Tag: Climate Change

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace (Asimov’s SF January–February 2023) opens with a billionaire called Rodrigo asking the female narrator of the story to wear a new invention (an “emotional fitness tracker”) to a lunch date with an old college acquaintance.
After a long lunch with Will, and surveillance drones photographing them outside the restaurant, he and the narrator are picked up by Rodrigo the billionaire. Rodrigo reveals that he is from a parallel world, and they drive to a building and go through a portal to Rome 2, where they speak Latin, have to wear the bracelets, and learn that the citizens are panicking because the planet is going to be hit by an asteroid in 19 hours. Rodrigo wants to transfer useful technology before the asteroid hits, but the narrator thinks they can save the planet—so she goes back for her world’s “Space Codex,” while Will gathers hard drives full of Rome 2’s knowledge. Then, after the narrator delivers the Codex and returns to her own world for the second time, the portal dies.
The narrator subsequently becomes a billionaire thanks to the cold fusion technology of Rome 2 (but there are still problems with climate change and the super-rich) and the story eventually ends years later with Rodrigo arriving out of a portal (a “white hole”). He tells her that they managed to save Rome 2 from the asteroid but now have a problem with a black hole in the upper atmosphere. He also adds that Will is sending more files through a white hole to the Burning Man festival, and he’ll meet them there.
This is all narrated in a vaguely satirical tone—but I’m not really sure what the point of this piece is other than to make a number of glib contemporary observations:

I also wanted to solve the prison problem. The police drones took all “unregistered” citizens to nasty offshore islands. It seemed unnecessarily cruel once you looked into the details.
I spent my fortune several times over trying to fund alternatives but never succeeded. It turns out that having money isn’t enough to effect change: you also have to get other people with money to agree with you. Otherwise, their billions act as anti-matter to your own, totally canceling each other out. The other billionaires were fine with me trying to fix the climate, but they thought having a large, incarcerated class of people was essential to their economy. How else would you motivate everyone else to work for you?

It certainly doesn’t work as any sort of believable story.
* (Mediocre). 5,050 words.

O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Posted on by Paul Fraser

O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)1 opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O2 cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O2 masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O2 cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O2 generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O2 arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
** (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

1. This story was (unusually) reprinted in Apex, another online magazine, two months later. I cannot see the point of Galaxy’s Edge putting it online for a month and then taking it down, only to let another publication reprint it almost immediately (my understanding is that most venues have a period of exclusivity in their contracts).

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera (Clarkesworld #164, May 2020)1 gets off to a rambling literary start:

The sea lapping at my back and my face to the fire, I translate: poems, mostly. Now that entire languages and cultures are on the verge of being lost forever to the sea, the storms, the smog, the plagues, and the fires, now the art of the dead and the almost-dead have become quaintly valuable to a small but enthusiastic readership of the living. The wealthy and living, I should say, but are those not the same thing, now? I am alive; I breathe in and am overcome with riches. It itches, deep in my lungs.
The big publishing houses (we used to count their decreasing number; I don’t know where the dice finally rolled to a stop) in distant walled New York pay an entire pittance for authentic translations from the lost world, which translates into a moderate income for me because of the horrific exchange rate. It keeps me fed and sheltered—long may the fashion in third world ruin-poetry last—and I pray now only for the goodwill of distant tastemakers. The world’s decay is now the province of poets, not the useless powers and principalities of the world. There was a war on loss and we lost. It is now the age of mourning. I only wish it paid better.

The idea of written works being lost to climate change a few decades in the future seems rather unlikely (one would have thought they would all be scanned and on the internet by then), but I suppose this occupation lets the narrator give his thesaurus a work out and utter pretentious comments like “Poetry causes delirium and weakness. It burdens the heart”, and “the city’s death will come après moi”, etc.
We also learn about the climate disaster future the narrator lives in, and how his home in a tower block has a flooded ground floor where the rugs stink of mildew (and yet they still have intermittent electricity—I’m not sure how that works in a building awash with water).
In amongst all this are a couple of trips to his friend’s library, and a mugging by the local youths for his groceries. The same feral children who steal from him later start setting people of his generation on fire (drowning would have been better symbology).
In short: a poet’s misery memoir crossed with climate-change hand wringing.
– (Tedious). 3,950 words. Story link.

