Drowned Worlds Read online

  TALES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE AND BEYOND

  – EDITED BY JONATHAN STRAHAN –

  – INCLUDING STORIES BY –

  Paul McAuley • Ken Liu

  Kim Stanley Robinson • Christopher Rowe

  Kathleen Ann Goonan • Charlie Jane Anders

  Nina Allan • Jeffrey Ford

  Rachel Swirsky • Sean Williams

  Nalo Hopkinson • James Morrow

  Sam J. Miller • Lavie Tidhar

  Catherynne M. Valente

  ALSO EDITED BY JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)

  Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005

  Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005

  The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1 - 10

  Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Vols 1-4)

  The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

  Life on Mars: Tales of New Frontiers

  Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron (forthcoming)

  Godlike Machines

  The Infinity Project 1: Engineering Infinity

  The Infinity Project 2: Edge of Infinity

  The Infinity Project 3: Reach for Infinity

  The Infinity Project 4: Meeting Infinity

  The Infinity Project 5: Bridging Infinity (forthcoming)

  The Infinity Project 6: Infinity Wars (forthcoming)

  Fearsome Journeys

  Fearsome Magics

  Drowned Worlds,: Tales from the Anthropocene and Beyond

  WITH LOU ANDERS

  Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

  WITH CHARLES N. BROWN

  The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction

  WITH JEREMY G. BYRNE

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2

  Eidolon 1

  WITH JACK DANN

  Legends of Australian Fantasy

  WITH GARDNER DOZOIS

  The New Space Opera

  The New Space Opera 2

  WITH KAREN HABER

  Science Fiction: Best of 2003

  Science Fiction: Best of 2004

  Fantasy: Best of 2004

  WITH MARIANNE S. JABLON

  Wings of Fire

  TALES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE AND BEYOND

  – EDITED BY JONATHAN STRAHAN –

  First published 2016 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Cover by Les Edwards

  Selection and “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Strahan.

  “The Common Tongue, the Present Tense, the Known” Copyright © 2016 Nina Allan.

  “Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy” Copyright © 2016 Charlie Jane Anders.

  “What is” Copyright © 2016 Jeffrey Ford.

  “Who Do You Love?” Copyright © 2016 Kathleen Ann Goonan.

  “Inselberg” Copyright © 2016 Nalo Hopkinson.

  “Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit – Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts” Copyright © 2016 Ken Liu.

  “Elves of Antarctica” Copyright © 2016 Paul McAuley.

  “Last Gods” Copyright © 2016 Sam J Miller.

  “Only Ten More Shopping Days Left Till Ragnarök” Copyright © 2016 James Morrow.

  “Venice Drowned” Copyright © 2016 Kim Stanley Robinson.

  “Brownsville Station” Copyright © 2016 Christopher Rowe.

  “Destroyed by the Waters” Copyright © 2016 Rachel Swirsky.

  “Drowned” Copyright © 2016 Lavie Tidhar.

  “The Future is Blue” Copyright © 2016 Catherynne M Valente.

  “The New Venusians” Copyright © 2016 Sean Williams.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-930-6

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THIS IS THE tenth book I’ve done with Jonathan Oliver, Ben Smith and the team at Solaris Books. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege. I’d like to thank them for taking the risks they have with the books we’ve done, and for giving me the freedom to do the books I’ve wanted to do. I will always be grateful to them for stepping in and for believing in the books and in me. Special thanks to my agent Howard Morhaim who for over a decade now has had my back and helped make good things happen. Finally, most special thanks of all to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie. I always say that every moment spent working on these books is stolen from them, but it’s true, and I’m forever grateful to them for their love, support and generosity.

  INTRODUCTION

  – JONATHAN STRAHAN –

  Introduction – JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Elves of Antarctica – PAUL MCAULEY

  Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit – Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts – KEN LIU

  Venice Drowned – KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  Brownsville Station – CHRISTOPHER ROWE

  Who Do You Love? – KATHLEEN ANN GOONAN

  Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy – CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

  The Common Tongue, the Present Tense, the Known – NINA ALLAN

  What is – JEFFREY FORD

  Destroyed by the Waters – RACHEL SWIRSKY

  The New Venusians – SEAN WILLIAMS

  Inselberg – NALO HOPKINSON

  Only Ten More Shopping Days Left Till Ragnarök – JAMES MORROW

  Last Gods – SAM J. MILLER

  Drowned – LAVIE TIDHAR

  The Future is Blue – CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

  About the Authors

  Also from Solaris

  INTRODUCTION

  – JONATHAN STRAHAN –

  IN EARLY JANUARY of 2014 I read J.G. Ballard’s landmark disaster novel, The Drowned World, for the first time. The book had just been published in a beautiful collector’s edition and for some reason reading about it prompted me to buy a copy online. It’s a lush, powerful book that tells of a post-apocalyptic world where rising levels of solar radiation cause the polar ice-caps to melt and worldwide temperatures to soar, leaving northern Europe and America cities submerged in beautiful and haunting tropical lagoons. It’s one of the great British disaster novels, with more than a taste of the work of Graham Greene to it, all seen through a romantic haze that hangs over the flooded, inundated ruins of a world laid waste by raising oceans.

