Intriguing premise, inoffensive story

Eternity Road
JackMcDevitt
Eos, 1998


Engaging and competently if not masterfully written, Eternity Road envisions a post-collapse North America dotted with the crumbling ruins of a bygone Golden Age, that of the "Roadmakers." McDevitt recounts the exploration of this land by a party of Illyrians (the neo-dark age successors to those who lived in what was once Memphis) in the context of an earlier, failed expedition.

He does a fine job of creating a landscape that is unsettlingly familiar. For example, the citizens of Illyria marvel at the ruins they call the Iron Pyramid, made not of iron but of some strangely permanent material and whose original purpose can't be fathomed. En route to the fabled outpost of Roadmaker civilization, a mythical (?) place called Haven, the travelers encounter other wonders: the Devil's Eye (perhaps the remnants of Fermilab's particle accelerator); an automated maglev train and the sole surviving artificial intelligence in Chicago's Union Station; a submerged Detroit-Windsor tunnel; the natural wonder that is "Nyagra;" reverse engineered technologies like steam engines; and, of course, the ubiquitous roadways which have given their name to the Roadmakers who built them.

While we learn that a plague killed almost everyone in North America (and presumably the world) in 2079 AD, the novel refuses to spell out explicitly just how long before our protagonists' time that plague occurred. Their knowledge of history only goes back 300 or so years, if that, and so we wonder at the age of ruined bridges and skyscrapers along with our heroes. Buried in the chapter on "Nyagra," the author gives us a substantial clue as to how far in the future the story takes place; if, through erosion, the Niagara has traveled approximately three feet upstream every year and the falls have traveled almost a mile in this fashion, then we are looking at roughly the year 3839 AD. That's approximately the same as our distance in time from the fall of Rome.

And so I guess my favorite feature of the story is that our contemporary, 21st century world becomes legend and pre-history to our barely civilized descendants and our commonplace technologies (those which survive anyway) are seen as the magical wonders of gods.

The story was strong until the last few chapters, which seemed hurried and disappointing. I was also unhappy with the conclusion, although perhaps McDevitt wanted his characters to learn to live in their own time and to experience progress on their own terms, instead of rescuing them from their "savagery" with a deus ex 21st century machina.

Definitely worth a read for people who like post-apocalyptic SF, especially since you can get it for a single cent.

(This review was originally posted on October 15, 2007.)

One small strange trip into the past, one long strange trip from the future

Summer of Love
Lisa Mason
Spectra, 1995


Teenage Susan Stein, aka Starbright, runs away from middle-class Midwestern suburbia and uses her savings to fly to San Francisco in the first days of summer, 1967. (Interestingly, I began reading this book a few days before the media began hyping the 40th anniversary of this strange fleeting season called the Summer of Love.) Beckoned by a postcard from her old friend Nance, now calling herself Penny Lane, she has traveled to the City by the Bay to escape her parents' constant bickering and to reconnect with her old friend. In one of the most uncannily accurate portrayals of an LSD experience, she is thrown into the ecstatically, erratically archetypal lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. She also becomes pregnant. Starbright accidentally comes across Penny Lane only to find that the young girl is now cynical, bitter, and self-destructive. Her friend confesses that her life has been one of absolute hell, as she was regularly raped by her stepfather and ignored by her mother. Not being as well-off as Starbright, Penny has had to sleep her way across the US in order to get away from his advances, and resents the fact that her once-best friend has somehow escaped all this, and was even able to fly to San Francisco thanks to her rich daddy. Starbright watches Penny, who is still basically a child, descend further and further into the dark side of 1967--speed, prostitution, biker culture, and death.

