In 2020, Luis Lopez Carrasco (Murcia, 1981) won the Goya tournament with Opening year, a documentary about the economic and social crisis caused by the industrial reconstruction of Cartagena in 1992, which was presented in contrast to the splendor of the national splendor – the Olympic Games, the World’s Fair – held that year. Now the director has won the Errald Award for his novels with White Desertan elliptical dystopia that begins in Madrid after the 15th M and whose storyline extends to the near future, in which humanity is forced to colonize space in order to escape planet Earth, which is suffering from a climate and political crisis.

“While working in the library of the Marquis de Vadillo, an image came into my head and I wrote it down. I literally wrote the last paragraph of the novel. I don’t want to give anything away, but I was interested in the idea of ​​two people watching each other from afar. The absolute most. That was the starting point. And then I structured the book, knowing that I needed to get to that final moment where all the stories come together, and that, though I may not have known about it at the time “I projected into the future the experiences of separation and farewell that affected people who emigrated from Spain due to the crisis,” López Carrasco explains during an interview with Independent in the cafeteria of the New Building of the Reina Sofia Museum – a shell of the illusion of prosperity that disappeared with the crisis of which he speaks, and which encourages the personal and collective conflicts of his book.

Ask.- IN White Desert he manages to paint a disturbing panorama without explicitly writing in an apocalyptic vein.

Reply.- I don’t see the novel as a dystopia. It seems to me that of all the possibilities that we will face in the medium to long term future, the one that I propose in the book is quite realistic and almost utopian if we think about the instability and uncertainty in which we find ourselves. live. I think this is almost the best possible scenario. And it’s not a matter of defeatism. Reality is what it is.

IN.- He connects the unrest of his generation with the global unrest caused by the climate and resource crisis. The escape of the heroes, be it a trip to the city or to Berlin, no longer serves any purpose.

A.- In the book, the escapist paradise provides only occasional comfort and no longer provides any escape. We are faced with scenarios of absolute uncertainty and instability, complex and completely new climate crises. This is what can happen. Suddenly there’s a pandemic, or seven in a row. In these cases, of course, escapism is nothing more than a dead end.

IN.- Contemporary science fiction authors such as Cory Doctorow see science fiction as the ideal genre for exposing the great global issues of our time.

A.- We tend to think of science fiction as a grittier genre, but I’m interested in the approach of authors like Doctorow or Ursula K. Le Guin, who through science fiction were able to talk about issues like colonialism, feminism, inequality and resource scarcity. Others, like Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon, always struck me as science fiction writers to the extent that they looked at reality from just the right distance and distortion to make its inconsistencies visible. I think Olga Tokarczuk also uses dystopian or futuristic views when talking about the present projected onto the near future. I feel identified with all of this. My previous book was more or less orthodox science fiction: there was time travel, societies of the future in which you can record your dreams… My own writing education is associated with authors such as Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg or Jack Vance, and I worked as a screenwriter on films set in the future where the world ends. He asked me what this says about us as a society, why we seem unable to imagine a future that is not catastrophic. But I think science fiction is a good tool for reading the present. For me, science fiction was the place from which to speak. I used it here to create enough weirdness in a present where we may be taking too many things for granted and may have to look at it differently.

IN.- Does being from Murcia help you paint a devastated future?

A.- When it comes to deserts and desertification, Murcia, Alicante and much of southern Spain are built on development models that are extremely fragile. Will mass tourism survive? Are low-cost flights sustainable? Is the model of urban development created in places like Benidorm, whose population increases from 40,000 to 500,000 in August, sewer and electricity networks with neighbors who do not pay taxes in these places, sustainable? Obviously not. Nor an agricultural model based on transfers and the cultivation of irrigated crops and golf courses on dry lands. This model, which also involves exporting a very high percentage of your products, is completely unsustainable. How to make it sustainable? The invention of the far right party, because our model only works if you have labor without rights. The entire Vega del Segura, where the businessmen who finance this party are located, votes for Vox. These are economic models that can only be sustainable through increasingly authoritarian political projects. This is what I mean when I think about writing from a desolate place like Murcia and how it needs to rethink how it creates jobs or how it relates to the environment.

IN.- In the novel, anxiety is not a generational issue, but rather something that young people who have survived 15-M share with their elders.

A.- It was important for me to try to imagine, given the fact that the book deals with this topic very obliquely, that 15-M was a phenomenon passed down from generation to generation, although perhaps we have forgotten. There was youthful anger and frustration, but imagine the level of frustration of those who were young during the transition, who partly enjoyed the building of democracy and a welfare state, albeit limited, and who saw their children. They were forced to travel far to earn a living. It’s extremely painful. What’s happening is that since then there have been many more crises and more upheavals, crises and more crises that have left society knocked out. The big problem is that we think we’re going back to 2005. I don’t know if we were okay in 2005, which I don’t think we were either. But there is a kind of fervor when one thinks that the 90s and 2000s, with a model of society based on financial speculation and real estate, were something desirable because there was a range of social classes that could access a townhouse, a barbecue , small garden or relaxation anywhere. But it won’t come back, and it won’t be sustainable. And if the left tries to offer prescriptions that make us think things will return, it can only cause disappointment and pain, and populism and authoritarianism offer easy recipes to cling to when you’re upset. The consequences of the disaster of ’29 ended in fascism and war.