THE LORE · LETTER FROM THE FOUNDER · INTELLECTUAL DRAMATURGY IN 3 ACTS
Want to read a three-act micro-play? Here’s our lore.
It’s a mock epic, but without the mock1. For those who love decorating their time with language.
Before it was all goo and bloom, cheeky lexical quibs and coinage; before it was acid critique and serious editorial guidelines; before the press’s voice that says “hi” flirtatiously to its followers to secure more submissions, UFP was born from someone’s rage and delight, Hollywood courtship and higher education sabotage, muteness and life story converging2. If it looks like we were born this way, it’s because we were.
THREE ACTS · A ~25-MINUTE SITTING, OR THREE COFFEE-BREAK SESSIONS · FOR WHEN YOU WANT TO BEFRIEND A PRESS
Muteness; ascent
When I was a child, I was mute. Couldn’t speak. My father was a doctor, and I came from a family of national scientists, so they took me to their various medical friends to figure this out. Someone checked the anatomy of my throat, and every anatomical part seemed to have the capacity to produce speech. For some reason, however, speech itself was unable to come online. They then took me to a psychiatrist — in stealth, on the hush-hush — because mental disorder and talk of trauma were taboo in Asian cultures. That ended up not being the point, because at the time they found no evidence of trauma affecting my speech — just lingering suspicions that the child with the big eyes often felt like a walking exposed nerve and had chosen to disconnect one channel through which to access the large overwhelming world.
A little later, when I was around six or eight years old, this speech-bereft kid stumbled into a gracious English teacher who had the bearing of a calm but benevolent matriarch. She pulled me aside and said: “Catherine, I read your poem. And I read your stories. They’re advanced. You have so much potential to be an exceptional person when you grow up. If you found a way to put all that literary voice into talking, you would be unfathomable.”
Unfathomable — what a formidable word. In the lexicon, a fathom is a marker of depth. To say that something or someone is unfathomable is to suggest that no markers exist — likely because the depths are too deep or too unknown to plumb, or because the right tools are not immediately available. I’m tempted to say “I was flattered” by the adjective, but I don’t think I had the concept of flattery just yet. More precisely, I felt . . . seen. And there was something about that belief, and about being met with that unsolicited recognition, that allowed me to find my literal voice at age eight.
Ten years later, by age eighteen, I would win a national literary prize reserved for masters of literary craft, and then perplex people who would receive me on the stage who suspected I was lost and wandered there somehow. Then another prize. And another. By then I’d accumulated a small portfolio of work by a young writer trying to decorate the world with strange syntax and off-kilter language, seemingly delighting the jurists in the process. I had specialised in literary pieces meant to be performed, embodied and orated — speechwriting and stagewriting, which proved particularly useful to statesmen and world leaders (a foreshadowing for later). How ironic, coming from a mute, that the found voice would echo across podiums and find their scale exactly the right sizing.
The speech that couldn’t take oral form would eventually be known to the people around me as my native one.
This would culminate in one of my favourite things I ever did: writing the genre-bending, maximalist work of long-form fiction “Postgraduate Admissions,” which was published by a literary journal spotlighting craft and literary innovation. It doesn’t seem so obvious from this vantage point, but Postgraduate Admissions would foreshadow Uncommon Future Press. Arguably, it was the first instantiation of our tagline, MEDIA EX ACADEMIA; and the first primitive of what we’re trying to achieve. The media taken out of the academy — because it was ultimately what I call “epistemological long form,” a fusion of knowledge production and lyricism.
Much has been said about Postgraduate Admissions since then. It has been staged in multiple locations and at multiple readings. But the bare bones beneath those descriptions are these:
The story takes place in a single take. One morning, in one room, in a fictionalised London School of Economics on Houghton Street. Four professors sit down to fill the last place on a master’s programme and adjourn for lunch having engineered the political future of a country. In the style of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (though faster-paced), the four characters legislate the crises of the world through their postgraduate admissions process, playing a geopolitical strategy game by treating their applicants as pawns in a chess game.
