David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

About the Story

This story was originally written for the “Imagine 2200” contest at Grist Magazine, where it didn’t quite make the cut, but I’m very pleased to see it published in Clarkesworld. The brief for the contest was “to imagine a future in which solutions to the climate crisis flourish and help bring about radical improvements to our world.”

The contest organizers offered plenty of links to articles about climate change, its consequences, and efforts to mitigate it. One article that was particularly interesting to me discussed how the Marshall Islands, with dozens of coral atolls sitting just a few feet above sea level, is strategizing to survive sea-level rise and drought. Another discussed how Puerto Rico has begun using batteries connected to residents’ rooftop solar panels to provide backup power for its grid, helping prevent blackouts and offering an alternative to fossil fuel-burning peaker plants.

Putting these ideas together, I came up with the notion of a semi-flooded city in which individuals and individual houses all play a role in keeping the community safe and alive. There is no central power plant; all the houses have solar cells and batteries and the total capacity of the community is sufficient to support the whole community. There is no central government; people mostly just live their best lives and, when larger problems appear, they form themselves into ad-hoc committees to address them.

This is an anti-grimdark, optimistic future in which the effects of climate change have arrived and people are coping well. This is the year 2200 and people are different. Culture, language, technology have all changed dramatically (they are as different from us as we are different from people of the year 1800). The effects of climate change are just part of their world… not a disaster, just the environment. The purpose of the story is to show that, in this very changed world, people are still people and life goes on. The climate-change aspect of the story is entirely in the worldbuilding, which is revealed through the people’s actions, language, and priorities; the plot concerns the characters’ personal problems, which are derived from and affect the worldbuilding (as I’ve repeatedly discussed in my class “Integrating Character, Plot, and Worldbuilding”).

This is a much more communitarian world than ours. It’s not a feudal or capitalist world in which the average person’s life is dominated by their responsibility to a lord, an employer, or a government (where people labor primarily for the benefit of the authority, and the authority then provides for them… to some extent). This is a world in which the average person’s life is dominated by their shared responsibilities to their neighbors, “neighbors” being broadly defined to extend to the entire planet. People labor for themselves and for their neighbors, and their neighbors provide for them. It’s not even “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs;” it’s “we all live our lives in such a way that we support ourselves and each other.” There’s no needs-testing. If you want a thing, you take it, with the confidence that there will always be another thing for the next person who needs one. And if you have the ability to make a thing, you will make it and leave it where someone who might need it will find it. It’s a Banksian post-scarcity world but without Banksian magic tech. I want to show that this world works because the people make it work.

These people are different from us. Their priorities are not ours. They consider the community first. They treat everyone the way you’d treat your beloved spouse or children, unthinkingly sacrificing when sacrifice is called for but mostly just living their best lives and sharing that best life with the other members of the community. Their attitude toward resources is that there’s plenty to go around. Part of the reason there is always plenty to go around is that people are satisfied with much less in the way of stuff. There’s no need to accumulate stuff when you can be confident that any stuff you might need will always be available when you need it.

The backstory of this world is tragic. People have evolved this communitarian spirit because it was what they needed to do to survive to this point. In effect, capitalism has been beaten out of them. People in the past who tried to accumulate all the stuff for themselves just made themselves targets; they were overwhelmed by the masses of people without stuff, whose greater numbers and powerful need to survive enabled them to beat the accumulators’ technology and weapons, and were killed. In the end the drive to accumulate stuff was selected-out by evolutionary pressure.

I started writing the story with no end in mind, which is unusual for me. In the end I wound up with what might be considered a tragic ending, though I still believe that the story is overall an optimistic one. Even though the ending may be sad for the viewpoint character, the community survives and, from the character’s communitarian point of view, that’s a success.

Excerpt

I looked to the east. Skies were clear, with just a few high cirrus clouds; the trade wind relieved the heat nicely; and the seas were a crystalline blue. But there was a storm coming.

I laid my notebook open on the railing, flipped to the page for weather, scribbled a request with my stylus. Maps and charts updated themselves with the latest satellite data: millibars, kilometers per hour, newton-meters. It was going to be a bad one. I circled the windward shore on the map and wrote another request.

I didn’t like what I got back…