"Some seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of
Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this
narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say that none of
them lasted for less than a millennium, none for more than ten; that each
extracted such secrets and obtained such comforts as its nature (and the nature
of the Universe) enabled it to find; and that each fell back from the Universe
in confusion, dwindled, and died.
“The last of them left its name written in the stars, but
no-one who came later could read it. More important, perhaps, it built
enduringly despite its failing strength—leaving certain technologies that, for
good or ill, retained their properties of operation for well over a thousand
years. And more important still, it was the last of the
Afternoon Cultures, and was followed by evening, and by Viriconium.”
Those are the opening
lines of The Pastel City by M. John Harrison, one of the
fixtures of my arguably misspent youth. I pulled it down from my shelf of old
paperbacks the other day, for the first time in years, and spent part of an
evening rereading it. There were several reasons for that. Partly it was a fit
of nostalgia; partly, I’ve finished all but the last minor edits on
Star’s Reach, my post-peak oil SF novel, preparatory to
placing it with a publisher, and was thinking back on some of the other
fictional explorations of the coming deindustrial future I’ve read; partly—well,
there’s a practical reason, but we’ll get to that a little later on in this
post.
There were any number of books like it back in the day,
mass-market SF paperbacks with gaudy covers ringing variations on a handful of
familiar themes. You could almost describe The Pastel City
as an example of what used to be called the sword and sorcery genre, one of the
standard modes of 1970s fantasy, except that there isn’t any sorcery. The weird
powers and monstrous enemies against which tegeus-Cromis the swordsman and his
motley allies do battle are surviving relics of advanced technology, and the
deserts of rust and the windblown ruins through which they pursue their fairly
standard heroic quest are the remnants of an industrial society a millennium
dead. In a real sense, it belongs to a genre of its own, which I suppose ought
to be called postindustrial fantasy.
I first read it in the bleak little apartment where my
father lived, in a down-at-the-heels Seattle suburb. Not long before, just as
soon as he finished paying her way through college, my mother dumped my father
like a sack of old clothes, and followed through on the metaphor by taking him
to the cleaners in the divorce settlement. He took what refuge he could find in
model airplanes, jigsaw puzzles, and science fiction novels, and I used to
catch a bus north from my mother’s house to spend weekends with him. His
apartment was a short walk from the library, which was one blessing, and close
to a hobby shop where I could fritter away my allowance on spacecraft models,
which was another; still, many of the best hours I recall from those days were
spent curled up on his secondhand couch, reading the volumes of science fiction
he’d bring home from the little bookstore six blocks away.
The Pastel City was one of those. I
recall vividly the first time I read it, because it’s the book that first
suggested to me that an industrial society could crumble away to ruins without
benefit of apocalyptic fireworks and be succeeded by simpler societies. What
was more, the last Afternoon Culture was simply backstory, no more immediately
relevant to tegeus-Cromis and his friends than the fall of Rome is to you and
me, and the wastelands, the marshes gone brackish with metallic salts, the dead
and half-drowned city called Thing Fifty, and most of the other relics of that
vanished time were just part of the landscape. It was easy for me, as I sat
there on the couch, to imagine the wreckage of today’s world forming the
background for adventures a thousand years in our own future.
I was curled up on the same couch when I first read
Davy by Edgar Pangborn. He’s mostly forgotten these days,
but Pangborn’s was a name to conjure with in the more literate end of the
science fiction scene of the 1960s and 1970s, and Davy was
much of the reason why. It’s a coming-of-age story—shall be literary and call
it a Bildungsroman?—that goes on the same Platonic ideal of
a bookshelf as Tom Jones and Huckleberry Finn,
except that it takes place about five centuries from now in what’s left of
northeastern North America.
Pangborn’s future history is as precise as it is
uncomfortably plausible. There was a nuclear war, which killed a lot of people,
and an epidemic among the survivors, which killed a lot more. Rising sea levels
driven by global warming—yes, Pangborn was already onto that in 1964—flooded
the lowlands. Stick in time’s oven and bake for centuries, and you’ve got a
world of neofeudal statelets with more or less medieval subsistence economies
clinging to the threadbare rhetoric of an earlier day. Here’s Davy’s description of his world:
“Katskil is a kingdom. Nuin is a commonwealth, with a hereditary presidency of
absolute powers. Levannon is a kingdom, but governed by a Board of Trade.
Lomeda and the other Low Countries are ecclesiastical states, the boss
panjandrum being called a Prince Cardinal. Rhode, Vairmant, and Penn are
republics; Conicut’s a kingdom; Bershar is mostly a mess. But they’re all great
democracies, and I hope this will grow clearer to you one day when the ocean is
less wet.”