1. This was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award—a group of voters who, it would seem, must like to see writers writing.

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants.
In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story).
Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement.
Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material).
Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.
“Nepenthe?”
As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone.
This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going).
**** (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then “tend the sick lands”. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn’t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

Even if you know, as I did, that the “you” in that passage is an AI called Opal, it’s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times.
After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, “non-manipulated biological”) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the “dimensionality” of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on “inter-procreation” with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha’s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch).
After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life—but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can’t go back in again.
Then, after Eesha’s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can’t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms.
Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story—who knows. Oh, and Opal/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they’ll just mess up the Earth again).
I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?—All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha’s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal?
It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year’s Best. Dreadful.
– (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link.

Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with a brief prologue that introduces the narrator Ling Chen—an obedient ex-US Navy pilot sent on a mission to the atmosphere of Venus. The story itself starts in the gondola that she (although the narrator’s sex isn’t clear till later in the story) shares with a scientist, Gabriel, and an AI, Zheng-123783b (there is brief reference to AI civil rights and the fact that “you couldn’t send humans on a great voyage of discovery and leave out the inorganics”).
In fairly short order Ling becomes sexually involved with Zheng, and soon after that she is outside the floating gondola hacking one of the native “flying pancakes” to death with a machete, a First Contact situation gone badly wrong. When they are almost overwhelmed by pancakes responding to the killing, Gabriel fires the rocket motors. This saves them but they lose a lot of their attached life support equipment.
At this point (spoiler) the story then morphs from a sex-with-AIs/First Contact tale into a Climate Change one, where Gabriel theorises that Venus was once like Earth but suffered from a huge runaway greenhouse effect. Then, when the crew are ordered home (they cannot survive for very long in their diminished state), Ling suggests that Zheng is sent back digitally to Earth, she take the one-man emergency pod, and Gabriel remains to do vital work on his theory. This solution is not accepted by mission control, and Ling gets a message from her Navy handlers on a secret backchannel—then, when Ling and Gabriel subsequently go outside on a routine EVA to remove the pancakes from the gondola, Ling stabs Gabriel with the machete and throws his body into the Venusian atmosphere, while making radio calls that suggest that AI Zheng has jumped.
Ling later goes home in the pod, while Zheng stays on the gondola impersonating Gabriel and doing his work (apparently Zheng couldn’t have been left behind on its own for political reasons).
Things slowly improve on Earth, although the similarity between the global warming effects on the two planets are never made public.
This story didn’t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I didn’t buy the Navy pilot as assassin malarkey (being able to drop a bomb on someone doesn’t qualify you as a close-quarters killer); second, this kitchen sink story can’t seem to decide whether it is about AI, planetary exploration, first contact, or climate change; third, the internal logic of the story does not convince (the political background is sketchy to say the least and, at one point, Zheng cryptically states it won’t be able to help Ling as it is “Asimov’ed” and “can’t kill Gabriel”. Obviously not that Asimov’ed, because colluding in Ling’s killing of Gabriel is an obvious First Law violation.
This is a bit of a mess.
* (Mediocre). 7,500 words.

On the Rocks by Ian Randall Strock

Posted on by Paul Fraser

On the Rocks by Ian Randall Strock (Analog, January-February 2022) is a short-short1 about a billionaire who tells of an effort to save Earth from global warming by bringing back “ice cubes” from the Kuiper Belt. These hollowed out ice asteroids will then be floated in the atmosphere to cool it down.
This references two other SF stories to tell the tale, and doesn’t articulate why the idea doesn’t work. It’s more ridiculous musing than story-telling.
* (Mediocre). 1,000 words.

1. I’m not sure when short-shorts became “flash-fiction” (as this is described in the table of contents), or why. I’m not fan of the category, given that the average standard of these is far below other lengths of story.