Lewis Jessen is nicknamed “Bear” for a reason: at 7 feet tall and with a build to match, even half-starved and 67 years old, he’s a giant of a man. In 2099, he’s homesteading in northern Montana, near the Canadian border, when just about everyone else has moved away or migrated north in the hope of getting into Canada, which still has a liveable climate. He’s getting by, but the fat he’d stored up over a lifetime has evaporated and he’s gone gaunt. Orla, his wife of 42 years, died of lung cancer just 4 months earlier, and Bear is despondent. Without her, and with no other humans anywhere nearby, he has no reason to live but for one: he promised her he would not kill himself after she died.
Some might persist from faith, but that won’t work for Bear: “Bear still believed in the Protestant God of his youth... but it was not a worshipful relationship.” By this stage of climate catastrophe, things have fallen almost completely apart, with billions dead or still slowly dying and predictions before the great die-off suggesting that fewer than 100 million people would eventually survive, most of them living within the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Like Bear’s slow slide towards death, the human world is headed downhill fast too, with not much to look forward to and no hope of reprieve from a higher power.
[Spoilers] Into this gloom comes a refugee, so starved and filthy and small Bear initially mistakes her for a 13-year-old. Patricia Vargas is actually 18, Hispanic, and clearly far from home. One night, while Bear sleeps, she invades his cabin and begins rummaging for supplies. He wakes, and he’s willing to let her take what she needs right up until the moment when she accidentally knocks over one of Orla’s vases, one of the few tangible mementos he has of his wife, and in his rage, he seizes the girl; she tries to kill him with a knife, but fails by chance and authorial intent. (A belly slash is a nasty wound, no matter how many rolls of loose skin you might have; unless he was sleeping in a parka, she should have hurt him badly.) Though he’s repeatedly considered suicide, having no reason to live anymore, he “didn’t want to make a murderer out of her for his own convenience”. Bear’s rage fades, but when Pat realizes what she’s done, she returns the next night while he’s asleep and fixes the broken vase with some of his last glue.
By a combination of luck and his creation of a wide fireline (i.e., an area with no trees), Bear’s cabin has escaped the periodic wildfires that sweep through northern Montana even now, but his luck eventually runs out. He sees the fire coming from far enough away to do something about it. Two trees still stand by his house: an old aspen by his bedroom window, and a giant ponderosa pine. Despite his despair, he chooses to make one last stand, and fells the aspen to protect his home—but he can’t bring himself to kill the pine. (I loved those trees when I was in Montana, and couldn’t force myself to kill it either.) Whether it’s that decision, or pure bad luck (wildfires can send burning debris flying for miles), his house catches fire that night, as does the pine. (Ponderosa pine is a fire-adapted species, and usually survives moderate-intensity fires. Sadly, it seems unlikely to survive future high-intensity fires.)
Bear escapes, still half asleep, but is overcome by despair at losing the last trace of his connection with Orla. He considers throw himself back into the fire, but Pat pulls him back and he lets her; a small troupe of equally starved, equally filthy children that she’s responsible for are watching, and he can’t imagine leaving them with the memory of his fiery death. Inevitably, Bear gets sucked into the task of caring for the children by the horror of their condition: the iconic images that extend in an unbroken chain of disasters from the Biafran conflict of the late 1960s to today’s ethnic cleansings, some are so starved they have distended bellies and one has eyes “that crawled with flies”. The supplies Bear and Orla had stockpiled in the cellar have survived the fire (not unreasonable), and he gives the children a small but restorative feast.
Pat has already traveled thousands of miles from Mexico City to reach this point, and she’s heading north to the Arctic ocean (almost as far again) to reach a sanctuary her wise grandparents and many others began preparing nearly 80 years earlier, confident the government wouldn’t act until it was too late. Her parents fled urban chaos in Mexico to keep the sanctuary running, but lost Pat in the process. And it’s here that Locke’s story runs completely off the rails after accumulating a powerful head of narrative steam. Pat rescued the children from the local warlord, Colonel O’Neal, who is capturing refugees and using them as slave labor in his factories. It would be uncharitable (and incorrect given the lack of resemblance on any other level) to accuse Locke of deliberately creating an airforce colonel with the same name as the protagonist of Stargate SG1 (but for one letter), but it’s an unfortunate choice of name because the remaining plot descends into bad Stargate pastiche, minus the aliens. (I like many things about Stargate; their understanding of military matters isn’t one of them.)
