Fourteen (The Number Prophecy) by Colette Black

Fourteen (The Number Prophecy)

By Colette Black

So during Phoenix ComicCo…*coughCOPYRIGHTcough* Oh right, San Diego went nuts.... So during Phoenix Comicfest 2018, I picked up a couple books that were either self published or small press. If you're interested in exploring books that don't have the approval of Random House (Someone bring back Teddy Roosevelt), events like this are a good place to try your luck. Just beware that anyone can self publish a book. Anyone. Ms. Black was born in the United States and has lived in the Philippines and Switzerland. She currently lives in the greater Phoenix area with her children, dogs and a cat; thus joining the ranks of writers who huddle beneath the merciless sun of this blasted land (It must be the spice. It’s everywhere. In the air, in the food...). Fourteen was published in 2015 with Ms. Black noting the idea came from her children constantly picking up rocks and bringing them home (in their defense Ms. Black, there is just something comforting about an interesting rock in your pocket). Let's take a look at this shall we.

Almost all the world rests under one roof (one world government, for clarification), under the rule of the self proclaimed divine emperor. All the world is organized and structured into ten castes. Each caste has their own responsibilities and duties; their own areas set aside where they can live. Specifically tailored education for the children of these caste ensures that every person knows exactly what they need to know to be a proper contributing member of society. If this sounds good to you, I'm going to have to suggest that you grab 1984 and give it another read. From his palace in the sacred city, the Emperor rules over all, dictating everything from the thrust of scientific research, the availability of goods and the mobility of the masses that he rules. He lives surrounded by his servants, advisers, concubines and sons, each son being a near mirror image of himself in his youth. To avoid confusion the boys are numbered instead of named, the number comes from their birth order. In this environment Fourteen, the 14th son of the emperor lives a life of luxury and constant struggle as he is locked in constant competition against his brothers for who will become the next emperor. You see, every couple of decades the Emperor retires, and in a mystic ceremony passes on his knowledge, wisdom, and connection to the Vasheri who are the gods of the people and supposedly dwell in the center of the earth. The competition grows urgent because the Emperor has announced that this year is the year of his retirement. So 14 strains himself to show every drop of strength, intelligence and craftiness he has. He also turns to his servant Aednat, a lovely young woman who sees him as a younger brother, and his mentor Master Den. Unfortunately to his view, neither Aednat or Master Den are really what you could call allies in this struggle, as they keep encouraging him to give up the idea of becoming Emperor and instead focusing on escape.

Escape is also on the mind of Mariessa. A low born subject of the Empire, she lives in constant battle to keep her stepfather's hands off of her and her life her own. Her real parents raised her with a unbroken sense of self worth and right and backed it up by training her in how to kill people with knives. Mariessa is going to need every scrap of skill and every drop of determination that she has, because her venal stepfather has decided to sell her off. Not to just anyone however but to the Emperor's Men themselves. In this case they’re not looking for just another concubine for the Emperor but a woman to bear the first son of the new Emperor. Mariessa has no desire for such an honor viewing it as slavery and frankly... She's not wrong. So she maneuvers, plots, fights, and runs every step of the way refusing to give up her attempts at escape even has she is dragged into the very palace itself by her curly dark hair.

It's when the competition ends and the winner is declared that everything goes bad. Mariessa, Aednat, Master Den and Fourteen himself are going to have to flee from fates worse than death from the very heart of imperial power. Their opponent is a madman who wields the power of the entire world and has lived entire life times. Against them are arrayed armies and in a way society itself.  On their side is the lifetime of preparation that Master Den has made against this day; a network of angry citizens and officials from the highest levels of glittering society to the lowest dregs of civilization; some mysterious powers long thought extinct; and an ominous prophecy that predicts that the 13th son of the Emperor will be his doom.

I'd like to talk about prophecy, both specifically this one and in general for a moment.

For me this is the weakest part of the book and feels largely unnecessary. Part of that might be a general exhaustion with prophesy when it comes to fantasy stories. Prophesy stories tend to be real easy to screw up and there's also a chance of the prophecy draining all the tension out of your book. If everything is foreordained then why does anyone need to worry? There's the option of being “clever” in how you fulfill the prophecy but to be honest, most of these clever fulfillments aren't very clever.  Ethier falling flat by twisting the prophecy around so much you might as well not have it, or just being unconvincing.  Additionally, the prophecy just kinda makes the Emperor look... Well kinda dumb, which is another risk of these plots. I mean look if you had rock solid information that your 13th son would one day kill you... Why have a 13th son? For that matter why not limit yourself to 6 or 7 sons to ensure that there's a vast amount of wiggle room? Why even bother rolling that dice? There's no benefit to winning! So don't play! You're the Emperor of humanity! Just invest in some damn condoms and make sure you don't father any children you don't mean to. It's not that hard, billions of men have figured out how not to leave bastards behind and so can you! Of course our villain doesn't do that, he does the other plan where he murders an infant and the baby's mother for having the gall to give birth at the wrong moment. Look, even ignoring morality, any plan that includes “Let's murder the newborn child and it's mother” is a bad plan! Infanticide tends to create vastly more enemies than it removes and quite often you kill the wrong infant. Just ask King Herod and the Pharaoh from Exodus about that! When the Old Testament is pointing out that your plan has problems... It's time for a new plan! Ms. Black tries to get around this by not revealing the full prophecy until the end of the book, mostly just dropping a few lines here and there but anyone who's read older fantasy books (Like say... David Eddings) knows right away what we're dealing with. So for me at least the trick fell flat. It doesn't help that prophecy is in many ways overdone and frankly I think it's time to put that specific toy back in the toy box for a bit and let it rest.

That said, I do like the world the characters inhabit, even if I would never want to live there. In contrast to her leaning on prophesy, the world is very distinct and different from your bog standard fantasy world. While she has harvested some Asian influences here and there, Ms. Black has been content mostly to build something new. The Empire has a pre-WWII feel for its technology, but heavily impacted by the totalitarian government squatting on society. For example they have airplanes and cars, but due to the Emperor's decrees only the elite can actually have any access to them. Indoor plumbing is only common among the top levels of society because the Emperor and his administrators have no interest in improving the lot of the common man. Scientific research is slowed by the fact that every research project has to justify itself to a single all powerful authority whose only interest is in what will produce tangible benefits to him in the short-term. This is really brought home in a scene where the Emperor decides to suppress further airplane research (planes becoming cheaper and more powerful increases the chances of a rebel gaining access to a plane and causing damage, whereas the Empire has enough ground troops to win any confrontation it wants to) and research into atoms. I don't think I have to explain why suppressing the research into atoms made me laugh. It's a world where the elite have comfortable toilets, 20th century medicine and electric lights. The poor have to cart off lepers to death colonies and watch their children growing up half starved and illiterate. Ms. Black shows us exactly what a centralized state with complete control of industry and research looks like in these scenes and it's not pretty. Another interesting bit of the world are the heartstones. The soil has creatures called xicao that strip the body of all flesh rather quickly, this process leaves behind a small stone-like object called a heartstone. Traditionally the heartstone is presented to a loved one as a memorial to the lost one. Most of them simply generate light and are useful as long as you don't think to much about where they come from. A minority of heartstones do other things, like help you find a specific thing or person, or ensure that your children will look just like you or things even more strange or sinister.

Fourteen and Mariessa are the main characters of the book and they're both teenagers with a lot of growing to do. Both of them have a lot of baggage and preconceptions from their upbringing and prior experiences that they need to shake off. Along with learning how to deal with each other while avoiding being hunted down and murdered for daring to exist. Ms. Black handles this rather well, keeping the two fairly realistic but keeping either of them from getting to obnoxious so I only wanted to strangle them a few times in the book. Considering there are adults I want to straggle on a regular basis, this is well done. Especially given Fourteen's deep ignorance and classism. Master Den, while the older character and more settled in his ways is, on the edge of being consumed by a desire for revenge and chewing on old grudges and secrets. He's honestly the character we learn the least about in this story. Aedat mostly serves as the steadying influence of the group that everyone loves. Her main duty is keeping the group together and keeping them from killing each other until they learn to live and work together. Ironically given that she's barely into her 20s, she's the most mature character in the book. This includes the villains.

