is quite a big one – what if we made a commitment to ask questions, look, find and swing into action?”Here is an excerpt from The Seeker Effect.***PrologueEver since Gaia-earth had drifted off its regular path around the sun into a randomised, skewed ellipse, the Bastions had forbidden the use of the word “years”. It was “Solcircs” now. No more Anno Domini.The Time Regulatory Body tracked circuits round the sun using the Giant Gaia-Shift as Day Zero. It wasn’t a specific day, of course. It had taken ages for the olden-days astro- and geo-scientists to figure out what was going on – why days and nights and stars and moons, not to mention the weather, were out of kilter. And when they had figured it out, it took even longer for the Bastions and the Depot System to be set up.In due course, the time when the earth started to slip became known as The Genesis Age, in a mind-bending effort to give it all a positive spin.The Genesis Age was also the time when the large tribe of Heirs-of-Musk, the HOMs, readied themselves to pack into SpaceX projectiles and to head for the imagined sanctuary of Mars. But as they sifted regretfully through their tiaras and their shareholdings, and eyed their minuscule luggage allowance, their earth-bound wealth became an itchy topic. In the end, to the jeers of the trolls, a scattering of HOMs opted to take their chances being rich on a capsizing Gaia rather than being poor in the rest of the galaxy. So, off the exiting HOMs shot in a wave of stellar sparks, while the remaining HOMs tucked themselves back into their darkening mansions.After that, the Bastions drew an invisible border around Gaia and renamed space as The Impenetrable. No more ships left the earth.Once Gaia had swung off its course, time was no longer stable or consistent. Clocks raced and slowed. Light and dark played tricks. Central time-corrections were announced continuously through the audio-feeds and typometer-feeds. These could be big jumps that meant skipping a bunch of days, but it might be a weeny, in-day jump that skipped a few beeps. The worst was when the corrections came in the night and forced people to roll out of bed after only a tiny dreamless snooze to start the “new day”, with the eight sleep-time beeps compressed into one.Seasons fried or froze the small population that had survived Earth’s crazed ellipses. Rampant AI brought about the implosion they later knew as “The Giant Knowledge Eradication”. Gaians hunkered down, enclosed in a series of giant domes. It was an epoch of subjugation and survival.Chapter 1: Happy BirthdayIt was today. The day.Flike didn’t know how it was all going to happen. At all. She knew nothing about when, either. Would they come get her and take her somewhere? Or would they message via the typometer, which was already flickering into life on her pod walls. Flike rubbed her sleepy eyes and tried to focus them. Her elbows knocked the pod-sides clumsily as she engineered a swivel. Her heart was pounding, her hands slippery with sweat.She’d lived twenty-four Solcircs now. Twenty-four times around the sun. Happy Birthday to me. For once, the typometer readout was different, with flashing lights around the border. The words were in capitals. A header read, INSTRUCTIONS FOR START OF PERIOD OF RE-CALIBRATION FOR CITIZEN FLIKE.Bye-bye earnest Clerk of Customs, Culture, and History (Grade 1, beginner, by predestination). Bye-bye life of unmitigated pointlessness. Bye-bye capsule string of three pods: sleep pod, bodily-functions pod, upright pod. Bye-bye receiving chute, typometer, and that voice that chattered out empty moralising and propaganda at all times over the mandatory audio feed. No more job of fake-curating completely static and largely fact-free, cultural data. Hello, freedom, variety, autonomy… whatever all those intangible things were.Flike stuck her arm into her receiving chute to grab a morning bottle of protein glop. She’d named it that as soon as she found “glop” in a “Child’s History of Archaic Words”. Even aged only eight Solcircs she’d known that the pretentious nutrition label was mind-messing, and anyway, she liked saying glop.At last, her eyes started to pull together and she began to read, doing so carefully, as was her custom. One never knew if something appeared only once then would somehow disappear forever. Her head must be abnormally big. How else could all this stuff ever fit in?No! Yes! I’m getting a new handheld! A Voyager’s Handheld, a VH. At nine beeps. The action would start at nine beeps.New clothes. Look at that – new clothes! She’d worn the same drabs forever. What would they feel like? Look like? She read on eagerly.“You will take off your Indoor Overalls and put on your Chute-supplied Voyager Uniform. Push your indoor clothes into the Disposal Chute.”Her pulse was racing. “At 10 Beeps you select a companion off a list. At 11 Beeps your companion will arrive. There could be some danger.”Danger? That gave her pause. Smuggled horror stories told of people returned from Re-calibration permanently wide-eyed, with staring black pits for eyes and stiff body movement. Those ones couldn’t sleep anymore, it was said. Or were selectively mute. Others behaved outrageously and unhinged, until they were disciplined or removed from society. Then there were those who simply never came back. She shuddered and read on.“You will exit your Pod at 12 Beeps! A siren will sound and your door seal will be released. Take 45 steps sideways to your left down the narrow tunnel. A moving unit will await to take you to the nearest Adjustment Facility.“Your Re-calibration will be concluded within one Lunarcirc.”Why couldn’t they say “month” instead of “lunarcirc”? So clumsy. They still spoke of mornings and days, after all. But months and years were outlawed. So meaningless.The ending was ominous, “Make no wrong moves. Your life will depend on it. Remember the Motto of the Bastions ‘No one is indispensable. Watch your back.” DMThe Seeker Effect is published by Modjaji Books. It is available at a retail price of about R360.