WHAT WILL REPLACE CAPITALISM?

Can capitalism continue indefinitely as the primary economic system of our society? Do we want it to?

Continuous economic growth depends on the production and consumption of ever more goods. Yet we know that our planet cannot sustain that indefinitely.

In Amsterdam and a few other cities around the world, experiments are underway into a new way of thinking called doughnut economics coined by a UK economist named Kate Raworth in a 2017 book. It’s the idea that the upper limit of what we can produce and consume is dictated by the limits of our environment: our planet’s tolerance for pollution and resource extraction, especially with the looming spectre of climate change. But there is also a lower limit of what humans need to produce and consume in order to live a healthy life (nutritious food, clothing etc.). The zone in the middle between the “social foundation” and the “environmental ceiling” is the doughnut. The practical applications of this mindset are many and varied, but one example from Amsterdam is grocery store pricing that includes costs normally ignored, such as a product’s carbon footprint. The essence of the movement is to ensure that everyone has a decent quality of life, but by means that are sustainable and don’t overtax the planet.

I can’t say whether or not doughnut economics is the way of the future, but something will have to change, or we and our home planet will have no future.

What does science fiction have to say about the future of economics?

In the near term, it’s possible to imagine new technologies that might extract more resources from trash and recycled materials, or that would make the mining of asteroids financially viable. Those might help capitalism stagger on for a while. In the long term, there are as many different models as there are fictional worlds, confederacies, empires, or what have you.

One of the most optimistic examples of a possible future economy comes from the world of Star Trek. Within the United Federation of Planets (at least by the 2360’s of Star Trek: The Next Generation) money is no longer used. Thanks to “replicator” technology, any form of inanimate normal matter can be produced if there’s a sufficient energy source. So there’s no longer such a thing as “scarcity”—every citizen can have everything they need and, presumably, anything they want. Therefore, accumulating goods is no longer a motivator. They don’t even need to work for a living. Mind you, lots of people do still work, it’s just that their compensation for doing so isn’t monetary. Instead, they’re rewarded by the gratification of achievement itself, by social status and influence (or power, such as commanding a starship). People work for a sense of self-fulfillment, helping others, and simply doing good.

Does that sound like any human beings you know? Yeah, that’s a problem—in our experience human nature just isn’t that selfless. Still, it’s a nice thought.

In what might be considered one of the earliest works of science fiction, the 1888 novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy features a man who falls into a hypnotically induced sleep and awakens in the year 2000 to a United States that’s a socialist utopia. No work for money; every citizen is given an equal amount of credit to buy what they need, everyone retires at the age of 45 with full lifetime benefits, those who work in less attractive or more hazardous fields get more time off, and the reward for superior performance is essentially recognition. Like when your kindergarten teacher awarded you star stickers for good behaviour. Again, Bellamy doesn’t seem to have taken into account the desire to not only “keep up with the Joneses” but surpass the Joneses whenever possible. Hasn’t that always been the problem when trying to reconcile concepts like Karl Marx’s communism with the behaviour of real people? We don’t actually want to be equal to the next guy. We want to have it better than the next guy. And we don’t see an incentive for working hard if everybody—go-getters and slackers—are going to have the same lifestyle anyway.

Many science fiction empires and societies include invented monetary, business, and exchange-of-labour systems, though not that many include economics as a significant focus. In several early stories (from the 1950s) by Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth, constant consumption is required to maintain national economies, advertising is a crucial tool of government, and citizens must meet a quota of goods to be purchased. On the other side of the coin (so to speak) the economics of overpopulation and scarcity figure into a good amount of SF. And looking into the far future, just try to imagine the economics of a society in which humans have “uploaded” into digital form, without the needs and wants of physical bodies at all! (See writers like Charles Stross.)

What about the near future? Cory Doctorow’s 2003 novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom introduces an economy driven in part by whuffie which reflects a person’s social status and influence (picture being able to get the good things in life according to how many likes you have on Facebook). There are also elements of a “reputation economy” in 1999’s Distraction by Bruce Sterling, and somewhat similar concepts elsewhere. I don’t know about you, but I don’t relish the idea of a society where people enjoy greater luxury and other perks just for being publicity whores (oh, wait, we have that already!)

Doctorow’s 2017 novel Walkaway features a “post-scarcity” society in which those who don’t want to participate in a rigged capitalist system run by the zotta-rich just drop everything and walk away. But where the walkaways congregate, most still want to accomplish things, it’s just that work isn’t required to get food and shelter, and rewards aren’t necessarily material.

All in all, capitalism probably isn’t sustainable forever, yet replacements as described in science fiction include any number of post-apocalyptic stories (pessimistic) and some that are perhaps overly optimistic (like Star Trek). A future economy with financial equality, no consumer pressure, and a minimalist lifestyle would require a big change in human nature. But, after all, there are plenty of stories that imagine changing human bodies and brains in innumerable ways. Maybe long-time traits like selfishness and greed can be changed, too.

Conscience engineering, anyone?

STARLINK VS. STARGAZERS

I suppose the course of progress has never run smoothly. Just look at the myriad ways we’ve screwed up our planet and all of its living species while trying to improve the lot of our own.

One of the newest examples is SpaceX’s ambitious plans for their Starlink internet service, intended to bring affordable high-speed satellite internet to even the most remote parts of our nations. As someone who lives in a rural area, poorly served by internet providers, this seemed like a great step forward to me. It didn’t cross my mind that it would conflict with my love of gazing into the night-time sky.