The big negatives for this book to me were the prophecy arc and the fact that some powers just seem to pop up out of nowhere, which a strange feeling of a lack of foreshadowing considering we're dealing with a fantasy revolving around a foretelling of the future. If you're going to have a character with secret magic powers, put in some build up. Additionally there were unnecessary plot elements (did we really need two palace escapes?) that ate up time that could have better used. Balancing against that, the characters of Fourteen and Mariessa are fairly well done and while they could use some more in-depth work, you get a good sense of what kind of people they are by the end of the book. The world is incredibly interesting, avoiding the fantasy traditions of NotEurope and the more recent one of NotJapan or NotChina. While there's a slight Pan-Asian feel to the Empire, there's enough variety of people and customs that it feels like a real world state inhabited by all kinds of people across the world. Ms. Black's strength is very much in the characters she creates and the world she allows them to inhabit. So I have hopes that any future books will be better. That said, I'm going to have to give Fourteen by Colette Black a C due to the plot issues. If prophesies and pacing issues don't bother you as much as they do me however the book is easily above average.

This Sunday, we bring in Joshua Simpson one of the co-writers of the Warpworld series to tell us a bit about worldbuilding.  Join us next Friday for the review of The Warrior's Stone by Matthew O. Duncan.  Keep Reading!

Red textis your editor, Dr. Ben Allen.
Black text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders.

Implanted By Lauren Teffeau

Implanted

By Lauren Teffeau

Lauren Teffeau was born on the east coast and traveled south where she graduated with a degree in English and a Master's degree in Mass Communications. She worked in academia for several years before heading to the Southwest where she would attend the Talos Toolbox, a masterclass workshop on writing (George RR Martin showed up for this year’s run). She is also an active member of Critical Mass, a New Mexico based invitation-only critique group of science fiction writers. Implanted is her first book released in August of 2018 (so we're reviewing it hot off the presses!), published by Angry Robot books. Angry Robot books is an imprint focused on science fiction and fantasy founded in 2008 by Marc Gascoigne, a former Black Library (which publishes books for Warhammer 40k and other Games Workshop products) publisher who was working with HarperCollins Publishing. Angry Robot Books was bought in 2010 by... Random House (they are everywhere! [Seriously, someone bring back anti-trust enforcement]).

Implanted takes place over a century in the future, humanity is huddled in a collection of domed cities. Why are we hiding under glass you ask? Well it turns out that two centuries of rampant industrialization can catch up to you pretty damn quick and we screwed things up so bad that people can’t go outside without a gas mask. So we spent over a century slowly and carefully cleaning things up with people huddled under glass domes in crowded cities. This story takes place in the city of New Worth built on the bones of Fort Worth after it was destroyed by out of control tornadoes. With limited space and resources the good people of New Worth find themselves in an increasingly stratified society, with people in the elite classes living in the canopy; the upper part of the dome where you get natural sunlight and real plants! The lower classes live in Terrestrial district, at the bottom of the city, where all the light is artificial and there's little beyond people, rats and cockroaches. What keeps this society going is the hope of emergence, the return to the outside. To that end each city has devoted massive time and effort to slowly detoxifying the outside world. Through back-breaking labor, the use of genetic engineered plants to draw toxic elements from the soil and water, and more. In the meantime to keep people from tearing each other apart, new technologies were needed; one of those was the implant. The implant is a computer interface that goes into the base of your skull and lets you plug directly into the internet. Facebook, snapchat, 4chan, all of it, directly in your head. I'll wait for you to stop screaming in horror. As a result augmented reality is present everywhere in the domes and VR is the most popular way of spending time. From massive Arcades where you can play full body simulation video games to real time chat systems. Of course there are a number of issues with this.

One of these issues is that as you get closer to a person, the more they get into your head due to the implant. You see, you can not only pass each other audio and text messages through the implant but also emotions and even memories. This is made more intense through physical contact. Even a handshake can get you “calibrated” with someone, connected at a level that you can feel them in your head. This is horrifying to me, the one place that should always remain private is the inside of your own mind (It is worth noting that this is definitely something people have to actively permit). The idea of never being able to get away from an alien presence in my own head is one that disturbs me greatly. The fact that people in this society consider it not just a normal but a desirable part of their lives seems incredibly alien to me. I'm not the only one, there are people who for mental, emotional, or ideological reasons can't or won't have a implant. There are even people who just can't afford one. They're called Disconnects and they're the lowest of the lowest. They can't work most jobs, they can't qualify for most educational opportunities and live in the worst parts of the dome. They are discontented as the world outside looks greener and greener but they are placed under more and more constraints. Because the long, painful clean up effort has born fruit, the cities are surrounded by slowly but steadily growing green belts and you can finally go outside and breathe without a mask. It's not finished yet however, the outside world is still dangerous and filled with toxic soil, water and other dangers but people are growing increasingly impatient. It's in this simmering social stew of clashing desires and resentments that our story takes place.

Emery Discoll grew up in the Terrestrial District but is on her way up. The sacrifices of her parents to get her the best implant and the best education have paid off. Emery is set to graduate from the best college in the city. She's networked with wealthy men and women and is best friends with the daughter of the man running the most powerful news network. She already has a job as a data analyst set up after graduation. The job is boring but it's well-paying and safe. With this job and her degree Emery can escape up to the Understory and take her parents with her. She's even got a kinda-sorta boyfriend, who she's been trading emotions with over the implant link for a while now. Things are looking up for her, as long as no one finds out about her after-school hobby. See, even in New Worth, or I should say especially in New Worth there is crime. One such crime is hunting the unsuspecting, attacking them, cutting out their implant,, wiping it and selling it on the black market to people who need an implant but can't afford one legally. Emery hunts them in turn, seeking to neutralize them so the police can capture them. This is dangerous however has the cops in New Worth don't like vigilantes and the merest hint of out of bounds behavior can ruin Emery's life forever. This makes sense given just how little space there is for everyone under the dome, New Worth isn't Mega City One, it occupies a small space and has a million people in that space. In such densely packed areas keeping anyone from acting wildly becomes a major priority, you see this in modern cities like Tokyo for example.

Of course, Emery's behavior catches up to her and her secret crusade is used as a means to blackmail her into abandoning her life, faking her death and wiping her implant clean so no one can find her on the internet (Isn’t… the destruction of her life what she seeks to avoid in being blackmailed?{There's a difference between disappearing utterly for 10 years and going to jail for longer and destroying your family and possibly close friends in the process}). She's blackmailed by a shadowy corporation that specializes in transporting data that people want kept secret using foot mobile couriers. They encode the data in the couriers blood, have the courier walk over to the drop point. Blood is drawn the data decoded and the freshly scrubbed blood is put right back into the courier. There's a time limit, after 3 days the alteration to the couriers blood starts making them sick and will eventually kill them, the couriers call it the curdle. This process only works on people with a rare trait in their DNA that allow their blood to carry the data. Emery, unlucky girl, is one of those people. I'm going to be honest, I have no idea how any part of that process would even work, but Ms. Teffaeu does a good job of outlining the limitations of the technology and its effects, which is all you need to do to tell an effective story. Plus given that I've literally reviewed stories about water-magic using elves in this review series, I don't think I'm going to be to picky on whether or not the technology is even possible. Ms. Teffaeu also does a good job of exploring Emery's complicated relationship with her employer and her fellow employees. In one sense they're her capturers, they have forced her into this job and cut her off from all contact with the outside world and she hates that. On the other side, they have taught her a wide variety of new skills and given her access to all sorts of new knowledge. On top of this her employers are fairly skilled in the use of carrot and stick. Promising her that if she follows the rules and provides good service that she will be allowed to recontact her friends and family. On top of that they provide a living to her parents disguised as a death benefit. On the flip side if she ever breaks the rules, she'll have her implant removed and be dumped in the Terrestrial District as a blacklisted Disconnect. They're even smart enough to have a handler who is mainly there to train her and look after her, so she has a sympathetic figure to serve as an authority figure. Her handler helps her deal with a couple of problems from before her conscription and giving her, among other things, closure. This is honestly a pretty good way to develop Stockholm Syndrome in an person. They feel they have reasons to be grateful and enjoy the work despite the fact that the only reasons they don't qualify as slave labor is that they’re paid and they are allowed to go free in 10 years. I suppose to be fair I should note that a good many of her coworkers are there voluntarily, having accepted an offer of secretive and dangerous but highly paid work. So Emery being a sort of highly paid hostage of sorts is not the norm for her employers and gives us a sense of just how rare her genotype is that they would resort to those methods.

Of course everything goes sideways when Emery is tapped for a super secret run with government data that goes bad. With unknown people trying to hijack the data (which means hijacking her) and her unable to tell who to trust, Emery has to go to ground. She must figure out who she can trust, what's she carrying and who would want this data so bad that they would kill for it. In the process she finds herself between an increasingly militant Disconnect movement determined to escape the city and an unknown conspiracy determined to control emergence into the new world. Can Emery figure out what she's carrying, why everyone is determined to get it out of her veins with or without her help and can she do so before the curdle kills her? You'll have to read to find out.

