[FRIAM] Cautionary Tales: CliFi

Tue Jan 25 19:58:44 EST 2022

< It might not surprise anyone here that I have become a CliFi obsessionist with Kim Stanly Robinson's stuff well represented ("Ministry for the Future" standing out well above the others).  His Red/Green/Blue Mars series is a good complement with the social/technological/spiritual implications of Terraforming there. >

Huh.  I found MftF drawn-out and boring with distracting little nonsense chapters interleaved.   I don't see why it is popular.   A few good ideas here and there but couldn't care less about the characters.  It could be massively compressed.

Marcus
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 5:26 PM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Cautionary Tales: CliFi

DaveW -

I too am a Bacigalupi fan, "Water Knife" in particular, also "Windup Girl" but for different reasons.

It might not surprise anyone here that I have become a CliFi obsessionist with Kim Stanly Robinson's stuff well represented ("Ministry for the Future" standing out well above the others).  His Red/Green/Blue Mars series is a good complement with the social/technological/spiritual implications of Terraforming there.  The 2015 Loosed Upon the World<https://www.amazon.com/Loosed-upon-World-Anthology-Climate/dp/1481450301/ref=asc_df_1481450301/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312029683605&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5512945638363124067&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9030505&hvtargid=pla-491283653239&psc=1> anthology of Climate Fiction includes contributions from Bacigalupi, Robinson, Atwood among others.

Most recently, I read Neal Stephenson's well crafted "Termination Shock" which I feel is way too focused on TechnoPhilic GeoEngineering escape conceptions but as is his style he covers the sociopolitical implications of Climate Change *and* our response to it well with his very unique style.

The classic (pre)CliFi (for me) is Santa Fe's own Roger Zelazny (RIP) 70s "Damnation Alley" which was made into a very weak B-movie (as most SF was before the budgets started getting gargantuan (e.g. Star Wars/Trek/Gate/???).   Bruce Sterling's 1994 Heavy Weather was a good (early) dip into the implications of climate change on extreme weather from the perspective of a gaggle of Storm Chasers.  Another NM author(s) is Stephen Gould and Laura Mixon's "GreenWar!".  There are surely earlier examples, but I'm not recalling.  Of course one could press biblical things like the Deluge (Genesis) or the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse in Genesis, Zecharia, Revelations...

Jack Williamson's (RIP)  (New Mexico's amazing son raised on classic Scientific Romances and contributing his own work right at the beginning of the Golden Age). Terraforming Earth<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/898087.Terraforming_Earth> is a "Dont Look Up" (asteroid smacking) scenario which does a good job IMO (I'm a big fan of his life story and work) of addressing the (near) mortality of the human species and Earth's biosphere itself.  The friend who introduced me to him in his 90s (died at 103?) knew him when he was a teen and provided him with the title for this book, though his first choice was "Terraforming Terra", but the publishers prevailed with "Earth" for arcane reasons.  FWIW the OED's SciFi inspired neologisms<https://www.capstan.be/sci-fi-is-a-fertile-breeding-ground-for-neologisms-some-have-entered-everyday-language-and-even-scientific-jargon/> credits Jack for coining "Terraforming" in a 1941 novel.

?Glen?'s invocation of the earth as a seed becoming an (naturally) empty husk (an expelled placenta?, a recovering womb?) as we flee it has interesting implications I hadn't thought of before... it is a good complementary perspective to thinking of it as simply escaping our own self-fouled water-hole.   "Terraforming Earth" also puts it's own twist on this.

Ramble,

- Steve
On 1/25/22 2:05 PM, Prof David West wrote:
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife. Excellent read, more for background on water and the kinds of things people WILL do to access it, than the story line.

In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez "cuts" water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.

davew

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022, at 11:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes:

< I don't see how we can prune the combinatorial explosion of [im]possible outcomes without deciding some kind of objective at the start, even if it's super vague like a Gaia-ish homeostatic health of the biosphere. >

One could imagine a sort of Mad Max scenario out in the streets where the Whole Foods deliveries are intercepted by the street dwelling climate refugees?   Or large compounds where food, water, temperature-controlled clean air were ensured for a price?   Take all the rusting metal sitting around from Trump's wall and build bigger fences around estates?   Green Zones, like in the Iraq sense?

Marcus

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From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com><mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of glen <gepropella at gmail.com><mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 11:50 AM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com><mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] health care logistics

Well, OK. But the question still stands: Necessary for what objective?

The Siebert & Rees paper talks about shared values like "socially just ecological sustainability", "salvage civilization", "one-earth living", etc. And each one of their criticisms in section 3 also assume some values. So, I'm guessing it's something like their objective that we're assuming as our objective. And anything that does not target that objective isn't put into the kitty of things we'll evaluate as possible or impossible. (E.g. the second-earth idea where we abandon this earth as a husk is not part of the conversation.)

I don't see how we can prune the combinatorial explosion of [im]possible outcomes without deciding some kind of objective at the start, even if it's super vague like a Gaia-ish homeostatic health of the biosphere.

On 1/25/22 06:39, David Eric Smith wrote:
> To say this is a value question is fair, glen, given my shorthands of language.
>
> However, I would like to split apart questions of "who wants what" from questions of "what can or cannot happen under what conditions, irrespective of what anybody wants".  In principle we have ways to get at the latter question; we often do worse in getting any resolution out of the former.  Maybe there is something basic in this?  Our notion of truth is that on any properly-posed question, there should only be one durable answer.  Whereas in the area of desires, we think it is either inescapable, or for many also desirable (a self-referential value judgment) that different answers coexist indefinitely.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>> On Jan 25, 2022, at 8:02 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com><mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Necessary for what, though? We need the shared value(s) before we can ask what response we'd get from the convergence on something that might be necessary to adhere to that value. Is the shared value that biology on this planet should be preserved and the thing we need to do is impossible? Or perhaps the shared value that all "lower forms of life" were simply stepping stones to the human organism, but to preserve the human organism is impossible? Etc.
>>
>> As Jon likes to ask: What are we optimizing? If we can't agree on that, then the responses to impossibilities will be as diverse as the values that underlie those impossibilities. And, if that's the case, then we're back to the clustering/homogenizing we see in any aspect of pop culture.
>>
>> On 1/24/22 17:21, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> In a real situation where we decided something was necessary that we believed there was no way to do, somehow I feel like the same movie doesn't become the response.  Something else does.  What is that?
>>
>> On 1/24/22 17:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Before I launch into a diatribe about why the hell we can't agree to basic, never mind interesting things:

--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.

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