First Love and Farming: Writing Thrutopian Fiction
Story: commentary piece and extract from novella, Dirt, by Laura Baggaley
“But is it thrutopian?”
This has become the preoccupying question, for me and for everyone on the editorial team here at Bending The Arc.
The question first lodged in my head a couple of years ago, when I read an article by Manda Scott about this new concept – this new genre. I’d been pursuing the Green Stories principle for a while – incorporating climate and environmental solutions into my young adult fiction in an effort to normalise urgently needed innovations such as solar panels and eating more vegetarian food, and planting for biodiversity, and ditching cars / single use plastic / pesticides etc.…. The idea of a thrutopian novel took this a step further.
I was excited. I was inspired. And, almost immediately, I was stuck.
Thrutopian writing takes up the challenge of imagining ways through from the present to a thriving future. And the present was the problem. I’d always tackled ‘now’ by writing near-future dystopias, transposing the awfulness of the contemporary world to a tomorrow where problems could be dramatically and satisfyingly solved. Evil corporations and corrupt governments exposed and transformed by plucky teenagers.
Thrutopianism means getting real. And, as I looked around at the gazillion things that need fixing now, it felt like I was banging my head against walls at every turn. The necessary structural changes to political, economic, educational and social systems felt overwhelming. The nitty gritty of grassroots campaigns for legislative change felt laborious. The difficulty of convincing those in power to care felt deadening. It all felt (forgive me) boring. I wasn’t going to engage young readers if I found my own story dull.
I had to unlock my imagination. So I took a jump into the future as a starting point. This future was still dystopian but, armed with new knowledge, I asked myself:
“Could it be thrutopian?”
Dirt might be set in an imagined future, but the situation it describes is exactly what’s happening today. Industrial agriculture is controlled by a tiny number of monopoly-wielding mega-businesses, promoting profit-driven farming methods that cause soil degradation and the annihilation of insect populations. Pesticides. Monocrops. Seed patents. Repeated ploughing. Fossil fuel-derived fertilizers. When soil becomes dirt, when there are no pollinators, food can’t grow. It isn’t hard to imagine the collapse of present-day food supply chains; this dystopia isn’t far off.
In the world of Dirt, the people farm government-allotted “Squares” of land, planting small numbers of authorized crops with expensive seeds purchased from the huge Green Cultivation Corporation. Fifteen-year-old Sam assumes this is the only way to grow food – until he meets a strange girl called Avril.
Dirt is a novella in a genre that I’m calling YA eco-romance. It’s a dystopia insofar as it’s set in a near-future world where global food supply chains have failed. But it’s a thrutopia in its embedded plea for the world to embrace truly sustainable agriculture. It feels like my first step on a new writing path.
My hope is that anyone reading Dirt won’t notice my thrutopian intentions. I hope that readers will be immersed in Sam and Avril’s unfurling romance. That they’ll find the world of the book interesting – and maybe absorb the principles of sustainable food-growing and community collaboration without even realising it.
“But is it thrutopian?” You decide…
The first chapter of Dirt follows. This is an exclusive extract courtesy of Habitat Press. Dirt will be released on 22nd May 2025.
Chapter 1
The girl rode into town wearing a sunhat as big as a bicycle wheel.
Sam watched her pedalling the rustiest bike he had ever seen, right down the middle of the dusty road. There was something lofty about her, as if the hat were a crown. Where had she come from? The east track out of town led nowhere but the impassable Cragg Hills.
As the girl drew nearer, Sam noticed that her junk-heap bike didn’t squeak or rattle as he would have expected. It glided smoothly along, the spring sunshine casting an enormous hat-shadow that slid over the ground with it.
She glanced sideways as she drew level with him, and suddenly braked.
She waited.
Sam waited too. Then he realised that she expected him to come to her. She sat perfectly still astride the bicycle, making no effort to turn or meet him halfway.
He was too curious to resist, but walked deliberately slowly to keep her waiting.
“Why aren’t there any trees?” she said.
Sam stopped walking. It was a weird question.
He shrugged. “Why would there be?”
“How can there not be?”
She sounded so outraged he grew impatient.
“You can’t grow trees alongside crops,” he said, his tone patronising. “They’d steal water from what you’re growing.”
She stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language, her expression somewhere between furious and confused. Maybe she doesn’t know about farming, he thought. Then he wondered again where she could possibly have come from. Everyone knew about farming.
“Is that your family Square?” She pointed to the large area of empty earth he’d just been weeding.
“Yup.”
“Why is it a rectangle?”
“Squares don’t have to be square, y’know.” He wrinkled his forehead. “Is it different where you come from? Where do you come from?”
He stared at her and she looked away, her eyes squinting sideways like a kid caught doing something naughty.
“No different,” she said airily. “I know all about Squares. Government land allocations. For growing on.”
It sounded like she’d memorised the phrases. Sam wasn’t convinced she’d ever seen a Square before, but he couldn’t imagine how that was possible. Every household in the country had a Square.
He was intrigued. “So where do you come–?”
She cut off his question. “No trees at all?”
Sam paused, tempted to push for information. He decided to humour her.
“There are some on Main Street,” he said, pointing. “That way.”
She stared at him and he felt like an idiot. As if some foreign kid would come to Newbeck to look at scrawny trees sprouting from the pavement of the only proper street in town. But then he wasn’t even sure she was foreign – her accent was exactly the same as his.
“Can you show me?” she said. “Main Street?”
It felt more like an order than a request.
Sam looked at his house. His parents were still at work – Mum at the architects’ office where she worked in project planning, Dad at the solar construction factory in the next town – but it was Chores Hour for Sam and his younger brother, Casey. Sam had spent the past thirty minutes methodically walking up and down the bald dirt furrows of the Square, plucking every tiny scrap of green that had dared peek above the ground since yesterday. He’d only collected a handful of weeds. His parents probably wouldn’t notice if he skipped the rest of it – Casey had most likely skimped on whatever his task was indoors.
She raised her pale eyebrows at him.
“Okay,” he said.
The girl dismounted and pushed her bicycle along. She was about his height – not tall. Sam wondered how old she was. He guessed about his age – fifteen – but her confident manner made her seem older.
They walked side by side towards town. Sam’s family lived on the very edge of the eastern side of Newbeck, and Main Street was about a mile away.
Their next-door neighbour, Bridget, was sweeping her porch and waved a friendly hello.
“Who’s that?” the girl asked.
“Our neighbour. Bridget.”
“Is she nice?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess.”
Sam waved back, hoping Bridget didn’t know he was meant to be doing chores, and picked up the pace a little. They walked on without speaking for a while. Then Sam looked at the silent bike. He couldn’t even tell what colour it had once been – it was all-over flaking rust, held together with clamps and lumpy patches of welded metal.
“Your bike...” He trailed off, unsure how to formulate the question without rudeness.
“It’s a perfectly functioning bicycle disguised as a wreck,” she said, her voice tinged with pride. She didn’t explain further, and Sam grew even more curious. He was about to ask another question when he was interrupted by a familiar shout from across the street.
“Oi, Rockstar!”
It was the twins.
“Who’s your girlfriend?”
“Ignore them,” he said quickly.
The two boys were shooting hoops in front of their house. The taller one, Caldo, had stopped marking Marley, so as to yell at Sam. Marley took the opportunity to land a perfect slam dunk, catching the basketball after a single bounce. He wheeled round and joined in the mocking.
“Rockstar! You wanna shoot a hoop to impress her?”
Caldo snickered at the idea.
The girl stared, apparently perplexed by the boys’ derisive laughter. Sam quickened his pace.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“No-one.”
They were past the twins’ house now.
Caldo hurled a final yell after them. “Awwww! Not gonna play?”
Sam was relieved to hear the quick thud of the basketball hitting the ground as the twins resumed their game.
“What is that game? Do you want to stop and play?”
Sam snorted. “Basketball? No. No I definitely don’t want to. Stupidest game ever invented. How can you not know –?”
She looked cagey and he shrugged, still smarting from the encounter.
“Dumb game. Don’t know why everyone loves it so much.”
They walked on in silence for a few minutes.
“Is that your name?” she asked. “R–”
“No! That’s just to annoy me.”
He didn’t admit it was bullying; he never had. It felt too pathetic. He tried to brush it off.
“They’re only idiots from school.”