Much like The Windup Girl, there's a lot of Cyberpunk in Implanted but I do think it can be fairly called a Solarpunk story. It takes place in a world after climate change and the collapse of fossil fuels and focuses on a society trying to rebuild itself to live in greater harmony with a environment that it is slowly rebuilding after our modern abuses. There's a thread of hope that runs through the story and an idea of community as well as a sense of slowly pulling ourselves back from the brink. The story is told completely from Emery's point of view, thankfully she is an engaging and sympathetic character even as she navigates divided loyalties and tries to sort out her messy conflicting emotions about the situation that's she in. Which is fairly realistic; while I'm unaware of any corporations that make a habit of blackmailing people into doing very sensitive work, Ms. Teffaeu avoids the trap of making them too cruel or brutal to their workers. This is a solid work, especially for a first novel. That said the actual villains of the book get very little development. In fact almost no one gets a lot of development beyond Emery and the main supporting character Rik (which will often happen from an entirely personal perspective). The book was first conceived as young adult fiction and later made into an adult work and that shows a bit with Emery retaining a very young personality. It's not unreasonably young however (but seriously she went through college without a single boyfriend and only one friend she can name off the top of her head without her implant?). More work could have been done with the other couriers for example, as we know very little about them. On top of that Emery's training period seems ridiculously short as I got the impression that it was measured in weeks considering what she's being asked to do, months would seem a better time frame. Lastly, why have them fake their deaths? Why not just keep them undercover? That way they could do courier runs as part of their cover jobs and it would be one extra layer of security. The claim that it would protect their families and friends kinda fall flat because if someone figures out who the couriers are, the family members are still there to threaten, and it being a crowded city state, it's harder to hide that these people keep showing up even with the fact that the majority of the population is buried in the world of their implants and not paying attention, and couriers have means of defeating electronic surveillance. I feel like someone who knows about the existence of the business (of which there are a good number, since people pay them to run data for them!) could devote the resources to crack things open and then what? Even with that, Implanted by Lauren Teffeau rates a solid B and I really hope to see more of her in the future.

Welp that wraps up Solarpunk month... Wonder what I should next?
You did pick up a bunch of books at ComicCon...
Oh... Right. The books I bought at ComicCon... In May. I should read those... Now. So we're doing independent authors September!  Starting with Fourteen by Colette Black!  Keep Reading!

Sidebar VI: Canceling the Apocalypse Solarpunk

Sidebar VI: Canceling the Apocalypse

Solarpunk

Solarpunk is perhaps the youngest genre I've discussed so far, if Cyberpunk was a person (God have mercy on such a man) it would be old enough to run for President. Climate Fiction would be attending grade school. The earliest reference I can find to Solarpunk is from around 2014/2013. That means Solarpunk is barely old enough for kindergarten. Suncatcher for example was first published in 2014 and Alia Gee would have no idea for sometime that there were other novels taking up the banner of Solarpunk. The first mentions I can find (admitly I can only really look at English language sources) on tumbler date from about 2014 as well (http://missolivialouise.tumblr.com/post/94374063675/heres-a-thing-ive-had-around-in-my-head-for-a). Although the term itself had been floated as early as 2010, I couldn't works I'd really mark as Solarpunk. Let's talk about what Solarpunk gets from from each of its “parents” and then look at what makes it different from them. .

Solarpunk works tend to be critical of capitalism and of modern society in general. It distrusts authority and hierarchy and often features characters somewhat estranged from society or oppressed by it's norms and mores. Emiko is a great example of this, as she could easily fit into a Cyberpunk book. Solarpunk also brings in the idea that technology doesn't necessarily everything and may not benefit the masses in the end. The Solarpunk books we've looked at present pretty profound ideas of why technology, be it the engineered plagues and blights of The Windup Girl or the genetic experiments present throughout Suncatcher, may in fact be a problem instead of a solution. Solarpunk also adopts the punk idea of rebellion against social expectations and rules and resistance to top down authority. In fact like Cyberpunk, Solarpunk presents these institutions and organizations as inherently dehumanizing and damaging to the psychological and often physical well being of the individual. Solarpunk also is rather critical of elites that profit off the current social set up and is unlikely to present them in a flattering light. These trends are inherited from Cyberpunk and show that the themes of Cyberpunks have been pretty influential, this isn't a surprise as Cyberpunk has soaked into our culture pretty thoroughly and Mr. Bacigalupi shows that he could easily write Cyberpunk. In both Cyberpunk and Solarpunk there's a strain of anarchist influence running throughout the themes and plots of the two genres both expressing in an inherent rejection of the limitations that authority and social expectations place on a person.

From Climate Fiction we see an anxiety about our changing climate and what costs industrialization and pollution will exact from our civilization in the end. I also think the recurring pandemics that show in the Solarpunk books I've examined may have slipped in from Climate Change, representing mankind losing the hard won, if incomplete and spotty, control we've wrestled from the natural world. There's also a reemerging of traditional problems that have tormented humanity until very recently that now need new solutions. Additionally Solarpunk inherits from Climate Fiction the call to action. Where Cyberpunk is often presents it's dark future as unavoidable, Climate Fiction and Solarpunk call on the reader and fans to act. One thing many of the boosters and writers of Solarpunk works is a dissatisfaction with modern society and a strong desire for large scale and often radical change. Alongside with this is the end of the fossil fuel era, Solarpunk takes place post peak oil and Climate Fiction predicts the end of our ability to access cheap, abundant fossil fuels to power our economy. So while Cyberpunk has provided the rebellion and themes of the genre, Climate Fiction provided the general shaping forces of your standard Solarpunk work (such as standard exists, remember we're in the opening stages of the genre here) and the general idea of using fiction to urge for specific social change.

Some of the differences I'm seeing is that there isn't a central figure that has emerged to stamp the definition in place for Solarpunk. There's no Dan Bloom or Gibson in Solarpunk (yet). Solarpunk instead emerges from the fervent discussions of it's adherents, from various short stories and collections and picks up steam from self published or small press novels. This has made Solarpunk rather diffuse and I'd be lying to you if I didn't say there were some disagreements in how the genre is presented. Many would disagree with my calling The Windup Girl, Solarpunk for example due to the darkness of the setting. There is a large dividing line there, Solarpunk is an inherently hopeful genre. That's where the writers and fans of the genre find their rebellion, in confronting the apocalypse dreaded by Climate Fiction and declaring that not only will they find a way to maintain and sustain civilization but they will build a better one. One more adapted to it's environment and more in harmony with the eco-systems that civilization is part of. Solarpunk protagonists don't dwell apart from society but work to change, often being part of alternate organizations working to build what I'll call alternate infrastructure. We see an example of this in this week's book, in Suncatcher by serving as roving solar chargers and selling the energy from that to cities along it's flight path to the point that large energy corporations feel threatened by this competing model is a good example of that. In fact one of the pharses that was repeated over and over by Solarpunk advocates I found was infrastructure as a form of resistance (https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/). The act of building a vertical farm or solar powered engine isn't just an act of construction, it's an act of subversion and rebellion. For Solarpunk writers, this is a revolt of hope against despair. Which leds to another difference, the anarchism in Cyberpunk is often nihilistic and expressed by self destructive behavior in the protagonist or apathy. Solarpunk rejects that in favor of communal styles of anarchism or just using more consensus based styles of decision making. The Cyberpunk protagonist is classically a loner who fits into groups uneasily at best. The Solarpunk protagonist is either already part of a group or looking to join one and be a productive member.

Solarpunk also embraces the idea of diversity within it's casts and protagonists. While fantasy and science fiction have become more diverse over time. Solarpunk writers don't have the sheer inertia or at times worrisome history that writers of Space Opera or Lovecraftian horror sometimes have to deal with. Women are well represented here, as are various minority groups be they defined by race, religion or orientation. Part of this I think is the fact that the fiction community simply has a more diverse fandom and more diverse group of creators involved then would ever be admitted in public in the past. Where in the days of Issac Asimov, writing sci-fi was largely seen as a white man's game (never you mind those ladies writing science fiction behind the curtain), today the science fiction and fantasy community is more open (even if there is some pushback) to writers and characters who aren't straight white men. Interestingly, like a lot of science fiction, Solarpunk does have a tendency to use people who were genetically engineered as a way to explore bigotry and oppression without triggering defensiveness from it's readers. Suncatcher uses Charlie, the part dog, part girl, all roving reporter to show how damaging it can be to declare someone a nonperson and The Windup Girl shows up how treating someone as a nonperson can be incredibly dehumanizing to the people doing the oppression. I haven't spoken about transhumanism but so far Solarpunk presents the transhuman supermen of as downtrodden and exiled to the margins of society compared to transhumanism triumphant predictions of post humans ruling the roost. Which is an interesting difference as well.

