“Existential threat” – a term used, even overused, by democrats and dictators alike to describe any threat to the very existence of someone or something. It’s a concept. An ideal. You must therefore defend yourself by all means, the strongest and, hopefully, the most unexpected. 

The threat always begins modestly, at your parents’ dinner table, as in There’s Plenty of Fish in the Sea, when everyone comments on your life choices to deny who you are. In Big And Little Hands, the death of a child is symbolically the death of one village, and poetry and music are the only weapons against a collective sense of dread. In Easter Day, life in wartime Ukraine requires navigating the absurdity of the “new normal” (and remembering to feed your cat). 

Faced with threats to the environment, saving a marsh means saving the world in The Water Was Here, while one threat to the marine ecosystem calls for desperate measures in Last Tropics. Finally, in order to defeat an artificial intelligence in The Diffusion Pilot, why not expose it to the throes of dementia?

Foreword by the programme curator: War, climate change, AI, and all the current threats to our very existence and how to survive them.