Abolition science fiction

Labouring Lives

Power from Water

Sounds Wild and Broken

Abolition science fiction - Various authors, 2022

This is a collection of short science fiction stories written by people involved in the prison abolition movement and/or researching alternative forms of justice. The book is structured into groups of stories which deal with the themes "prison break", "after prisons", "expansions" and "critical utopias", with a discussion following each set of stories which seeks to explore the group's response to each story.

Around 2023 I visited HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow for work, with the objective of taking dimensions of various luminaires to assess their potential for remanufacturing. Even as a visitor, escorted by a guard and accompanied by 2 colleagues, the experience was somewhere between terrifying and deeply unsettling. Barlinnie is without doubt the most oppressive, unpleasant modern building I've been in. It is dark, low-ceilinged, maze-like and shabby, complete with exposed materials and plenty of metal bars. At the time I was struck by how much lower the quality of lighting (in terms of every metric) considered acceptable was compared to...the rest of society. I came away with the (perhaps correct) conviction that the place was designed to oppress, to other, to beat down it's inhabitants. The lighting is a tangible expression of that; too-dark or too-bright lighting which visibly striates flat surfaces and causes glare for inhabitants has the predictable effect of making us feel irritated and uncomfortable. I was told that misbehaving prisoners would sometimes paste wet toiletpaper over the lights in their cells, and I then understood why; they were intervening in the only way they had control over their environment, to dim or diffuse the horrible fluorescent light in their cell (which they do not have a switch for). That day, part of me felt what it was like to lose your freedom, life, hope, future. To be outside society.

Abolition is a concept I tend to associate more with the US, where (my impression is that) the policing and carceral system results in more brutality, deaths and racial discrimination than in the UK. Nevertheless, 2025 saw the death of nearly 400 prisoners, including 80 suicides (ref), and the UK prison population is at an all-time high, just under 90,000 (ref). So, why explore abolition, in the UK or any country? A quote that resonated with me is that prison represents a physical manifestation of our 'giving up' on people. Prison strips people of nearly all liberties, sees them live in unpleasant conditions and in a condition of loneliness and fear, subjects them to trauma and harms their future job prospects. Abolition does not excuse the acts which brought people to prison, but is opposed to the bureaucratic system of carceration and othering and rejects the need for and value of carceration as a punitive tool in society. Abolitionists emphasise points like the poor record of incarceration in supporting rehabilitation, and point out that prisons have disproportionate concentrations of neurodiverse people and those with mental health difficulties. They emphasise the importance of understanding crime in the context of societal inequality and intergenerational trauma, rather than simply punishing and locking-away individual offenders.

The authors use science fiction to explore these themes because they make it easier to inhabit alternative realities without getting stuck in 'today'. They write utopias to offer a vision of different justice systems and, but maintain the importance of difficult characters, pain, suffering and transgressive action. This allows each story to navigate a theme that the author is interested in, such as how a community can hold transgressing members to account without resorting to incarceration.

Labouring Lives (Industry and Informality in new India) - Archana Aggarwal, 2023

Living in Bristol a few years ago I lived with a supplychain specialist working at Superdry, who had the unenviable responsibility of working with suppliers (including in India) to audit, monitor and improve conditions. This book is testament to the importance of such roles for companies with international supplychains. In my work I am often in a position of some influence over component selection and have (at least some) stake in choosing where components are sourced from, yet have no such influence on suppliers as an SME. While the supplychain is something I can only ever consider briefly at at a high level it is trade and procurement which sit at the heart of globalisation, international politics and the working lives of millions of people. Labouring Lives provided a sober assessment of India's industrial sector and evolution of labour laws from independence to the modern day.

India's economy did not evolve according to the 'conventional' path where agricultural production gives way to industrial and then service sector employment, offering progressively higher-earning jobs; instead, India's industrial sector has barely surpassed its agricultural sector in GDP, capping at some 20% - less than half the size of the service sector. Aggarwal explores the contradictions this presents throughout the book - principally that while industrial jobs were meant to bring prosperity to workers, the cost of living in cities means that many workers in the National Capital Region (NCR) actually rely on food rations or minor income from their home villages to survive, and never amass any savings or property.

Aggarwal conducted interviews with workers in the textile and automotive sectors in Noida, Gurugram, Manesar and Delhi and paired this with analysis of government labour statistics and laws. They found that while industrial sector employment can offer a secure and adequate income, formal permenant employment is held by few who act as an aspirational 'elite' at the top of complex labour strata. The desirability of these roles allows employers to make extreme demands of temporary staff, in terms of low pay, holiday entitlement, breaks and punitive measures for absence. Many workers are not employed during the summer quiet period. Underpaid workers are forced to rely on overtime for survival, enabling some employers to pay overtime at below base rates.

