Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  Much SF has been both deliberately intended by its authors and deliberately received by its readers as value-relevant. Some, but not all, science fiction consists in future stories; and some, but not all, is concerned either to advocate what its authors and readers see as desirable possible futures or to urge against what they see as undesirable ones. In short, the future story can be used as a kind of futurology. Science fiction of this kind is intended to be politically or morally effective—that is, to be socially useful. “We badly need a literature of considered ideas,” Turner himself argued in 1990: “Science fiction could be a useful tool for serious consideration, on the level of the non-specialist reader, of a future rushing on us at unstoppable speed.”10 Three years earlier, in the “Postscript” to The Sea and Summer, he had written, “We talk of leaving a better world to our children, but in fact do little more than rub along with day-to-day problems and hope that the long-range catastrophes will never happen.” This novel, he explained, “is about the possible cost of complacency.”11

  Much radical SF scholarship exhibits a certain antipathy to dystopia, essentially on the grounds that it tends, in Fredric Jameson’s phrase, “to denounce and … warn against Utopian programs.”12 But many dystopias, including some of those most disliked by Jameson, actually function as implicitly utopian warnings rather than as “anti-utopias” in the strict sense of the term. This is true, I would argue, for On the Beach and The Sea and Summer. Writing in the Australian newspaper The Age in January 2008, Peter Christoff, the then–vice president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, observed that On the Beach had “helped catalyse the 1960s anti-nuclear movement.” Comparing the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s with that of global warming in the early twenty-first century, he warned that “we are … suffering from a radical failure of imagination.” When Christoff connected On the Beach to climate change, he did so precisely to urge the need for a parallel contemporary effort to imagine the unimaginable. “These are distressing, some will argue apocalyptic, imaginings,” he admits, “but without them, we cannot undertake the very substantial efforts required to minimize the chances of their being realised.”13 The Sea and Summer, it seems to me, had attempted more or less exactly this two decades previously.

  THE NOVEL WITHIN THE NOVEL

  Turner was born in Melbourne in 1916 and published the first of five non-SF novels in 1959. He began reviewing genre fiction for The Age during the 1970s, produced his first SF novel, Beloved Son, in 1978, which was followed by sequels in 1981 and 1983,14 and by the time of his death in 1997 had become in effect the genre’s Australian elder statesman. Four other SF novels of his were published between 1987 and 1994 and a collection of SF short stories in 1990, and two posthumous works, an unfinished novella, And Now Time Doth Waste Me, in 1998, and the novel Down There in Darkness in 1999.15 All were essentially exercises in futurology, all preoccupied with the ethics of sociopolitical action, all distinctively Australian in tenor. By far the most critically successful was The Sea and Summer, which in 1988 won both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award for the South East Asia and South Pacific Region and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best SF novel published in Britain (the previous year’s Clarke Award had gone to Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale). In 1985 Turner had published a short story, “The Fittest,”16 in which he first began to explore the possible effects of global warming on his home city. He quickly expanded this story into a full-length novel that was published in 1987 in Britain as The Sea and Summer and as Drowning Towers in the United States.17

  Like On the Beach, The Sea and Summer is set mainly in and around Melbourne, a vividly described place, terrifyingly transformed into the utterly unfamiliar. The novel is organized into a core narrative, comprising two parts set in the mid-twenty-first century, and a frame narrative, comprising three shorter parts set a thousand years later among “the Autumn People” of the “New City,” located in what are today the Dandenong Ranges to the east of Melbourne.18 The core narrative deals with the immediate future of our “Greenhouse Culture,” the frame narrative with the retrospective reactions to it of a slowly cooling world. The latter depicts a utopian future society, which uses submarine archaeology to explore the drowned remains of the “Old City,” but which is also simultaneously aware of the imminence of a “Long Winter” that might well last a hundred thousand years. The novel opens by introducing the frame narrative’s three main characters: Marin, a part-time student and enthusiastic Christian, who pilots the power craft used to explore the drowned city; his great-aunt, Professor Lenna Wilson, an expert on the collapse of the Greenhouse Culture in Australia, who teaches history at the university; and Andra Andrasson, a visiting actor-playwright from Sydney, researching the twenty-first century as possible material for a play.19 Together they explore the remains of the substantially submerged “Tower Twenty-three” (6–11) and investigate the ruins of the only twentieth-century “Enclave” never to have flooded (93–96), debating their meaning both on-site and at the university.

