Imagine the city of Cape Town submerged under a rising sea level, surrounded by a blackened, burnt down landscape, shacks built up against the slopes of our beloved Table Mountain, where survivors feebly cling to life in a lifeless space. I can’t imagine anything more unsettling, writes Cape {town} Etc’s Rachelle Immelman. An environmental apocalypse is already a frightening thought, but Alistair Mackay brought the message home for Capetonians. Literally.
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way is a speculative, eco-dystopian fiction that takes place in Cape Town. It shows what our future in Cape Town possibly could be if the climate crisis shared around the world remains unchecked. The city has collapsed, the rich has taken refuge in a climate-controlled dome on Signal Hill, and the rest of the survivors are struggling to survive in extreme and increasingly unlivable circumstances.
The post-apocalyptic world Mackay has created in his book feels horribly familiar to what we already know today, and this familiarity is what grips you from start to finish. It mentions droughts and water crises in one part of the country, and floods in another. I found it incredibly eery when I read about the floods in Durban (which were probably inspired by the 2019 floods) while simultaneously seeing articles, photos and videos on Facebook in real-time about the latest Durban floods in 2022 as I was reading the book for the first time in May.
The narrative is also filled with the worries many of us currently have about the climate, overpopulation, unemployment and homelessness. It mentions, Greta Thunberg, Covid, Day Zero, and Eskom – all images we associate with crises.
In It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, the story doesn’t simply cut straight to a post-apocalyptic world – it actually leads you into it with these ‘pre-apocalyptic’ scenes that span a decade or so before the Armageddon. And that makes the message of the novel even more profound. It’s a warning: we’re right now hurtling towards the end of the world as we currently know it.
But It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way isn’t just about an environmental apocalypse – it deals with more than just burning forests and melted ice caps. With the environmental collapse as its central theme, the novel also explores LGBT matters through its three queer main characters, as well as concerns around technology, social media use, and inequality.
The novel shifts between four different points of view, each focusing on one particular aspect of the end of the world: We first meet Milo, a child born into the social and environmental collapse, and through his eyes we see the destruction and horror that await us in the future. Then we jump a few decades back in time and meet Luthando, the greenie-turned-eco-terrorist. His chapters focus mainly on the pre-apocalyptic fight for nature. We also meet Viwe, Luthando’s lover, whose chapters view the apocalypse through a queer lens. Finally, we explore what role technology and social media could play in the apocalypse, as well as the depiction of inequality between Cape Town’s rich and poor, through the narrative of Malcolm, a tech guru and close friend of Luthando and Viwe.
Meet the author
Alistair Mackay (whose surname rhymes with ‘sky’) is a Johannesburg-born writer who now lives in Cape Town with his husband, Pug and “enough house plants to restart the ecosystem after it all collapses”. He is interested in exploring queerness, marginalisation, social justice and climate change, all topics that shine through brilliantly in his debut novel It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way. He has a long and creative history with writing, a skill that started in childhood where he illustrated adventure stories and wrote cringe-worthy, angsty teenage poetry, and continued into his adult life where he ventured into business writing, content strategy and news features.
Mackay’s inspiration for this book came from his own passionate awareness of the environment and the future of a world threatened by accelerated climate change. He began writing his novel while he was studying for his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Columbia University and received invaluable feedback and guidance from his peers and professors, as mentioned in an interview with Columbia University School of the Arts.
The theme of It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way took root while Mackay was still an undergraduate student studying politics, and developed from his exposure to green political thought. After being terrified by what he learned about the future of climate change, Mackay imagined what Cape Town would look like if climate change developed into a full-blown apocalypse. From there he created the world we see through the eyes of his characters in It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way. Some of the earlier scenes in the book, such as the pre-apocalyptic stage of the story, were even inspired by real-life events. The scene where the main characters are at a reforesting festival, for instance, were inspired by Mackay’s own attendance at the Greenpop Reforest Fest, a tree planting festival aimed at restoring degraded land.
Grim subject, but bright reception
Despite the frightening subject matter in the book, It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way has been met with overwhelming positivity, both locally and internationally. The debut novel was highlighted by several local media outlets prior to its release, such as the Sunday Times, Daily Maverick, and Rapport, and was reviewed by News24, the Sunday Times and Culture Review Magazine.
Mackay has also been invited to sit on discussion panels at the annual Open Book Festival (where I first learned of It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way) and the prestigious Franschhoek Literary Festival. And since the release of his highly successful book, he has also given interviews to numerous media outlets such as SABC News, 5FM and Cape Talk 567AM.
And based on his social media, his book has even travelled around the globe. Readers as far as USA and Switzerland have uploaded reviews and photos on Instagram.
While we wait for Mackay’s next project, or for It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way to be picked up for a movie deal, make sure to get your hands on a copy of It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way. It has been distributed to all major book retailers, such as Exclusive Books and Wordsworth Books, but also smaller independent book stores like The Book Lounge in Cape Town, and Liberty Books in Elgin.
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Picture: Supplied
