The Cold Equations

 

 Global warming means significant cooling for the Western Seaboard of Europe? Could be true, tho' its unlikely to happen as fast as in the Bold As Love series (as far as anyone knows anything). A hundred, two hundred years is more likely. Read about it here:"thermohaline circulation ". But climate change is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, when it comes to the special effects promised by climate change. The freezes, storms, droughts and floods will be nothing to the refugee problem, the economic disruption, the social breakdown, the repressive regimes of scarcity (Siberia is a state of mind). If you want my real opinion it will be slow, insidious, and we'll have plenty of time to do more damage to the living world before we start to suffer our population crash. Why did I choose the cold? I like snow. Blame Charles Dickens. And snow is hopeful, it promises renewal. It was the cold that stopped Napoleon and arguably Hitler too. So I called on General Winter and General Hunger. Will they come?

Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders is one of the books that inspired Bold As Love. I read it when I was writing "Life" (Aqueduct Press). It's about what happened to the Viking settlements in Greenland when the Viking Summer came to an end, and the Little Ice Age began. It's relentless, absorbing. They're done for, long before they realise what's going on. "Abrupt" climate change is a poison without an antidote, and you die slowly.

The Cold Equations (Tom Godwin 1954) is a wonderfully notorious primitive scifi story, about a space-freight pilot (young male, of course) who finds he has an innocent stowaway (pretty female, of course). She doesn't realise a ship only has exactly enough fuel to make its trip, with the weight of the pilot and the load he's hauling. No redundancy. He's awfully sorry, but he shoves her out the airlock. The sf world divides into the many sf fans who see this as a true and poignant fable, and the rest of us, who see it a transparent excuse for male fans with crap sex lives to enjoy the fun of girl whimpering for mercy and then going SPLAT! in vacuum, disguised as a ridiculous way to run a freight company. Try the link, see what you think, but still "cold equations" is a concept for our future.

Arguably worrying about global warming is pointless, if any of this is real, we're already there. But we can do it better, or we can do it worse. This is global war, against no human enemy. Are you going to let civilisation go down, or will you fight?

            

A more harmonious way!
Pendulum divination - magickal diviners!
These special pendulums are used for pregnancy divination. Hold one over an hopeful mother's hand or stomach. If the Diviner swings up and down, she's pregnant! If it swings from side to side, she isn't.

(For those who quite fancy being pregnant only. Not reccommended if you really need to know...ed)