Aurora – Kim Stanley Robinson

Not really climate fiction, per se, but the story of a generation ship with several fully functioning ecosystems that eventually makes the return journey to earth there’s plenty of relevance. One of the main themes that causes the colonists to give up on their mission (aside from the inhospitable location that was chosen for settlement) is that the generation ship, despite featuring lots of futuristic 3D printing for any kind of material they could want (and a generous amount of raw material to print from) there are ecological issues to do with staying in such a small total biosphere. The bacteria and viruses reproduced (and thus evolved) at quite different rates to plants and animals – imagine the situation in a modern hospital and then lock everyone inside for three hundred years and you get the bacterial picture. This was but one problem facing the ship, others were recycling and ‘fixing’ certain elements: nitrates in the soils, calcium in human and animal bones, and salt, always ‘too much salt’ and so on and so forth. The ecological aspect of it was one of its most compelling dramatic engines, and one of its chief engineers talked about the problem of maintaining the ship in this way as an issue of metabolism which is one that has come up in other theory that I’ve been reading lately (Jason W. Moore’s ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life’).

Once the ship gets back home, however, they arrive to (naturally) a climactically changed planet – and though this isn’t fleshed out a great deal in this book I think his other one set in the same time period does more. Still, there’s a really great passage about beaches and an implied expansion of the littoral zone of beaches. Naturally, all the beaches are gone, but there are some who dedicate their lives to rebuilding them. I found it a seriously compelling image, and here’s an excerpt:

The earthmover moves sand from the giant piles of it in their receiving area, out onto the strand itself. In the horizontal light of late day they rumble and bounce down a long ramp to the new beach, now covered with vehicle tracks. Past smaller vehicles of various kinds, some plowing smaller and smaller piles of sand into flat surfaces or pushing up dunes at the back of the beach. The important thing is to accept the new sea level and work with it, the people operating the earthmover tell her; it won’t go back down for centuries at best, and may never recede at all. But they are confident it won’t go any higher either; all the ice in the world that is likely to melt has already melted. There’s still a considerable ice cap in eastern Antarctica, but with temperatures stabilized at last, that one is likely to stay there. If not, well, too bad! More beaches to build!

For now, this is sea level. Tides here slosh up and down a vertical distance that averages three metres, more in the neap tides when the moon is closest to Earth. Tides really are a matter of tidal attraction between Earth and Luna. Tug of gravity, spooky action at a distance. Source of a great deal of life on this planet, possibly even the appearance of life, some say.

They are making sure the high-tide mark is well below most of their new strand, which will be one hundred meters wide at least. Behind the strand they are building dunes, and planting and introducing all the dune life. And during low tides, the wet strand that is temporarily exposed is made mostly of sand, with only some rocky areas under points in the bluff, for tide pools and the like. All these parameters and elements are designed, engineered, built, monitored. Freya sees it: this beach is their artwork. These people are artists. (p.443)

The Year of the Flood/MadAddam – Margaret Atwood

The next book(s) I read after that was The Waterless Flood by Margaret Atwood, which is about a group of back-to-nature fundamentalists who, responding to the environmental depletion around them and the advancement of corporate control (Corp’s control basically everything) have decided that there will come a disaster to wipe everyone off the planet and they alone might escape it. They life full vego lives, have saints like Jane Goodall and other environmentalists, are generally harmless and kind of wonderful actually. The Waterless Flood is a calamity that does indeed wipe everyone out and mostly the God’s Gardeners do actually survive, but that’s kind of just the backdrop on which everything plays out.

The main thing that I took away from it was actually quite similar to what Timothy Morton calls ‘ecology without nature’, and it’s essentially that there is no pristine earth/Nature/environment and there can be no going back. In response to the massive, unabated extinctions of the time it’s set in (the semi-distant future, I’d guess 20-50 years from now?) the corporations actually genetically modify a small number of animals to survive and be profitable and so on. Mo’hairs are goats/sheep but with human hair (wigs!) and there are a bunch of other weird things too.

