And, like any animal who starves to death, with the dignity of acceptance. The narrator relates all this as simple facts, with the same equanimity that also characterizes his recounting of the infrastructural and societal breakdown and of the many failed attempts to save and rebuild, to scavenge and survive in a world that has been stretched beyond its breaking point. One could easily argue that The Great Bay is a post-apocalyptic narrative. After all, it takes the near-complete collapse of human civilization as its starting point and then shows individual humans who try to survive in its aftermath, trying to make do with the limited resources and machinery available.
However, the novel's unusual time frame and the nature of the disaster complicate this classification. Accordingly, the global catastrophe in Pendell's narrative is not so much an apocalypse as it is a fateful combination of several unintended consequences of scientific, technological, and societal risk taking and decision making. Pendell's Collapse is the moment in which risks turn into hazards and, ultimately, into catastrophe. Similarly important is the fact that the global disaster doesn't really provide a clean slate for a fresh start, as is often the case in post-apocalyptic narratives.
The nature of climate change prevents this, since the human CO2 emissions that are already in the atmosphere keep forcing the climate even though there are very few additional emissions after the Collapse. These changes happen very slowly, over the course of almost sixteen thousand years, and they affect the lives of individual humans in very different ways during this long time span. Carbon dioxide levels approached those of the early Eocene.
Industrial outputs of CO2 had stopped, but a long chain-reaction was in progress, and CO2 in the atmosphere is long-lived. Permafrost thawing was releasing large amounts of methane. The manmade aerosols and other particulate matter that had been masking the heating from greenhouse gases were gone In the West, summer temperatures of degrees Fahrenheit were more and more common, the heat spells lasting for a month a time New records would have been set everywhere, if anyone had been keeping records.
Rather than a post-apocalyptic text, The Great Bay is therefore a risk narrative in which crises continue to be underway all around and their impacts cannot ever be fully or at all mitigated. In order to show the human dimensions of these impacts, the representation of large-scale anthropogenic changes to the physical properties of the planet is combined with stories of individual humans who try to survive in an increasingly strange environment. These texts narrate a wide range of human responses to their changing environment, many of which are futile or tragic.
Right after the collapse, a girl named Amanda is sent away from her home in Los Angeles by her infected mother so that she can find her father and be safe. She meets Inez, who is also looking for her father, and together the two girls try to make their way north, meeting dozens of strangers along the way, some of whom help them while others try to rape or kill them. In the end, they seek the protection of a gang of bikers and live among them.
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The need for protection and community looms large in many of the stories, as does the need for spiritual and religious consolation. Now the ocean is coming up because the ice is melting. We all knew, but none of us wanted to change. So the change came to us. That's what people are supposed to do I don't think anybody survived who wasn't in some kind of group.
It no longer seems to matter. What counts in this group and in others like it is nothing but sheer survival. Although The Great Bay again and again affirms the human need for sustaining and sustainable communities, it puts a large question mark behind the ability of such communities to withstand what's coming. Nothing built by humans, the novel suggests, can really withstand what's coming, simply because human lives and their products are no match for the forceful processes that have been set in motion during the early centuries of the Anthropocene.
In the course of a few millennia, the ecological effects of the Anthropocene thus have become naturalized, but for the contemporary reader, the dramatic devolution of humanity as a result of dramatic environmental changes will in all likelihood seem strange and unsettling.
The narrative's many protagonists must live within these strange new geographies, dwelling in the midst of prolonged environmental crisis because they have no other choice. However, despite the many risks faced by individual humans and their often tragic fates, the text makes it difficult to care very much for any of them. Pendell's laconic tone and cursory treatment of his protagonists creates a distance between readers and the human suffering that is presented to them, not only in the Panoptic sections, but also in the short vignettes that introduce us to individual future humans.
The reader never gets to know any of them well enough to have much of an idea of how they would react in a given situation. In a way, this narrative strategy mirrors the continuously waning influence of humans over their own destinies and that of the environments around them. They are of very little consequence not only to their immediate and distant surroundings but also to the reader.
However, since, as Eric Otto has pointed out, effective cognitive estrangement requires elements of both strangeness and familiarity, 61 a certain intimacy with the characters is needed to fully understand and care about their fates in an increasingly strange environment.
