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)