- Part 33

Saliency or efficacy

By way of footnote to previous post. Thought this post about the impact of images on the way we think about climate change was interesting. It connects well with some thoughts I’ve had about the difficulty of writing fiction about climate change. Images of the effects of climate change get the message over about the threat (saliency), but make people feel fatalistic. Images of attempts to mitigate climate change make people feel something can be done about it (efficacy), but don’t get over the seriousness of the threat. Tricky!

Giant wind turbine at Nigg Yard by John Wright

The Politics of Climate Change, 2nd ed, by Anthony Giddens

In a previous post, I discussed this video clip of an American woman, emerging from a cinema after seeing the film ‘Chasing Ice.’ She’s clearly on the conservative side of the American political spectrum. ‘I love Bill O’Reilly,’ she says (he’s a right-wing commentator on the Fox News channel), ‘I watch Bill O’Reilly every day, and I’m proud to be an American, but…’

It’s the ‘but’ that fascinated me, the ‘but’ that she felt obliged to insert before she went on to say how badly she’d been shaken by the movie and how, in spite of previous scepticism, she now recognised climate change as a reality and a threat. Why a ‘but’ rather than an ‘and’? If you are proud of your country, doesn’t it logically follow you’d want to protect it from being ravaged by drought, storms and global chaos? Surely protecting a thing is something you do because of your love for it, not in spite of it?

I’m only pretending to be surprised though. Politics is a very tribal thing. All of us (liberals and lefties as much as conservatives) tend to subscribe to approved clusters of beliefs, rather than working out for ourselves what we think about each individual issue. The newspapers we read, peer group pressure, our own inertia – all tend to have the effect of homogenising these clusters of beliefs, so that we end up with a comforting ‘us’ and ‘them’ (and thus a linear dimension – left-right, liberal-conservative – to represent the entire multi-dimensional space of possibilities). These are ‘our’ views. Those are ‘theirs’. And of course ‘their’ views are always based on ignorance, fear, self-interest, or a refusal to face reality, while ‘ours’ are always based on wisdom, courage, decency and deep understanding of the world.

It so happens that a concern about climate change has come in America and elsewhere to be associated with the political left. Research cited by Giddens in this book shows that Democrats are almost twice as likely as Republicans to believe that global warming is a reality, and more than three times as likely to believe that it is the result of human activity. That’s why the woman in the clip says ‘but’. She knows this is an idea that is associated with ‘them’, and she wants to make clear that her essential loyalties remain, nevertheless, unchanged. (I know how she feels. It’s uncomfortable to admit to a view that doesn’t fit the consensus of the group that assumes you are ‘one of us’.)

One of things that I appreciated about this book is that Giddens identifies this as a problem. A concern about climate change really should not be associated with a particular political position: (a) because a change in the global weather system is going to affect everyone’s children and grandchildren, whatever they happen to believe about the appropriate mix in society between state and private enterprise (and all the other issues on which we disagree politically), (b) because nothing useful is going to happen if this remains just another political football to be kicked back and forth between two teams:

“Responding to climate change should not be seen as a left-right issue. Climate change has to be a question that transcends party politics, and about which there is an overall framework of agreement that will endure across changes of government. (p 74)”

In the same vein, Giddens also argues that we need to be very careful not to automatically conflate climate change with the usual ‘green’ concerns. Being ‘green’ is of course another cluster of beliefs and lifestyles, which are assumed to all belong together but may in fact need to be disaggregated:

“For example, a key green value is that of ‘staying close to nature’ – or, more briefly put – conservation. It is a value that has a certain aesthetic quality to it. It is very possibly important to the good life, but it has no direct relevance to climate change. Clashes can easily occur between conservationist values and policies relevant to global warming – for example, conservationists might resist the building of a nuclear power station, or a wind farm, in a particular area of the country.”

Greens of course (with a few exceptions) usually hate nuclear power, and Giddens acknowledges that “the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the possibility of nuclear terrorism and the difficulty of disposing of nuclear waste” but one of the overall thrusts of this book is that “no course of action (or inaction) is without risks; and that, consequently, there is always a balance of risks and opportunities to be considered in any policy context.”