  The core narrative takes the form of a novel within the novel, also titled The Sea and Summer, written by Lenna as a “Historical Reconstruction” of the thirty-first century’s real past (15). In form it is polyphonic, tracing the development of the Greenhouse Culture through a set of memoirs and diary extracts written during the years 2044–61 by six main protagonists: Alison Conway, Francis Conway, Teddy Conway, Nola Parkes, Captain Nikopoulos, and Arthur Derrick. The only silent voice is that of the Tower Boss, Billy Kovacs, the novel’s central character and also, perhaps, its central enigma, the remains of whose flat Lenna and Andra explore (9). This core narrative is counter-chronological, beginning and ending in 2061, but moving through the 2040s and ’50s as it proceeds. The sections set in 2061 might therefore be considered a frame within the frame. In the first of these, Alison recalls her own childish delight in play on the beach at Elwood, from the vantage point of what we will later learn to be the last year of her life. She wistfully concludes: “The ageing woman has what the child desired—the sea and eternal summer” (20). In the second, her son Francis records his intermittent diary entries from the period February 2056 to March 2061, concluding with that for March 20: “Mum is dead…. Once, she said very forcefully, ‘I’ve had a good life, Francis. So full.’ Full, I thought, of what would have been avoided in a saner world…. Billy came in later, but by then she was rambling about the past, about summertime and the glistening sea” (311).

  Professor Wilson’s historical reconstruction depicts the twenty-first century as a world of mass unemployment and social polarization, where rising sea levels have resulted in the inundation of the city’s bay-side suburbs. As it opens, the poor “Swill” already live in high-rise tower blocks, the lower floors of which are progressively submerged; the wealthier “Sweet” live in suburbia on higher ground; the “Fringe” subsist in the zones between. In 2033 a third of Australia has been set aside for Asian population relocation; by 2041 the global population has reached ten billion, and the cost of iceberg tows and desalinization projects has brought the economy close to bankruptcy (29, 21, 30). On his sixth birthday in 2041, Francis and his nine-year-old brother, Teddy, are taken by their parents, Fred and Alison, to see the sea. What they find is a concrete wall “stretching out of sight in both directions.” Francis’s mother surprises him, however, by explaining, “This is Elwood and there was a beach here once. I used to paddle here. Then the water came up and there were the storm years and the pollution, and the water became too filthy.” “It must be terrible over there in Newport when the river floods,” she continues. “A high tide covers the ground levels of the tenements” (23–24). In 2044 Fred is laid off and commits suicide, leaving Allie and the boys to move to Newport (30–34). There they meet Billy Kovacs, who becomes Alison’s lover, Francis’s mentor, and the reader’s guide to the social geography of an Australian dystopia.

  In adolescence both Teddy and Francis abandon their mother in pursuit of upward social mobility,
although both will eventually be returned “home.” For Teddy, mobility comes through formal education, leading to Police Intelligence Recruit School (48–49) and thence to a career as a police intelligence officer. For Francis, it comes by way of an unusual aptitude for mental arithmetic, leading to a career as a “cally that spouts answers without using a key or chip” (57), for illicit business deals. Each acquires an appropriate sponsor: for Teddy, “Nick” Nikopoulos, a captain in Police Intelligence (113); for Francis, Mrs. Nola Parkes, the owner of a small import-export firm, who, after the collapse of the money economy, directs the state sub-department performing essentially the same function (72). Alison and the boys tell their own stories, Nikopoulos and Parkes retell the stories from different vantage points, and eventually these are all contextualized by Derrick, a senior state official with a quite literal power of life or death over the other characters (291). “Why don’t you all go home?” he tells them. “We’re finished here” (301).

