Lawson: Sundown
Jul. 13th, 2011 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteRiki is a biological researcher who lives in the Kaimai Mamaku Forest of New Zealand, on a hobby farm where she raises alpacas. Her life changes in an instant when she receives a call from a friend, an astronomer at the Mauna Loa observatory who reports that his satellite measurements show the solar constant has dropped by more than 30% in an hour and is continuing to drop. Recognizing the implications, Riki immediately gathers survival supplies and flees, abandoning her farm, her alpacas, and her old life.
[Spoilers] As in Niven’s chilling “Inconstant Moon”, only in reverse, something has changed drastically in the Sun. In this case, it’s not a solar flare, but rather a drop in heat output this will precipitate an ice age literally overnight. Riki is smart enough (and strong enough) to force herself to instantly drop everything, and rather than bemoaning her fate, she cuts her losses and immediately flees for Rotorua, where the hot springs will provide heat long enough for people to survive. It’s a fortunate coincidence that Riki’s area of research is nutritionally complete algal food sources, with the goal of sustaining long space missions such as a mission to Mars using food grown onboard; with luck, her genetically engineered algae will provide enough nutrients for survival even though the rest of Earth’s food chain has been erased in a single stroke. Another fortunate stroke is that she’s been working on microorganisms suitable for terraforming cold planets such as Mars, a related area of research; releasing these microbes into the newly frozen world means there’s a chance of eventually restarting Earth’s ecosystems and giving humans a chance to survive. Perhaps most important of all, Riki is smart enough to immediately start gathering the experts that her small enclave of humanity will need to survive: she includes the obvious ones like engineers and medical professionals, but also remembers crucial roles such as the planners and organizers who are often neglected in disaster stories. Having chaired (and endured) numerous committees at research institutes, I can attest firsthand to the importance of such people and can also state that even the brightest scientists (perhaps particularly them) are not always the best choice for such roles.
Lawson accomplishes a potentially difficult task, namely making the human cost of the tragedy clear and something we can empathize with, yet without being manipulative; this is done by describing in simple, unadorned words consequences such as the loss of distant loved ones, inability to save friends who won’t be able to reach the Rotorua sanctuary in time, and listening by radio as other enclaves of humanity gradually lose power, are unable to produce enough food to survive, and succumb to these and many other death sentences. Talk about “cold equations”! Those who survive the initial crisis may not survive much longer if they cannot develop some kind of sustainable food source, so Riki and her colleagues set about planning to bring them her algal food resource as soon as the New Zealand enclave has ensured its own survival; this is as much about ensuring that enough genetic and intellectual resources remain to preserve humanity as a species as it is about concern for others. That makes Riki an interestingly complex character: she has sufficient strength of character (possibly even enough outright coldness) to cut off her emotions and do what’s necessary in a crisis, yet at the same time, she mourns her abandoned alpacas and wishes she’d stayed long enough to shoot them so they wouldn’t suffer; keeping them alive simply wasn’t in the cards, and unlike most of us, she understood this and made the necessary sacrifice.
Except for a couple (brief) didactic chunks, Lawson maintains a tight emotional focus on the human tragedies at the heart of the story and does so effectively. It’s a sobering tale, and doubly so because of Lawson’s rigor in following through the harsh premise to its logical conclusions. Told from the perspective of one of the survivors, speaking to an adopted child (possibly because the narrator has lost their own child or that child has lost their parent), “Sundown” becomes an effective and moving “founder myth”—a celebration of the human will to survive even the worst catastrophe.
The contrast with the other stories in this anthology, all of which feature greenhouse warming, is striking, and represents one of the things I love about SF/F: the ability of an occasional author to subvert the standard assumptions and try something new. Lawson also reminds us, without preaching, that even if we don’t manage to destroy ourselves with greenhouse gases, Nature might still manage the trick for us. Even after decades of research, we still understand the sun so poorly that without considerable additional study, our only hint that something bad is about to happen will be when it smacks us upside the head, as in this story and Niven’s story. Moreover, space opera notwithstanding, there’s not much we can do to alter the behavior of something as large as a star, and it will be centuries or longer before we develop that capability. There have been many pleas by scientists to increase funding to study our sun, and given the importance of variations in its behavior on life on Earth, we’re overdue to start some serious investments in those studies. With enough warning, we might survive such a catastrophe. Without that warning...
Several someones, scattered around the world, are working on projects similar to Riki’s project, so it’s not a stretch to think that her algae might soon be available. The notion of terraforming Earth is a bit more problematic, since the microbes Riki has been working on must first survive, then multiply, and any way you slice it, terraforming will take an awfully long time. The rest of the science and its consequences are highly plausible, though with a few footnotes. The biggest one is that a global ice age this severe would leave few to no refugia for plants and animals, although the plants are more important in this case. Unless tropical refugia exist, there won’t be enough plants to replenish Earth’s oxygen, and people may even suffocate before they starve. If the sun’s output drops so dramatically, radio transmission and reception might become impossible other than for short distances. (If memory serves, long-distance radio transmissions require the ionosphere, which would dramatically shrink or even vanish if solar output drops sufficiently.) A third concern is whether it’s realistic to think that with no advance warning, even Analog-style scientific and technological heros could bootstrap a safe enclave on (literally) a few hours’ notice that would survive the near-instant plunge into an ice age long enough to build something more durable. The complexity of such an undertaking is not to be trivialized.
