Some thoughts on Changing Lifestyles

I bought this book new in 1991, read it a couple of times then lent it out to anyone who was interested. Somewhere along the line it didn’t come back and I added it on to my list to re-buy when I saw it (along with Shockwave Rider, The Dispossessed and Ender’s Game). When Amazon came along I looked for it on there. I don’t know when it had gone out of print but it wasn’t even mentioned and for a long time it wasn’t in the secondhand section either. And then, joy! Not only was it available but there were a number of copies.

It arrived a week or so ago when I was reading Sandi Toksvig’s ‘Valentine Grey’. Given the need to scramble to get work completed I was losing the plot of VG repeatedly and so I put it aside to read over Christmas and picked up Changing Lifestyles, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t grip me in quite the same way. It turns out to be an excellent book to read whilst struggling with a heavy workload. The chapters are short, the language is simple and the ideas are not new, but I found a piquant pleasure in reading his exhortations to the extent that I had to ration myself to just a chapter before bed.

For many years I have enjoyed the writings of those who have recently been redefined as grumpy old men/women. Lawrence D Hills and John Seymour typify the category. They were not grumpy so much as opinionated. Lawrence Hills, founder of the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now Garden Organic), seems to have all but disappeared from popular culture but John Seymour’s Self Sufficiency seems still to be around and has stopped him falling into total obscurity.

I’ve been giving some thought as to why the highly opinionated (environmental) writer appeals to me. I think it’s because, although I believe in the urgent need to change our actions, and though my work involves raising awareness of environmental issues for businesses, I am not evangelical. It’s just so lovely to read someone who says it plainly and obviously lives his ideals. And so, John Seymour.

I first recall coming across Seymour in my teens. My father, a reluctant gardener but great dreamer, had a copy of ‘The Self Sufficient Gardner’, I think from his book club. I have no idea whether he chose it in a moment of enthusiasm or whether it turned up because he didn’t cancel it. I think he passed it on to my uncle, a man interested in gardening for food production rather than simply avoiding censure. Before it disappeared I spent some time reading it, loving its downright instructions and beautiful illustrations although I felt no call to put its advice into practice at that time.

I was a teen in the 70s, a time of flared jeans, cheesecloth shirts and a dawning awareness of potential limits. Limits to Growth was published in 1972. There had been electricity blackouts during the 1972 miners’ strike and again in 1974. The oil price shock of 1973 meant that the school cruise I went on didn’t go to Dubrovnik because the cruising speed was lowered to save fuel. A further oil shock happened in 1979. None of these issues were caused by real shortages but we became aware, for the first time in the post-war UK, that our modern systems were not invulnerable. Then, of course, there was the Good Life and Jimmy Carter’s ‘cardigan’ speech. At my first election I voted Ecology Party. In other words, I was environmentally aware and not averse to the whole idea of living more lightly.

Changing Lifestyles was published in 1991, when my son was just walking and I was expecting my daughter. It didn't change my life. I was already the breastfeeding mother with my babies in terry nappies, cooking wholefoods and heading towards educating otherwise. It wasn’t life changing but it was lifestyle affirming. He wrote about energy, transport, work and homes, rubbish and recycling, the land, farming and food. Twenty years on and there is nothing that he was saying that couldn’t be said right now, although he thought that by 2012 we would be safely post-petroleum. 

Reading it now it is really difficult to find something surprising to say about it. We should turn down the thermostat, we should drive less, we should find meaningful work that supports our communities, we should grow much of our own food and buy what we can’t grow locally, we should eschew processed ‘dead’ food, we should step back from the precipice and save ourselves. There have been twenty years worth of books saying the same thing since Changing Lifestyles, although a great deal of what we come across these days is so based on emotional manipulation that it wearies me to even begin to read it, and much is a call to action for everyone else, whilst making no effort to reduce the author’s own impact. Al Gore is the quintessential example. This book was written by a man living his beliefs and, as he notes,  ‘this book is about quality of life.‘  

I determined some time ago thatI wasn’t very happy with my own quality of life. I needed some sort of meaning. God does not really provide that for me. Shopping doesn’t do it either. John Seymour’s vision of a life lived to the full, a life of hard but meaningful work, of food made with natural, local ingredients, of making a difference, speaks to me in a way that so much of the modern lifestyle and the recent calls to action do not. 

