Moffett: The Middle of Somewhere

Kaylee is a high school student working on the Cornell “Nestwatch” project, which tracks birds and various of their characteristics such as when they first lay eggs. (That’s the “greenhouse” tie-in: as temperatures grow warmer earlier in the year, eggs are laid earlier in the season.) To help in this project, she’s staying with Jane, a senior who lives alone and “off the grid” in a small log cabin in rural Kentucky. One of the predicted side-effects of global warming will be increased storm frequency and severity, so Jane keeps her radio tuned to the NOAA weather alerts channel, and sure enough, a thunderstorm watch soon turns into a tornado warning. Thus, it’s no surprise when the tornado hits the cabin, and both Jane and Kaylee are hiding in a tornado shelter in the basement.

[Spoilers] After the tornado passes, the two women are trapped in the basement, and cut off from civilization: the storm has knocked out the cell tower, so Kaylee can’t call or text for help. And they’re going to need help, since Jane is bleeding badly from a wound incurred during the damage done to her cabin, which has been crushed by a falling tree. Fortunately, Kaylee is no wimp, and steps up magnificently to her responsibilty. She helps Jane stabilize the wound, gathers the resources that Jane has stocked and that they’ll need to survive for the next few days until rescuers arrive, and even finds it in herself to rescue a nestbox full of hatchlings whose parents have been killed by the storm. (That’s one of those fundamentally human things we do in a crisis: focus on doing something good, even if that something may appear trivial in the larger scheme of things.)

There are a few awkward moments from a fictional/narrative perspective once the immediate crisis is over. The discussion of how global warming affects sea temperatures and thus, storms, emerges more or less naturally from the dialogue between the two women. However, the subsequent discussion of how part of the problem with the public perception of global warming is how far we’ve distanced ourselves from nature (losing touch with what Kaylee and Jane both call “fundamental things”), and of the virtues of Thoreau’s homesteading, self-sufficiency, and the “buy local” movement, felt preachy. I emphatically agree with these sentiments and solutions, but they somehow didn’t seem to emerge organically from the story, and thus felt more intrusive than they might have been. The ending, in which Kaylee begs Jane to stay and repair her home so she can teach Kaylee some of what the older woman has learned, is true to the characters, but seemed somehow flat. Possibly that’s just an early-morning “coffee not yet working” thing.

Quibbles notwithstanding, Moffett does many things very well indeed. Kaylee is a perfectly realized teenager, by turns smart and helpful and then “emo” and resentful, but in the end, she’s a good kid, worrying about her parents and pitching in without complaints to get the necessary things done. Jane’s living the life of Thoreau, mostly self-sufficient and doing conservationist things such as drawing water from a cistern rather than municipal services and raising her own bees. These aspects are explicitly revealed, but others are skillfully left implicit, such as Kaylee’s description of Jane’s antequated computer; Jane clearly doesn’t upgrade to the latest model just because it’s available, and thus keeps using the old computer because it’s still plenty good enough for her needs. Similarly, Jane lacks a clothes drier and dishwasher, both of which would suck more power than her solar cells can provide (a subtle reminder that such things depend heavily on coal-fired power plants in the U.S.). Kaylee, on the other hand, has the latest “SmartBerry” phone, and is continuously in contact with her friends by FaceBook and Twitter even while she’s keeping an eye on the birds she’s been assigned to watch; amusingly, she recognizes that this kind of obsessive multitasking is her generation’s thing (speaking as the father of a teenage daughter, “oh yeah!”) and that for her, it’s difficult to slow down and focus on one thing at a time.

