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How empty and worthless is the power of kings

At first glance, it is hardly surprising that oil companies and the like fund efforts to debunk the science on climate change.   It’s in their interests to do so, right?  Just as it was in the interests of tobacco companies to try to debunk the evidence of links between smoking and cancer.

But then you think, hang on, don’t oil executives have children and grandchildren, the same as the rest of us?

This is something more complex than cynical self-interest.  It’s a deep category error.   Climate change is being seen as an essentially political threat, a thing to be outmanoeuvred, fobbed off, discredited, or managed through spin and symbolic placation.   There’s a failure to understand that this isn’t about interest groups, it isn’t about the politics of left versus right.  It’s about air, and water, and ice.

“Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings,” Canute is supposed to have said, when the tide refused to obey his command to stop, and began to wash around his feet.

It’s not nature that’s fragile, it’s us

I think we’ve got it all wrong about  our relationship with nature.   For years we’ve been presented with the idea of nature as something precious and fragile and vulnerable, which is threatened by us crass and oafish humans.  This invites a hard-nosed, macho, ‘realist’ response: ‘Tough!’, ‘Too bad!’, ‘Nature’s going to have to look after itself.’

But nature isn’t fragile.  (What hubris!)  Nature is exploding supernovae.  It’s the eruption of Krakatoa.  It’s Hurricane Katrina.  It’s the tsunami that devastated Japan.  It’s the force that created the dinosaurs, and the asteroid that destroyed them.  It’s the electric storms that can been seen from space flashing continuously across the surface of this violent violent planet.

The question isn’t how to protect nature.  Nature doesn’t give a damn what we do.  The question is whether we want to go on being part of nature, or whether we’re just going to chuck in the towel and let it sweep us away.

(Thoughts prompted by this rather hard-hitting post about impending climate catastrophe.)

(NASA photo of Hurricane Katrina).

Dark Eden on Daily Mail’s books of year list!

Dark Eden is on Daily Mail’s books of the year list too.  Harry Mount writes:

“I reviewed this first novel [sic] in January and it has haunted me all year. It’s set on Eden, a horribly ill-named distant planet that is freezing-cold and sunless, lit only by the stars and weird trees that give off a little light and heat.

“Humans have colonised Eden by accident after two astronauts were marooned there. Now, 163 years later, their descendants eke out a desperate existence, hemmed in by forbidding mountains, trapped by fear and the cold and the loss of centuries’ worth of knowledge and technology.

“Our hero is John Redlantern, a bold teenager who breaks away from the rest of his hopelessly maroooned tribe and heads off to explore the frozen wilderness that lies beyond the mountains. His expedition, the plight of the rest of the tribe and Eden’s alien landscape and fauna are all marvellously well done in a book that’s assured and truly memorable.”

Slightly more arcanely, it’s also on the Lowy Institute’s books of the year list here.

The heat

“The 4°C scenarios are devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems.

“And most importantly, a 4°C world is so different from the current one that it comes with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our ability to anticipate and plan for future adaptation needs.”

The above comes from that well-known bunch of hippies, the World Bank, who add that “4 degrees Celsius… is what scientists are nearly unanimously predicting by the end of the century, without serious policy changes.”

“Turn Down the Heat: why a warmer world must be avoided” from The World Bank.

Ripples

I found this clip interesting.  It’s about a woman who’s seen the film ‘Chasing Ice’ and been convinced that global warming is real, having apparently previously been such a ferocious climate change denier that when people talked about it she ordered them out of her home.

Two things struck me in particular.

First of all the bit where she feels the need to say ‘I’m proud to be an American but…’  You wonder what on Earth patriotism has to do with it, and then you realise that no one’s belief system really works as a set of separate propositions.  She’d subscribed to a cluster of values, climate change denial came as part of the package along with patriotism, and now she was experiencing some dissonance.

The second thing that struck me, and I found it touching, is that she spoke of ‘undoing the harm’ that she’d done.  I’m not sure everyone really gets the fact that, if you deny something that’s a real threat, or make fun of it, then you’re actually doing harm, because we are actually in the world, and what we say spreads out like ripples in a pond.

God knows how much harm a figure like Jeremy Clarkson has done, for instance, with his jokes that imply that this sort of thing isn’t really for red-blooded males to concern themselves with.