So far, SpaceX has launched more than 700 of their small Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, has permission to launch 12,000, and plans to launch a total of 30,000. That’s a lot of metallic objects whizzing overhead! They call it a “mega-constellation”, and that cutesy name probably fits better than they intended because, just like the original constellations, the Starlink satellites can be seen, thanks to the solar panels they depend on for energy.

Have you ever watched a satellite speed overhead while you’re stargazing on a clear night? It’s interesting—not really an impediment. But what if you were seeing dozens of them like beads on a string? That could get annoying. Now imagine you’re a professional astronomer taking long-exposure pictures of the night sky in hopes of discovering new space objects like asteroids or comets, or learning new information about other star systems. Annoying doesn’t cover it. Infuriating maybe. And that’s exactly what astronomers have been facing since the Starlink launches began. In fact, the disruption may not affect only optical astronomy; the creators of a new radio-telescope array in South Africa complain that the Starlink satellites will broadcast on one of the frequencies they hope to survey in the search for organic molecules elsewhere in the galaxy.

Now, I’m sure none of this was ever intended by SpaceX engineers—the satellites are brighter than expected—and the company is trying some things to remedy the problem. They’ve made the satellites much darker and less reflective (I’ve never seen one, but apparently the first few hundred are visible to the naked eye) and added visors to block the most reflective components, but scientists say these measures aren’t nearly enough. Other possible solutions are being discussed. Meantime the satellites keep going up. And at least two other companies plan to launch large numbers of similar satellites in the coming years.

I’m sure that every satellite ever launched has interfered with some astronomer’s observations, but the Starlink plans elevate the problem to a whole new scale, and it will only get worse. Why? Because now that private industries like SpaceX, Blue Origin (owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), and others are gaining a foothold in space, Low Earth Orbit will become the new frontier of manufacturing and even tourism. As I’ve said many times, as soon as the cost of launching materials beyond the atmosphere drops below a certain threshold, any number of space-based industries will become profitable, and private companies are steadily bringing that cost down. Everything from pharmaceutical laboratories and medical treatment facilities to hotels and habitats for the aged (and very wealthy!) will be put up there. There will be orbiting factories to produce super-conductive fibreoptic cable, semi-conductors, replacement human organs, exotic alloys and metallic glasses for a huge variety of applications, and who knows what else?

The next step will be staging platforms for deeper space travel, whether to the Moon, the asteroids, Mars, or beyond, since long-range spacecraft will be assembled in orbit and begin their journeys there. Traffic like that will steadily increase, leaving trails of ionized gases across the sky.

Precision optical astronomy based on the surface of the Earth is probably doomed. The writing is already on the wall.

That doesn’t mean the end of astronomy, of course. It will be a case of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. We already know that telescopes and other scientific instruments can view the heavens with vastly improved precision once beyond the pesky interference of the Earth’s atmosphere. For now, the choice of whether to observe from a mountaintop or high above the ocean of air comes down to cost (and maybe convenience), but before much longer, there won’t be a choice. The sky near Earth will simply be too crowded.

I hope these changes won’t entirely spoil the pleasure of lying on your back under the sky on a summer night and wondering at a billion blazing points of light. There are few experiences more glorious.

Astronomers, I feel your pain.

PERSONAL PROGRESS WHILE THE WORLD'S ON HOLD

By now, no one expects anything very “normal” from the year 2020. The past few months have seen me spending most of my time building and doing repairs on the cabins and sheds of the property where I live. That might be normal for some, but I’m a writer for a reason—the only power tool I’m proficient with is a computer! Each day is like a new comedy of errors.

Outside my little domain the world at large is still turning, but in fits and starts. I’m sure parts of your life feel “on hold” while the coronavirus pandemic rages. Even so, things happen. Developments arise.

A lot of the interesting stuff in my life and career recently is thanks to my longtime writer friend Mark Leslie Lefebvre (who writes as Mark Leslie). He’s been keeping me busier than I’d otherwise be, first by recruiting me to be the narrator of his A Canadian Werewolf In New York series, which includes not only the full novel of that name, but also the origin story One Time Around and the sequel novella Stowe Away. They relate the adventures of Michael Andrews, bestselling author and transplanted Canadian in the Big Apple who also happens to be a werewolf, which gives him superhuman abilities in the days around a full moon. When Mark decided to produce new editions of the stories, including audiobook versions, I was happy that he thought of me. Mind you, I was a career radio show host for more than 30 years, and I’ve recorded lots of audiobook-related material. Along with my current writing career, I work as a freelance voice talent.

Mark was not only thrilled by the result but inspired to knuckle down and finish writing the next book in the series. As a lifelong voice talent and book lover, narrating audiobooks is a perfect fit for me, and I urge you to check out Mark’s stuff. (http://markleslie.ca/bibliography/) He’s also publishing another anthology of short fiction called Obsessions from some great writers, and I’ve narrated a couple of stories for it too.

But the voice work wasn’t our only collaboration. Mark and I are both from the city of Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, and both of us learned a lot about writing from fellow Sudburian Sean Costello, a writer of internationally successful horror and thriller fiction often compared to Stephen King. Last month Mark came to us with the brilliant idea of publishing a small collection of stories from the three of us. It’s a treat (no trick) for me to be published with these friends and talented writers, and just in time for Halloween too. Strange Sudbury Stories features ghosts, monsters, and the supernatural, as well as some dark science fiction tales from me. It’s now available in ebook format, with print editions coming any day now (http://books2read.com/strangesudburystories), and if I know Mark, he probably has an audiobook version in mind.

Recording audiobooks for Mark has shamed me into recording audio versions of some more of my own work, so the first example is an audiobook edition of my three-story anthology called BEYOND: The Stars: three exciting stories of space travel.

A solo pilot in deep space risks losing his sanity when his ship is invaded by disembodied thoughts.