At the end of his book Seymour looked at where we were and what options were open to us. He delineated a continuous growth scenario, a palliative scenario and a radical change scenario. He concluded that the only possible choice was radical change. I would suggest that, since 1991 we have attempted to paper over the cracks of continuous growth with a little bit of palliative action. I’m no different. Maybe a bit more palliative than continuous growth but not by much. And not anywhere near radical change. 

We are still discussing what, if anything, we should do to pull back from the brink of disaster, as the edge crumbles under our feet. As Seymour says, ‘in the end each one of us has got to take responsibility for what we do, and what we don’t do. There is only one person in the universe over whose actions I have complete control and that is myself.’ And yet. I am so weak. I know what I could do and I don’t, because I’m trying desperately to pass for normal. I think perhaps I should spend some time returning to this book where the issues are clear, and remind myself that I have control over my own actions. 

Incoherent bookish thoughts

I don’t read books as much as I used to. I think I might have mentioned this before. Ian and Julian have infected me with the need to read the internet until I’ve finished it. Ian knows he’s read it all when he resorts to DefenceTech. I’ve never reached the end.

This compulsion to finish things has affected me for years. In a strange way. Years ago, when I was a graduate trainee, they did a psych test on me which came up with the stunningly accurate insight that I do an excellent job until I have completed 95% of a project and then I abandon it and move on to the next new and interesting thing. That’s why I treasured my ex-colleague Catherine, a completer/finisher. Given that the very last thing I do on a project is send out the invoice, this could be a very bad thing for an independent consultant. These days I have a little spreadsheet whose boxes are coloured green when I have completed a project, when I have invoiced and, much more rarely at the moment, when I have been paid. Requiring enough money to live focuses one’s mind remarkably. Of course, being paid in advance short circuits this useful mechanism and, as I write this, the one outstanding project for April is one I was paid for in advance. Must finish that this weekend. Still, those don’t happen very often.

Anyway, I’ve meandered away from my point, which is that I like to finish reading a book. When I first went to a convention I shared a room with a German woman who stated that she always finished any book she started even if it was awful. I’m not that driven, but I feel a mild sense of failure when I don’t get to the end.

There are, of course, some books that I want to fling away rather than put down and just neglect to pick up again. Angel of Death was one of these. It came free in a convention bag some time ago. It was the only book I took when I spent three days in Coventry last year. The blurb was good; the book itself was not. Something about an angel of death who used a mass murderer to effect the required deaths. The murderer cut off the hands and head of his victims and masturbated into the head. The angel fell in love with the woman detective investigating the murders. Blech! I felt no urge to finish this book even though the writing style was engaging. It’s somewhere in the bedroom awaiting disposal.

In these apocalyptic days, when Julian Headlong has stopped buying books (an obvious sign of the end times) I have decided that I can attempt to change my habits. This whole line of thought crystallised when I was reading the comments on a Suzanne Moore article about hoarding. The comments generally agreed that hoarding, whilst many of us have a tendency towards it, is not a good thing. Until, some way down the comments thread, Mrs Moose chimed in with, ‘But having lots of books is okay. Isn't it? I mean most of them (not all) are on shelves. And I don't have two copies of that many things. The children's books might come in useful if there are grandchildren. I'm sure I could make myself stop. I gave a book away to a charity shop once. I think. Yes, I'm sure I did....’ My thoughts exactly! But is this right? It made me think. I have some books that could be categorised as trashy that I’m almost certainly never going to get rid of. Ring of Fear by Anne McCaffrey comes to mind. I have some classics, lit and SF, which could certainly go; I’m never going to read them again. They might be landmark works of the genre but they’re just not that good and, with no interest in academia, why give them shelf space?

I hesitate though. I’ve regretted disposing of the Chalet School books, I’d quite like to have all my Cadfaels back. It seems that every time I get rid of something I need it the next day. Samuel Delaney’s Tides of Lust is a case in point. I was never going to finish reading it. The writing is gorgeous, the subject boring in both senses. I hid it among some less salacious books and took it to Oxfam. And then I found I wanted to quote from it in a fanzine article. I mentioned this and within days a new copy arrived from a friend in America. Sigh. I guess it’s a keeper, or at least, a returner. Maybe one day I’ll attempt to read it again.

