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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

  FOREWORD

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI

  SHOOTING THE APOCALYPSE

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI

  THE MYTH OF RAIN

  SEANAN MCGUIRE

  OUTER RIMS

  TOIYA KRISTEN FINLEY

  KHELDYU

  KARL SCHROEDER

  THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

  JEAN-LOUIS TRUDEL

  THE RAINY SEASON

  TOBIAS S. BUCKELL

  A HUNDRED HUNDRED DAISIES

  NANCY KRESS

  THE NETHERLANDS LIVES WITH WATER

  JIM SHEPARD

  THE PRECEDENT

  SEAN MCMULLEN

  HOT SKY

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  THAT CREEPING SENSATION

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  ENTANGLEMENT

  VANDANA SINGH

  STAYING AFLOAT

  ANGELA PENROSE

  EIGHTH WONDER

  CHRIS BACHELDER

  EAGLE

  GREGORY BENFORD

  OUTLIERS

  NICOLE FELDRINGER

  QUIET TOWN

  JASON GURLEY

  THE DAY IT ALL ENDED

  CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

  THE SMOG SOCIETY

  CHEN QIUFAN

  RACING THE TIDE

  CRAIG DELANCEY

  MUTANT STAG AT HORN CREEK

  SARAH K. CASTLE

  HOT RODS

  CAT SPARKS

  THE TAMARISK HUNTER

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI

  MITIGATION

  TOBIAS BUCKELL & KARL SCHROEDER

  TIME CAPSULE FOUND ON THE DEAD PLANET

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  AFTERWORD: SCIENCE SCARIER THAN FICTION

  RAMEZ NAAM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  FOR GRACE,

  WHO I HOPE WILL INHERIT A BETTER WORLD

  THAN THE ONES DEPICTED HERE.

  INTRODUCTION

  JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

  Welcome to the end of the world, already in progress.

  Apocalypses are something of a specialty of mine, having edited five anthologies on the subject so far, and it is extraordinarily clear to me that climate change is nothing short of an apocalypse in action. And when the head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is the author of a book calling climate change “the greatest hoax” and says things like “Man can’t change climate [only God can],” it brings to mind the dystopian volumes I’ve edited as well.

  One of the many problems we face is simply in popular comprehension. It’s hard to imagine how a two-degree increase in the average global temperature could possibly affect you or me, or why a three-foot rise in sea level would matter to someone who doesn’t live on a coastline. We might hear about the rapid extinction of fauna in some far-off place and respond with nothing more than, “That’s a shame . . .”; or complain to our neighbors when beach access is closed to us because some small sea bird is nesting. It all feels distant, either in space or in time—something that’s affecting someone somewhere far away, or will affect a future generation as yet unborn.

  But that sense of distance is a false one. It’s happening now, and we will feel the affects in our lifetime. As I write this, my home state of California is in its fourth year of drought. The snowpack that we rely on every winter to sustain our water supplies throughout the year never came.

  Better minds than mine are working on solutions to the problem of climate change, some of whom have applied their expertise in the stories in this volume. It’s an enormous problem with ramifications for every species on Earth. It will require the cooperation of every nation that shares this fragile globe.

  Fiction is a powerful tool for helping us contextualize the world around us. By approaching the topic in the realm of fiction, we can perhaps humanize and illuminate the issue in ways that aren’t as easy to do with only science and cold equations.

  It’s my hope that this anthology will serve as a warning flare, to illustrate the kinds of things we can expect if climate change goes unchecked, but also some of the possible solutions, to inspire the hope that we can maybe still do something about it before it’s too late.

  FOREWORD

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI

  If I were to tell you that Lake Mead is setting record lows for its water reserves, or that Las Vegas is currently tunneling under the lake, in a multi-billion-dollar mega-project pursuit of this dwindling supply, it may not mean much to you. You don’t live in Las Vegas, or, even if you do, it’s a little hard to get worked up over the sight of a serene blue artificial lake with only a white bathtub ring around its edge to mark its shrinkage.

  But what if I were to drop you into a life where your house was suddenly valueless? A place where your neighborhood had emptied of people overnight? A world where your polished granite counter tops and maple cabinets and marble-tile bathrooms can’t be sold to a new buyer, because no one would be stupid enough to buy a house where no water comes out of the faucet and no toilet flushes. If you were to live in that world, where your five bed/three bath house and crushing mortgage were suddenly the value equivalent of owning a cave, that might make an impact.

  It would for me, at least.

  Theories and ideas and infrastructure versus visceral experience. Human beings are wired to react quickly and exquisitely when it comes to the visceral, but we remain primitive as apes when it comes to the abstract, the complex, and the long-term. This gap, between what we flee on the savannah and what might destroy us completely in thirty years, is where I make my writer’s home. Sometimes, I’ve discovered, it’s possible for a fiction writer to perform a kind of hack on a reader’s mind, making them feel things that do not yet exist. And if we writers do our jobs well, when the reader closes a book, they will see the world differently. They will see low water levels in Lake Mead and connect them to catastrophic loss, to forced migration, to uncertainty.

