Arcx is all about literary inspiration. We’re kicking off this season with debut novelist Prashanth Srivatsa to discuss his debut epic fantasy novel, The Spice Gate (HarperCollins 2024).

Prashanth lives in Bengaluru, India, and is a longtime sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast. His short stories have been published in a variety of prestigious publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more.

The Spice Gate is a sweeping, exciting first novel, featuring a young man from the lowest rung of society, who, through a series of strange events, changes the world. Amir, the protagonist, is desperate to save himself and his family from a life of exploitation spent painfully transporting spices between kingdoms. Despite his dire circumstances, Amir dares to dream of a different life and soon becomes embroiled in political plots, resistance movements, and more. Throw in a love story, a socio-religious revolution, magic, mayhem, and you have a recipe for something truly special.

Join us as we discuss South Asian pirates, white saviour complexes, the best biryani, the many aspects of resistance, and generational trauma.

You can follow Prashanth on X where he’s at prashatsa.

Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, we are in conversation with Dr. Craig Walton, a planetary scientist based at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge. Craig’s work spans the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe.

In this podcast, we chat about cosmic dust, the origins of life on Earth, and phosphorus—a key element for life, known as the ‘bringer of the light of day’, and its more fiendish nickname, “The Devil’s Element”. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in February 2024, Craig and his colleagues note that life on Earth probably originated from “reservoirs of bio-essential elements” such as phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon. But our earth rocks are relatively poor in reactive and soluble forms of these elements. So where did they come from? Apart from meteorites and asteroids, they could have also found their way to earth through cosmic dust, mineral grain aggregates of less than 3 mm derived from asteroids and comets. And glaciers provide settings capable of both locally concentrating cosmic dust and initiating closed-system
aqueous prebiotic chemistry in cryoconite holes, self-sustaining puddles or lakes.

In a more poetic turn, we talked about meteorites, which has been termed by Elizabeth Grosz
as the ultimate outsider, a cosmological imponderable that might burst through the perceived
limits of the known. Craig noted that these materials speak at a deeper level about where we
come from and how we should live. Potentially, all life derives from these cosmic gifts. We
are really made of stardust. Everything about meteorites and their eviscerated metallurgic
intensity speaks to their incredible durability. We then moved on to Craig’s PhD thesis on phosphorus, the backbone of DNA and our metabolism. It cycles through ecosystems in a mostly closed loop as organisms live, die and decay. This remarkable element, crucial for global food production, allows our civilization to flourish. However, with its overuse, we now face the dangers of fertilizer run-off such as algal blooms which can lead to ocean anoxic events which have been correlated with mass extinctions. For four and a half billion years, life has recycled minerals and resources, but we humans take them for granted. We churn through these resources, dump them in the oceans and move on. It can’t end well.

Outside of research, Craig writes science fiction as well as science communication articles on
a wide range of topics. If you want to hear more from Craig about all of the above, you can follow him on Twitter/X @lithologuy for updates.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of
Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research
addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and
social change. Her research is published in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or
None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the
Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024).

The conversation centres around the science of geology and its epistemic and field
practices. In her book Geologic Life, Yusoff notes that geology, which emerged in the late
fifteenth through nineteenth centuries as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry, was a form
of earth writing riven by systemic racism, complicit in the building of colonial worlds and the
destruction of existing earths. The origin stories of earth and scripts of race are natal twins.
Both mineralogical material and the subjugated person, such as on racial lines, were
categorized as ‘inhuman’. She approaches this work not through a linear historical geography
but through undergounds (as footnote, mine, appendix, subtending strata, and stolen suns)
that reveal subterranean currents.

Part of the task is to bring this whiteness down to earth through counter-gravities such as
insurgent geology, non-fossil histories and questioning stratification. Broadly, Black, Brown,
and Indigenous subjects whose location is the rift have an intimacy with the earth that is
unknown to the structural position of whiteness. This inhuman intimacy represents another
kind of geo-power: the tactics of the earthbound. So, whether it be through growing food, or making music such as the Blues, or the earth as a revolutionary compatriot, there have
always been persistent resistances against these racialized relations.

Yusoff speaks of the paradigm of the mine, which encapsulates this presumption of
extraction. She speaks of how material value is stabilized in the present from skyscrapers to
palm plantations, but both inhuman mineral “resources” and subjugated labouring people are
relegated to the underground. The mine has also inspired carceral forms such as the prison
complex.

For a more reparative geophysics, we need to embrace practices that don’t start from the
division between bios and geos and actually understand the earth and minerals as part of a
kin relationship with a more expansive understanding of how the human comes into being.
The separation between biology and geology is purely a kind of historical effect of disciplines
and disciplining practices. These changes are even more important in the Anthropocene,
where we have what she terms as a “white man’s overburden” with tech bros or
predominantly White Western men deciding the future of Earth. Geobiology is a relational
affair, and we need to see geology as a praxis of struggle and earth as iterative and
archiving of those struggles.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.