Pierre Barbet's "A Problem in Bionics" (short story, detective)

A group of scientists are working on a bunch of green technologies inspired by the workings of animals & insects. To get noticed by a wider audience, they move to live on an island using only the green tech - no petroleum, no CO2, ... The idea is to demonstrate that living in an environmentally sane way is possible.

But a thief among them has been selling the technology to unscrupulous elements outside, who intend to patent them; hence hinder their widespread adoption.

So a detective is hired to catch the thief...

Notes.

I'm not convinced of the ending. I've never seen a microfilm, but can you attach one to a wing of a butterfly & have the poor thing still fly?

Collected in.

1. Donald A Wollheim (ed)'s "The Best from the Rest of the World: European Science Fiction".

Fact sheet.

First published: Horizons du Fantastique (French), sometime in 1974. This post is based on an English translation by Stanley Hochman included in Wollheim's anthology.
Rating: B.

Sean McMullen's "The Precedent" (novelette, environmental dystopia, free): "Victims" of global warming witch-hunt its culprits

It's an easy read, but is very dark. Modeled after any number of class-persecutions in history.

Story summary.

In the year 2035, the world has turned green, everyone born before 2000 is automatically a "climate criminal", those born after the tipping year are the "victims" & current rulers. To keep their conscience clear, the current rulers don't summarily execute the older folk; they instead hold monkey courts that sentence most to death with trials sometimes lasting just a minute.

This story is narrated by Dr Jason Hall, an 80 year old climatologist facing such a court. Through his eyes, we will see the horror of concentration camps. He will be the first individual pardoned by such a court, but will discover that this is not a happy outcome...

Fact sheet.

First published: F&SF, July/August 2010.
Download full text from Suvudu.
Caution: Recent F&SF fiction tends to be online only for a couple of months. Save it to a local file if you want to read it later.
Rating: B.

Bud Sparhawk's "Encounter in a Yellow Wood" (short story, free): There's a human problem with long gestation projects...

This is of a class of stories that speculate about human issues in very long gestation projects - so long that the people who slog will not be the beneficiaries; benefits will go to a future generation. Among the best reads of the class is Walter M Miller's "Crucifixus Etiam".

Note: There is a publisher's regret notice with the online copy of this story (linked below) at Analog - that printed version had errors & that this online version is clean. Only, the online version has atrocious paragraph spacing (at least in my Firefox) & totally wrong page title!

Story summary.

Two technological options, each spanning decades, to render cities' garbage dumps harmless: one involves repeated planting/cutting of genetically modified trees; other is faster but doesn't involve any tree planting & leaves the site unusable till the project is over. Which is a better option?

This story mostly focuses on the former, where the locals have come to love the intermediate woods & would rather not have the site completely cleaned up because this will make the site unusable to community during intervening years.

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, March 2010.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Bud Sparhawk.

Some nightmare pictures of birds caught in BP's current oil spill

Photo gallery at Boston Globe. [via Boing Boing]

Paolo Bacigalupi on environment

A very moving example in this introduction to his new novel, "Ship Breaker", at John Scalzi's blog.

Nearly the same example had cropped up last year during a discussion of Indian government's budget deficit. Applies even more to environment.

Related: Stories of Paolo Bacigalupi.

Next generation lawn mowers!

From Google Blog: "in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint", "More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing."

Related.

1. Google in fiction.
2. Howard L Myers' "Questor" (download): Uplifted goats hope to inherit earth, now that man has left for the stars!
   

Iva Koevska's "It Feels Like" (flash fiction, environment, free)

Undesirable side-effects of the ultimate air conditioner - where the whole earth is running a kind of AC all the time...

Fact sheet.

First published: 365tomorrows, 4 December 2009.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.

Karl Schroeder & Tobias S Buckell's "Mitigation" (short story, environment): When a robbery did some good too!

"Svalbard seed vault", a library of world's plant seeds intended as defense against rapidly diminishing biodiversity, is the ultimate gold mine for folks kept out of genetic engineering business by gene patent hoarders.

A group of armed terrorists, backed by a national government, is planning on seizing the Svalbard Vault - either to threaten the governments to loosen patent controls, or to sequence rare seeds themselves. A mafia group is in knowledge of this terror plan, but is barely ahead.

Chauncie St Christie is the mafia's man - to get inside the vault, sequence a list of rare seeds (destroying seeds in the process), then transmit the resulting data wirelessly in return for good money. Things get complicated, of course, because he needs the green activist River Balleny's help entering the vault & because terrorists reach a bit before mafia planned for.