Solarpunk hasn't yet reached it's fully mature and realized form as a genre. It's very possible it never will and will die a premature death. The opening years of a genre are when it's most likely to simply flop and fade away. That said, in it's brief history Solarpunk has found an interesting niche and is in the process of exploring interesting ideas that bring fresh air to science fiction. Additionally while Climate Fiction does speak to our modern anxieties and fears, Solarpunk dares to suggest that there can be hope even in the face of something so huge and unrelenting. My own thought is that we need a constant exploration of new ideas and ways of looking at the world to prevent becoming stale and out of touch with the world. Also, I not counsel despair. To quote, despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. We may have to take a hard road to the future. A road unforeseen. That said, I would say there are worse things to do then trust to hope, as long as we act to bring that hope about and do not use it as an excuse to be idle. After all sometimes revolutions win.

If you would like to read more about Solarpunk

https://solarpunkanarchists.com/2016/05/27/what-is-solarpunk/

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/solarpunk-against-a-shitty-future/

https://eco-fiction.com/contest/what-is-solarpunk/

https://theconversation.com/explainer-solarpunk-or-how-to-be-an-optimistic-radical-80275

See you Friday when we review Implanted. Keep Reading.

Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky By Alia Gee

Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky

By Alia Gee

Suncatcher is another fine example of what the internet can do, in some ways. Published in 2014 by a Print on Demand company called Booklocker.com (which for a wonder isn't owned by Random House [For now]). So the odds of finding Suncatcher in a bookstore or library are at best vanishingly low, that said you can find the book on Amazon which sells a paperback or kindle version. Suncatcher is Alia Gee's first and at the time of this review only novel. Mrs. Gee, who was named after Alia Atreides from Dune (YAAASSS!) by her parents according to one story, graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio and currently lives in New York with her husband and children. She is politically active and while I did not speak to her for this review, I'm sure she wouldn't mind me reminding you to vote this year.

Suncatcher is set in the year 2075 AD, taking place mainly in the free city of Miami. The United States and frankly the world have gone through a lot. Peak oil has left the world mostly devoid of fossil fuels. Pandemics have made travel a lot less common and severely pruned the population of the world. Climate change has turned cities like Miami and New York City, into islands huddled behind great sea walls of concrete and metal holding back the newly risen seas. Indentured servitude is back as people sign life debts to corporations to ensure that they have three hots and a cot (to be honest this doesn't really seem like something corporations would do, reclassifying all their employees as “contractors” so they only have to pay them on a job to job basis seems more in character for a modern corporation). People have found ways to deal with the new stresses and problems of life, but others have found themselves going insane and committing terrorist attacks as part of “blood cults.” Committing mass murder while screaming that God needs blood for atonement(Guys, guys! No! Don’t kill your fellow workers, kill your corporate overlords!). Civilization has however survived (That is debatable. Depends on your definitions I suppose.) and is slowly but surely rebuilding from all of this. People are traveling by airship and train. Cities and states are recreating economies and the education system is roaring back to life. This is all aided via communicating through the Internet 2.0 called the aether, which is accessed through VR goggles or wearable bracelet computers and seems to create a very subjective experience, where each user can visit the same site and see something completely different. I have to admit this kinda fascinates me a bit because the sheer software resources needed to do this alongside the profiling and interactive programming requirements speaks to a civilization that has managed to greatly outdo our own mastery of computers and communication networks. At the same time I am wondering what an aether reddit or facebook would even look like. Maybe Mrs. Gee can address that another novel.

We see this world through the eyes of Professor Radicand Jones, a Muslim women. She is an American of Pakistani and Welsh origin and survivor of the plague that caused the entire American Northwest to be quarantined. That plague took a heavy toll on her family, killing Professor Jones younger brother and her older sister's fiance. As part of a response to that tragedy her older sister Professor Pari Jones took off with an airship she designed with a bunch of graduate students and... Kinda never came back. In fact Radicand and Pari hadn't really seen each other in ten years as of the opening of the novel. If that wasn't enough, their father is also in a coma, with a possibly malfunctioning cybernetic implant that no one seems to be sure how to fix. Despite this, the Jones family has managed to keep moving and build up. Radicand has become a respected professor in New York City. The now Admiral Pari Jones has build a “flock” of airships from that one single ship she built. They move from port to port collecting solar energy in their sails, selling to the cities they visit to pay for supplies while making decisions based on consensus instead of a top down command structure (which means they vote on things instead of Pari just giving orders). However both sisters feel something missing in their lives. With Professor Jones feeling increasingly trapped by her role as a professor but unable to explain her feelings to anyone around her. This, of course, makes her feel more trapped. So when Admiral Jones invites Professor Jones to join her flock for a little vacation and a possible sisterly reunion Radicand jumps at the chance.

However Professor Jones is walking into more then a chance to repair her relationship with a long absent sister. Admiral Jones has attracted some unwelcome attention as her habit of selling energy for the amount of money she needs instead of at what the market will bear has attracted attention from the companies that she's undercutting. As the flock approaches the free city of Miami that’s holding back the seas with walls and hope, they attract pirate attacks, blood cult rampages and ever-deepening mystery. On top of this Radicand has met a perfectly nice young man in the flock named Toby, who also happens to be a martial artist capable of killing you with his toes. So she finds herself trying to reconcile with her sister while juggling the demands of a new romance and keeping pirates and more from killing them all. Of course the Jones aren't the only ones in trouble, that would be too easy. An old friend of Radicand’s from college, a young lady named Charlie whose genetics are about 10% canine is also in trouble as a corporation using bounty hunters and lawyers attempts to kidnap her under the stance that she isn't a person but missing property (Kill Them All).

Charlie is an interesting character in her own right. Charlie is what we refer to as a chimera, in genetics that refers to a creature that has two different sets of DNA, but I’ll let my editor, the man with a PhD, go into that. In Charlie's case she has the DNA of a human spiced with that of a dog.

Ok, there is a distinction we need to make. A chimera is a mix of cells from different sources. They can be naturally occurring in humans. From time to time, two eggs get fertilized and instead of becoming twins, they fuze. When this happens the system of position-based regulation we use during gestation to determine what cells go where means that while the skin or blood might be from one genetic sibling, the liver or brain cells might be from the other. This is occasionally an issue in paternity tests and criminal investigations. If, in this case, the term Chimera is accurate, then she is a human who had dog cells somehow integrated into her embryonic tissue that then, somehow, developed normally into a person who has some dog tissues, or even entire organ systems or gross anatomy in some ways (like her eyes or something being dog eyes). A transgenic would be where dog DNA was inserted into Charlie’s genome likely as an embryo. This might be to give her physiological functions that a dog has that humans don’t (for example: the ability to synthesize vitamin C) without affecting her gross anatomy, or at 10% it might affect her gross anatomy, but it would likely be less… targeted, in a way. It would affect regulatory functions rather than cell fates and for something that disarate would likely end up with something kinda… Ripley-Clone-esque. Given that Charlie is basically human but with certain dog anatomical parts without begging for death, I’d say Chimera is accurate, but talking about her percent of dog DNA is probably an authorial brainbug or cultural shorthand.

That said, she is fully a person here even if her mannerisms and abilities aren't fully human. However in the United States, this is a matter of some dispute. It appears much like in The Water Knife, the federal government is weaker then in our modern day (no shit). In northern states, Charlie is a person and a citizen of the US and is accorded the full protections and rights under the law as such. She is even married (although her husband doesn't appear in the story, he is often mentioned). In the Southern states however, there is a fair amount of resistance to the idea of treating people like Charlie as... People (Because...The South. I can see it, but that might just be my utter contempt for the CSA speaking.). Interestingly enough this appears to be a minority position, likely buttressed by the fact that Charlie makes her living as a roving reporter, using aether technology to live cast a good amount of her travels and investigations. It is however enough of a position that armed bounty hunters can make an attempt on someone in broad daylight and seem to expect support from the government in their kidnapping. Radicand finds herself drawn into Charlie's problem and wondering how it intersects with her issues. For that matter, they have to look into Charlie's most recent investigation into a traveling Evangelical preacher who leaves a trail of violence behind him and what strange connections he might have. Radicand also finds herself puzzling over why all of this reminds her of father, but he's been in a coma for years so what connection could he have to these events? Just in case dealing with, corporate harassment, pirates, bounty hunters, and more isn't enough; Radicand finds herself drawn into her new boyfriend's past as well and what is Toby hiding in his desperate street-rat past? Radicand has to work fast to save her best friend from college, her boyfriend, and her sister's life’s work while trying to repair her relationship with said sister. Why does she need to work fast? Because she's in Miami, living on an airship and it's hurricane season. I bet you thought your deadline issues were serious huh?

