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Water Rights
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★★1/2Synopsis: An explosion interrupts water supply for a near-Earth orbital station. The owner of a large water reserve must decide if she is going to sacrifice her own goals - raspberry and roses - to the survival of many people. After all, the crisis could lead to self-sufficiency and autonomy from Earth.
Review: A bit of political and social interaction and a nice, optimistic end turn. I didn't get into the character and wasn't interested too much in the background.
I liked the story a good deal more than Andreas.
"Water Rights" tells a reasonably straightforward story. There's a crisis caused by a technological failure/sabotage on the space elevator. Without regular shipments of air, water, and food, the various human-occupied outposts in Earth orbit don't have sufficient supplies to be self-sufficient. Water rationing is especially complicated, because food production via hydroponics is the largest user of water.
Andreas, I think you mischaracterize Jordan's goals/dreams. She's apparently built up her hydroponic operation over many years to provide a wide variety of foods for those people living both at the mid-station of the space elevator and L1 colonies. (L1 an interesting choice, BTW, since it's only stable in 2 of 3 dimensions; but it is a lot closer than the stable L4/L5.) Letting 80% of those crops die off to divert the water to drinking means losing years of effort building up her farm.
The roses we're really just the final touch. Having finally created a farm sufficient to provide food for cislunar humanity, she thought she could devote a small fraction of resources to creating a rose garden (and especially finicky flowering plant requiring considerable water. In fact, she just reached the point where she was ready to go down to Earth to tour some rose breeders when her sister when the crisis began. So those roses maybe symbolic of Jordan's dream, but certainly not the entirety.
(Any relationship you may find here to the current discussion of the drought in California and competition between Central Valley agricultural interests and Southern California population centers is purely coincidental, since this book is a couple of years old. :)
I liked the storytelling. It starts off with a good hook, and propels itself forward with a sense of urgency, even though that urgency is purely technical and without high risk personal heroics.
3.5 stars ***1/2*
"Water Rights" tells a reasonably straightforward story. There's a crisis caused by a technological failure/sabotage on the space elevator. Without regular shipments of air, water, and food, the various human-occupied outposts in Earth orbit don't have sufficient supplies to be self-sufficient. Water rationing is especially complicated, because food production via hydroponics is the largest user of water.
Andreas, I think you mischaracterize Jordan's goals/dreams. She's apparently built up her hydroponic operation over many years to provide a wide variety of foods for those people living both at the mid-station of the space elevator and L1 colonies. (L1 an interesting choice, BTW, since it's only stable in 2 of 3 dimensions; but it is a lot closer than the stable L4/L5.) Letting 80% of those crops die off to divert the water to drinking means losing years of effort building up her farm.
The roses we're really just the final touch. Having finally created a farm sufficient to provide food for cislunar humanity, she thought she could devote a small fraction of resources to creating a rose garden (and especially finicky flowering plant requiring considerable water. In fact, she just reached the point where she was ready to go down to Earth to tour some rose breeders when her sister when the crisis began. So those roses maybe symbolic of Jordan's dream, but certainly not the entirety.
(Any relationship you may find here to the current discussion of the drought in California and competition between Central Valley agricultural interests and Southern California population centers is purely coincidental, since this book is a couple of years old. :)
I liked the storytelling. It starts off with a good hook, and propels itself forward with a sense of urgency, even though that urgency is purely technical and without high risk personal heroics.
3.5 stars ***1/2*
G33z3r wrote: "Andreas, I think you mischaracterize Jordan's goals/dreams."You're right, I left out the whole economical goals of food production and went directly to the dream part. Certainly one can dream of getting rich and independent - in this case by food production. But I personally dream more of strawberries and roses than of wheat fields - maybe that is why I transferred that to Jordan.
I don't think that we are far apart - the story lost one star because I somehow couldn't connect to Jordan at all.
"Water Rights" by An Owomoyela
This story is part of the Edge of Infinity anthology discussion.