Anyway, coming back to the point, I’m giving up the guilt. If I don’t finish a book I’m going to get rid of it. Sometimes. There are those that don’t get finished, not because of any flaw in the book but because of circumstances. I forget to take my current book when I go away and have to buy a new one that sets me off on a different train. Or a new Gail Carriger, Mike Carey or Tanya Huff book comes out and all other books fall by the wayside.

Recently I was reading Windhaven by George RR Martin and Lisa Tuttle. It’s a perfectly good SF with ‘hang gliders’ book and the characters are mildly interesting however I have premonitions of disaster and I don’t want to read about it. The characters are doing things that will lead to hurt and loneliness. I don’t want to follow them on that journey. John Dowd passed the opinion that if you are not going to read books because bad things happen to the characters you’ll miss many great reads. That’s as maybe. I’ve got enough where that isn’t going to happen. To read Windhaven I would have to spread it out over weeks, maybe months, picking it up again only when I have ceased to care about the characters and putting it down when I start to worry about them again. It might take years. It doesn’t even matter when the characters are vile. I worried about the angel of death in just the same way. I sometimes wonder if I embraced golden age SF because the characters were so cardboard that it didn’t set off my worry reaction. This may be linked with my distaste for the comedy of embarrassment and for watching people do stupid things. Whatever. There are so many books in the world and I have so little time to read them why struggle with something that is not worth it in the end.

It has occurred to me that there is a nuance here. Felix Castor does stupid things resulting in harm for himself and those he loves, and yet I read these books avidly. I think it is because I care deeply about Felix. The people in Windhaven, names already forgotten, and the angel, are not sufficiently large characters for me to need to know what happens to them. And I don’t want to know.

Anyway, back to the point. White Mars is going, despite being signed by Brian Aldiss, because there is too much of it that is dull. Windhaven is going. The Angel of Death is certainly going. It may even be that Gladiator at Law is going. I’ve reread it recently and I’m fairly sure I’ll never read it again. I will make the commitment to at least attempt to read the books before ditching them. Physical Metallurgy and the Design of Steels by Brian Pickering will probably be kept for sentimental reasons. And it’s a cracking good read. Oh yes, and it cost me £27 in 1981.

High Anxiety!

I have found recently that it is taking me ages to read a book. It’s not because I’m not caring about the characters. The books where the characters leave me cold end up on the ‘I’ll finish reading it when I can be arsed’ pile which has expanded remarkably over the years. I really ought to dump them. No, with these recent books it’s because I care so much about the characters and I see so much nastiness rolling towards them that I have to take small sips of the story to keep my anxiety for the characters at a low level. This was the case with The Windup Girl where disaster was obviously hovering, waiting to pounce on all the characters. It was the case with ‘Swordspoint’ where I really cared about Alec and De Vries and wanted them to have a nice comfortable life. How likely is that for a swordsman and his lover? Even worse, I’m currently reading `Blueheart’ which I have to take in a couple of pages at a time. The stakes are high. The characters are working with incomplete information and all trying to do their best within their somewhat compromised ethical frameworks. Once I’ve read the entire book and the tension is resolved I’ll be able to read it again with a level of comfort and probably enjoy it far more.

In this case, ironically, it is the art of the novelist that makes this so difficult to read. If I felt that it would all end happily ever after (as in Doctor Who or any series novel) I would be far less anxious (but it would be far less meaningful). The books that have knocked me sideways and have left me changed have never been the comfortable ones. ‘The Eye of the Heron’, ‘Golden Witchbreed’ and ‘Ancient Light’ (damn you Mary Gentle!) and ‘Woman at the End of Time’, for example, were never easy reading but neither have they disappeared into the morass of ‘books that I have read but can’t clearly recall’. A couple of days in Blackpool with no useful internet connectivity has forced me to get half way through Blueheart. An evening in Reading may well complete it. I’m hoping the denouement will be meaningful without being too searing. I hope Rache, Lisel Teal and Cybele all survive.

What happened to Alison Sinclair anyway? Two excellent SF novels (Legacies and Blueheart), a less stellar book (Cavalcade), a joint SF then three fantasy novels. Why do women end up writing fantasy? Lack of recognition? Lack of sales? I’ll have a look at the new stuff. Perhaps it’s as fab as the SF?