A marathon runner on a dangerous desert planet discovers that it may not be uninhabited after all.

The crew of a survey ship encounters a powerful being with an injury that will test their every belief.

Previously only available as an e-book, you can now listen to BEYOND: The Stars in your car, on your bike, or wherever you like. It’s in the pipeline and will be available any day now wherever you buy your audiobooks.

All of this hasn’t left me much time to write, but I have sent a novel manuscript off to my frequent editor in the hope that we can whip it into shape for publication in 2021. I don’t know about you, but I see way too much writing that’s just plain bad because the authors didn’t work with an editor. So I refuse to do that, even though it means I can’t crank out half a dozen books a year. I hope you’ll feel that my books are worth the wait. The SF-thriller The Primus Labyrinth is available everywhere and is being compared to Michael Crichton’s work (one of the greatest compliments you could give me). The next one is an alien contact tale that’s almost like a superhero origin story. I can’t wait for you to see it.

In the meantime, I can’t say I’m looking forward to Winter, but at least the snow will bring an end to my construction attempts and give my battered thumbs a rest!

PREDICT THE FUTURE? FOLLOW THE MONEY

Can we predict the future by studying the past?

Some insist that history is bound to repeat itself (especially if we don’t learn from it). It also teaches us a lot about human nature, which we can use to extrapolate future behaviour. But sometimes developments come along that really shake things up and send us off on a whole new tangent.

One of my summer reads, a book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, is a real eye-opener. It’s a hugely ambitious history of the human race from our beginning to the present day, but not a list of dates and facts. Instead it seeks to explain why homo sapiens rose to prominence instead of other human species like Neanderthals, and how we got to where we are from our humble origins. It especially charts the most significant changes in our history, and analyses their impact, from the births of spoken and written language to the rise of modern thought, the Agricultural Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and more.

One of Harari’s key assertions that had never occurred to me is that, before the rise of modern science in the 1500’s, most people on the planet were encouraged to believe that all significant knowledge was contained in the foundational books of the main religions and the teachings of the ancients. What wasn’t revealed in those just wasn’t important to know. The findings of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and many others changed that, especially when they led to improvements in technology. It gradually became accepted that learning about how the universe works wasn’t just worthwhile, it could make life better for humans. Similarly, most people had believed that the human condition was stagnant, or even declining, including the distribution of wealth. The size of the world’s “pie” didn’t change, so for you to get a bigger slice you had to take it from someone else. Then came the “discovery” of the American continents and many other previously unknown lands offering huge wealth in conjunction with still more technological improvements, and suddenly there appeared the concept of progress: that the world pie could actually grow and benefit everyone (except the native people of those places, of course).

Enter capitalism. After all, scientific research and exploration are expensive. Those with the capital to pay for it want to see concrete (ie. profitable) benefits. That will continue to be true in centuries to come. Which means that science will advance in areas where there’s money to be made.

We’re already seeing the space travel business pass from the hands of governments to private industry because companies like SpaceX can profit by providing space delivery services not only to NASA but also to everyone who wants to put a satellite, or anything else, into orbit. Since many chemical processes can be easier to carry out under zero gravity and with extremes of heat or cold (or are much safer accomplished far from human populations!), expect to see laboratories and chemical factories in space. The availability of abundant raw solar energy outside the atmosphere is another plus (and a potential industry of its own once it can be safely beamed to receivers on Earth). Future mining of the Moon, the asteroids, and the moons of other planets is something we’ve long assumed will happen. Entrepreneurs eager to carry out such developments are only waiting for the cost of space launches to drop below a certain level, to make the ventures profitable.

Space tourism is a fairly safe bet as a coming attraction, but also expect orbital or Moon-based health spas and retirement homes for those to whom gravity, weather, or unfiltered air have become undesirable. For those of us with insufficient incomes for an actual presence in space, there will at least be a lot of virtual experiences available, driving moon buggies, skating across planet-size ice rinks, or surfing Saturn’s rings. In fact, painstakingly accurate virtual experiences of every kind imaginable will be a growth industry for many decades to come.

The transportation industry has hit a speed bump with Covid-19 (and future pandemics) making it unwise to pack large numbers of people together, but new solutions will be found, and soon the race toward ever faster and pervasive travel will resume. Maybe it’ll be with individual pods linked like train cars travelling in vacuum tunnels. Or drones big enough to carry a human. Or maybe I’m wrong, and only goods will be transported over long distances while humans become accustomed to increasingly realistic virtual travel and social interactions.

Scientific progress isn’t only about space or speed, either. Genetic engineering has already made vast amounts of money for drug and chemical companies, and will only get bigger. Progress in medical science affects everyone, curing diseases, chronic illnesses, and hereditary health problems until life expectancy soars toward immortality. And there’s no question that drug and medical care can be very profitable (note that it will not be profitable for anyone to discover a permanent cure for anything, so don’t expect it. Profit lies in making customers pay for ongoing treatments!) And, like it or not, genetic modification will extend to humans, first for medical reasons but eventually for fashion and entertainment, because there is money to be made. Giant corporations will keep lobbying governments to relax rules against gene editing, cloning, transformative surgeries and the like, while aggressively persuading the masses that it’s what they want. From picking the characteristics of your children, to enhancing your physique with artificial muscle or mechanical accessories, to making you look (and smell) like your favourite celebrity or animal, it’s only a matter of time.

There’s another commodity side to genetic engineering: creating made-to-order creatures. Scientists have already been working to recreate extinct species like woolly mammoths, but you just know that mini-dinosaurs would be big sellers, and the new creations won’t be confined to real species. Chimeras out of legend, or pure fantasy, will be brought to life. Imagine the smile on your daughter’s face when you give her a real unicorn for her birthday!

