The Aspera Group

My project is a digital literary work surrounding one organization’s efforts to stop the apocalypse. This project displays a science fiction world through the lens of a corporate website. Through research into surveillance capitalism, historical views of monstrosity, and social movements around doomsday prepping, I have deconstructed the genre of apocalypse fiction to display it from a different angle and center the perspectives of diverse characters. The central character is a disabled trans woman struggling to control the organization she’s created as it spirals out of her control. I have stripped the genre down to the world-building by displaying this world in frame, because many aspects of science fiction and fantasy have historically had elements of race, sex, age, and ability built into their framework. In the world of this organization, disabled people don’t simply exist as a metaphor or as a curse to be cured, but as a key and fundamental part of identity. My research on surveillance capitalism and bureaucratic systems sought to center the understanding of the individual and the organization as linked but separate as one character at the center of the web both embodies her organization and is damaged by it as she loses control of it. The website centers both her perspective and the perspective of her employees as they interface with her personally and professionally and reach out in a variety of ways. The website updates, control slips, and the world-building is displayed as the world itself slides towards an inevitable collapse.

My project was to produce a story about apocalyptic trauma. This involved a lot of different kinds of literary research on a number of different subjects, from free market capitalism to hauntings to the mindset of doomsday preppers. In order to tell an apocalypse story- which hinges very heavily into the genres of science fiction and fantasy- you need to first understand the genres and frameworks that you’re working within. Science Fiction is scientific because it tests hypotheses about the world in a literary framework- what WOULD the apocalypse look like? How would it affect regular people? How would you cope with the enormity of something like that? To answer those questions I started on a narrative framework using a character named Lorelei Algamest, whose answer to conquer the unthinkable was to try to take over the world, control every outcome, and stop every potential apocalypse by instituting control from the top down. Thus, she created an organization called Aspera, and my project was to display her vision in a literary form. I decided to do that by creating the Aspera Organization’s website. My research hinged on a lot of different angles as I’m seeking to unfold the amount of bureaucratic complication involved in running the world, while also handling the underpinnings of world building. Science Fiction and Fantasy as genres can be a little bit fraught with preconceptions about gender, race, and ability. Too often, Science fiction treats the “other” as inherently terrifying, treats disability as a thing to fear, and while exploring gender differences often handles them in traditional binaries. The concept of a new world order, too, is fraught with antisemitism and historical fears. In order to create a narrative that was about bureaucratic horror and apocalyptic horror specifically, my research often focused on how narratives around monstrosity can be based on race and ability, specifically so I could remove those elements. Aspera is an organization run by a disabled trans woman. The website I built focuses on community and her efforts to empower people even as her decisions remove much of their autonomy. As the narrative unfolds, the authoritarian utopia shows cracks. The website continues updating with news bulletins, the efforts of a single woman to hold together the weight of everything begins to fail. She escalates her efforts, sacrifices some of her values, her own employees begin to work against her as her plans fail. Her conceptions of herself and the world around her and the perspectives of others in her organization are all painted by their vastly different experiences, and I’ve researched each of their jobs and perspectives- mechanics, accountants, social workers- to understand the ways in which lots of different people make up the entity that is the organization, and how that entity becomes a thing unto itself, and then proceeds to break down. Through my research on science fiction, the other, disaster, and real-world economics and subcultures, I developed a story centered around an entity: an organization, and the woman at the heart of it. And I showcase averted apocalypses and the slow cataclysmic collapse of the organization preventing them through a mundane medium: a corporate website. OSCAR’s grant has provided me with the opportunity to explore all these potential avenues of research and build this website- the story would be incomplete without the frame creating the impression of being an employee entering into this organization and watching its collapse in real time, and i truly believe this framework unlocks a new and interesting way to create not just this narrative, but to tell stories in the digital age. Web storytelling is a new and fascinating medium and i’m truly grateful to have had this opportunity.