  The novel is at its most compelling in its representations of the everyday horror of life in the drowning towers, and of the sheer ferocity of status consciousness within a class structure mutating into a caste system. Both are recurrent motifs in both the frame and core narratives, although in the latter they invariably prove more telling because more experientially grounded. There is a terrible poignancy, for example, to Francis’s diary entries for February 11, 2056: “Five years back in the Fringe and resigned to it. Not reconciled, never that. What a hopeless, helpless lot the Swill are” (306). And March 22, 2057: “Three times this month the water has raced through the house. Sea water, salt and cold. We pay now for our great-grandparents’ refusal to admit that tomorrow would eventually come” (306–7).

  In the novel’s final subplot, Captain Nikopoulos, Billy Kovacs, and Teddy discover that Mrs. Parkes and Francis are unwittingly involved in a state-sponsored conspiracy to “cull” the Swill, by means of a highly addictive “chewey” designed to produce infertility. “A State that strikes its own,” Nola Parkes protests, “at random, for experiment, is past hope” (303). Arthur Derrick’s response is directed at Turner’s twentieth-century readers as much as at Parkes herself: “Nola, idealism was for the last century, when there was still time … we’re down to more primitive needs. The sea will rise, the cities will grind to a halt and the people will desert them…. The State has no time to concern itself with moral quibbles” (304).

  THE FUTURE AND THE FUTUROLOGY

  The debates among the Autumn People in the frame narrative are clearly designed to make meaningful sense of the Greenhouse Culture. For Marin, its meaning is straightforward and simple: “They were wicked—they … ruined the world for all who came after … they denied history” (6). Lenna, however, conceives of their distant ancestors more sympathetically, as victims of the unintended consequences of their own collective action. “In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” she tells Andra, “the entire planet stood with its fingers plugging dykes of its own creation until the sea washed over their muddled status quo. Literally” (13). Andra’s own underlying response is incomprehension. Attempting to grapple with the social inequalities of the Greenhouse era, he can only ask: “How did this division arise? Why no revolution?” (16). Lenna suggests the answer might lie in the “rise of the Tower Bosses” to run “small states within the State.” This allowed the poor “a measure of contentment,” she explains, “by letting them run their own affairs.” Moreover, she continues, the Political Security executive was also able “to convince the Tower Bosses that only a condition of status quo could preserve a collapsing civilization” (93). Ultimately, however, Andra remains as uncomprehending as ever and, after “three years and a dozen attempts,” abandons his play (315).

  A primary effect of this frame narrative is to blunt the force of dystopian inevitability driving the core narrative. “We’re very well equipped to endure a million years of cold,” Lenna tells Andra…. We have knowledge and we have the Forward Planning Centres. We’ll make the change smoothly” (12–13). A secondary effect, however, is to suggest how little control humanity can actually exercise over its destiny. “It is history that makes us,” Andra observes in his closing letter to Lenna. “The Greenhouse years should have shown that plainly; the Long Winter will render it inescapable” (315). Much the same is true of the frame within the frame when it moves forward into the late 2050s. For here we learn how Teddy, Nikopoulos, and Kovacs, and eventually even Francis and Derrick, become involved in an attempt by the “New Men” to organize the Swill in preparation “for the dark years coming” (310). The crisis will not be averted, we know from the thirty-first century, but “little human glimpses do help,” Lenna will conclude, “if only in confirming our confidence in steadfast courage” (316).

  The least persuasive aspect of the novel is in its understanding of how the crisis developed. In the “Postscript” Turner identifies six “major matters” of futurological concern: population growth, food shortage, mass unemployment, financial collapse, nuclear war, and the greenhouse effect, only one of which—nuclear war—fails to feature in the novel, because it seemed to him increasingly unlikely in any foreseeable future (98, 317–18). Empirically, Turner’s predictions have often proven surprisingly close to the mark. In the novel, world population reaches ten billion during the early 2040s (21); according to the 2010 biennial revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects, it will reach between 8 billion (low projection) and 10.5 billion (high projection) by 2050.20 In the novel, “two-thirds of the world starves” by 2045 (158). This might have seemed hopelessly pessimistic during the 1980s and 1990s, when world hunger rates were persistently trending downward. But the numbers of hungry people increased from 825 million people in 1995–97 to 857 million in 2000–2002, 873 million in 2004–6, and were projected to reach a historic high of 1.02 billion, or a sixth of the world’s population, by the end of the decade.21

  In the novel, the Australian and world unemployment rate has reached 90 percent by 2041 (25). Again, this must have seemed an extraordinarily gloomy prognosis on the book’s first publication, as indeed it still is for Australia, where the unemployment rate was as low as 5.4 percent early in 2013.22 But the situation is very different across much of the European Union, where Spain has an unemployment rate of 27.2 percent, Greece 27 percent, Portugal 17.7 percent, Ireland 14.7 percent, and France 10.7 percent.23 Moreover, youth unemployment rates are higher still: in the fourth quarter of 2012, the figure was 57.9 percent for Greece, 55.2 percent for Spain, 38.4 percent for Portugal, 36.9 percent for Italy, 29.4 percent for Ireland, 25.4 percent for France, and 20.7 percent for the United Kingdom.24

  In the novel, the financial crisis that bespeaks the collapse of the international monetary system comes in the 2040s; in reality, something like it almost certainly began during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–12. In the novel, there have been no nuclear wars, but the “armaments factories” nonetheless continue “belching out weapons … for a war nobody dared start … and an industry nobody dared stop” (71); in reality, we have indeed been spared nuclear war, but nonetheless, as of January 2011, eight states possessed between them about 20,530 nuclear warheads, 5,000 ready for use and 2,000 on high operational alert.25 In the novel, average temperatures have risen by 4½ degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) and sea levels by 30 centimeters (almost 12 inches) between 1990 and 2041 (74–75); the current projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are less dramatic, pointing to temperature increases of between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11.5 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1980–99 and 2090–99 and rises in sea level of between 18 and 59 centimeters (7–23 inches).26 But there is near-consensus among climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect and also strong evidence that recent increases in extreme weather events, such as heat waves and flooding, are related to climate change.27 The experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 201
2 tends to confirm these suspicions.

  Nonetheless, neither Turner nor his characters have any sense of which, if any, of these processes is the driver of the catastrophic crisis that overcame the Greenhouse Culture. One suspects his own answer might well have been essentially Malthusian. Mine, by contrast, would be Marxian; that is, that all six—including the nuclear arms race, if not nuclear war itself—are likely outcomes, within a world of finite resources, of any system of unregulated competitive capital accumulation akin to that sketched in The Communist Manifesto and analyzed in detail in Capital.28 No doubt, the days are long gone when one could take a creative writer to task simply for being insufficiently Marxist. One might, however, still object to the implausibility of a thousand years of hindsight failing to provide the history profession with any generally accepted account of so significant an event as the collapse of an entire social order.

  This isn’t entirely fair: Professor Wilson has, in fact, written a five-thousand-page Preliminary Survey of Factors Affecting the Collapse of the Greenhouse Culture in Australia (13). But she decides to offer Andra her fictionalized account because Andra lacks the “general historical and technical grounding” necessary to understand the longer work (14). Three years later he still appears not to have read her Survey. So we do not know what, ultimately, drove the system into crisis. We do, however, know how Turner thought it could best be avoided—that is, by rational planning based on scientific advice. The epigraph to the novel, repeated in the “Postscript,” is taken from Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the Australian virologist, immunologist, and public policy activist, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960: “We must plan for five years ahead and twenty years and a hundred years” (317). Lenna Wilson gives Andra Andrasson essentially cognate advice: “Keep up as well as you can with the scientific information and you could be able to think usefully if the time for action should arrive. Otherwise, live as suits you. Be like the Swill, aware but unworried” (99).