Rethinking disasters to prepare for future ones
"Not Now, But Soon" is a podcast miniseries hosted by speculative fiction author and humanitarian aid worker Malka Older. Art by Rey Velasquez Sagcal
Tsunamis. Hurricanes. Earthquakes.
Stories about disasters often make these tragedies feel like things that happen in far-off places to far-off people. The stories pretend there is a straightforward plot: After a disaster, aid is sent, things get fixed and then the news coverage moves on. It’s harder to tell the story of how the affected community will change, what brought disaster to its doorstep in the first place and the lessons we can learn.
"Not Now, But Soon," a new podcast miniseries from ASU Media Enterprise, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters — and even what counts as a disaster. Rather than bad luck or happenstance, disasters are deeply rooted in the ways society is constructed. A hurricane can be a catastrophe or simply a passing storm, depending on how homes are built, the resilience of the electrical grid, the durability of levees and the level of community cohesion. Understanding disasters can help us understand society’s priorities and values, illuminating our blind spots and assumptions.
Hosted by Malka Older — a speculative fiction author, humanitarian aid worker, disaster researcher and senior global futures scientist at ASU — the five-part series explores how we can improve disaster response. It also asks how storytelling and speculative fiction can help us create a vision for better futures and begin to work toward them.
The podcast miniseries is part of the larger Future Tense Fiction project, a collaboration between Issues in Science and Technology and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination that uses speculative fiction to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Each month, the project publishes a short story and a response essay from an expert who connects the fictional narrative to real-world policy debates. The project has been publishing short fiction since 2017.
Featured podcast guests include:
Steven Gonzalez, a fiction author and anthropologist who uncovers the overlooked costs to our internet infrastructure.
- Thin Lei Win, a journalist who asks if our food systems are a disaster.
- Julisa Tambunan, deputy executive director of Equal Measures 2030 who explores gender and data equity.
- Nasir Andisha, permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, who finds a way to imagine a better future for his country after losing it. Premieres Oct. 28.
- Brigitte van der Sande, an art historian who examines the stories we tell about war and violence. Premieres Nov. 11.
The miniseries is part of Issues in Science and Technology’s podcast "The Ongoing Transformation." Follow the miniseries by subscribing to "The Ongoing Transformation" wherever you get your podcasts. You can also keep up with "Not Now, But Soon" on the miniseries’ website.
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