  A few years earlier I’d been charmed, which is probably the wrong word but it comes close enough, by Paul McAuley’s “The Choice”, a powerful and beautifully written novella set in a flooded Norfolk, England, which has been inundated by rising sea levels. In the story a young boy sails a small boat across the flooded countryside in search of rumours of an alien vessel landed nearby. Reading The Drowned World reminded me of “The Choice”, which in turn led me for no particular reason back to Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore. In no time, after finishing The Drowned World and re-reading “The Choice”, I found myself pulling Robinson’s debut novel off the shelf for the first time in nearly thirty years and getting lost in the story of a young boy growing up in a post-apocalyptic United States, though in this case an apocalypse caused by nuclear war.

  Reading of these post-apocalyptic worlds, something that has always been close to
the heart of science fiction, and in particular reading of these drowned and inundated futures, made me think. I’d just finished compiling my annual best of the year anthology and, as I always complain, I was stuck in the middle of Western Australia’s long hot summer. There was a book in here, a set of tales to be told. A book, I said to my editor, which could explore, or at least discuss, how we sit poised on the precipice of one of the greatest ecological disasters to face humanity. As Ballard saw so presciently in the pages of The Drowned World, our world is warming and the seas are rising. While small islands are threatened now, one day soon London could be a submerged sargasso, Manhattan could be besieged by storms, and Australia be nothing more than a distant dusty memory of climatological loss. We are, it has become clear, living in the Anthropocene, that time when human actions start to have significant impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. It is a time of darkness and disaster, and it’s a time we have to face, to confront, and to combat. There will be triumphs among the disasters, humanity among the apocalypse, and those are the stories that could appear in the right book. And my editor agreed, and so the book you are now holding was born.

  I did what I usually do when that happens, and asked some wonderful writers to create stories set in drowned and inundated futures, in the possibly shattered worlds of the later Anthropocene, or in any drowned world they could imagine. As the agreements to write came in, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization published a report that said that the city I live in, Perth, was likely to be become the first Australian city to be abandoned due to climate change. Population levels are climbing dramatically, the environment is heating every year, ultraviolet radiation levels are typically extreme in the summer, rainfall levels are falling so quickly that more water currently evaporates from dams than runs off into them, we survive on desalinated ocean water, and are forced to pump water from underground aquifers back into the ocean to stop them from becoming poisoned by rising sea waters. They gave us until 2050, which seems frighteningly close.

  It made it even clearer to me that this is one of the single biggest issues facing our world, and facing writers who want to discuss the future. What is happening to our world? How will we survive? Will we survive? And how will we remain human through it all? Will we turn into the desperate and debased people of a penny dreadful zombie apocalypse, or will we find better ways to cope? The fifteen writers who answered my call have, as you will soon see, answered those questions in different ways. Some have looked into the abyss and seen the worst in us; some have found clean, technological solutions to the problems we face; and some have jumped hundreds of years into the future, moving past the terrible times of transition to show us new worlds that are hotter, wetter and less populous that the one we know now. Some of these stories are serious, some are not. One looks at a parched future in a desert land, one of global warming’s worst gifts. None of them are the way forward. Each of them, though, is part of asking the question of how we move forward from here, and show that, for all that the challenges of the Anthropocene are terrifying and overwhelming, they are challenges we will have to face together.

  As always, I hope you’ll find these stories as rewarding and enjoyable as I have. I hope they’ll entertain you, make you think a little, and perhaps move you to action.

  JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Perth, Western Australia

  March 2016 (34 years before the Abandonment)

  ELVES OF ANTARCTICA

  – PAUL MCAULEY –

  MIKE TORRES SAW his first elf stone three weeks after he moved to the Antarctic Peninsula. He was flying helos on supply runs from Square Bay on the Falliéres Coast to kelp farms in the fjords to the north, and in his free time had taken to hiking along the shore or into the bare hills beneath Mount Diamond’s pyramidal peak. Up there, he had terrific views of the rugged islands standing in the cold blue sea under the high summer sun, Mount Wilson and Mount Metcalfe rising beyond the south side of the bay, and the entirety of the town stretched along the shore below. Its industrial sprawl and grids of trailer homes, the rake of its docks, the plantations of bladeless wind turbines, and the airfield with helos coming and going like bees, two or three blimps squatting in front of their hangars, and the runway where a cargo plane, an old Airbus Beluga maybe, or a Globemaster V with its six engines and tail tall as a five-storey building, might be preparing to make its lumbering run towards the sky. All of it ugly, intrusive and necessary: the industrial underbelly of a project that was attempting to prevent the collapse of Antarctica’s western ice sheet. It was serious business. It was saving the world. And Mike Torres was part of it.

