Sunday 20 November 2011

Apocalypse quite soon?

An interesting article on the possible forms that the end of the world might take in the science section of The Observer Review today. I've pasted the whole article below, or you can read it in its original context - along with reader comments - here.


Is the end of the world really nigh?

Science is moving ever closer to understanding how, and when, humanity may be extinguished

Alok Jha
The Observer,

    Sun storm
     
     
    An exceptionally strong magnetic storm would have deadly effects. Photograph: Alamy
    Judging by the run of successful natural disaster films in the past few years, people are fascinated by the idea of the end of the world. In Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, a virus ravaged the UK and beyond; an asteroid was the world-ending threat in Deep Impact and Armageddon; and climate change got a starring role in The Day After Tomorrow. In the real world, we don't know how the Earth (or humanity) might meet its end or when that will happen. Pondering and predicting the event has usually been a job for the world's great religions: all of them have some idea about how humans will meet their maker. Indeed, "the end" (or judgement day) is usually a deity's way of cleansing our planet, to allow a fresh race of people who are morally purer to repopulate the resulting clean slate. Usually, there is too much sin or debauchery and the time has come to start again. Stories of brimstone, fire and gods make good tales and do a decent job of stirring up the requisite fear and jeopardy. But made-up doomsday tales pale into nothing, creatively speaking, when contrasted with what is actually possible. Look through the lens of science and "the end" becomes much more interesting. Since the beginning of life on Earth, around 3.5 billion years ago, the fragile existence has lived in the shadow of annihilation. On this planet, extinction is the norm – of the 4 billion species ever thought to have evolved, 99% have become extinct. In particular, five times in this past 500 million years the steady background rate of extinction has shot up for a period of time. Something – no one knows for sure what – turned the Earth into exactly the wrong planet for life at these points and during each mass extinction, more than 75% of the existing species died off in a period of time that was, geologically speaking, a blink of the eye. One or more of these mass extinctions occurred because of what we could call the big, Hollywood-style, potential doomsday scenarios. If a big enough asteroid hit the Earth, for example, the impact would cause huge earthquakes and tsunamis that could cross the globe. There would be enough dust thrown into the air to block out the sun for several years. As a result, the world's food resources would be destroyed, leading to famine. It has happened before: the dinosaurs (along with more than half the other species on Earth) were wiped out 65 million years ago by a 10km-wide asteroid that smashed into the area around Mexico. Monica Grady, an expert in meteorites at the Open University, says it is a question of when, not if, a near-Earth object (NEO) collides with our planet. "Many of the smaller objects break up when they reach the Earth's atmosphere and have no impact. However, a NEO larger than 1km wide will collide with Earth every few hundred thousand years and a NEO larger than 6km, which could cause mass extinction, will collide with Earth every hundred million years. We are overdue for a big one." Other natural disasters include sudden changes in climate or immense volcanic eruptions. All of these could cause global catastrophes that would wipe out large portions of the planet's life, but, given we have survived for several hundreds of thousands of years while at risk of these, it is unlikely that a natural disaster such as that will cause catastrophe in the next few centuries. In addition, cosmic threats to our existence have always been with us, even thought it has taken us some time to notice: the collision of our galaxy, the Milky Way, with our nearest neighbour, Andromeda, for example, or the arrival of a black hole. Common to all of these threats is that there is very little we can do about them even when we know the danger exists, except trying to work out how to survive the aftermath. But in reality, the most serious risks for humans might come from our own activities. Our species has the unique ability in the history of life on Earth to be the first capable of remaking our world. But we can also destroy it. "Existential risks are a relatively novel phenomenon," writes Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, in the World Economic Forum's annual publication, Global Agenda. "With the exception of a species-destroying comet or asteroid impact (an extremely rare occurrence), there were probably no significant existential risks in human history until the mid-20th century and certainly none that it was within our power to do anything about." All too real are the human-caused threats born of climate change, excess pollution, depletion of natural resources and the madness of nuclear weapons. We tinker with our genes and atoms at our own peril. Nanotechnology, synthetic biology and genetic modification offer much potential in giving us better food to eat, safer drugs and a cleaner world, but they could also go wrong if misapplied or if we charge on without due care. Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society, warned in his 2003 book, Our Final Century?, that the odds of human civilisation surviving beyond 2100 are no more than 50%, given the easy access to technologies that could have global impacts, such as biological terrorism, or the potential adverse impacts of molecular nanotechnology. The first manmade existential risk, said Bostrom, might have been the first detonation of the atomic bomb. "At the time, there was some concern that the explosion might start a runaway chain-reaction by 'igniting' the atmosphere. Although we now know that such an outcome is physically impossible, an existential risk was nevertheless present then." Potential points of danger continue to come from the more successful achievements of our recent past. Our society is connected and computerised like never before and this has brought us big benefits in terms of trade, access to knowledge and education and better communications. But those same interconnections can spread viruses (human and computer) ever faster. A skilled terrorist cell (or intelligent machine) could compromise power systems, steal or delete financial data and wreck supply chains, all of which are crucial for the modern world to function. A failure in a digital system in the United States can spread to China or Australia in seconds. It is perhaps ironic that the shadow of potential threats becomes ever longer the more light we shed on our understanding of the universe. Imagine that we took some of the most learned figures of the enlightenment period in western Europe – Isaac Newton, say, or Francis Bacon, or Bishop George Berkeley – and asked them how they thought the world would come to an end. There might be tales of divine intervention (Newton believed doomsday would be in the 21st century, calculated from clues in the Bible), or the idea that a bloody war would end up causing so many casualties that nations would suffer and wither away. There might be serious consideration of other fantastical theories, but none of these clever people could have told you about the doomsday potential of nuclear bombs, or black holes, or rising sea levels due to climate change. You can only know that the world could pop out of existence in a bout of vacuum decay, and be wiped out in a blink, if you know about quantum particles and the evolution of the universe since the big bang. We are beginning to understand that what we conceive of as "time" might one day disappear from our universe, giving us no sense of movement or direction. And let us hope we never run into a clump of the deadly strangelet matter anywhere in the universe. This is a substance nominally so very close to being made of the same stuff that makes up everything we see around us, yet coldly destructive of our way of life. Jason Matheny, a program manager at the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, routinely considers potential ways that humanity might be threatened. In a 2007 article for the journal Risk Analysis, he pondered the inevitable death of the sun. "In one billion years, the sun will begin its red giant stage, increasing terrestrial temperatures above 1,000 degrees, boiling off our atmosphere, eventually forming a planetary nebula, making Earth inhospitable to life," he wrote. "If we colonise other solar systems, we could survive longer than our sun, perhaps another 100 trillion years, when all stars begin burning out. We might survive even longer if we exploit non-stellar energy sources." Which all sounds very positive. But the universe has some further tricks up its sleeve. It is hard to imagine, wrote Matheny, how humanity will survive beyond the decay of nuclear matter, which is expected in 10³² to 1041 years. "Physics seems to support Kafka's remark that there is infinite hope, but not for us. While it may be physically possible for humanity or its descendents to flourish for 1041 years, it seems unlikely that humanity will live so long. Homo sapiens has existed for 200,000 years. Our closest relative, Homo erectus, existed for around 1.8 million years. The median duration of mammalian species is around 2.2 million years." Should any of this doomsaying concern us, particularly in a credit-crunched world? Yes, argues Bostrom. "Attempts to quantify existential risk inevitably involve a large helping of subjective judgment. And there may be a publication bias in that those who believe that the risk is larger might be more likely to publish books," he writes in Global Agenda. "Nevertheless, everybody who has seriously looked at the issue agrees that the risks are considerable. Even if the probability of extinction were merely 5%, or 1%, it would still be worth taking seriously in view of how much is at stake." It is sad, he concludes, that humanity as a whole does not invest much in improving its thinking on how to enhance its own survival against the threats about which we might do something (vacuum decay and the death of the sun notwithstanding). Addressing the World Economic Forum's 2006 panel, which was convened to consider global catastrophes, he gave this advice: "A great leader acts in awareness of the big picture and accepts responsibility for the long-term consequences of the policies he or she pursues. With regard to existential risks, the challenge is neither to ignore them nor to indulge in gloomy despondency, but to seek understanding and to take the most cost-effective steps to make the world safer." In short, better safe than sorry.

