Compost Futures

‘Compost’ as a metaphor and a theoretical framework has been taken up by ecofeminists (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018), anti-colonial scholars (French et al 2020), critical posthumanists (Roura 2022), and queer artists and theorists (Pau et al 2024). In Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis’ thinking, composting is a citational practice that draws knowledge from ‘arrangement of correspondences’ and ‘quality ingredients’, allowing these ingredients agency in the process of decomposition (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018, 34-35). For Ester Toribio Roura compost ‘is a speculative tool of ecological thinking that explores ways of activating discussions of care, both between humans, and between humans and other-than-humans. It questions how humans relate with the other-than-human and the ecologies we all co-form’ (Roura 2022). <br/><br/>In composting these theories in turn, might we also dream, create, and write an open, undefined future, as this special issue of Vector suggests? To answer this question, the co-directorate of the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) has produced a creative-critical submission in the form of a zine on the theme of ‘Compost Futures’. In order to make space for more-than-human agency in the production of this submission, the zine was printed and buried for 3 weeks (the amount of time needed for paper to begin to be decomposed by soil microbes; Yuan et al 2012). <br/>