But all ends well... including for humanity, though not for terrorists.

Collected in.

1. David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (Ed)'s "Year's Best SF 14" (2009).

Fact sheet.

First published: Lou Anders (Ed)'s "Fast Forward Two" (2008).
Rating: A.
Added to my "best of the year 2008" list.
Related: Green fiction.

Murray Leinster's "The Mad Planet" (novelette, adventure, free): Beginning of the Man's return to sentience after a major environmental disaster

Among the best known stories of Leinster, & the first in a series of 3. The fix up novel, The Forgotten Planet, combines the 3 stories, moves the location away from earth, & has a silly ending. But this post is about the original & the best known story of the lot.

Story summary.

For unknown reasons, earth's interior began spewing carbon dioxide. By the time things settled down, earth had returned to carboniferous era - low oxygen, lot of carbon dioxide in atmosphere.

30,000 years later, most humans, animals & plants are dead. This is a world dominated by giant fungi & insects - insects far more dangerous than the worst mammals we know. Some tiny isolated tribes of what were once human survive; but they're physically transformed beyond recognition, have lost not only all technology including fire making but most language & indeed sentience. This is the story of man's beginning of the return to sentience & hopefully greater things.

20 year old Burl, the hero of this story & the series, is out to hunt something special to impress Saya, the girl of his tribe he has a soft spot for. The hunt will turn into a major adventure, & by the time he returns several days later, he will be a different man.

Quotes.

1. "He was ignorant of fire, metals, or the uses of stone and wood. A single garment covered him. His language was a meager group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying no abstractions and few concrete things."
2. "Only a man attempting to advance in the scale of civilization tries to explain everything. A savage or child is content to observe without comment, unless he repeats legends from wise folk possessed by the itch of knowledge."
3. "Even in the high civilization of ages before, few men had really used their brains. The great majority had depended on machines and leaders to think for them."
4. "There is something strangely daunting in the actions of an insect. It moves so directly, with uncanny precision, utterly indifferent to anything but the end in view. Cannibalism is almost universal. The paralysis of prey, so it remains alive and fresh--though in agony--for weeks on end, is commonplace. The eating piecemeal of still-living victims is a matter of course.
   
   Absolute mercilessness, utter callousness, incredible inhumanity beyond anything in the animal world is the way of insects. And these vast cruelties are performed by armored, machinelike creatures with an abstraction and a routine air that suggests a horrible Nature behind them all."
5. "30,000 years of savagery had not lessened Saya's femininity. She became aware that Burl was her slave, that these wonderful things he wore and had done meant nothing if she did not approve."

Fact sheet.

First published: The Argosy, 12 June 1920.
Rating: A.
Download full text from The Wondersmith.
Related: Stories of Murray Leinster.

Italo Calvino's "The Daughters of the Moon" (short story, fantasy, consumerism, free)

Reason for this post is the source: genre fiction is not too common at The New Yorker; I would not have posted it otherwise. This story didn't work for me - but then most fantasy fiction doesn't work for me. Your take will likely vary if you like fantasy.

Story summary.

On a parallel earth that is too similar to ours, consumerism is rampant: people discarding used products too quickly & going for new ones.

Now the moon of this world has withered too. It has lost mass, orbit, & is on its way down to earth. But likely holocaust is not the issue - issue is the ugly sight in the skies!

On a certain day, when moon is hanging low in the skies, it seems to have a group of naked girl worshipers in New York City who seem to be guiding it to gently land somewhere. But "authorities" have other ideas. They pick it up out of skies with a huge crane & dump it in a garbage yard to rot!

Various things happen next day, resulting in both moon & earth magically reinventing themselves as a new green worlds. In an instant, earth's cities die & are taken over by vegetation, & moon becomes habitable & rises up in the skies to occupy it normal perch!

Fact sheet.

First published: 1968 (where?). Translation from original Italian by Martin McLaughlin, & this English translation reprinted in The New Yorker, 23 February 2009.
Rating: C.
Download full text of English translation.
Related: Fiction about environment, consumerism, or moon.

Anil Aggarwal's "The Mystery of the Burnt Bride" (short story, environment, free): Could air pollution be affecting human evolution?

A much better variation of author's "The Mystery of the Drowned Man".

Some years back, there were two events in India that attracted a lot of media attention:

1. A series of murders - mostly in the North - of young recently married women. Suspects were in-laws. Cause - dowry. And with similar methods of killing - a staged fire accident in kitchen. Over the years, I've sometimes heard of convictions, but they inevitably get less media attention than gruesome murders.
2. Some citizen groups in Delhi took the government to courts over the quality of air in the city. I doubt Delhi still has great air quality, but virtually all (half-hearted) air quality norms of municipal corporations in India happened after this. Or such is the impression I'm carrying.