Books 'n' stuff

I read 'Cannery Row' when I was in my teens. I reread it whenever I need to. Recently I have been prompted to search it out from my chaotic bookshelves by Powells. 


Do you know of the wonderful, fiendish service Powells provide? Powell's Books is based in Portland, Oregon and their shipping costs, among other things, prevent me from buying from them and yet, generously, as any pusher will, they send me teasers to what my appetite. Every morning a little email of temptation arrives in my inbox. I first came upon the review service as a reference in Suzette Haden Elgin's live journal and signed up unthinkingly at the end of 2007. Since then I have received a book review every day. All sorts of books are reviewed, new and old. The reviews come from a number of sources. Some are dull and endless and I give up way before the end. Some are erudite and although I have no interest in buying the book I enjoy the easy acquisition of a superficial knowledge on its subject. Some are so tantalising that I buy the book. Amazon UK do very well out of Powell's generosity. The full list of books reviewed can be found here.


Actually, whilst I'm sharing I ought to note Sam Jordison's blog at the Guardian. I visit this page infrequently but when I do I can lose a whole afternoon. Currently he is revisiting the Hugo awards as well as the Bookers and has got up to Rendezvous With Rama. Intelligent, accessible and even the comments are worth reading.


Anyway, back to Powell's review a day. On the 5th March Cannery Row was reviewed by Doug Brown. This is a nicely short review that sent me searching for my dog eared old copy. It took a while to locate as the end of the alphabet hasn't been ordered on my bookshelves yet (it's only been 3 & 3/4 years). Finally there it was, socialising with the elderly Sturgeon books. They have a lot in common, not least a sympathetic understanding of the less than perfect members of humanity.


Cannery Row was based on Monterey in California. The days of the sardine cornucopia that fed the canneries is long gone and that area of Monterey has been tidied up. Monterey Bay Aquarium and Steinbeck memorabilia have taken the place of that industrial wasteland. The majority of the characters inhabiting this slender book would be treated with suspicion by the nice new attractions in the area, and rightly so. 


At the centre of this book are Mack and the boys living in the Palace Flophouse & Grill, and Doc, a scientist making his living by harvesting, preserving and sending off for study the various creatures of the sea edge. At the centre of the book is a party. These alone would make it a good book but the cast of characters from Lee Chong with his 'anything' shop, through Dora, the magnificent madam of the Bear Flag Restaurant to Frankie, a little boy unable to learn but full of yearning and love, make this book a wonder. The short chapters make it ideal for 5 minute train journeys and the sea shore makes it astonishingly beautiful. The 'orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs' who 'slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers', the gorgeous but deadly anemones, the nervous Hermit crab moving house, the murderous octopi, inhabit the tranquil lovely pools of low tide as Doc picks his way through them looking for specimens. All this to the sound of sacred music and the crashing of waves in the distance. Even better, there is a sequel, Sweet Thursday, hiding somewhere in the bookcases. And before that, I am going to order Cannery Row in hardback so when this sad copy finally falls into separate pages I have a robust replacement. This is a book to keep forever.

Weeds!

This is the first reading book (as opposed to knitting pattern or gardening book) I have borrowed from the library. If it were not borrowed I’d put it in my ‘definitely keep’ category. I might end up buying it anyway which sort of negates the whole cost saving benefit of using the library.

I picked it off the shelf whilst I was looking at gardening books. I have a weakness for single subject books – they are often as illuminating about people as they are about the putative subject. This was no exception and proved truly fascinating. I had come across Richard Mabey only as the author of the ubiquitous and useful ‘Food for Free’ but had never read anything else by him. This is a shame because he turns out to be a knowledgeable and lyrical writer. Anyone interested in plants should seek his work out, this book in particular.

What are weeds? Before we began farming I guess there were just plants, some of which were useful to us, some not; weeds probably only arrived as a concept when we began to try to control nature for our benefit. The standard definition seems to be ‘a plant in the wrong place’. Ruskin, though, is quoted as saying a weed is ‘A vegetable which has an innate disposition to get into the wrong place … It is not its being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent – thrusting itself where it has no business, and hinders other people’s business – that makes a weed of it.’