The children clearly need Bear’s help to reach the Canadian border, as he knows the local land intimately and is a wilderness expert, but they face insurmountable obstacles: all roads are patrolled by the Colonel’s troops, who capture or kill travelers, and the Canadian border is tighly controlled to keep out refugees. It seems unlikely Bear would have night-vision binoculars or that they’d survive the fire, but he does have them and they let Tommy, an older child and skillful scout, spot an ambush by two soldiers, children Bear used to know who have grown up and fallen into bad company. Bear tricks them into lowering their guard, and kills one with his knife; Tommy kills the other before he can shoot Bear. The group finds their way uneventfully to the border, where they’re promptly captured and turned over to the Colonel. Because they were carrying his men’s salvaged equipment, O’Neal wants to punish whoever killed his men.
O’Neal’s a cardboard villain, shooting a refugee to punish Bear when he won’t talk (not to mention enslaving people to run his factories). It’s never clear whether he’s a civilian who rose to become a warlord and somehow captured key military resources that should have been desperately defended by their owners, or a fallen professional; the former seems most likely given that his troops are poorly trained amateurs with little discipline. That makes it implausible he could have captured such significant military resources. Various useful civilians have accreted around O’Neal’s camp, including Desmond Marcus, Bear’s former pastor and a former friend; their friendship ended when Bear could no longer accept Marcus’ blither optimism over God’s plan for the world. (Sadly, Marcus is the standard kind of stereotypical religious nut from central casting that infests too much SF/F.) Because Bear is an engineer, and would therefore be useful, O’Neal will employ rather than punish him for killing the two men, and will even spare the children from servitude in his factories if Bear toes the line, but Pat will become the Colonel’s personal property. (Why he’s interested in a half-starved 18-year-old girl when he has his pick of the civilian population defies reason: she’s too old for this to be pediphilia and too young to have developed much skill in bed.)
O’Neal’s plans would embarrass a Bond villain: he will use a military-grade blimp to invade Canada bearing nuclear weapons his men have unearthed. (For the record: “Blimp” is the wrong name, as it refers to a class of non-rigid airships that are limited too a small size and low cargo capacity for engineering reasons. “Zeppelin” or “airship” would be a better description, since only this class of machines are large enough to contain all the facilities Locke describes.) For this to be plausible, we must ignore two inconvenient facts: modern nuclear weapons are tightly locked down to prevent domestic terrorism (you can’t use them without high-level access to the necessary codes that O’Neal could never have obtained), and no large airship can be fast enough to deploy a nuke and escape the blast radius. Hollywood rears its ugly head as Bear overpowers O’Neal and binds him and all his guards singlehanded. (A lesson to budding writers: Always play-act your key stunts. Here, hold a prop gun to the head of a friend and try binding his arms and legs one-handed, even if he merely resists passively. Next, bring in two more friends as guards and a third as your captive’s executive officer in the same room, all armed, and remind them that the exec is a cold-blooded killer with no qualms about killing his commander and taking command for himself. Now try binding all five of them. The scene simply doesn’t work physically or logically.)
Bear frees Pat, who in turn frees the children, and they plot their escape. Bear’s had experience with explosives in his engineering career, so it’s plausible he could set demolitions charges—if he could somehow evade the guards at the weapons repository. Fortunately, they’re drunk enough that he can, but would anyone really risk drinking on duty given the punishment any leader as brutal as brutal would deal out? As a skilled hunter, Bear might be very stealth indeed, but given the number of guards, it seems unlikely he could wander around a busy military camp undetected. When the charges detonate at the crack of dawn, Bear and the children rush to the airship hangar, only to find O’Neal’s exec has escaped and is waiting for them with his men. Bear continues to use O’Neal as a shield, and we’re told that Pat and the children move out of range—which is just plain silly. Men with rifles could take down Bear before he could kill O’Neal, and a trained rifleman (Locke uses the term “snipers”) could easily and reliably hit targets 100 yards away indoors with no wind, which farther than the longest dimension of even the largest hangar. The good guys escape, but Bear’s shot three times before they clear the hangar; fortunately (deus ex machina time), there’s a fully equipped surgical suite aboard the airship, and a surgeon there to staff it (even though the theft of the airship occurred at 6 AM). The point here is to achieve a happy ending, no matter how it might defy logic. Also, need I mention that even modern airships generally can’t take off and land by themselves; all that I’m familiar with require a large support crew on the ground.
