No Way Back

In collaboration with Hestetika Magazine

Foreword by the Founder of BPSA

No Way Back is meant to be a device. I don’t know whether it is really a novel. But I am certain it is a system that, through its chapters and the way it unfolds, asks the younger generations to break with the ones before them, mine included. It does not ask for rebellion or confrontation. It asks for something harder, and necessary: a clean cut—to push away, and to walk away—so that the people who will have to build the future can build it together, and not out of inherited narratives, because none of those narratives leaves any room for the interests of a young person today. No Way Back is about speciation, and it makes no concessions. It is the only gift I want to give young readers, because rebellion doesn’t immunize anyone against complicity. You can be the child of victims and still reproduce the tools of the perpetrators. You can think you know everything and still do the wrong things. You can think you belong to a shared story, and be handed its responsibilities, when you are only the byproduct of a rapacious, destructive ego that refuses to give up its dominance over those born after it. This is not a moral judgment. It is a description of the structure we all live inside.

I despise paternalism too much to borrow its language of self-absolution. What I wanted, in making No Way Back, was for the reader to live inside a simplified system of interactions and feel, from within, the pressure of three very different generational intentions. Three generations live inside this device. Each believes it is protecting the next, and every act of protection or care builds the next one’s prison. Each hides from the others what it is doing, and lies to itself about why. Each betrays the one before it and the one after it, and from the very start the last one looks like the one left holding the bag.

The grandparents lived through war on Earth. From that experience they drew a response, dressed up as ideology and progress. From the Moon, with the precision that only distance allows, they attacked the Earth. Every nation’s deterrence systems woke up, one after another, in a cascade. The planet burned, and it is settling into a nuclear winter. This is not a metaphor. It is the premise the story starts from. The parents believed in their own parents’ vision of progress and built the lunar base, certain it was a stepping stone to Mars, their generation’s goal. They gave heart and soul to a larger future—certainly not to help build the final destination from which the Earth would be attacked. They signed documents, managed narratives, chose not to know and not to act so as to avoid open conflict. And even as their goals collapse, their privileges remain untouched.

The children were born there, on the Moon, with bodies that lunar gravity has irreversibly rewritten and that Earth’s gravity would shatter. They cannot go back to Earth. They did not choose to be born there. Theirs is not a condition; it is a sentence, passed before they existed. When they find out, they don’t protest and they don’t rebel; they act. They are also proof that a new environment gives rise to new languages. What they come to understand about the life they are living takes shape in a culture of their own.

What happens inside the device is told in an unusual way: official documents, the logs of an artificial intelligence that can’t make sense of what is happening, screamo songs in pidgin, private chats encrypted through the wastewater system of the lunar base’s bathrooms, monologues, medical reports, increasingly degraded transmissions from Earth. Each of these is a partial view. Each carries its own version. None is complete. None lies on purpose. Each believes its own narrative with a fidelity indistinguishable from blindness. Everyone is convinced of their own reasons for choices they tell themselves—in a thoroughly self-absolving way—are acts of care for others.

No Way Back asks us to see a mechanism whole, so that we can free ourselves from it. That is why I can’t bring myself to call it a novel; I prefer the word device. I didn’t write No Way Back out of love for language, though I recognize that love in other work of mine. I think it is written about as far as it could be from any wish to give the reader something aesthetically pleasing, or even pleasant. That was never the goal.

I needed to build a system in which one could see control masquerading as care. The lie dressed up as protection. The way each generation deceives itself, the one before it and the one after it, with the best intentions available and the worst possible consequences. To do that, I had to leave behind everything I had done until then and think only about what I have lived as a human being. The work was all there: to describe what I have seen and lived firsthand.

I was born in a city that likes to think of itself as left-wing, and from it I took a condition and put it on the page: a ferocious abuse of power, built on a pathological self-mythology and answerable to no one, able to justify every aberration and every illegality by silencing every established fact, willing to destroy lives, people, whole families merely to keep itself going, masking each action in full, brutal awareness of what it is doing, and painting itself as good, ethical, moral through a self-absolving paternalism that every news outlet the system owns repeats in lockstep. I imagine the other side is just as indefensible, but I lived inside this one—a system that lives on nothing but praise of itself, sadistic and content. The “grandparents” and the “parents” of No Way Back come from here: they mirror two generations I have known, ready to do anything for power. The result is the generation, or generations, that follow the “parents.”

I recently read a report that describes a situation so grave I believe it will change the face of Italy: nearly a million young people between the ages of ten and nineteen are living with mental health problems. Nearly a million young people, and that is only that age group. I don’t believe the generation after them, or the one after that, or the one still in diapers, is any better off. It saddens me, of course, and I believe it is the plain result of the systemic breakdown of Italy’s cultural machine, built for one purpose only: to manage the story of a single generation, the one that will soon be gone.

The distance of the lunar base is not decorative. The question these pages pose is not a moral one. It asks for something more demanding than paternalism: to look at the whole mechanism and not look away. I did not describe innocent young people set against guilty old ones. I wrote about young people who, the moment they understand what has been decided at their expense, have to choose between articulating their own future with the tools that made them and building new ones. Raga, for example, one of the children born on the base, at first uses control over the others’ food supply as the only form of power he knows. Rebellion is no immunity against stupidity. Awareness doesn’t come automatically, even in the face of injustice.

From these premises, I believe, what I have written becomes a tool—a device—rather than a story. There are no heroes to follow and no models to replicate. I am asking—though I don’t expect to be heard by a society that keeps proving it would rather die than give up its exhausted clichés—that the new generations build a direction that was not decided for them, before they were born, by someone else. And I ask that they do it with a different intent: far from rage, far from nostalgia, far from any vague hope in a future that is bearing down on us like a speeding truck.

Cutting the ties with the previous generations is not the theme of a coming-of-age novel. In No Way Back it is a structural necessity. Not because the previous generations are enemies, but because the narratives they built are the walls of a prison that protects only those who built it. To tear them down is to find your bearings, deliberately, outside a contract between generations that never existed. A story passed down with the care we give a tradition, built by those who held power to convince those who didn’t that the power was being exercised in their name. No Way Back is the moment that story ends.