     

    Strange ways to go

    DEATH BY EUPHORIA Many of us use drugs such as caffeine or nicotine every day. Our increased understanding of physiology brings new drugs that can lift mood, improve alertness or keep you awake for days. How long before we use so many drugs we are no longer in control? Perhaps the end of society will not come with a bang, but fade away in a haze. Danger sign: Drugs would get too cheap to meter, but you might be too doped up to notice. VACUUM DECAY If the Earth exists in a region of space known as a false vacuum, it could collapse into a lower-energy state at any point. This collapse would grow at the speed of light and our atoms would not hold together in the ensuing wave of intense energy – everything would be torn apart. Danger sign: There would be no signs. It could happen half way through this… STRANGELETS Quantum mechanics contains lots of frightening possibilities. Among them is a particle called a strangelet that can transform any other particle into a copy of itself. In just a few hours, a small chunk of these could turn a planet into a featureless mass of strangelets. Everything that planet was would be no more. Danger sign: Everything around you starts cooking, releasing heat. END OF TIME What if time itself somehow came to a finish because of the laws of physics? In 2007, Spanish scientists proposed an alternative explanation for the mysterious dark energy that accounts for 75% of the mass of the universe and acts as a sort of anti-gravity, pushing galaxies apart. They proposed that the effects we observe are due to time slowing down as it leaked away from our universe. Danger sign: It could be happening right now. We would never know. MEGA TSUNAMI Geologists worry that a future volcanic eruption at La Palma in the Canary Islands might dislodge a chunk of rock twice the volume of the Isle of Man into the Atlantic Ocean, triggering waves a kilometre high that would move at the speed of a jumbo jet with catastrophic effects for the shores of the US, Europe, South America and Africa. Danger sign: Half the world's major cities are under water. All at once. GEOMAGNETIC REVERSAL The Earth's magnetic field provides a shield against harmful radiation from our sun that could rip through DNA and overload the world's electrical systems. Every so often, Earth's north and south poles switch positions and, during the transition, the magnetic field will weaken or disappear for many years. The last known transition happened almost 780,000 years ago and it is likely to happen again. Danger sign: Electronics stop working. GAMMA RAYS FROM SPACE When a supermassive star is in its dying moments, it shoots out two beams of high-energy gamma rays into space. If these were to hit Earth, the immense energy would tear apart the atmosphere's air molecules and disintegrate the protective ozone layer. Danger sign: The sky turns brown and all life on the surface slowly dies. RUNAWAY BLACK HOLE Black holes are the most powerful gravitational objects in the universe, capable of tearing Earth into its constituent atoms. Even within a billion miles, a black hole could knock Earth out of the solar system, leaving our planet wandering through deep space without a source of energy. Danger sign: Increased asteroid activity; the seasons get really extreme. INVASIVE SPECIES Invasive species are plants, animals or microbes that turn up in an ecosystem that has no protection against them. The invader's population surges and the ecosystem quickly destabilises towards collapse. Invasive species are already an expensive global problem: they disrupt local ecosystems, transfer viruses, poison soils and damage agriculture. Danger sign: Your local species disappear. TRANSHUMANISM What if biological and technological enhancements took humans to a level where they radically surpassed anything we know today? "Posthumans" might consist of artificial intelligences based on the thoughts and memories of ancient humans, who uploaded themselves into a computer and exist only as digital information on superfast computer networks. Their physical bodies might be gone but they could access and store endless information and share their thoughts and feelings immediately and unambiguously with other digital humans. Danger sign: You are outcompeted, mentally and physically, by a cyborg.

Wednesday 26 October 2011

Cinema thinks it's the end of the world

As I mentioned in class the other day, there were four films released this month alone that deal - in some way - with the depiction or threat of apocalypse: Melancholia [dir. Lars Von Trier], Contagion [dir. Steven Soderbergh], Perfect Sense [dir. David Mackenzie], and Retreat [dir. Carl Tibbetts]. Three of the four opt for the 'deadly virus' theme, whilst the fourth (Melancholia) begins and ends with a giant meteor destroying the earth (that's not a spoiler - you know from the outset of the film that it's going to happen!) You can watch trailers/read more about the films by clicking on their titles, above.

To date, I've only seen Melancholia, although I'm hoping to see Contagion in the next week or so; the other two I think I'll have to catch on DVD. Melancholia is astonishing - I'll post a review when I have time - and I recommend it, as the sheer audacity and chutzpah of Von Trier is something to marvel at and the opening sequence of scenes is breathtakingly beautiful. Besides that, it may make you laugh aloud (in disbelief/hilarity), feel sick (jumpy camera work), or cry copiously. I did two of these things - you'll have to guess which.

On the face of it, Perfect Sense looks like primarily a romance film (ick), but watch the trailer and you'll learn otherwise. It has some great cast members (e.g. Stephen Dillane, an under-used and excellent character actor), and the director, David Mackenzie, has good form: he also directed Young Adam (an adaptation of the deeply depressing novel by Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi) and Hallam Foe. Also, the music is by one of my favourite contemporary composers, Max Richter.

On the evidence of the trailer, Retreat looks like it is exploiting a standard horror story/film formula: isolated couple terrorised by crazy person (in this instance, Jamie Bell), and therefore it might not be a 'proper' apocalypse/disaster/catastrophe film at all. This is a shame, as I like the escalating panic, crumbling social infrastructure and pointless heroics of the more 'conventional' apocalypse film or disaster movie.