While you might think that the world I've outlined is a grim and dark one, it’s Radicand Jones and the other characters around her that keep this from dissolving into a grim dark world. While the world she lives in has many problems, she shows us a good number of people, like Charlie, her sister, and even Toby working to make the world a better place. Whether it's Peri Jones attempt to bring clean cheap solar power to communities that might not have access to it, a Quaker run cafe providing food and shelter to those in need (I’ve always had a deep and abiding respect for Quakers). Or Radicand Jones' attempt to enforce her friend's innate personhood, opposition be damned. There's plenty of that here. One thing that often escapes people when discussing when a setting is grim dark or not is that it’s not the problems that beset the world presented to us, it's whether they can be solved and whether the actions of the characters to address those problems are allowed to matter. I'm going to argue that this is one of the driving themes in Solarpunk; the idea that people and communities working on both the small and large scale can make things better. That in the end, your actions do matter and can change the world one way or another. When you think about the settings where nothing is allowed to change for the better, that's an interesting theme to embrace.

I enjoyed Suncatcher but it does have what I will call “first novel problems”. There are points where the dialogue hits the point where you can write that line but you can't say it. While how people speak to one another does change over time, it still needs to be believable to your audience. I also feel the storyline with her father could have been better foreshadowed and I also find myself wondering if she didn't put in much story for one novel at certain points, as all these problems coming together at once seemed to be stretching it a bit. That said, she does a good job with Radicand and the supporting characters and her world building was downright amazing; she was able to use a breakfast menu to really show the massive difference between the world of 2075 (with 50$ pancakes) and today.  So Ms. Gee is able to build an interesting world and fill it with engaging and compelling characters. Honestly, Suncatcher is a pretty good novel and a great example of Solarpunk. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the emerging genre or to anyone would like to see more a woman-focused story, as most of the main characters are ladies. All things considered I'm giving Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky by Alia Gee a B. This is really good for a first novel and if Ms. Gee is reading this review. I would really like to see you write more novels, set in the Suncatcher universe or elsewhere.

So this Sunday I'll be talking about Solarpunk itself at last and you should join next week for Implanted by Lauren Teffaeu. Keep reading!

The dark text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders.
The red text is your editor, Dr. Ben Allen.

Sidebar V: The Other Influence Climate fiction

Sidebar V: The Other Influence

Climate fiction

Great fiction is often declared timeless and there are certainly timeless themes, fears and hope you can speak to. However, the stories that grab a hold of a culture's imagination and leave deep marks on that culture's mental landscape are those that speak to a certain time. They invoke and speak to the fears and hopes of that time and lay them out in the open for everyone to see. That's what Climate Fiction seeks to do and it's certainly speaking to modern fears. To be blunt on the matter, the hottest years on record are uniformly listed in the last decade. In 2018 alone Japan, Korea, much of Europe (including above the Arctic circle) and the Arabic world (including the Sahara Desert, recording temperatures of 124 F or 51.3C the highest temperature recorded in Africa). Canada has declared this a record summer and it stands as the hottest La Nina on human record. Before this, 2016 was declared the hottest year in record with 2017 coming in 3^rd. I point this out to show that frankly, yes to write of climate change is to write of something incredibly pertinent to our modern day lives and to society. Despite what some people would like to think.

That said Climate Fiction didn't spring from the aether fully formed. There were people experimenting with the ideas of climate change as narrative form or setting before the modern day. From Jules Vern distopian novel, Paris in the 20^th century to New Wave writer J.G. Ballard's books The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Burning World (all written in the 1960s). These books did explore the effect of climate change on the world in some ways but for example, Paris in the 20^th Century focused more on the alienation of it's main character, a man who wanted to be a poet, living in a society that only valued science and business. JG Ballard's book often didn't explore the science and were more often in using climate change to explore the effects of disasters on communities and individuals or to examine psychological effects of disasters. The genre didn't really set itself apart or start gathering steam however until the 21^st century.

Today Climate Fiction is sometimes referred to as Cli-fi or eco-fiction. Cli-Fi was a term coined by Dan Bloom. Mr. Bloom is a native of Springfield Massachusetts, where he graduated Tufts University in Boston with a degree in literature. While he wrote a novel he never published it and instead when to work as a journalist where he had a varied career with a number of publications and positions. Two experiences combined to solidify the term in his head however, first seeing the honestly horrible film Day After Tomorrow. Second and likely more important the 2006 report released by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which he read. Mr. Bloom would coin the term Cli-Fi in 2008. It would catch on when NPR did a 5 minute radio with writers about it. Mr. Bloom would also make a concentrated effort to push the term and encourage novels to be published in the new genre. Describing himself as a PR person, he contacts publishers to help writers get their stories published, encourages the writers to write stories featuring Climate Change. He also maintains and runs cli-fi.net, a website that focuses on the genre. He does all of this without payment or asking for recognition.

But what is Cli-Fi you're asking. Climate Fiction is made of stories, usually set in the near future where Climate Change and environmental neglect have caught up to humanity and industrialized civilization begins to fail. It often focuses on the poor and down trodden, those least able to shield themselves from the ravages of a new world. In books like The Water Knife for example we can see that the wealthy are retreating into arcologies while the poor are left to the mercy of an increasingly dry and merciless planet. As such there's often a dystopian tone to Climate Fiction novels and a tendencies to focus on people on the margins of society and civilization. This is much like Cyberpunk, however while in much of Cyberpunk, society is shown as corrupt but vital, in Climate Fiction there is often a sense of decay. That society may be in fact living on borrowed time that is rapidly running out. This is very well done in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and the following sequels. Course, Margaret Atwood also mixes in fears about pandemics but that is also common in Climate Fiction as the thought is the strain of dealing with a changing world leaves the door open for traditional human problems we thought we had banished to come creeping back in. Climate Fiction can also take place in the current day however, examining how the current changes in our climate can and are impacting people living today and the role that social and government action, or inaction plays in that. These stories will often have a scientist protagonist as they research the effects of climate change. Although that shouldn't be considered a hard or fast rule as there are also plenty of books that buck that trend.

Climate Fiction is also a call to action. Many of the writers are hoping to spur people to act on the facts of Climate Change to aide in mitigating or avoiding the worse damages. Because to be honest, a good story is often much better at planting an idea in people's head then a dry recitation of facts. That's not to say scientific fact has no place in Climate Fiction, but it is buttressed by the addition of narrative and characters to ensure that it's lodged into the memories and thoughts of the reader. This isn't the first time that the environmental movement has used fiction to help communicate it's goals and beliefs to the greater public and it won't be the last. Hopefully, we'll look back at books like The Water Knife in 50 years and discuss how such books helped avert the future written in those pages or at least the worst of it.

So at long last, next week, we'll tackle Solarpunk itself. I'll try to show what it's derived from it's parent genre and why I've staked Cyberpunk and Climate Fiction as such and we'll discuss... What the hell is Solarpunk anyways?

Keep Reading.

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

“They have no idea what they're doing. These are the people who are suppose to be pulling all the strings, and they're making it up as they go along.”

