SF

Stochastic Land

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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)

Waistcoatpunk

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The supposedly definitive speech for hopepunk is given by Samwise Gamgee in The Two Towers: “That there’s some good in the world”, and so on.  It’s a fine speech, and it would be churlish indeed to pick on good-hearted Sam. But recently I read (or possibly re-read) Michael Moorcock’s old essay on Tolkien, as well; the one that pegs Lord of the Rings as an armour-clad Winnie the Pooh.

I was never quite the Tolkien-maniac so many teenagers are, though I won’t claim it was out of social competence or any foresightful discomfort with JRR’s racial scheme. It was probably because I’d read too much trash fantasy before I got hold of The Fellowship of the Ring, and was hoping for more of the same. Even though I knew it was unfair, it seemed like Tolkien was plagiarizing himself. 

Underneath, I think the structure of the world and the story might have also got up my nose. I always sympathized more with elves than hobbits. More fool me, perhaps. All of the hobbits have a bit too much Forrest Gump in them, a much worse work of art whose magic moron morality I will continue to hate until my dying day.

I was certainly up for Moorcock’s pulp literary experimenta. My taste was much more for Melniboné than Bag End. And he’s a pretty good critic. He gets the politics of Middle Earth and Middle Hopepunk bang on:

While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism. I don’t think these books are ‘fascist’, but they certainly don’t exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times.

— Epic Pooh

It’s not that hopepunk is bad. Like Tolkien, it’s deeply anti-fascist, and pro-community, in a rural traditionalist way. But it’s as punk as a hobbit in a four button waistcoat. It’s comfortable to wear, but I remain skeptical it will change much.

Does Anne of Green Gables Dream of Electric Sheep?

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Caroline M Yoachim – A Rabbit Egg For Flora 

Adam Berman – Egg Tooth

Philip K Dick – The Preserving Machine

In an early Philip K Dick fairy-tale, an eccentric scientist invents a machine for turning musical pieces into animals. It works quite well, at least when the animals are kept inside, as pets. The animals can be easily converted back into recognizable entries of the classical canon. Yet the point of the project is preservation for the ages, across scores of generations, and when released into the nearby forest, the animals change. Some are eaten. Some turn wild. When the pipe-organ-like machine is used to convert them back, the result is strange, disturbing, sounds, barely classifiable as music at all.

A Rabbit Egg For Flora, by Caroline Yoachim, feels like it is set in one of these PKD worlds, while telling a story that the great man seemingly never could. In The Preserving Machine, for example, the vivid clunking fact of the machine breaks down for the characters, while reality of the world grows for the reader. Character reality frays and reader reality intensifies. Rabbit Egg is not about fraying, but repair. A single parent and her daughter play a game, discovering artificial eggs. It’s Pokémon, but for nanotechnological wonders which restore ecosystems.

“What do you think it will be?”

“Bobcat!”

I laugh. “I don’t think our local ecosystem can support a predator that big.”

“Deer!”

“Lobster!”

The dark-haired boy snorts. “The sea-life expansion got pushed back three months because ocean acidity is still too high.”

Behind the children’s game, this is a world of catastrophic loss. It is perhaps decades or centuries in the future: probably billions of people died as supporting natural systems collapsed around them, before everything finally bottomed out. It is perhaps a few decades on from the dayglo dystopia of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, where, unlike Blade Runner, Deckard had an obsessive hobby of trying to find pet animals, and where even dogs and cats are so rare they are fabulously expensive. Rabbit Egg, daringly, takes this place as the setting for a charming childhood romance. It’s in a solarpunk collection, and this is the solarpunk gambit, really: envisioning repair instead of doom. Eventually, in Androids, Deckard finds a frog, which he doesn’t recognize is actually a mechanical simulacra. He is always a childlike assassin. You can imagine him enjoying searching for eggs.

Egg Tooth, by Adam Berman, is an uneasy, meticulously crafted, story that doesn’t show its cards early. It could be set in a more orderly, Australian, corner of that same collapsing world, albeit without any androids. If the voice of Rabbit Egg is Anne of Green Gables, the voice of Egg Tooth is clearly Kafka. This is not the cartoon avatar of bureaucratic frustration found in popular culture. (Is it a red tape? Is it a show trial? No – it’s Kafkaman!) This is the baffled observer-protagonist of The Castle or the A Country Doctor, intensely moved, evicted from his own head.

Between the apartments were skyscrapers in varying styles and states of decay. Whereas the oldest buildings tended to be the most complete, more recent projects appeared unfinished, with large black tarps covering jagged upper floors. The older buildings paid their penance in other ways, being covered in higher concentrations of graffiti and torn nylon banner advertisements. 