(As for how we’ll treat the life forms we create, or any alien forms we might encounter, just remember the millions of Africans once condemned to lives of slavery, the billions of animals treated like mere raw materials by agribusinesses today, and the wild species we’re driving to extinction. Everything will depend on which is more profitable: cruelty or kindness. Humankind has a long history of turning a blind eye to the plight of others if that suffering benefits us.)

Don’t forget that profit can also include political advantage and power. The exploitation of the Americas and elsewhere led to European empires that soon surpassed the largest economies of their time, in India and China. It’s also important to remember that much of the wealth of recent centuries came from the discovery of wholly new materials like aluminum and plastics, and new technologies like electrical generation and global communication. The parade of new discoveries will continue as humankind reaches outward and more money is pumped into the science pipeline. Money will be made from things we don’t even know exist yet.

All in all, science fiction writers will be well-advised to plan out our imaginary worlds and empires based on a clearly established framework of trade goods and profit margins. Science depends on investment, which depends on capitalism, which depends on consumers who buy goods and services. (Although it’s also true that, where there’s no existing market, advertising will create one!)

In closing, I’m compelled to point out one more thing to the capitalists reading this:

Saving the planet can be a money maker too! Think of it as “preserving your capital”, “protecting your market”, or just “ensuring future growth”.

Right now, that’s the most important investment of all.

COMET NEOWISE: PAST AND FUTURE VISITOR

Even if the Covid-19 crisis didn’t have everyone in lockdown desperately looking for distractions, Comet NEOWISE would have captured a lot of attention because it’s the first easily seen comet since Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. You may have made the effort to see it yourself if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, most recently a little after sunset in the northwestern sky below the Big Dipper. The comet itself is a small smudge and to the naked eye the tail is actually easier to detect if you’re not looking straight at it. The view is a lot more impressive through binoculars or a small telescope, although what really makes the whole thing noteworthy is knowing that what we’re seeing is a 5 km-diameter ball of slush trailing a plume of gases that extends millions of kilometers through space. Its orbit takes it more than a hundred billion kilometers from the sun and requires 6800 years to complete. So it’s the scale of the thing that’s mind-boggling, rather than the actual visuals themselves.

With the huge span of time involved in NEOWISE’s relentless course through the cosmos, it’s impossible to resist thinking about conditions on Earth when the comet last passed our way, and what our little blue planet will be like when it returns about the year 8863 CE.

Humans of circa 4800 BC didn’t know anything about the physics of astronomy, but they would have been much more familiar than we are with the stars in the night sky. The appearance of a comet would have been big news, and could have been seen as a portent to any number of events (disastrous or auspicious, depending on the needs of the local astrologer). But the entire human population at the time was probably less than forty million. The first Agricultural Revolution was in its late stages, meaning that tribes of hunter-gatherers had largely turned to living in small villages in set locations rather than roaming the countryside, raising a few domesticated animals and crops like millet and spelt. In China, people had begun to fire pottery in kilns and may just have begun experimenting with metals like bronze. It would be another few hundred years before the predecessor of Indo-European languages began to be spoken, and nearly a millennium before the Sumerian culture developed the first written language.

Advances in technology, language, and social organization occurred gradually over the next four thousand years until the Industrial Revolution brought an explosion of change in the late 1700’s CE. The last 2 ½ centuries have seen much greater change than the 6 ½ millennia before them. With that in mind, is it possible to forecast what our planet and our race will be like the next time Comet NEOWISE streaks through the night skies?

Climate modelling tells us that if we humans hadn’t interfered by pouring megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the Earth would have begun to slowly cool on its way toward the next ice age. The human race has survived a number of ice ages in the past, though with a much smaller population to feed. But now that ice age has been diverted or postponed. In fact, the coming centuries will be a very difficult time because of too much heat, with melting ice caps, rising sea levels, expanding deserts, and seriously acidified oceans. The climate changes we’ve triggered will force us to adapt in order to survive, and that adaptation could take many forms. We might need to biologically engineer our bodies to store and use water more efficiently, withstand higher heat, and digest more hardy forms of food plants (cactus burgers anyone?) Or we might need to move underground and inhabit colonies in vast caverns or silos (like in Hugh Howey’s Wool stories). There’s not enough water in Earth’s ice caps to flood the whole planet as portrayed in the 1995 Kevin Costner movie Waterworld, but we might still choose to live on the oceans where we could produce lots of food via algae farms enriched by cool, nutrient-rich water from the ocean depths. Or we might even be forced to leave our home planet and either exist in giant space habitats in orbit, on the Moon, or within hollowed out asteroids (none of them likely to support large numbers of people), or set out to find other habitable worlds around other stars (Mars is the best option for a colony within our solar system and it’s not a good one—the technology to make it human-friendly within a reasonable timeframe would be better put to use in mitigating the effects of climate change on Earth). Who knows where the human race will live by the year 8863?

Potential futures are not all gloom and doom by any means. Consider the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek universe, to be founded in the year 2161, and the multi-species habitats of Babylon 5 in the 2250’s. These include (mostly) peaceful coexistence with alien species too. Mind you, as much as I’m a devoted fan of Star Trek and heartily approve of its generally positive outlook (dependent on advanced technology, especially reliably fast space travel) there are a lot of other elements to take into consideration when predicting the path that the human race will take.

