The Descent Into Light

If you're not afraid, there is no end, only an imminent bliss. So burn like love and love like fire.

The World Changed, Not Me

You think I'm unreasonable.

But in an unreasonable world, that's just how I look.

The Broken Thread of Culture

There are times when the deindustrial future seems to whisper in the night like a wind blowing through the trees, sending the easy certainties of the present spinning like dead leaves. I had one of those moments recently, courtesy of a news story from 1997 that a reader forwarded me, about the spread of secret stories among homeless children in Florida’s Dade County.  These aren’t your ordinary children’s stories: they’re myths in the making, a bricolage of images from popular religion and folklore torn from their original contexts and pressed into the service of a harsh new vision of reality.

God, according to Dade County’s homeless children, is missing in action; demons stormed Heaven a while back and God hasn’t been seen since. The mother of Christ murdered her son and morphed into the terrifying Bloody Mary, a nightmare being who weeps blood from eyeless sockets and seeks out children to kill them.  Opposing her is a mysterious spirit from the ocean who takes the form of a blue-skinned woman, and who can protect children who know her secret name. The angels, though driven out of Heaven, haven’t given up; they carry on their fight against the demons from a hidden camp in the jungle somewhere outside Miami, guarded by friendly alligators who devour hostile intruders. The spirits of children who die in Dade County’s pervasive gang warfare can go to the camp and join the war against the demons, so long as someone who knows the stories puts a leaf on their graves.

This isn’t the sort of worldview you’d expect from people living in a prosperous, scientifically literate industrial society, but then the children in Dade County’s homeless shelters don’t fit that description in any meaningful sense. They live in conditions indistinguishable from the worst end of the Third World; their lives are defined by poverty, hunger, substance abuse, shattered families, constant uncertainty, and lethal violence dispensed at random. If, as Bruce Sterling suggested, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed yet, they’re the involuntary early adopters of a future very few people want to think about just now, but many of us will experience in the decades ahead, and most of humanity will face in the centuries that follow: a future we may as well call by the time-honored label "dark age."

That label actually dates from before the period most often assigned it these days. Marcus Terentius Varro, who was considered the most erudite Roman scholar of his time, divided up the history known to him into three ages—an age of history, for which there were written records; before that, an age of fable, from which oral traditions survived; and before that, a dark age, about which no one knew anything at all. It’s a simple division but a surprisingly useful one; even in those dark ages where literacy survived as a living tradition, records tend to be extremely sparse and unhelpful, and when records pick up again they tend to be thickly frosted with fable and legend for a good long while thereafter. In a dark age, the thread of collective memory and cultural continuity snaps, the ends are lost, and a new thread must be spun from whatever raw materials happen to be on hand.

There are many other ways to talk about dark ages, and we’ll get to those in later posts, but I want to focus on this aspect for the moment. Before the Greco-Roman world Varro knew, an earlier age of complex, literate civilizations had flourished and then fallen, and the dark age that followed was so severe that in many regions—Greece was one of them—even the trick of written language was lost, and had to be imported from elsewhere centuries afterwards. The dark age following Varro’s time wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was close enough; literacy became a rare attainment, and vast amounts of scientific, technical, and cultural knowledge were lost. To my mind, that discontinuity demands more attention than it’s usually been given.  What is it that snaps the thread that connects past to present, and allows the accumulated knowledge of an entire civilization to fall into oblivion?

A recurring historical process lies behind that failure of transmission, and it’s one that can be seen at work in those homeless children of Dade County, whispering strange stories to one another in the night.

Arnold Toynbee, whose monumental work A Study of History has been a major inspiration to this blog’s project, proposed that civilizations on the way to history’s compost heap always fail in the same general way. The most important factor that makes a rising civilization work, he suggested, is mimesis—the universal human habit by which people imitate the behavior and attitudes of those they admire. As long as the political class of a civilization can inspire admiration and affection from those below it, the civilization thrives, because the shared sense of values and purpose generated by mimesis keeps the pressures of competing class interests from tearing it apart.

Civilizations fail, in turn, because their political classes lose the ability to inspire mimesis, and this happens in turn because members of the elite become so fixated on maintaining their own power and privilege that they stop doing an adequate job of addressing the problems facing their society.  As those problems spin further and further out of control, the political class loses the ability to inspire and settles instead for the ability to dominate. Outside the political class and its hangers-on, in turn, more and more of the population becomes what Toynbee calls an internal proletariat, an increasingly sullen underclass that still provides the political class with its cannon fodder and labor force but no longer sees anything to admire or emulate in those who order it around.