So far, Contagion is getting mixed reviews, with some suggesting it is rather 'slick' and 'sterile' (is the use of this word supposed to be a joke, Daily Mail?), but I like the rising panic of the trailer. Also, if you are feeling in any way complacent in the face of the impending apocalypse, then why not read these recent news stories accompanying the release of the film:

Dr Ian Lipkin, a 'virus scientist' who was an adviser on Contagion, tells The Observer that: "When I was a kid, the launching of Sputnik made us aware that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the race for space. Now all of us are in a battle that is potentially devastating, only it is not against another country but against microbes."

Meanwhile, in the Guardian film blog, David Cox writes that: "Life as we know it won't be brought to a halt by asteroid impact, a new ice age, nuclear holocaust or alien invasion. A bug could do the job no sweat." (I love that he references an academic journal article!)

Right, off to do some more obsessive hand-washing now.

Saturday 15 October 2011

Atwood on SF

Margaret Atwood has a great piece in the Guardian today, where she discusses the varying definitions of SF, speculative fiction, fantasy and her own term 'ustopia', whilst reflecting on her three futuristic novels: The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. (The article is meant to herald the publication - this week - of a non-fiction book about SF by Atwood, entitled In Other Worlds).

Here's the full text of the article (or you can visit the Guardian page here if you want to see it in its original format and read the comments):