Without such empathetic ties there is little interest on the part of readers in the goals a character seeks to achieve and only very limited affective engagement in that character's story. Reducing human protagonists to brief and mostly unremarkable and inconsequential presences on a dramatically changing planet might mirror the actual future we are facing, but it also runs the danger of disappointing the expectations and needs of many readers, who savor fictional texts not least because of the emotional experience they offer them.
Since the lives of individual humans are reduced to unrelated snapshots scattered throughout the text, it is ultimately the story of the Great Bay itself — and by extension the planet as a whole — that provides some kind of continuity and potentially sustains the interest of the reader. Pendell's Earth is no avenging Gaia but rather a planet that reacts with great sensitivity to physical and chemical forcing. The changes it undergoes as a result of human activity are quite dramatic: By , sea level had risen eighty feet. If Antarctica continued to melt, sea levels could rise another two hundred feet.
Typhoons moved to high latitudes in the Atlantic, mixing the waters. The Gulf Stream gradually found a stable course, and heat began moving again to the British Isles and Northern Europe, ending their short little ice age, but not the global flooding of the ocean. The earth had entered a Pliocene climate in half a millennium. Rainfall was heavy in the far northern and southern latitudes, but the sub-tropics were deserts. Vegetation zones shifted too quickly for many plants and trees or the creatures who depended on them to follow.
About two thirds of the world's plant and animal species died out. It is an ever stranger world that Pendell presents to us, as his nonhuman protagonist changes and develops as a result of anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. Eventually, the glimpses into human life get shorter and shorter, dwindling to flashes as the planet heads inescapably into the next Ice Age. There would be no surface deposits of ores or minerals, no underground reserves of energy, and far less resilience in the biosphere.
The Great Bay represents an ambitious attempt to tell the story of anthropogenic climate change on a time scale that is large enough to accommodate its relatively slow nature. Unlike Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow or even Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy, the novel does not compress time in order to make climatic processes more easily accessible and dramatic for readers.
Whether a better writer would have been able to provide them with more engaging snapshots of future human lives remains open to debate. However, the story Pendell tells about the future of planet Earth is nevertheless fascinating and disturbing. Rather than fostering empathetic ties to individual human protagonists the text succeeds in instilling in its readers a sense of awe and wonder in the face of these great transformations.
Equally remarkable are his imaginings when it comes to human adaptation to the strange new world he has created. There is little left of nineteenth and twentieth century beliefs in the human domination of nature by the means of science and technology. Human communities are shown to be fragile and extremely vulnerable to changes in their environment, and the knowledge of all scientific advances of the past few hundred years is lost forever. Despite its limitations, Pendell's narrative about the future life of the Great Bay thus is a grim reminder of the risks produced by what we have come to call the Anthropocene.
Dale Pendell, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, Polity Press, , 5. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Westview Press, , 4. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, , 2. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: Oxford University Press, , James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: Bloomsbury, , ix.
For a detailed analysis of the use of apocalyptic modes of narration in the environmentalist discourse and fiction, see Chapter 5 of Greg Garrard's Ecocriticism London and New York Routledge, Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism Columbus: Ohio State University Press, St Martin's Griffin, Routledge, , Basic Books, , Peter Ward, The Flooded Earth: Basic Books, , 1. Based on the scientific literature on climate change, Six Degrees is organized into six chapters with each chapter describing the possible ecological as well as social and political impacts at a specific average temperature, starting with a rise of one degree and ending at a rise of six degrees Celsius.
Our Future on a Hotter Planet London: HarperCollins, , xxii. There were fundamentalist cults, Pentecostal cults—even the Methodists returned to the tents. Obviously times change, and now that thermonuclear war might conceivably destroy mankind generally I can't accept the better dead than Red argument. I'm perfectly willing to have the better dead than Red argument on an individual basis—if you'd rather die than give in to the Communists, fine!
But is it wise to kill the entire human race rather than to give in to Communism? There, you figure, if you give in, you might in some future generation win out again. For the entire human race to be dead is final. At different times in my life, I might give different answers to the same question. I see now, and I wouldn't dwell on it any longer, but we need to add that we wouldn't have been giving in to a superior civilization, had we given in to the Nazis.
Smashwords – I Think, ThereforeA Science Fiction Story – a book by Rebecca M. Senese
The Gods Themselves was your first SF novel in a long time. Throughout the '60s you were producing magazine articles and books by which people could further their knowledge of science. Why did you stop, and why did you start writing SF again? In the first place I never really stopped writing SF altogether; I would always turn out a small story or two every once in a while.