  It’s interesting that by creating a made-up world, you can show the real world more sharply and clearly, and in that process, you have the chance of making people engage not with the future, but with the intense realities of our present—the realities that were previously passing them by. Suddenly, when someone is watering a lawn, or a news magazine prints a drought map, you can experience not abstractly and theoretically, as before, but viscerally, as we must, if we ever are to think long-term effectively.

  But which long-term? What future waits for us? If you pick up an environmental news magazine, you’ll see one set of storylines telling you that the destruction of the Earth is imminent; if you read Popular Science, you’re going to see another set of st
orylines that say, “Look at the cool gadgets that could change the game for climate.”

  As writers, we decide which storylines matter—which ones we give weight to, with our attention. I can’t say that we’ll never discover some fabulous way to scrub carbon out of our coal-burning power plants and sequester it—but I can say that I haven’t seen it make any impact yet.

  The reality is, from what I understand about our current climate situation, we’ve already skipped merrily past the point of causing immense damage, and now we’re headed for a more final cliff. That is fact. Carbon in the atmosphere has hit 400ppm and we still don’t have a serious plan to stop it. So when a feel-good technology magazine talks about the possibility of a technology like carbon sequestration, that’s all it is: a possibility. The fact of 400ppm remains, uncombatted.

  Ultimately what all these feel-good technology stories add up to, is “Oh, we’ll fix that problem somehow” and how that plays out is “Let’s just go on, conducting business as usual.” The idea is that somehow we’re going to get out of it with a clever techno-fix, but because there are no technologies that are proven, nor any technologies that are in wide use, these are “idea” technologies. They are, in fact, fiction, or if you really want to stick the knife in—fantasy.

  Of course, there is a solution for sequestering carbon—it’s to not burn the goddamn stuff in the first place. But that’s not as sexy. That’s not a techno-fix; it’s a social fix, and social fixes are hard, and complicated, and require human cooperation and restraint, whereas fantasy techno-fixes are easy. We can just lie back and dream about them. So easy.

  At root, the “Techno-optimist” argument says that we are an innovative species and whenever we face a problem we will innovate. Our entire history proves it. And yet . . . just because we are innovative, it doesn’t necessarily mean we are wise. If our food sources are tainted with mercury, perhaps we conclude that the solution is to make ourselves immune to mercury-poisoning, which would then allow us to dump as much mercury into the air and water as we like. It might screw up the whales, but hell, we don’t need whales, so why should we care? Similarly, if we could make it so that factory pollution didn’t cause asthma, would we care about air quality much? Probably not. We could make the air as thick as soup, while our factories cranked out another round of iWatches, or smartphones, or dumb rubber chickens.

  All of these fixes are symptomatic of a solution-set that is seldom holistic and utterly disinterested in root causes. We’re just clever enough to say, “The problem is pollution.” But we’re not clever enough to say, “Let’s stop polluting.” Or, rather, we are that clever, but given that so many people get short-term profit from activities that generate pollution, we never go there. So instead we hunt for a cheap techno-fix. So we’ll hunt for a way to regenerate people’s lungs, or we’ll invest in desalinization for California in the face of water scarcity, or we’ll invest in bioengineered crops to weather the droughts and hurricanes that will become more common as our climate-wrecked future becomes more inescapable.

  This lust for the techno-fix is on full display in our fetish for space travel, the idea that humanity’s best chance of survival is to get off our blue marble and go . . . elsewhere. In stories on the subject, the Earth is almost always used up, polluted, broken, nuked—but whatever, that’s fine, because we’re going to Mars!

  Ahem.

  I’m not sure why we think that Mars, or any other planet, would be such a great destination for us. Here we are on a planet that gives us free water, free air, even free food, essentially—a place where I can literally drop seeds on the ground, add water, and make food for myself—and yet we think our best hope lies on a planet where none of these things exist.

  It boggles the mind. We have a hard time surviving on Antarctica, and at least there you’ve got air and water and penguins. So sure, Elon, you go ahead and give that Mars thing a shot, but don’t try to tell me that’s a good survival tactic.

  Engineers don’t grow up thinking about building a healthy soil ecosystem, or trying to restore some estuary, or making sure that migratory bird patterns remain undisturbed. They don’t spend their time trying to turn people into better long-term planners, or better educated and informed citizens, or creating better civic societies. That’s not where our techno-fix obsession goes; it’s toward making an internal combustion engine work better and go faster, or swapping it out for an electric one. It’s toward making things go up, go boom, go fast, go digital, go go go . . .