Margaret Atwood: the road to Ustopia

The author of The Handmaid's Tale has been criticised for not wanting to call her books science fiction. But what is SF anyway, and how does it connect with her lifelong fascination with creating other worlds?
Margaret Atwood
Friday 14 October 2011
    Scene from English National Opera production of The Handmaid's Tale
    Ancillary services: scene from English National Opera's production of The Handmaid's Tale. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
    Recently I set out to explore my lifelong relationship with science fiction, both as reader and as writer. I say "lifelong", for among the first things I wrote as a child might well merit the initials SF. Like a great many children before and since, I was an inventor of other worlds. Mine were rudimentary, as such worlds are when you're six or seven or eight, but they were emphatically not of this here-and-now Earth, which seems to be one of the salient features of SF. I wasn't much interested in Dick and Jane: the creepily ultra-normal characters did not convince me. Saturn was more my speed, and other realms even more outlandish. Our earliest loves, like revenants, have a way of coming back in other forms; or, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the child is mother to the woman. To date, I have written three full-length fictions that nobody would ever class as sociological realism: The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Are these books "science fiction", I am often asked. Though sometimes I am not asked, but told: I am a silly nit or a snob or a genre traitor for dodging the term because these books are as much "science fiction" as Nineteen Eighty-Four is, whatever I might say. But is Nineteen Eighty-Four as much "science fiction" as The Martian Chronicles? I might reply. I would answer not, and therein lies the distinction.
    My desire to explore my relationship with the SF world, or worlds, has a proximate cause. In 2009, I published The Year of the Flood, the second work of fiction in a series exploring another kind of "other world" – our own planet in a future. The Year of the Flood was reviewed, along with its sibling, Oryx and Crake, by one of the reigning monarchs of the SF and fantasy forms, Ursula K Le Guin. Her 2009 review in this paper began with a paragraph that has caused a certain amount of uproar in the skin-tight clothing and other-planetary communities – so much so that scarcely a Q&A session goes by at my public readings without someone asking, usually in injured tones, why I have forsworn the term science fiction. Here are Le Guin's uproar-causing sentences: "To my mind, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn't want any of her books to be called science fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can't be science fiction, which is "fiction in which things happen that are not possible today". This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn't want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto." The motive imputed to me is not in fact my actual motive for requesting separate names. What I mean by "science fiction" is those books that descend from HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters – things that could not possibly happen – whereas, for me, "speculative fiction" means plots that descend from Jules Verne's books about submarines and balloon travel and such – things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don't like Martians, I hasten to add; they just don't fall within my skill set. Any seriously intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed. In a public discussion with Le Guin in the fall of 2010, however, I found that what she means by "science fiction" is speculative fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really could not happen she classifies under "fantasy". Thus, for her – as for me – dragons would belong in fantasy, as would, I suppose, the film Star Wars and most of the TV series Star Trek. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein might squeeze into Le Guin's "science fiction" because its author had grounds for believing that electricity actually might be able to reanimate dead flesh. And The War of the Worlds? Since people thought at the time that intelligent beings might live on Mars, and since space travel was believed to be possible in the imaginable future, this book might have to be filed under Le Guin's "science fiction". Or parts of it might. In short, what Le Guin means by "science fiction" is what I mean by "speculative fiction", and what she means by "fantasy" would include some of what I mean by "science fiction". So that clears it all up, more or less. When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance. Bendiness of terminology, literary gene-swapping, and inter-genre visiting has been going on in the SF world – loosely defined – for some time. For instance, in a 1989 essay called "Slipstream," the veteran SF author Bruce Sterling deplored the then-current state of science fiction and ticked off its writers and publishers for having turned it into a mere "category" – a "self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of bookstore rack space"A "category", says Sterling, is distinct from a "genre", which is "a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent aesthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will". Sterling defines his term slipstream – so named, I suppose, because it is seen as making use of the air currents created by science fiction proper – in this way: "I want to describe what seems to me to be a new, emergent 'genre', which has not yet become a 'category' … It is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a 'sense of wonder' or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction. Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late 20th century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." His proposed list of slipstream fictions covers an astonishing amount of ground, with works by a wide assortment of people, many of them considered to be "serious" authors – from Kathy Acker and Martin Amis to Salman Rushdie, José Saramago and Kurt Vonnegut. What they have in common is that the kinds of events they recount are unlikely to have actually taken place. In an earlier era, these "slipstream" books might all have been filed under the heading of "traveller's yarn" – Herodotus's accounts of monopods, for example, or medieval legends about unicorns, dragons and mermaids. Later they might have turned up in collections of the marvellous and uncanny, such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or – even later – the kind of you-won't-believe-this hair-raiser to be found in assortments by MR James or H P Lovecraft or, occasionally, RL Stevenson. But surely all draw from the same deep well: those imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one: in another time, in another dimension, through a doorway into the spirit world, or on the other side of the threshold that divides the known from the unknown. Science fiction, speculative fiction, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and slipstream fiction: all of them might be placed under the same large "wonder tale" umbrella. Ustopia is a world I made up by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other. In addition to being, almost always, a mapped location, Ustopia is also a state of mind, as is every place in literature of whatever kind. As Mephistophilis tells us in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Hell is not only a physical space. "Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it," he says. "Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd / In one self place; but where we are is hell, / And where hell is, there must we ever be." Or, to cite a more positive version, from Milton's Paradise Lost: "then wilt thou not be loth / To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A Paradise within thee, happier far." In literature, every landscape is a state of mind, but every state of mind can also be portrayed by a landscape. And so it is with Ustopia. How did I come to create my own Ustopias – these not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind? Why did I jump the tracks, as it were, from realistic novels to dystopias? Was I slumming, as some "literary" writers are accused of doing when they write science fiction or detective stories? The human heart is inscrutable, but let me try to remember what I thought I was up to at the time. First, The Handmaid's Tale. What put it into my head to write such a book? I had never done anything like it before: my previous fiction had been realistic. Tackling a Ustopia was a risk. But it was also a challenge and a temptation, because if you've studied a form and read extensively in it, you often have a secret hankering to try it yourself. I began the book – after a few dry runs – in Berlin in the spring of 1984. I had a fellowship, in a programme run by West Berlin to encourage foreign artists to visit, as the city was at that time encircled by the Berlin Wall and its inhabitants felt understandably claustrophobic. During our stay we also visited East Berlin, as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia, and I thus had several first-hand experiences of the flavour of life in a totalitarian – but supposedly utopian – regime. I wrote more of the book once I was back in Toronto, and completed it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the spring of 1985. Tuscaloosa provided another kind of flavour – that of a democracy, but one with quite a few constraining social customs and attitudes. ("Don't ride a bicycle," I was told. "They'll think you're a communist and run you off the road.") The writing of The Handmaid's Tale gave me a strange feeling, like sliding on river ice – exhilarating but unbalancing. How thin is this ice? How far can I go? How much trouble am I in? What's down there if I fall? These were writerly questions, having to do with structure and execution and that biggest question of all, the one every writer asks him- or herself with every completed chapter: is anyone going to believe this? (I don't mean literal belief: fictions admit that they are invented, right on the cover. I mean, "find the story compelling and plausible enough to go along for the ride".) These writerly questions were reflections of other, more general questions. How thin is the ice on which supposedly "liberated" modern western women stand? How far can they go? How much trouble are they in? What's down there if they fall? And further: if you were attempting a totalitarian takeover of the United States, how would you do it? What form would such a government assume, and what flag would it fly? How much social instability would it take before people renounced their hard-won civil liberties in a trade-off for "safety"? And, since most totalitarianisms we know about have attempted to control reproduction in one way or another – limiting births, demanding births, specifying who can marry whom and who owns the kids – how would that play out for women? And what about the outfits? Ustopias are always interested in clothing – either less of it compared to what we wear now, or more of it. The clothing concerns usually centre on women: societies are always uncovering parts of women's bodies and then covering them up again. My rules for The Handmaid's Tale were simple: I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not already have the tools. Even the group hangings had precedents: there were group hangings in earlier England, and there are still group stonings in some countries. Looking further back, the Maenads, during their Dionysian celebrations, were said to go into frenzies during which they dismembered people with their hands. (If everyone participates, no one individual is responsible.) For a literary precedent, one need search no further than Emile Zola's Germinal, which contains an episode in which the town's coal-mining women, who have been sexually exploited by the shopkeeper, tear him apart and parade his genitalia through town on a pole. A less raw but still shocking precedent is Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" (which I read as a