Birdwatching
Can hope take flight?
You’re reading the fourth story in Thaw, Tractor Beam’s Winter 2025 issue. You can read Jeff VanderMeer’s guest editor letter and the remaining stories here. Subscribe to receive future Tractor Beam issues in your inbox as soon as they drop!
Story by: Maisie Cowell
Annotations by: Jeff VanderMeer
The year is 2548. A 200-year extreme drought has swept over earth, forcing the human race to rely on massive drilling operations to extract fresh water from deep below the surface of the dry sea bed. You are a maintenance worker, lonely yet quietly hopeful, as the earth stirs in its sleep. Could we go back? Is there anything left for us to return to?
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1. Of course, in the present day, deep-sea mining is a huge threat to those seabeds, so what we experience in this graphic work may in part exist in the aftermath of that desecration or simply as the effects of the climate crisis. The pathos evoked by the piece exists in how, if the deep seas are indeed empty, it feels an impossible stretch that water deposits can make a difference, except to postpone the end. (Annotation by Jeff VanderMeer, Guest Editor)
2. In addition to being a powerful yet wonderfully simple graphic, this panel evokes deep, deep history, given that the geology of the landscape tells us of many places that were seas and became valleys or plains, and places that were once dry that filled up. It makes one wonder what creatures have evolved in this new ecological location, because they always do. We may simply not see or understand them, much as we view deserts as lifeless, despite containing a wealth of life. (Annotation by Jeff VanderMeer, Guest Editor)
3. There’s a poignant commentary here on our current way of energy usage, in that large utility companies fight rooftop solar while urging the destruction of thousands of acres of biodiverse areas in the western United States so that “clean” solar energy can be more or less “piped in” to places far distant. The simplification of a complex issue means that even clean energy can be harmful when it doesn’t need to be. (Annotation by Jeff VanderMeer, Guest Editor)
4. Again, I feel this piece is commenting quite pointedly on a number of topics surrounding extractive approaches to resources, including labor relations and exploitation in that context. There’s a lot going on in just a few panels. (Annotation by Jeff VanderMeer, Guest Editor)
Bringing Sci-Fi Down to Earth…
Tractor Beam is a soil-based Sci-Fi publication that explores speculative ideas around farming, food, earth sciences, and beyond, imagining a positive future here on Earth (in the earth). Our goal is to connect people to regenerative agriculture and soil health in a meaningful way. We call it “soilpunk.”