Over the past few months Taiwan-based journalist Dan Bloom has become more and more concerned with climate-change issues, notably the prospect of humanity retreating to new cities built in the polar regions to escape rising temperatures elsewhere. So when he strongly urged me to read a new novel, published online and set in an environmentally devastated future, I felt duty-bound to take a look.
E-books are the modern version of self-publishing. Contrary to what many choose to think, this is an honorable way of issuing works, and one with a long history. William Blake printed and colored his own books, Shelley had pamphlets privately printed and then tried to hand them out to passing citizens, and Ronald Firbank self-published all his novels, now considered by many as classics, in the 1920s. Even James Joyce’s Ulysses was self-published in a way — brought out by a friend who ran a Paris bookshop rather than by an established publishing house.
Hamish MacDonald stands in this august tradition, writing novels and issuing them online, but also hand-printing and binding them in his own workshop. This combination of the newest and one of the oldest technologies feels like the true mark of a dedicated indie publisher.
Finitude is set at an unspecified time in the future. Two men, Jeremy and Victor, are heading for somewhere called Iktyault in search of Jeremy’s parents. On the road they encounter other travelers, plus whole societies, that have responded in different ways to the horrors brought on or threatened by climate change. “Terraists” roam the land, frozen ground is thawing and releasing methane that’s waiting to ignite, there are Non-Reproduction Benefits, compressed air cars (now obsolete), something intended to be edible called Mete (“no amount of cooking was going to make it better”), a city of the blind, a sea of plastic, gangs, looting and, needless to say, wars over resources.
This is essentially a novel of ideas. None of the characters is particularly memorable, and you wouldn’t lose much sleep if one of the major players disappeared in a flash of light — an ever-present possibility. But the ideas are strong — sometimes ingenious, but more often just humane. Others had “spent the wealth of the world,” says a warlord, Tydial Lupercus, in a memorable phrase; once a farmer, he began to move north as his topsoil turned to dust. Disaster struck because people debated the science of the situation rather than simply caring for the planet, argues another. And carbon trading was intended to help poorer nations, but when one of them didn’t play ball the world government (the “International Coalition”) simply invaded, and so on.
There’s some grim humor, too. The pair arrive at one destination and a character offers a toast to “the ultimate survivors.” Jeremy, however, “wasn’t sure if he was referring to them or the cockroaches.” And the permafrost is thawing, the ice in the oceans melting, and if the trapped methane suddenly erupts the planet is going to become “a big, lifeless rock.” To which a character replies: “Suddenly the fact that I’m feeling hungry doesn’t seem so important.”
The government and its efforts are viewed with considerable skepticism. It had announced a “VC (Victory over the Climate) Day,” and was now planning to launch a rocket to block the sun’s rays and so reduce the Earth’s temperature. Little goes according to plan, however. Yet the book ends on a slightly optimistic note, with any final collapse at least temporarily delayed, and the now reunited family setting off by boat towards some sort of viable future. The author doesn’t give many credible grounds for their optimism — someone mentions the possibility of a 50-year reprieve — and you feel that this ending was adopted in preference to a bleak one of total collapse, or an ecological equivalent to Orwell’s Room 101.
One curiosity is that there’s a casually-treated gay element in the story. Maybe the lack of comment by other characters is meant to represent a likely characteristic of society in general in the future. Certainly it’s never explained in any other terms.
Finitude stands in the tradition of dystopian novels like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. These offered visions of nightmarish futures with the implicit message that this was how things might turn out if we didn’t take action to change our ways. Huxley warned of eugenics, or tampering with the genes of our descendents, and Orwell of the totalitarianism that was inseparable, as he saw it, from communism. In the place of these fears, Finitude offers unchecked global warming, the danger almost everyone is now focusing on. The strange thing is that we haven’t been deluged with novels on this theme already.
This book reads more like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy than the science fiction it would have been classified as 10 years ago. Science fiction is supposed to deal with future events that are, from a rational viewpoint, never likely to happen. Finitude, by contrast, feels more like ecological prophecy.
This is a coherent, lively and fast-moving attempt to put a widely feared future into imaginative, fictional form. It’s all the more attractive for being available free of charge online for prospective
readers to sample at their leisure. All this author’s novels are available in a format that can be downloaded to e-book readers at hamishmacdonald.com/novels/novels.html. Finitude can also be read online at hamishmacdonald.com/novels/novels/finitude.html, and hand-bound copies ordered from the home page of the same Web site.
The Taipei Times last week reported that the rising share of seniors in the population is reshaping the nation’s housing markets. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, about 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident. H&B Realty chief researcher Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨), quoted in the article, said that there is rising demand for elderly-friendly housing, including units with elevators, barrier-free layouts and proximity to healthcare services. Hsu and others cited in the article highlighted the changing family residential dynamics, as children no longer live with parents,
It is jarring how differently Taiwan’s politics is portrayed in the international press compared to the local Chinese-language press. Viewed from abroad, Taiwan is seen as a geopolitical hotspot, or “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” as the Economist once blazoned across their cover. Meanwhile, tasked with facing down those existential threats, Taiwan’s leaders are dying their hair pink. These include former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), among others. They are demonstrating what big fans they are of South Korean K-pop sensations Blackpink ahead of their concerts this weekend in Kaohsiung.
Oct 20 to Oct 26 After a day of fighting, the Japanese Army’s Second Division was resting when a curious delegation of two Scotsmen and 19 Taiwanese approached their camp. It was Oct. 20, 1895, and the troops had reached Taiye Village (太爺庄) in today’s Hunei District (湖內), Kaohsiung, just 10km away from their final target of Tainan. Led by Presbyterian missionaries Thomas Barclay and Duncan Ferguson, the group informed the Japanese that resistance leader Liu Yung-fu (劉永福) had fled to China the previous night, leaving his Black Flag Army fighters behind and the city in chaos. On behalf of the
I was 10 when I read an article in the local paper about the Air Guitar World Championships, which take place every year in my home town of Oulu, Finland. My parents had helped out at the very first contest back in 1996 — my mum gave out fliers, my dad sorted the music. Since then, national championships have been held all across the world, with the winners assembling in Oulu every summer. At the time, I asked my parents if I could compete. At first they were hesitant; the event was in a bar, and there would be a lot
RSS