Ecopunk!
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ECOPUNK!
EDITED BY
LIZ GRZYB
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CAT SPARKS
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To all Ecowarriors, past, present and future.
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Ecopunk! edited by Liz Grzyb and Cat Sparks
Published by Ticonderoga Publications
Copyright © Liz Grzyb and Cat Sparks 2017
Cover artwork by Peggy Hewitt
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise) without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder concerned.
All stories are original to this collection.
Designed and edited by Russell B. Farr
Typeset in Sabon and Franklin Gothic
A Cataloging-in-Publications entry for this title is available from The National Library of Australia.
ISBN 978–1–925212–54–9 (trade paperback)
978–1–925212–55–6 (ebook)
978–1–925212–56–3 (hardcover)
Ticonderoga Publications
PO Box 29 Greenwood
Western Australia 6924
www.ticonderogapublications.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 x
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Our thanks to
Isobelle Carmody for her Melbourne Red Queen extravaganza that began this journey, Robert Hood for his commando-style editorial assistance, Peggy Hewitt for her luscious cover art, our authors for their fruitful imaginations and tireless work.
Cat would also like to thank Dr Helen Merrick for shepherding me through the bulk of my ecocatastrophe-themed PhD.
Liz would also like to thank Rivqa Rafael for her crash course in crowdfunding and Russell B. Farr for his unfailing support and love.
Contents
Ecopunk!
Liz Grzyb
Science fiction and climate fiction: contemporary literatures of purpose
Cat Sparks
Mr Mycelium
Claire McKenna
The Right Side of History
Jane Rawson
The Wandering Library
D.K. Mok
The Radiolarian Violin
Adam Browne
Broad Church
Tess Williams
Trivalent
Rivqa Rafael
Milk and Honey
Jason Fischer
Island Green
Shauna O’Meara
The City Sunk, the City Risen
R. Jean Mathieu
Monkey Business
Janeen Webb
The Today Home
Jason Nahrung
The Mangrove Maker
Thomas Benjamin Guerney
From the Dark
Emilie Collyer
The Butterfly Whisperer
Andrew Sullivan
Future Perfect
Matthew Chrulew
The Scent of Betrayal
Jane Routley
First Flight
Ian Nichols
Happy Hunting Ground
Corey J. White
Pink Footed
Marian Womack
About The Editors
About The Authors
Our Backers
Ecopunk!
Liz Grzyb
As we put the finishing touches on this anthology, a one-in-a-thousand-year storm is lashing Texas, the third “one-in-five-hundred-years” event to occur in the past three years. Simultaneously, Bangladesh and Nepal are facing floods killing thousands of people. The climate of our world is changing, no matter how many of our world leaders remain in denial and such “freak” events are becoming frequent. Ecopunk! Speculative Tales of Radical Futures examines how humanity might cope with dramatic changes in nature, and learn to adjust to new versions of normal.
The seed of this anthology was a discussion between Cat and I at Isobelle Carmody’s spectacular launch of her final Obernewtyn book, The Red Queen in Melbourne, back in December 2015. We found ourselves surrounded by fans cosplaying Carmody’s dystopian world, in which the struggle between humanity and nature is often acrimonious. This led us to wondering about examining the opposite—rather than focussing on dystopian visions, encourage the telling stories in which the human race perseveres and pushes through, embracing these changes, utilising new technologies and attitudes to make our new, emerging world sustainable.
Cat and I have been buddies for longer than we’d like to admit. We’ve both edited our fair share of anthologies—Cat ran Australia’s award-winning Agog! Press and was fiction editor at Cosmos Magazine for five years, whereas I’d been working on mainly fantasy-based anthologies and was looking for a different kind of challenge. We both find climate fiction intriguing, with Cat currently completing her doctorate in this very subject. Ecopunk! Speculative Tales of Radical Futures seemed to be the perfect storm.
The stories we have chosen for these pages explore a plethora of possible futures. Our amazing authors have blown us away with their powerful, near-future visions, inspiring us with humanity standing strong with optimism and hope.
Perth, Australia
September 2017
Science fiction and climate fiction: contemporary literatures of purpose
Cat Sparks
The way we believe in the future is intrinsic to the fabric of our storytelling. Authors utilise imagination to situate readers in a different place and time. Science fiction authors are often required to craft and shape entire new worlds complete with functional cultures and economic systems in order to render future projections engaging and believable. Such a skillset is invaluable as we come to the point of requiring new approaches to life on a rapidly warming Earth.