In just one generation, we’ve seen incredible progress in communications and information technology that results in new social challenges every day. The Covid crisis itself is an example—a sudden shift toward self-isolation creating social interaction that’s (for now) almost exclusively online. Back in the 1950’s SF writers like Arthur C. Clarke and others depicted future societies in which people rarely left their homes and only interacted remotely via holographs or ubiquitous wall displays. For all we know, the coronavirus may have triggered a wholesale change that will only accelerate.

Then there’s bio-engineering: within the coming century, we’ll have the ability to preselect almost every characteristic of our offspring and make any number of radical changes to our own bodies. Whether out of necessity, or at the whim of fashion, the physical form of humanity will change, and by 8863 it could change a lot.

And that’s if we still inhabit a physical form at all. If futurists like Ray Kurzweil are right, within the next few centuries we’ll find ways to transfer our consciousness into digital form, and either inhabit mechanical bodies, or choose to live in entirely virtual worlds within ultra-powerful computer networks. By the 89th Century we will have left silicon circuitry far behind and discovered how to use the atomic structure of any ordinary matter as digital media—we could inhabit the very rocks, trees, and grasses that make up our planet.

And don’t even get me started on Time Travel!

So when you go out tonight looking for Comet NEOWISE, think about the stories it could tell about the last time it toured through the inner solar system, and take a moment to imagine what our world could be like the next time it comes. Earth and its neighbourhood might be a very different place.

THREE GREAT SFF BOOKS YOU'LL RECOMMEND TO FRIENDS

This is the season when voting begins for one of the preeminent awards in Canadian speculative fiction, the Aurora Awards. Though I take many of the awards in the entertainment world with a huge grain of salt, literary awards—especially in the science fiction and fantasy genre—do capture my interest. And Canada has some terrific authors, well-deserving of their worldwide recognition. I haven’t read all of the Aurora-nominated works yet, but I’m working my way through them, and while award nominations don’t always guarantee authentic greatness, I felt compelled to recommend three excellent novels published in the past year. Give them a look—you won’t be sorry.

The Quantum Garden   by Derek  Künsken

The Quantum Garden is a sequel to Künsken’s The Quantum Magician and continues the story of the new sub-species of humanity called Homo quantus—humans genetically engineered to have brains that can act like quantum computers. Belisarius Arjona’s con game in the first book has now thrust the Home quantus into the spotlight as potentially valuable military assets, and the key to saving the lives of his whole race lies in the past, where the best of intentions go badly off track.

Künsken’s descriptions of Homo quantus, time travel, and the complex politics of his universe are thorough and fresh. His skilled plotting and crisp writing move the story along quickly. The novel is strikingly ambitious but in Künsken’s capable hands it’s an impressive success. If I have to include any caveat, it’s that quantum physics is mind-bending territory, and while I think Künsken makes it as accessible to non-mathematicians as anyone can, the book will still be a daunting ride for some. But if you’re up to the challenge, I highly recommend it.

The Gossamer Mage  by Julie E. Czerneda

After a long, successful run in science fiction, Julie E. Czerneda has turned her talents to fantasy as well in recent years including The Gossamer Mage, a story of a land steeped in magic now threatened by an evil force that threatens to consume it. The mage Maleonarial, living as a hermit, is forced to confront his own role in the growing peril and try to stop it, but in this world every use of magic bears a high cost to the vitality and lifespan of the mage. Especially when your ultimate goal is the overthrow of the Goddess herself.

As always, Czerneda’s worldbuilding is creative, rich, and detailed. The language and writing are beautiful. This is a book to sink into, enjoy its textures, and recall with pleasure like a favourite myth.

A Brightness Long Ago  by Guy Gavriel Kay

Over many years and many books, Guy Gavriel Kay has created a literary niche of his own, writing fantasy that could be historical fiction—especially medieval history—except the lands his characters inhabit never existed. They are much like real places and times in Earth history, though, and are evoked so richly that you might find yourself jumping on Google to find them.

In A Brightness Long Ago the realm is Batiara where city states compete, and sometimes war against each other using mercenary armies, especially the two led by bitter enemies Folco d’Acorsi and Teobaldo Monticola. The encounters of these two affect every part of the landscape. A cast of memorable and endearing characters weave their way through a complex plot that hinges on many fateful coincidences but scrupulously avoids predictability. Kay is a master at these kinds of stories, and A Brightness Long Ago doesn’t disappoint. If you’re already a fan of Guy Gavriel Kay, you’ll love it, and if you’ve never read his work before, this is an excellent introduction.

HOW MUCH WILL COVID-19 CHANGE OUR WORLD?

Articles are popping up everywhere with speculations about how Covid-19 might change our world, and you can expect a flood of fictional treatments along the same lines in the months to come. Because we all have the sense that the world has changed—it will never be quite the same even once this pandemic has finally died out. Will the change be large scale? Maybe even the collapse of our civilization?

That’s a bit extreme, but many countries will be facing record-high deficits and badly-hobbled economies, so a return to the status quo is not a sure thing. And history has shown that pandemics do have the power to trigger such big changes.

• An early pandemic is thought to have spread from Spartans to Athenians during their 5th century BC war and helped give Sparta the victory.

• When the bubonic plague appeared in the 6th century CE, now known as the Justinian Plague, it not only killed between 30 – 50 million people—nearly half of the world’s population at the time—but it ended Emperor Justinian’s attempts to revitalize the Roman Empire. Trade faltered, sources of wealth dried up, and the empire became vulnerable to both internal rebellion and external invasion. The so-called “dark ages” soon followed.

• And when Spanish explorers brought smallpox to the New World, the Aztec Empire was wiped out.

