Filed under: futurism, Hot Earth Dreams, Uncategorized | Tags: Hot Earth Dreams
Sorry for not blog posting. We’ve been in the middle of a housing blitz, wherein developers, aided and abetted by the County of San Diego, are trying to ram through a bunch of high end, environmentally damaging housing developments. They realized we’re slow to respond, so they’re trying to inundate us.
Still, I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about Hot Earth Dreams, which was published back at the end of 2015. Before I published it, I seriously considered sending it to a conventional publisher. Aside from its unconventional format and my lack of a guaranteed audience as a Celebrity Scientist, the problem with conventionally publishing was that (given the normal one year lag between submission and appearance) it would have been published in December 2016. While I didn’t think we’d have the politics we currently have, I did think it would disappear in the media noise.
The book’s sold pretty well. While it didn’t sell well enough to immediately make the jump to commercial success, it’s still selling a few copies every quarter, all over the world. The reviews on Amazon have been mostly positive, too, surprisingly for a book on climate. Thanks to all who reviewed it!
Hot Earth Dreams actually changed my life, in good and bad ways. One good (?) way is that it got me seriously engaged in climate activism. I’d originally intended the book more as a source-book for writing cli-fi, but once I had some idea of where we’re likely headed, I couldn’t just sit back and profiteer off it. I had to get involved. One bad (?) change is that I’ve had to deal with anxiety issues ever since. You can’t live with even a speculative apocalypse for three years and not be affected by it. My coping strategy is meditation, and it does help quite a bit.
But I’ll bet you might be wondering what comes next, and the answer is yes, I am planning a substantial rewrite. A lot has changed since I started writing in 2012. Back then, I was struggling, a chapter at a time, to understand what was going on. After sitting with all the information for years, I have a better idea of how all my half-formed ideas fit together. Rather more importantly, there’s been quite a lot of scholarship since the 2012-2015 timeframe I was writing in, and some of it has been quite useful. And then, of course, I got a bunch of comments. Most of them were about typos, but a few were substantive, and all were welcome.
So yes, there will be a new version of Hot Earth Dreams coming out sometime. I hope it will be in 2019, but given politics and life, who knows? It will be a different book, one aimed a bit more at helping people, as well as a source-book for the distant future. Perhaps this gives you something to look forward to?
Filed under: climate change, deep time, disasters, futurism, Hot Earth Dreams, livable future, Speculation | Tags: Hot Earth Dreams, livable future, memory palace
Sad that I missed posting in September. My only defense is that there’s a lot going on in the real world. Not writing for profit, sadly, but dealing with development, environmental impact reports, and policy. And pulling weeds. I’d rather write about something totally different: the idea that civilization collapses and magic comes back. It’s not new, of course. It’s the premise of, oh, the whole Shannara series, a bunch of stories by Fred Saberhagen, even the Dying Earth if you stretch the metaphor until it breaks. You can probably name another dozen stories in a similar vein.
I think I found a different angle, one that might make practical enchantment work in the real world. With, yes, wands, staves, amulets, fetishes, and all sorts of enchanted items and rituals. Continue reading
Filed under: deep time, evolution, Hot Earth Dreams | Tags: deep time, evolution, Hot Earth Dreams
I’m not following the primary journals as much as I used to, so this pop-science article in Quanta on the rate of evolution caught my attention. It claims, apparently on the grounds of several different lines of evidence, that rates of mutation and evolution appear to run faster at short time scales than long time scales. In other words, there’s more genetic and morphological variation over short time spans than over long ones.
Paradoxical? Not quite. Useful? Very. Continue reading
Filed under: climate change, deep time, Hot Earth Dreams, science fiction, Uncategorized, Worldbuilding | Tags: Hot Earth Dreams, Space Opera
I was going to post this on Charlie Stross’ Antipope, where there’s another interesting discussion developing on space opera. So as not to chunk 1,450-plus words onto that message board, I thought I’d post my thoughts over here, for those who are interested.