Lucy Monroe page 344

You can't live without it. You don't think about it when you have it but when you don't... You do anything to anyone to get enough to keep going. There's a number of things that applies to, but in this review, we're talking about water. We talked about Mr. Bacigalupi last review so let's discuss the book. The Water Knife was published in 2015 by Vintage Books. Vintage Books was founded in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was purchased by Random House in 1960 and currently operates as a subdivision of Random House. Now's let's dig into it. (I’ve never figured out why he goes through the history of publishers like this.{Someone needs to, do you know how many I've linked back to Random House?})

The Water Knife takes place in a near future American Southwest. The changes in the climate that we see taking effect around us have kept ramping up, to the point that the southern parts of the US are in collapse. Texas and Louisiana have become disaster zones as hurricanes and drought have driven the state governments to their knees. In response to the massive number of refugees, California led a coalition of wealthy states in creating the State Independence and Sovereignty act. This let those wealthy states keep other Americans out so as to avoid having to spend resources on them while they frantically poured resources into protecting their own populations and resources (In reality, California is even more screwed than LA and TX are…). Now your state residence matters and which state you're a citizen of is way more important than being a US citizen. States that can use their national guard units to enforce their borders and resource claims. States that cannot? They use militia groups recruited under the table to keep out undesirables by any means necessary. Meanwhile in the southwest, a resource war over water is being raged between Phoenix, Los Vegas, and California. Folks, no matter who wins Phoenix is the definite loser (Well yes, we’re going to lose in real life too. Even without climate change this metro area is screwed. That’s what we get for living in a monument to the hubris of humanity.). California uses a vast machinery of political, legal, economic, and military power to establish an informal empire in the west. The state drains entire other states of their water to keep themselves going, as an increasingly weak federal government can only half-heartedly protest. Meanwhile Los Vegas rallies behind Catherine Case, a real estate operator and political operator who is using an army of lawyers, crooked politicians, national guardsmen, and when all else fails troubleshooters willing to break the law to keep her arcologies lush and booming. Now, some of you may be wondering what an arcology is. An arcology is a self-contained human habitat that is nearly self sufficient. In science fiction they are often presented as being as large as cities. They show up in the Water Knife as a new model of human habitation that's being created as a response to Climate Change. Catherine Case is building a number of them around Los Vegas and is leaning hard on her less-than-legal operatives to get the water they need.


These operatives are called Water Knives because they cut water from other cities and communities in order to redirect it to their patrons. Angel, a former Mexican (now the Cartel States) refugee who grew up to be a gangbanger only to be turned into a savvy operative in Case's organization is one of the best of those Water Knives. Angel is a very interesting and complex character, someone who fully admits that what he's doing is ruining lives but rationalizes it with the belief that it has to be done. Also it will be done one way or another and it might as well be him. Angel, much like Anderson Lake in The Windup Girl, also tells himself that he's making a better world. Yes, there are losers who are crushed in the attempt, but there are also winners who gain entry into a new paradise of life free from concerns over the rapidly changing environment. Angel puts his faith in Catherine Case's vision and so is willing to be a devil to bring it about. So we get a man who is willing to blow up a water treatment plant and through that kill a city (and a good number of the people living in it) but is a big fan of a T.V series about a Texan trying to protect fellow refugees while hunting for his wife and children in the chaos of a Southwest that is falling apart and is incredibly understanding and forgiving of people trying to kill him. Whether or not that moral complexity is going to help him is an open question as he's sent into a dying Phoenix on the rumor that a game changing source of water is about to found in Arizona and Case's operatives in Phoenix have gone dark and silent. Meanwhile people in Phoenix have their own problems.


Between waves of Texan refugees that can't leave, California, and Las Vegas systematically stripping the state of Arizona of its water rights and the cartels moving north smelling blood on the sand; Phoenix is a dying beast that refuses to believe it's dead. While a Chinese built arcology is rising in the middle of the city, the remainder is turning into a vast slum choked with desperate Texan girls selling themselves for food and water; Mexican gangsters taking control of the city one street and dirty cop at a time; as well as Chinese and Californian business men picking over the corpse for anything of value. Meanwhile Coyotes offer a way north for anyone who can pay enough and is willing to brave the desert while being hunted by militias willing to commit the kind of crimes you usually associate with news about civil wars in the Middle East. Living in this city is Lucy Monroe, a journalist who came to Phoenix to provide front-line coverage of the death of a city and perhaps an entire state. Lucy could leave anytime she wants, she has citizenship in a New England state, has won Pulitzers for her work, and has a sister living in Canada who practically pleads with her to get out of there. But it's to late for Lucy, Phoenix has gotten to her and she has become a part of the dust-ridden sun-blasted hell it's become. That said Lucy still holds out hope that something can be done to at least slow down the dying and while she's not a fan of Catherine Case, her real hatred is reserved for an increasingly imperialist California. When her friend Jamie is tortured to death after telling her about a deal that could change the entire region, Lucy starts digging to find out what the hell happened. Maria Vilarosa can't leave however; a Texan refugee, climate change drove her family out of Texas and has killed the rest of her family one by one. Her life is one of trying to hustle from score to score, find a way to save some money despite the gang claiming almost everything she earns as “tax”, and avoid being turned into a street-walker. This might be impossible as her neighborhood is owned lock stock and barrel by the Vet. The Vet is a criminal madman who has built a violent criminal enterprise and is squeezing the Texan community for every last cent he can. He maintains power through fear, violence, and feeding people who disobey him to the pack of Hyena he keeps in a lock pen outside his home. (...Woah. Points for creativity and animal trafficking I suppose.) Maria has an overriding goal, she is going to get out of Phoenix and she is not letting anything stop her.


The plot moves quickly in The Water Knife as the characters encounter one another, part ways, meet again and create alliances, betray each other and remake alliances and play against an increasingly violent and unstable backdrop. It's a world where the United States has all but fallen and no one seems to realize it (which echos the fate of the Roman Empire in a lot of ways) and it's component parts are increasingly turning on each other for whatever resources those governments can grab for themselves. The story presents us with a world where Americans have abandoned national unity and have turned on each other; where the actions and behaviors we see in the third world are now played out in the United States as a vast chunk of the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet is turned into a wasteland by changes in the climate. This story is light years darker and more dystopian then The Windup Girl. There is no strain of hope here, no emerging group of human beings better able to live in harmony with their environment. There are only those lucky enough to be in safe zones, like arcologies or states that have the wealth and power to deal with the changes being wrought, and those who live in the ruins of places that don't. Places where girls who are barely high school age sell themselves for a chance at real food and a shower, where religious fanatics duel with criminal armies. The biggest conflict in The Water Knife isn't between Los Vegas and California, or between criminal gangs and refugees though. It's between people who are trying to keep the old order who still believe in the way things were and could be again; and those who believe that things have changed and there is only finding a way to survive in the world they’re in now. It's not all bleak, Mr. Bacigalupi is careful to show us good people in this world, trying to help others. The Red Cross for example hasn't abandoned Phoenix, nor has the UN, even if the US government has. There are characters who perform good deeds and reach out to help those around them; even Angel is willing to aid and help his fellow man if he can. This creates depth and realism to the story, while only making it more frightening because of it's realism. For me, the most terrifying thought is the idea of the states turning on each other. I have to admit that it isn't impossible, but if it ever got to the point where states where using armed troops to keep other Americans out of their states and launching armed raids on each other to steal resources and destroy infrastructure... Then we're doomed. Our greatest strength despite all the political disagreements and economic competition is that our states work together; that our shared identity as Americans is more important than any party, state, or local loyalty. Without that, we're not a country and much of our power, wealth, and basic safety goes down the drain, most likely never to return. It's my hope that no matter how bad things get, we don't forget that, that those who declare they would prefer serving a foreign nation rather then see their political rivals win are enough a minority that they don't matter. It's my fear that they aren't.


Turning back to our theme this month, while The Water Knife was recommended to me and I defended The Windup Girl as Solarpunk... I can't really do that with this novel. While Mr. Bacigalupi remembers that solar power is a thing in this book (the fact that California would rather loot water from other states then build desalination plants is also pretty believable (Keep in mind, California is vast and so is its need for water. Desalination is good for small populations like Israel, or to smooth out the edges of a drought in a larger region, California has a larger population than Australia or Canada by a wide margin, and staggering agricultural needs to boot. Desal is so energetically expensive that it simply won’t cut it]{That’s why you attach a nuclear reactor to your desalination plant<I agree, clearly, but this is California. Even an ecological catastrophe isn’t going to convince them to build more nuclear plants without something I’d be tempted to call an act of God, or a massive federal mandate.>}), it doesn't really have what I would consider the main themes of Solarpunk. It's too dark and too much about the fall from grace rather then the rebuilding or living in balance. So apologies folks I owe everyone another solarpunk novel review (don't hold your breath though it might take a while for me to find one). That said The Water Knife is an amazing read, well plotted, and carried by characters with believable motivations and outlooks on life that just kinda sucks you right into the book. Like water down a drain. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi gets an A.


Join me Sunday when I talk about climate fiction and look at it's influences on Solarpunk.  Keep reading! 

Red text is your editor, Dr. Ben Allen.

Black text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders. 

Sidebar VI: The Root of the Tree, Cyberpunk

Sidebar VI: The Root of the Tree 

“How did I actually create the word? The way any new word comes into being, I guess: through synthesis. I took a handful of roots—cyber, techno, et al—mixed them up with a bunch of terms for socially misdirected youth, and tried out the various combinations until one just plain sounded right.”