The other thing that’s just kind of interesting from a climate fiction perspective is that climate change is just another kind of silent, unspoken and assumed facet of the world they live in – everyone goes out wearing sunscreen all the time, it’s always hot and horrible, and there are constant afternoon thunderstorms because that’s the new climate. Meanwhile, life in all its fucked up forms goes on. It’s not a bleak image, but it’s not a particularly one either – it just is.

A few fleeting mentions of climate change consequences that I took note of – there’s a mention of a “Wisconsin desert” which is a nice and effective way of communicating that particular image, someone says at some point “used to be a fall variety when we still had fall”, a couple mentions of off-shore unstable high-rises (sea level rise) and then this really quite evocative passage. It comes in a kind of flashback to an even earlier period that the main character has:

By the time she had moved to college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall then a knock at the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began talking about it you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.

We’re using up the earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. (p.319)

From the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Atwood writes: ‘The year of the flood is fiction, but the general tendencies and many of the details in it are alarmingly close to fact.’ (p.573)

I also read the sequel to the trilogy MadAddam, which is interesting as well, but maybe not quite as good. Less to say about climate anyway, because a lot of it is just in the set-up – though we do get some more backstory on how things deteriorated – e.g. one main character is involved in dumping garbage up north in order to feed starving polar bears. It’s a kind of rich charity folly, and perfectly extrapolates from contemporary coordinates.

The Water Knife – Paolo Bacigalupi

This one was really interesting, it’s basically near-future sci-fi genre fare, with fairly workmanlike prose, pretty neat characterisation and a story that gets really, really interesting as it all revolves around tight water restrictions. The gist of it is that in the future Dustbowl America expands from Texas on up, spreading desertification, chaos, and social dysfunction to the point that state borders are closed. It’s the disintegration of the united states with an ecological driver behind it. Water doesn’t so much become a defacto currency, so much as access to water becomes highly constrained and commodified. Arcologies of entirely sealed habitats are the realm of the 1% and the rest of the population (including a great huddled mass of refugees from the state of Texas) are forced to eke their survival out in the dusty exterior world. Solar power is ubiquitous, fossil fuels are rare, and states have their own militaries – extending their quasi-legal property rights through military might in order to secure water for their populations. The titular ‘water knife’ is a character well versed in cutting off whole cities, towns and suburbs access to water. Highly fascistic and militarised regimes ensue, violence and exploitation are everywhere as people are so economically desperate to obtain enough money to buy water just for the bare essentials. Water is charged by the gallon through taps and ‘red cross relief wells’.

The plot spirals out of control as ancient senior water rights once belonging to a group of Indians (the hohokum tribe – whose name literally means ‘used up’, a rather foreboding omen) are lost, chased after by every political actor in that part of the world (Nevada, Arizona, California) as they try to get their hands on a legal guarantee to a lot of access to water. At first I found it all a bit extreme – I didn’t think it was actually all that plausible… but then I started reading around a bit and talking to some people about the stuff that the book assumes about water in that part of the world and all of the issues that he extrapolates out into the future become a bit more worryingly plausible. It’s based around (and features frequent mentions of) a 1986 book about water history and access in western America called ‘Cadillac Desert’. I haven’t read it yet, and I might not get around to it, but just looking through some of the topics it covers has already been interesting. Learning from where, and how, Los Angeles gets its water was a bit of a shock.

Like the other books I read this year that feature climate change as a feature of their fictional settings, this one too – even in spite of how terrible it a vision it is – left me at the closing with a strong sense that all these challenges that we are likely to face aren’t insurmountable, and that human life will probably continue in the face of tragedy. Having engaged with some of these climate scenarios now, and having spent the time dwelling within them, what was formerly the shroud of not-knowing that enveloped the future of our unfolding planetary disaster has been slightly pulled back. Now instead, I feel like I have a slightly better handle on if not the specifics, since the specifics may well be wrong, then at least the dynamics that may come into play. Once again, it seems, fear of the unknown is a large part of the problem wider society faces in addition to the other practical challenges of climate change.

