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blatherskiteWhat’s the upshot of this long series of reviews? On the whole, “Welcome to the Greenhouse” is a worthwhile investment of your time and reading effort. Like any anthology, there are weak stories, including a couple that should have been sent back for major rewrites (“Benkoelen”, “True North”). But there are also several very strong pieces that more than compensate for them: in particular, Benford’s “The Eagle”, Sterling’s “Master of the Aviary”, and Vukcevich’s “Fish Cakes” are standouts, though for very different reasons.
The tone of the tales spans the gamut from hard SFnal extrapolation to nearly unalloyed fantasy, and from pessimistic “we’re all gonna die” scenarios to tall tales and humor in the service of a moral. There are tales driven almost entirely by character, tales driven mostly by plot, and some elegant mixtures of the two; the Benford and Sterling tales probably strike the best balance. If you like the range of stories that typically appear in F&SF, you’ll enjoy this anthology too. Foster’s “That Creeping Sensation” earns special mention (in my entirely subjective opinion) for *ahem* breathing new life (and a scientific justification) into the hoary old notion of giant insects while also exploring this unusual but plausible side-effect of global warming for (so far as I’m aware) the first time.
From a scientific perspective, most of the stories are sound, and take only minor and acceptable liberties with what we know about global warming. A few seem a bit shakier, but remain within the bounds of what is acceptable for the sake of fiction. I still find too many tales for which the author didn’t adequately research the scientific or technical underpinnings of their story or fully explore the consequences of their SFnal premises, but not to the point of undermining most stories or the anthology as a whole.
My take-home message, to the extent that one can do so from what is (after all) a survey of a small sample of stories rather than a formal study of our field is that global warming has emerged from being an occasional blip on the SFnal radar and has become something that will increasingly become part of our field’s literary and scientific dialogue. My experience with a great many scientists over the past 25 years is that most won’t pay much attention to the musings of fictioneers, even to those with distinguished academic credentials (several authors in various fields, but most notably Benford from the perspective of “hard science”). But a few will, and I have some faint hope that they’ll find inspiration in this collection. In particular, I hope that some will begin working on Plan B, as Locke proposes in “True North”. That’s a notion I thoroughly endorse, despite my relatively harsh critique of his story.
I particularly endorse disaster planning *right now* because the kind of potential crisis we’re facing is the kind of thing that will take as much as a decade simply to plan, and decades more to implement in anything like a satisfactory way. We have no historical or practical experience with problems such as the following:
Transplanting hundreds of millions of people out of countries that have become uninhabitable is a political and logistical nightmare the like of which boggles the imagination, witness how badly we’ve handled this problem for mere thousands in Africa. Even sending them food will be an order of magnitude more difficult than any historical aid projects.
This raises the additional problem of finding ways for nations to cooperate in a world that (since the founding of the League of Nations) has stubbornly continued to insist that politics is a zero-sum game. For the first time in history, will we find a way to see ourselves as all being in the same lifeboat and behave accordingly, or will we fall into old habits and descend into warfare over a dwindling supply of scarce resources such as arable land?
Finding enough food to feed all these people in a world where food security is already precarious will become even more difficult as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns become increasingly unpredictable; many crops will fail outright, others will produce much lower yields, and unless we dramatically lower our population, millions will starve.
Helping people cope with the psychological impact of such a catastrophic change will be a particular challenge. Modern psychotherapy has made great strides to escape its more questionable historical roots, but from the perspective of hard science the field is still at the stage of Alchemy 3.1 or perhaps Psychology 0.9. The changes that are coming will require an enormous amount of psychological support and a clear understanding of how to communicate successfully with frightened and probably violent populations.
Depending on how fast the situation becomes desperate, and how early we begin planning, we may face some nasty triage situations. If we can’t save everyone, how will we choose who gets to survive and what will we do with those who aren’t chosen? This kind of situation has been discussed with varying degrees of rigor by many SF authors over the years, and a consideration of these suggestions by professional ethicists (rather than reinventing the wheel) will be necessary long before we actually have to perform the triage.
There are many other issues; these are just the most obvious. The development of such a plan would be precisely the kind of project ideally suited to a group as diverse as the SF/F community. We have authors who can extrapolate better than many scientists (because they’re less constrained by the need for scientific rigor), including some who contributed to this anthology, but we also have members who can provide the rigorous professional expertise in physics, biology, sociology, psychology, and other fields that will transform those extrapolations into something concrete and actionable. It’s never possible to fully characterize or fully anticipate the consequences of such a complex problem, but putting a large number of minds to work on the project (crowdsourcing!) would help us at least try. If we’re more fortunate than I expect, and all this effort proves to be unnecessary, at least we’ll have encouraged a new kind of international cooperation.
This is precisely the kind of thing that a Wikipedia-like project would be ideal for. Any volunteers?
The tone of the tales spans the gamut from hard SFnal extrapolation to nearly unalloyed fantasy, and from pessimistic “we’re all gonna die” scenarios to tall tales and humor in the service of a moral. There are tales driven almost entirely by character, tales driven mostly by plot, and some elegant mixtures of the two; the Benford and Sterling tales probably strike the best balance. If you like the range of stories that typically appear in F&SF, you’ll enjoy this anthology too. Foster’s “That Creeping Sensation” earns special mention (in my entirely subjective opinion) for *ahem* breathing new life (and a scientific justification) into the hoary old notion of giant insects while also exploring this unusual but plausible side-effect of global warming for (so far as I’m aware) the first time.
From a scientific perspective, most of the stories are sound, and take only minor and acceptable liberties with what we know about global warming. A few seem a bit shakier, but remain within the bounds of what is acceptable for the sake of fiction. I still find too many tales for which the author didn’t adequately research the scientific or technical underpinnings of their story or fully explore the consequences of their SFnal premises, but not to the point of undermining most stories or the anthology as a whole.
My take-home message, to the extent that one can do so from what is (after all) a survey of a small sample of stories rather than a formal study of our field is that global warming has emerged from being an occasional blip on the SFnal radar and has become something that will increasingly become part of our field’s literary and scientific dialogue. My experience with a great many scientists over the past 25 years is that most won’t pay much attention to the musings of fictioneers, even to those with distinguished academic credentials (several authors in various fields, but most notably Benford from the perspective of “hard science”). But a few will, and I have some faint hope that they’ll find inspiration in this collection. In particular, I hope that some will begin working on Plan B, as Locke proposes in “True North”. That’s a notion I thoroughly endorse, despite my relatively harsh critique of his story.
I particularly endorse disaster planning *right now* because the kind of potential crisis we’re facing is the kind of thing that will take as much as a decade simply to plan, and decades more to implement in anything like a satisfactory way. We have no historical or practical experience with problems such as the following:
There are many other issues; these are just the most obvious. The development of such a plan would be precisely the kind of project ideally suited to a group as diverse as the SF/F community. We have authors who can extrapolate better than many scientists (because they’re less constrained by the need for scientific rigor), including some who contributed to this anthology, but we also have members who can provide the rigorous professional expertise in physics, biology, sociology, psychology, and other fields that will transform those extrapolations into something concrete and actionable. It’s never possible to fully characterize or fully anticipate the consequences of such a complex problem, but putting a large number of minds to work on the project (crowdsourcing!) would help us at least try. If we’re more fortunate than I expect, and all this effort proves to be unnecessary, at least we’ll have encouraged a new kind of international cooperation.
This is precisely the kind of thing that a Wikipedia-like project would be ideal for. Any volunteers?