It can be an unsettling experience to read American newspapers or wide-circulation magazines from before 1960 or so with eyes sharpened by Toynbee’s analysis.  Most newspapers included a feature known as the society pages, which chronicled the social and business activities of the well-to-do, and those were read, with a sort of fascinated envy, very far down the social pyramid. Established figures of the political and business world were treated with a degree of effusive respect you won’t find in today’s media, and even those who hoped to shoulder aside this politician or that businessman rarely dreamed of anything more radical than filling the same positions themselves. Nowadays? Watching politicians, businesspeople, and celebrities get dragged down by some wretched scandal or other is this nation’s most popular spectator sport.

That’s what happens when mimesis breaks down. The failure to inspire has disastrous consequences for the political class—when the only things left that motivate people to seek political office are cravings for power or money, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that the only leaders you’ll get are the sort of incompetent hacks who dominate today’s political scene—but I want to concentrate for a moment on the effects on the other end of the spectrum. The failure of the political class to inspire mimesis in the rest of society doesn’t mean that mimesis goes away. The habit of imitation is as universal among humans as it is among other social primates. The question becomes this:  what will inspire mimesis among the internal proletariat? What will they use as the templates for their choices and their lives?

That’s a crucial question, because it’s not just social cohesion that depends on mimesis.  The survival of the collective knowledge of a society—the thread connecting past with present I mentioned earlier—also depends on the innate habit of imitation. In most human societies, children learn most of what they need to know about the world by imitating parents, older siblings, and the like, and in the process the skills and knowledge base of the society is passed on to each new generation. Complex societies like ours do the same thing in a less straightforward way, but the principle is still the same. Back in the day, what motivated so many young people to fiddle with chemistry sets? More often than not, mimesis—the desire to be just like a real scientist, making real discoveries—and that was reasonable in the days when a significant fraction of those young people could expect to grow up to be real scientists.

That still happens, but it’s less and less common these days, and for those who belong to the rapidly expanding underclass of American society—the homeless children in Dade County I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, for example—the sort of mimesis that might lead to a career in science isn’t even an option. A great many of those children won’t live to reach adulthood, and they know it; those who do manage to dodge the stray bullets and the impact of collapsing public health, by and large, will spend their days in the crumbling, crowded warehouse facilities that substitute for schools in this country’s poorer neighborhoods, where maybe half of each graduating high school class comes out functionally illiterate; their chances of getting a decent job of any kind weren’t good even before the global economy started unraveling, and let’s not even talk about those chances now.

When imitating the examples offered by the privileged becomes a dead end, in other words, people find other examples to imitate. That’s one of the core factors, I’m convinced, behind the collapse of the reputation of the sciences in contemporary American society, which is so often bemoaned by scientists and science educators.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson, say, may rhapsodize about the glories of science, but what exactly do those glories have to offer children huddling in an abandoned house in some down-at-heels Miami suburb, whose main concerns are finding ways to get enough to eat and stay out of the way of the latest turf war between the local drug gangs?

Now of course there’s been a standard kneejerk answer to such questions for the last century or so. That answer was that science and technology would eventually create such abundance that everyone in the world would be able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle and its attendant opportunities.  That same claim can still be heard nowadays, though it’s grown shrill of late after repeated disconfirmation. In point of fact, for the lower 80% of Americans by income, the zenith of prosperity was reached in the third quarter of the 20th century, and it’s all been downhill from there. This isn’t an accident; what the rhetoric of progress through science misses is that the advance of science may have been a necessary condition for the boomtimes of the industrial age, but it was never a sufficient condition in itself.

The other half of the equation was the resource base on which industrial civilization depended. Three centuries ago, as industrialism got under way, it could draw on vast amounts of cheap, concentrated energy in the form of fossil fuels, which had been stored up in the Earth’s crust over the previous half billion years or so. It could draw on equally huge stocks of raw materials of various kinds, and it could also make use of a biosphere whose capacity to absorb pollutants and other environmental insults hadn’t yet been overloaded to the breaking point by human activity. None of those conditions still obtain, and the popular insistence that the economic abundance of the recent past must inevitably be maintained in the absence of the material conditions that made it possible—well, let’s just say that makes a tolerably good example of faith-based thinking.

