Manda Scott is the published author of Any Human Power, a groundbreaking Mytho-Political thriller centred around our imprints on the planet, and leaving behind a legacy that future generations can be proud of. Following the release of Any Human Power, What We Reading sat down with Manda talk through everything from the inspirations and influences behind the story, the success of her podcast, Accidental Gods, to her appreciation for Moon of Gomrath!
First off, tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to the world of writing.
Well, I used to be a veterinary surgeon – I lived near Newmarket which is the center of UK horse racing and specialised in neonatal foal intensive care, then went to Cambridge University to specialise in Anaesthesia/Intensive Care. About 10 years in, I realised this wasn’t what I wanted to do long term – it wasn’t going to help the world move to a better place – so I shifted slowly over to writing novels full time.
This took about 6 years, and I wrote contemporary crime novels to begin with, on the grounds they took the least research, but the books that let me give up the day job were the Boudica: Dreaming series that explored our indigenous, pre-colonial, shamanic past in the islands of Britain and then, over the course of the 4 book series, built forward to the invasion and occupation by the Roman armies.
The Boudica books also nudged me into teaching ‘shamanic dreaming’ which is my spiritual path: contemporary shamanic practice predicated on the concept that we can shift realities without recourse to any kind of recreational pharmaceuticals, plant-based or synthesised. I thought I’d teach a couple of courses and be done, but we celebrated our 20 year anniversary this year and my senior apprentice now teaches the first 5 years of what is notionally a 10 year cycle, though nobody has gone all the way round the wheel in less than 6 years.
Everything I’ve done has been as a result of this practice and so in 2016, I ended up doing an MA in Regenerative Economics (I swear this was nowhere on my radar until then!) at Schumacher college. The course was life-changing and, coming home, I gave up writing and set up the Accidental Gods podcast as being a far faster, more effective way to edge us all towards an emergent, generative future. My partner and I also set up the Accidental Gods membership program, to help people connect to the Web of Life in ways that will let them ask, ‘what do you want of me?’ and respond to the answers in real time.
And that was me, until a series of shamanic events led to the writing of Any Human Power. So now I’m writing again, and still running the podcast and they work better together than I could ever have imagined, though there are rarely enough hours in the day.
Talk to us about Any Human Power. What is it about, where did the inspiration for it come from, and how did you find the experience of writing it?
I was teaching one of the more advanced dreaming courses at the summer solstice of 2021 when I had pretty explicit instructions from whatever we think sends such things, to go and sit at a particular place on our hill, in a particular frame of mind, ‘for at least an hour as the sun goes down’ every evening until further notice.
Plain text instructions don’t come often in this work, so I did as was asked (there were other criteria involving a fossilised horse’s tooth and a hawthorn tree) and by the end of the week, I had the first scene of Any Human Power, plus three scenes as we go through – and, crucially, the understanding that I needed to write a novel that walked the readers through from a recognisable point in the present towards a future we’d all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. This was the start of what became known as Thrutopian writing, although Prof Rupert Read had created the name in a Huffington Post article in 2017 – I just didn’t get to know about it until almost a year later when Faith and I were setting up the Thrutopian Writing Masterclass.
Writing this was easily the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Wrapping my head around novel historical periods was a walk in the park compared to this. Definitely, I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t been running the podcast every week for the previous two and a half years. It was crucial that all the ideas in the book were possible – and were (are) being implemented somewhere in the world. So what I needed to do was to pull them together into a narrative that would carry readers through to a sense of possibility.
I wrapped it in a thriller arc, largely because this was the genre I was most familiar with. But because it had all arisen out of my dreaming – and because the main character dies at the end of the first chapter and the rest of the narrative is told through her eyes, locked in the Between by a promise – there’s a lot of what we might loosely call magical realism, too.
I’ve been calling it a Mytho-Political thriller, which covers most of the bases. I do think we need a new mythology – one that doesn’t laud power-over, but that shows the astonishing sense of connection, agency and belonging – the heart-exploding love of life- that comes when we find power-with.
What is the number one goal you want your work to have with readers?
I want people to understand that the current system is not fit for purpose and we have to (in the words of Vanessa Machada de Oliveira) ‘Hospice Modernity’. I want to show people that this is both necessary, and possible – and that the world we can build as an alternative will be so, so much more engaging and inspiring and enlivening than the one we’ve built out of our fears of separation, scarcity and powerlessness.
What do you think makes you stand out as an author?
I am probably not the best person to answer this. I’d like to say that I take risks and explore new territories in ways that open doors for other creatives to come after me: for sure we need many, many, many more Thrutopian novels. I’d go so far as to say that we need every single novel published (and TV script, screenplay, poem, song, blog, op-ed… whatever) to be Thrutopian.
As Amitav Ghosh says, ‘it’s not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine different futures.’ That’s our job as writers and too many of us are churning out the same old, same old, or running down dystopian rabbit holes as if yet one more horror story is going to change things (it won’t: It never has, it never will. It’s not how we’re built), or fluffy utopias set in a different time or a different place with no route to get there.
What would you say has been your biggest success so far?
Heck, I don’t know… that sense that true radicalism is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. I don’t remember who said that, but they’re right. I’m pretty sure if you asked my publishers, they’d say being shortlisted for the Orange, Prize or the Edgar, or the Saltire; or winning the McIlvenney – but for me, having young people send emails saying they feel hope for the first time, that it might be possible to build a world where they’d dare to have children… that’s a pretty big success.
If you could go back in time to one book you read for the first time, what would it be and why?
I’d go back to reading Alan Garner’s ‘Moon of Gomrath’ when I was about 9 years old… and tell my younger self that it’s OK to be who I am, and that there may be a lot of grief around the corner, but there’s a sense of meaning to be gleaned out of everything, however hard it seems at the time. And I’d gently nudge me really to focus on the writing, as much as on the story because it’s the rhythms of language that make it a truly great book.
What’s one tip you would give your younger self if you had the opportunity?
Do whatever it takes to connect to the Web of Life in a way that feels authentic. And this means knowing what authenticity feels like. Make that your life’s goal and we’ll meet in the middle, you and me.
And finally, what do you hope the future holds for you and your writing?
Whatever the world needs of us, me and my writing. I’d like Any Human Power to sell in every country in the world, in huge numbers and for everyone who reads it to be inspired to walk away from the stories we’ve been told of ‘business as usual’ and to start creating the worlds we’d be proud to leave behind.
I’d like readers to abandon tribalism and find common cause in a world where integrity, compassion, agency and accountability leads us all to a sense of being and belonging: where we find meaning in every moment. And then I’d like us all to work together to dismantle the worst of what’s destroying us and build up the best of what can bring us forward.
In my ideal world, we’d get funding from people who get that this is both necessary and possible to make the book into a TV series, with the entire production founded on generative principles and we’d work together on a whole raft of sequels. We’d create a think tank of Thrutopian ideas and offer it as open source to anyone who wanted to write a story so that they could open up ideas of possibility.
Check Out Manda And All Of Her Work On Her Website, Facebook Or Twitter/X
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Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
