In 2019 I was lucky enough to be able to afford to tag along on a dream of a lifetime trip to Antarctica on a small ship with only 100 passengers including my friends Prof. Charne Lavery who is on South Africa’s National Committee (SANC) for the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), philosopher Prof. Lucy Allais, and Africanist Prof. Isabel Hofmeyr. The trip inspired a short story about Weddell seals and orcas and billionaire egos competing with scientific research and exploration. My “Seal Skin Coat” was originally published as part of the XPrize’s Oceans anthology, now unfortunately no longer online, so I’m reprinting it here with some personal photos from that amazing trip (credit to Charne Lavery).
The London Reader’s Foreword: Could virtual reality bring us closer to the natural world and perhaps our true nature? In this elegant short story, Lauren Beukes imagines an experience like a live nature documentary that links her main character, Maia, to the seals hunting and swimming beneath the ice of Antarctica. She uses this immersive virtual reality to explore disembodiment, a difficult experience for some neuro-divergent people. Beukes took inspiration from her own trip to the endangered continent where wealthy vacationers and scientists come face to face with the sublime beauty of icebergs and sea mammals. It led to her truly original take on the cyberpunk theme of an impoverished jockey jacking-in to virtual reality at the behest of wealthy corporate benefactors; however, here the impoverished protagonist is the increasingly familiar academic desperate for funding. Beukes takes us into new solarpunk territory beneath the ice of a natural habitat that is fast disappearing.