I didn't write any SF novels because I got interested in writing other things, and an SF novel is a very time consuming thing. I don't think I can write an SF novel in less than seven months, and in those seven months, even when I'm not typing, I'm thinking about the novel a lot. Whereas, if I write nonfiction, it goes very quickly, I don't get involved with endless thinking, and I can turn out a book a month.
That's fun, for me. I like to be typing, I like to be turning out books; I don't like to stay awake nights thinking that maybe I ought to change the plot to include this or that—you know, it gets very difficult. SF is the most difficult thing there is to write, and I'm essentially a lazy person, so I like to write other things when I can. Even mysteries are easier to write. My mystery novel Murder at the ABA was written in seven weeks. I couldn't for the life of me write an SF novel in seven weeks!
Could you be more specific about why, other than the amount of time, SF is so much harder to write?
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In SF there are two aspects: This society, if you do it properly, should be just as interesting as the plot itself; in other words, the reader should be just as eager to read about the society and to picture it as to see the development of the plot. But you don't want to subordinate one to the other: In the end, therefore, you have to maintain this perfect balance, as I think I maintain it, for instance, in The Caves of Steel. It's hard to work it out.
You have to do a lot of thinking and writing and rewriting, whereas in mysteries you're using the present society. When you're writing non fiction, of course, you don't even have a plot.
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Is it fair to generalize, then, that for you the powers of invention are taxed more fully in SF than in other forms? Yes, provided it's good SF.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Bad SF is easy to write. If you really try to turn out a piece of good SF, it just takes everything you've got in you. At least in my case, it does. In the case of The Gods Themselves , I started out to write a 5, word short story, and it got away from me. The style of that novel seems significantly different from that of your earlier work, especially the characterization and the idea of an alternate world.
Was that the first time you approached that? Well, I rarely deal with extraterrestrial beings in my stories; some thought because I couldn't handle it. I suppose that did irritate me a little; so when I wrote The Gods Themselves , I deliberately placed the middle third in another universe and worked up a set of extraterrestrials which were not just humanoid creatures, not just human beings with antennae, but really completely different in every possible respect. I tried so hard to show them that I could do it that I turned out what I think—and some people would agree—is the best story of extraterrestrials ever written.
Also, my novels and stories never contain explicit sex and very rarely contain romance; my explanation, when someone asks, is that I'm a pure person, at least in my fictional life. This they tend to disbelieve, and say that I just don't have the capacity to deal with sex, so in the other universe of The Gods Themselves I had that section of the plot completely involved with sex—every line of it, so the plot made no sense without sex and all its details. Of course, it was extraterrestrial sex and, therefore, nothing like ours; but that's all right. I'd like to ask another question about the Foundation series and your approach to psychohistory.
Much of that, at least theoretically, reminds me of the current "think tanks," the Hudson Institute, and others. Did you have any of that in mind? No, because the essence of the Foundation appeared in a series of eight stories in Astounding Science Fiction. The whole notion of psychohistory appeared in the very first story, which appeared in the June Astounding; it was written in , when I was 21 years old.
That was well before "think tanks," and I had no knowledge of them when I wrote it. Virtually all readers who have made their thoughts about your Foundation books public have pretty much attended exclusively to what you yourself emphasize: Yet it seems to me that a quite different, and counterbalancing, conception also informs the original trilogy, at least.
You've just reminded us that the earliest stories in your trilogy came out at about the same time as, say, The Hamlet and "The Bear" ; and it seems to me that those stories of Faulkner's have a certain kinship with yours. What I mean is that your stories, too, appear to belong to the American tradition of the Tall Tale, featuring as they do the adventures and exploits of individuals of legendary proportions. I therefore wonder to what extent you conceived of them as such, and also to what extent your subsequent, and exclusive, stress on the psychohistorical—i.
You must understand that of all the successful writers I am probably the least well read. As a youngster, I read indiscriminately at the local library—which meant, for the most part, l9th century fiction and 20th century non fiction. By the time I grew old enough to move into 20th century fiction, it was too late: I was too busy writing to read anything but material directly related to what I was writing.
This admission is in order to explain that I have never read one word that Faulkner has written—right down to this day. I don't advance this as either praiseworthy or blameworthy, but merely to indicate that I have never been influenced by him directly. It is conceivable that I have been influenced by someone who was influenced by Faulkner, but I have no way of telling that. As for psychohistory versus the "tall story" While I have larger than-life heroes, that is just because pulp fiction always did The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc. That, however, was not what I was interested in.
