DaveW -
I too am a Bacigalupi fan, "Water Knife" in particular, also "Windup
Girl" but for different reasons.
It might not surprise anyone here that I have become a CliFi
obsessionist with Kim Stanly Robinson's stuff well represented
("Ministry for the Future" standing out well above the others). His
Red/Green/Blue Mars series is a good complement with the
social/technological/spiritual implications of Terraforming there. The
2015 Loosed Upon the World
<https://www.amazon.com/Loosed-upon-World-Anthology-Climate/dp/1481450301/ref=asc_df_1481450301/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312029683605&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5512945638363124067&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9030505&hvtargid=pla-491283653239&psc=1>
anthology of Climate Fiction includes contributions from Bacigalupi,
Robinson, Atwood among others.
Most recently, I read Neal Stephenson's well crafted "Termination Shock"
which I feel is way too focused on TechnoPhilic GeoEngineering escape
conceptions but as is his style he covers the sociopolitical
implications of Climate Change *and* our response to it well with his
very unique style.
The classic (pre)CliFi (for me) is Santa Fe's own Roger Zelazny (RIP)
70s "Damnation Alley" which was made into a very weak B-movie (as most
SF was before the budgets started getting gargantuan (e.g. Star
Wars/Trek/Gate/???). Bruce Sterling's 1994 Heavy Weather was a good
(early) dip into the implications of climate change on extreme weather
from the perspective of a gaggle of Storm Chasers. Another NM author(s)
is Stephen Gould and Laura Mixon's "GreenWar!". There are surely
earlier examples, but I'm not recalling. Of course one could press
biblical things like the Deluge (Genesis) or the 4 horsemen of the
Apocalypse in Genesis, Zecharia, Revelations...
Jack Williamson's (RIP) (New Mexico's amazing son raised on classic
Scientific Romances and contributing his own work right at the beginning
of the Golden Age). Terraforming Earth
<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/898087.Terraforming_Earth> is a
"Dont Look Up" (asteroid smacking) scenario which does a good job IMO
(I'm a big fan of his life story and work) of addressing the (near)
mortality of the human species and Earth's biosphere itself. The friend
who introduced me to him in his 90s (died at 103?) knew him when he was
a teen and provided him with the title for this book, though his first
choice was "Terraforming Terra", but the publishers prevailed with
"Earth" for arcane reasons. FWIW the OED's SciFi inspired neologisms
<https://www.capstan.be/sci-fi-is-a-fertile-breeding-ground-for-neologisms-some-have-entered-everyday-language-and-even-scientific-jargon/>
credits Jack for coining "Terraforming" in a 1941 novel.
?Glen?'s invocation of the earth as a seed becoming an (naturally) empty
husk (an expelled placenta?, a recovering womb?) as we flee it has
interesting implications I hadn't thought of before... it is a good
complementary perspective to thinking of it as simply escaping our own
self-fouled water-hole. "Terraforming Earth" also puts it's own twist
on this.
Ramble,
- Steve
On 1/25/22 2:05 PM, Prof David West wrote:
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife. Excellent read, more for background
on water and the kinds of things people WILL do to access it, than the
story line.
/In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle.
Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the
Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology
developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing
water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for
answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the
landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy
Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria
Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As
bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far
bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water
is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only
truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes
to drink./
davew
On Tue, Jan 25, 2022, at 11:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes:
< I don't see how we can prune the combinatorial explosion of
[im]possible outcomes without deciding some kind of objective at the
start, even if it's super vague like a Gaia-ish homeostatic health of
the biosphere. >
One could imagine a sort of Mad Max scenario out in the streets where
the Whole Foods deliveries are intercepted by the street dwelling
climate refugees? Or large compounds where food, water,
temperature-controlled clean air were ensured for a price? Take all
the rusting metal sitting around from Trump's wall and build bigger
fences around estates? Green Zones, like in the Iraq sense?
Marcus
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of glen
<[email protected]>
*Sent:* Tuesday, January 25, 2022 11:50 AM
*To:* [email protected] <[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] health care logistics
Well, OK. But the question still stands: Necessary for what objective?
The Siebert & Rees paper talks about shared values like "socially
just ecological sustainability", "salvage civilization", "one-earth
living", etc. And each one of their criticisms in section 3 also
assume some values. So, I'm guessing it's something like their
objective that we're assuming as our objective. And anything that
does not target that objective isn't put into the kitty of things
we'll evaluate as possible or impossible. (E.g. the second-earth idea
where we abandon this earth as a husk is not part of the conversation.)
I don't see how we can prune the combinatorial explosion of
[im]possible outcomes without deciding some kind of objective at the
start, even if it's super vague like a Gaia-ish homeostatic health of
the biosphere.
On 1/25/22 06:39, David Eric Smith wrote:
> To say this is a value question is fair, glen, given my shorthands
of language.
>
> However, I would like to split apart questions of “who wants what”
from questions of “what can or cannot happen under what conditions,
irrespective of what anybody wants”. In principle we have ways to
get at the latter question; we often do worse in getting any
resolution out of the former. Maybe there is something basic in
this? Our notion of truth is that on any properly-posed question,
there should only be one durable answer. Whereas in the area of
desires, we think it is either inescapable, or for many also
desirable (a self-referential value judgment) that different answers
coexist indefinitely.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>> On Jan 25, 2022, at 8:02 AM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Necessary for what, though? We need the shared value(s) before we
can ask what response we'd get from the convergence on something that
might be necessary to adhere to that value. Is the shared value that
biology on this planet should be preserved and the thing we need to
do is impossible? Or perhaps the shared value that all "lower forms
of life" were simply stepping stones to the human organism, but to
preserve the human organism is impossible? Etc.
>>
>> As Jon likes to ask: What are we optimizing? If we can't agree on
that, then the responses to impossibilities will be as diverse as the
values that underlie those impossibilities. And, if that's the case,
then we're back to the clustering/homogenizing we see in any aspect
of pop culture.
>>
>> On 1/24/22 17:21, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> In a real situation where we decided something was necessary that
we believed there was no way to do, somehow I feel like the same
movie doesn’t become the response. Something else does. What is that?
>>
>> On 1/24/22 17:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Before I launch into a diatribe about why the hell we can't agree
to basic, never mind interesting things:
--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
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