“You go to school? What’s it like?”
“You don’t?”
She ignored the question and pressed the point. “What’s it like?”
“Um, it’s – it’s like...” He struggled to find words, unable to imagine daily life without school. “It’s just school. I can show you the building if you want? It’s behind Main Street.”
“Where the trees are.”
“Right.”
“Okay, let’s look at it.”
Before they reached Main Street, he turned the familiar corner and led her along the back road to school. The playground was empty – school had finished for the day – but there was movement in some of the classrooms. A cleaner at work. Teachers preparing the next day’s lessons.
“Trees!” she said, poking a finger between the tall wire netting that enclosed the grounds.
“Oh, yeah.”
He had forgotten there were clusters of trees in the playground, and in lines surrounding the sports pitch.
“And you go there,” she said, as if rehearsing an unusual, hypothetical thought. “Every day? With other kids? How many?”
“Er, about twenty in my class. There are seven classes.”
Her eyes widened. “So many.”
“Not really. It’s a small town.” He gestured at the deserted street. “Obviously.”
She propped up her bike, took off her extraordinary hat and put her eye close to the netting.
“Now I can look at everything as if I’m inside the fence,” she said, sounding pleased with the innovation.
Sam watched her surveying the grounds. She was extremely weird, but also the most interesting person he’d ever met.
“Have you really never been to school?” he asked.
She pulled away from the fence and gave him an assessing look. There was a diamond-shaped mark on her face from where she’d pressed against the wire.
He evidently passed her unspoken test. She shrugged and answered the question. “Home educated.”
“Oh, wow. How does that–”
“It’s not interesting. What do you study at school?”
“It’s not interesting,” he countered.
“Oh, but it is!” she protested, then noticed he was grinning. “Touché.”
“What?”
“Touché! It’s–”
She was interrupted by a gruff shout from the playground. “Oi!”
Sam tensed. “Quick, we have to go.”
“What are you doing here after hours? No loitering!”
The voice was louder this time. Clifford, the school caretaker, was striding towards them.
Sam grabbed the girl’s arm. “Come on!”
“Who’s–?”
“Never mind! Go!”
She pushed her bike and balanced, standing on the nearside pedal. Sam ran alongside and they were away and round the corner before Clifford reached them.
“He’s rather alarming,” she commented, once they were out of sight.
“Do you always speak like that?” Sam asked, before realising it might sound rude.
“Like what?”
He changed the subject quickly. “That was Clifford. He’s the school caretaker.”
“Caretaker?”
“He, uh, fixes things. Maintains the buildings, equipment. I dunno. Changes light bulbs? The thing is, he hates kids. Or maybe he hates the world – he’s always in a terrible mood, anyway. Even the twins are scared of him.”
“Oh, I see.” She nodded sagely. “Please, can you tell me about school?”
Her green eyes were imploring, and as they walked towards Main Street, Sam found himself explaining about timetables and exams, and subjects like practical circular economics and sustainable industrial models and carbon management systems.
“What about poetry? Philosophy?”
“Er, yeah, a bit of poetry. In the first year. No philosophy.”
“Geography?”
“Yeah, we do that.”
She smiled. “Geography is my absolute favourite. Do you do cartography?”
“Carto-gro-what?”
“Maps.”
“Nah.”
Her smile faded. “Oh. That’s sad. Maps are sublime.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Avril.”
It figured, Sam thought. A name as peculiar as her way of speaking.
He gestured to the street in front of them. “Ta-dah. Main Street.”
Several bicycles, some delivery trikes and a couple of electric commercial vehicles were driving along the two-lane thoroughfare. A few shoppers drifted or bustled on the pavements on either side of the road. Spindly trees jutted from the ground at infrequent intervals.
“It’s so busy!”
“Not really. You should see it on a Saturday. Your town must be tiny! Or do you live in a village or something?”
She looked evasive. “That kind of thing.”
Sam followed her along the pavement. The street was the same as always, familiar and boring, but Avril stared at the window displays as if they were doorways to new worlds. There was the Library of Things (where everyone borrowed tools, appliances, stuff), the actual Library (where fewer people borrowed books), the Culture Club (where everyone got the bacterial food cultures and vitamins that were their staple diet) and the Local Fresh Depot (where there was a daily queue for fruit and veg rations).