I am cagey about sharing the details of Egg Tooth, lest I inadvertently pick apart its fine weave. There are plenty of stories about the future being horrible, and they generally don’t interest me. What makes Egg Tooth compelling, and a little sickening, is the implication that among the collapse, this society is a relative success: a place of orderly utilitarian kindness among more general chaos, with famine and death just off-screen.

Both of these stories appear in collections of solarpunk science fiction, though Egg Tooth is by far the glummest boat in the sunny tech nouveau solarpunk regatta. Despite the revolutionary names of solarpunk, or even Extinction Rebellion, green politics is often forced to be conservative, or even reactionary – stop doing this, stop killing that, restore what was good and beautiful and pure. Flora wants rabbits back; in Egg Tooth the platypus may just be saved. Indeed, we need to stop and restore! But this is also why, politically, it’s so easy to slip from green to ecoreactionary; to the idealization of past social and technical forms. (And from there, ecofash is but a short goosestep away.)

Solarpunk is a countermovement of repair. It does not idealize feudal peasant tech and social mores, but puts the technology of the sun in its name. If we need romanticism, well, this is a far better romance. I hope Flora gets her rabbit egg, given she lives in North America, where it is not a pest. But the clever nanites that build the rabbits are also little conservatives, rebuilding what once was. Though both of the stories I’ve talked about here are great, and take risks in their own ways, most solarpunk plays it safe. Solarpunk is usually solarcozy. Quite a lot of it is secretly Egg Tooth wearing sunglasses – the literature of the precautionary principle and managed decline.

Most solarpunk I’ve seen – and much of these two collections – is good at the local, the relational, and the romantic – the Mrs Brown stories of the Turkey City Lexicon. This is a strength where science fiction traditionally had a weakness. It is good to have stories like this. The two stories I’ve named don’t span all of the weird creatures of the subgenre. But I wonder, based on what we’ve seen so far, whether this cozy vision can encompass the radically changed, and the truly planetary.

There are two and a half stories I imagine could only be written if solarpunk writers stopped playing it safe. The half is Fully Automated Planetary Solarpunk, a setting with Green Stack crisis management and universal basic services, which writers like Kim Stanley Robinson have at least had a crack at. The second is a Neo-Edwardian High Tory Solarpunk, with Art Nouveau aesthetics, solar industrialists, plucky aristocratic Indian adventuresses, and imperial confidence in multi-generational stewardship. I have to admit I name this one partly for the joy of the cognitive-political dissonance it implies in a community which can be painfully earnest at times. But beyond that, stories which deal with the age of Dadabhai Naoroji and the first National Parks also ask what it means to wield and abuse power across global networks, to preserve ecosystems, and to valorize traditional and indigenous continuity. The third, often quite incompatibly with the other two, would be a xenofeminist solarpunk, a solarpunk of unprecedented scale, cunning, and vision, a tech-subverting, wilderness-unleashing liberatory force, that like punk, would celebrate the strange, wild things that hatch from future eggs.

—

A Rabbit Egg For Flora by Caroline M Yoachim is published in Multispecies Cities. Egg Tooth by Adam Berman is published in And Lately, The Sun.

Ancillary SYN-ACK

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Ancillary Justice is a cyborg soldiers and AI spaceships novel (with complications) in a space opera setting, built around a soldier called Breq. Think Iain M Banks but with the Roman Empire instead of plush toy communism. The complications are both cool and fundamental to the characters, and I won’t spoil the slow reveal of the first book here, even though it’s all over the web.

The trilogy is completed with Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy. After the galaxy-spanning wandering of the first book, racing towards the capital, the second and third books focus back on a particular system. Breq muscles in as a fleet captain of a capital ship. Aliens, ships and stations join the cast of characters. Interpersonal and gunboat diplomacy ensue.

The heavy Space Roman Empire vibe of the first volume evolves into something a bit more Space Girls Boarding School Naval Academy in the later books. Though both have their virtues, I always tend to favour first books, and the thick vertigo of new ideas is denser in Ancillary Justice than the other two volumes. I still devoured all three at speed and with pleasure.

The Ancillary trilogy is, at some level, network space opera, about synchronization, replication, latency and packet corruption. The empire exists because it successfully replicates itself over distance and time. And then it stops: packet loss and fragmentation.

Pogromon Go

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It’s not fair to blame it on Pokémon, really. They weren’t the worst of it by far, though the limited edition Pikajew did echo the unfortunate spirit of the times.

The Pure Tribe had their own apps, monsters and backends. Variations. Innovations. Memes and games catch on and evolve. The whole time they were annotating and mapping. Highlighting targets in bold colours: signs, shrines, grandmothers, foxes. Sharing high scores on the day. Trading in parts. People and drones had got in plenty of practice beforehand. “Gotta catch ‘em all!”

Fads come and go.