On the other hand, it could be said that some long-term good came out of such suffering at times. It’s been suggested that the horrors of the Black Death in the 1300’s (bubonic plague again) actually raised standards of living and brought about the end of the feudal system in places like Britain because the reduced population meant more work for the survivors. It may also have halted Viking incursions into North America. There have been numerous cases of disease-driven hardship triggering rebellions that changed the social order, leading to independence from colonizing powers, for example.

It’s interesting to note, too, that the fall of some ancient civilizations were hastened by climate disasters; the Minoan culture in the Mediterranean was rocked by the explosion of the Thera volcano around 1600 BC, and a number of Bronze Age cultures in that same region were laid low by a suddenly cooler climate after the 1100 BC eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland. Droughts and cooling weather are thought to have contributed to quite a few collapses.

And here we are, in the early stages of a climate crisis, also facing a global pandemic with the certain knowledge that it won’t be the last.

But it’s worth taking a look at what’s considered to be the most comprehensive look at the rise and fall of human civilizations, historian Arnold Toynbee’s massive A Study Of History. Having analysed 28 civilisations, Toynbee saw strong patterns, one of the most crucial being the gradual failure of the creative minority that leads and drives a society. Such leaders become complacent, resting too much on their laurels rather than continuing to reinvigorate their societies. The rest of the population—the proletariat—become increasingly dissatisfied. Social upheaval begins from within, and outside pressures increase as the central authority weakens. The change that follows can take many forms, but it is inexorable. Environmental factors like disease and climate can hasten and shape the change, but the impetus for it comes from the civilisations’ own internal vulnerabilities. Some historians believe that social inequality is a powerful contributing factor too, and that societies can collapse under the weight of their own bureaucracies.

Does that sound like what we’re seeing in a world where wealth is increasingly hoarded by the one percent?

Just a thought.

Science fiction writers insist that our job isn’t to predict the exact details of the future, but to point out the many different futures that might happen, so the world can clearly see the ones it doesn’t want. So what are some of the long-term implications of this Covid-19 crisis?

We’ve discovered that a surprising percentage of office work really can be done from home with current and emerging technology. If the trend persists, the demand for commercial real estate could plummet, easing overcrowded business centres of cities (allowing them to be re-purposed or even re-greened), and shrinking concrete production (a huge polluter and consumer of energy). It could mean momentous reductions in commuter traffic too. With the price of oil already hitting unthinkable lows, a continued loss of demand might be the final straw that breaks the Big Oil camel’s back—the beginning of the end of our society’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Compounding that impact will be a significant shrinkage in the airline industry—it might be a long time before people again feel comfortable packed into pressurized tubes with hundreds of others for hours at a time, and navigating airports among travellers from all over the world.

Covid-19 has also taught us the dangers of relying on global commerce for essentials like personal protective equipment, medicines, and even food. We’ve allowed vast amounts of production to be moved to certain countries because of cheaper labour, only to be caught with our pants down when a crisis hits. Then we’re stunned to find that the things we urgently need are in short supply. If we learn that lesson (and we should!), more products will once again be produced close to where they’re consumed. This could have a real impact on global shipping and trucking, two more of the most egregious carbon emitters.

The above trends taken together could result in the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions we desperately need to head off the worst of climate change. A surprising benefit of a horrible event.

Another big change could be in the wind: When a financial recession hits, governments often try to spend their way back out of it, but they really count on consumers regaining enough confidence to go out and buy lots of goods. That’s the medicine that cures a sick economy. Well, in the past couple of months enormous numbers of people have been thrown out of work, at least temporarily. National and regional governments have had to step in with a whole spectrum of financial supports. Some countries will be judged to have done a better job of that than others, and if, after Covid-19 passes, the economies of those countries also perform a more successful rebound, it will be powerful evidence in support of a guaranteed minimum income or universal basic income for citizens. In some places, that idea is considered unthinkably socialist. In other places, it’s already being done. But if Covid-19 shows that citizens kept from bankruptcy by government support programs can quickly regain their confidence and spend their way back to communal economic health, that will be a persuasive argument for ongoing measures to reduce financial hardship and poverty.

All in all, I certainly don’t expect our current civilization to collapse, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see significant shifts in political power around the world, especially when some countries like the U.S have been let down so badly by their leadership.

And while these are some of the biggest changes we might see, there will also be hundreds of others, especially involving more spending on preventative medical research and treatment measures. Increased reliance on social networking, the internet, and nearly every aspect of communications technology. Remote education. Food delivery. Shopping online from local retailers. Just observe the creative ways people have coped with the lockdowns, and think about how many of those solutions will catch on and stick around.

It will give you something to do while you’re stuck at home!

A Sampling of Additional Reading

https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/these-4-ancient-apocalypses-changed-the-course-of-civilization

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/study-history  Arnold Toynbee

https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/pandemics-timeline https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-pandemics-change-history

https://www.businessinsider.com/pandemics-that-changed-the-course-of-human-history-coronavirus-flu-aids-plague#coronavirus-or-covid-19-2019-present-11

And an interesting panel discussion on the subject that includes science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaLphVBg9ew&feature=share

IS COVID-19 A SCIENCE FICTION SCENARIO?

The quick answer to the title of this post is: of course!

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict individual events. It looks at societal trends and tries to envision the implications of those trends. Epidemics and pandemics have happened many times in human history, but the more we improved our means of traveling from place to place, and the more interconnected our global society became, the more we increased the potential of a disease outbreak affecting every human on the planet. As this trend became apparent, fiction writers took to it like a virus to a growth culture. So there have been lots of stories featuring pandemics although, to my recollection, not as many that take place during the spread of the infection. Movies seem to have dipped into that well more often, including some nail-biting examples like 1995’s Outbreak and the one everyone’s watching on Netflix lately, the 2011 film Contagion. A much larger number of novels take place before or after the pandemic. The “befores” range from vintage thriller The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean to one of the first great technothrillers, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. “Afters” are too numerous to mention, but some standouts include Stephen King’s The Stand, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. A fictional pandemic is a convenient way of creating a post-apocalyptic setting with a drastically reduced human population and a devastated social infrastructure—a perfect environment for lots of gritty and emotional drama.

