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Phase Change: Imagining Energy Futures
Catastrophic climate change sparked by the fossil fuel industry leaves us no choice: we must decarbonise. To create another world, we need different narratives. With visions spanning from transhuman planet-hopping through post-cyberpunk paranoia to solarpunk ecotopianism, this collection dislocates our present energy regimes to imagine energy transitions and futures in all their complexities. These are stories of phase change.
462 pages, Paperback
Published March 28, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 16, 2024
I mostly read this because I'm interested in what kinds of energy we might be using in the far future, and there were lots of ideas here but the one mentioned by the greatest number of stories was fungus. I'm not sure how feasible any of those ideas are, however, and the stories were not too forthcoming with concrete details.
One of the stories that seemed the most realistic was "Sunny Days" by Jasper Wyld, in which energy is so strictly rationed that you must have "currency" on a "sunchip" that you use to pay for transportation, the lights in your apartment, even a beam to light your way outside where it is perpetually dark because of the permanent cloud cover caused, presumably, by climate change.
I also enjoyed "Checkerboard" by Thoraiya Dyer. In this future, the fortunate live in houses that are underneath the shadows cast by giant solar panels on stilts which "shade your place down to a tolerable twenty-five Celsius." When temps soar past 50 C, the less fortunate find relief by staying at their climate-controlled workplaces, or even crawling into old water pipes underground. School is conducted via an extreme version of remote learning, and we get to read some essays written by a teenager that are sometimes quite humorous. Good story, good worldbuilding, good character development.
"Zimmers" by David Whish-Wilson is one of the stories featuring funghi (or mycelium, if you prefer) and their link with trees and a society where humans have learned to live in symbiosis with the this network. A very hopeful story.
"Seven Non-Abolitions" by Jo Lindsay Walton crosses the galaxy searching for a civilization that manages to avoid killing its planet's ecology. It's quite pessimistic in that time and again, societies manage to slow down carbon emisssions and throw out oppressive governments, only to fall back on old habits and find new oppressors to whom they can hand their liberty. One whole section details Earth's endeavors to create a better future, with some great prose. I particularly enjoyed the author's skewering of strategic planning techniques (which I have used myself many times) in this passage:
.A telemicroscopic SWOT analysis, overlaid with a four-quadrant chart featuring 'Rewilding' on the X axis and 'Worldbuilding' on the Y, algorithmically revamped into an AR-navigable tesseract space, was used to reconceive of the global eco-citadel founded on watashiato, an eco-citadel whose ruggedised lavender anticarbon horticulture tresses could unravel in many-dimensional crystal systems from the endlessly unpinning trellises of its evanescent pinnacles.
As fun as such flights of verbiage are, they are so untethered from reality that the end effect for this reader of the collection in general was a feeling that there are very few actual ideas about how to get us out of the climate catastrophe we are facing.
One of the stories that seemed the most realistic was "Sunny Days" by Jasper Wyld, in which energy is so strictly rationed that you must have "currency" on a "sunchip" that you use to pay for transportation, the lights in your apartment, even a beam to light your way outside where it is perpetually dark because of the permanent cloud cover caused, presumably, by climate change.
I also enjoyed "Checkerboard" by Thoraiya Dyer. In this future, the fortunate live in houses that are underneath the shadows cast by giant solar panels on stilts which "shade your place down to a tolerable twenty-five Celsius." When temps soar past 50 C, the less fortunate find relief by staying at their climate-controlled workplaces, or even crawling into old water pipes underground. School is conducted via an extreme version of remote learning, and we get to read some essays written by a teenager that are sometimes quite humorous. Good story, good worldbuilding, good character development.
"Zimmers" by David Whish-Wilson is one of the stories featuring funghi (or mycelium, if you prefer) and their link with trees and a society where humans have learned to live in symbiosis with the this network. A very hopeful story.
"Seven Non-Abolitions" by Jo Lindsay Walton crosses the galaxy searching for a civilization that manages to avoid killing its planet's ecology. It's quite pessimistic in that time and again, societies manage to slow down carbon emisssions and throw out oppressive governments, only to fall back on old habits and find new oppressors to whom they can hand their liberty. One whole section details Earth's endeavors to create a better future, with some great prose. I particularly enjoyed the author's skewering of strategic planning techniques (which I have used myself many times) in this passage:
.A telemicroscopic SWOT analysis, overlaid with a four-quadrant chart featuring 'Rewilding' on the X axis and 'Worldbuilding' on the Y, algorithmically revamped into an AR-navigable tesseract space, was used to reconceive of the global eco-citadel founded on watashiato, an eco-citadel whose ruggedised lavender anticarbon horticulture tresses could unravel in many-dimensional crystal systems from the endlessly unpinning trellises of its evanescent pinnacles.
As fun as such flights of verbiage are, they are so untethered from reality that the end effect for this reader of the collection in general was a feeling that there are very few actual ideas about how to get us out of the climate catastrophe we are facing.
October 10, 2022
Personal top 3: the Jain (OMG bacteria and Les Mis), the Bacon and the Dugan. W00t!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews