I picked up Manchukuo 1987 as a low stakes pulp alt-history wheeze by an amusing internet rando. A few days later I was depriving myself of sleep to find out what a fascist middle-aged Japanese secret policeman with a gammy leg was going to do next.
The setting is Manchuria, what we would now think of as northeast China, in a timeline where the Japanese remained a colonial power into the 1980s. It comes complete with third generation settlers, ghettos for locals, and racial purity laws. But the Japanese home islands have drifted towards liberalism, the t-shirt wearing, Walkman-toting gravity well of Asquith and Fukuyama, and have lost interest in empire. So the novel gives us Manchkuo on the eve of independence, at street level, complete with a messy mix of class, race and colonialism.
That’s really the appeal of the book: drifting through the regional town of Ryujin, through the grimy nightlife, the spinlocking racist brain of the overachieving settler schoolgirl, guzheng played in an elegant courtyard with a self-hating Chinese novelist, whores and gangsters, illegal communist graffiti, whisky, noodles and McDonalds, fascist functionaries going through the motions in a hollow regime, twin portraits of the Japanese emperor and a geriatric Puyi on the wall.
If the first great obsession of the book is historical forces grinding against each other at street level, the other great obsession is violence. Lurid, pulp violence, certainly; gangster novel sex, blood and splatter plays its part. But also political violence, scar tissue, bandit government and death squads. The suit of samurai armour on the cover is key. It’s retro power armour, electric powered hydraulics that multiplies the strength of the wearer while shielding them from rifle bullets the same way a tank does. It’s an old tech, in the book, from the 1950s. This is an absurdity, but not completely ridiculous: that’s an era where eight North Korean T-34 tanks defeated an entire American infantry battalion at Osan while bullets pinged comically off the armoured exterior and soldiers jumped out of the way like extras in an episode of the A-Team. More importantly, it’s the only technological leap of faith the book asks of you. Just as important as the suit itself is how they were used: by a local counter-insurgency force, the surveymen, made up of thugs and drifters of all races, in a dirty war vision of vicious multicultural harmony. In the novel the surveymen are both nightmare and historical relic, not just for their war crimes, but because they are too threatening to the regime’s doctrine of racial purity. Our detective used to be one.
The blurb namechecks Disco Elysium, and there is an dodgy alcoholic detective here, but where that fascinating game is amnesiac and obsessively introspective, Manchukuo 1987 is many-voiced and full of hidden memories. It switches between Chinese and Japanese characters, male and female, youth and age, different flavours of damage and compromise. Arguably it doesn’t really have a main character at all for the first half, and is all the better for it, because that makes Ryujin the main character, an unpretentious weatherbeaten protagonist that just happens to be a town.
There’s a writerly choice made halfway through the novel, a death, that turns the plot towards ultra-violence and a climax that is less Nostromo than Wolfenstein 3D. Part of me hurts for it. But maybe that’s just sentimental attachment to a fictional character, or maybe it was what the writer needed to get the novel written at all: permission to write throwaway trash, set in a place that never existed, under an internet pseudonym: samurai electric power armour. If that was the intent, it didn’t work. It’s pulp, but not trash. Put it on the shelf, next to the copy of Abe Lincoln, Simulacrum, with the half-ripped paperback cover, and the faded plastic video cassette case for That Blazing-Red Scar!: Story of a Surveyman at War. The classic Koji Wakamatsu version, of course, not the forgettable 2009 remake.
Pandora’s Star has very solid speculative premise, namely, what if trains, but in space, and the promise of a hard SF mechanic underlying it had me quickly mashing the buy button. The space trains emerge as a side effect of wormhole technology. A wormhole is an expensive, high energy, hard to calibrate way of travelling point to point. So it’s pretty logical to hook up energy efficient movers of mass freight to those fixed points. Therefore, space trains.
Truth be told, despite solid friend recommendations, the first 200 pages were bloody hard work. Having finished volume one, I can now see that Pete set out to write War and Peace in the style of Arthur C Clarke. Tragically, he succeeds at this, and the result is scene setting where instead of a confusing but ultimately compelling tapestry of human emotional detail about the alien society of the 19th century Russian aristocracy, you get page after page of detailed descriptions of early 21st century neoliberal mallrats in space, where the sentences individually taste like cardboard, that goes on for twice the page count of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Every character sounds like Fred from Scooby Doo; even the women and aliens.
Somehow I managed to survive the nutrition desert of the extended opening and discover the fresh fruit of spaceship construction, megastructures and weird aliens on the other side. Even the annoying space elves got more interesting than the thundering pixie cliches suggested by their initial appearance. The last six hundred pages were great, and by the end of volume one the much trailed war has broken out and everything. There are another thousand pages to go.
You know, Sir Arthur was not ignorant of human emotion, but he never really faced it head on in his writing. He sensed it wasn’t his strength, and his most moving books, like The City and the Stars and Songs of Distant Earth, are better for it. It’s a very English tactic, I guess, a stereotypical one, but it works for a reason. What we cannot speak about, we must pass over like a rattling space train, as the aeronautical engineer once said.
EVERY MORNING I wake up to find words painted on my door like toadstools popping up in the night. Today it says NIHILIST in big black letters. That’s not so bad! It’s almost sweet! Big Bargains flumps toward me on her fat seal-belly while I light the wicks on my beeswax door, and we watch them burn together until the word melts away. “I don’t think I’m a nihilist, Big Bargains. Do you?” She rolls over onto my matchbox stash so that I’ll rub her stomach. Rubbing a seal’s stomach is the opposite of nihilism.
The Past is Red starts with a beautifully direct voice. It’s a young woman’s voice, talking to us in first person, and she’ll be with us for the entire novel, for it’s her story. Tetley, her name is, named after a label on a discarded teabag, and it’s a voice of survivor optimism, the voice of someone finding beauty every day in between episodes of horrible abuse. Tetley is amazing, she finds beauty in garbage, and she lives on a giant floating island of garbage, cobbled together from the future version of the Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s called Garbagetown.
Tetley’s people live on and in Garbagetown because there’s nothing else left after catastrophic climate change. Just garbage and old ships floating atop a world-sized ocean. The rubbish is a serious resource, pragmatically sifted by the residents. They make use of what their predecessors, the Fuckwits – that is, us – threw away. Like the residents of Smokey Mountain, the Manila garbage dump, they have rituals, songs, etiquette, dialects, fashion and social hierarchy. They have a culture.
Tetley is Cinderella, Rapunzel, Cassandra, and a terrorist. The fairy tales come together in a weave that is itself a new fairy tale, not just the execution of a template. As the story progresses, and we learn about the world, Tetley’s moral and intuitive understanding of the world is repeatedly confirmed. This isn’t really a surprise: she’s the hero.
There is something nihilistic and death-loving about this book. It’s not at all lack of craft: it is beautifully written. It’s not abused, romantic Tetley either. Valente writes she knew this story had a special voice from the first sentence, and I believe that. No, the choice that makes this death-loving is the construction of the world.
To touch on spoilers, it is an ocean world not just in the sense that the oceans rose and coastal cities were destroyed. In this book everything terrestrial is now underwater – everything except a sad little island a few hundred metres wide, full of memorials. This is also a nearish future setting, where various bits of historical electronics still work, if well maintained and you get lucky. Now, a common very high emission scenario – a scenario where we go backwards on the lukewarm carbon emission progress made since the nineties – has a projected sea level rise of seven metres by the year 2300. Let’s be clear – seven metres is pretty catastrophic. It would flood cities and displace millions or even a billion people. But there’s a hill at the end of my street that’s about fifty metres tall. I live in Brisbane, on the coast, too. Drive 130 km west to Toowoomba and you can get a whole regional city at 690 metres elevation, on the flattest continent on Earth. Even Singapore, a small, flat island hugely vulnerable to sea rise caused by climate change, has Bukit Timah hill, 164 metres tall. The standard science could be wrong by an order of magnitude and bits of Singapore would still be well above the water. Actual serious mountain ranges like the Andes or Himalayas are thousands of metres tall; Everest is over eight kilometres.
Sea level rise under different emission scenarios and timescales. IPCC 2023 Longer Report, Figure 3.4, p80.
Obviously Valente is writing fiction and is allowed to make things up. The question is why. Why make a world where there is no land, and the humans left need to live only on islands of floating garbage from the before-times? The moral arrow of the story points to an explanation. The virtue of a floating world with no land is that it’s a closed system. We have to learn to make do with what we have. This world of hyper-degrowth and hyper-austerity is beyond even sustainability. Trees can’t come back to replace ship hulls; sails can’t be replaced with canvas from newly grown cotton. Humanity can feed itself fine with seafood, but as the foundations of Garbagetown rot away, in ten or twenty generations of eking out a living, presumably everyone just falls into the sea and dies. This is why Tetley blows up part of Garbagetown – because they were about to waste resources on a futile quest for land, and she is angry that they won’t just conserve and appreciate the beautiful things they have (and then later die). Within the world of the book, she’s totally right. Her reasoning is not from any systematically collected evidence or theory: it’s pure intuition. Or since she was completely right, perhaps we should call it prophecy.
This book was a pick for the Solarpunk reading group, and I see why: Hugo nominee, optimistic protagonist. But it’s actually the most anti-solarpunk novel ever written. There is no hope of building a future of beautiful architecture and technology which supports the harmonious thriving of ecosystems and human societies, even on the other side of catastrophe. It’s an entire society with terminal cancer, and the best they can do is die with grace.
The book’s surface layer is one of tough minded gutter realism, of facing up to tough facts. But this is not at all the planet we ourselves live on. Our planet is not a terminal patient on a cancer ward: it’s a patient in an emergency room. It needs urgent interventions like shutting off coal plants and solar geoengineering, while longer term medicine like changes to healthier lifestyles, energy and social systems, and nurturing of ecosystems back to health, can start to take effect.
Both Tetley’s optimism and her instinctive thriftiness are survivor instincts. She has been compared to Candide, but she reminds me more of survivors of death camps that hoard every scrap they can find. Valente’s fairy tale projects that grief and trauma onto us. The world is just what it is, the fight is already lost, and the best you can do is live quietly and find the beauty in garbage. It’s beautifully crafted. It’s planetary trauma porn. It’s awful.
A River With A City Problem – Margaret Cook (2019)
Termination Shock – Neal Stephenson (2021)
Last year I fled my house due to rising floodwaters, and soon after, my daughter’s cricket team finished up for the season. The water stopped short of our backyard, though not by much, and my daughter took some nice wickets with her loopy leg spin. It’s the second near miss we’ve had since buying the place nearly twenty years ago, but on the other hand, it’s two solid misses in two major Brisbane floods, which is a pretty good strike rate. Nevertheless, the whole street still exists on a rise at the edge of a wetland cleared a hundred and twenty years ago. Streets further south, the ones that had the creek running through them during the flood, would have been in the wetland itself, once. What does that make the odds of our house flooding? One in a hundred years? Maybe five hundred?
Fairly early in Neal Stephenson’s near future science fiction novel Termination Shock, a Texas oilman is flying over submerged Texas houses, many of which have been built thirty years earlier, and some of which have been expensively retrofitted by raising them on stumps. The oilman muses while watching a man standing on a porch with floodwaters near his feet. “He did not understand – none of these people did – that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. He didn’t understand because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically.”
A lot of Brisbane is built on stochastic land. Yeronga. Rocklea. New Farm. Milton. Tucked into the sinuous curves of a tidal river, in the folds of crinkled hills and gullies that don’t seem vulnerable until your kitchen is full of muddy water.
It’s not hard to find evidence that people don’t understand statistical concepts. Casinos are full of bad gamblers. Kahneman and Tversky won a Nobel Prize for showing numerous ways that people don’t choose mathematically optimal strategies on various probability-based problems. Fine. On the other hand, statistical phenomena are pervasive. Will it rain today? Are the fish biting? Will the price of my house go up? The natural and artificial worlds are full of things that might happen, and that we can put some sort of partially informed odds on. If our bus to work is often delayed by traffic, we learn to leave more time, so even if the dice rolls badly, we won’t be late.
So perhaps we are bad at preparing for low probability catastrophes. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence for that as well, as flooded cities across Australia, melting cities in Europe, and accumulating disasters elsewhere attest. Yet long-established human societies learn rules for dealing with rare catastrophes as well. This is where Margaret Cook’s book, A River With A City Problem, starts. The Turrbal and Jagera peoples are fishing peoples, but when they camped on the banks of the Maiwar, the Brisbane River, they camped 14 metres above the waterline.
Cook has written a history of the Brisbane River, and in the period since colonial settlement, that makes it mostly a history of floods. There have been half a dozen major floods since the Brisbane penal colony was established in 1823, and a number of smaller ones in between. The pattern has been: new immigrants build unwisely on the floodplain; a flood comes a few years or decades later, with tragic loss of lives and livelihoods; reports are written and sometimes dams are built; rinse and repeat.
In a 1983 interview with James Peck, Noam Chomsky was asked why people aren’t informed about the complicated systems of world politics, intellectual history, and so on. Chomsky had an unusually modest response.
CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I’m driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding.
This sophisticated technical understanding and engagement is also probabilistic. Sports are probabilistic. That’s a way they generate drama and surprise. Players exploit this in many different ways; they learn techniques to slightly tip the odds in their team’s favour. Fans know much of this too. The interplay all adds to the richness of the game. We evolved to survive stochastic land. And though people may not be optimal in the way they manage probability, they can work with numbers too, as sports stats show every day of the week. The problem is not so much that people can’t navigate stochastics, at least in a rough and ready way. It’s explaining how a person can both know that Don Bradman had a batting average of 99.94 and also live in a house that will flood an average of every forty years.
A River With A City Problem goes some way to explaining how. It was a combination of path dependency, social proof, and lies. Waves of new settlers came to Brisbane and Ipswich, short on local knowledge and keen to take advantage of the low-lying land near the river. At first this was because the rich soil (from historical floods) made farms there fertile. Later on it was because new subdivisions in suburbs like Rocklea were more affordable for working class families saving up to buy their own home. Dams built for drinking water and partial mitigation upstream were treated as magic totems that banished all future floods. Once suburbs were developed, with many different title holders, roads, electricity, and other infrastructure, they were extremely difficult to unsettle. Roads build a literal path dependency of the most material sort, made of gravel and bitumen. And a whole street full of families is a pretty powerful piece of social proof.
Real estate developers lied about flood risk. Politicians lied about the protection of dams. People lied to themselves about what living in a subtropical climate next to a winding tidal river means. Any child who has played with water pooling in the rain can tell you that a dam only protects you from rain that falls above it in the catchment. Queenslanders learnt from their environment in plenty of other ways. The traditional Queenslander house is on stilts, like the fishing villages on the subtropical Mekong.
People also lied to themselves because no political institution to mediate the river and the cities existed. The state government had the power but was at the wrong scale to manage subdivisions and urban flood maps. A unified Brisbane City Council was only formed in 1925; powers to resume land with houses on it was only granted in 1965, and has barely been used. In 2000 half a metre of buffer was added to the allowed height for housing; despite new data, the official flood level wasn’t changed. There’s been two major floods since then. In summary, people and governments haven’t done nothing, but they haven’t done much, and what has been done has always been late, disconnected from technical evaluation, politically easy, and on the cheap.
The climate change metaphor alarm is deafening.
Cook really wants to blame technocracy for this. She also really wants to whack governments for a failure to act on expert advice.
Cook repeatedly portrays the building of dams as a semi-tragic fall into a ‘hydraulic society’: “A reliance on technocratic solutions to control floods endures in South East Queensland, which has led to the misguided belief that floods will not happen again.” SEQ certainly became a hydraulic society, but surely the bigger problem is that it’s not very good at it. What’s so strange about these assertions is they are directly contradicted by adjacent text. This wasn’t a society that enthroned technical expertise, but that ignored it: the known expertise of local tribes, but also the colonial knowledge of flooding tropical rivers from India, and the repeated engineering reports describing what dams would and would not do. This wasn’t technocracy, it was presentocracy, government for the moment; procrastinatocracy; la-la-la-I’m-not-listening-ocracy.
While the expert historian Cook has an uneasy relationship with experts, not knowing whether she wants to excoriate them, use them, or whack politicians over the head with them, Neal Stephenson has no such ambivalence. He bloody loves experts. He loves the way they think. He loves the way they talk. He always has, ever since Snow Crash (1992) and Interface (1994):
“When lawyers and family members are present,” Mary Catherine said, “we say that the blue parts were damaged by the stroke and have a slim chance of ever recovering their normal function.”
“And amongst medical colleagues?”
“We say those parts of the brain are toast. Croaked. Kaput. Not coming back.”
And though he does love his scientists and doctors, he loves other forms of expertise too. In Termination Shock we have detailed descriptions of the problems faced by deep sea oil divers, wild pig hunters, and Queens of the Netherlands, to name just three.
Termination Shock is a geoengineering novel. It is not only a novel about consciously intervening in the planet’s climate, and the political and geophysical reaction to that, but one fairly comfortable with the trade-offs involved. The main character is a giant cannon that fires sulphur into the stratosphere, in a non-speaking part. In this near future, much like our climate present, energy transition solutions have been partial mitigations at best, sophisticated technical advice and lived local expertise has been ignored, and politicians and captains of industry have continuously lied about how protected we are. Impatient with the slow failures of multilateral technopolitics, a Texas oilman builds a big gun in the desert to at least apply some brakes to the heating feedback loop the world is now rollercoastering around. This is entirely grounded in our present technical understanding: atmospheric sulphur mimics the natural process of volcanic eruptions, and though not popular, is the geoengineering proposal that makes people fret the least. A little startup is trying it with hot air balloons.
It’s quite a fun book, in the way of good Stephenson novels, and I enjoyed it more than it perhaps deserves. It’s a flittingly and fittingly global novel. He even makes room for sports with ambiguously political consequences, and a violently repurposed cricket bat. Science fiction can fetishise the technical, and human power, but can also decentre the human in a positive way. It’s not an austere novel. It loves spending time with its hypercompetent human characters. But it loves the atmosphere, the eagles, and the drones too. A genre that can have terrain, inhuman intelligences, or machines as characters lets us put our human social obsessions into ecosystemic perspective. It can remind us that, as Cook’s title has it, a river might have a city problem.
In A River With A City Problem, Cook has written an opinionated history, one that argues for ending reckless urban expansion and conducting a managed retreat from building in the most flood-prone urban areas. She has a point. But implementing such a rollback would surely involve new regulations, the scrutiny of flood maps and models, the acquisition by government of title to existing lands, so that some houses can be demolished, and similar measures. These are surely also technocratic solutions. They are solutions that would make Brisbane a more successful hydraulic society, one where blood and treasure weren’t sacrificed to a particularly venal form of short term thoughtlessness and greed.
—
References
The Chomsky Reader – James Peck (1983)
Interface – Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (1994)
Everyone that writes about Didion seems to pick her up because of her role as a cultural critic, and a bagful of other MFA student values. It’s true: her prose style is exquisite, and she is one of the few writers who can make reading about the sixties bearable. All well and good.
The moment I fell in love with her, however, was when when she confessed her obsession with Californian hydrological engineering. Her writing about the romance of infrastructure – traffic control, the Getty Museum, airports, shopping mall theory, and especially Hoover Dam – is unsurpassed. How I wish we had a twenty-first century Didion to anatomize our cities and sketch our broken unconscious geoengineering in sharp dark lines against a white background.
Conflated Automatons 