Metatropolis by John Scalzi Et Al

From The Week of July 23, 2012Though there remains much argument over the extent of the resource crisis and the degree to which it will impact our lives, there can be no doubt that human civilization is not resource neutral. Not only do we rarely recycle the raw materials we dig out of the ground and refine into useful products, we lack the requisite knowledge to reduce many of those finished products back to their constituent elements for re-use. If we lived on a planet of infinite resources, or had some feasible means of extracting them from elsewhere and bringing them to Earth, this would not be a problem. But such a utopia is precisely that, a fantasy with which reality does not truck. We do live on a planet with finite resources and we don't know how to replenish them from elsewhere. Thus, eventually, we will run out of stuff.

What will happen to our civilization when we fall off the resource cliff? When a lack of supply drives the prices into the stratosphere, how will the billions of demanding humans respond? Will they riot, feverishly snatching what little remains and hording that surplus as currency? Or will they approach the problem rationally by shifting to a resource-neutral economy that will stabilize prices and create a lasting blueprint for prosperity on a planet sucked dry? These are the questions that Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, John Scalzi and Karl Schroeder grapple with in this collection of short stories on the nature of the cities of the near future. They fascinate and terrify.

Thirty years from now, the world is unrecognizable by those of us alive today. Where we live and thrive in sprawling cities, where we enjoy unmetered water and cheap electricity, where we think nothing of driving gasoline-power cars and shrug at the news of oil spills, those who descend from us will either dismiss such legends as fantasies, loose talk around warm fires, or they will rage, knowing that our profligacy has contributed to their current state. For in the years between now and then, a series of crises, from the political to the economic, from the climate to the materialistic, will ravage civilization, angering populations, weakening governments, and gnawing away at the social ties that bind us all. Wars will spark up from these many, potent frictions, and the fallout from such conflicts will be the death knell for the nation state, replacing it with chaos, at first. But slowly, gradually, communities will reform, organizing around different principles, different necessities.

In this changed world, the hungry and the hopeless strive for the basics of food and shelter. In Detroit, they bounce for bars and turk for lawyers, courier messages and fight for the future of their children, all while laboring in the heart of a burnt out city. In New St. Louis, they work for co-opts and fill out militias, all in the hopes of creating and maintaining a totally self-sufficient city capable of growing its own food and engineering its own products. In Cascadia, that mountainous corridor between Vancouver and Seattle, they cook and they clean, philosophize and stand guard, trying to imagine and ignite a new society that, even if it takes generations to actualize, will re-shape the world into something better. The world over, new frontiers are being explored from the digital to the oceanic, the new bobbing up to try to fill the vacuum left by the old. And yet, many powerful remnants of the old world remain, military units and corporate boards both of which are more than willing to ruthlessly strongarm this new world into conforming to their vision of the future.

A collaboration between five of science fiction's talented voices, Metatropolis is an engrossing, if fatalistic, glimpse of an increasingly probable future. Having begun from the premise that life cannot continue as it has, the reckoning they envision is devastating, leaving behind only the bones of the world we know and replacing it with a grimmer, sleeker version that, though it packs a mean bite, augurs some promise for the future. After all, humans, when not pressed by necessity, are highly resistant to change and to the voices that warn of its coming. But when necessity does come, and the choices are evolve or die, the explosive powers of change are unleashed and trained upon re-imagining a stagnated world. The result, as envisioned by these authors, is as mysterious as it is sheened in hope.

For all its intrigue and its consistency of vision, it must be stressed that this is but one possible outcome. The authors don't appear to give much credence to the equally plausible notion that the advancement of technology will outstrip the depletion of resources, creating machines capable of solving the resource problem for us. In such a case, civilization will still have to adapt, but with far less turmoil. This notion is eschewed for the darker, more cynical view, that humans are foolish when not compelled by circumstance to change. This is understandable -- this is fiction after all --, but it is perhaps less than honest. For there is, playing out all around us, a race against time, to see whether or not technology can reach a critical threshold before the humans propelling it burn themselves out. Should that threshold be reached, we will find these problems negligible when viewed in the context of what we can do with our new machines.

Interesting work, but its negativity is strongly suggestive of paranoia and pessimism more than reality. (3/5 Stars)