Green Planets (24 page)

Professor Wilson's historical reconstruction depicts the twenty-first century as a world of mass unemployment and social polarization, where rising
sea levels have resulted in the inundation of the city's bay-side suburbs. As it opens, the poor “Swill” already live in high-rise tower blocks, the lower floors of which are progressively submerged; the wealthier “Sweet” live in suburbia on higher ground; the “Fringe” subsist in the zones between. In 2033 a third of Australia has been set aside for Asian population relocation; by 2041 the global population has reached ten billion, and the cost of iceberg tows and desalinization projects has brought the economy close to bankruptcy (29, 21, 30). On his sixth birthday in 2041, Francis and his nine-year-old brother, Teddy, are taken by their parents, Fred and Alison, to see the sea. What they find is a concrete wall “stretching out of sight in both directions.” Francis's mother surprises him, however, by explaining, “This is Elwood and there was a beach here once. I used to paddle here. Then the water came up and there were the storm years and the pollution, and the water became too filthy.” “It must be terrible over there in Newport when the river floods,” she continues. “A high tide covers the ground levels of the tenements” (23–24). In 2044 Fred is laid off and commits suicide, leaving Allie and the boys to move to Newport (30–34). There they meet Billy Kovacs, who becomes Alison's lover, Francis's mentor, and the reader's guide to the social geography of an Australian dystopia.

In adolescence both Teddy and Francis abandon their mother in pursuit of upward social mobility, although both will eventually be returned “home.” For Teddy, mobility comes through formal education, leading to Police Intelligence Recruit School (48–49) and thence to a career as a police intelligence officer. For Francis, it comes by way of an unusual aptitude for mental arithmetic, leading to a career as a “cally that spouts answers without using a key or chip” (57), for illicit business deals. Each acquires an appropriate sponsor: for Teddy, “Nick” Nikopoulos, a captain in Police Intelligence (113); for Francis, Mrs. Nola Parkes, the owner of a small import-export firm, who, after the collapse of the money economy, directs the state sub-department performing essentially the same function (72). Alison and the boys tell their own stories, Nikopoulos and Parkes retell the stories from different vantage points, and eventually these are all contextualized by Derrick, a senior state official with a quite literal power of life or death over the other characters (291). “Why don't you all go home?” he tells them. “We're finished here” (301).

The novel is at its most compelling in its representations of the everyday horror of life in the drowning towers, and of the sheer ferocity of status consciousness within a class structure mutating into a caste system. Both are recurrent motifs in both the frame and core narratives, although in the latter they
invariably prove more telling because more experientially grounded. There is a terrible poignancy, for example, to Francis's diary entries for February 11, 2056: “Five years back in the Fringe and resigned to it. Not reconciled, never that. What a hopeless, helpless lot the Swill are” (306). And March 22, 2057: “Three times this month the water has raced through the house. Sea water, salt and cold. We pay now for our great-grandparents' refusal to admit that tomorrow would eventually come” (306–7).

In the novel's final subplot, Captain Nikopoulos, Billy Kovacs, and Teddy discover that Mrs. Parkes and Francis are unwittingly involved in a state-sponsored conspiracy to “cull” the Swill, by means of a highly addictive “chewey” designed to produce infertility. “A State that strikes its own,” Nola Parkes protests, “at random, for experiment, is past hope” (303). Arthur Derrick's response is directed at Turner's twentieth-century readers as much as at Parkes herself: “Nola, idealism was for the last century, when there was still time … we're down to more primitive needs. The sea will rise, the cities will grind to a halt and the people will desert them…. The State has no time to concern itself with moral quibbles” (304).