Thus Tyson is on one side of the schism Toynbee traced out, and the homeless children of Dade County and their peers and soon-to-be-peers elsewhere in America and the world are on the other. He may denounce superstition and praise reason and science until the cows come home, but again, what possible relevance does that have for those children? His promises are for the privileged, not for them; whatever benefits further advances in technology might still have to offer will go to the dwindling circle of those who can still afford such things, not to the poor and desperate.  Of course that simply points out another way of talking about Toynbee’s schism:  Tyson thinks he lives in a progressing society, while the homeless children of Dade County know that they live in a collapsing one.

As the numbers shift toward the far side of that dividing line, and more and more Americans find themselves struggling to cope with a new and unwelcome existence in which talk about progress and prosperity amounts to a bad joke, the failure of mimesis—as in the fallen civilizations of the past—will become a massive social force. If the usual patterns play themselves out, there will be a phase when the  leaders of successful drug gangs, the barbarian warbands of our decline and fall, will attract the same rock-star charisma that clung to Attila, Alaric, Genseric and their peers. The first traces of that process are already visible; just as young Romans in the fourth century adopted the clothes and manners of Visigoths, it’s not unusual to see the children of white families in the suburban upper middle class copying the clothing and culture of inner city gang members.

Eventually, to judge by past examples, this particular mimesis is likely to extend a great deal further than it has so far. It’s when the internal proletariat turns on the failed dominant minority and makes common cause with what Toynbee calls the external proletariat—the people who live just beyond the borders of the falling civilization, who have been shut out from its benefits but burdened with many of its costs, and who will eventually tear the corpse of the civilization to bloody shreds—that civilizations make the harsh transition from decline to fall. That transition hasn’t arrived yet for our civilization, and exactly when it will arrive is by no means a simple question, but the first whispers of its approach are already audible for those who know what to listen for and are willing to hear.

The age of charismatic warlords, though, is an epoch of transition rather than an enduring reality.  The most colorful figures of that age, remade by the workings of the popular imagination, become the focus of folk memories and epic poetry in the ages that follow; Theodoric the Ostrogoth becomes Dietrich von Bern and the war leader Artorius becomes the courtly King Arthur, taking their place alongside Gilgamesh, Arjuna, Achilles, Yoshitsune, and their many equivalents. In their new form as heroes of romance, they have a significant role to play as objects of mimesis, but it tends to be restricted to specific classes, and finds a place within broader patterns of mimesis that draw from other sources.

And those other sources?  What evidence we have—for the early stages of their emergence are rarely well documented—suggests that they begin as strange stories whispered in the night, stories that deliberately devalue the most basic images and assumptions of a dying civilization to find meaning in a world those images and assumptions no longer explain.

Two millennia ago, for example, the classical Greco-Roman world imagined itself seated comfortably at the summit of history.  Religious people in that culture gloried in gods that had reduced primal chaos to permanent order and exercised a calm rulership over the cosmos; those who rejected traditional religion in favor of rationalism—and there was no shortage of those, any more than there is today; it’s a common stage in the life of every civilization—rewrote the same story in secular terms, invoking various philosophical principles of order to fill the role of the gods of Olympus; political thinkers defined history in the same terms, with the Roman Empire standing in for Jupiter Optimus Maximus. It was a very comforting way of thinking about the world, if you happened to be a member of the gradually narrowing circle of those who benefited from the existing order of society.

To thos who formed the nucleus of the Roman Empire’s internal proletariat, though, to slaves and the urban poor, that way of thinking communicated no meaning and offered no hope. The scraps of evidence that survived the fall of the Roman world suggest that a great many different stories got whispered in the darkness, but those stories increasingly came to center around a single narrative—a story in which the God who created everything came down to walk the earth as a man, was condemned by a Roman court as a common criminal, and was nailed to a cross and left hanging there to die.

That’s not the sort of worldview you’d expect from people living in a prosperous, philosophically literate classical society, but then the internal proletariat of the Roman world increasingly didn’t fit that description. They were the involuntary early adopters of the post-Roman future, and they needed stories that would give meaning to lives defined by poverty, brutal injustice, uncertainty, and violence. That’s what they found in Christianity, which denied the most basic assumptions of Greco-Roman culture in order to give value to the lived experience of those for whom the Roman world offered least.