Into this time of upheaval tachyports Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco, a young man from 500 years in the future. He has come back in time to the Summer of Love in order to find a mysterious young woman, known only through a few seconds of recovered video footage and a lot of probabilities. His job is to find this girl, protect her, and ensure that events unfold as they are supposed to, so that the existence of his future will be assured. The girl's name is not known to him; what is known is that she is pregnant, that her pregnancy is important to the future of humanity, and that demonic anti-matter forces from an alternate timeline are seeking to destroy her. As a time traveler capable of producing profound paradoxes, he is bound by an incredibly strict code of noninterference called the Grandfather Principle. He meets and befriends Starbright, whom he suspects is his mystery woman, and Ruby A. Maverick, the gorgeous 35-year old proprietor of an occult bookshop. Over the course of the novel, he reveals both the daunting shape of the future--sharing tales of overpopulation, ozone depletion, genetic mutations, and devolution--and Starbright's role, through her unborn daughter, in assisting humanity to survive the coming transitions. Alas, things are never as easy as they seem, especially when time travel and the (pardon the pun) embryonic women's reproductive freedom movement are involved, and so Chiron and Starbright have their work cut out for them.

This novel was a joy to read. Although I wasn't around for the Summer of Love (and so can't vouch for the book's veracity), the story conveys such a complex mixture of innocence, hope, joy, exuberance, ecstasy, revelation, chaos, despair, freefall, nihilism, and violence that I can't help but suspect its authenticity. It reveals the same multifaceted, ambiguous "60s" as the Love album Forever Changes, and that makes it seem straight from the source. As well, the use of regular references to newspaper clippings from The Berkeley Barb and The Oracle, sections from the I-Ching, and tidbits about environmental science rounded out this loving, and knowing, portrait of the Left Coast in `67. Finally, Starbright's regular references to Star Trek were a loving homage to that groundbreaking show; as I read the book, I realized how much that program, and the increased interest in SF that accompanied it, inspired the progressive and outlandish thinking of many young people at the time, including most likely the author herself.

(This review was originally written on June 24, 2007.)

Investment guide/nonpartisan introduction to the coming energy crisis

The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel
Stephen Leeb
Business Plus, 2007


For those who aren't familiar with the issues surrounding the peak in oil production, this easy-to-read book provides a short introduction to the hard times ahead. It also serves as a resource for those investor-types who want to try to surf that chaos and make a tidy profit. The authors, both experienced financial writers, set the stage for discussing the imminent oil shortage and its consequences by recounting the late-90s tech bubble and the fact that few investors noticed the unsustainability of this bubble. "The oil delusion is a mirror of the technology delusion. While almost everyone in 1999 believed that the bull market in technology would endure, almost everyone today believes that the bull market in oil is temporary" (12). Needless to say, the authors don't share this assessment of the oil market and go to great pains to explain their contrarian conclusions. The coming peak in oil production (whether this year or in 20 years), the increasing insecurity of American oil supplies, and the growing need for energy resources in China and India are creating "a clash between supply and demand that will send oil prices soaring to unprecedented levels" (19). According to the authors, the only thing that will postpone this hyper-bull market in oil is a worldwide depression, a situation that none would consider beneficial.

The near-future scenario outlined by the authors is similar to that predicted in other works on peak oil; in short, it entails at best a massive depression and reduction in societal complexity, and at worst the complete collapse of the economy and of civilization as we know it. "[A] crisis of epic proportions is brewing" (89). They assert that this crisis can be prevented or at least mitigated against and they repeatedly affirm their hope that it will be. However, they also recognize the profound failure in American leadership and the profoundly deluded perceptions of our economists, media, and citizenry about this looming crisis. In the 10th chapter, they outline a few possible visions of what the world of the near-future might look like---decline, stasis, or Armageddon---none of which options is particularly appetizing to someone raised in a world of boundless growth and opportunity.

The primary author, Stephen Leeb, holds a PhD in psychology, and he uses this expertise to articulate the blind spots of conformity and groupthink that are contributing both to this crisis and to the fortunes that will be lost with the economic downturn. Wise investors like Warren Buffett and George Soros have succeeded because they've not followed conventional wisdom. Likewise, the reader is challenged to abandon groupthink and to grapple with the reality of this looming crisis, both for reasons of personal financial success and for reasons germane to the whole of human civilization.