The final strike is an intrusive and clumsily executed delivery of the story’s message: “Why had nothing been done while there was still time to act?” I emphatically support the message;
as I noted in the essay that began my reviews of this anthology, I think we’re already long past the tipping point, and that it’s time to begin planning survival strategies rather than debating whether we can halt global warming. My only objection is how clumsy Locke’s delivery of the message felt.
From a larger perspective, I find the whole notion of local warlords in a modern nation unlikely. I’ll accept them as a fictional device, but it’s far more likely that as things collapse, local military units will be detached from central command and control, and assigned to local civilian command, with their circle of influence steadily narrowing to the area surrounding the civilians they’re protecting. All of the military men I’ve known (mostly Canadian, one American, most officers) have been consummate professionals, and without falling into hero worship, I believe they are profoundly committed to their service. I have a hard time imagining them suddenly becoming pirates; discipline is the foundation of a modern army, and what separates (say) the U.S. army from your typical banana republic crowd of thugs with rifles is discipline and a profound devotion to protecting their civilians.
Speaking from a Canadian perspective, I also couldn’t buy the notion that Canada (my home) could remain an independent nation in such a situation. In the otherwise lamentable film “The Day After Tomorrow”, the U.S. relocates en masse south to Mexico as the north freezes; in a rare note of realism, the Mexicans, not being fools, welcome them. In Locke’s story, the U.S. leadership would relocate northward en masse, and Canada’s government would undoubtedly welcome them with open arms rather than publicly admitting they had no alternative. Our armed forces have world-class training, and are respected internationally for their quality, but they’re a small force (far less than 10% of the U.S. staffing level), and their equipment was state of the art—for 50 years ago. Recent history (water rights, softwood lumber, electricity exports, forced import of fuel additives banned in the U.S., Arctic sovereignty) have convinced most Canadians that the U.S. largely does what it wants and ignores Canada’s concerns. As a former prime minister, Pierre Trudeau noted with his trademark wit: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
Bear’s a likeable curmudgeon, nothing new under the sun but still well described and a pleasant POV character. Locke gets many details right, as when he eloquently describes Bear imagining his wife’s likely reaction to a situation and the way that old couples nurse their arguments: “Eventually, he figured, he’d either get over being mad at her for dying first, or die too, and end the argument that way.” He also has a cynical and often amusing way of looking at the world; for example, the fire has destroyed (Pooh) Bear’s “hundred acre wood”. Locke also has a gift for the occasional memorable phrase. My favorite is undoubtedly the finest description I’ve read of the ecologically unsustainable modern consumer society: “Human civilization had collapsed under its own weight, the way Ponzi schemes do.” I’ve seen a great many experienced scientists do a worse job of explaining the problem.
What Locke does well, he does very well indeed. He writes well on a sentence and paragraph level: the words flow smoothly, often eloquently, and create a clear sense of place and of his main character. Bear is an attractive, fully developed character who faces an emotional and physical challenge that would crush a lesser man, and he rises to the challenge and finds a way to restore his will to live by focusing outwards on alleviating the misery of others instead of dwelling on his own despair. That rings very true, and if the story ended there, it would have been one of the stronger contributions to the anthology. But the last half of the story completely erases the gains made during the first half: the plot is sabotaged by poor research (*never* rely on Hollywood or TV for your military education), and by a failure to give the secondary characters any attention, let alone as much attention as he gave to Bear. In the end, “True North” is a disappointing story that should have been sent back for a major rewrite.
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