Each chapter is named after a weed, beginning with Thoroughwort and ending with The Shoreditch Orchid by way of Love-in Idleness, French Willow and Triffid. We see how weeds arrive; by accident in hay or wool or packaging or deliberately (damn those Victorian gardeners) escaping into the wild. Our views have changed too so a lovely wildflower may be reclassified as a weed and sometimes back again.  Generally, though, weeds are associated, some might say made, by people. We select them, inadvertently, by our actions and the choices we make. Examples are the cornfield weeds, which were selected by our harvesting methods to be a similar height to the crop and by our threshing and cleaning methods to have a similar size and shape of seed. Evolution in action, with us as the evolutionary pressure. But as we disturb and compact soil signature weeds turn up to take advantage of our work. I am fascinated by the idea put forward that the weeds in an area indicate past human habitation and can be a living picture of what has happened on a site long after other signs have disappeared.

An illustration of the type of fascinating story embedded in this book is that of ‘the trunk-road hitchhiking of Danish scurvy-grass. Up to the 1980s [it] was a scarce native of the drier areas of the coasts around Britain….In the mid 1980s it began to appear on a few inland railway-line sites, where its seeds had been introduced with stone rubble brought from the seashore. Then it began to show up along the edges of motorways and major roads. The plants were packed close together, especially on the central reservations, and in their flowering time of March and April it was as if a deep and persistent frost had gripped the verges.’ Mabey continues his tale, noting that in Ireland, where road grit is salt free, there has been no similar diaspora. He notes other contributing factors but concludes, ‘the saltiness of the modern road – that shoreline tang sprayed from council gritting lorries every icy evening even in the landlocked heart of Britain – has been the crucial factor. Again, a social innovation has been immediately exploited by a weed.’

Mabey, towards the end of the book, suggests that we might consider restraining ourselves in our war against weeds given that something living is better than nothing as we move towards a different, more disrupted world. Even more, the urban ecosystems that have developed and made our cities more interesting are no longer in danger of infecting valuable cropland and could be left to naturalise. Weeds are usually pioneer creatures – they move in when we have destroyed a balanced ecosystem. Mabey comments that ‘they are like a kind of immune system, organisms which move in to repair damaged tissue, in this case earth stripped of its previous vegetation.’ He continues, ‘Weeds’ rapid, opportunist lifestyles mean that their role – what they do – is to fill the empty spaces of the earth, to repair the vegetation shattered naturally for millions of years by landslide and flood and forest fire, and today degraded by aggressive farming and gross pollution. In so doing they stabilise the soil, conserve water loss, provide shelter for other plants and begin the process of succession to more stable and complex plant systems.’ I will admit to a sneaking affection for most weed species and it’s good to see someone like Richard Mabey articulating this view so eloquently. This is definitely a keeper, not only for its sound ecological viewpoint, standing back a little from the concept that the world and its contents are solely for the use of humanity, but for its beautiful prose, dense with both information and imagery:

‘We habitually think of weeds as invaders, but in a precise sense they are also part of the heritage or legacy of a place, an ancestral presence, a time-biding genetic bank over which our buildings and tinkerings are just an ephemeral carapace.’


Picture (discussed in the book) by Albrecht Durer

Reflections on books

When I read a good book it consumes my attention for as long as it takes to finish it. If I have to put it down in order to, say, interact with my beloved I resent it, feel guilty for resenting it then forget both emotions immediately as I dive back into the action. Meals degenerate into something that can be made in a couple of minutes and eaten without attention. Sandwiches are a mainstay of my diet when reading.  Given that I quite like my relationship with Ian and I really would like to have friends other than Miles Vorkosigan, Shevek, Tycho Potter, Susan Pevensey, Felix Castor, Sam Starfall et al, I don't read nearly as much fiction as I used to. There have been times, far distant now, where I would read all through the night to finish a book and zombie through my work the next day. I can't afford to do that either. 


Another feature of my reading style is that I have no memory at all. Oh, some books I have read so many times that I remember them wholesale but I do my best to avoid that happening. I love being able to re-read a book and only encounter a faint feeling of familiarity. It means I don't have to buy so many books though sometimes I read something not worth a second read because I've forgotten the mediocrity of it. I should really have re-homed some of my books.


