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Book Cover for 'The Leftover Girl'
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Book Cover for 'A Children's Crusade'
Pseudo-shrubs (detail)
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Alphane life (detail) , dome in distance
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Category: mass migration

Reset

Reset

As I’ve said before in this blog, we live in worrying times. Previous entries have addressed other recent threats to our well-being; principally populist rulers, unaccountable billionaires and the organisations they run, including their corrosive and equally unaccountable social media platforms; but these all pale into insignificance beside the clear and present danger, which has come sharply into focus in the current news cycle. The existential threat posed by the collapse of the biosphere will mean the end of human civilisation and cannot be mitigated by technological fixes despite all self-serving claims to the contrary. The likes of Boris Johnson waffle on about ‘Green Capitalism’ as an acceptable version which would allow for continued economic growth. But as a number of commentators have pointed out, any economic growth is in the end unsustainable, and the only way out of the coming catastrophe is to drastically reduce the size of the world economy and with it the size of the world’s population.

When very rich people start buying up land in geographically-isolated places such as New Zealand, and tech billionaires draw up serious plans to colonise Mars as a back-up planet to Earth, then it’s time for everybody to worry.

However most people don’t have the options of the super-rich, and the number of sufficiently-isolated islands with the resources to support a significant population is necessarily finite. Those wealthy people wishing to seek this kind of asylum will need to act quickly, as the drawbridges are likely to be lifted very soon. You can probably think of the quarantines imposed recently by the likes of Australia and New Zealand as a sort of dry run for what they will be forced to do again later. And in the end it may be to no avail, as the populous and militarily-powerful nations at most risk of collapse are unlikely to just sit on their hands when things get desperate. Ecological collapses in the past have always led to warfare and violence, just ask the Easter Islanders!

At some point in the near future, a one-way trip into indentured servitude on Mars is going to look like a very attractive proposition, and millions will be applying.

Ironies abound in our current predicament; that we should have reached this point when pure science has enabled us to gain a frighteningly-sophisticated understanding of the Cosmos and our place in it, is merely the most poignant. But it’s not pure science which is the villain here, it’s the application of that science in technology, and the Abrahamic social and economic doctrines pursued by all urbanized societies which have brought us here. 

And the reset part?

This is not a new phenomenon for our planet; mass extinctions are par for the course, although the active complicity of a sentient race in the process is (as far as we are aware) a new variant.

In the end the planet doesn’t care, it has a built-in self-correction mechanism. If things move too far in one direction it acts (blindly one assumes) to correct the imbalances that have built up within the system. All that pesky carbon will eventually be safely locked up again and the climate will return to something less inimical to higher forms of life. But in the meantime (and we’re talking millions of years here), evolution will be reset, starting again with the few hardy and adaptable species able to survive both the collapse and the testing times that follow, and it will be their descendants who eventually inherit the Earth. 

Whether any of these creatures will achieve sentience is, of course, unknowable.

And if you’ve wondered why we’ve never been contacted by a technologically-advanced species from another star system…

The Author   October 2021

Normal service resumed

Normal service resumed

After blogging twice in February I’ve now managed to miss out March 2021 entirely!

I think I’ll blame the mental fog that is supposed to be a consequence of lockdown, though in truth the limitations haven’t changed my life that much. My life is no more isolated than it was previously and uncertainty is a part of life, but hey!

As forecast back in February, I’ve become dissatisfied with the new name for novel eight of Lights in the sky, but I know if I give it time, the right title will emerge.

We have reached a crucial point in what’s currently still called Finding your place, my heroine has lost most of her friends to the vicissitudes of guerilla warfare and has realised that her place is far from secure within the changing Camposetta movement. The opportunistic and cynical leadership still expects Bolivar’s Army to take Manaus, but have not provided them with the means to do this.

I watched another Adam Curtis series recently, this one from the prehistory that is the 1990’s, Pandora’s Box apparently originated the format Curtis has mined successfully ever since, and, despite a truly terrible theme tune composed (it would seem) by members of post-punk quartet Gang of Four, it was both informative and stimulating. The last programme A is for Atom sticks in my mind as it dissects the lies, state secrecy, total disregard for safety, manipulation and general venality that lay behind the nuclear energy programme, leading with appalling inevitability to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. 

Nuclear fission as a source of energy is now thoroughly discredited, but a concerted campaign to boost nuclear fusion is underway. I think it’s fair to say that the only saving grace about fusion is that it’s unlikely ever to work. This is not a flip comment, I have read extensively on the topic and technical limitations have made it impossible to achieve anything beyond milliseconds of fusion, attained at colossal expense. Even if the necessary reaction could be maintained (and contained), the necessity to use elements such as deuterium or tritium, rather than plain old hydrogen, means that (despite the claims) nuclear waste will still be produced. As with fission, the likely cost of the power (if any) finally produced continues to rise. And of course, rather like mining the Asteroid Belt and other fantasies, all that success would lead to is the continuation of our mad Abrahamic Crusade until our entire world is utterly despoiled.