Avril was interested in the Ready-and-Bespoke Clothes Store but even more fascinated by the Repair Workshop, with its bold-but-accurate sign: We Mend Anything!, the space divided into different areas for tech equipment, household appliances and furniture. Sam watched Avril’s face light up at the sight of the specialist bike-service stall, and she seemed equally enraptured by the hardware store and the Community Arts Space, where painters and glassblowers worked alongside woodturners and potters, rug makers and sculptors. They stood for a while at the art studio, watching local artist Denley Emmitt, who was working on yet another technicolour oil-paint canvas with a ferocious scowl on his face.
They’d just reached the last shop in the row, Creativ UpCycle (where most people in town had their clothes refurbished), when Sam was accosted by a familiar voice.
“Hello!”
“Oh, uh, hi, Rosie.”
Sam’s former childminder hurried past them, pushing a buggy full of toys from the Library of Things. She cast a curious glance at Avril.
“Wish I could stop to chat but I have to get home. The Whittingstall triplets are arriving at mine in half an hour!”
“Oh, right,” Sam said.
“Wish me luck!” Rosie called over her shoulder.
“Good luck!” said Sam obediently. He watched her go, then tapped Avril’s shoulder. “Hey!”
Avril had been gazing dreamily at a colourful tunic on display in the shop window. “Huh?”
“I have to get going.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m supposed to be at home doing chores and if my parents hear I was in town I’ll be in trouble!”
“Oh.”
She trailed behind him pushing her bike slowly, apparently reluctant to leave.
“Those trees are pretty small,” she said, looking back at Main Street. “Were they only planted recently?”
Sam shrugged. “They’ve always been there.”
“Huh.”
They walked on in silence, past the widely spaced wooden houses, each sitting next to its big Square of bald earth. It was late April, and it would soon be planting time.
As they neared the twins’ house, Sam took a right turn to cut down a side street. Normally he made it a point of pride not to avoid walking on his own road, but their mocking had felt worse with Avril as a witness. She didn’t question his change of direction and soon they were walking a parallel route towards home.
“What are they doing?” She pointed ahead to a scattered group of people moving slowly across a Square. They were all wearing white protective face masks and holding large canisters with spray tops. Sam looked at the nearest house. In the window sat an elderly man, watching the activity on his land with a grey, set face.
“That’s Mr Trigg’s Square,” Sam said. “It probably had too many weeds, so they’re spraying it.”
Avril stopped walking. “Spraying what?”
“Weedkiller.”
“Poison?”
“No, chemicals.” Sam thought about it. “Well, I guess it’s poison to weeds. And you wouldn’t want to breathe it in. But the ground needs to be clear. For crop plants.”
“So they’re... helping him? Mr Trigg?”
“Sort of.” The expression on her face was making Sam feel uncomfortable. “If weeds grow on his Square, they’re more likely to spread to the neighbours’ Squares. So they’re treating his land to protect their own.”
“Treating. With poison.”
“Yeah.”
She set off again, pushing her bike and staring at the masked cohort as they passed. Sam had a strong feeling she wasn’t saying everything she was thinking.
After a minute, she said, “What will you plant? On your Square?”
“Don’t know,” said Sam. “Depends what GreenCult brings.”
“What’s that?”
Sam was dumbfounded. Life revolved around the Green Cultivation Corporation. His parents spent half the winter worrying about the big spring visit of the agricultural megacorporation. Worrying whether they’d be able to afford enough soil, how much the extra fertiliser would cost and if it was worth it, whether they’d be able to buy all four of that year’s crop seeds. GreenCult decided annually what would be best to plant in Newbeck each spring, and that determined the town’s lives for the following year. Whether the crop was labour intensive or not. Whether it would thrive. How much it would yield. Sam still remembered the year his family could only afford to plant one crop, and how half of it failed. By January, they were so fed up with eating beetroot, they were almost glad their stores ran out. But by March they would’ve exchanged a whole vat of Bacterial Culture for just one root.
“What’s GreenCult? You know,” he managed to reply, “the agricultural company, Green Cultivation Corporation. They sell soil, seeds, crop stuff. You must know.”
She looked at him from under the brim of her vast hat. “No. No, I don’t.”