teenager, shortly after it came out, and which made a chilling impression on me). The coverups worn by the women in The Handmaid's Tale have been variously interpreted as Catholic (as in nuns) or Muslim (as in burqas). The truth is that these outfits are not aimed at any one religion. Their actual design was inspired by the figure on the Old Dutch Cleanser boxes of my childhood, but they are also simply old. Mid-Victorians, with their concealing bonnets and veils to keep strange men from leering at their faces, would not have found them so unusual. I prefaced the novel with three quotations. The first is from the Bible, Genesis 30, the passage in which the two wives of Jacob use their female slaves as baby-producers for themselves. This ought to warn the reader against the dangers inherent in applying every word in that extremely varied document literally. The second is from Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal": it alerts us to the fact that a straightfaced but satirical account – such as Swift's suggestion that the grinding Irish poverty of his times could be alleviated by selling and eating Irish babies – is not a recipe. The third – "In the desert there is no sign that says, 'thou shalt not eat stones'" – is a Sufi proverb stating a simple human truth: we don't prohibit things that nobody would ever want to do anyway, since all prohibitions are founded upon a denial of our desires. The Handmaid's Tale was published in Canada in the fall of 1985, and in the US and the UK in the spring of 1986. In the UK, its first reviewers treated it as a yarn rather than a warning: Britain had already been through Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan republic and there seemed to be no fear of re-enacting that scenario. In Canada, people asked, in anxious Canadian fashion: "could it happen here?" In the US, Mary McCarthy, writing in the New York Times, gave the book a largely negative review on the grounds that it lacked imagination, and anyway it was unlikely ever to take place, at least not in the secular society she perceived as the American reality. But on the west coast, so attuned to earthquake tremors, switchboards on talk shows lit up like Las Vegas, and someone graffitied on the Venice Beach seawall: "The Handmaid's Tale is already here!" It wasn't already here, not quite, not then. I thought for a while in the 1990s that maybe it never would be. But now I'm wondering again. In recent years, American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government. Approximately five years after The Handmaid's Tale was published, the Soviet Union disintegrated, the west slapped itself on the back and went shopping, and pundits proclaimed the end of history. It looked as if, in the race between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World – control by terror versus control through conditioning and consumption – the latter had won, and the world of The Handmaid's Tale appeared to recede. But now we see a United States weakened by two draining wars and a financial meltdown, and America appears to be losing faith in the basic premises of liberal democracy. After 9/11, the Patriot Act passed with barely a cough, and in Britain citizens have accepted a degree of state supervision that would once have been unthinkable. It's a truism that enemy states tend to mirror one another in organisation and methods. When colonies were the coming thing, everyone wanted one. Atom bombs in the United States created the desire for some in the USSR. The Soviet Union was a large, bureaucratic, centralised state, and so was the America of those times. What form will the United States assume now that it's opposed by unrelenting religious fanaticisms? Will it soon produce rule by the same kind of religious fanaticism, only of a different sect? Will the more repressive elements within it triumph, returning it to its origins as a Puritan theocracy and giving us The Handmaid's Tale in everything but the outfits? I've said earlier that dystopia contains within itself a little utopia, and vice versa. What, then, is the little utopia concealed in the dystopic world of The Handmaid's Tale? There are two: one is in the past (the past that is our own present). The second is placed in a future beyond the main story by the afterword at the end of the book, which describes a future in which Gilead – the tyrannical republic of The Handmaid's Tale – has ended and has thus become a subject for conferences and academic papers. I suppose that's what happens to ustopian societies when they die: they don't go to Heaven, they become thesis topics. After The Handmaid's Tale there was a period of approximately 18 years during which I did not write ustopian novels, but then came Oryx and Crake in 2003. Oryx and Crake is dystopic in that almost the entire human race is annihilated, before which it has split into two parts: a technocracy and an anarchy. And, true to form, there is a little attempt at utopia in it as well: a group of quasi-humans who have been genetically engineered so that they will never suffer from the ills that plague Homo sapiens sapiens. They are designer people. But anyone who engages in such design – as we are now doing – has to ask: how far can humans go in the alteration department before those altered cease to be human? Which of our features are at the core of our being? What a piece of work is man, and now that we ourselves can be the workmen, what pieces of this work shall we chop off? The designer people have some accessories I wouldn't mind having myself: built-in insect repellant, automatic sunblock, and the ability, like rabbits, to digest leaves. They also have several traits that would indeed be improvements of a sort, though many of us wouldn't like them. For instance, mating is seasonal: in season, certain parts of the body turn blue, as with baboons, so there is no more romantic rejection or date rape. And they can't read, so a lot of harmful ideologies will never trouble them. There are other genetically engineered creatures in the book as well: chickie nobs, for instance, which are chicken objects modified so they grow