To remove them is to create a void, a nothingness.
If we eliminate art and pain and exuberance for life, you first have to eliminate the people who exemplify those characteristics, and those people are artists, empaths, and storytellers. But we know that throughout history those deny painful events or ignore the mistakes that we’ve made in the past don’t really have the motives of humanity and compassion at their core. In that moment, those observing had no idea the extreme this Collective was going to take their cause, and one could argue that it ended up going to a really absurd level. There is a moment in the book when one of the characters, in referring to the Collective, says, “What they want isn’t so much the scary part, it’s how they propose doing it.” To erase our knowledge of war and other horrific events throughout history allows us to repeat our mistakes. Most of us would love for that to happen, but their motto is to create a “new history,” and that involves forgetting and eliminating the memory and the record of what it means to be human. The Collective wants to create a society where there’s no suffering or hunger. The opposition in the book is the Collective, and they’re trying to create a perfect society by erasing the past. The book’s villains conflate knowledge of stories and history with control, associating storytelling and recordkeeping with negative outcomes and emotions.
Your story focuses on storytelling as a source of inspiration and comfort as well as something that is intrinsically connected to identity, memory, and resistance. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Higuera spoke to us via Zoom from her home in Washington state. What follows is a powerful tale of hope, survival, and the power of storytelling. Twelve-year-old Petra Peña’s family is one of the lucky ones, but when she awakes in a future where everyone has been reprogrammed by a nefarious Collective, she realizes her suspended animation failed and she is the only one with the memories of the past intact. Humanity’s last chance is a journey deep into space, with a chosen few to spend 370 years in stasis. 12) takes place in the year 2061, when the world is about to end. Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista(Levine Querido, Oct.
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