THE FUTURE AND THE FUTUROLOGY

The debates among the Autumn People in the frame narrative are clearly designed to make meaningful sense of the Greenhouse Culture. For Marin, its meaning is straightforward and simple: “They were wicked—they … ruined the world for all who came after … they
denied
history” (6). Lenna, however, conceives of their distant ancestors more sympathetically, as victims of the unintended consequences of their own collective action. “In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” she tells Andra, “the entire planet stood with its fingers plugging dykes of its own creation until the sea washed over their muddled status quo. Literally” (13). Andra's own underlying response is incomprehension. Attempting to grapple with the social inequalities of the Greenhouse era, he can only ask: “
How did this division arise? Why no revolution?
” (16). Lenna suggests the answer might lie in the “rise of the Tower Bosses” to run “small states within the State.” This allowed the poor “a measure of contentment,” she explains, “by letting them run their own affairs.” Moreover, she continues, the Political Security executive was also able “to convince the Tower Bosses that only a condition of status quo could preserve a collapsing civilization” (93). Ultimately, however, Andra remains as uncomprehending as ever and, after “three years and a dozen attempts,” abandons his play (315).

A primary effect of this frame narrative is to blunt the force of dystopian inevitability driving the core narrative. “We're very well equipped to endure a million years of cold,” Lenna tells Andra…. We have knowledge and we have the Forward Planning Centres. We'll make the change smoothly” (12–13). A secondary effect, however, is to suggest how little control humanity can actually exercise over its destiny. “It is history that makes
us
,” Andra observes in his closing letter to Lenna. “The Greenhouse years should have shown that plainly; the Long Winter will render it inescapable” (315). Much the same is true of the frame within the frame when it moves forward into the late 2050s. For here we learn how Teddy, Nikopoulos, and Kovacs, and eventually even Francis and Derrick, become involved in an attempt by the “New Men” to organize the Swill in preparation “for the dark years coming” (310). The crisis will not be averted, we know from the thirty-first century, but “little human glimpses
do
help,” Lenna will conclude, “if only in confirming our confidence in steadfast courage” (316).

The least persuasive aspect of the novel is in its understanding of how the crisis developed. In the “Postscript” Turner identifies six “major matters” of futurological concern: population growth, food shortage, mass unemployment, financial collapse, nuclear war, and the greenhouse effect, only one of which—nuclear war—fails to feature in the novel, because it seemed to him increasingly unlikely in any foreseeable future (98, 317–18). Empirically, Turner's predictions have often proven surprisingly close to the mark. In the novel, world population reaches ten billion during the early 2040s (21); according to the 2010 biennial revision of the United Nations
World Population Prospects
, it will reach between 8 billion (low projection) and 10.5 billion (high projection) by 2050.
²⁰
In the novel, “two-thirds of the world starves” by 2045 (158). This might have seemed hopelessly pessimistic during the 1980s and 1990s, when world hunger rates were persistently trending downward. But the numbers of hungry people increased from 825 million people in 1995–97 to 857 million in 2000–2002, 873 million in 2004–6, and were projected to reach a historic high of 1.02 billion, or a sixth of the world's population, by the end of the decade.
²¹

In the novel, the Australian and world unemployment rate has reached 90 percent by 2041 (25). Again, this must have seemed an extraordinarily gloomy prognosis on the book's first publication, as indeed it still is for Australia, where the unemployment rate was as low as 5.4 percent early in 2013.
²²
But the situation is very different across much of the European Union, where Spain has an unemployment rate of 27.2 percent, Greece 27 percent, Portugal 17.7 percent, Ireland 14.7 percent, and France 10.7 percent.
²³
Moreover, youth unemployment rates are higher still: in the fourth quarter of 2012, the figure was 57.9 percent
for Greece, 55.2 percent for Spain, 38.4 percent for Portugal, 36.9 percent for Italy, 29.4 percent for Ireland, 25.4 percent for France, and 20.7 percent for the United Kingdom.
²⁴

In the novel, the financial crisis that bespeaks the collapse of the international monetary system comes in the 2040s; in reality, something like it almost certainly began during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–12. In the novel, there have been no nuclear wars, but the “armaments factories” nonetheless continue “belching out weapons … for a war nobody dared start … and an industry nobody dared stop” (71); in reality, we have indeed been spared nuclear war, but nonetheless, as of January 2011, eight states possessed between them about 20,530 nuclear warheads, 5,000 ready for use and 2,000 on high operational alert.
²⁵
In the novel, average temperatures have risen by 4½ degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) and sea levels by 30 centimeters (almost 12 inches) between 1990 and 2041 (74–75); the current projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are less dramatic, pointing to temperature increases of between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11.5 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1980–99 and 2090–99 and rises in sea level of between 18 and 59 centimeters (7–23 inches).
²⁶
But there is near-consensus among climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect and also strong evidence that recent increases in extreme weather events, such as heat waves and flooding, are related to climate change.
²⁷
The experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 tends to confirm these suspicions.