The four characters, though, are not people who hold schools of thought. They are the schools of thought themselves, personified through prose. They gain bodies that are constantly failing them: Positivism, tie askew, who can only reach a painting by converting it into data. Neo-Marxism, whose greatest temptation is not to punch his colleague but to bellow bibliographies at him. Postcolonial Feminism, holding a stillness so complete that the only thing moving on her is a loose thread on her Savile Row velveteen garment. And presiding, the institution’s own memory at seventy years old: a Departmental Head losing his grip on language and on which decade he is in.
All of it is narrated by a man (or is he?) who is not supposed to be in the room. He let himself in, set down a pot of Darjeeling and sat at the back wearing a brown suit. The chairs had red and brown tones; he camouflaged. He is omniscient in patches and unreliable in others, not because he is necessarily deceptive, but because he is subject to moments of diminished Observatory Functions. At one point he loses control of the narration entirely to a character impatient with his pacing and gets exiled from his status as narrator. You never learn whether he’s a spy, a traitor, an agent of the status quo, a mischief-maker or an otter. You can only guess from the clues.
— and then there are the twenty-six footnotes, which is where the book actually happens. The first is two words long, and it is a question: The textual body calls the seminar room a bastion of insulation. This seems like innocent scene description. But the footnote asks: Against what? — signalling ominous times. The point is this: everything below the line is interrogating everything above it. The characters try to overthrow each other. Meanwhile, the footnotes try to overthrow the text.
Which is the joke and the argument at once. Power doesn’t operate in the discussion. It operates beneath it, in the small print, in the part everyone agrees to skip or is too impatient to read. More importantly, power is braided in with knowledge production. Who gets to declare how the world works determines how the world works.
Who gets to declare how the world works determines how the world works.
A phrase surfaces twice — once near the opening and once as the final sentence of the book: plot twists of the knife. A plot twist and a twist of the knife, fused, with plot holding both its meanings: the story and the conspiracy. Both are always happening in the prose, as are portmanteaus derived from a mute girl’s brain.
But I find that even these layers of description don’t do PGA justice. In fact, I spoke casually about it to my writer-friends and English Lit professors at the time, and we began to play a game of deciding which genre to slot it into. We concluded that it was unslottable. In that sense, it was ridiculously hard to market and PR. It was a satire on geopolitics and power, yes, and on the zeitgeist of the time. But it was also a satire on satires. And it was a satire on itself.
It was eventually called many things: maximalist, insane, weird, erudite, polymathic. But also: convertible to a play, convertible to a graphic novel, convertible to a movie. A new aesthetic turn perhaps, or a new voice; epistemology turned sideways and made to be literary. But my favourite was: baroque, unironically so.
And by Baroque, we mean that it accumulates force rather than reducing it. One image produces another register, another historical scale, another conceptual turn. The writer doesn’t move cleanly from A to B; the writer makes A unfurl until B is discovered inside it. The lofty blue-sky expedition is paired with ridiculous nonsense, then sliced through with serious epistemology. Audiences and critics went: Who is this author? And what is she up to?! This was pre-social media, they never really knew.
It also drew criticism: lovers of contemporary fiction might find it difficult to read if they were impatient with a new type of literary conceit. Some people didn’t know how to read it, i.e., the reader was supposed to be okay even if they didn’t know what “Positivism” or “Neo-Marxism” meant; the story was going to tell them. But not every reader has or had the sort of patience for that species of payoff. I find that works like this install new types of neural architectures, and sometimes that’s a demand on readers who’d rather their neural networks remain unchanged.
I had no idea how it was going to be received, and to some extent I wasn’t engineering a particular response. I simply took a liking to seeing literary friends and English professors bowled over and folded in half by laughter. I hadn’t written it to be funny; I had written it to be an outpouring of my most potent registers of creativity. I was just having fun with the text and relieving the internal pressure of keeping its contents inside my brain. This became a moment of self-discovery too: apparently my best and most creative self was rip-roaringly, theatre-busting hilarious.
In retrospect, rereading PGA now, the writing style feels like a meld of the theatrical and the architectural. The sentences often feel as though they are forms of staging: entrances, reveals and reversals are choreographed. Bodies are arranged in rooms; abstractions become characters. My ideas at the time wanted sets, costumes and physical form. More than once, I felt a presence at my office desk: it was the ghost of my characters longing for a thespian body to possess.