  He was a second-generation climate change refugee, born into the Marshall Islands diaspora community in Auckland. A big, quiet guy who’d survived a tough childhood – his father drinking himself to death, his mother taking two jobs to raise him and his sisters in their tiny central city apartment. Age sixteen, Mike had been part of a small all-city crew spraying tags everywhere on Auckland’s transport system; after his third conviction for criminal damage (a big throwie at Remuera Railway Station), a sympathetic magistrate had offered him a spell of workfare on a city farm instead of juvenile prison. He discovered that he loved the outdoor life, earned his helicopter pilot’s licence at one of the sheep stations on the high pastures of North Island, where little Robinson R33s were used to muster sheep, and five years later went to work for Big Green, one of the transnational ecological remediation companies, at the Lake Eyre Basin project in Australia.

  Desalinated seawater had been pumped into the desert basin to create an inland sea, greening the land around it and removing a small fraction of the excess water that had swollen the world’s oceans; Big Green had a contract to establish shelter-belt forests to stabilise and protect the edge of the new farmland. Mike loved watching the machines at work: dozers, dumper trucks and 360° excavators that levelled the ground and spread topsoil; mechanical planters that set out rows of tree seedlings at machine-gun speed, and truck spades that transplanted semi-mature fishtail, atherton and curly palms, acacia, eucalyptus and sheoak trees. In one direction, stony scrub and fleets of sand dunes stretched towards dry mountains floating in heat shimmer; in the other, green checkerboards of rice paddies and date and oil palm plantations descended stepwise towards the shore of the sea. The white chip of a ferry ploughing a wake in blue water. A string of cargo blimps crossing the sky. Fleets of clouds strung at the horizon, generated by climate stations on artificial islands. Everything clean and fresh. A new world in the making.

  Mike hauled supplies to the crews who ran the big machines and the gangers who managed the underplanting of shrubs and grasses, brought in engineers and replacement parts, flew key personnel and VIPs to and fro. He sent most of his pay packet home, part of it squirrelled into a savings account, part supporting his mother and his sisters, part tithed to the Marshallese Reclamation Movement, which planned to rebuild the nation by raising artificial islands above the drowned atoll of Majuro. A group of reclaimers had established a settlement there, occupying the top floors of the President’s house and a couple of office buildings they had storm-proofed. Mike religiously watched their podcasts, and liked to trawl through archives that documented life before the flood, rifling through clips of beach parties, weddings, birthdays and fishing trips from old family videos, freezing and enlarging glimpses of the bustle of ordinary life. A farmer’s market, a KFC, a one-dollar store, a shoal of red taxis on Majuro’s main drag, kids playing football on a green field at the edge of the blue sea. Moments repossessed from the gone world.

  He watched short films about exploration of the drowned ruins, feeds from web cams showing bright fish patrolling the reefs of sunken condos and shops. The reclaimers were attempting to construct a breakwater with fast-growing edited corals, and posted plans for the village of floating houses that was the next stage of the project. Mike dreamed of moving there one day, of making a new life in a new land, but places in the reclaimer commu
nity were fiercely contested. He’d had to dig into his savings to get his mother the stem cell therapy she needed for a heart problem, and one of his sisters became engaged, soon there would be a wedding to pay for... So when the contract at Lake Eyre finished, Mike signed up for a new project in the Antarctic Peninsula.

  Lake Eyre had created a place where refugees from the drowning coasts could start afresh. The engineering projects run out of the Antarctic Peninsula were part of an attempt to preserve the continent’s last big ice sheet and prevent another catastrophic rise in ocean levels, the loss of half-drowned cities and land reclaimed from previous floods, and the displacement of more than sixty per cent of the world’s population. Factories and industrial plants on the peninsula supported a variety of massive geoengineering projects, from manufacturing fleets of autonomous high-albedo rafts that would cool ocean currents by reflecting sunlight, to creating a thin layer of dust in the lower stratosphere that would reflect a significant percentage of the sun’s light and heat back into space. One project was attempting to cool ice sheets by growing networks of superconducting threads that would syphon away geothermal heat. Another was attempting to protect glaciers from the heat of the sun by covering them in huge sheets of thermally reflective material.

  Square Bay’s factories used biomass supplied by the kelp farms to manufacture the tough thin material used in the thermal blanket project. As a bonus, the fast-growing edited strains of kelp sequestered carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, contributing to attempts to reverse the rise in levels that had driven the warming in the first place. It was good work, no doubt, the sharp end of a massive effort to ameliorate the effects of two centuries of unchecked industrialisation and fossil carbon burning, but many thought that it was too little, too late. Damage caused by the great warming was visible everywhere on the Antarctic Peninsula. Old shorelines drowned by rising sea levels, bare bones of mountains exposed by melting snow and ice, mines and factories, port cities and settlements spreading along the coast... There were traces of human influence everywhere Mike walked. Hiking trails with their blue markers and pyramidal cairns, scraps of litter, the mummified corpse of an albatross with a cache of plastic scraps in its belly, clumps of tough grasses growing between rocks, fell field meadows of mosses and sedge – even a few battered stands of dwarf alder and willow. Ecopoets licensed by the Antarctic Authority were spreading little polders and gardens everywhere as the ice and snow retreated. They had introduced arctic hares, arctic foxes and herds of reindeer and musk oxen further south. Resurrected dwarf mammoths, derived from elephant stock, grazing tussock tundra in steep valleys snaking between the mountains.