Then, now, forever? Researching and writing nuclear landscapes for The Half-Life of Snails

In a room at the back of the building she finds rows of rusting bunk beds, a floor scattered with dead-eyed dolls and faded clothes. Frozen in time, the websites say, but there is evidence of time passing everywhere: the moulding material, the curling paint, the dried leaves heaped in the corners of the room.-Holloway, 2022 Since the 1986 Chornobyl disaster, the Exclusion Zone has become a tourist site, offering the chance to see a landscape, villages and cities 'frozen in time'. As research for my novel, The Half-life of Snails, I engaged in embodied and psychogeographic research in Chornobyl's Exclusion Zone to explore perceptions of landscapes that act as palimpsests of nuclearity. These are spaces in which time is a recurrent tension, where past events still impact the emotions and behaviours of communities, policy makers and individuals, and where future use of land is marked in centuries-long half-lives. The individual human, too, is a palimpsest, made up of their own unique and layered experiences of place and culture, of interactions and ideas. And we exist in the Nuclear Anthropocene-a moment timestamped by the detonation of the first atomic bomb and the resulting presence of man-made isotopes in the ground (and by extension the bodies of those living there) (Lewis & Maslin, 2015; Miller, 2016)-and therefore bring conceptual perceptions and experiences of nuclearity into interactions with these landscapes. This chapter explores how I negotiate these tensions of time and place, experience and concept, both through my research and creative practice, and in the novel, to show how layers of time-past, present and speculative futures-affect our relationship with landscape and the nuclear industry and can be explored in literature. It touches on the philosophies of landscape and time perception explored by scholars such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson, to contextualise and explain my autoethnographic and phenomenological research practice, and how I recognise the temporal issues at play in this subject and address them within both my creative practice and the final text of the novel.