Meanwhile, this was whetting a hunger for a new aesthetic, and I felt the weight of literary colleagues’ expectation that I would forge it and carry it forward.
But the plot twist of the knife of that decade was this: I didn’t forge it or carry it forward. This was the last categorically literary thing I would write, as I went on to live the story inside the story instead.
I had become interested in architecting the actual world instead of architecting its fictional stories. Though, as you’ll see shortly, this thesis has a way of collapsing in on itself, and UFP would be born in the rubble.
Gravitas; at the summit
Rather than kick-starting a new aesthetic, or making further and louder literary waves, I became interested in other fictional worlds born from somebody else’s imagination: economics and public international law.
Seemingly doctrinal, “serious” worlds — worlds that produced consensus reality itself — these two fields had many things in common. They’re bodies of imagination that had hardened into fact after somebody rained down material resources to support them.
They were, too, containers of things: I’d always perceived law as a container for values, where we try to throw in our notions of justice, peace, duty, obligation – and sometimes their opposites. Meanwhile, economics was similarly a containment. But this time, of capital. It was the field that lent frameworks on how to conduct resources, symphony-like in its best iterations (which is arguably rare), across spaces: What type of capital flows in and out, and to whom. How much porosity to imbue the material quality of its borders. How to move what has been stuck. When functioning ideally, said conduction should flow capital from spaces of abundance to spaces of lack – but it’s no surprise that some forms of containment function to incubate and privately accumulate stock, before hardening their borders.
This chapter would be one of the hardest to parse: On one hand, it would end with an offer to become a technical expert for some ‘important’ body; and stacked on top of it, an ambassadorial role that allegedly broke records to do with age.
But on the other, it was easy to detect a gray-scale pallor to the way I saw the world the longer I breathed in this atmosphere. Cue a temperature drop between Act I and Act II. My words – previously noted for levity and airy portmanteaus – would gain a gravitas that read as tired and serious, like they’ve been pinned down from attempts at ascendancy. Sentences were longer but less baroque; an imagination cut down by too much ‘depth,’ a painful reluctance to unfurl for a bracing fear of what I might find inside. There grew in me a disinterest in chewing the scenery, or lingering in scenes; I just wanted to move past them. Because they were too blegh, and in many cases too hard to look at. Along the way, this chapter would offer Odyssean turns of events in the form of traumatising confrontations with power.
After writing satires about power, this new chapter surely offered no escape from it.
The space should have held a warning sign: No space for ironic distance over here; and footnotes don’t overthrow the text. The machinery isn’t that sophisticated. There’s no subtext. No hidden caveat emptor. No notes on the margins. It’s just what it is. Power is not at its height when it’s invisible. It’s at its height when it’s not even bothering to hide.
But I didn’t expect this magnitude of change at the start. On the surface, my turn towards economics and public international law would seem to be either:
AA life upgrade, if the evaluator were a serious institutionalist.
BA path towards the straight and narrow, to the sheer delight of my Asian parents, who had seen me unserious because of literary and creative proclivities.
CA major downgrade, for lit professors the world over.
It was none of the above for me. Before the heft, the gravitas, and the political trauma, my motivating forces were much simpler: I needed a release valve for my intellectual creativity. Much as literary writing had been one for the creative tension in my mind, building a career in “serious” fields served exactly the same purpose for the side of me that liked to deconstruct things, and rebuild them. The impulse was no different from playing with lego blocks: deconstruct models, chuck out the biases hiding inside – whether that be racism, colonialism, or some other thing – and reconstruct them from the rubble. World-destroying, so as to do world-making. I couldn’t do this through literary text alone. Literary text alone felt too removed from that twin project; the stakes felt low under conditions of blank pages and tabula rasa.
There was no material pushing back. I wanted material that pushed back.