It is in the final two chapters that the authors outline their preferred investment classes and strategies for growing wealth in the hard times ahead, so if you just want them to show you the money, so to speak, you can skip the rest and read those concluding chapters. For those who want an introduction to the coming energy crisis, the rest of the book is an excellent, nonpartisan place to start.

(This review was originally written on March 6, 2007.)

Heinberg is a definitely a Cassandra, but remember what happened to those who ignored her

The Party's Over: Oil, War And The Fate Of Industrial Societies
Richard Heinberg
New Society Publishers, 2005


Richard Heinberg set out to answer the questions, "How much petroleum is left? How much coal, natural gas, and uranium? Will we ever run out? When? What will happen when we do? How can we best prepare? Will renewable substitutes--such as wind and solar power--enable industrialism to continue in a recognizable form indefinitely?" (p. 3) He sorted the various responses to these questions into four broad voices--those of free-market economists, environmental activists, petroleum geologists, and politicians--and of these four, he found the third, the petroleum geologists, to be the most useful, if only because "theirs is a long-range view based on physical reality" (p.5). (Throughout the book, Heinberg notes that the free-market economists are almost constitutionally opposed to talk of Peak Oil, because, as economist Robert Solow said, "the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources." Resources, in other words, are merely commodities created by the market to satisfy demands, and when the demand arises, the market will find a supply. Needless to say, Heinberg finds this laissez faire approach to Peak Oil--"perilous optimism"--quite dangerous because it ignores hard ecological realities.)

"The message here is that we are about to enter a new era in which each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how to adjust to this new regime" (p.5). In short, an ecological perspective on humanity's consumption of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources reveals that the astronomical population growth and economic expansion of the last century are the biological bloom and population overshoot enabled by an energy subsidy from cheap, abundant oil, coal, and natural gas. As with other population overshoots in human (and evolutionary) history, the end probably won't be pretty, with massive die-offs and "structural readjustments" (to use free-market lingo) bringing the human population back into line with the Earth's carrying capacity. Heinberg's book challenges us to face this coming change NOW and to do what we can to mitigate against its worst effects through exploring and developing economical and social alternatives to the status quo.

The discovery of new oil resources peaked several decades ago, according to the majority of petroleum geologists, and as it seems that discovery and production follow similar curves, it will be but a matter of years until the production of oil peaks. (For the record, this doesn't mean that we will literally run out of oil, but only that it will seem like we've run out, because it will cost more--financially and energetically--to extract and refine the oil than it is worth.) The peak in oil production won't merely have a direct impact on the automobile industry, but will also undermine the production of plastics and pharmaceuticals, of which oil is the feed stock, and will yank the rug out from under petro-intensive, corporate, "Green Revolution" agriculture. Combine these consequences with growing population and energy consumption of developing nations like China and India, and you have a recipe for seriously ugly changes. Like James Howard Kunstler in The Long Emergency, Heinberg examines various other energy sources and technologies, from natural gas to zero-point energy, and finds them all wanting in one way or another. (Unlike Kunstler, Heinberg maintains a solid faith in our flexibility as a species and in our ability to adapt.) According to this perspective, oil (and other nonrenewables) were a one-time windfall in ecological terms, and once we've passed the peak in extracting them, we will have to recognize our ecological limitations as one species amongst many struggling for limited resources.

I recently read PowerDown, the follow-up to this book, and found it an excellently written, powerful and thought-provoking read. Perhaps it's because I read The Party's Over in conjunction with the contrarian book The Bottomless Well (Huber and Mills) or perhaps it's because I'm a bit burned out reading books on Peak Oil, but whatever the reason I did not find this book as compelling as its sequel. That said, it is still a better introduction to the subject of Peak Oil and to its ecological basis and implications than most others I have yet read.

(This review was originally written on February 10, 2007.)