I said in Melbourne at my talk for DiGRAA about the book-length work on this that I’m writing, and that if I were an artist, I would make climate change art. If I were a painter, I would paint climate change. If I were a labourer, I would try to labour on projects that will in some way contribute to the larger efforts to address climate change. I really do believe that a fundamental reorganisation of society is not just necessary, it is already starting to happen. A colleague of mine is doing research on public sector unions in the US who are starting to acknowledge the problem that heat in the workplace is a health and safety issue for people like police, emergency services, and so on. Climate change is just at the start of a process of moving out of the periphery and into a central concern of the political sphere – going from being just an “issue” to a central, everyday aspect of our lives. It’s going to happen quicker than anyone imagines, and we should try and get out in front of it as much as possible. Imagining these futures and how we are likely to exist within them, how they are going to impact on our own areas of work, our daily routines in our lived environments is going to be a critical project for the next several years if we are to avoid a reactionary political force taking advantage of it.

Please join me in this in whatever small ways you can – read some climate books and let us have a chat about them. Think about what climate change means for you and your workplace, where you live, and what you might want to start doing now to prepare. Maybe it’s planting a drought tolerant tree in your backyard. Maybe it’s adding another angle to your art, or your research, or your consciousness when you engage with media. Maybe it’s getting your landlord to sign up for solar power. Maybe it’s simply getting involved with a group like Solar Citizens or reading more stories from Renew Economy. Whatever it is, there is nothing too small that it’s not worth doing. There’s also no time to lose, and I promise that eventually, rather than climate change being a scary or fearful thing, knowing more about it actually lessens the worry. The fear eases. It’s hard but important work to imagine the future – any future, let alone a better one. But that’s what we’re here for.

Two short excerpts from Raymond Williams’ essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (which is nice for lots of reasons) – but these two are important things to keep in mind for climate activists and action. The first is about the working class’ relationship to (industrial/mechanical/electrical) power and the real benefit to life that it brought, which is worth keeping in mind when we talk about energy, etc.:

For one thing I knew this: at home we were glad of the Industrial Revolution, and of its consequent social and political changes. True, we lived in a very beautiful farming valley, and the valleys beyond the limestone we could all see were ugly. But there was one gift that was overriding, one gift which at any price we would take, the gift of power that is everything to men who have worked with their hands. It was slow in coming to us, in all its effects, but steam power, the petrol engine, electricity, these and their host of products in commodities and services, we took as quickly as we could get them, and were glad. I have seen all these things being used, and I have seen the things they replaced. I will not listen with patience to any acid listing of them – you know the sneer you can get into plumbing, baby Austins, aspirin, contraceptives, canned food. But I say to these Pharisees: dirty water, an earth bucket, a four- mile walk each way to work, headaches, broken women, hunger and monotony of diet. The working people, in town and country alike, will not listen (and I support them) to any account of our society which supposes that these things are not progress: not just mechanical, external progress either, but a real service of life. Moreover, in the new conditions, there was more real freedom to dispose of our lives, more real personal grasp where it mattered, more real say. Any account of our culture which explicitly or implicitly denies the value of an industrial society is really irrelevant; not in a million years would you make us give up this power. (Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, 1958, p.9)

Williams description puts paid to the idea (widely held among some back-to-nature types) that power is somehow an inessential and a luxury (think of the way that boomers talk about the number of unnecessary “devices” that young people use today, Cf: this tweet by old mate Donnie).