It’s a little harder to understand why so much of pandemic fiction involves plagues that turn people into zombies. Examples include I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and World War Z by Max Brooks. It’s a sub-genre in itself, but aren’t real pandemics scary enough?

It can be fun imagining the chills and challenges such a bleak setting can provide. It’s no fun at all actually living through a scenario like that. Like Covid-19.

Every story’s a little different, but it’s possible to list some of the things that pandemic fiction predicts will happen, and compare them to what we’re really seeing:

People will flee the cities: There’s been no mass exodus yet. However, where I live in Ontario, Canada, many people have left their city homes to isolate themselves at their vacation properties. Sensible, at first glance, except if they do get sick or injured, the health care facilities in such places will be overwhelmed.

Governments will be unprepared: Real examples are everywhere. Most are just from a lack of foresight, but some responses, like from the Trump White House, look more like criminal negligence.

Food and other essential supplies will quickly become scarce: So far only toilet paper! (What in hell is that about anyway???) Supply chains are holding up well to this point, except for critical medical supplies like masks and ventilators, but if the crisis is prolonged and even more stringent lockdowns are necessary, some rationing might become necessary.

Looting becomes rampant: It’s easy to see why this would be expected, given that so many businesses are temporarily abandoned. But I haven’t heard about it going on. Maybe it’s low priority news, or perhaps police are keeping quiet about it, but really, who are thieves going to sell the stuff to? When so many people see themselves as potential victims of this, I think most folks will alert the police rather than rewarding lowlifes who take advantage of a pandemic to rob the unfortunate. Hopefully, too, governments’ support of people unable to work will keep them from having to steal out of necessity.

Powerful people will act like warlords, hoarding and creating their own fiefdoms: There is some hoarding going on, but mostly it seems to be misguided morons hoping to make money off people’s fears. Fortunately, governments are cracking down hard on these people (as they should) and there’s no need to take their bait. As to survivalist compounds and the like? The reality is that trying to hide from the infection as a group would not be smart. All it would take is one carrier to get in and suddenly your protected compound is like a cruise ship. Much better to isolate ourselves individually. Whether that value equation could change if food becomes more scarce is anybody’s guess.

It’s every man for himself: I guess we SF writers are a cynical lot, or maybe it’s just inherently more dramatic, but the greatest danger from a fictional pandemic (once the disease has run its course) is from other humans. People turn violent, fighting over every scrap—to hell with friendships and any sort of benevolence toward our fellow beings. Of course, the reality we’re seeing is the opposite of that. People are eager to help others, friends, family, and strangers, especially assisting the elderly with visits and deliveries. Not to mention the selflessness of front-line health care workers, first responders, and so many people in every kind of service industry doing their part. It’s truly heartwarming and inspiring and, believe me, we writers would love to continue to be proven wrong!

We’re also seeing a lot of things I’m not sure any writers predicted. The weird stuff includes a rise in street-racing (because traffic is so sparse), shoppers emptying the toilet paper aisles in grocery stores (you can’t eat toilet paper, people!!), and some misguided religious leaders blithely ignoring calls to avoid gathering in groups. Stupidity is not a blessing.

On the good side, who could have predicted how businesses like restaurants are adapting to lockdown restrictions? Or that manufacturers would re-tool their factories to produce ventilators and even invent better ones, while idled fabric workers sew masks for hospitals? Who would have thought that neighbours would do communal exercising in their front yards across from one another, or have parties by sitting alone on their front steps talking to each other on the phone? Who knew that artists and performers would offer free online concerts, readings, theatre shows; that experts would provide free lessons of every kind; that teachers would provide home schooling resources and parents so diligently share them? In fact, I don’t think anyone could have predicted the way online socializing and sharing has soared—it’s a new phenomenon peaking at just the right time. Ain’t human ingenuity a wonder? And kindness. Let’s not forget kindness.

There’s even some evidence that this unplanned wrench in our collective plans is giving our planet some much-needed relief from our constant abuse.

So while relatively few fictional pandemics turn out well, there’s good reason to hope that the real thing will have a much happier ending.

Do your part. Help where you can. Stay home as much as humanly possible.

After all, there are lots of great books to read!

(P.S. Here’s a Goodreads list of Popular Pandemic Books!)

THE PRIMUS LABYRINTH IS YOURS TO OWN, OR WIN!

My new science fiction thriller The Primus Labyrinth is now available to pre-order!

You can buy it in epub and mobi e-book formats right here in my own bookstore, or at places like Amazon US, Amazon Canada, Kobo, and almost every other online book retailer. The print version, with a solid 470 pages of suspense and action, is available from Amazon, Indigo, and other retailers online, or can be ordered through most good bookstores.

Here’s the book description:

In a coercion plot against the U.S. president, a VIP’s bloodstream has been mined with germ-sized bombs. The only hope is a prototype virus-sized submersible, but the man most qualified to pilot it, Curran Hunter, is traumatized by a near-fatal underwater accident. The sub is piloted by virtual reality—there should be no danger—but when VR becomes full telepresence, Hunter’s very sanity is on the brink. The bombs could be detonated at any moment. Mercenaries are mobilizing to kill the team of scientists working with Hunter. And he’s fallen in love with the victim.

But to save her life will require the deepest violation of all.