Bruce Bethke 

Before we can really examine Solarpunk, I feel we need to go back a bit and look at where it sprang. Having looked into it, that would be the Cyberpunk movement for my money. Cyberpunk was the first “punk” genre and was an evolution in how science fiction stories were told and who they were told about and that created in many ways the space that Solarpunk operates and the themes it carries forward. Many supporters of Solarpunk have adopted opposing themes and ideas to the ones common in Cyberpunk but I found on digging that what goes in a Solarpunk novel, of which there aren't many is often more complex but we'll get to that. First let me discuss Cyberpunk. A quick note, this is not exhaustive by any means but should serve to give everyone an idea of where Cyberpunk came from, what it does and let us observe it's donations to Solarpunk.

Cyberpunk has it's roots in the New Wave Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was a subversive movement in fantasy and science fiction. It was a reaction to the Golden Age of both genres where stories were honestly at times limited in their themes, characterizations and plots. The new generation of writers wanted to attempted stories that would feature things that were rather taboo at the time. Like drug use by protagonists, or protagonists that were deeply flawed or even rather sinister, the exploration of counter culture values and ideas and a rejection of the idea that new technology is always the solution to our problems along with the suggestion that new technology might bring its own problems. Underlying this was a rejection of things like Joseph Campbell's idea of the monomyth, the idea that the hero should always be upholding society and deferring to proper authorities and the utopian views of the future science fiction often provided. Now that's not to say all of this was never happened in the stories of the 1940s and 50s but it wasn't common and definitely wasn't the accepted tone of either genre. It was here that a number of proto Cyberpunk novels would be written like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” which led to the movie Bladerunner. The New Wave grew throughout the 1960 but by the 1970s, it seemed that it's high water mark was behind it. With the closing of the magazines that provided the main voice many were declaring the New Wave dead and gone and were debating if it had any real lasting impact. Enter the 1980s.

In the 1980s the seeds for the massive changes still taking place in our society were being laid and while the average citizen had no damn clue what was coming. There were an increasing number of people who realized that technologies like the home computer, the ability to network them and create things that only existed on those networks were going to make a big noise in the world and soon. This combined with the increasing deregulation in the United States, the increasing inequalities in wealth and economic anxiety that there simply wasn't room in the wondrous future for the American worker. In California the Hardcore Punk movement was eating up the music scene and was seen as overly violent, anti-intellectual and downright anti-social. Interesting it's the outside view of the punk, as opposed to the musicans themselves that seems to have influenced the early writers of Cyberpunk. Despite that, the punk themes of rebellion against authority and social convention and an embrace of what some folks called anti-social behavior would fliter into the behavior of the protagionists of Cyberpunk works. It was Bruce Bethke, an American writer took the word punk and combined it with Cyber, for computer creating the term. By his own admission he was combining terms until he created a word that sounded right to him, but there's a reason the word gelled with the public. While Mr. Bethke gave us the word Cyberpunk, it was William Gibson who gave us the meaning of the word and almost single handly defined the genre for almost a decade and he did with a little book called Neuromancer.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” 

Written in 1984, it was Gibsons first full length novel and according to him was written a state of barely controlled terror and he was sure everyone would think he was ripping off Bladerunner, the film being released while he was a 1/3rd of the way into the novel. But write it he did, in the space of a year and when it was released... There was no fanfare but Gibson had hit a cultural nerve. It became an underground hit, spreading by word of mouth. Honestly if you were born after 1995, I'm not sure you realize how hard that was back then. There were no youtube personalities to help the book become viral, no reddit for fans to spread the word, or twitter. No amazon, so every copy of the book had to be hunted down in book stores or libraries (we also had to read books upside down, in the snow back then, especially in summer!). Word of the book was spread face to face, books passed from hand to hand. It would become the first book to win a Nebula, a Hugo and a Philip K Dick Award for paperback original. It would also become the landmark work of Cyberpunk throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s.

It's from here we get mercenary hackers slipping into Cyberspace to do battle with ICE programs, while Razor Girls and Street Samurai (cybernetic mercenaries who do their work in realspace) guard their inert bodies or seek to find and kill them. The archetype of the Cyberpunk protagonist, an isolated loner alienated from his or her community emerges here as well. This archtype is an enduring one, we see it in Snowcrash and we also saw it in Altered Carbon. What also appeared in the 1980s was a heavy Japanese influence as Japan's economy grew larger and larger at increased speed. Interestingly enough the Japanese themselves would pitch into the growth and development of the Cyberpunk genre through manga and animes like Bubblegum Crisis, Akira and of course Ghost in the Shell, which would in turn heavily influence Anglosphere writers in the future (the state of entertain between the Anglo sphere nations and Japan is something in and of itself that I could happly blather on for hours but we'll stop here). A lot of this would change over time but the themes and core setting ideas of Cyberpunk have remained very carefully nailed in place.

First and most likely the core idea is that technology doesn't actually fix things for everyone, or even most people. The worlds of Cyberpunk are often more high tech ( at least when they don't get tripped up by the writers own assumptions, for example Gibson's suggesting that in the future people would find 3 whole MBs of RAM worth killing over) then our own. That doesn't mean that the majority of people in those worlds are living better then us or even as well as us. Technology in a Cyberpunk world tends to excessively favor the elite and make it easier for them to dominate everyone one else. Second is the idea of alienation, which is the state of being isolated from a group or activity that you should be involved in. Hiro Protagonist (Snowcrash) should be involved in the greater community of programmers and hackers but he plants himself on the margins and refuses to move. Takshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon) is alienated from pretty much his entire species, as a result of the training that the United Nations put him through and the results of constantly moving from world and world, due to the re-sleeving technology Kovac is even alienated from his own body! Which is a profound escalation in the theme if you ask me. This has allowed Cyberpunk works over time to be more and more diverse in their characters and plots, allowing for variation in race, gender and more to expand over the genre. Lastly Cyberpunk also hosts a number of works that are critical of modern society, sometimes ferociously so. Of these a good number of Cyberpunk books have veiled or not so veiled criticisms of capitalism in general and corporate practice and life in specific. I haven't run into any Cyberpunk critical of socialism but that may be because most of the Cyberpunk I'm aware of is written in nations where a style of deregulated and unfettered capitalism is practiced. I suppose it's possible that Denmark for example may have Cyberpunk stories that criticize socialism, as Cyberpunk books also criticize the idea of authority at some level, but I haven't seen any. Additionally, with the fall of the USSR and the PRC turning to capitalism, there's a certain feeling of why bother criticizing ideologies and economic methods that failed so spectacularly and completely? Capitalism is currently the last man standing in the economic debate club in a lot of ways. Even those who champion more nordic styles of government and management are really just arguing for a different style of capitalism. That doesn't mean new ideas and models won't emerge but it's hard criticize something that hasn't been thought up yet.

Cyberpunk is almost 40 years old with precursor works lurking about as far as a half a century ago, so in this it has been more successful then more experimental movements like the New Wave Science Fiction I discussed earlier. It's also spawned a vast number of offshoots and subsets, one of which is the subject of this month. However, children have more then one parent and Cyberpunk did not bring Solarpunk into the world alone. So next week, we're going to take a look at eco or climate fiction and then we should be on a solid footing to look at the emerging genre.




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The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi was born in Colorado, August 6th 1972. He has appeared in a wide variety of publications, ranging from local newspapers, to Slate, and Wired for nonficition. When it comes to fiction writing he has written stories for middle-school aged kids, young adult fiction, and of course science fiction stories with heavy emphasize on how humanity might possibly deal with climate change. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and have won three Nebulas, four Hugos, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short fiction. The Windup Girl was actually his first full length novel.

The Windup Girl was published in 2009, and appeared in Time Magazine which declared it one of the top ten fiction novels published in that year. It would win the 2010 Nebula Hugo awards for best novel (tying with China Mieville's The City and the City). It would go on to win the 2010 Compton Crook Award and the Locus Award for best 1st novel. It would also win awards in Japan (the Seiun award), Germany (The Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis), Spain (The Ignotus Award) and France (the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire), proving to be a book of international appeal and acclaim. So let's talk about this book, shall we?