The second excerpt is about the relation between power–technology and aesthetics, and the idea that power technology = ugly:

[This] false proposition is easily disposed of. It is a fact that the new power brought ugliness: the coal brought dirt, the factory brought overcrowding, communications brought a mess of wires. But the proposition that ugliness is a price we pay, or refuse to pay, for economic power need no longer be true. New sources of power, new methods of production, improved systems of transport and communication can, quite practically, make England clean and pleasant again, and with much more power, not less. Any new ugliness is the product of stupidity, indifference, or simply incoordination; these things will be easier to deal with than when power was necessarily noisy, dirty, and disfiguring. (p.10)

I highlight this point precisely for how, well, obvious and banal it seems even at the same time as so much power generation still does produce incredible ugliness. Tesla seems to get that aesthetics are important. Of course, others disagree but that’s the nature of taste. One of my favourite photographs (one i’ve linked here on the blog before) illustrates the sharp contrast between modes of power generation and their effect on the landscape. I also think one of the reason Joe Hockey’s “wind farms are ugly” type comments gained so much traction is that people, instinctively or intuitively, understand the importance of regimes of taste in the making-or-breaking of technology. My work on the aesthetics of renewable power generation has tried to contribute to that sense, and I think it will only become more and more important.

Of course, the other thing that the photo of the open-cut coal mines next to the wind farms makes clear is the way that fossil fuel production gets to neatly shift or obscure its impacts away from the public eye, while new technologies like solar and wind come under immediate and intense scrutiny just for their ‘newness’. By contrast, legacy industries and their impacts are just facts of life.

After reading this essay, what I feel like the really interesting point Burch could have approached was something like what Parker and Croggon get at – the fact that a lot of what passes for criticism at the moment really is just “human reactions” and this kind of adjective salad that results from this approach:

rather than confront the possible meaning or significance of the artist’s choice of sample (whether or not they know exactly what is being sampled) and address how that might impact our understanding of and relationship with the work, we get a flurry of adjectives. The music is “romantic,” “mesmerizing,” “intense,” and the unknown orchestral sample is an opening onto something “personal and momentous.”

It’s the “feelpinion” version of criticism – and though it sounds a bit pejorative, like the authors of the piece I’m uninterested in shutting this type of work down. It’s great and important and even awesome – it should not go away – it’s also not quite sufficient for a really well developed critical perspective. The conclusion that Parker and Corggon reach is that it takes real work to develop that insight and expertise, and I think the error that Burch made was thinking that it took literal work – making games. He was really quite horrified at how dismissive he had been as a games journalist and how much he underestimated the work that went into even seemingly small issues.

But how the sausage is made is not always important, or even relevant. Just like how we wouldn’t really care about whether the musician inserted the sample with Logic or Ableton – that’s not the important detail to focus on, and it’s actually fairly telling that the games industry (as embodied, partially, by Burch) still cares a great deal more about how the “sample” is inserted than what that sample says or its history and place within a larger history and trajectory of games/music/etc.

But I also don’t know what forms of knowledge and experience, exactly, about games (or about players? game culture? developer culture? all of these things?) is important for a critic. I’ve read some really fucking great pieces that do design analyses and intensely detailed breakdowns of certain game mechanics that go nowhere near the development process, but which do really, really illuminating work to get closer to the heart of the game-object without obsessing over the utterly boring (yet downright impressive) technology. I’ve also attempted my own Latourian thick description style analysis with limited success. Frankly, I mostly couldn’t care less about how a game is made, unless it’s under conditions of exploitation.

The necessary caveat, of course, is that design thinking goes into the development process (or should) and that might be worth knowing about, but again that’s not the same as letting your knowledge of the very human, and very sympathisable, difficulty of just making games dull your critical faculties. Yes, making games is hard, but if you don’t like the conditions, change them, or do something else.

So I gave this talk at Critical Proximity a couple weeks back and tried to just share some memorys from blaggin and doing CritDist. My slides are here on the CritProx website.