Yet science fiction has a poor track record of accurately predicting the future. Some authors proved more prescient than others: Jules Verne anticipated lunar modules and splashdown capsules in in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and the Nautilus of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) predated modern electric submarines.
HG Wells gave us the battlefield tank in The Land Ironclads (1903). The World Set Free (1914) forewarned of nuclear weapons. John Brunner’s 1968 Stand on Zanzibar included satellite and on-demand TV, laser printers, electric cars, the EU, and the collapse into decay of Detroit. His 1975 The Shockwave Rider presented the accoutrements of computer-dependent surveillance culture back when most computers didn’t even have monitors.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer is arguably the most influential science fiction novel of the past fifty years in that it not only imagined but helped shape notions of cyberspace.
But, Gibson’s work aside, generally a lack of broad cultural impact rendered even successful science fiction imaginings useless as innovations or cautionary tales. Genre taint from science fiction’s lurid pulp heritage entrenched widespread belief in the material’s juvenilia and thus excluded science fiction from much intellectual literary discourse in the wider community.
Science fiction has, almost fatally, failed to conceive of the shaping of the future in grand engineering terms. It missed the transistor, the transformation of the entire world through the rise of petrol-fueled cars, the mostly non-violent fall of the Soviet Union, the end of indoor smoking, the fact that the carbon released since the Industrial Revolution could blow an unforeseen carbon budget, and that the process of creating transformative technology introduced a planetary limitation: that of sustainability.
Not all science fiction is set in the future, nor has its main function ever been to predict future events, societies or technologies, but, rather, to contemplate possible outcomes and to highlight fears cont
emporary society has about itself and where it might be heading.
By its very nature, science fiction needs to be rooted in plausibility. It promotes or reflects reality and reason. By imagining future scientific developments, science fiction creates the conditions for emergence and commentary on the consequences of certain technological pathways and their likely cultural impacts.
If there’s one thing science fiction definitely excels at, it is imagining what might possibly go wrong, highlighting potentials we ought to fear, the dangers and the possible catastrophic outcomes of technological, scientific and even sociological and political trends.
Lack of global response to the imminent threat of climate change is sometimes blamed on a failure of societal imagination. This despite the fact that science fiction has been imagining various forms of environmental catastrophe since its Pre-Golden Age. The ecocatastrophic alarmism of the 50s–70s focused on the horrors of overpopulation and pollution. Anxiety about pollution and global warming spiked when nuclear fears subsided after the Cold War.
Recent years have seen an unsurprising surge in the popularity of post-apocalypse and dystopian fiction in tandem with rising concerns about global issues such as climate change, the potential of weaponised pathogens, unregulated synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, autonomous combat weaponry, computer hacking, terrorism, species extinctions, religious fundamentalism and the widening gap between rich and poor.
Right now we appear to be standing ankle deep on the threshold of planet-wide human-induced disasters that appear inevitable. Global catastrophic and existential risks make our world seem smaller than ever. We are bombarded daily with news reports and data, but facts and figures are not enough to stir people to action. Never have we had more information at our fingertips, and yet cultures of practical denialism persist. Lack of immediate effect creates a false sense of security and the inability to visualize problems that will impact hard on future generations and locate their source in our own actions. We’re more afraid of losing what we want in the short term than facing dangerous obstacles in the distance. These are failings of culture, not of science.
It is unsurprising to see these rising threats resonating through our art. After all, conflict is the engine driving narrative fiction. In literature as in life, it’s easier to break things than fix them. It is too tempting to view relentless post-apocalypse and dystopian scenarios as a form of contempt pornography. Easier to describe the Earth flooded or parched barren than experiment with solutions, or envision adaptations and alternative pathways such as building new energy economies or the wholesale transformation of quarterly late-stage capitalism.
Traditionally, post-apocalypse stories are less about the end of the world than about overcoming and surviving it. Dystopias highlight heroic individuals gaining agency and fighting corrupt systems, serving as romanticized ciphers for our own personal life struggles.
While much mimetic fiction traditionally focuses inwards on individual identities and challenges, both science fiction and climate fiction take on the task of envisioning physical and cultural landscapes facing uncertainty through processes of transformation and adaptation. Indeed, as humanity becomes more and more integrated and inseparable from technology, the boundaries between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction are becoming increasingly meaningless for readers.
