Rakesfall

"Yes, so Rakesfall is a very different approach to the concept… Not to get all theological, but reincarnation is a major theme of – well, of many religions and belief systems, but in my case the religion that I’m setting myself against is Buddhism. It’s the culture I grew up in. So Rakesfall is about people being reincarnated, but it’s also a critique of the whole concept of reincarnation – of what it actually means to have other people who are ‘you’ in the future or in the past. Does that mean that something of yourself was transmitted? Is a soul moving, or is it more like an echo? Is it more that we can have a kind of solidarity across deep time with people who share so much of their personality, of their values, with us, that they are in a way a version of us? So that’s how Rakesfall approaches it, following these – well, two people or one person, depending on how you look at it! Again, much like the Locked Tomb. What interests me is the idea of stretching these histories and political projects of liberation across vast stretches of time – because we have a culture focused on immediacy. It’s the outgrowth of this neoliberal atomized culture, that we’re all very focused on the moment. Which is why even dealing with climate change is so hard: no one thinks beyond the electoral cycle. So deep time is one of the things about both fantasy and science fiction that’s always been very interesting to me – the idea that you can think in these vast stretches of time. For Rakesfall , I wanted to go all the way from the mythic past to basically the point at which the sun swallows the earth. So it’s a very large span of time! It’s following – rather than two people, maybe I might say two perspectives, which are sometimes even embodied within the same person. They go through different personhoods, different bodies, different ways of relating to each other. And I want to get across this idea that self and personhood are very porous, that we shouldn’t draw these very strict lines between the one and the other, the inside and the outside, because we’re all a lot more similar than we think we are. And that holds both among all of us alive today, and across time. That commonality is one of the things that you can cling to, I think, in the face of inhumanly vast time scales."