Memory Insufficient’s Ecology and Games History issue is here. [PDF]

‘…a sense of place, even for a place that is really mundane in a lot of ways, is really, really powerful… …having the sense of place and the sense of the environment be so strong, I feel, makes the counter-position of the kind of violence that happens in it, much more shocking.

You don’t blow people up in any more shocking way than you do in any other game, it’s just when you have these long periods of silence where you might have stopped on the side of a rock and listened to water trickling, and as the sun was setting behind a tree for a few minutes, you get this strange sense of peace and like ‘ah the world is beautiful and things aren’t all that bad’. And seven seconds later you’re burning a guy alive with a Molotov cocktail while he’s screaming and flailing around in a brushfire. It’s the juxtaposition of these things, and without being authored or without being scripted, it can mess with your emotions.’

Later on in the talk, they get onto discussing the systemic nature of the game a bit, and talking about it reminded me of State of Decay which I’ve been playing this week, which takes a lot of the same systemic premises and runs with them to a really fantastic degree. Which made me think, we tend to think that the most ‘Far Cry 2‘-game has already been made, but really I think that might not be the case. The most ‘Far Cry 2’ like game is probably yet to be made. Which is exciting to me.

Addendum: if nothing else, listen to the very final question that Steve asks Clint at about 1hr 47mins. Long story short, the way that they solved the problem of playtesters taking pleasure in killing wild animals, their solution was minimal, elegant, and absolutely effective. Just a fantastic solution.

With that out of the way, I want to talk about one particular moment – the one, single, solitary ‘jump scare’ in this whole spooky house game. It’s the when the lightbulb pops on the staircase down in the first ‘secret passage’. I jumped so hard that I literally threw away the little crucifix I had just picked up to inspect. I probably even made some kind of noise as I spun around looking for some ghost or monster inevitably bearing down upon me to eat my soul or something. God punishing me.

So that moment, and really it’s true for the rest of the game, is a really nice example of ludonarrative harmony – an example of when I am experiencing exactly what the games mechanics (popping lightbulb) and the story (scared 20 year old in the ‘psycho house’ at midnight alone) am supposed to be feeling. It’s just really nice and I think it begins to answer some of Robert Yang’s question that he posed earlier this week, which was ‘Why should we care about ludonarrative dissonance since most players don’t seem to either?’

Yang takes, I think, slightly the wrong lesson from mainstream ‘core gamer’ audience’s failure to care about any major ludonarrative dissonance in a game (his example is Bioshock Infinite but take your pick). His point is that the “dissonance” component of ludonarrative dissonance isn’t really all that dissonant at all, which is sort-of true because heaps of people barely even register it. But my contention is that it never was an obvious form of dissonance, since even the prototypical Bioshock little sister example of ludonarrative dissonance went unnoticed until you did the kind of analysis that Hocking undertook. The concept never specified an overt dissonance to begin with. We put up with (even enjoy!) all kinds of learned dissonances everyday – just listen to jazz.

But getting back to the game, I raved about Gone Home on Facebook last night to a friend of mine James Dalmau – who is not a ‘core’ gamer, just a smart guy with a masters in law who like most people also plays games – and we chatted this morning about his experience, which differed considerably from mine. James told me via FB chat that,

…to be honest I never really thought it was spooky ghosts

I thought that was just silly kid stuff put in as a red herring

But every ‘core gamer’ journalist/critic friend of mine seemed to expecte horror. We’ve all played Amnesia: The Dark Descent (or watched hilarious Let’s Play reactions). Brendan Keogh even wrote on his blog about this point exactly:

I love the way Gone Home plays on Horror tropes to build that sense of trepidation and forewarning. The stormy night in the woods, the eerie old mansion, the missing family, those (at first) messed up answering machine messages. I was terrified for most of the game, just waiting for the inevitable ghost. When the lightbulb burst as I picked up the crucifix, I almost had to stop playing. When I found a room in the basement where the light wouldn’t turn on, I refused to enter. My mind turned the shapes of curtains and shadows into people staring at me. The tropes of the Horror genre reverted me back to being a terrified teenager who should probably know better but really doesn’t. Like the time I freaked out when I was 15 because there was a guy getting out of a car in front of the house and it was just dad’s friend dropping by. Something about being a teenager means you always expect the worst. Because being a teenager is dramatic, right? It’s a time of constant change and impermanence and everything new that you discover you want to hold onto but it’s going to be lost the moment you finish high school or move to a new town or enter puberty or whatever. Until the closing moments of Gone Home, I expected the worst.