Nonetheless, neither Turner nor his characters have any sense of which, if any, of these processes is the driver of the catastrophic crisis that overcame the Greenhouse Culture. One suspects his own answer might well have been essentially Malthusian. Mine, by contrast, would be Marxian; that is, that all six—including the nuclear arms race, if not nuclear war itself—are likely outcomes, within a world of finite resources, of any system of unregulated competitive capital accumulation akin to that sketched in
The Communist Manifesto
and analyzed in detail in
Capital
.
²⁸
No doubt, the days are long gone when one could take a creative writer to task simply for being insufficiently Marxist. One might, however, still object to the implausibility of a thousand years of hindsight failing to provide the history profession with any generally accepted account of so significant an event as the collapse of an entire social order.

This isn't entirely fair: Professor Wilson has, in fact, written a five-thousand-page
Preliminary Survey of Factors Affecting the Collapse of the Greenhouse Culture
in Australia
(13). But she decides to offer Andra her fictionalized account because Andra lacks the “general historical and technical grounding” necessary to understand the longer work (14). Three years later he still appears not to have read her
Survey
. So we do not know what, ultimately, drove the system into crisis. We do, however, know how Turner thought it could best be avoided—that is, by rational planning based on scientific advice. The epigraph to the novel, repeated in the “Postscript,” is taken from Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the Australian virologist, immunologist, and public policy activist, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960: “We must plan for five years ahead and twenty years and a hundred years” (317). Lenna Wilson gives Andra Andrasson essentially cognate advice: “Keep up as well as you can with the scientific information and you could be able to think usefully if the time for action should arrive. Otherwise, live as suits you. Be like the Swill, aware but unworried” (99).

The obvious question to ask is why, when faced with the incontrovertible evidence of impending catastrophe, not only the Swill, but also the Sweet, the Fringers, and the state, should have failed to plan adequately. The novel is clear that science had indeed sounded warnings. “As I understand it,” Andra observes to Lenna, “
they
knew what was coming…. Yet they did nothing about it.” “They fell into destruction,” she replies, “because they
could
do nothing about it; they had started a sequence which had to run its course in unbalancing the climate” (13). What neither she nor Turner adequately explain, however, is
why
they were unable to do anything about it, why they had started this sequence, and why it had to run its course. Logically, the answer can only be that some social power prevented them from acting on the scientific advice.

Yet Turner is at pains to insist that his fictional Australian elites were essentially well motivated. As Marin tells Andra, “The idea was not oppression but preservation. The Sweet, educated and by and large the most competent sector of the population … were necessary to administer the State. With the collapse of trade and … industry the Swill became a burden on the economy, easier and cheaper to support if … concentrated into small areas” (91). When Derrick, the most senior representative of Turner's Australian state, defends the cull to Nola, he does so in similarly benevolent terms: “If there has to be a cull—and you know damned well that sooner or later there has to be—let's at least learn to do it with a minimum of suffering for the culled” (297). How could an elite so well educated, so competent, so concerned to minimize suffering—in short, so much like the one Macfarlane Burnet had hoped for—have failed to prevent such preventable catastrophe? The answer must be that it, in turn, had been
confronted by social powers more powerful and also less rational than itself. No doubt, there are a range of possible candidates available in the real world, but none within the novel. The competition between global capitalist corporations fits the bill rather nicely, however, as explanation for this peculiar combination of historically unprecedented power with historically unprecedented irrationality.