We don’t need mystical conjectures about “cycles of history” to explain, for instance, the fall of Rome. Perlin shows how the Roman Empire, the Aegean civilization of ancient Greece, imperial China, and so many other past cultures performed the same feat, ignorantly fouling their own nests, using up the land, poisoning the future for their children. Ecological historians are at last starting to realize that this is simply the natural consequence whenever a people acquires more physical power than insight.
While it is romantic to imagine that tribal peoples — either ancient or in today’s retreating rain forests — were at harmony with nature, living happy, egalitarian lives, current research shows this to be far from uniformly true, and more often just plain false. Despite a fervent desire to believe otherwise, evidence now reveals that members of nearly every “natural” society have committed depredations on their environment and each other. The harm they did was limited mostly by low technology and modest numbers.
The same goes for beating up on the human race as a whole. Oh, we have much to atone for, but the case isn’t strengthened by exaggerations that are just plain wrong. Stephen Jay Gould has condemned “… as romantic twaddle the common litany that ‘man alone kills for sport, but other animals [kill] only for food or in defense.’ ” Anyone who has watched a common housecat with a mouse — or stallions battling over dominance — knows that humans aren’t so destructive because of anything fundamentally wrong about human nature. It’s our power that amplifies the harm we do until it threatens the entire world.
My purpose in saying this isn’t to insult other cultures or species. Rather, I am trying to argue that the problems we face are deep-seated, with a long history. The irony of these myths of the noble tribesman, or noble animal, is that they are most fervently held by pampered Westerners whose well-cushioned culture is the first ever to feel comfortable enough to promote a new tradition of self-criticism. And it is this very habit of criticism — even self-reproach — that makes ours the first human society with a chance to avoid the mistakes of our ancestors.
Indeed, the race between our growing awareness and the momentum of our greed may make the next half century the greatest dramatic interlude of all time.
In that vein, I might have written a purely cautionary tale, like John Brunner’s novel The Sheep Look Up, which depicts Earth’s environmental collapse with terrifying vividness. But tales of unalloyed doom have never seemed realistic to me. Like the mechanistic scenarios of Marxism, they seem to assume people will be too stupid to notice looming calamities or try to prevent them.
Instead, I see all around me millions of people who actively worry about dangers and trends… even something as far away as a patch of missing gas over the south pole. Countless people write letters and march to save species of no possible benefit to themselves.
Oh, surely, a good dose of guilt now and then can help motivate us to do better. But I see nothing useful coming out of looking backward for salvation or modeling ourselves after ancient tribes. We are the generation — here and now — that must pick up a truly daunting burden, to tend and keep a planetary oasis, in all its delicacy and diversity, for future millennia and beyond. Those who claim to find answers to such complex dilemmas in the sagas of olden days only trivialize the awesome magnitude of our task.
So much for motivation. In my acknowledgments, I thank scores of people who kindly read drafts of this work and offered their expert advice. Still, this has been a work of fiction, and any opinions or excesses or errors herein can be laid at no one’s door but mine. Mea culpa.
In a few cases, the liberties I took demand explanation.
First, for the sake of drama, I exaggerated the extent greenhouse heating may cause sea levels to rise by the year 2040. Though real losses and suffering may be staggering, few scientists think glacier melting will have progressed as far as I depict by then. The consensus seems to be that the Antarctica ice sheet is safe until late in the next century. Likewise, I oversimplified weather patterns in India to make a dramatic point.
Another assumption I make is that energy shortages will return. Most experts consider this a safe bet, but I admit (and even hope) that declining petroleum reserves may be partially offset by new discoveries. Certainly breakthroughs in solar power, or access to space resources, or even something completely unexpected, might alter events for the better. (At the same time, our list of potential catastrophes also grows. Who can say we’ve even imagined the worst yet? I wouldn’t put money on it.)
Some of the geological features I describe match the best modern theories. Others, such as possible high-temperature superconducting domains far below, are highly speculative and not to be taken too seriously.
Along similar lines, the plot of this novel orbits around one particular wild beastie — a type of gravitational singularity to make even Stephen Hawking or Kip Thorne gulp in dismay. Those physicists, and others, calculate that the universe probably contains a great many of the large type of black hole people have heard so much about, and astronomers claim to see evidence for several already. There may even be gigantic cosmic “strings” occupying the voids between the galaxies. Micro black holes, on the other hand, remain totally theoretical. Tuned strings and cosmic “knots” are my own inventions.
Interestingly, though, after finishing Earth I learned that two astronomers at the University of Cambridge, Ian Redmount and Martin Rees, now predict beamlike gravitational radiation might be emitted from certain superheavy objects out there. So who knows? In any event, although I have my union card as a physicist, I don’t claim to be qualified in the specialized area of general relativity. The science of “cavitronics” can safely be dismissed as bona fide arm waving.
Of course, Beta served a higher function in the book than perpetrating wild-eyed conjectures on physics. The taniwha let me include the very guts of the planet — its complex mantle and layered core — as central concerns of my characters. (What book could claim to be about the entire Earth if it left out over ninety-nine percent of the planet’s volume and mass?) Anyway, nothing spices up a novel like a monster threatening to gobble up the world.
Sociological trends are even more problematical than tomorrow’s physics. While this book was in the works, changes in the real world seemed ever about to overtake my wildest speculations. One result — readers of early drafts suggested I was being much too optimistic in predicting an end to cold war tensions. But by the final draft some were turning around and complaining that I was shortsighted, because security alliances like NATO couldn’t possibly still exist in fifty years’ time! There wasn’t that much difference between drafts. It was the world that went into fast-forward rewrite mode.
(Not that I’m convinced we’re in for relaxing times just because a few walls have come down. It might be argued that the cold war is ebbing in large part because neither side can afford it anymore. Other serious threats loom to take its place. And nations will probably still make and break alliances as they wrestle over dwindling resources.)
Likewise, I find myself bored with the current fashion of depicting a tomorrow dominated by Japanese economic imperialism. Doesn’t anyone remember when it seemed that the Arabs were bound to own everything? Before that, Europeans expressed dismay at American industrial dynamism. Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.
Daily life may be even harder to predict than global politics. One crisis I see looming involves the plight of women, which seems bound to go far beyond matters typically addressed today by feminists. Equality under law and in the workplace must be achieved, of course. (And in many parts of the world that battle has barely begun.) But of growing concern to women in the West is a problem I hardly ever hear spoken of by all those learned theoreticians in ivy halls. That problem is the decay of marriage and family as a dependable way of life. This is a subject so difficult — and so dangerous for a male author to deal with — that I’m afraid it got short shrift in this novel, despite my belief that it will reach a dire climax during the decades ahead.