Rossdavidh’s Comments (group member since Feb 08, 2022)

Rossdavidh’s comments from the Solarpunk group.

Finally reviewed it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Haha! I'm just realizing that I got the first in the series, published in 2009, and y'all might be reading (or listening to) a later book in the series. Oh well! I wonder if it makes it easier for me to figure out what we're talking about than Khalil's experience; they might feel more obligation to explain things in the first book.

I'm all in favor of gardening (conventional or rooftop or etc.) in cities. I live in a city, and I garden. I guess it doesn't do enough for the typical SF author because it doesn't make the city independent of the countryside (and the fossil fuels to connect the two), because as you say it doesn't produce enough. Also, the foods where it makes the most sense, are the ones that are not as easy to store for the winter (you could can the vegetables, as my mom did, but that requires a good bit of energy as well). Basically, there's some pretty hard physical limits to how much food you can produce in a small space, and there's a reason that early cities were in grain-producing areas. Grain is just easier to scale up to feed cities, and easier to store for the off-season.

You could, in theory, depopulate a skyscraper (or whatever) until it could produce enough food for the remaining inhabitants, but then I suppose it wouldn't really be a city, it would be an artist colony (or whatever).

The second story of this collection also has an itinerant city, which reminds me of Burning Man (probably not supposed to), which sounds fun but wouldn't be a long-term sustainable model. Most of the Burning Man "inhabitants" go back to working in conventional society for most of the year.

But, the book does raise interesting questions, even if it doesn't always seem to realize it.

From the wikipedia article on "vertical farming":

Vertical farming technologies face economic challenges with large start-up costs compared to traditional farms. In Victoria, Australia, a "hypothetical 10 level vertical farm" would cost over 850 times more per square meter of arable land than a traditional farm in rural Victoria.[10] Vertical farms also face large energy demands due to the use of supplementary light like LEDs. Moreover, if non-renewable energy is used to meet these energy demands, vertical farms could produce more pollution than traditional farms or greenhouses.

...I don't know if these specific numbers hold up, but I don't doubt that it will turn out that you cannot grow enough food in a city to support the people in that city, and the harder you try the more electricity (and other resources) you will burn in the attempt to replace all that large amounts of soil and large surface area to absorb sun provides.

Finished second author's section. At the core of it is the idea that you can get the desired social aspects of cities, without the population density, and without relying on a rural surrounding that is dedicated to agriculture to support that. For example, the whole plot relies on everpresent electronics (e.g. headsup displays) and somebody running a Mechanical Turk service, but neatly avoids the topic of where the factories are to make the electronics (including the millions of servers to run the turking service), and where the electricity comes from to run the factories and the servers.

Also, the revolutionary movement seems to have a lot of money available for bailing people out, paying fines, etc, and it's not clear where that comes from.

Still, an interesting thought experiment on how "turking" could be used at scale, if you had an automated means of organizing it.

Just finished the first author's section. It's a Christ tale. Nothing wrong with that, even if you're not a Christian; "Cool Hand Luke" was a Christ tale. But it's a pretty self-aware Christ tale.

Interesting question was whether or not the female mercenary was intended to be an update on the prostitute character (often, and I am led to believe falsely, identified as Mary Magdalene), mercenaries being in some ways analogous to prostitutes. Cascadia council of elders (I forget the actual name) was the Pharisees, Bashar was Judas, etc.

So, I'm only 70 pages in, but so far there aren't any characters here that I actually like. But, there are some distinct characters, and also some "mystery box" elements that are handled well (giving occasional bits of information so it's not just a permanent question mark, while still leaving plenty to wonder about).

I am, I admit, finding much of the world-building to be very, very 2009, perhaps even written pre-GFC, both futuristic and dated at the same time. For example, the "somehow we can live in cities but not depend on country folk with their regressive politics for food and such". It doesn't ring very true to reality. However, it is thought-provoking, and well written, so I'm going to keep going.

Hákon wrote: "You're probably right. Still, it would be an interesting version to have the human character killed, and the dog walk into the sunset."