Filed under: 2016, climate change, Hot Earth Dreams, writing | Tags: climate change, Earth Day 2016, Hot Earth Dreams
Yay, it’s the day after Earth Day. They’ve started signing the Paris climate accord, John Kerry photo-opping by signing with his granddaughter on his lap. Obama will ratify it by executive action, the Senate Republicans will pass something nauseating telling him to stop chasing myths (unless maybe that doesn’t happen?), he’ll veto their attempt to quash him, and…
Well, what happens next? In the real world, I’m not so sure, but after I finish the swarm of stuff I’m working on (I won’t be blogging for the next few weeks), I’ll start figuring out how to revise Hot Earth Dreams. There’s still time to get your comments in, but the window is closing.
Now that it’s the day after Earth Day, what have I learned?
Filed under: Altithermal, climate change, Hot Earth Dreams | Tags: California High Altithermal, climate change, future, Hot Earth Dreams
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading articles (such as this one) about how anomalously warm Alaska and other parts of the Arctic were this winter. Someone even said that if California had warmed half as much as the Arctic did, we’d be in trouble.
Well, we did warm about half as much. By my calculations, San Diego was 9°F/5°C warmer than average for the month of February. This turned what is normally our wettest month into a dry month, with tumbleweeds sprouting in February instead of June, and flowers blooming months early. The heat squelched our El Niño rains, with persistent high pressure forcing the rains north to flood northern California and Oregon. Since I’m not a climatologist, I can’t say authoritatively that this is the new normal, but given the fossil record of rain forests in Oregon and the models of a hot dry So Cal, I’ll go out on a little bitty limb and say it sure could be. But I’m not sure whether we know that we’re in trouble yet.
Still, some rain did get through, so my wife and I took a three day weekend to go up to Death Valley and see the tail end of the “superbloom,” and all I got was this lousy blog idea. Actually, I had fun and got a lot of cool pictures of individual flowers and landscapes as well, but the massive fields of flowers have faded away.
Filed under: Altithermal, climate change, Hot Earth Dreams, Permaculture | Tags: California High Altithermal, climate change, Hot Earth Dreams, Permaculture
This idea seems to be sprouting like a weed in some odd places, including (reportedly) with a group of professors at UC Davis. The general idea, as I’m hearing it second and third-hand, is a conglomeration of “this time it’s different,” “weeds are the new natives, you stupid nativists,” and “It’s now the Anthropocene, so the old rules are out the window.”
Filed under: book, Hot Earth Dreams, news, Uncategorized | Tags: Hot Earth Dreams, news, Peak Oil?
Just another quick entry with two bits of news, one about Hot Earth Dreams, one about carbon production peaking (???) in 2015.
Filed under: Altithermal, climate change, Hot Earth Dreams | Tags: California High Altithermal, climate change, Hot Earth Dreams
This is an ongoing series. Here are links for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.
One of the things that’s hard about talking about California’s future is that, on the one hand, I’d love to predict winners and losers, and I suspect others would be happier if I did. For example, perhaps the Latinos take over. Or possibly the white ranchers will become the feudal lords of the 24th Century. Or the permaculturalists will agroforest the north, and the Rainbow Family will become a model for future communities. Or the resurgent Indian tribes will reassert their ancient hunting and gathering life-styles, aided and abetted by the native plant enthusiasts who help them rewild the hills. Or Guatemalan migrant farm laborers will teach the people of California how to make milpas to take advantage of the increasingly tropical climate, and we’ll all go Mayan or Aztec or Tarahumaran or some such, and grow coffee under the trees instead of pot. Or the tech tycoons will build their shining arcologies on the hills, beacons of sustainable civilization midst a howling wilderness populated by scattered bands of survivalists.
And I could make a story for each of these. But are any of them stories worth telling because it might be true? Or are they just my biases and preconceptions playing out?
Putting the life back in science fiction 