  The reality is that bundling humanity into rocketships to take us off to find Earth 2.0 is a fantasy. It’s easy to see why our love affair with that fantasy is so seductive—it embodies so many powerful mythic concepts: adventure, frontier, reinvention. And yet, it also embodies the idea that our salvation lies on planets that lack, well, everything really.

  And while we’re staring up at the stars, we’re distracted from the real work at our feet—making this place that nurtured us whole and healthy enough to sustain our children and grandchildren and their children after them, so that they can thank us, instead of cursing us for the ruins we leave to them.

  Ultimately the argument over whether we write about and imagine positive or negative futures is a straw man. The important thing to understand is that imaginative literature is mythic. The kinds of stories we build, the way we encourage people to live into those myths and dream the future—those stories have power. Once we build this myth that the rocketship and the techno-fix is the solve for all our plights and problems, that’s when we get ourselves into danger. It’s the one fantasy that almost certainly guarantees our eventual self-destruction.

  One hopes that as we go about constructing our many theories of how the future will unfold and what part we will play in it, that we look not to the simple escape myth of last-minute innovation that gets us only out the frying pan of one disastrous scenario while landing us in the fire of another, but instead look to the root causes of each desperate techno-fix action, and instead of reaching for the simple tool, and fantasizing about quick and easy escape from our responsibilities via rocketship or desal plant or GMO, that we reach instead for the wisest tool.

  What if we dreamed a different future, one where did this profoundly unsexy thing, and actually cared for the garden that we evolved within? It seems to me that this is a future with potential . . . and maybe a myth worth dreaming.

  SHOOTING THE APOCALYPSE

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI

  If it were for anyone else, he would have just laughed in their faces and told them they were on their own.

  The thought nagged at Timo as he drove his beat-up FlexFusion down the rutted service road that ran parallel to the concrete-lined canal of the Central Arizona Project. For any other journo who came down to Phoenix looking for a story, he wouldn’t even think of doing them a favor.

  All those big names looking to swoop in like magpies and grab some meaty exclusive and then fly away just as fast, keeping all their page views and hits to themselves . . . he wouldn’t do it.

  Didn’t matter if they were Google/NY Times, Cherry Xu, Facebook Social Now, Deborah Williams, Kindle Post, or Xinhua.

  But Lucy? Well, sure. For Lucy, he’d climb into his sweatbox of a car with all his camera gear and drive his skinny brown ass out to North Phoenix and into the hills on a crap tip. He’d drive this way and that, burning gas trying to find a service road, and then bump his way through dirt and ruts, scraping the belly of the Ford the whole way, and he still wouldn’t complain.

  Just goes to show you’re a sucker for a girl who wears her jeans tight.

  But it wasn’t just that. Lucy was fine, if you liked a girl with white skin and little tits and wide hips, and sometimes Timo would catch himself fantasizing about what it would be like to get with her. But in the end, that wasn’t why he did favors for Lucy. He did it because she was scrappy and wet and she was in over her head—and too hard-assed and proud to admit it.

  Girl had grit; Timo could respect that. Even if
she came from up north and was so wet that sometimes he laughed out loud at the things she said. The girl didn’t know much about dry desert life, but she had grit.

  So when she muttered over her Dos Equis that all the stories had already been done, Timo, in a moment of beery romantic fervor, had sworn to her that it just wasn’t so. He had the eye. He saw things other people didn’t. He could name twenty stories she could still do and make a name for herself.

  But when he’d started listing possibilities, Lucy shot them down as fast as he brought them up.

  Coyotes running Texans across the border into California?

  Sohu already had a nine-part series running.

  Californians buying Texas hookers for nothing, like Phoenix was goddamn Tijuana?

  Google/NY Times and Fox both had big spreads.

  Water restrictions from the Roosevelt Dam closure and the drying-up of Phoenix’s swimming pools?

  Kindle Post ran that.

  The narco murders that kept getting dumped in the empty pools that had become so common that people had started calling them “swimmers”?

  AP. Fox. Xinhua. LA Times. The Talisha Brannon Show. Plus the reality narco show Hard Bangin’.

  He kept suggesting new angles, new stories, and all Lucy said, over and over was, “It’s been done.” And then she’d rattle off the news organizations, the journos who’d covered the stories, the page hits, the viewerships, and the click-thrus they’d drawn.

  “I’m not looking for some dead hooker for the sex and murder crowd,” Lucy said as she drained her beer. “I want something that’ll go big. I want a scoop, you know?”

  “And I want a woman to hand me a ice-cold beer when I walk in the door,” Timo grumped. “Don’t mean I’m going to get it.”

  But still, he understood her point. He knew how to shoot pictures that would make a vulture sob its beady eyes out, but the news environment that Lucy fought to distinguish herself in was like gladiatorial sport—some winners, a lot of losers, and a whole shit-ton of blood on the ground.