Essential and unsettling reading about our options for making it in the Post-oil Age

PowerDown: Options And Actions For A Post-Carbon World
Richard Heinberg
New Society Publishers, 2004

Author Richard Heinberg approaches his topic, the consequences of peak oil and the final stop of the cheap oil gravy train, with ecological sensibility and moral clarity. These two characteristics, coupled with a straightforward prose style, make for compelling reading, as well as for serious reflection on the hard choices that we most likely face in the near future.

Heinberg's introductory chapter recaps his earlier book, The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. In it, he describes a century's uncritical addiction to cheap oil and outlines the impending crises it has wrought, crises for which we must prepare and to which we will soon respond, voluntarily or otherwise.

After this brief introduction (which basically assumes the truth of the peak oil dilemma, a definite problem for those who are still unconvinced), Heinberg lays out four paths that we may take, both individually and collectively, in response to the threats of dwindling power supplies, climbing global temperatures, etc.

1. Last One Standing - In this scenario, which Heinberg glumly admits is the default scenario given our inability (or worse, unwillingness) to consider the reality of our natural constraints and our predilection for settling things militarily, the powers of the world scramble in their rush to control the world's remaining energy resources. The US misadventure in Iraq, and the current threats to Iran, are part and parcel of this "option," which, as most sane people will admit, doesn't sound like much of an option at all but is, instead, the path of least resistance. As Heinberg notes, this is "a breathtakingly alarming prospect" that may lead to "the general destruction of human civilization and most of the ecological life-support system of the planet" (p. 55). (And for those who would dismiss this speculation as merely the work of a green handwringer, he cites a Pentagon report featured in Fortune magazine that sketches the basic outlines of this kind of "option." If the top brass are seriously thinking about it, then so should we citizens.)
2. Powerdown - This scenario is all about radically reforming the human heart, so as to replace a global culture of greed and self-interest with one of collective interest, sharing, and community. Important components of this powerdown strategy include limiting the size of the human population, increasing the efficiency of our energy consumption, replacing planned obsolescence with enduring quality, and returning global agriculture from its contemporary dependence on fossil fuels to its sustainable, organic roots. Of course, these changes necessitate a change in our underlying economic principles, so that eternal growth is seen as a suicidal imperative and an ecological impossibility, which will in turn necessitate changes in our social and political organization. Because these radical changes will have to be implemented quickly, Heinberg realizes that something like Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat will have to be formed, presumably of like-minded folks of ecological sensibility and moral clarity. Alas, this option seems to me to be a combination of wishful thinking and highly questionable forms and uses of power; as anyone with a sense of history knows, such vanguards tend not to dissolve of their own accord and folks who aim at radically transforming the human heart end up getting crucified. Nevertheless, the scenario is one we may face out of necessity rather than choice, and so it is essential to come to grips with it.
3. Waiting for the Magic Elixir - This describes the option, if it can be called that, of waiting for the technoscience and free market cavalries to deliver the solution to our problems. Because we've muddled through before, goes the argument, we will surely do so again. This option includes all the hullabaloo about the new hydrogen economy, or abiotic oil, or tar sands, or zero-point energy, etc. None of these options take factors like ERoEI into account, for example, but more problematic, they seek to tackle the problem solely from the supply-side. If we don't work on the demand-side, argues Heinberg, we will merely forestall the crises of overpopulation and overconsumption that come from living beyond our ecological means. Needless to say, Heinberg has little patience for this option, seeing in it a self-centeredness that is morally reprehensible.
4. Building Lifeboats - In this final option, Heinberg echoes Morris Berman's Twilight of American Civilization in calling for a counterculture of "new monks" who will preserve those aspects of human science and arts that are worth preserving. In short, we will need to have small communities in which traditional and primitive technologies and skills are mated to contemporary knowledge of science, politics, literature, etc. Again, this is a tall order for such a short amount of time, but at least this challenge sounds possible and interesting.
   