Of course my memory problem has a positive side. I can't hold a decent grudge because I don't retain the vehemence of my emotions, and sometimes even forget the cause. I can occasionally find notes around the place, often used as bookmarks, reminding me of important things. These are seldom effective but luckily some things stick from being thought so many times. I can remember, 'Don't trust Tony Blair' and 'I really shouldn't have had the second bottle of wine'. Over the last dozen years, as I've mentioned before, my backup has been rereading my old fanzines. Given that I've now got a big hard-drive and Time Machine makes backing up easy I thought I might try to keep some sort of log of what I've read and whether it might be worth a second reading in the future. I'd backdate it but, other than 'I Shall Wear Midnight', 'The Downhill Crocodile Whizz' and the five Liadan books I read over the Christmas break I can't really remember so I'll start my list with 'Moonfall' by Stephen Baxter.


I shall also attempt to put the books that I don't love in the 'Ready for Fostering' box.

Assorted catastrophes

I’ve been a bit busy recently. That’s what I always say, of course, but I’ve been doing a lot of training so instead of having spare time to read and write about my deep personal passions I’ve spent every evening and all train journeys going though slides trying to remember what I’m supposed to talk about. Yesterday I had a horribly frantic scramble (on the train from Marylebone and later in the NiteNite in Birmingham) to get up to speed with the May 09 version of the Code for Sustainable Homes so that I could inform a select group of builders, local authority staff and the guy who manages training for the National Construction College all about how it works just two days before the 2010 version is released. I think I managed with the presentation but the exercises were a bit chaotic. The feedback forms were good though, even from the NCC guy. Usually I have a little furtive check of feedback, egoscanning for the tutor questions (knowledgeable? approachable?), on the train back but the train before mine had been delayed for over an hour and all the stranded passengers had jumped onto mine. There was no room in the seats and I ended up sitting on the floor in the wheelchair space between two grey suited guys standing primly and, of course, properly. Reading a Darkover book. Yes, I know, but I really rather like them. (I have always wondered why women SFF writers seem to love feudal societies.) The train was crowded enough that the trolley was stuck at the very back of the train, minimising my risk of severed feet. Yes, of course I go everywhere on public transport. It’s so relaxing! Masochist? Apparently.

So today I’m going over the Pennines to deliver a Waste Awareness Course, which I could probably do in my sleep, and I’m taking the chance to write a little something. Daybreak over Manchester looks truly apocalyptic and that’s where my thoughts have been recently. Not over Manchester. In the Apocalypse. I’ve been reading a number of The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWK) books. Darkover Landfall (yes, I know!) and Alas! Babylon! being the most recent. We talked about them over dinner at Julia & Doug’s on Friday. Sally wanted to know what we meant by Cosy Catastrophe (CC).

Some of my favourite comfort books are cosy catastrophes. The quintessential cosy catastrophe is The Day of the Triffids (though the Kraken Wakes is more catastrophe and less cosy). Triffids is a lovely SF novel by John Wyndham, short but effective. The first part, where the hero wakes up on the morning after TEOTWAWKI, blind from an earlier accident, in a London obviously not right, is one of the creepiest pieces of writing I’ve come across. I never read this book alone in the house at night. The terror is contagious.

If this were only going into my fanzine I would leave Triffids at that, assuming that everyone would have read this seminal work of British SF, but some of my colleagues, non-fans, read the blog and, strange though it seems, need a quick explanation.

The Day of the Triffids was written during the cold war era, a time of fear and paranoia, a time when mass unforeseen death seemed quite possible. Was quite possible. Alas! Babylon! looked at this fear in a quite straightforward, nuclear war sort of way. Triffids was somewhat more oblique and the more frightening because of it. When, in my day job, I look at potential incidents and accidents they usually have more than one cause. It is the combination of a number of errors that result in massive spills, explosions etc. One error alone usually results in a ‘near miss’ rather than a full blown incident. Triffids is based on two such accidents and is the more believable because of it.

The first mistake was the development of triffids and their accidental dissemination across the world by industrial espionage gone wrong. Mobile and dangerous plants; plants with some level of intelligence and malevolence. These were my first introduction to GMOs and perhaps why I have always had reservations about them. The triffids were developed, nurtured and spread throughout the world because of the high-grade edible oil they produced. In Wyndham’s world, where it is critical that population and food production balance, it seems fine to ‘domesticate’ this dangerous creature, a plant that can and does kill and feeds off the nutrients from the rotting corpse. Yum.