Although it was inspired by one of my movie favourites Fantastic Voyage, The Primus Labyrinth is wholly original and will take you to one of the strangest and least-travelled places in science fiction: the labyrinth of vessels that transports our very life’s blood. Early readers say it’s perfect for fans of Michael Crichton.

But there’s more good news! If you’re a US member of Goodreads, you could win one of 100 copies of the Kindle version of The Primus Labyrinth that I’m giving away all through March. Just enter at its Goodreads Giveaway page, but again, it’s for Goodreads US members only.

If you love getting deals on e-books like I do, you should sign up with BookBub. Every day they’ll send you an email of Daily Featured Deals: e-books from the genres you choose, all heavily discounted. Many of them are free. Most are $1.99 or $2.99.  And I’d love to have you follow me at BookBub so you can be the first to know when I have new releases or special deals there.

One last thing: whether you win a copy of The Primus Labyrinth or buy one, I truly hope you’ll spend a couple of minutes to review the novel at Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever else you and your friends share books. It costs you nothing, but it’s one of the very best ways to help your favourite authors keep writing the books you love.

SHOULD WE GET SERIOUS ABOUT THE SEARCH FOR E.T.?

Did our earliest human ancestors look up at the points of light in the night sky and wonder: are we alone in the universe?

Well, they certainly had no concept of stars or planets or evolution, but they saw patterns in those bright dots that spoke to them of strange beings and creatures. And there’s no doubt that once we did comprehend that some of those dots were planets like our own, we wondered if they could be inhabited.

The question has persisted, and though it might have been dampened a little once we learned how inhospitable our sister planets Mars and Venus are to life, there’s been a resurgence fuelled by our discovery of hundreds of planets circling other stars. Collectively, the pursuit of answers to such questions has become known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Although ‘outer space aliens’ would have to be awesomely powerful to create something we could see through optical telescopes, it was understood early on that an advanced civilization would very likely produce energy transmissions detectable on the radio bands. Scientific genius Nikola Tesla thought he’d detected a Martian signal in 1899, and in 1924, when Mars was at its closest distance to Earth in 80 years, the USA held a ‘Radio Silence Day’, halting radio transmissions for five minutes every hour to enable scientists to listen for possible signals from the red planet. Radio telescopes have been actively involved in SETI since the late 1950’s, and especially during the 1970’s and later, although US government funding of NASA’s SETI efforts was cut in 1981. The SETI@home project involves average people lending the processing power of their home computers to the search, analysing telescope data. After a bit of a slump in interest, in 2015 famed physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire Yuri Milner announced a ten-year $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen that pays for dedicated telescope time. And now in 2020, on the heels of an announcement that the Very Large Array radio telescope in Mexico will join the search, the director of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, Dr. Anthony Beasley has been quoted as saying that it’s "time for SETI to come in from the cold and be properly integrated to all other areas of astronomy". Beasley insists that governments should commit funding to SETI. Of course, the idea of using tax dollars to search for intelligent life in outer space has always been controversial.

Why is it so important to know if there are intelligent species out there?

Science fiction has gotten its teeth into the subject from the earliest days. H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds raised one of the most compelling reasons: what if a race of aliens came to Earth with hostile intentions? It’s a given that such invaders would be more technologically advanced than we are, or they wouldn’t be able to cross the enormous distances involved, and we know that the clash of unequal societies in human history has never gone well for the less advanced ones. Human explorers travelled to distant lands for specific reasons: to take resources from the new territory back home with them, to capture slaves, or to use the new lands strategically in their conflicts with others. A secondary motivation was to convert inhabitants of such places to their own belief systems. That motivator was outwardly characterized as altruistic benevolence—wanting to help the ‘less fortunate’—and there may have been benefits along the way, but few would argue that they’ve outweighed the harm done.

Of course, we can’t judge the motivations of alien species by human standards, can we? They may think in completely different ways with utterly different values.

Sure. Statistically, I suppose the spectrum ranges from species that would squash us like ants, to godlike races determined to bring peace and love to the galaxy. The thing is, we can’t afford to assume the latter, so every bit of warning we can get about who is out there is vital.

I want to make it clear that, while I do think we should search for signs of extraterrestrial life, I do not support sending out signals to attract attention. It’s just too risky. (Besides, with nearly a century of profligate radio and television transmissions, what’s the point of adding more?! That’d be like holding up a sandwich board in Times Square.)

And if all of the above has given you the impression that I expect hostility from non-terrestrials, in fact I don’t—I believe they would have good intentions. But you know what they say about the road to hell….

Even without the threat factor, there are other extremely valuable results that could come from  the confirmation of intelligent life around other stars.

We would know that intelligence/sentience is an integral part of the universe, and not just a fluke. That would open our eyes to seeing the potential for sentience among our fellow life forms on Earth, gaining a better appreciation of the other life that shares our planet. It would also force us to be more open-minded about the ways of those strange to us.

We would know that other places in the galaxy are inhabitable, motivating us to spread human life (and hopefully other Earth life) beyond our fragile globe, either because we need to, or just to ensure against a cosmic catastrophe.

We might gain clues that would help us advance our own science in unknowable ways, perhaps by whole new approaches that wouldn’t have occurred to us. We might even find ways to consult and partner with another species for our own betterment.

And one of the most important benefits of discovering a more advanced civilization: we could see proof that it’s possible to survive the enormous technological change we’re undergoing without rendering ourselves extinct. Not only survive, but thrive, perhaps with the kind of benevolent egalitarian society envisioned in our most optimistic imaginings, like the world of Star Trek.

Discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe could provide tangible hope for the whole human race.

Isn’t that worth a few million bucks?