Ah, but buyer beware: that material does push back. But first it coats you with a thin veneer of sheen and glamour —
My life during this decade or more, depending on what you count, felt smoothed over with an overt sense of polish and poise. I had met and interfaced with a few maximalist buildings that resembled the baroque construction of my sentences in Act I, and laughed at the juxtaposition. I had felt an odd safety from being saddled with a protective detail in geographies of high violence rates. And quite frankly it just felt nice to be out and about in the world, sluicing through its borders.
But I’d be lying if I said the story ended there. Every positive valence had a twin negative one hiding behind it: I was travelling every three weeks, with allowances from the UN — but sometimes had to pay out of pocket. I was speechwriting and addressing publics — but some audience members had an anaesthetic sensibility that bounced the best of the prose back. I was in ornate, exclusive rooms like the ones I used to satirise — but their grandeur was the opposite of my aesthetic sensibility. I had access to a vast range of global networks — but they weren’t my people. I was described as a formidable mind of my generation — but those conferring the title did not know what it meant.
It didn’t help that there was real, high-stakes political violence on the table, in addition to the usual bureaucratic violence that existed as ambient atmosphere in these spaces. The profession meant being in close proximity to evil, and to gangs of characters who had learned how to systematise their ontological position for maximum self-interested efficiency. Gangs, warlords, fascists, organised crime scions, and dick-tators. There were death threats and van rides in a bullet-proof convoy with rifles. There were offers to be taught how to handle firearms, and 48-hour days. All too real for a mute child who just wanted to fire on all cylinders. There were false accusations of espionage at a border, and two attempted kidnappings that required copious therapy I could not access in time. There were David-and-Goliath battles (which, ten years later, I would compile into a book). There was a fallen colleague and his brother.
This is what I mean when I say my writing can’t linger here; I can’t chew this scenery. If my arguments wanted stages, exits, curtain calls and standing ovations in Act I, in Act II I can’t mine the scenes for the sake of literary flourish. I can’t extract the art from the scene, because it feels like an injustice to do so. A fetishism; a stealing.
My soul, in this world, was dying.
My soul, in this world, was dying. I’d aged twenty-five years in ten and felt ready to retire. My friends were concerned at the sudden loss of light and levity. Professors were worried at the state of my sentences. The space this world afforded my creativity seemed smaller and smaller than what the platform could provide.
While gravitas carved itself deeper and deeper inside me, this world offered more and more equipment to ascend heights. At the end of this run, I was offered a prestigious technical expert post. It was influential and positional. For climate change. Stacked nearby was also an ambassadorial role that would have broken records on age at the time, as well as a promise of eternal job security in a precarious age.
These were everything that the climb had pointed to, but I stood at the summits wanting specifically to descend.
So, barring a pilgrimage to an insane sanatorium or a Thomas Mann-style visit to a nunnery in the Alps to rehabilitate myself, I decided to choose the nearest-seeming refuge in which to re-incubate my soul.
At home; outer space
That refuge was academia. But as you’ll soon see, the operative word here is nearest-seeming.
Soon after I left the old world, I became part of a statistical wave of people returning to academia, a sort of homecoming to a well-known institution. Psychologists would say that it’s our longing for familiar comforts and structures that animates returns of a similar nature. This makes intuitive sense, as most of our populations have been in some school structure since childhood.
But I suspect there’s also a slightly deeper and more magical reasoning behind it: that our returns are from harbouring a desire to sit in one place, look out into space, and be forced to philosophise the world. In saying this, I am actually paraphrasing a famous female essayist, whose name continues to elide despite years of search. It could’ve been Didion — or Sontag. She mused about how grateful she was for being stationed at the Ritz-Carlton in the 80s, forced to philosophise the world. By force, she meant paid. By a rich patron.
That, I pointed to her. Want that.
In the lead-up to my re-entry, my inherent unseriousness from younger life chapters was coming alive again. The ideas that felt pinned down by legal and governmental bodies and their dense 1,600-year-old historicity broke free and regained height. And because they’d been starved of flight for so long, it seemed they overcompensated and straight shot at a velocity so fast, they ended up on the other side of reality. The fringe.
“Do you know how people in warzones evade drone attacks?” I was fun fact-ing a friend. “They move in zig zag motion. It’s a trick they learned from biologists who dealt with Komodo dragons. Komodo dragons can’t zig zag. Drones can’t either.”