The second mistake provides the ‘meteor showers’ that everyone watched the night before TEOTWAWKI. Perhaps a satellite weapon, watching the magnificent display resulted in blindness. The hero has been temporarily blinded by a triffid sting across the eyes and on the morning that the book starts, in the anxious and increasingly terrifying darkness behind the his bandages, he is waiting to find out if the damage is permanent.

So, two mistakes herald the end of the old comfortable and cosy world. Millions of people die, either through suicide and accidents due to their sudden blindness or by triffid sting as they stumble outside, unaware of their danger.

What makes it cosy? The way the story is told makes it rather cosy. The hero doesn’t lose anyone dear to him. He goes from being a lonely person in a dead end job to being far more important and far happier in the long term. The human race survives and does not sink into barbarism and chaos. The world is rather saved by this disaster – population is drastically reduced and those survivors have a whole world to repopulate. Nice. Alas! Babylon does the same for nuclear war. Earth Abides does the same for ‘plague’. These seem to be fantasies of stepping back from the edge of ultimate destruction and getting away from the dull and ordinary lives so many of us live.

I’ve always rather liked Cosy Catastrophes, even though I know that these are unlikely scenarios. In Earth Abides the water treatment plant delivering clean water continues working effectively for decades. In Triffids a lovely farmhouse overlooking the Downs is available for moving into without a dull job and a mortgage to support it. In Alas! Babylon! the hero has access to artesian water and enough warning to stock up. We have lived comfortable lives for so long, dependant on our cheap energy and complex systems, that we’ve forgotten what damn hard graft it is to deal with all our needs without such sophisticated assistance. In reality systems break down remarkably quickly when not fed with power or money. We saw that with the oil refinery blockades – a couple of days with no deliveries and we are short of energy for transport and even if we can get to the shops, the shelves are bare. The CCs I’ve mentioned have side-stepped this issue by having lots of people die off very quickly leaving lots of unprotected goods in unprotected shops. Any of us who have been too honest to shoplift might see the thrill of taking free goods without guilt. Even in these books the free cans don’t last forever and we regress to hard labour.

It’s a bit of a joke that fans think we are so clever that we would be the survivors in this sort of scenario when, more likely, we would be surplus to requirements. An ability to build a Civilisation in cyberspace is not the same as scraping a living and keeping the light alive in TEOTWAWKI scenarios. There are other TEOTWAWKI books that are not in any way cosy. Gudrun Pausewang’s book, Fall Out, is a short brutal book about nuclear disaster which has no sign of comfort; a step into horror. And this a kids book. The ultimate of the non-cosy catastrophes for me, is On The Beach, really the end of the human world, a slow and agonising process of waiting for death by radiation poisoning. I only read it once.

Ian frequently accuses me of being a survivalist and wanting to see TEOTWAWKI. Nope. I really don’t. I do a fair amount of research for my job and what I see is a looming disaster, a slow reduction of comfort and possibilities with none of the thrill of the cosy catastrophes. John Michael Greer calls if the long descent. I might call it The End Of The Glorious Future (TEOTGF). We are not the first civilisation to outrun our resources but we are the first global civilisation to do so. In the past, whilst one empire fell another endured for a while. Some ways of life were sustainable, some cultures survived. China was one of those. No longer, I feel, as they purchase resource all around the world and foul their own country to produce junk for us. How did that go so wrong?

We’ve worried about resource issues before. The Limits to Growth, Small is Beautiful, the ‘Good Life’ back to the land movement were all part of a concern about resource. Had we actually taken action then we might not be facing these issues now. We are probably past peak oil, a point where there is still plenty left but it will never be so cheap and easy to obtain again. Why drill in high risk deep water areas, ruin aquifers by fracking difficult gas fields, pollute huge areas extracting tar sands, plant and subsidise the production of biofuel on fertile food producing land if not because the easy stuff has all been used? Much of the material we use in our ubiquitous electronic equipment has limited availability. We’re pumping our aquifers dry all over the World. There’s too many of us and we’re too greedy. Oh for a cosy catastrophe to leave me and my friends in proud possession of what’s left, but we’ve seen that that would not work. We only live in luxury now because someone somewhere is being exploited to make it possible. I wouldn’t be able to extract, refine and manufacture dysprodium magnets to make my personal wind turbine work. I never grow enough food to be able to rely on it. I’m unlikely to achieve more even if my life depended on it. My cosy catastrophe would decay very quickly into starvation, cold and darkness. I’ve got a dozen candles in the house. How long will they last?