I don't recall the dates of the two events, but I've a feeling both must have been current events at the time this story was written - which would place them sometime in mid-1990s. Both have influenced the plot.

Story makes a reference to a law that in certain crimes, it's accused who has to show innocence in court rather than prosecution proving his guilt. I'm no lawyer, but I think the author is extending imagination here. Even the anti-terror laws discussed in parliament in the wake of Bombay terror attacks in November 2008 threw out proposals that would have placed the onus of proving innocence on accused; it's always prosecution's job. Of course, there are cases where cops are biased.

Story summary.

Sarita, a recently married woman, has died in a fire accident in kitchen at home, & the police officer has formed the opinion that it's a dowry murder.

Doctor doing the postmortem (narrator) has to find out weather she was dead at the time she came into contact with fire - which will be conclusive proof of murder. Or if she was still alive at the time, which kind of leaves the possibility of a genuine accident open.

Normally a straight-forward autopsy procedure, some events complicate it. But result is a new medical discovery - the dead woman was carrying a genetic mutation that made her better cope with carbon monoxide pollution in the air.

Fact sheet.

First published: Spandan, 1996-97.
Rating: A.
Download full text from author's website.
Related: Stories of Anil Aggarwal.

Susan Partridge's "The Rape Of Io" (flash fiction, science fiction, free)

Story of colonization & annexation of others' territory retold - symbolically.

Jupiter's moon Io is inhabited with natives used to hot & volcanic local environment. Until earthmen decide they want to sell to natives & exploit their mines. Eventually, Io is annexed as a new state of US "to protect newly developed areas from indiscriminate exploitation".

A while later, tinkering with environment is so severe - everyone needed evacuation to earth. Now "Ionians" also live on earth - their own world uninhabitable.

Fact sheet.

First published: AntipodeanSF, #109 (June/July 2007).
Rating: B
Download full text.

END.

Jane Smiley's "Paradigm Shift" (short story, science fiction, humor): Going green can spice up your married life!

This amusing story doesn't describe new technology. It's about human issues - an individual's trials when trying to become environment friendly at home - using currently available technology. I suppose the story is triggered by recent fuel price hikes - it's mostly about saving energy.

Indians among the audience will find some of the issues frivolous (because of hot sticky weather, & per capita consumption far below many other places), others impossibly expensive - but look at the overall message, please. And it's an interesting story even if you don't want to take the message.

Skip it if explicit talk of sex bothers you.

Story summary.

Mary Lou Harris-DeLong has decided to go green. Story is mostly about enrolling her husband, Dave, in various projects that will cut down her household's energy consumption.

Dave normally doesn't care. But she has worked out an incentive - sex, & playfulness related to it. By the time they are done, they would also have shed many kilos - sex can be energy consuming! And they are closer together - sex can be a relationship tonic!

Some of the projects include:

1. Energy saving light bulbs. Far more expensive than normal (in India at least) - reason they have low penetration here.
2. Wear cloths longer before washing. Many Indian will laugh at it, or at least feel uncomfortable with the idea - you mean in this dusty, hot & humid environment?
3. Cut down on water usage: don't leave tap open when not needed during toothbrushing; cut down on water consumed when bathing.
4. One shower a day if you take two. Author gives an interesting solution: if you use bathtub & hot water, how about joint husband/wife showers! Can have sex there too!
5. Bunch errands together; be more organized about stocking up.
6. Take bus, bicycle, walk a mile.
7. Solar panels - feed electricity to grid when possible. How I wish they were cheap enough? I get so much sunlight, & it not only goes waste but actually increases electricity bills in this hot weather!
8. LED lights. Only homes I've seen them used in Bombay are where they are installed to make a fashion statement. Very low energy consumption, but sooo expensive!

OK - Indians will see government propaganda here. But that is because we are fed so much of it - we stop listening out of sheer boredom.

There are actually funny reasons I see change happening. A relative, e.g., switched most lighting fixtures to energy efficient but expensive ones last year because the town he lives in has very bad electricity quality - newer gadgets can withstand wild voltage fluctuations better! A friend recently installed a lot of colorful LEDs as part of "mood lighting" - so at least part of the evening, it's only mood lighting that is lit!

Fact sheet.

First published: (US) Playboy, June 2008.
Rating: A
Added to my best of the year 2008 list.