Gentle Decline 1/9: Fictions & Findings

Hi. I think I had best accept that issues of Gentle Decline will be composed piecemeal in short bursts as time allows, because it keeps on happening. It is, of course, the case here.

I had said I was going to look into long-term effects of climate change, and that's still coming, but there's a lot of it, and really it would all be links, because I haven't had time to do the thinking and work out what I think will happen, or might happen. And in some weird way, I'm not so interested in the long term stuff (which in this case is more than 50 years), because all kinds of crazy things could happen by then. In discussing this stuff offline, I thought of looking at portrayals of post-climate-change (or post-disaster) Earth in fiction, and that suddenly seems like an astoundingly useful thing to do.

Let me ramble about fiction for a little while before I start into listing and recommending stuff, though. I know there are people out there who don't read fiction at all, and some smaller number who don't consume any even through the medium of TV or audiobooks, and I genuinely have no idea how to relate to those people. I use fiction to explore ideas, to look at how other people have thought about a topic when released from the tyranny of actual events, and to see how my thinking compares - not in a measurement sense, but a degrees of difference sense. That's particularly useful for near-future partially-unknowable material like coping with climate change. Obviously, this can go in all kinds of darker directions, but in this issue - and in my reading in general, really - I'm interested in positive, or at least hopeful outcomes. Not the grimdark future of Alien and its ilk, and possibly not the shiny future of Star Trek (although that seems like it would be nice; transporters and replicators would solve most of the world's problems right there).

First up, and probably the purest example of what I'm looking for, is Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. It's set in a version of NY that has been flooded to a depth of about 18m. At its time of publication, only two years ago, there was criticism of the idea that sea level could rise that far that fast, but there've been some uncomfortable studies released since then which imply that it's not such an extreme possibility. In this future era, people still live and work in the upper stories of the buildings which exist in New York right now, and there are boats and bridges between them. Like much of Robinson's work, it's critical of capitalism mostly by depicting a world where it doesn't hold sway any more - there are communes and other shared-resource groups working in the city, and being clearly beneficial for the people involved.

Paolo Bacigalupi's books are worth a side mention here; all of them seem to be set in post-climate-change eras, but they don't foreground the climate itself all that much. And obviously J. G Ballard's The Drowned World should appear in this list, but the science behind that wasn't the same. I don't know if that should exclude it or not, but my non-doom-and-gloom, cheerful-apocalypse filter doesn't really want to include it, so I'll mention it and move on. There's also, apparently, a book I haven't read by R. M. Meluch, entitled Chicago Red, but given it's not available as an ebook, and the mass market paperback is $20 plus outrageous postage from amazon.com, I think I might let it go for a while longer.

There's the whole genre of Solarpunk. I know lots of people object to the -punk suffix, but for me it reads "somewhat transgressive speculative fiction based around whatever word comes before this". So we see steampunk, diselpunk, timepunk, and so on. "Transgressive" is so much part of the background of speculative fiction at this stage that we don't really notice it anymore - or at least, I don't - and it sometimes takes me a little while to realise this. There are people who still find David Weber's Honor Harrington books to be somehow weird and out there because the lead character is a woman in the military, while in the reality I inhabit, his books are small-c conservative. Sorry, rambling. Solarpunk, yes.

Solarpunk is a genre focusing on settings that use green energy, very often in a post-fossil-fuel world. There's a general air of upbeat-ness about the narratives, a sense that the world will continue, even if in a substantially different form. As yet, there are many more short stories than anything else, but I imagine that there will be novels in the near future too. A lot of solarpunk appears to come from Brazil, and is therefore in Portuguese, although translations to English appear quickly. I do not read Portuguese, or only very slowly.

Current collections include: Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri (with a forthcoming sequel about winter, too, which is very much my thing); Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, which is one of the first collections I read; Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World, which I have bought but not read yet, and Ecopunk!: speculative tales of radical futures, which I've only just spotted, but which seems to fit in here very well. There's also a slightly more academic collection containing four solarpunk stories, with accompanying essays, available for free: The Weight of Light.

Next up, David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. I think Mitchell wants to be Michael Moorcock when he grows up. Or maybe Robert Heinlein - both had the same kind of all-books-in-the-same-universe thing going on, even where the books contradicted each other. It's really only the very last of the six sections of the book that count here, but I have a definite soft spot for it because it's set in a post-climate-change Ireland. It deals with globalism (Chinese sponsorship of Irish civilisation), and a good few real concerns like food rationing, in a fairly sane manner, despite the fact that the main plot of the book is very speculative speculative fiction.

Also on the list of stuff what I have not read is Nora Roberts' Year One. The reviews I've read indicate that the writing is good - as might be expected - but the world-building is not all that. However, while the disaster in this is not climate change but a pandemic, the rebuilding concepts are said to be solid. In similar vein, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, which I have read, is set during and after an epidemic which takes out a lot of people. The world-building in it, however, is pretty impeccable, and it's hard to class it as science fiction because there's nothing in any way non-realistic about it; no advances in technology, and no changes in anything else.

In older books, we might look at John Christopher's The World in Winter, which follows through on a different climate change, where solar output drops, and a permanent winter sets in. It falls into that peculiarly British post-war mini-genre of the cosy catastrophe, of which the inimitable Jo Walton has been rather critical. And there are a selection of books in that genre and of that time that also fit in, but I'm not entirely comfortable including them in my thinking here - they tend to have a very limited understanding of global economies, let alone the science of the disasters they follow, and to assume that upstanding Englishmen will be the ones left standing when all is said and done.

Kim Stanley Robinson's book - and we should consider his Mars trilogy as some of the same thinking - is the "best" example of post-climate-change thinking, in that it focuses on day to day life in a relatively realistic world that just happens to be a number of metres deeper in water, and has carefully considered what that will actually do, rather than consider it just as some kind of metaphor, or as just a reduction in land space without much consideration of the knock-on effects. It's worth reading just to get a handle on that stuff.

Some of the books above make me note that I haven't considered disease or indeed pandemic as a consequence of climate change, and there will almost certainly be something of that ilk to contend with. I'll think about that in some future issue. It's not an area I know a whole lot about.

Finally, because I can't have an issue of this without some news-type links: in terms of the previous issue's concerns with employment, the New York Times has a profile of some green energy workers.

It is Wednesday evening in a four-day bank holiday week. The last two days have been chaotic in work, and we cleared about 6 cubic metres of crap out of the house over the weekend and put it in a skip to be disposed of elsewhere. The next two days are going to be chaotic as well, and tomorrow evening, I'm going to climb into my armour for the first time in some months, put on a helm that's been newly strapped and padded, have contact lenses on, and see how that goes. It doesn't quite fall into the post-apocalyptic skillset, but it's at least adjacent. Should you feel that someone in your life could do with reading this stuff, let them know that Gentle Decline exists at https://tinyletter.com/gentledecline.