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). 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).