Those ecclesiastical states aren’t Christian, by the way,
but they might as well be. Pangborn was gay, and thus got an extra helping of
the hypocrisy and intolerance that characterize American Christianity in its
worst moods; he was accordingly an atheist; and his Holy Murcan Church was
partly a parody of the mainstream American churches of his time, partly the
standard atheist caricature of the medieval Catholic church, and partly a
counterblast against Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for
Leibowitz, with its portrayal of Catholicism as a force for good in a
future dark age America. Those of my readers who are atheists will enjoy that
side of Davy; those who aren’t may find Pangborn’s bouts of
religion-bashing annoying, or if they’ve heard the same talking points often
enough elsewhere, simply dull. Fortunately there’s plenty more in
Davy that makes it worth the read anyway.
Brilliant though it was, Davy still
followed the conventions of the then-thriving postapocalyptic genre and didn’t
quite manage, as The Pastel City did, to think its way right
out from under the myth of progress and stop seeing history as a straight line
that always leads back to us. Pangborn thus needed, or thought he needed, the
diabolus ex machina of a nuclear war to bring Old Time
crashing down. I forgave him that because his nuclear war wasn’t the usual
canned Hollywood death-fantasy, just a bunch of cities being blasted to rubble,
a lot of corpses, and high rates of sterility and birth defects among the
descendants of the survivors, followed by normal decline and recovery.
Pangborn’s own summary is typically succinct: “barbarism,
not actually ‘like’ Fifth Century Europe because history can’t repeat itself
that way, but just as dark. Here and there enclaves where some of the valuable
bits of the old culture survived. In some places, primitive savagery in its
varied forms; and monarchies, petty states, baronies, whatever. Then through
many centuries, a gradual recovery toward some other peak of some other kind of
civilization. Without the resources squandered by the 20th Century.” That’s
from Still I Persist In Wondering, an anthology of short
stories set in the same future as Davy, as were two other novels of his, The
Judgment of Eve and The Company of Glory. Yes, I
read all of them, many times; those of my readers who followed Star’s Reach and pick up
Pangborn’s tales will doubtless catch the deliberate homages I put in my story,
and probably some influences I didn’t intend that sneaked in anyway.
The third book I want to mention here didn’t come to my
attention until long after the secondhand couch went out of my life, but it
came at another bleak time. That was the autumn of 1982, toward the end of my
first unsuccessful pass through college, and right about the time it was
becoming painfully clear that the great leap toward a sustainable future
through appropriate technology, in which I planned on making my career, wasn’t
going to happen after all. Those were the years when the Reagan
administration’s gutting of grant money for every kind of green initiative was
really starting to hit home, and attempts to mobilize any kind of support for
those initiatives were slamming face first into the simple fact that most
Americans wanted to cling to their cozy lifestyles even if that meant flushing
their grandchildren’s future down the drain.
Somewhere in the middle of that autumn, under a hard gray
sky, I went for a long and random walk in the grimy end of downtown Bellingham,
Washington, down past old canneries and retail buildings that used to serve the
working waterfront when there still was one.
Somewhere in there was a shop selling girlie mags—this was before the internet,
when those who liked pictures of people with their clothes off had to go buy
them from a store—and out in front, for no reason I was ever able to figure
out, was a tray of non-erotic used paperbacks for 50 cents each. I had a dollar
to spare; I stopped to look through them, and that’s how I found The
Masters of Solitude by Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin.
If The Pastel City is sword and sorcery
without the sorcery, The Masters of Solitude might best be
described as a post-apocalyptic novel without the apocalypse. It’s a
three-handed poker game of a story set maybe two thousand years from now in the eastern United States. From
Karli in the south to Wengen in the north runs Coven country, a tribal realm
following a faith and a culture descended from today’s Wicca. Off in what’s now
western Pennsylvania are the Kriss, who worship a dead god. To the east, the
urban enclave that extends from Boston down to Washington DC is simply the
City, its people maintaining high technology with solar power, living for
centuries by way of advanced organ-transplant techniques, sealing out the rest
with an electronic barrier that shreds minds.
Long ago things were different; everyone in the world of
The Masters of Solitude remembers that, however dimly. Then the land was invaded and conquered by
another people, the Jings, who left their name and some of their genetics and
then faded from history. Out of the
ordinary chaos of a fallen civilization, the ordinary process of reorganization
and cultural coalescence birthed new societies drawing in various ways on the
legacies of the past. It’s history the way it actually happens, the normal rise
and fall of nations and cultures, and it’s in the course of their ordinary
history, the Covens, the Kriss, and the City stumble toward a confrontation
that will shatter them all.
There were other books that could go into a list of
postindustrial fantasy classics, of course, and I may talk about some of them
another day. Still, the question I suspect a fair number of my readers are
wondering is why any of this matters. Modern industrial civilization is
beginning to pick up speed along a trajectory of decline and fall that differs
from the ones we’ve just discussed in that it’s not safely confined to the realm
of imaginative fiction. Is there any point in reading about imaginary societies
that fell back from the Universe, dwindled, and died, when ours is doing that
right now?
As it happens, I think there is.
Most of what’s kept people in today’s industrial world from
coming to grips with the shape and scale of our predicament is precisely the
inability to imagine a future that’s actually different from the present.
Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history may have been a
masterpiece of unintentional comedy—I certainly read it in that light—but it
spoke for an attitude that has deep roots all through contemporary culture. Nor
is that attitude limited to the cornucopians who can’t imagine any future that
isn’t a linear continuation of the present; what is it that gives the
contemporary cult of apocalypse fandom its popularity, after all, but a
conviction that the only alternative to a future just like the present is quite precisely no future at all?
It would be pleasant if human beings were so constituted
that this odd myopia of the imagination could be overcome by the simple
expedient of pointing out all the reasons why it makes no sense, or by noting
how consistently predictions made on that basis turn out to be abject flops.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen to be the case. My regular readers will long
since have noticed how easily believers in a business-as-usual future brush
aside such issues as though nobody ever mentioned them at all, and keep on
insisting that of course we can keep an industrial system running indefinitely
because, well, because we can, just you watch! The only thing I can think of that compares
with this is the acrobatic ingenuity with which believers in imminent
apocalypse keep on coming up with new reasons why this week’s prediction of
mass death must be true when all previous examples have turned out dead wrong.
What underlies both of these curious phenomena, and a great
many other oddities of contemporary culture, is simply that the basic building
blocks of human thinking aren’t facts or logical relationships, but stories.
The narratives we know are the patterns by which we make sense of the world;
when the facts or the testimony of logic don’t fit one narrative, and we have a
selection of other narratives to hand, we can compare one story to another and
find the one that’s the best fit to experience. That process of comparison is
at the heart of logic and science, and provides a necessary check on the normal
tendency of the human mind to get stuck on a single story even when it stops
making sense.
As I pointed out here in
the earliest days of this blog, though, that check doesn’t work if
you only have one story handy—if, for example, the story of onward and upward
progress forever is the only story about the future you know. Then it doesn’t
matter how badly the story explains the facts on the ground, or how many gross
violations of logic are needed to explain away the mismatches: given a choice
between a failed narrative and no narrative at all, most people will cling to
the one they have no matter how badly it fits. That’s the game in which both
the cornucopians and the apocalypse fans are engaged; the only difference between
them, really, is that believers in apocalypse have decided that the way to make
the story of progress make sense is to insist that we’re about to reach the
part of it that says “The End.”
The one way out of that trap is to learn more stories—not simply
rehashes of the same plot with different names slapped on the characters, mind
you, but completely different narrative structures that, applied to the same
facts and logical relationships, yield different predictions. That’s what I got
from the three novels I’ve discussed in this post. All three were fictions, to
be sure, but all three were about that nebulous place we call the future, and
all three gave me narratives I could compare with the narrative of progress to
see which made the better fit to the facts.
I’ve met enough other people who’ve had similar experiences that I’ve
come to think of fiction about the future as a powerful tool for getting
outside the trap of knowing just one story, and thus coming to grips with the
failure of that story and the need to understand the future ahead of us in very
different ways.
All of which brings me to the practical dimension of this
week’s post.
A few weeks ago, I fielded an email from the proprietor of
the small publishing house that released After
Oil: SF Visions of a Post-Petroleum Future, the anthology of stories
that came out of the peak oil fiction contest I held here in 2011 and 2012. He was pleased to report that sales have been
modest but steady—contributors should expect a statement and royalty check
shortly—and asked about whether I was perhaps interested in putting together a
second anthology along the same lines. (He also expressed a definite interest
in hearing from writers who have novels on peak oil-related themes and are
looking for a place to publish them; those of my readers who fall into this
category—I know you’re out there—will want to check out the submissions
requirements page on the Founders House website.)
I’m certainly game for a second story contest, and for
editing a second anthology; given the torrent of creativity that the last
contest called forth, I don’t expect to have any trouble fielding an abundance
of good stories from this blog’s readers, either, so the contest is on. The
requirements are the same as before:
- Stories should be between 2500 and 7500 words in length;
- They should be entirely the work of their author or authors, and should not borrow characters or setting from someone else’s work;
- They should be in English, with correct spelling, grammar and punctuation;
- They should be stories—narratives with a plot and characters—and not simply a guided tour of some corner of the future as the author imagines it;
- They should be set in our future, not in an alternate history or on some other planet;
- They should be works of realistic fiction or science fiction, not magical or supernatural fantasy—that is, the setting and story should follow the laws of nature as those are presently understood;
- They should deal directly with the impact of peak oil, and the limits to growth in general, on the future; and as before,
- They must not rely on “alien space bats”—that is, dei ex machina inserted to allow humanity to dodge the consequences of the limits to growth. (Aspiring authors might want to read the whole “Alien Space Bats” post for a more detailed explanation of what I mean here.)
That is to say, the stories that will find a place in the
second anthology, like those that populated the first, will feature human
beings like you and me, coping with the aftermath of the industrial age in a
world that could reasonably be our future, and living lives that are
challenging, interesting, and maybe even appealing in that setting. I’d like to
make an additional suggestion this time around: don’t settle for your ordinary, common or garden variety
postpetroleum future. Make it plausible, make it logical, but make it
different.
