H Is for Hawk author Helen Macdonald and her co-writer Sin Blaché on Barbenheimer, the power of the past and how late capitalism is eating itself
When we told people we were writing a sci-fi novel together during lockdown, they’d ask us what it was about. A reasonable question, but very hard to answer. “A love letter to genre fiction” felt insufficient, and “a military spy adventure mystery horror sci-fi queer romance thriller” too much. But now, in this glorious summer of Barbenheimer, a time of proliferating memes and T-shirts printed with hot-pink mushroom clouds, we usually answer the question with “It’s Barbie meets Oppenheimer”.
Set in 2010 in a universe just one perilous step from our own, Prophet was intended to be as comedic and subversive as Barbie and as darkly philosophical as Oppenheimer – and it also has scenes set in nuclear test towns in the Nevada desert overrun with animate plastic dolls. But the deepest connection between Prophet, Barbie and Oppenheimer is that all, in different ways, are shaped by nostalgia. Greta Gerwig’s film playfully interrogates the candy-lit utopia of a consumerist childhood, and Christopher Nolan’s complex response to the terrifying romance of the cold war nuclear desert reminds us of a time when the apocalypse was easier to comprehend because it only came in nuclear flavour.