He calls this ‘the percentage principle’ (as opposed to the precautionary one). I know it well from my career in social work. We can’t eliminate the possibility of nasty thing happenings, not least because reducing the risk of one nasty thing typically increases the risk of others. If we are to avoid the worst consequences of runaway climate change, therefore, we will be need to willing to take some risks, and to accept some changes that, in themselves, we don’t particularly welcome.

I wouldn’t say this was a great book. It helped me to crystallise a few existing thoughts, rather than providing me with new ones that had never occurred to me. But it was worth reading.

Climate change is an odd kind of threat, as Giddens points out:

“Since the dangers… aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life, many will sit on their hands and do nothing… Yes waiting until such dangers are visible and acute… before being stirred to serious action will be too late.”

He calls this Gidden’s paradox. I’m not sure the thought is so original as to justify him naming it after himself, but the problem is real enough. The way to get round it is to keep foregrounding the issue, and for that reason, as much as any other, I think this book is to be welcomed.

The sound of the underground train

I was sitting the other day in an underground train in London, surrounded by strangers.

Books and films often turn underground trains into symbols of urban alienation and loneliness, as in the Eurythmics song ‘This city never sleeps.’ And, if I think about it at all, that’s how I tend to see them: machines hurtling through dark tunnels, people who don’t know each other avoiding eye contact or interaction of any kind.

But it struck me on this occasion that there was entirely different way to see it. How amazing that so many people can coexist so peacefully in such close proximity, feeling so unthreatened that they can peacefully read, listen to music, play with their smartphones, until the point where the path of their individual lives diverges from the route of the train, when they join other peaceful streams of people, on moving stairways, streets, buses, and continue on their way. Why call this alienation, why not call it a remarkable ability to respect each other’s space? I suddenly found the scene incredibly reassuring and benign. Cram this many chimpanzees into a space this size and they’d go crazy with aggression and fear.

Why go for the gloomier image, the darker story, when there is more than one alternative? David Brin raises a related question here, when he wonders why books and films routinely portay society and its institutions as stupid, dangerous and malign when, after all, they are also what delivers the food to our plates, the power to our plugs, the roads we travel on, the ambulances that pick us up when we fall…

I think we rather like the fantasy of being surrounded by darkness and danger. It allows us to imagine we aren’t the tame and domesticated creatures that most of us really are.

Belgium’s doughnut island

In order to move away from fossil fuels, we need to move towards either nuclear or renewable energy . Both of these, for different reasons, create problems of inflexibility of supply. Nuclear can’t just turned on and off to respond to fluctuations in demand (actually, this isn’t so easy with gas or coal stations either), and renewables are dependant on sources outside of human control. Gloomier souls sometimes suggest that renewables, for this reason, are very little use.

But there just needs to be a way of storing surplus energy when demand is lower than supply. Dinorwig power station in N Wales is an example of a large-scale solution to this problem. It pumps water uphill at times of surplus power, and then lets it run downhill again to generate power when extra power is needed.

I’m no engineer, I’m not even someone that likes to fix his own bike, but I enjoy thinking about these problems, and what interests me is that it isn’t so very hard, even for a not-particularly well-informed lay person, to dream up solutions. I wondered whether fly-wheels could be used, for instance, and when I did a little internet search, it turned out that one fairly large fly-wheel-based plant actually does exist.

A more fanciful idea of mine (or so I thought) was to construct a large doughnut-shaped island in the sea out of which water could be pumped and then allowed to flow back in again. I’ve just found that the Belgian government really does propose to build just such an island (Details here.)

I’m not suggesting here that flywheels and doughnuts islands are ‘the answer’. I’m saying that, if even I can think of solutions, then this really isn’t such an insurmountable problem.

Climate change denialists are one thing, but climate change fatalists are also pretty dangerous: the ones who say that change is happening alright but it’s just too difficult to fix. That could so easily become a self-fulfilling prophesy, and therefore yet another one of those dangerous positive feedback loops that threaten to exacerbate the problem.

Look at the resources, brainpower and effort that is now put into extracting petrochemicals from ever more difficult places (tar sands, the arctic, mile-deep ocean beds). Is it really so difficult to imagine that a low-carbon economy could not be achieved by the same kind of commitment and effort?