This is what the internal proletariat of every collapsing civilization finds in whatever stories become central to the faith of the dark age to come.  It’s what Egyptians in the last years of the Old Kingdom found by abandoning the official Horus-cult in favor of the worship of Osiris, who walked the earth as a man and suffered a brutal death; it’s what many Indians in the twilight of the Guptas and many Chinese in the aftermath of the Han dynasty found by rejecting their traditional faiths in favor of reverence for the Buddha, who walked away from a royal lifestyle to live by his begging bowl and search for a way to leave the miseries of existence behind forever.  Those and the many more examples like them inspired mimesis among those for whom the official beliefs of their civilizations had become a closed book, and became the core around which new societies emerged.

The stories being whispered from one homeless Dade County child to another probably aren’t the stories that will serve that same function as our civilization follows the familiar trajectory of decline and fall. That’s my guess, at least, though of course I could be wrong. What those whispers in the night seem to be telling me is that the trajectory in question is unfolding in the usual way—that those who benefit least from modern industrial civilization are already finding meaning and hope in narratives that deliberately reject our culture’s traditional faiths and overturn the most fundamental presuppositions of our age. As more and more people find themselves in similar straits, in turn, what are whispers in the night just now will take on greater and greater volume, until they drown out the stories that most people take on faith today.

The Quiet Rebellion

Challenge the world that gives you the chance to live longer but asks you to do small things with that longer life.

The Light Of Hidden Tragedies

Sometimes you'll find it hard to find, the difference between diamonds in your hand and broken glass on the freeway.

The Reflection In Shop Windows

If you live in your head for too long, you run the risk of becoming your own secret.

The Stories of our Grandchildren

Over the last six weeks, in what spare time I could find, I’ve glanced back over the last eight years of weekly Archdruid Report posts, trying to get some sense of where this blog has been and where it might head in the months and years to come. In language the Grateful Dead made famous—well, among those of us in a certain generation, at least—it‘s been a long strange trip, crossing terrain not often included in tours of the future of our faltering industrial civilization.

Among those neglected landscapes of the mind, though, the territory that seems most crucial to me involves the role that stories play in shaping our ideas and expectations about the future, and thus our future itself. It’s a surprisingly difficult issue for many people these days to grapple with. Each time I raise it, I can count on hearing from readers who don’t get what I’m saying, usually because they’ve lost track of the distinction between whatever story they’ve gotten stuck in their minds and the far more diffuse and shapeless experiences that the story claims to explain. We tell ourselves stories to explain the world; that much is normal among human beings, and inevitable. The problem creeps in when we lose track of the difference between the narrative map and the experiential territory, and treat (for example) progress as a simple reality, rather than the complex and nuanced set of interpretations we lay over the facts of history to turn them into incidents in a familiar narrative.

During the time just past, I’ve had several reminders of the power of stories to shape the world of human experience, and the way those stories can get out of step with the facts on the ground. I’d like to take a moment to talk about a couple of those just now.

The first reminder made quite a splash in the news media a couple of weeks ago, when the Energy Information Administraton (EIA)—the US bureaucracy that publishes statistics about American energy resources and production—was forced to admit in public that, well, actually, there was only about 4% as much economically extractable oil in the Monterey Shale in California as they’d claimed a few years earlier. Given that this same Monterey Shale was supposed to provide us with around two-thirds of the oil that was allegedly going to turn the United States into a major oil exporter again by 2020, this was not precisely a minor issue. How many other oil shale deposits are facing similar downgrades? That’s a good question, and one which the EIA seems noticeably unwilling to address.

Bertram Gross pointed out a good many years ago that economic indicators were becoming “economic vindicators,” meant to justify government policy instead of providing accurate glimpses into what’s actually happening in the economic sphere. That certainly seems to have been one of the things behind the EIA’s stratospherically overenthusiastic estimates.  Equally, the US government seems to have responded to the current boom in shale with exactly the same sort of mindless cheerleading it displayed during the housing bubble that popped in 2008 and the tech stock bubble that popped in 2001. I trust it hasn’t escaped the attention of my readers that the key product of the shale oil boom hasn’t been oil or natural gas, but bundled shale leases and similar scraps of overpriced paper, sold to gullible investors with the same gaudy promises of fast wealth and starry-eyed disdain for mere economic reality that fed those earlier bubbles, and drove the market crashes that followed.