I saw him chairing Have I Got News For You, the other night, and the not-very-macho Will Gomperts was on the panel, having to deal with Clarkson’s challenges to his manhood.  Sure enough when wind power came up as a subject, Gomperts saw his chance and promptly rubbished wind turbines, saying they were absolutely hideous things and he much prefered (big macho) powerstations.  He got a raised eyebrow of mildly surprised approval from Clarkson and looked very pleased with himself.

After all what’s more important than your manhood?

Atheism: the new Christianity?

Although I obviously take violent exception to his description of ‘the Adam and Eve fable’ as ‘one of the most despised modes’ of the SF genre, I was interested by this article by Adam Roberts in which he argues that atheism is, as it were, ‘the new Christianity’.

‘Moses brought 10 commandments; Jesus replaces them with two — to love God, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself,’ Roberts writes.  The stripping away of rules and structures and outward forms is a constant theme of the Jesus of the New Testament, and this does indeed make it rather ironic that Christianity has crystalised into a religion of ‘beliefs’.  (And of course a religion which has put many, many people to horrible deaths for not having exactly the right ‘beliefs’.)

Roberts is particularly interesting here on this thing called ‘belief’, which means something entirely different in a religious context from what it means in everyday life.  And he concludes with a paradoxical argument that actually makes some sense to me, which is that ‘believing’ in God actually has the effect of putting distance between a person and God.

Supporting evidence for this, I think, is contained in the article by Ken MacLeod in the same magazine, which I discussed here.   He describes how as a child he didn’t recognise a spiritual experience when it hit him smack in the face (my words not his), because, although he accepted the ‘beliefs’ inculcated  in him by his religious upbringing, they had led him to think of entities like God as being something remote and out there, ‘like Australia.’

*  *  *

It’s interesting how selective ‘belief’ is.  All this fuss about about women bishops and gay priests, when the gospels contain no instructions on either matter (but do clearly set out the above general principle that there are no commandments other than loving one’s neighbour and God).   And yet the actual sayings of Jesus about the need to give up material wealth in order to enter the kingdom of heaven seem not to be taken seriously at all!

The secret sea

‘The Caramel Forest’ and ‘Day 29’ are both set in the forests of the planet Lutania.

This imagined place owes a lot to the Strugatsky brothers’ The Snail on the Slope, which also describes a strange forest where human inhabitants live among strange alien life forms, while a scientific agency sits on a cliff above.  Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris has a similar set-up of human scientists hovering above a weird, utterly inscrutable, living ocean, and the ‘castle’ in ‘The Caramel Forest’ was suggested to me by the inexplicable structures that emerged from time to time from the seething surface of Solaris.

Both Solaris and Snail on the Slope are books that refuse to resolve themselves.  One way of looking at this is to say that such books deny the reader the pleasure of tied-up loose ends.  But you could equally well say that they refuse to snatch back from the reader an encounter with the alien. Tidy endings can be acts of vandalism.

‘Hansel and Gretel’ is in the mix here too of course, along with all the other sinister/enticing forests in fairy tales. (Laura Diehl, who did the illustration of ‘The Caramel Forest’ for the Asimov’s cover is primarily a children’s book illustrator.  A great choice.)  So, I think, is a stoned and dreamy LP by a jazz-tinged 1970s prog-rock band called Caravan, whose title track began:

In the land of grey and pink where only boy-scouts stop to think
They’ll be coming back again, those nasty grumbly grimblies
And they’re climbing down your chimney, yes they’re trying to get in
Come to take your money – isn’t it a sin, they’re so thin?

*  *  *

The ‘goblins’ in Lutania are able to stir things up in people’s minds.  For most people, this is unwelcome.  They are forced to think about painful or scary things that they’ve tried to bury.  They feel invaded.   But for Cassie in ‘The Caramel Forest’ it’s actually a relief to hear the voices in her head confirming what she already knows about her parents’ unhappy marriage and her mother’s lack of interest in being a mum. Better to have it confirmed than to leave it unspoken.

Odd, solitary Stephen in ‘Day 29’ is a different case.  His secrets are so deeply buried that even the goblins can’t winkle them out.  But they can still taunt him with the fact that he’s hiding things.

(This post refers to two stories, both originally published in Asimov’s, which are included in the Peacock Cloak collection.)

SF novel of the year, 2012!

I’ve just found out, two days late, that Dark Eden was The Sunday Times’ SF novel of the year for 2012.   I’m very pleased.

Alison Flood, the Sunday Times’ SF reviewer wrote:

“…Written in an extraordinary vernacular, this is a stunning novel and a beautiful evocation of a truly alien world.  I have thrust it on countless people this year and they’ve all loved it.