So the fringe. The zigzag, the sideways movement, the oblique attack. Moving in a way that couldn’t be detected. I loved it: I had become a little enamoured with the idea, that if I could be as ‘fringe’ as possible, to take my weirdest parts to the hilt, that I could somehow be immune or illegible to the governmental spaces that produce or set up violence experienced in Act II. In that same way that footnotes flipped power in Postgraduate Admissions, these real-life flips and inversions would be my salvation. This was finding healing through a metaphor.
And so began a new intellectual sensibility: So how do I fringe up, strange-ify, queerify, neurodiverge my intellectual sensibilities?
Put plainly, I was speed-running my dosage of neurodiversity. I found my way to the outer limits of legal thought, where it became clear what I, as an intellectual, needed to do next: to watch the propositions that govern the world bend, break and be remade. I wanted to see the edges where things fall apart. This would soon inform the field and intellectual agenda I would pioneer and teach, which I affectionately called law and the challenge of weird fringe things. Here be dragons, and by dragons I mean Indigenous robots running on Indigenous philosophy. Scientists resisting Big Tech by growing plants that double as machines. Societies afloat on oceans trying to replicate pre-capitalist times (but likely doing the opposite); decentralised digital planets and their attempts to incubate sovereignty; invitations to outer-space simulations. Once, in San Francisco, I met people resurrecting extinct species, funded by Paris Hilton. In this same era, on another occasion, I turned to my seatmate, and said: “Hi, so what do you do?”
“I’m an architect from the Netherlands. I work with icebergs.” He was an ice architect.
This chapter of my life easily eclipsed Act I and Act II, if the metric were sheer interestingness. Anything impressive from prior life chapters seemed to pale in comparison with this science-fiction-adjacent seam of reality. Whenever this work reached a dinner table, the response from my audience would always be: I’ve literally never heard of anything like this. How did you even discover these?!
How did I discover these? It was hard to pinpoint; I didn’t know either. The metaphorical-literary stars — astrology — pointed to my being an Aquarius stellium, which meant being a magnet for this sort of thing. True to the descriptor, I was indeed marinating myself in the strangest frontiers I could find, the ones the mainstream hadn’t discovered yet. This was partly due to Act II’s traumas. I had felt, by then, that the mainstream spaces — economies, laws, governments — had colonised almost every facet of life. They were near-totalising in their registers: anywhere you looked, there they were, with their original sins and path dependencies that clipped timelines before they had the chance to bloom. So I went looking for the things they hadn’t yet encountered or rendered into a parsable framework.
Not that I trusted the fringe automatically. Novelty isn’t an immediate precondition for innocence. Parts of Silicon Valley had already demonstrated that you could speak the language of world-changing while rebuilding the oldest forms of domination with better UX and fonts. So these fringe things got the same vetting as the incumbents. Would this new thing wreck us further or bring forth relational harm? And if not — how might we let it enter unscathed?
I took up a new hobby: looking for the axioms that had once been solid and load-bearing — sovereignty, territory, personhood, property, law itself — and taking them apart, testing them, redesigning them to hold more. More volume, more people, more humanity. I had become radically uninterested in reproducing any regime: any politics, any law, any economic agenda. The contexts and reality-settings that allowed Act II to happen were permanently foreclosed to me.
The instrument I kept reaching for was deep time. Because what else, indeed, has law or politics not touched? Bathrooms are a legal construct. Scent is a legal construct. Even time itself is a legal construct — which is exactly why deep time was the only lever I could find that ran older and longer than any of it, and the only thing capacious enough to decolonise the gravitas of these institutions. Run it backwards and you arrive somewhere law does not exist yet, at the birth of the purest iterations of being. Run it forwards and you get the avant-garde, which is where my research subjects lived: objects arriving with no precedent, swung at the old structures like a wrecking ball. Either direction melts the legal sensibility. Deep time is the only thing I have found that could kill law.
Some might say this was escapism. But the intentional distance was healing, and eerily, every time I dipped into these alternate worlds I brought back something grounded and intimate. My sojourns to thematic outer space made me more human.