As always, there are nits to be picked, but none that seriously detract from the story. I don’t know whether Lawson has considered expanding the story to novel length, but that would provide a fascinating opportunity to explore all the characters and human tragedies—and triumphs—implied in this short story in greater depth.
[Spoilers] As in Niven’s chilling “Inconstant Moon”, only in reverse, something has changed drastically in the Sun. In this case, it’s not a solar flare, but rather a drop in heat output this will precipitate an ice age literally overnight. Riki is smart enough (and strong enough) to force herself to instantly drop everything, and rather than bemoaning her fate, she cuts her losses and immediately flees for Rotorua, where the hot springs will provide heat long enough for people to survive. It’s a fortunate coincidence that Riki’s area of research is nutritionally complete algal food sources, with the goal of sustaining long space missions such as a mission to Mars using food grown onboard; with luck, her genetically engineered algae will provide enough nutrients for survival even though the rest of Earth’s food chain has been erased in a single stroke. Another fortunate stroke is that she’s been working on microorganisms suitable for terraforming cold planets such as Mars, a related area of research; releasing these microbes into the newly frozen world means there’s a chance of eventually restarting Earth’s ecosystems and giving humans a chance to survive. Perhaps most important of all, Riki is smart enough to immediately start gathering the experts that her small enclave of humanity will need to survive: she includes the obvious ones like engineers and medical professionals, but also remembers crucial roles such as the planners and organizers who are often neglected in disaster stories. Having chaired (and endured) numerous committees at research institutes, I can attest firsthand to the importance of such people and can also state that even the brightest scientists (perhaps particularly them) are not always the best choice for such roles.
Lawson accomplishes a potentially difficult task, namely making the human cost of the tragedy clear and something we can empathize with, yet without being manipulative; this is done by describing in simple, unadorned words consequences such as the loss of distant loved ones, inability to save friends who won’t be able to reach the Rotorua sanctuary in time, and listening by radio as other enclaves of humanity gradually lose power, are unable to produce enough food to survive, and succumb to these and many other death sentences. Talk about “cold equations”! Those who survive the initial crisis may not survive much longer if they cannot develop some kind of sustainable food source, so Riki and her colleagues set about planning to bring them her algal food resource as soon as the New Zealand enclave has ensured its own survival; this is as much about ensuring that enough genetic and intellectual resources remain to preserve humanity as a species as it is about concern for others. That makes Riki an interestingly complex character: she has sufficient strength of character (possibly even enough outright coldness) to cut off her emotions and do what’s necessary in a crisis, yet at the same time, she mourns her abandoned alpacas and wishes she’d stayed long enough to shoot them so they wouldn’t suffer; keeping them alive simply wasn’t in the cards, and unlike most of us, she understood this and made the necessary sacrifice.
Except for a couple (brief) didactic chunks, Lawson maintains a tight emotional focus on the human tragedies at the heart of the story and does so effectively. It’s a sobering tale, and doubly so because of Lawson’s rigor in following through the harsh premise to its logical conclusions. Told from the perspective of one of the survivors, speaking to an adopted child (possibly because the narrator has lost their own child or that child has lost their parent), “Sundown” becomes an effective and moving “founder myth”—a celebration of the human will to survive even the worst catastrophe.
The contrast with the other stories in this anthology, all of which feature greenhouse warming, is striking, and represents one of the things I love about SF/F: the ability of an occasional author to subvert the standard assumptions and try something new. Lawson also reminds us, without preaching, that even if we don’t manage to destroy ourselves with greenhouse gases, Nature might still manage the trick for us. Even after decades of research, we still understand the sun so poorly that without considerable additional study, our only hint that something bad is about to happen will be when it smacks us upside the head, as in this story and Niven’s story. Moreover, space opera notwithstanding, there’s not much we can do to alter the behavior of something as large as a star, and it will be centuries or longer before we develop that capability. There have been many pleas by scientists to increase funding to study our sun, and given the importance of variations in its behavior on life on Earth, we’re overdue to start some serious investments in those studies. With enough warning, we might survive such a catastrophe. Without that warning...
Several someones, scattered around the world, are working on projects similar to Riki’s project, so it’s not a stretch to think that her algae might soon be available. The notion of terraforming Earth is a bit more problematic, since the microbes Riki has been working on must first survive, then multiply, and any way you slice it, terraforming will take an awfully long time. The rest of the science and its consequences are highly plausible, though with a few footnotes. The biggest one is that a global ice age this severe would leave few to no refugia for plants and animals, although the plants are more important in this case. Unless tropical refugia exist, there won’t be enough plants to replenish Earth’s oxygen, and people may even suffocate before they starve. If the sun’s output drops so dramatically, radio transmission and reception might become impossible other than for short distances. (If memory serves, long-distance radio transmissions require the ionosphere, which would dramatically shrink or even vanish if solar output drops sufficiently.) A third concern is whether it’s realistic to think that with no advance warning, even Analog-style scientific and technological heros could bootstrap a safe enclave on (literally) a few hours’ notice that would survive the near-instant plunge into an ice age long enough to build something more durable. The complexity of such an undertaking is not to be trivialized.
As always, there are nits to be picked, but none that seriously detract from the story. I don’t know whether Lawson has considered expanding the story to novel length, but that would provide a fascinating opportunity to explore all the characters and human tragedies—and triumphs—implied in this short story in greater depth.