"The idea is the hero.” — Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
Francis Spufford, the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, is the newest Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. “I recognized him as a kindred spirit,” says SFI President David Krakauer. “He is a metaphysician, a writer of ideas — ideas that move him into the absolute nexus of what is done at SFI.”
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Francis Spufford teaches writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and resides in his native Britain with his wife, the Reverend Dr. Jessica Martin, Dean of Chelmsford, and their younger daughter. He is the son of two lauded British professors: social historian Margaret Spufford and economic historian Peter Spufford. It was through his father that Francis first encountered the Santa Fe Institute, accompanying him in May 2004 to an SFI meeting concerning the network properties of the medieval economy.
“My father told me ‘there are these weirdos in New Mexico who want me to go talk about medieval trade,’” says Spufford. “And I said he had to go, and he had to bring me with him.”
As the child of two historians, it is not surprising that Spufford’s writing, both fiction and nonfiction, engages deeply with the entanglement of historical, economic, and social forces. He does so in his first novel, Golden Hill — a picaresque of a protagonist trying to cash in on a letter of transatlantic credit at the counting houses of colonial New York — and in his nonfiction book Red Plenty, with its narrativized, fiction-infused depiction of Soviet scientists struggling to make viable their planned economy.
“I have no mathematics,” says Spufford. “But I can see structural complexities and enjoy them very much as the subject for writing. I have a knack for pattern recognition, even if it takes me a while.”
Spufford’s work asserts the right of the artist to imagine the public and private lives of others, both in our own history and in alternative universes that reflect our own, as is the case with Cahokia Jazz, a hardboiled detective novel set in a 1920s Native metropolis, where history diverged when a different and less-lethal strain of smallpox arrived with Europeans to North America. Works of imagination such as these are akin to forms of scientific modelling, and any static in those depictions, any discussion that might arise, are very much the point.
“At SFI, we’re world builders,” says Krakauer. “We use different tools to do it: and Spufford’s orthogonal method through fiction, the elaborate edifice created by his imagination, reveals parallel insights to those we draw in complexity science.”
Spufford’s writing self-consciously defies categories of genre and mode. “This is not a novel,” he writes in the introduction to Red Plenty. “It has too much to explain, to be one of those.” Novel or not, Red Plenty utilizes all the novelist’s tricks to orient a reader in the hearts and minds of the Soviet engineers (most historical, some composite, some completely fictional) who are frantically trying to develop a computer powerful enough, and an algorithm optimal enough, to make their struggling economy fly. Meanwhile, sixty pages of notes at the back indicate that the narrative is buttressed with more research than you’re likely to find in a popular history. Spufford confronts the limitations of the novel’s form in his first completely fictional effort, Golden Hill, putting doubts about the veracity of the narrative in the words of its hidden narrator, Tabitha. “Well, I still hate novels,” she writes, in an afterward that reveals that all a reader has encountered in Golden Hill is the product of her character’s literary imagination: “They still seem to me to be tissues of exaggeration, simplification, a sweetness that falsifies . . . How can such farragos be trusted?”
“I’m a wholehearted lover of novels, and epistemologically skeptical of them,” says Spufford. “I keep meaning to return to nonfiction, and it keeps getting bumped forward as each next idea turns out to be a novel rather than a nonfiction book.”
Spufford’s forthcoming novel, Nonesuch, concerns espionage, magic ritual, and time travel in the context of WWII London. “The genuinely strange and unearthly qualities of the blitz; winding streets with all the lights out, this pitch-black fairy forest, while strangers are overhead, trying to kill you,” he says. “As with New York in Golden Hill, I like to take cities — which are fascinating — and bring into focus elements beyond their stereotyped versions.”
Histories that use the form of novels, and novels that proclaim their own limitations — Spufford’s body of work keenly interrogates the categorical limits of non-fiction and fiction, utilizing tools of each mode to create a form that feels more grounded than most fiction and which can be more legible and emotionally affecting than most science writing. His spiraling and transdisciplinary meditations on history, fiction, economics, and ethics deeply resonate with the work of SFI.
Before his appointment as a Miller Scholar, Spufford attended a 2024 working group at SFI called “The Calculated Economy in the Era of Machine Learning.” Organized by Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell and SFI External Professor Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon University), the working group investigated whether contemporary advancements in AI have now made achievable the kind of economic planning Soviet scientists were attempting back in the mid-century — the theme of Spufford’s Red Plenty. The result, according to Spufford at the Community Lecture he gave with Farrell at the Lensic Theater — “Comrades: Let’s Optimize” — was “a resounding maybe.” Spufford remains deeply skeptical about the potential of AI in bringing about a general prosperity.
“We’re all skeptics here,” says Krakauer. “Or we try to be; to make bold conjectures and meet them with ruthless refutation.”
As part of his Miller Scholarship, Spufford is planning a months-long residency at SFI later this year. What bold ideas — refuted or not — will emerge as heroes in the pages of Spufford’s upcoming works? “I plan to be promiscuously interested in whatever I can wrap my head around,” Spufford says. “SFI is so gloriously nondirective towards its Miller Scholars, and I am confident that I will find my way into fascinating conversations.”