In conclusion, Heinberg argues that the world's elites will probably play up option three while tacitly working on option one. Most of the outspoken opposition, the so-called "Other Superpower" of the anti-globalization, etc. activists, will choose a variant of option two, but they are limited because of their resistance to admittedly problematic ideas, specifically those involving population control. The rest of us folks here on the ground, living our modest middle class lives in our modest single-family homes, will suffer the impact of option one (e.g., sending our children to die in oil wars, watching as formerly unmentionables like torture become acceptable again, etc.) while also being able to reduce our own consumption, to reach out and form new small-scale communities, and to increase our practices of cultural preservation. None of these options looks pretty to those of us reared in the age of opportunity, but if what Heinberg and others argue about peak oil is true, these options may be all we have.

(This review was originally written on January 3, 2007.)

"The world ends tomorrow. Let's see how that will effect today's stock market."

The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
Paul Roberts
Houghton Mifflin, 2004


Roberts, while attempting to be comprehensive in his treatment of the coming end of the oil age, omits several crucial points in his attempts at "balanced" reporting.

The author discusses the centrality of the politically volatile (and at times uncooperative) OPEC nations to the oil economy, and notes that the lion's share of geopolitical strategy and military adventurism is over energy supplies. The impending peak in oil production is as much a danger to our energy economy as are geopolitical machinations, but he downplays the consequences of peak oil after a cursory review of the literature, concluding rather tepidly that, "the picture for long-term oil is not encouraging." Given that the developing nations, specifically China and India, are expanding their energy consumption, this picture is definitely not encouraging.

Roberts also discusses the technological options that we may use to extend the oil economy as well as to transition into the next energy economy. He presents the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed hydrogen economy, of increased energy efficiency, and of combinations of different energy sources, yet he does not also note that many alternative sources of energy presuppose an underlying petroleum economy. This latter idea, connected to the concept of ERoEI (energy returned/energy invested), would seem to be essential to understanding our energy options, and its omission from Robert's analysis and reporting was conspicuous.

The author is also far too optimistic in his assessment of solutions delivered by the deus ex machina of free market technoscience; the sense of "can-do" that permeates this book is reminiscent of an ostrich with its head in the sand. I agree with Robert Anton Wilson that resources are less about what exists "out there" and more about our creative use of what exists, but I simply cannot imagine approaching this impending crisis creatively solely in the context of the "free market." As Roberts himself notes repeatedly, the free market has little incentive for investing in alternative ideas or marginal technologies when the existing economy is so lucrative. Instead of driving innovation, it seems that petrocapitalism stifles through its preference for the profitable, if catastrophically unsustainable, status quo. Roberts seems to recognize the need for intervention into the free market (like including "externalities" in the prices of the oil economy), yet his reliance on market solutions fills the book.

Thankfully, on the penultimate page, Roberts' facade cracks and he admits, "frankly, though, the thought of any kind of delay, no matter how rationally justified, terrifies me." This recognition of the seriousness of the problem, belated though it was, restored a bit of my confidence in the reporting that had preceded it.

(This review was originally written on January 1, 2007.)

For those who suspect that something is terribly wrong with contemporary America

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
Morris Berman
W.W. Norton, 2006

The guy behind you in the theatre bellows into his cell phone for the first fifteen minutes of the film, and then threatens to kick your butt when you ask him to be quiet. Someone in a Hummer sideswipes your car on the interstate off-ramp and then explains to the police that she shouldn't be ticketed because she couldn't see your car from "up there." The U.S. invades and occupies a sovereign nation based on ever-changing rationales and in violation of international law, kidnaps and tortures that nation's citizens, and then wonders why the world responds with contempt and violence. Meanwhile, those American citizens who protest the actions of their government, including things as beyond the pale as the legalization of torture, are called traitors.

What do all of these seemingly disparate phenomena have in common? According to Morris Berman, they are all indicative of a nation that is rotten to the core, an empire on the verge of collapse, and they are all the consequences of the laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog, me-first-and-devil-take-the-hindmost ethos that has permeated American culture since it's inception.