Fusion is rather like mass-migration to Mars; the very worst thing that could happen would be if it were to succeed. 

You may have noticed that the commanding heights of the world economy have been seized by a bunch of sociopathic billionaires. The phrase, ‘this is not really happening!’ springs to mind (thank you Tori Amos!), which is of course correct, because this is now a virtual world within a virtual economy.

And here’s me thinking that the AntiChrist had been voted out of office, but of course these people don’t actually believe in democracy because they know better! An opinion  shared with oligarchs and autocrats everywhere.

And it’s just been announced that a number of English soccer clubs, some very successful, others not so much, have decided to join a new Europe-wide league with other like-minded clubs. Nothing like enlightened self-interest, huh!

Just like the tech billionaires want to get rid of annoying inconveniences like accountability and the democratically-expressed will of the people, the so-called European Super League wants to get rid of fair competition and the notion that you might actually get demoted if you’re shit!

Lovely world we live in…

The Author  April 2021

Not the end, then?

Not the end, then?

Sometimes you convince yourself that you’ve reached the end of something only to find you haven’t. This has happened several times with Lights in the sky, which started life as a short story, submitted (unsuccessfully) to Analog magazine, became a novel, grew into a trilogy and over the past few years has become a septet…
Well, it’s happened again…
I was always conscious that I needed to tell the story of various minor (and not so minor) characters introduced at various points during the series arc, and have found many ingenious ways of doing this. The story of Klara, the original self-aware automaton, and thus the prototype for all the nursemaids on Alpha 5, was to have been accommodated as a parallel narrative within …when you wish upon a star, which otherwise concerns itself with the story of the original Marta on Earth.
I’d written five ‘interludes’, telling Klara’s story from inception in the Alpha Mission laboratory of Dr Helen Choi, right through to her demise at the hands of a marauding band of Camposetta irregulars, more than half a century later. But when it came to it, this felt unsatisfactory, an unnecessarily perfunctory end for a much-loved character, however shocking in its brutal suddenness it might have been.
The solution was obvious; Klara will get her own book and so her future existence, beyond the confines of …when you wish upon a star, can be fully explored.
As usual the source material for the character’s future arc is to be found in the character’s thoughts, beliefs and actions. Without wishing to give anything away about a work in progress, it will become clear that her subsequent actions are entirely consistent with what we already know about her in the four chapters that currently exist.
The provisional title of the eighth book in the series is Klara, but this may change, and work on it will commence in earnest once the current novel is completed
Back in the increasingly surrealistic ‘real world’, it is clear neither Brexit nor the Pandemic will be resolved soon. We exist in the same curious but fevered state, swinging between fearing the worst, while seizing on the smallest crumb of comfort in the media that reassures us that things might not be quite as bad as anticipated.
As ever, COVID-19 is the great unknown; we just don’t know nearly enough about the virus that causes it to predict its long-term effects on our society, economy and personal well-being. We don’t even know for sure how many people have been infected, as the vast majority of cases appear to be asymptomatic, which makes a reliable estimate of the death rate from Coronavirus extremely difficult. We have no idea when (or if) it will mutate and whether this will make it more or less dangerous, though evidence from previous pandemics would appear to suggest that the ‘second wave’ will be worse than the first. Whether being asymptomatic the first time round will protect people from future infection, is again unknown, as is whether any of the dozens of potential vaccines currently being developed around the world will even be partially-effective.
This uncertainty is corrosive of our institutions whether they be commercial, political, artistic or sporting, and the long term implications of all of this can only emerge over time.
Brexit, by contrast, is more straightforward, as it becomes clearer by the day how damaging, short-sighted, irrational and essentially masochistic this whole enterprise is. I note that highly skilled and qualified people are already voting with their feet and choosing to relocate to countries within the Eurozone. They will presumably be followed by the flight of capital, as the wealthy (who are, of course, in possession of more than one passport) begin to remove themselves and their wealth from poor old Blighty, once the shit really begins to hit the fan. Ironically, the Brexit-supporting amongst them may be forced by deteriorating conditions in the United States, to relocate to Europe, of all places, where they will presumably continue to either, assure the rest of us that everything is going swimmingly, or blame us for the fact that it’s not. To quote an anonymous ballad sung by British soldiers in the Great War,

It’s the same the whole world over.
It’s the poor wot get’s the blame,
It’s the rich wot get’s the gravy,
Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?