Likewise, Dan Bruno responding to Brendan’s piece in a Facebook comment said that he played the game in the style of a scared teen, rushing for the light switch in every room:

…that is literally exactly how I played. Open door, peek around corner looking for switch, then make a beeline for it before looking at anything in the room

At one point in the game I thought I spotted an actual ghost, but it turns out it was just black jagged veil that indicated the limits of the engine’s render distance, the contents of a hallway on the other side of the house appearing and disappearing as I stepped back and forth. But I was still expecting ghosts.

So what’s going on here? A non-core gamer isn’t scared by the game’s red herrings, but we seasoned veterans expect the worst. I’m going to suggest that what Gone Home does is actually exploit gamic expectations, gamic tropes, even the expectation of ludonarrative dissonance to resolve into a weird, and almost ironic, situation of ludonarrative harmony. Because we expect the worst, we get the best possible synchronicity with the player character.

If you expect monsters because you have played horror videogames, your expectations are set up by the history of the medium, by the hundreds of spooky-house games that have come before (no slight on them). But until now there has never, or almost never, been a game this real before. Gone Home is almost shockingly quotidian, in an ordinary rational sense, and it’s the confounding of our gamic (ludic?) expectations (built up through years of expectation of ludonarrative dissonance since ghosts don’t actually exist but okay sure I’ll fight one in a game) which places us, the player, into the subject position of exactly who and where Katie is and what she is feeling.

That is supremely weird, and a triumph of a sort that I haven’t seen anyone comment on yet. Of course, there is so much more to say about this game – and so much great stuff has already been written. Check out Cameron’s piece, and Brendan’s is also great linked above. Leigh Alexander obliquely addresses the game’s setting of the 90s in a piece for Gamasutra. Claire Hoskings has a piece that I’ve read a draft of too which should be coming soon. And this post addresses an element of the relationship between two characters that I totally missed myself.

But I wanted to highlight this strangely harmonious aspect of Gone Home and maybe set up for another post that I have in mind that is a bit more ambitious, aiming to unite the political ideas of ‘accelerationism’ that Mark Fisher applies to the realm of cultural production with the idea of ludonarrative dissonance/harmony. It’s an exciting time.

The first imperative of paranoia is There must be no bad surprises, and indeed the aversion to surprise seems to be what cements the intimacy between paranoia and knowledge per se including both epistemophilia and scepticism.

…

The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known. …the temporal progress and regress of paranoia are, in principle, infinite.

…No time could be too early for one’s having-already-known, for its having-already-been-inevitable, that something bad would happen. And no loss could be too far into the future to need to be preemptively discounted.

…

Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, seems to understand only by immitation. Paranoia propses both Anything you can do (to me) I can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can do first – to myself.

…

It seems no wonder, then, that paranoia, once the topic is broached in a nondiagnostic context, seems to grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand. …What may be even more important is how severely the memeticism of paranoia circumscribes its potential as a medium of political or cultural struggle.

…

Whatever account it may give of its own motivation, paranoia is characterized by placing, in practise, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure. Maybe that’s why paranoid knowing is so inescapably narrative. Like the deinstitutionalized person on the street who, betrayed and plotted against by everyone else in the city, still urges on you the finger-worn dossier bristling with his precious correspondence, paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, is hardly treated as a possibility.

From Chapter 4 of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, pp. 130-131, and 138.