Still, there’s more going on here than the common or garden variety political puffery and securities fraud that makes up so much of business as usual in America’s years of decline. The question that needs asking is this:  why are investors who watched those two earlier booms go bust, who either lost money in them or saw many others do so, lining up so eagerly to put their nest eggs into shale-oil companies that are losing money quarter after quarter, and can only stay in business by loading on more and more debt?  Why is the same weary drivel about a new economic era of perpetual prosperity being lapped up so uncritically for a third time in fifteen years, when anyone in possession of three functioning neurons ought to be able to recognize it as a rehash of the same failed hype paraded about in previous bubbles, all the way back to the tulip bubble in the 17th-century Netherlands?

That’s not a rhetorical question; it has an answer, and the answer follows from one of the most popular stories of our culture, the story that says that getting rich is normal. From Horatio Alger right on down to the present, our entertainment media have been overloaded with tales about people who rose up out of poverty and became prosperous. What’s more, during the boom times that made up so much of the 20th century, a modest fraction of those tales were true, or at least not obviously false. Especially but not only  in the United States, you could find people who were born poor and died rich. An expanding economy brings that option within reach for some, though—despite the propaganda—never for all.

The story was always at least a little dishonest, as the golden road up from poverty was never normal for more than a certain fraction of the population, and the wealth of the few always depended, as it always does depend in the real world, on the impoverishment of the many. During their 20th century heyday, the world’s industrial societies could pretend that wasn’t the case by the simple expedient of offshoring their poverty to the Third World, and supporting their standards of living at home on the backs of sharecroppers and sweatshop workers overseas. Still, in those same industrial nations, it was possible to ignore that for a while, and to daydream about a future in which every last human being on earth would get to enjoy the benefits of upward mobility in a rapidly expanding economy.

That dream is over and done with. To begin with, the long arc of economic expansion is over; subtract the fake wealth generated by the mass production of unpayable IOUs—the one real growth industry in our economy these days—and we live in an economy in decline, in which real wealth trickles away and  the fraction of the population permanently shut out of the workforce rises year after year.  Downward mobility, not upward mobility, has become a central fact of our time.  The reality has changed, but the story hasn’t, and so investors convinced that their money ought to make them money are easy prey for some grifter in a Brooks Brothers suit who insists that tech stocks, or real estate, or oil shales will inevitably bring them the rising incomes and painless prosperity that the real world no longer provides.

The same sort of mismatch between a popular story and an unwelcome reality defines the second reminder I want to discuss, which popped up during and after the Age of Limits conference late last month in the woods of south central Pennsylvania. That was a very lively and enjoyable event; when Dr. Dennis Meadows, this year’s special guest, noted how pleasant it was to speak to an audience that didn’t have to be convinced of the reality of limits to growth, he spoke for all the presenters and a great many of the attendees as well. For a few days, those of us who attended had the chance to talk about the most important reality of our age—the decline and impending fall of modern industrial civilization—without having to contend minute by minute with the thirty-one flavors of denial so many people use to evade that reality and the responsibilities it brings with it.

That said, there were a few jarring moments, and one of them happened in the interval between my talk on dark ages and Dr. Mark Cochrane’s excellent presentation on the realities of climate change. In the Q&A session after my talk, in response to a question from the audience, I noted how the prestige of science among the general public had taken a beating due to the way that scientific opinions handed down to the public as proven fact so often get retracted after a decade or so, a habit that has caused  many people outside the scientific community to treat all scientific pronouncements with skepticism. I cited several examples of this, and one of them was the way that popular works on climate science in the 1970s and 1980s routinely claimed that the world was on the brink of a new ice age.

Mention the existence of those claims nowadays and you’ll inevitably get denounced as a climate denialist. As my regular readers know, I’m nothing of the kind; I’ve written extensively about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on the decades and centuries ahead, and my recently published science fiction novel Star’s Reach takes place in a 25th-century America ravaged by the impacts of climate change, in which oranges are grown in what’s now Illinois and Memphis has become a seaport. It’s become popular, for that matter, to insist that those claims of a new ice age never happened; I’d be happy, if anyone’s curious, to cite books published in the 1970s and 1980s for the general public, written by eminent scientists and respected science writers, that described the imminent ice age as a scientifically proven fact, since I have several on my bookshelf.

