My firm, Magrathea Futures AB, turned two years old yesterday. I started looking at statistics on business survival rates to see how that measures up against the context, but very quickly decided against further spelunking in the dark waters of quantification. I’m still going, and that’s what matters.
I know that I certainly wasn’t sure I’d last this long, and I know I’m pretty proud to have done so, even though it’s as least as much down to luck and hustle as to anything else. (It sure as shit isn’t down to any innate business nous on my part.)
Some wanderings in the clickhole yesterday led to my discovering that what are sometimes still referred to in English as the dog days of summer are called råtmånaden in Swedish—literally “the months of rot”, because food would spoil and wounds go septic in the days before refrigeration and antibiotics, which for the vast majority of people (not just Swedes) was really not that long ago.
Lately I’m thinking a lot about how things were a handful of hundred years ago, because I’m being nagged at by an idea for a novel (or perhaps more than one) set a handful of hundred years hence, in that temporal trough of unknowing that sf writers have avoided addressing for quite some while now. This is probably a hostage-to-fortune thing: if you want to write stories with that sort of time horizon, you have to make some choices with regard to what was done (or not) about climate change in the latter parts of the C21st.
Having been reading a bunch of the academic literature on “civilisational collapse”—the basic thrust of which boils down to “elites fall and their middle-class hangers-on lament their loss, but for the most part people just get on with it, and frequently live better for the lack of overlords”—I’m increasingly interested in thinking about worlds in which a diminished population is adapting to a much changed but perhaps re-stabilising climate.
This is partly because such a setting, combined with that handful-of-centuries purview, lets you play with successor cultures who in turn get to play among the ruins of their antecedents; less “dying Earth” than “mutated Earth”, if you like. (Yes, I have been re-reading Wolfe’s New Sun sequence, how did you guess?)
The other reason is that, frankly, I think it’s the most likely outcome, and I want to start the work of thinking “collapse” less as nightmare worst-case outcome, and more as a possibility worth preparing for.
Hardcore veteran readers of VCTB will be thinking “hmm, Paul’s kicking fiction ideas around in public; guess he’s pretty busy at the moment”. This is how it always works: the ideas come to haunt you when you have the least capacity to entertain them.
Furthermore, you also keep stumbling into articles that feed the flame. Like, how long would it take abandoned agricultural land to essentially reforest itself? Turns out that about forty to fifty years will do it, though you’d want to modulate that number in accordance with the closeness of surviving stands of trees.
As for cityscapes, I’m sure you’ve all seen urbex photos from places like Chernobyl, right? Give it a couple centuries, and a shrunken population kept busy by doing agriculture without the multipliers of international trade and infrastructure will regard those overgrown cities as haunted necropolis-middens, explored mostly by an academic remnant that has returned to something closer to monasticism, and which harbours a deep and well-earned distrust of the digital devices and documents it’s still just about able to recover and work with.
(Yes, these are ideas I started playing with in “Inference”, which I mostly regard as a failed but nonetheless useful experiment. Aficionados of genre crate-digging will also recognise not just the afore-mentioned Wolfean approach to deep time but also the influence of A Canticle for Liebowitz and Riddley Walker.)
As a parting shot on the subject of time and its passing, I also blundered across an Ian Leslie sort-of-listicle on ageing. Item number 7 felt like it was pointed at me personally:
In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “ about twenty years ago”. And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.
Yup.
But here’s number 24:
To be reminded of your decay every time you look in the mirror is, as the kids say, low-key brutal, but if nothing else it teaches you acceptance of things you can’t control. It’s a rigorous spiritual practice.
I sometimes wonder if physical insecurity isn’t actually an advantage in the ageing process. I hated my face as a young person (not to mention the rest of me), but as the years have passed I seem to have acquired a mask of middle-aged mediocrity; ignore the tonsorial and sartorial choices, and I just look like Yet Another Bloke, albeit one who looks uncannily like my father from certain angles.
Of course, looking like Yet Another Bloke isn’t without its downsides… but that’s just one of those things I can’t control.
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