“Their scientists decide what crops will be best for this area this year. Then they bring four selections for people to buy. It happens every spring. They’re coming next Wednesday – we get the day off school.”
“And they sell soil too?”
“Yeah. Of course. How else would we grow stuff?”
He was starting to think Avril was a bit stupid. Or maybe just a lot younger than she looked. She didn’t seem to know even the most basic facts.
“Well, I think Squares are ridiculous.”
She swung a leg over her motley bike and pushed herself along with a toe-tip on the ground. Sam walked a little faster to keep up with her coasting.
“I mean,” she said, “my dad says they were meant to be temporary.”
“They are.”
“Temporary for fifty years! The Government should’ve fixed the supply chain by now.”
“Yeah, but global infrastructure takes time to–” Despite their struggles, Sam’s parents were firmly on the side of the Government.
She interrupted him. “Fifty years! Anyway, they already have replaced carbon-burning aviation. You see dirigibles in the sky all the time. I love dirigibles! Don’t you?”
Sam had never really considered the question of modern air travel and, while he hesitated, Avril surged on.
“They’re so beautiful – great airborne ships, like whales in the sky! And lighter-than-air transport is such a romantic notion, isn’t it?” She gazed dreamily at the sky for a moment, then returned to the argument in hand. “But why aren’t they transporting food? And another thing! I’ve been researching SolarWind Shipping capacity – it’s increased tenfold in the past decade! So why isn’t food coming into the country?”
Sam didn’t understand half of this, but he had revised his opinion of Avril’s mental capabilities. Maybe she wasn’t stupid, just ignorant of how Squares worked.
“I’ll tell you why!” she went on. “Because the countries we want to import from don’t want to share their crops! Why would they? They need to feed their own people first. In Spain and France and Italy and the Netherlands – and probably further afield, but I haven’t done the research on that yet – their farmers have adapted successfully to global heating. They’ve adopted sustainable agricultural practices, maximised production and established food security policies.”
“But–”
“While here, the Government tells us everyone should keep grubbing away on little patches of earth, supplementing the Fresh Rations with whatever people can manage to grow, desperately trying to stave off scurvy and diseases that shouldn’t even exist anymore! And blaming this ridiculous situation on a non-existent global infrastructure challenge!”
She stopped and glared, as if Sam himself were responsible for the country’s situation.
“It’s not my fault!” he blurted.
“I know.” Her tone was sweetly condescending.
Sam felt a wave of rage. “Look, you might know about Europe and all their fancy policies–”
“I do! It’s my chief study focus. Travel is my main–”
“But you don’t know about Squares! You don’t even have one! And you don’t know about me or my family. So you can just stop criticising everything and go home! Wherever that is!”
Sam’s voice had become very loud. A thrumming silence followed.
Avril looked at him with stern consideration, her eyes narrow and lips compressed. Then, without saying another word, she pushed firmly on the bike pedal and sped away.
Sam watched her go. The road stretched straight ahead, carving a line between Squares and houses until town ran out and the surrounding land became scrubby desert. Avril was cycling directly towards the rocky hills. Sam knew that the road stopped at the base. There was a waterhole where he and his friends sometimes went swimming on hot days, if they could get out of working on the Squares. There were no buildings or other roads where she was heading. So where the hell did the strange girl come from?
Dirt is published by Habitat Press on 22nd May 2025. For updates, sign up to Laura’s newsletter at www.laurabaggaley.co.uk
Laura Baggaley is a writer of fiction for young adults, and teaches acting and literature at City Lit adult education college in London.
Her first novel, Enough, was one of three finalists in the Mslexia Children’s Novel Competition and longlisted for the Times / Chicken House Children’s fiction Competition. Her second novel, currently in its final draft, was longlisted for the Yeovil Literary Prize.
Laura is a firm believer in ‘imagination activism’ and loves books that ask big questions, usually starting ‘What if . . . ?’ She enjoys the challenge of creating alternative possible futures in her writing, and hopes that by imagining different worlds we’ll be able to build a better one.
Really interesting and useful perspective -- and absolutely brilliant book too!
I feel you. It's a challenging genre. I like your approach so far. Avril is an intriguing character and Dirt is a great title.