The Windup Girl takes place in the 23rd century, in the Kingdom of Thailand. The world has been devastated by climate change, the end of oil and easy fossil fuels, and if that wasn't enough by a cycle of gene engineered plagues that attack both the people and their crops (Whoo! Those were some vicious resource wars. Damn). Many nations are trapped in a cycle of buying genetically created super crops that are immune from the plagues from international food companies called calorie companies, only to see them destroyed in a few years from brand new plagues that if they weren't created by a competing company were created by the very company they bought their crops from to ensure repeat business (Ok, I don’t think even Monsanto is that dickish. Sygenta maybe). With Peak Oil firmly centuries in the past, most power is provided via methane burning or more commonly muscle power. Giant genetically engineered elephants called megodants aren't just used as heavy transport but to turn the spindles powering factories and generators in this future (What? WHAT!? No. Just… No.  WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR POWER!? WHAT ABOUT WIND, SOLAR, HYDRO, GEO-THERMAL?). That power is stored in kink springs (a fictional technology) that can power scooters and other devices that don't have a heavy energy requirement. Travel times are longer being handled by clipper ships or dirigibles. That said there are still plenty of high technology nations out there. Japan remains an center of technology, having solved it's population problems via the creation of “New People” genetically engineered humans who are created to fit certain tasks from assembly line work to personal security to military assassin. (WITH WHAT ENERGY!? Elephant power? Let’s assume that an elephant can pull 9 tons against a coefficient of friction of .5 at a rate of 5 ft per second. That’s about 81.8 horsepower. Let’s double that for super-elephants. That’s ~122 kilowatts for those keeping track at home and using sane systems of measurement. The average energy use of an industrial facility is about 250,000 kKh per year, and that same elephant can produce about 50,000 kWh per year. So five elephants per human factory, and that assumes 100% efficiency which is certainly not true. Energy loss in those sorts of mechanical work to electricity generators are on the order of 60%, so you’re looking at having to use 13 gigantic elephants per factory rounding up just… why? WHY?!) They of course aren't treated like human beings and are in many places considered soulless monsters because despite everything we've been through, humanity hasn't learned a damn thing (Time for the replicant revolution!). If you're wondering, that's not a criticism of the story, I find such bigotry perfectly believable. I am left wondering what the hell happened to solar, wind and nuclear power and technology like the hydrogen battery. These technologies aren't mentioned and it seems odd that in an age where people are constantly suffering from power shortages no one builds a fission plant or 10 (*editor has a apoplectic fit and dies*).

The Kingdom of Thailand is not a center of high technology or wealth but has through planning, sacrifice and a bit of luck maintained its independence from the hated calorie companies. Because Thailand has managed to keep and maintain something most other nations did not have the resources or foresight to. Thailand has a seed bank, a hidden fortress devoted to maintaining a treasure trove of heirloom seeds from before the dark days of bio-plagues. With their carefully maintained hoard of genetic engineering machines (which they power with WHAT!?{Coal strangely enough}) and trained scientists, Thailand has managed to keep the calorie companies out, using their own resources to create plague resistant crops and their own troops to hold the border shut. The white uniformed troops of the Environment Ministry (Now this idea I like.) have held the line for generations now but the Queen is a child and reduced to a figure head. In the absence of powerful central authority General Pracha of the Environment Ministry and his right hand man, Captain Jaidee are facing political opposition from Akkarat the Minister of Trade (I'll come back to these characters). This internal conflict now has the potential to explode and bring in external forces because the secret of the seed-bank is out and there are people who will lie, cheat, and kill for a chance to harvest it's riches.

One of those people is Anderson Lake, undercover calorie man, whose job it is to comb the world looking for new genetic stock for his Midwest based company (So… Not! Monsanto?) to use as raw material in the race to keep the world fed. For a price of course. Posing as a kink spring factory owner, Lake pushes his way into high stakes politics in the name of profit, food, and gaining access to the seedbank. What's interesting about Lake is that he honestly believes he's doing the right thing and that his work will result in a better life for everyone. Eventually. He isn't an idealist though and seems to have accepted that a large number of people will have to be pushed under the bus before it can roll into the promised land. He's rather cynical and willing to go to extreme ends to fulfill his goals but he's not sitting there scheming to break the Thais. Instead he’s focused on the idea that gaining access to the Thai seed vault will allow his company to bring forth new plenty and prosperity, which would include the Thai people. This makes him a rather human character, in fact Mr. Bacigalupi is very skilled in making a number of these characters very human.

On the other side of the coin, Captain Jaidee is also a true believer willing to go to the very wall to do what he believes is needed to protect Thailand and more importantly it's people. Given his job as an enforcer for the Environment Ministry, that can mean anything from burning a village to ashes to prevent the spread of plague to raiding an airport and seizing the cargo of wealthy and powerful men. Meanwhile he is also a devoted father and gentle husband who wants to see his family taken care of and his sons to grow up healthy and free. It's that very belief that creates his legend and his loyalty to his family that leads him to his fate in the story. Meanwhile his Lt. Kanya is a women torn between conflicting loyalties and working frantically to reconcile them. She is constantly hedging and trying to find a middle path that will let her make everyone happy and it's almost to late when she makes her final choice. She is a good reminder that you cannot serve two masters, sooner or later you must choose one over the other. There are venal and corrupt figures in the story, Minister Akkarat being among them but for the most part many of the characters believe they are doing the right or at least necessary thing in their actions. A good amount of it is rationalization but that's also a very human trait.

I would argue that none of these characters are our main character however, I would argue that Emiko is the main character of the story. Emiko is a genetically engineered human, created and trained in Japan to serve as a personal companion. She's faster and stronger then a baseline human, but due to how her skin was engineered, she overheats easily. She was born, trained, and lived in Japan until brought to Thailand as a translator on a business trip. She was abandoned by her owner in Thailand, because he felt it was easier to simply ditch her in Bangkok and get an upgraded model when he got home (I told you there were venal and vile characters in this story didn't I?). Called a windup girl, her very presence is illegal within the borders of Bangkok and she's forced to work in a sex club being humiliated and sexually sold at night just to survive (Yep. Definitely time for that replicant revolution…). Her mental conditioning trained her to never use her superior speed or strength and to constantly obey baseline humans, especially her owner. However a life of constant hate, humiliation and lack of any hope of improvement is slowly but surely wearing away at that conditioning without her even realizing it. Emiko's story arc is one of realizing that most of the limits forced on her are entirely artificial and that she can strike back and hope to survive while doing so. She grows from a hopeless, embittered person, faced with the fact that she is nothing more than property and worse believing that's her rightful place in the world, to being a woman willing to take action to defend her life and her freedom and fully understanding her abilities. What starts this journey is her meeting Mr. Lake, who reveals that there are communities of New People but what really kicks it into gear is the fact that Lake treats her like a person. This causes Emiko to both have a goal for herself and to see herself as someone who deserves to have goals and a chance to strive for them. I won't say he treats her with any great dignity or such but he acknowledges her as a person with her own interests and agenda which is more than she’s gotten from any other person in her life. Which is heartbreakingly sad when you think about it. Emiko's story is very personal in scope and hidden among grand events that decide the fate of a nation and perhaps an entire people but it's her story, her actions, and her interactions with the other characters that end up driving the plot forward. A whole nation will find its course changed, because a wind up girl wanted to life with her own people and be treated like a human being.

The Windup Girl is a story of tightly written intrigue and action driven by complex characters who are often trying to bridge the gap between conflicting goals, which is an honestly human thing to do. It's set in a world that is plague ridden but with the seeds of new life emerging (I see what you did there.) and the hope that eventually a new ecosystem may arise and move the story of life forward... A new ecosystem that may even have humans in it. It's a story of corruption, humiliation, and enslavement; and how people can rise above such things if they're willing to act and brave the consequences. So while the world of The Windup Girl can be very dark and grim, I can't call the story itself grim, although there is a lot of unavoidable darkness in it. I'm giving The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalup an A. Seriously read it.

To tie back to our theme of Solar punk, I've had people contest The Windup Girl's inclusion within the emerging genre. I have to admit that The Windup Girl may be on the edge of the genre but I do think it lies within it. This is due to its theme of learning to exist in harmony with nature rather then trying to beat it into submission and accepting that life must change if it is to stay in such harmony. That, and it's a world without fossil fuels and dependent on alternative means of power (even if there is no solar power in the story, seriously Mr. Bacigalupi what happened to Solar Panels, I mean we can make massive elephants, super cats, 10-armed people but we can't make Solar panels?[*Screaming*]). So I'm going to argue that a story about how we might get to a environmental harmonious existence (by changing ourselves to fit into the environment instead of the other way around) does fit into it. Now if you excuse me, I have to tranq my editor.

Next week, we see how far we can push these boundaries by looking at Paolo Bacigalupi's other major work, The Water Knife. Join us Sunday, as I discuss one of the roots of Solarpunk, the Cyberpunk genre. Keep reading.

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen.
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.