I’d like to finish this piece with a solution, a call to action, but this is not a problem, it is a predicament. There are no solutions only things that we do that minimise the misfortune. A bit. Curse you darkness!

We’ve got iPhones. Surely that is future enough for any of us. But I’d hoped for something more in my lifetime. I was hoping for the stars. 

Excuses, excuses...

No blogging available due to the new Tiffany Aching novel, 'I Shall Wear Midnight' and because yesterday's 'Made in Dagenham' and 'Single Father' both made me weep and I ended up with a miserable headache, and yes, and before that, 'Case and the Dreamer', the last of the Theodore Sturgeon collected stories. Later.

How your language affects your thinking

As a science fiction fan of many years standing I've been aware of the idea that your ability to deal with certain concepts is constrained by the language you speak. Apparently this is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which comes in a strong and weak version. The strong version posits that you cannot think things for which your language has no words.

One of my favourite books in my teenage years was Babel 17 by Samuel R Delany, based on the strong version of the hypothesis. This is a wonderful book in many ways whose central conceit was that your mind and intentions could be completely subverted by speaking and thinking in the constructed language, Babel 17, to the extent that you would betray your country and be unaware of it.

The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance has a similar central idea where societies are manipulated by the languages they are taught to speak. When I wiki'd Babel 17 the piece cited Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin and The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin along with The Languages of Pao as similar books. I don't quite agree with this.

Native Tongue and the follow up, The Judas Rose, are books written by a linguist with language as a central theme but although the women's language, Laadan, is transformational, it does not seem to make the ability to think about concepts impossible. Indeed, Suzette's language is designed to give words to things that are common experiences for women but which cannot be easily expresses in English and so necessitate endless words being used to try to approach the concept, in some ways the opposite of strong Sapir-Whorf as it is plain that the concepts can be approached but not with any grace or economy. I've just taken the book off the shelf to remind myself of some of the words given in the appendix. I particularly like to words beginning with 'ra', words about not doing or being something, and the words ending with lh which seem to imply intention for wrongness. Examples that I like:
ramime: to refrain from asking, out of courtesy or kindness
ramimelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intent; especially when it is clear that someone badly wants the other to ask
Another that I think very useful:
raheena: non-heart sibling, one so entirely incompatible with another that there is no hope of ever achieving any kind of understanding or anything more than a truce, and no hope of ever making such a one understand why ... does no mean enemy.  
This last gives a flavour of how I felt about my ex-husband, David. We could talk and talk and he would rarely understand what I was talking about.


So what got me started on this? I came across an article, via Ran Prieur's site, about language and how it affects thinking that is quite fascinating. It's called, 'Does Language Shape How You Think?' and it's well worth reading the whole piece. It gives a history of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and gives some very interesting examples of the weak SWH, that colour perception is influenced by words, e.g. if your do not have separate words for blue and green you will see them as essentially shades of the same colour, and in languages where objects are allocated sexes, this will subtly affect how you perceive the object. Examples are given of words allocated opposite sexes in German and Spanish. The really intriguing example is the difference in perceptions in languages who view direction as person centred (front, right, behind, left) and those that are geographic (north, east, south, west). The implications of this to the way we use our minds are huge. 


I wonder how many similar language based differences may eventually be discovered. Because our thinking is enveloped in our language I imagine it is difficult to see outside it. We all sort of assume everyone else perceives things the way we do.    

Lending out my books

So Jack is heading back to Oxford and he's 'borrowing' some books. He's burrowed through the boxes of books stored under the eaves to find all my Pratchett books, leaving the stacks in disarray, and then asked for some other light reading. What to loan? I picked out Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester, After the First Death by Robert Cormier, The Rape of the Fair Country by Alexander Cordell, Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula LeGuin (the paperback), The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon and Miss Mole by E. H. Young. I hesitated and then took the Cordell back as it's no longer in print. It's not that I don't trust him but I'd be very grumpy if that didn't come back or was damaged. It's fragile enough as it is. Pan didn't print on high quality paper and it's an 1969 edition. Anyway, I'm not sure what 'A tremendously lusty novel' of industrial Wales would mean to a generation who have never seen heavy industry in this country.