Water is running dry, the birds stopped singing, ice is melting, and we keep doing business as usual: lately, pretty much every signal that could light up to warn us that the worse could happen did actually lit up to tell us that the worse was happening.
There is a trendy word in France which comes to everyone’s mouth these days: collapsology. This new field of studies tries to understand how our industrial world is driving to its own doom, and what can be done in order to prevent our future to go all wrong. I would like, here, to try and explore both the way the world is going adrift, and what can be done, through two novels that I read quite a while ago, and that offer an unexpected echo of our times. That would be a sort of guide to those who are still haunted by French president Jacques Chirac’s famous quote : “Notre maison brûle” (our house is burning).
First things first : is our world burning ? According to a series of essays published recently, there is no doubt about that : Comment tout peut s’effondrer, by Pablo Servigne & Raphaël Stevens (2015), was the cornerstone that laid the foundation for a critical theory of the end of the world. The idea of an end of the world has always been quite seducing: the first myths already convey one form of apocalypse or another, and millenarian movements used long ago all kinds of fears to control a fistful of credulous people. Collapsology doesn’t want to be frightening: its purpose is to cross many analysis to prove that there are so many potential crises that one of them will necessarily burst one day — and that it will lead to a series of other crises. As such, the world is not going to end. Rather, it is the world as we know it whose days are counted.
I have read a few years ago a sci-fi novel whose plot had raised my interest: in Spin (2005, Hugo Award 2006), Robert Charles Wilson imagines that the Earth enters a time bubble. One minute on Earth corresponds to many years for the rest of the universe. As a consequence, the Sun grows at an unprecedented pace, causing a global warming — and it will soon become so big that it will explode, and destroy the planet. Nobody knows how long remains before the disaster: many months, some years or a few decades? The end of the world is announced, but nobody knows when it is going to happen. The (vast) question explored by Wilson here is: what would happen to a society that is facing the certainty of its doom? Will it burn, will there be plunder and rape, fire and despair?
Going against the tide, Robert Charles Wilson focuses on narrating the life of a guy, Tyler Dupree, who was lying on a turf, looking at the night sky, the day the stars disappeared. Tyler Dupree was a normal boy before that night, and, well, he keeps being a normal boy the days after. The media talk about the disappearance of the stars, of strange meteorological events, but his daily routine goes on: he keeps on playing with his best friend, Jason Lawson, and with his best friend’s sister, Diane Lawson, on who he has a crush. And while he keeps playing with his friends, everyone keeps on doing business as usual, all the same: politicians try to govern the people, the people tries to make a living, and there is no sign of an apocalypse for years. Tyler Dupree grows up, goes to high schools and has love stories — and we read about his life with great interest. Meanwhile, the characters sometimes mention, as if it was normal, that roads are becoming dangerous because of plunders: the description of the chaos that announces the end of the world doesn’t go beyond that point.
What I find interesting in this example is that it shows how a society which is sure that it is going heads first to a catastrophe can keep acting natural. After all, what can we do?
Collapsology precisely tries to explore what we can do. There would be no point, after all, to only foretell major changes without trying to have an impact on them. But instead of wasting effort on saving our world, Pablo Servigne, one of collapsology’s most eminent thinkers in France, tries to think about how we can prepare the new world to be built quickly, and in the best way. He explores the many alternatives —he insists on not calling them “solutions”, for they are not exactly solutions — that exist today, and should govern us tomorrow. And that, precisely, reminded me of something.
I had bought Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (first published in 1941) several years ago, for everyone told me about how great a science-fiction cycle it was. I read the five books in a row during a week at the hospital, during a hot summer. To be honest, I was quite disappointed: the novels weren’t as epic as I had expected. Asimov isn’t known for his literary style, although he does know how to spin a story. However, there was, at the very beginning of the series, quite a revolutionary idea, that is incredibly relevant today.
Asimov imagines that in a few thousand years, the Human intergalactic empire will be so wide that it rules thousands of planets. Mathematician Hari Seldon discovers a new discipline, psychohistory: through complex mathematical models, he succeeds in predicting everything that is going to happen in the universe. Thanks to his equation, he discovers that the Human empire has grown so big that, in the same way as the Roman empire, it is going to collapse. 30,000 years of chaos should follow the collapse of the Human empire. Hari Seldon’s solution is surprisingly close to collapsology’s propositions: instead of wasting time trying to slow the pace of the collapse, Seldon designs a way of reducing these 30,000 years of chaos to only 1,000. To do so, he sends a foundation with all the knowledge to build a new world out of the reach of the Empire.
What do these novels tell us? Indeed, they remind us that it has been decades — almost a century, actually —since far-sighted artists have told us about the situation we are in today. They also remind us that fiction is always a way of predicting the future, and dreaming about how the world can be. The future won’t necessarily be the dystopic cityscape depicted in Blade Runner (1982 & 2017). It can also be a woody place of reconnection with nature Jean Hegland dreams about in Into the forest (1998). And, if you are not interested in writers’ ideas about the way the world will be in a few years, maybe this scene from Soylent Green (1973) will remind us what the world looks like today — and how beautiful he appears to two men who live in a overheated, overcrowded and overpolluted New York City in 2040, and how important it is to protect it.
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