What I found interesting is that Dr. Cochrane, who is a more than usually careful scholar, jumped to the conclusion that my reference to these popular works of a bygone decade meant that I must be a climate denialist. I corrected him, and he accepted the correction gracefully.  Yet permaculturist and peak oil author Albert Bates then proceeded to miss my point in exactly the same way in his blog post on the event. Bates was present at the discussion, and presumably heard the whole exchange. He’s neither a stupid man nor a malicious one; why, then, so embarrassing and so public a misstatement?

This isn’t a rhetorical question, either; it has an answer, and the answer follows from another of the most popular stories of our culture, the story that says that having the right answer is all you need to get people to listen to you. You’ll find narratives with that theme straight through the popular culture of the last two centuries and more, and it also pervades the rhetoric of science and of scientific history: once the protagonist figures out what’s really going on, whether it’s a murder mystery or the hunt for the molecular structure of DNA, everything falls promptly into place.

Now of course in the real world, things aren’t generally so easy. That was precisely the point I was trying to make in the discussion at the Age of Limits conference:  however convincing the evidence for anthropogenic climate change may be to scientists, it’s failed to convince a great many people outside the scientific enterprise, and one of the things that’s driven that failure is the accelerating decline in the prestige of science in modern industrial society as a whole. Among the roots of that decline, in turn, is the dogmatic tone so often taken when scientists and science writers set out to communicate current scientific opinions to the general public—a tone that differs sharply, it bears remembering, from the far more tentative habits of communication practiced within the scientific community itself.

When climate scientists today insist that they’ve determined conclusively that we’ve entered an age of rising temperatures, I see no reason to doubt them—but they need to recall that many people still remember when writers and speakers with equally impressive scientific credentials insisted with equal vigor that it was just as certain that we’d entered an age of cooling temperatures.  Scientists in the relevant fields know what’s behind the change, but people outside the scientific community don’t; all they see is a flip-flop, and since such flip-flops of scientific opinion have been fairly common in recent decades, members of the general public are by no means as quick as they once were to take scientists at their word. For that matter, when spokespeople for the scientific community insist to the general public nowadays that the flip-flop never took place—that, for example, no reputable scientist or science writer ever claimed to the general public that a new ice age was imminent—those spokespeople simply leave themselves and the scientific community wide open to accusations of bad faith.

We don’t talk about the political dimensions of scientific authority in the modern industrial world. That’s what lies behind the convenient and inaccurate narrative I mentioned earlier, the one that claims that all you have to do to convince people is speak the truth. Question that story, and you have to deal with the mixed motives and tangled cultural politics inseparable from science as a human activity, and above all, you have to discuss the much-vexed relationship between the scientific community and a general public that has become increasingly suspicious of the rhetoric of expertise in contemporary life.

That relationship has dimensions that I don’t think anyone in the scientific community these days has quite grasped. I’ve been told privately by several active online proponents of creationism, for example, that they don’t actually care that much about how the world’s current stock of life forms got there; it’s just that the spluttering Donald Duck frenzy that can reliably be elicited from your common or garden variety rationalist atheist by questioning Darwin’s theory is too entertaining to skip.

Such reflections lead in directions most Americans aren’t willing to go, because they can’t be discussed without raising deeply troubling issues about the conflict between the cult of expertise and what’s left of the traditions of American democracy, and about the social construction of what’s considered real in this as in every other human culture. It’s much easier, and much more comfortable, to insist that the people on the other side of the divide just mentioned are simply stupid and evil, and—as in the example I cited earlier—to force any attempt to talk about the faltering prestige of science in today’s America into a more familiar discourse about who’s right and who’s wrong.

Equally, it’s much easier, and much more comfortable, to insist that the ongoing decline in standards of living here in America is either the fault of the poor or the fault of the rich.  Either evasion makes it possible to ignore all the evidence that suggests that what most Americans think of as a normal standard of living is actually an absurd degree of extravagance, made possibly only briefly by the reckless squandering of the most lavish energy resource our species will ever know.

One of the crucial facts of our age is thus that the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we use to make sense of the events of our lives, have passed their pull date and no longer make sense of the world we experience. The stories our grandchildren use to make sense of their world will be different, from ours, because they will be living in the world that the misguided choices of the last four decades or so will have made—a world that is beginning to take shape around us already, even though most people nowadays are doing their level best not to notice that awkward fact.

Meanwhile, those new stories, the stories of our grandchildren, may already be stirring in the crawlspaces of our collective imagination. In future posts, I’ll be talking about some of the more troubling of those, but this week I’m pleased to have the chance to discuss something a little more cheerful along those lines:  the outcome of this year’s “Space Bats” deindustrial science fiction contest.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that back in the fall of 2011, in the course of discussing the role that the science fiction of previous decades played in shaping our expectations of the future, I put out a call for SF short stories set in a world on the far side of peak oil and climate change. I was delighted by the response: over the five months or so that followed, 63 stories were submitted, and I duly assembled an anthology: After Oil: SF Stories of a Post-Petroleum Future. This January, I announced a second contest of the same sort, with a three-month window in which stories would be accepted.

The response was even more impressive this time around. Over those three months I received 92 story submissions, some from Archdruid Report regulars but many others from people I didn’t know from Robert Heinlein’s off ox, and a remarkably large fraction of them were not only publishable but of very high quality. I despaired of winnowing down the input to one anthology’s worth; fortunately, the publisher came to the rescue by proposing a slight change in plans.

I’m therefore delighted to announce that there will be not one but two new anthologies—one of stories set in the twilight years of our own civilization, one of stories set in the new societies that will rise after the industrial world is a fading memory. The first one, After Oil 2: The Years of Crisis, will include the following stories:

Grant Canterbury’s "Dreaming"

Walt Freitag’s "A Mile a Minute"

Matthew Griffith’s "Promised Land"

Diana Haugh’s "The Big Quiet"

Martin Hensher’s "Crown Prerogative"

J.M. Hughes’ "Byte Heist"

Calvin Jennings’ "A Dead Art Form"

Joseph Nemeth’s "A Break with the Past"

N.N. Scott’s "When It Comes a Gully-Washer"

David Trammel’s "A Fish Tale"

Tony Whelk’s "Al-Kimiya"

Rachel White’s "Story Material"

The second new anthology, After Oil 3: The Years of Rebirth, will include the following stories:

Bill Blondeau’s "The Borax Road Affair"

Phil Harris’ "North of the Wall"

Wylie Harris’ "Dispatches"

Diana Haugh’s "Silver Survivor"

Jason Heppenstall’s "Saga and the Bog People"

J.M. Hughes’ "Dahamri"

Gaianne Jenkins’ "Midwinter Eclipse"

Troy Jones’ "For Our Mushrooms"

Catherine McGuire’s "Singing the World"

David Senti’s "Nuala Thrives"

Al Sevcik’s "Community"

Eric Singletary’s "City of Spirits"

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed a story to the contest; even with a spare anthology to fill, it wasn’t easy to choose among the entries. I’m looking into whether it might be possible to launch a quarterly magazine for deindustrial SF:  there’s clearly an ample supply of good writers who want to tell such stories, and (to judge from sales of the original anthology, and of my deindustrial SF novel Star’s Reach) plenty of people who want to read them as well.

That strikes me as a very good sign. We may not yet be in a position to guess at the stories our grandchildren will tell each other to make sense of the world, but the fact that so many people are already eager to write and read stories about a world on the far side of progress gives me hope that the failed narratives of the past are losing their grip on the collective imagination of our age—and that we may be starting to tell at least a few of the new stories that will make sense of the world after oil.

The Dreams On The Line

I chased my dreams until I caught them.

I chased my thoughts until I I stopped thinking.

And I chased my heart until I found you.

The Last Part Of This Sentence Is Still Yours

You still take things from me in the most beautiful way.

You are still the only way I can sleep, when I wake up to tell you, I cannot sleep.

You still make sense in a way that only birds know when they leave winter.

The Future Of Anger Management

One day they'll tell you that you aren't allowed to be angry anymore and when you tell them how angry that makes you, they'll arrest you.

The Fate Of Those Born In Dirt

When I end, I will end as a tree ends: as a fire, bleeding out the sunlight from every summer it lived.

So do not judge me yet.

You have only seen, how I begin.

The Anxiety Inherent In Air

If you must know, this is what I'm scared of. I'm scared that everyone else is more who they are than I am who I am. I think everyone else just looks at the things they feel or think and says "Of course this is what I feel or think, this is who I am."

But I am never sure of what I feel or think.

And I'm scared because I'm holding all the things I could feel or think on a boat that the slightest breeze could tip over and if that happens, I will fall with all of it into the water. I am scared I will be left with nothing and no idea who I am.

I am scared of the wind.

The Pictures From The Camera We Threw Away

Everyone wants to show you pictures of the things you used to do together but all you can do, is wonder why no one’s taking new ones.