Ironically, this ethos is the "shadow side" as it were of those ideals that once made the United States great in the eyes of the world: its traditions of challenging monarchic authority and of guaranteeing individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Berman argues that this shadow side undermined any sense of community or commons and paved the way for a contemporary society in which financial success is the sole standard of achievement. Without any higher goals or deeper virtues than winning at any cost, American success has been surprisingly and shockingly empty. As well, because this ethos of empty consumerism has been predicated upon the maintenance of global inequities through militarism, much of the world (especially the so-called Third World) has grown to see the US as a belligerent Goliath bent on global domination, instead of as the self-righteous David of our national fantasies. The sense of false egalitarianism that pervades our culture (but that is opposed to any redistribution of wealth) means that being smart is shameful, that ignorance is endemic, and that we gleefully re-elect a moron as President because he doesn't threaten our own collective intellectual shortcomings. Our fascination with technology as a panacea has also contributed to the breakdown in civil society at home (e.g., the cell phone anecdote above) and to our lack of concern for those abroad (e.g., seeing smart bombs as somehow "benevolent" weapons). Finally Berman also discusses in some detail specific cases of US intervention in Iran, Iraq, and in the affairs of the Palestinians and their unintended but inevitable consequences in the blowback of 9/11 and the subsequent "War on Terror."

The picture he paints is not a pretty one and is one that most Americans will reject out of hand, precisely because, I think, it is so accurate. Like Dorian Gray, we are going to want to keep our true picture hidden from ourselves as long as we can, but unlike that famous literary monster, our false image (in this case, of global benefactor) no longer convinces those in the rest of the world. Contrary to what many of the reviewers here would have you believe, he also does not romanticize the other modes of social and economic organization that the 20th and 21st centuries have seen, including tribal fundamentalism, suffocating collectivism, or state communism, seeing in them situations that are as pernicious, if not more so, than the televoid consumerism the US seeks to export to every swath of land on the globe.

Most of the one- and two-star reviews of this book are indicative of the very trends that Berman addresses. They reduce his nuanced musings to the tired right-wing tropes of a "liberal elite" that "blames America," insist that the global US military presence is protecting the world from "someone else's" imperial schemes instead of being prima facie evidence of our own global domination, and even fall back on our military supremacy as some kind of litmus test for how civilized we are. As Berman notes throughout the book, we Americans have little patience for nuance and alternative perspectives, and have an uncanny ability to see the world in precisely upside-down terms.

Which is not to say that the book's critics are entirely mistaken; _Dark Ages America_ is far from flawless. His arguments at times draw on his own gut reactions to things, rather than on solid evidence (not necessarily a bad thing, but something that contradicts his thesis that we need to privilege reason over faith). As well, his prose is often long-winded, and the evidence he musters is sometimes self-contradictory (why, for example, does the laissez-faire, me-first ethos manifest in terms of a Christianist hive mind?). Finally, he overlooks the other converging catastrophes that we seem to be facing in the next century---global warming, peak oil, the total collapse of seafood stocks---and how these relate to the end of American empire. The value of the book far outweighs these relatively minor criticisms, though.

And, alas, Berman does not provide simple solutions, like "rocking the vote" or "electing Democrats," which would be the approach of traditional liberals who think that, with some tinkering, the system can be saved. He leaves the reader left scratching her head, wondering what, if anything, she can do to halt this juggernaut, and this has left him open to charges of being a pessimist. Instead I feel that he is guardedly optimistic about humanity's overall ability to survive and adapt. As he says in conclusion (p. 327),

"My own belief is that there is no warding off the Dark Age; all the evidence points in that direction. But you can certainly do your best to keep it out of your head, which is a contribution of a sort. What is thus called for is long-term study and thought, in an effort to come up with a serious alternative to global bourgeois democracy---blueprints for a better time, perhaps, and for another place."

In other words, those who already suspect that something is profoundly wrong need to be regularly reminded that their resistance to the "colonization of the imagination" is worthwhile and sane. For that reason alone, this book is profoundly important and should be read by anyone, left, right, or center, who considers themselves a radical (in the original sense of returning to the "root" of the problem in order to work out solutions).

(This review was originally written on November 28, 2006.)