Different factions on the station, such because the port authority, the previous union Havenage, and the loosely regulated and overly trusting Hypha commune, are organizations which can be simply as dispersed as any company and simply as able to institutional neglect. Whereas Damian Martin has their politics, they don’t seem to be concerned about veiled agitprop.
“I by no means needed to make a narrative centering round taking down a comically evil conglomerate. I needed to inform a narrative at capitalism’s periphery, the place so many people have discovered methods to exist.”
Our Precarious World
In a lot of their interviews about Citizen Sleeper’s depth, Damian Martin facilities the idea of precarity, which impressed them as they learn Anna Tsing’s Mushroom on the Finish of the World, one in every of many good works of latest science fiction alluded to within the sport.
“So many buildings round us apply strain to our lives,” Damian Martin notes, “it’s on us to be wholesome, profitable, and content material. We’re all scrambling to attain these items in competitors with each other, combating over jobs, alternatives, property, even social standing.
“We justify this with the parable of meritocracy, which mandates that the one factor that separates somebody from the comforts of success or the despair of failure is being arbitrarily judged as being good at one thing arbitrarily beneficial. That’s an extremely precarious technique of validating our proper to exist with dignity.
When you think about the implications of inventory markets, worldwide politics, or the restrictions that include being an immigrant or one other restricted identification, you discover much more precarity. Our world is stuffed with methods we will’t ever conceivably management. We’re surrounded by tiny, fragile partitions,” Damian Martin explains, “when these partitions buckle and break, we tumble towards psychological breakdown, chapter, destitution, and even demise.”
We really feel these partitions always in Citizen Sleeper. The sport’s financial fears about having the ability to afford meals are compounded with medical nervousness about the place to safe the serum that sustains our failing physique, or methods to afford the options which will elevate us out of our harmful circumstances. When caught amongst so many predatory methods throughout essential junctures, rolling a low set of motion cube can create cascading setbacks.
“The largest protection in opposition to these unsympathetic methods, as I’ve discovered, is grassroots mutualism,” Damian Martin concludes. “Whereas we will’t resolve the worth of what we earn or the rights we deserve, we will at all times attempt to present up for each other once we’re wanted. When the folks round us roll snake eyes. The intimacy of mutual help is actually how everybody survives this world. From the very starting, this was at all times going to be the arc of Citizen Sleeper, because it has been in my very own life in some ways. I don’t suppose there are sufficient tales about folks trapped in these precarious areas.”
Citizen Sleeper is about to proceed with three free episodes of DLC, the primary of which, entitled “Flux,” tells the story of a refugee flotilla locked out of Erlin’s Eye by quarantine measures.
“All I’ll say proper now could be ‘Flux’ turns the main focus in the direction of points round refugees, forms, and making area for compassion inside democratic methods,” Damian Martin explains. “I hope gamers will discover it fascinating and can comply with together with the episodic story because it unfolds this yr and subsequent.”
