Introducing Bram E Gieben
Author of The Darkest Timeline
Tell us a little about yourself?
I'm from Scotland. I live in a very beautiful part of the country near Loch Lomond with my wife and two mischievous tuxedo cats. Besides writing essays and books, I make a podcast called Strange Exiles where I interview thinkers, writer, artists and dreamers from the periphery of the mainstream to the fringes of the counter-culture. I started that in 2020, and it's been a wild ride. My background is in culture journalism, but I'm also a rapper and poetry slam champion.
What made you become a writer?
I always wanted to be a writer. At age 15 I won an award for a short play I wrote, and saw it produced by the Scottish Youth Theatre. Seeing other people perform my words was intoxicating, but as I got older my ambitions shifted more towards criticism, journalism and fiction. I earned a meagre living from journalism for a while and helped to establish one of Scotland's leading arts magazines. I never made much headway as a fiction writer despite some short story sales, competition wins, and taking part in the live literature performance group Writers Bloc. As a poet, I produced several shows for the Edinburgh Fringe between 2010 and 2015. It wasn't until I started experimenting with narrative and creative nonfiction as part of my postgraduate degree at Glasgow University that I really "found my voice" as a writer, despite producing many thousands of words in other forms and styles. Since then I've sold essays to a few different politics, culture and theory publishers.
Where did the idea for The Darkest Timeline come from?
The Darkest Timeline is a plot (and well-known meme) from the TV show Community. The idea is a riff on the Star Trek 'Mirror Universe'. In both examples, you can tell everyone in the alternate timeline is evil, because they have beards. In Community, the darkest timeline begins when a character rolls a die. The outcome of that roll leads to a parallel reality where key characters become evil. It struck me this was the perfect metaphor for our dystopian present moment. The choices we make today about issues like climate collapse, technological acceleration and autocratic politics will reverberate for generations to come. The question of whether we are in the darkest timeline already, or whether we can avoid that fate, seemed to be a good way to sum up the multiply-intersecting crises we face today in our societies, our economies, our politics and our ecosystem. If we're truly living in a world with 'no future' how do we respond? I set out to answer that question.
What is The Darkest Timeline about?
The book is a collection of nine critical essays about our dystopian present, and our increasingly impossible futures. It's about how we navigate a discourse about the future laden with ideology, propaganda, spectacle, and utopianism. A corrective to apocalypse fiction, it is an exploration of the reasons why the world feels so precarious right now. Influenced by the cultural analysis of Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek, and the pessimistic philosophies of John Gray, Byung-Chul Han and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, the essays explore a wide selection of films, video games, television, scientific studies and cultural commentary to find a path through the chaotic landscape of collapse.
Tell us about your main characters are they based on anyone you know?
As a nonfiction writer, the characters in my book are mostly the ghostly wisps of quotations from philosophers and artists, but I hope they tell an illuminating story. In a funny way, I'm a character in my own book. It's a record of my obsessions, worries, fears and hopes. It's written not to inform, educate or inspire, and certainly not as a manifesto for one type of change or another. Rather, it's intended to act as a series of provocations, designed to challenge a reader to think about the assumptions they make about human nature, and our past, present and future. The reader is a character too, in a sense. My imagined reader is younger than me (I am 43) and perhaps better positioned to act on (or react against) my more pessimistic statements and provocations.
What tips would you give a new writer?
Time's on your side. While it's harder than ever to "make it" as a writer, there are more ways than ever to get your voice out there. The most important thing is finding that voice. Once you are able to do that, the actual physical production of pages and word count will start to feel almost effortless. You'll recognise it in a 'flow state'. You sit down to write, and it pours out of you. Hours go by like minutes. You'll spend all day making notes and thinking about the next page. Getting to that point takes hard work. You may have to write a lot of words in the 'wrong' format, style, genre, industry, or using the wrong technique before you hit upon something that works for you. And it might not be what you think.
What are your favourite books?
I'm a huge science fiction fan, and have been since I was a kid. I'll recommend three of my favourite novels in that genre. Everyone should read Philip K. Dick's UBIK, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. Those are just hands down three of the best, most mind-changing books ever written. I also love comics, and the influence of Grant Morrison's psychedelic counter-culture epic The Invisibles is hard to deny. In terms of my theory and critical writing, nobody's a bigger influence on me than Mark Fisher. His Capitalist Realism and Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times provided some of the key jumping-off points for the arguments in my book.
Where can we find you on social media?
My Substack is strangeexiles.substack.com, this is where I publish my podcasts and writing. The podcast is also known as @strangeexiles on TwXtter, Instagram and Facebook. My own TwXtter is @weaponizer. I run my music through a separate account, @t3xtur3. The music will definitely appeal to anyone who is similarly obsessed with the apocalyptic, dystopian, cyberpunk themes of my writing!
Here are some links:
Book pre-orders: linktr.ee/thedarkesttimeline
More of my writing: linktr.ee/bramegieben