I was interested in psychohistory from the very start; and I was careful to show that when heroes had psychohistory on their side, they won; when they did not, they lost. Of course, my fascination with psychohistory altered with the decades. By the s, I had come to the decision that psychohistory would get nowhere if human ways of thought, human social systems, etc. Beginning with Foundation's Edge , psychohistory as a tool was de emphasized and I began to consider fundamentally different social systems—that of the first Foundation, that of the second Foundation, that of Gaia.
And I continue it still further in my latest book, Foundation and Earth. I'd like to ask you a question about SF as literature. You have written during the period of greatest change in SF. What projection would you make about the direction in which SF is going now? SF is the only branch of fictional literature that is flourishing. In general, fiction is in the doldrums, certainly compared to what it was when I first came into the field. In those days there were literally dozens upon dozens of "pulp" magazines; there were "slicks" that published fiction; there were all sorts of literary quarterlies; and publishers were eager to put out novels.
The beginning writer had plenty of places to go. Nowadays the "pulps" are gone; the "slicks" that are left don't publish fiction; there are no literary quarterlies; publishers don't like to publish fiction, especially first novels. As a result, young people who want to write are in a quandary. It's becoming more literary, more experimental in style, less science fiction, because a lot of the writers don't happen to be full of expertise in science. They don't think they ought to be; they don't think we ought to have science fiction, but speculative fiction in which you speculate about the future in any style you happen to like.
And I suppose they're right. In the future, as long as we have a future, SF will broaden, become more dilute, and spread out until it overlaps all of fiction. I think all people who write fiction are going to have to take into account certain SF trends, especially that society is changing faster and faster. Within this broad field of SF, there will be a narrower field of old fashioned SF, dealing entirely with scientists and science. I'll still be in that narrower field. You're very careful in your essay on social SF to specify that you're talking not about the term science generally but something like technology.
It seems to me that's what you're talking about here, because fields we now identify as sciences—psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology—do not lead to technologies. Obviously, if you're talking about SF in those terms, you're going to get a much broader definition. Yes, but in the Foundation trilogy I deliberately and specifically dealt with what we might call political science or the science of history, and developed a technology for it.
That was my attempt to broaden the notion of science in SF. On the other hand, we have extremely gifted writers like Harlan Ellison, who couldn't be less interested in science; he concentrates entirely on human beings and does it very effectively. It's only SF by courtesy, and he recognizes that. He's in the forefront of the movement to use the term "speculative fiction. Ray's stories have great poetic value. And he doesn't consider himself an SF writer. He's a fantasy writer; I called him at one point a social fiction writer, and he accepted that at the time. Probably Fahrenheit is as technological as most of what passes for SF.
But it's not very extrapolative. No, it's very hard to make these hard and fast boundaries. Everything fades into everything else. To what extent do you think "hard SF" is a preparation for books like Future Shock? I tend to agree with Toffler. It's difficult not to, and be human. I don't like change that upsets my well worn way of life, but I do know that change will take place. I may not like it, but I'm not outraged.
As a matter of fact, what we might call the "SF attitude"—"hard SF"—is essential if we are to survive as a technological society. Unfortunately, too many people just take it for granted that things won't change or that if they do they shouldn't, and you should make every effort to restore the status quo.
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As a result, we're not prepared for the changes, and we make no effort to direct them in optimum fashion. We're going to be overwhelmed in a couple of generations by the changes that are now taking place, most of which are undesirable. Unless we can look these changes boldly in the face, try to figure out what we ought to do to prevent these undesirable changes and to bring about desirable ones, to think hard about distinctions between desirable and undesirable ones, we are certainly going to go under.
Now, no matter what we do, we may go under, but I would prefer to do something which would give us a chance than do nothing, which would give us no chance at all. You produced for us the three laws of robotics, but how about coming up with three laws for human beings so that when we manufacture human beings by means of genetic engineering we can have the built in protections you gave us for robots. That's an interesting thought, which I've never considered.
Well, why don't I think about it? I'd hate to come up with something off the top of my head, because it wouldn't be as good as if I were to give it some thought, and because I might like to write a story about it. You wouldn't mind if I wrote one about it, too? It's your idea I'm stealing, right?