Ruth Joffre’s story, “Icediver”, centers on Vira, a mer-human Alaskan who makes her way as a freelance underwater cable repair tech. During a lucrative and dangerously deep gig, Vira encounters a hidden mer community and an opportunity to learn more about her heritage.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
E.C. Barrett: What was your inspiration for this story?
Ruth Joffre: I wanted to write my version of a mermaid story, and I wanted to explore some landscapes that I’ve been learning about for the past couple years doing a lot of work in Alaska via my day job. I started thinking, what would a mermaid or a mer-human hybrid be like in Alaska? What would they do? How would that be politically? What would their life in Alaska entail, when so much of the economy is driven by the tourist season? I say that as somebody who has only ever been to Alaska during the tourist season, though I was there for work.
Alaska has a lot of money coming in for infrastructure projects of various kinds, including the big one of connectivity across the state. The story is set in the Aleutians, where one of these connectivity projects is underway. I wanted to think about what a mer society would look like in the Aleutians to a mer-human hybrid if she were to encounter that society for the first time after not having had access to it for most of her life. So all of these bits and pieces of my life and things that I’ve experienced in Alaska filtered their way into this story.
ECB: I know connectivity is an equity issue for rural and low-income communities, but what are some of the environmental aspects of building out connectivity infrastructure?
RJ: If you’re going to build out facilities, does that mean you have to build a road alongside it? If you’re building a road, are you cutting down trees? Are you destroying wildlife paths and habitats? All of the concerns that come with any development. Somebody has to be able to go out there and service the line–that’s a car or a plane burning fossil fuels to get out there. Once there is connectivity, there’s also more “opportunity” for people to start various businesses and for them to move further out without necessarily losing connection to the systems that we have in place digitally. So yeah, it definitely enables a spread of development that can have a really negative impact on the environment.
The other side is that it is important to close that digital divide because of equity. A big reason why governments step in to assist in building connectivity in remote areas is because businesses won’t bother, because it’s not profitable enough. That’s judging entire communities as not valuable.
ECB: What do you hope readers come away with after reading your story?
RJ: I think one of the core things in this is that finding another society or envisioning another way of living is much easier and more possible than we think. Enacting it is really hard, obviously, as we can see with the abolition movement in the United States and attempts to implement new systems of justice. With this story, I was thinking through what it could mean to be a utopian society. What could it mean to enact fair policies? And what would policy even look like in this case of a mer society in the Aleutian chain, very deep underwater?
It’s hard to make an easy, one-to-one analog to our society, because of all of the uniqueness that comes from being in the Aleutians, but I still think the story presents a way for us to think about how we can do better. And also how we shouldn’t idealize other societies that do some things better, as tends to happen when people in the U.S talk about how much better it would be to live in Europe while ignoring all the things that European countries do poorly.
ECB: What connection do you see between Vira’s search for her heritage and environmental justice?
RJ: Searching for your heritage is connected to the landscapes of your ancestors. I’m the daughter of a Bolivian immigrant, and I have not been back to Bolivia. I have all of these connections to the culture and to my family, but how do I engage with and have those experiences that my family members had with the land and the environment in Bolivia, especially since parts of it are also severely threatened by climate change?
For example, there are plants that are moving higher and higher up mountains, because it’s getting too warm down below and they can’t survive at those altitudes anymore. They’ve lived there for 1000s of years. What does it mean for Bolivians if those plants move higher and higher up and run out of places to go? I think there’s a certain amount of heritage that could become completely inaccessible, because you’ve lost native plants to climate disaster.
ECB: I loved how much this story was also about Vira’s alienation from herself as someone who can do something other than earn just enough money for her and her mom to get by. Is that something you regularly think about in your stories–how these people exist in capitalism?
RJ: Totally. That’s a major theme of the new collection that I’m working on, which includes this story. I’ve been working in capitalism, holding a full-time job, since graduate school, and now that I’ve been in it for a decade I understand it better than I ever possibly could have as an undergrad trying to write about adults. As a student, I didn’t really understand the strain on adult life, your time, and your capacity to think beyond your job or beyond paying the bills.
And that is what the vast majority of people in this world are experiencing–the hustle to try and make ends meet, having multiple jobs or one shitty job and terrible co-workers that you hate, but you have to put up with because you have rent to pay.
The reality is that it’s just getting worse and worse. Rent is getting higher. Salaries are stagnating for a lot of people outside of the tech sector or, you know, senators. It’s kind of impossible to think about adult life without thinking about capitalism. A lot of my fiction now is thinking about how to re-envision society without capitalism or fight against it, to find ways to center your life around other things.
Moving forward, I’m more interested in stories that are questioning whether we really need to live this way and presenting new worlds, because I’ve been working this full-time job plus writing, plus teaching, plus, plus, plus all the things for so long. And I hate that I have to. I think a lot of people hate it. So I’m trying to find ways to express in fiction that other things are possible.
ECB: Are you currently reading anything? Or have you read anything recently related to these sorts of themes that you’d like to share with others?
RJ: On the anti-capitalist theme, I just read Nino Cipri’s Finna, which is a novella about working in a huge, obviously IKEA-inspired, warehouse furniture store. It’s about trying to survive going through a wormhole but also deciding whether you come back and what you come back to. Do you just go back to your capitalist service job in this awful warehouse store? Or do you find something else for your life? So I highly recommend that. It was really fun.
ECB: What role can speculative fiction play in helping us tackle, or at least think about, some of these issues?
RJ: Spec Fic is probably our best way of thinking about new structures and systems that enable other ways of being. Realist fiction–even though it is beautiful and incisive and capable of doing so many things–often gets stuck in a “the world is what it is, and we can’t change it” mentality. Whereas speculative fiction imagines many possible worlds and shows we can change everything; we can imagine whatever we want.
With the climate apocalypse, the aftermath of the Trump administration, and the potential for a second Trump administration, it’s really important to think outside of the current systems, because they’re clearly broken. They’re clearly only designed to help a few people. So the question is: how can we break free of them? How can we pack them with different ways of thinking in order to change them from within, if at all possible? That is really what I’m focused on.