multiple legs, wings and breasts. They have no heads, just a nutriment orifice at the top, thus solving a problem for animal rights workers: as their creators say, "no Brain, no Pain". (Since Oryx and Crake was published, the chickie nob solution has made giant strides: lab-grown meat is now a reality, though it is probably not in your sausages yet.) A sibling book, The Year of the Flood, was published in 2009. Its original title was God's Gardeners, but although this was perfectly acceptable to the British publisher, the American publisher and the Canadian publisher objected to it on the grounds that people would think the book was a far-right extremist tract, which goes to show how thoroughly the word "God" has been hijacked. Many other titles were proposed, including "Serpent Wisdom", which the Canadian publisher liked but the US felt suggested a new age cult, and "Edencliff," which the British thought sounded like "a retirement home in Bournemouth". Book titles are either immediately obvious, like The Edible Woman, or very hard to decide on, and The Year of the Flood was the second kind. The Year of the Flood explores the world of Oryx and Crake from a different perspective. Jimmy/ Snowman, the protagonist of Oryx and Crake, has grown up within a privileged though barricaded enclave, but The Year of the Flood takes place in the space outside such enclaves, at the very bottom of the social heap. Its pre-disaster plot unfolds in neighbourhoods that the security forces – now melded with corporations – don't even bother to patrol, leaving them to criminal gangs and anarchic violence. However, this book, too, has a utopia embedded within a dystopia; it's represented by the God's Gardeners, a small environmental religious cult dedicated to the sacred element in all creation. Its members grow vegetables on slum rooftops, sing sacred-nature hymns, and avoid hi-tech communications devices such as cellphones and computers on the grounds that they can be used to spy on you – which is entirely true. Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood cover the same time period, and thus are not sequels or prequels; they are more like chapters of the same book. They have sometimes been described as "apocalyptic", but in a true apocalypse everything on Earth is destroyed, whereas in these two books the only element that's annihilated is the human race, or most of it. What survives after the cataclysmic event is not a "dystopia", because many more people would be required for that – enough to comprise a society. The surviving stragglers do, however, have mythic precedents: a number of myths tell of an annihilating flood survived by one man (Deucalion in Greek myth, Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh epic) or a small group, such as Noah and his family. Do the surviving human beings in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood represent a dystopic threat to the tiny utopia of genetically modified, peaceful and sexually harmonious new humans that is set to replace them? People have asked, many times, about the "inspiration" for these two books and their world. Of course there are proximate causes for all novels – a family story, a newspaper clipping, an event in one's personal history – and for Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood there are such causes as well. Worries about the effects of climate change can be found as far back as 1972, when the Club of Rome accurately predicted what now appears to be happening, so those worries had long been with me, though they were not front-page stories in the spring of 2001 when I began Oryx and Crake. As with The Handmaid's Tale, I accumulated many file folders of research; and although in both there are some of what Huckleberry Finn would call "stretchers", there is nothing that's entirely without foundation. So I could point to this or that scientific paper, this or that newspaper story, this or that actual event, but those kinds of things are not really what drive the storytelling impulse. I'm more inclined to think that it's unfinished business, of the kind represented by the questions people are increasingly asking themselves: how badly have we messed up the planet? Can we dig ourselves out? what would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if played out in actuality? And also: where has utopian thinking gone? Because it never totally disappears: we're too hopeful a species for that. "Good", for us, may always have a "Bad" twin, but its other twin is "Better". It's interesting to me that I situated the utopia-facilitating element in Oryx and Crake not in a new kind of social organisation or a mass brainwashing or soul-engineering programme but inside the human body. The Crakers are well behaved from the inside out not because of their legal system or their government or some form of intimidation but because they have been designed to be so. They can't choose otherwise. And this seems to be where Ustopia is moving in real life as well: through genetic engineering, we will be able to rid ourselves of inherited diseases, and ugliness, and mental illness, and ageing, and … who knows? The sky's the limit. Or so we are being told. What is the little dystopia concealed within such utopian visions of the perfected human body – and mind? Time will tell. Historically, Ustopia has not been a happy story. High hopes have been dashed, time and time again. The best intentions have indeed paved many roads to Hell. Does that mean we should never try to rectify our mistakes, reverse our disaster-bent courses, clean up our cesspools or ameliorate the many miseries of many lives? Surely not: if we don't do maintenance work and minor improvements on whatever we actually have, things will go downhill very fast. So of course we should try to make things better, insofar as it lies within our power. But we should probably not try to make things perfect, especially not ourselves, for that path leads to mass graves. We're stuck with us, imperfect as we are; but we should make the most of us. Which is about as far as I myself am prepared to go, in real life, along the road to Ustopia.