As a simple story, generally well told, about an older woman sharing her wisdom with a younger woman and gradually forging a bond with her, “Somewhere” works well. As an explication of some of the social factors causing global warming and of possible solutions, it works less well. The larger problem we’re facing is that our population has grown too large for everyone to simply “return to the land”; given the area required to feed a person using low-impact farming methods, the environmental impacts (e.g., the large area of land required) would be prohibitive. Cities, despite their problems, could produce less overall environmental impact than individual homestead if they were designed from the beginning to achieve that goal. The larger problems of global warming stem from power consumption by the industrial facilities that permit our current standard of living, a diet heavy in animal protein (methane from cattle farts is about the second-largest source of greenhouse-effect gases), and global transportation of goods that would be produced more rationally (if more expensively) locally instead of burning fuel to transport them halfway around the world. These problems can’t be solved by simple local actions, which can mitigate but not eliminate these problems. Larger measures will need to be taken to solve the problem.

Hughes: Not a Problem

I don’t think I’ve read Hughes writing outside his trademark and delightful “high-Vancean” prose (Henghis Hapthorn et al.), so it was a pleasant surprise to see that he’s capable of equally entertaining material in a very different voice. Or perhaps not so different after all, since “Not a Problem” is also full of his trademark humor.

Half a century in the future, Bunker Hill Sansom (“Bunky”) is a billionaire who’s grown rich embracing the notion of contrarian economics, which means that if the market is running one way, you run the other way to take advantage of whatever it is that they missed. As the saying goes, “one man’s problem is another man’s opportunity”. Thus it is that when global warming hits hard, with Pacific islands being submerged by rising seas and the Manhattan seawall collapsing to flood the city, Bunky sees an opportunity where others see only looming disaster. For him, the opportunity lies in the stars: Bunky has enough money to fund SETI singlehandedly, confident in the notion that with enough money, they’ll be able to find some civilization that will give him a product he can capitalize on, thereby further enriching him and possibly letting him find a way to rule the world.

[Spoilers] Sure enough, throwing enough money at the SETI problem solves it, and Bunky’s scientists soon start contacting alien civilizations by the handful. Early contacts aren’t very helpful; the aliens are either giant bugs (which Bunky abhors and won’t deal with) or won’t help Earth unless we provide them with “fafashertz”, a transuranic element that’s essential for FTL travel. But soon the scientists find a race of slugs willing the teach them the secret of FTL communication; how such a dialog could be conducted in real time when the distances to even the nearest star would require round-trip times of years must be handwaved, perhaps by assuming that the aliens are initially broadcasting blueprints for their ansible-like devices and that this is the only signal SETI receives from them, though Hughes should perhaps have made that explicit. To canvass all the visible stars opened up by this technology and look for potential saviors, Bunky “hires India” to man his new FTL call center. And sure enough, they do eventually find helpful aliens, giant birdlike creatures who keep telling the humans that their predicament is “not a problem” and that they’ll soon come to Earth.

The problem with the contrarian approach is that it only works if you understand why everyone else is running in one direction and where the real profit opportunity lies. The “not a problem” of the title refers both to the way many capitalists see the opportunity and miss the problem, and how the aliens (not us) are the ones who are going to profit from this opportunity. When the aliens turn out to be flesh-eating dinosaurs (something veteran SF readers will see coming well in advance), the global disaster for humans turns out to be an opportunity for them, restoring the warm and lush conditions that they loved before climate change (to a colder, drier climate) forced them to leave Earth long ago. Bunky is neatly hoist on his own petard—or perhaps skewered on his own sharp wit, as he’s immediately devoured by one of the nominal alien saviors.

Apart from serving as a neat satire of the super-engineer character (often Heinleinian) who can solve any problem through diligent application of science, “Not a Problem” reminds us that sometimes the solution is worse than the problem, and that it’s wiser to avoid the problem in the first place. All told in a delightfully droll manner, cleverly constructed to deliver a concealed and perfectly timed punchline that arrives with maximum effect. I don’t think Hughes has come up with any solutions engineers will be able to use to solve our problem, but that’s hardly the point; the point is a highly entertaining read and a reminder to relax a little and enjoy life, even if catastrophe looms. In the words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic”: it’s not a problem.