Dark Eden shortlisted for BSFA award

Dark Eden is shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA award for best novel. I’m pleased pleased.

Si Scott is also in the Best Artwork shortlist for the beautiful dark cover he made for the book.

The other four novels shortlisted are:

Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)

Intrusion by Ken Macleod (Orbit)

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

2312 by Kim Stanley-Robinson (Orbit)

More details here.

The White Man’s Burden

I was nauseated on sight by a new ad from Oxfam: “Let’s make Africa famous for its epic landscapes, not hunger,” it said. And then “Help end hunger”.

It struck me as pretty patronising to suggest that Africa isn’t known for anything other than either beautiful scenery or starving people. And what arrogance, to suggest that somehow foreign NGOs could ‘end hunger’ in Africa. Do African people themselves have no agency? Might as well talk about ‘benighted heathens’ or ‘the dark continent’ or the ‘white man’s burden’.

It seems I wasn’t the only one to react this way. See this piece for instance.

Meanwhile here’s a picture of a street scene in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Neither beautiful scenery nor starving children, just people getting on with things, the same as anywhere.

Street scene Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.

From Wikipedia. Photo by Helge Fahrnberger. Full credits and copyright details here

A stranger

There is my wife, my two daughters and my son, and then there is a fifth family member who they all know but I have never met.

Oh I know what he looks like, at least in the sense that I can identity him in a picture, but if I hear a recording of his voice it’s the voice of a stranger, and if I see a video of him, his mannerisms and body language are quite different from those I’d expect. I’ve very rarely seen what he looks like when he doesn’t know he’s being observed, only momentary glimpses in the background of pictures of other people.

I’ve been told many things about him: the things he characteristically does do and the things he characteristically doesn’t. As I grow older, these stories add up in my mind into a somewhat more rounded picture than I used to have, but I’m still capable of being completely surprised, and there are still some characteristics which baffle me, even though I’ve been told about them so often that I know they must be real.

I wonder if I’d really have any sense of him at all, if it wasn’t for these reports from others. It’s true that I have access to lots of information about him that no one else has, but it would be such a strange and limited picture if I had to rely on that information alone, like that odd remote view you get of the sky and the outside world from underwater, looking up through the silvered undersides of waves.

150 slaves

“If we were to add together the power of all the fuel-fed machines that we rely on to light and heat our homes, transport us, and otherwise keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed, and then compared that total with the amount of power that can be generated by the human body, we would find that each American has over 150 ‘energy slaves’ working for us twenty-four hours a day.”

Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over, p 31.

YA?

Genre labelling can be annoying. I have more than once moaned here about the fact that a lot of people won’t touch my books, simply because they are ‘science fiction’. Another genre label that I’ve seen applied several times recently to Dark Eden is ‘YA’. (According to Wikipedia: “Young-adult fiction or young adult literature (often abbreviated as YA), also juvenile fiction, is fiction written, published, or marketed to adolescents and young adults”.)

Well, the book is certainly primarily about young adults – the two main narrators/protagonists of this book are both (in Earth terms) in their teens – and I’m very pleased and proud to hear that teenagers and young adults are enjoying the book. But I didn’t write the book for teenagers or young adults, or for middle-aged adults or indeed for any specific demographic group. I try to write books and stories that I’d like to read. And personally I don’t seek out stories with characters of my own age and background (how dull that would be), or stories aimed at my own age group.

The assumption behind labelling Dark Eden as YA seems to be that, because a book is about a certain type of person, it must therefore be written specifically for that type of person. It’s an assumption you can often also see being made in the way that individual books are marketed. (For example, ‘This is a book for anyone who has ever loved and lost’).

Well, I suppose one reason for reading a book is to look for role models and validation, people you can identify with, people who will confirm that it’s okay to be the person you are, but it would be rather limiting if that was the only reason we read books. And unhealthy and atomising too. (Do we want each age group and each gender to occupy its own separate little cultural bubble?) The point of reading fiction is surely to imaginatively experience lives that are different from your own, not just to look into a mirror and see some sort of idealised version of yourself.