Many industrial workers are located in small units which carry out specialised or single steps of production in complex supplychains. This obfuscates the supplychain, retains workers in smaller groups and sidesteps legal provisions for health and safety requirements which larger factories are subjected to. Even those who work in well-organised workplaces are typically employed by third parties and contracted to the end employer, weakening worker solidarity and contributing to precarity.

Overall, the book was an short and approachable but concerning read. It made me wary of procuring industrial parts from suppliers in India without evidence of their worker and environmental treatment - the same, perhaps, applies to many developing countries. Yet, while I don't want to source from supplychains which perpetuate such a negative working environment, I have limited time and ability to assess such factors like I can for technical specifications and unit-price.

Power from Water - T.A.L. Paton and J. Guthrie Brown, 1960

With my interest in hydroelectricity (and especially the Scottish type) in full flow, sometime last year I purchased a 1960 author-signed copy of the book on eBay. This short book provides an engineer's perspective on hydro-electricity in direct and highly-readable writing. Technical communication often seems to lack a middle-ground, either satisfying the needs of career experts or simplifying content sufficiently to reach a mass audience; this book explores all the little details of planning, gaining approval, constructing and operating hydro-electric power stations but in a readable way. The authors are experienced civil engineers who worked on a number of the pioneering projects they discuss, and treat each consideration with interest; and what does that reward the reader with? An interesting account of the subject, studded with little pieces of rare learning and unexpected understanding.

Now I do love 'Plates', hand-drawn Figures and yellowing but high-quality paper but I wasn't interested in this book for the vintage aesthetic (only). It provides a concise portrait of the changing technology of hydroelectric and civil engineering through the early projects through to the contemporary of 1960. The authors speak of new techniques in engineering calculation; the use of electrical computers and the photo-elastic effect. They speak of scale models, the Reynolds number and experimental salmon-ladders. They talk around the way that the power grid and, increasingly, the super-grid, were and would change the adoption and priorities for hydro-electric power. They talk about chemical engineering advancements improving the properties in concrete and their perspective on its significance. They speak about Nuclear and the power of the atom as an exciting and upcoming development that will accompany coal, oil and hydro-electricity. As the authors emphasise, good engineering understands its context, demands and technical constraits and selects the most appropriate path; to understand so clearly the contemporary context of the 1960s hydro-electric engineer is the real enjoyment Power from Water offered me.

It's a bit unfair to read someone's predictions from over 60 years ago. While I'm just as poorly equipped to speak of the year 2080 the authors did have one thing on their side; confidence. They exalt in a career contemporaneous with increasingly virtuoso schemes. They recognise the best schemes have been developed in the UK and speak easily of new developments. What happened next? There was only some five more years of committed hydro-electric construction by the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board to come. The authors were right about Nuclear power, to an extent; the 60s saw around ten Nuclear stations connect to the grid - but what they could not have anticipated is that pace would also fade. Curiously, they do not mention or anticipate such issues as waste, decommissioning costs (either hydro-electric or nuclear) or deindustrialisation. What I know that they could not is that Gas would become the UK's principle fuel, and that it would be the variability introduced by new wind and solar that would return interest to pumped hydro storage projects. I like to be reminded that we are no smarter than people of the past and know no more about the future than they did.

Sounds Wild and Broken - David George Haskell, 2022

I picked up a copy at the recommendation of Tom Fisher / Action Pyramid at the Glasgow Listen Gallery's 'Listening as Porosity' event. His exhibition was my first real introduction to hydrophones and how applying technology to augment our human senses can reveal the activity of life underwater.

Sounds opened my mind, or rather ears, to the huge sonic variety of nature and has given me a new enthusiasm for listening attentively not passively as an important way of interacting with the world. As with all things, our world's sonic landscape (soundscape) is rapidly changing in a very short timeframe compared with the evolutionary periods over which our hearing and aural communication developed. As Sounds charts that evolutionary history for humans and other animals, such as birds, frogs, small mammals and whales, there were numerous takeaways that made me pause and reflect on how I understand myself, humans and other species.

Particularly enjoyable is coming to understand how the hearing and communicating organs in different animals have evolved to so carefully respond to their respective sonic habitats and needs. This knowledge lets us make deductions about the sensory realms for both ancient and contemporary species - did you ever wonder what a Dinosaur could hear? or how much we know about what they sounded like? That we are today becoming more sophisticated in our ability to listen and parse the sonic communication of diverse animals is exciting and, to Haskell, marks an opportunity to change our relationship with non-human animals. He poses numerous prompts relevant to our conservation efforts today: why do we relate so easily to animals we can hear? which make sounds we like? and if we cannot understand their sounds, why do we consider them to be unimportant or unintelligent? how will it change our attitudes to be able to, through new technologies, listen to and even understand such sounds?