Inside those governmental spaces, what I had wanted to build were capacious homes for all sorts of people (plants, animals and things), where weird fringe characters could exist without harm or friction. It took a little introspection to see that the weird fringe thing I was trying to protect was me.
Not for lack of space, exactly; the invitations to ascend kept arriving. It was the lack of congruence. Every invitation seemed to arrive with instructions to amputate the very thing being invited, as if each one carried a hidden dictum. Bring the intelligence, but leave the strangeness. Bring the argument, but leave the form. Bring the credentials, but leave the voice behind. My voice had already disappeared once. I wasn’t interested in losing it again.
I had gone there for myself. But the indigenous robots, the plant-object cyborgs and the ocean societies were in exactly the same position: species of thought with nowhere to live, arriving without a container, asked at every threshold to become something smaller in order to be let in. So I wondered if I could make room for this species of thought too.
What I was building up there, I can now name in retrospect: a queered-up, pumped-up, weird-ified version of the life I’d just left. The disciplines never changed; the objects just did. The legal scholar went from treaty rooms to robot personhood, ocean jurisdictions, the legal subjecthood of things without precedent. The economist went from vetting multi-billion-dollar negotiations to vetting the economies of decentralised digital planets. The diplomat stopped negotiating between states and started negotiating between ontologies — between the world that is recognised and the worlds that don’t exist yet. I queered up my law-and-economics proclivities; I neurodiverged them. The serious mental game, the verticality, the trained attention — all of it was flipped into the Alice-in-Wonderland side of the world, funnelled into things routinely dismissed as unserious, where I kept finding the very serious stakes they posed. And I ended up persuading the serious people that this matters.
And the work itself was a form of play: take load-bearing blocks apart, see what they prop up, then stack them into an equitable, decolonised version. What does a robot owe its ancestors? Can a plant hold a patent? Who writes the constitution of an ocean? Making more space in the Anthropocene world for other objects and non-human animals gave my mind a sense of play.
It gave my mind a sense of play.
Shortly after this, my own Didion or Sontag moment of philosophising at the Ritz had arrived. A variation of it, at least. Two sets of Hollywood producers came knocking, both wanting to develop stories out of my academic material. (Since when do dissertations get optioned?!)
But visibility has twin valences too. While the world outside said yes, the corridors were aggressively hostile. Senior faculty took it upon themselves to answer on my behalf. No to Hollywood: you’re just a junior person. Do you know how hard it is to make a film? No to speaking invitations, Catherine, it’s too much networking. No to the film again, unless it helps your data analysis, it’s a rule — a rule that exists nowhere, written by no one. There was commentary on my maximalist writing style that ignored the fact that style has been political for as long as writing has existed. And there were toxic manoeuvres: moving goalposts mid-game, gaslighting, shadowboxing and enlisting third party professors to influence my decisions.
I’m still too close to the academic “no, no, no” culture to be fully unbothered by it. But at worst, it reads to me as irritating.
Juxtaposed to an Act II that featured attempted kidnapping on my person, slain giants, and death threats from cartels, traditional academia and its bureaucracy read as a little funny and mundane. The stakes on this table were: citation cartels, salami-slicing gang wars, and a tribunal that judged works before reading them. Traditional academia presented itself as so serious and so scary, but I felt it… hilarious and unserious. A boogie man masquerading as the final boss behind the door.
And this is how Uncommon Future Press was born. It was equal parts the baroque literary unslottability of Postgraduate Admissions from Act I, sliced through with the big swinging audacity from having an Act II. It was being a scholar at the outer limits of thought, bending axioms until they break. It was the zigzag, institutionalised. It was from marinating in extinct species, and realising there is one in the nearest corner — species of thought, cropped out by intellectual monocultures.
UFP is the container I designed for it, and it turns out the container was never only for me. It is a home for weird fringe ideas and the weird fringe people who have them. It protects and incubates the genres that were threatened out of existence before they got the chance to exist at all.
It has room for yours too. If it looks like we were born this way, it’s because we were.
My soul literally imprinted in here.
HER LINE, STAGED AS THE CLOSE · THE UNIVERSE ARRIVING IN THE LETTERS THEMSELVES