Dark Eden seems to appeal to a lot of different people, men, women, young, old, atheists, Christians… etc etc. And that’s exactly what I wanted it to do.

Sweet Home, by Carys Bray

“I’d pestered and pestered to be allowed outside to play in the fine scatter of snow and eventually my mother gave in. She packed me into my red snowsuit, fastening the zip so high that it caught my throat. Then she escorted my outside and positioned me on the patio. My eyes were awash with unshed tears as my father called, ‘Say cheese.’ Afterwards, when I wanted to play they said it was too cold and made me come straight back indoors. They have forgotten this. It is something that has been… unremembered. They refer to the photograph as ‘that lovely picture of you having fun in the snow.'”

In 2010, I was one of the judges for the Edge Hill Short Story Award. As well as the main prize, which is given for single-author collections (that year it was won by Jeremy Dyson for The Cranes that Build the Cranes), we were also asked to give an award for individual short stories submitted by students on Edge Hill University’s creative writing programme. This proved to be an easy task, for we were all immediately agreed that the most outstanding submission was a story by Carys Bray that began:

“I have been looking for a baby to borrow for a number of weeks. I’ve offered to look after several, even some I don’t know very well. But their mothers seem suspicious. I ask nicely. I say please and I smile. I remember to ask if it’s a girl or a boy and how old it is, although I’m more interested in its length than anything.”

The story, ‘Just in case’, is included in this new collection from Salt, along with 16 others. They are all more or less about domestic life. Many of them, like ‘Just in Case’ are downright dark, and others are sad and bleak. A dementing old women in ‘My burglar’ hides her possessions in strange places because she is convinced that a burglar comes in the night, and their resulting absence then becomes more evidence of the threat, and a reason to hide yet more things. The ‘Wooden mum’, worn out by the incessant crazy-making demands of her autistic son Tom and the cruelly underming ‘help’ of her mother-in-law, reflects on the moment when Tom was born, and she imagined herself the happiest woman in the world. A father in ‘The Rescue’ waits outside the flat of his heroin-addicted son in a concrete corridor in a tower block, for someone from somewhere to come and rescue him, as those Chilean miners were rescued from underground.

But this book is not just an orgy of bleakness and despair. The quote I started with cames from a story called ‘Love: terms and conditions’. It begins with a woman visiting her parents with her husband and three children, and being reminded of her own wretched childhood, but it ends with an account of how she has managed nevertheless to achieve for her own children ‘a family where love doesn’t track a base rate of obedience’ (what a brilliant line!). You can see this is hard for her, you can see that sometimes she tries too hard – at one point, remembering how she wasn’t allowed to play in the snow, she tries to get her reluctant children out of their warm beds to come out and enjoy the snow in the middle of the night – but she has succeeded. Life is often sad, and that can make us afraid to tell hopeful stories for fear that we are sugar-coating the truth, but this story really earns its happy ending.

It’s a difficult thing too, I think, to write about family life, which unlike wars and love affairs and murders and all the other staples of fiction, does not tend to come with a beginning, a middle and an end, but follows a daily cycle, on and on for years. But it’s a trick that Carys Bray pulls off in various ways. The final story in the collection, ‘On the way home’, works like a relay race in which the baton is passed on from family to family. In the final scene, a little girl called Anna realises that her mother is fed up with her for grazing her leg and making a hole in her tights. “The mild rebuke presses a slump on Anna’s shoulders. Mummy is disappointed again.”

Her mother tells her to wait while she goes into a shop. When she comes out again, she is holding a lollypop in a bag.

“‘ Don’t worry about the tights, sweetheart. That looks sore. Does it hurt?’

“‘A bit,’ Anna admits.

“‘I know something that always makes people feel better,’ Mummy says. She hands the lollypop to Anna. Then she crouches on the pavement of Bridge Road and places winter-cool lips on the exposed cap of Anna’s knee where it pokes through the hole in her tights, round as a biscuit.

“And on the nobble at the base of Mummy’s neck, in the delicate fuzz of hair, Anna places a soft, dry kiss of her own.”

What a great ending. It made me wonder why literature deals so little with such kisses, and treats them so lightly on the whole, and yet deals so often with, and treats so very seriously, the quickly fading kisses of romantic love.