The transformation of Kent into one huge lorry park, the end of most foreign travel, and shortages of food and essential medicines in the New Year are likely to be only the start…
But, of course, things may all turn out for the better…

The Author August 2020

The strange death of Liberal Democracy

The strange death of Liberal Democracy

It occurs to me that there are a couple of possible criticisms of the Lights in the sky series, if we consider it purely as futurology. The most pertinent currently, is the lack of any evidence of (or reference to) infectious disease during the breakdown of civilisation to which (in the novels) I give the name ‘The Collapse’. I talk about fire and flood, I reference civil war, species extinction and resource depletion, and I describe mass migration, the breakdown of law and order and war between States. I also depict whole countries being lost to the waves, and I do say (or rather Marta Camacho does in the sixth novel, Maya) that the human population of the Earth drops to a third of pre-Collapse levels. But nowhere do I mention the role pandemics play in this process. Nor do I specifically mention famine.
I’m not alone in this, at least as far as disease is concerned. Neil Gaiman, in his television adaptation of the Good Omens (the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett) has bumped Pestilence from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and replaced him with Pollution, a more ‘up-to-date’ Horsewoman. Recent events should now be persuading him of the error of his ways.
My abiding impression viewing this series was that even though it was set in 2018, it now appears to be part of the more distant past. In fact, a lot of contemporary culture is beginning to look distinctly like it’s on borrowed time. It all has a fin de siecle feel about it twenty years too late), with everyone desperately trying to have their fun, make their point, push their interest group, consume to the nth degree, before it all gets too late. Before our globalised world economy and related global culture start to come apart at the seams as nation states retreat behind their borders, trading blocs break up, political alliances fracture.
The pressures bringing this change about are many and various. Some are progressive, some are reactionary, but all speak to a truth that our current way of doing things is unsustainable. We cannot (physically at any rate) be citizens of the world for much longer, the environmental costs of the mass transport of people around the world are becoming too high. The idea that your food should be grown on the far side of the globe and your clothes made there also, is now palpably absurd. There is (I think) a curious sort of unanimity across political divides, with people who loathe, despise and refuse to debate with each other reaching startling similar conclusions by completely different routes.
The populist right appears to dismiss the notion that an environmental crisis is upon us. However, if you examine much of the content of right-leaning social media and the reactionary populist press, so much of the talk is about looming catastrophe, expressed in terms of out of control weather, imminent asteroid strikes, super volcanoes erupting etc etc. To me this all has the appearance of metaphor, a bizarre process of transference whereby the truth they all know in their hearts but dare not admit (i.e. that our civilisation is headed for a fall) cannot be completely suppressed and comes out in an attachment to fringe catastrophe theories.
Opposing shades of political opinion appear to be moving inexorably towards the notion of smaller political units and a less integrated global economy, with the liberal democracy that promoted globalisation in danger of being sidelined somewhere in the middle.
I mentioned that there were two possible criticisms; the second relates to timescale, as I have my Collapse happening near the end of the century, far enough away in time to not be immediately threatening. As I concluded earlier in this blog, I am (in the great tradition of English science fiction) basically writing a ‘cosy’ catastrophe.
However, it looks like Armageddon isn’t prepared to wait, and, unlike the world of Lights in the sky, there doesn’t appear to be a benign deus ex-machina waiting in the wings to save us…

The Author March 2020

‘The Roaring Twenties’

‘The Roaring Twenties’

It’s New Year’s Day and what’s that sound filling the air? Well, if you’re in the Antipodes it’s probably the roar of bushfires as they consume your neighbourhood. A former friend moved to Australia with her husband a while back, and lives in Sydney, I’m wondering how she regards that decision today. I’m also wondering how much longer the television series Wanted Down under will continue to be made (or even shown), and I’m thinking that this may turn out to be a post-Brexit windfall for Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers, with a steady stream of skilled expatriates returning from the Southern Hemisphere to take the jobs recently vacated by those EU citizens heading back across the Channel. My niece is already here, and her parents may not be too far behind.
As ever, I feel like I’m in some way inextricably-linked to unfolding events, as no sooner do I write about something than life starts to imitate art. In a passage from my current novel …when you wish upon a star, I write about an Australia being consumed by flames, with a scene set in a gridlocked traffic queue inching its way to hope-for safety, beset on all sides by fire. This has now become a reality for thousands of unfortunate Australians in New South Wales and Victoria.
Although it’s gratifying on one level to be part of the zeitgeist, it’s not something I expected to be happening this soon. It all adds to the feeling of apprehension as we contemplate the 2020’s, a feeling that it may already be too late and climate change has become inevitable. In …when you wish upon a star I write about a world consumed by fire and flood, but I set the worst consequences of this comfortably in the future. But it seems that the future is only too eager to start early, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trying to crash your New Year’s Eve party, and guess what? They’ve brought a couple of extra friends, Fire and Flood, along with them.
In short, the coming decade is not filling me with a great sense of anticipation. Many people (I imagine) will be too lost in their personal orgy of unnecessary and conspicuous consumption to notice, and it may take something really ‘significant’ happening (like the World Cup or the Olympics being cancelled) before it registers.
However we have (very nearly) the worst possible set of political leaders in place at this moment, whose ‘strategy’ would appear to be denial, closely followed by lies and excuses. One can only hope that a new generation emerges, before it is too late.
Happy New Year
The Author January 2020