The long haul

Lambert, Athena (2023) The long haul. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

The Long Haul is a post-apocalyptic story following Finch, a cargo driver, and Lizbeth, a medic. After a catastrophic crash Finch has to recover and restructure her entire life. While Lizbeth is ordered by The Council to explore the mysterious borderland of the Beyond and accidentally awakens something terrible. It is up to her to warn the people of the Basin and protect them when their leaders will not; and it is up to Lizbeth and Finch together to help one another heal. This book has been a huge project that has spanned the whole of my MFA career, the first draft of this novel being my entry to my very first workshop within the MFA. I have come a long way from that initial draft and that is due in part to the constructive comments I received in that workshop, the further lessons I’ve learned in other classes, and the help of my professors. Though what I learned through the MFA helped me actually craft this novel, what propelled me through the initial idea and into a full fledged world were my many points of inspirations and topics of interest. From video games and books to political dynamics and current events I found inspiration everywhere I looked. The initial idea was sparked by the game Signs of the Sojourner which had a similar caravan type setting, though much lighter and interpersonally dependent then my own novel. The very chill gameplay belied the pretty severe stakes your character faces if they fail and that appealed to me in a narrative sense and I wanted to try and match that as well. A further inspiration for my thesis was the most recent Space Race amongst the billionaires. Like the Space Race an endeavor is taken on for exploration wherein there are bigger issues in the known civilization that are being ignored in favor of experiencing the new and exciting. And, for me, when I think of the Space Race I think of the class dynamics and labor issues that are so prevalent surrounding people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Even in a post-apocalyptic civilization such as the one I’ve depicted there are class differences. The difference between the traders, the people who receive the trade, and the people who control the trade. And on top of all that, literacy forms a strict line between these classes, creating distinct sides of privilege and control. Another source of inspiration was Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series. Her post-empire, blue collar focus on this massive universe she created appealed to me in a similar way that Signs of the Sojourners did; the interior lives of the people that keep their society running, but are ultimately forgotten. Despite our slight differences in genre, my post-apocalyptic/dystopian road novel to her space opera/space westerns, I believe The Long Haul fits well in the literary canon alongside Chambers’ works. I am very passionate about genre and speculative work and I think my novel is a good example about why these types of stories are important. Placing the political reality and class dynamics that we’ve grown so accustomed to in a wildly different setting makes it harder to ignore these difficult topics. It draws on real world events to subconsciously make the reader draw those same connections, and when the absurd, comically evil things we read about in stories match real life people and events it makes the reader think. As well as, I hope, being an inviting story full of intrigue and suspense.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	Dystopian; Fiction; Post-apocalyptic; Sci-fi; Speculative; Speculative Fiction
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PE English
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Arts and Letters > English
Date Deposited:	19 May 2025 16:55
Last Modified:	19 May 2025 16:55
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6150

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