Wednesday 12 October 2011

The future on the internet

Futuristic Fictions students - and future fans more generally - might find these two websites interesting:

1. William Morris Unbound - a blog by a Morris scholar/nerd, which engages with various of Morris' writings and ideas and considers their resonances and relevance in the 21st century.

2. Damien Walter's Weird Things - the Guardian column by Damien Walter (interesting ideas, terrible hair!), which focuses on science fiction, fantasy and thinking about the future. The most recent column, on 'The Political Possibilities of SF' is worth a look - and read through the comments for an entertaining argument about utopia!

Bidisha discussing The Handmaid's Tale on Radio 4

Bidisha was discussing Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on Radio 4's 'A Good Read', yesterday. You can listen to the discussion (which was recorded live at the Cheltenham Literary Festival) here. The discussion of The Handmaid's Tale begins about 3 minutes in to the recording.

Saturday 8 October 2011

Post-apocalyptic cartoon

Excellent post-apocalyptic cartoon in the Guardian today. You can see it here.

Imagine, life without/after the internet...

Friday 7 October 2011

John Wyndham, 'Consider Her Ways'

I stumbled across a reference to this 1956 SF oddity in the most unlikely place: the 'Lesbiana' book list of The Ladder, the newsletter/journal of the first American lesbian organisation, the Daughters of Bilitis. In the brief review in the February 1958 issue of The Ladder, 'Consider Her Ways' is described as 'one of the most delightful stories of feminine superiority ever written' and a 'feminist story', featuring 'a happy, well-integrated group of Lesbians'.

I can only imagine that the reviewer hadn't actually read the story, which hardly warrants such praise, and which I would describe as definitively anti-feminist. (It also features zero lesbian characters, so what was the reviewer thinking of?) Wyndham's novella is one of three included in a collection published by Ballantine in 1957, under the heading Sometime, Never. The other two novellas are 'Envoy Extraordinary' by William Golding, and 'Boy in Darkness' by Mervyn Peake. The Golding piece is an odd, intermittently comical tale, featuring Romans; the Peake story appears to be an outtake from his Gormenghast series; neither is what I would call 'science fiction', although both are being marketed as such here.

And so to the Wyndham. I have a soft spot for Wyndham, having loved both The Chrysalids  and The Day of the Triffids, but I have always found his gender politics to be problematic and 'Consider Her Ways' almost killed my affection for his very English, amusingly parochial, class-bound fantasies of apocalypse and futurity. The female narrator wakes up in an unfamiliar place and time, apparently having been transported into another, quite alien body. She finds herself as one among many 'Mothers', large, indolent women who are waited on hand and foot by some rather sinister Lilliputians and whose only function is to breed; the wider society consists only of women, but it is no feminist utopia. The Mothers are categorised as 'Class One' or 'Class Two' Mothers, depending on the 'grade' of babies they produce, and the society is rigidly hierarchical and regulated so that 'Mothers' serve only that reproductive function and the protagonist's expression of a desire to read is met by consternation and alarm. When she starts asking questions about 'the two human sexes' and attempts to escape her confinement, she is warned that she will be arrested for 'Reactionism'.

Ultimately, her experience of time travel is explained as a case of 'projected perception', brought on by some kind of South American hallucinogenic drug that she has been prescribed in her own time, and an elderly historian tells her the history of their society, in which all the men became sick and died in the course of one year. The dialogue between the historian and Jane (the protagonist) is used by Wyndham to offer a notably anti-feminist argument: whilst the historian offers a rather cartoonish 'feminist' reading of the mid-twentieth century ("there was probably, in the aggregate, more disappointment, disillusion, and dissatisfaction amongst women than there had ever been before..."), Jane interjects to dispute this view of her own time ("it wasn't like that. [...] It didn't feel a bit like the way you put it. I was in it. I know.") It is, asserts Jane, "the most curiously unrecognizable account of my world that I have ever heard - it's like something copied, but with all the proportions wrong." The historian, in turn, simply tells her that her response is due to her "conditioning" (a familiar 'false consciousness' argument).

The story ends with Jane taking a drug that will return her to her own time, and attempting to alter the course of history to ensure that the future world she has witnessed cannot possibly come about. It's certainly fascinating to read this story in conjunction with bona fide feminist utopias but its interest lies mainly in the way it provides a kind of counter-narrative to these, using a futuristic story as a way of warning against the perceived 'dangers' of feminism - and thereby exemplifying the peculiarly masculine anxieties of the postwar period.