I think it's a similar issue that led JRRT, in "Lord of the Rings", to have a couple of named horse characters that survive, while a number of significant human characters die. Perhaps kind of a payback for having the horses get killed off so often in "The Hobbit".

...One thing though, why do writers so often feel the need to kill the dog? "

My guess is it's too nicey-nice to have everyone live, but they don't want to kill off the human characters they have spent time building up, so they kill the dog (or cat, or horse).

I liked it, and it definitely had a climate change angle (albeit not a very straightforward one). It is way better at raising questions (usually along the lines of "WTF was that?") than at answering them, but I don't mind that every once in a while, especially when the writing is good (and it is). If a person doesn't like uncertainty and dark shadows in their fiction, though, probably this will not be their cup of tea.

it's sometimes a bit like horror, except nothing is quite horrifying, exactly, if that makes sense.

Well, I don't know if it's solarpunk, but it surely is intriguing! I've read the first few, and the author is quite good at not-now-but-yet-realistic.

Nicole wrote: "haha – funny you saying that about techn..."

So, there is a saying that people tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term. Of course, it might just seem that way because the technologies that don't really have a long-term impact, we forget about. Zeppelins and VR and nuclear power and 3D movies all keep getting brought up as the big new thing, every generation or so, and never seem to really take off in the way that SF writers (among others) think they will. Doubtless there are many others that I don't know about, because they are forgotten.

This is also why I am skeptical of demands for tech entrepeneurs to think more about the consequences of their new businesses; it assumes they have the ability to do this. The record of business execs accurately predicting the impact of their technology on society is not really any better than the rest of us.

But, I'm in favor of SF trying anyway! When I read things like Andre Norton predicting cars with nuclear powered engines in "Star Man's Son", I don't think that's a knock against Norton, it's just the way it is; predicting is hard, especially about the future.

It has been said, that all good science fiction is a thought experiment. So, as with thought experiments of any other kind, sometimes (usually?) what you discover via the experiment is "that is unlikely to work out well". But, it's still sometimes a valuable thought experiment.

I haven't found much in the way of solarpunk that proposes new ways of thinking that I have much enthusiasm for, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to have the thought experiment. It's better than the dystopian "nothing will work out" that solarpunk is kind of a reaction to (I think), because it at least attempts to think through how we could make things better.

As for your last question, my general experience is that the longer one works with any technology, the fewer illusions one has about how it will change the world. We only hear form the few who are professional boosters, trying to get money for their ideas or otherwise in the business of trying to overpromise. But the actual people in biotech see things like the decades long slog for very limited results in gene therapy. Kind of like what people who have actually worked with AI think about it vs. those who have business incentives to say it is about to change everything.

Received! I don't think I realized until this point that it was originally written in French, although I suppose the mention of a City of Quebec book award should have clued me in. Anyone reading it in French?

Ordered! (the paper copy, I mean)

I'm trying to formulate a joke about "glass domes" not going well with "blatant violence and lawlessness", but it's not coming together for me. But I agree with your basic point.

It has been said that utopias 'wish away the most fundamental problem to be solved by society, and then speculate about all that could be done once that problem is gone'.

As a vegetarian for 30+ years now, I have not fished in a long time, and I do wonder if the author has, given that I recall the same as Lena that you would either kill the fish quickly or leave it (hooked) in the water until you're done fishing, then kill them with the knife. But if could easily be that other societies did it differently.

The thing that didn't, as I recall, get explored in the book was the idea that Mosscap (being an observer of nature) has almost certainly seen a lot more death than Dex, who seems to have mostly gotten food from a market. One might have expected Dex to be more uncomfortable with it, and Mosscap curious about that, since all of the (non-human) animals he has seen up to that point, that eat meat, have no problem with killing. But perhaps I am misremembering the characters' different reactions to that scene.

Lena wrote: "The passive aggressive solar home: https://youtu.be/5uz40RvqsmE"

Awesome. The basis for a great horror short-story.

Adam wrote: "...The "humanoids are everywhere" convention in much SF is a bit questionable, but it's also so common it seems harsh to whack Becky Chambers for it specifically."

A fair point.