Climate fiction focuses on anthropogenic climate change rather than random natural unstoppable ecological catastrophes, such as supervolcanos, solar flares or large, Earth impacting meteorites. Emerging initially as a subset of science fiction, climate fiction straddles genre boundaries: science fiction, utopia, dystopia, fantasy, thriller, romance, mimetic fiction, nature writing, and the literary, from fast-paced thrillers, to inward looking present day narratives and even historical fiction. It uses real scientific data to translate climate change from the abstract to the cultural. As the field grows, it is expanding its parameters and becoming a contemporary literature of purpose and revolution, forming a bridge connecting scientific information with people preparing to face an uncertain future the past can no longer be relied upon to guide us through.
William Gibson reminds us that all fiction is speculative. Climate change is happening now, and we need a literature of now to address its issues as glaciers melt, corals bleach, typhoons kill and forest fires rage. Climate fiction highlights the hard-impacting economic and interpersonal realities of climate change, encouraging us to understand it as a problem we have brought upon ourselves and that changes to our economic and energy systems are required if we are to survive it.
Canberra, Australia
October 2017
Mr Mycelium
Claire McKenna
“Ugh, look at that guy.”
Mr Mycelium in the end of the row, with his name graffitied to the side of a rusted Kombi Van in 1990s Wild Style. Mr Mycelium with the junkyard tables of myco-wood alongside the van’s sliding door, cellulose cardboard pallets of black dirt before him and under his fingernails, white nodules in the medium where the fruiting bodies had sprouted. Everything he wore was a fungal derivative, from his biopolymer clothes to the muddy mycofoam loafers he’d hand-stitched to accommodate his wide, flat feet.
“Probably some mushrooms in his hat too,” Jack said to me in a stage whisper. We passed the van to join the grumbling queue of Ridgefolk, all trying to gain entry through the traders’ gate.
(We had a third with us, a cow named Fiddy after the 50-brand on her shoulder, so at least she drew the ire of the others in our line, rather than me with my galumphing gait and my propensity to stand on people’s toes.)
“ . . . and his beard.”
I wondered if Jack was joking. No smile on his face to soften the slurs. Cruel Jack today then. I kept an arm’s distance. Wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for his mother asking me to keep an eye on her son, make sure his good sense didn’t run away with him.
Jack had first spotted Mr Mycelium hawking his wares out behind a Superior Brand Switchgrass marquee, while simultaneously leaching power off the exhibitor’s battery bank. The sales rep was too busy chatting up young farmhands to notice the redlining gauges. Obviously Mr Mycelium wasn’t one to catch the sunlight with his own giant aerofoil of photovoltaic cells. He preferred to plug himself into an unsecured outlet and metabolise other people’s hard-caught energy.
As heterotrophic as his mushrooms, I thought.
Jack received a lanyard at the gatehouse, and we were waved on through.
“Well, three pretty ladies at the fair,” Mr Mycelium said cheerily as we passed, me, Jack and Fiddy. Then he then gave an apologetic nod, “ . . . oh I mean gentleman,” on reading Jack’s lanyard.
Jack stewed. It wasn’t his fault that he was pretty Jack Dunfries, when everyone else in the Eden Ridge Production region was a bombproof Bowles, or ropey Rogers or crusty Merkel-Wu. Out in the fuel-crop boonies people were absolute in their gender roles. If you were pretty, you were a lady; if you were rough in face and voice you were a man. If you were a rough-looking lady, the man’s privilege would be extended to you. A pretty man: otherwise. Beauty without utility was a moral sin as much as gluttony and waste.
“That’s a shitty—” Jack started, before I got a hold of his wrist.
“C’mon,” I said, pulling him away from a possible confrontation. “Security will kick us out.”
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The Emerging Technologies Roadshow had rolled in to town like a carnival of capitalism, all the second-rate start-ups and distributors come late to the revolution, and now struggling to play catch-up with more forward-thinking competitors. We’d come across most of the exhibitors in previous town fairs , familiar hawkers with their smartly arranged pop-up storefronts and miniature models of polyethylene processing labs, a forest of glossy banners bearing logos of benzene rings and lipid membranes and corn cobs scattering seed. Alongside the slick corporate booths, I halfway expected shabby Mr Mycelium to be part of an elaborate street theatre protest about Environmental
Reparations.
Once we had run the gauntlet of exhibitors, who harassed Jack and ignored me as if I were invisible, we reached the sales-and-barter yards.
“Hey Minty,” Jack said, pointing. “Over there. That’s him.”
Without waiting for me to respond, Jack gave Fiddy the cow a tug on her halter. Fiddy was the sole reason for our being here at the show, rather than on a farm that couldn’t spare our absence. She represented a substantial technological investment for a family long gone.
A memento perhaps. But one that was aging rapidly. Eliza Dunfries, Jack’s mother, had sent her son to market to reclaim what little could be had from the cow’s sale.