It’s paying attention to science that helped create whatever pseudo-predictions the book may contain. Science often tells us things we couldn’t see as individuals, and fiction can benefit from that infusion of artificial intelligence. Yes, science itself is the genius AI that we fear to create; it’s already up and running. Attend to it and act on what you learn. It’s the science fiction way.
The acknowledgments for all three volumes, now combined at the back of this book, show how much help I had along the way, and I want to thank everyone again. I also want to reiterate how much I owe to the National Science Foundation. They sent me to Antarctica as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers Program in 1995, and that experience began this whole sequence of stories. After that they invited me to their headquarters often, first to serve on panels selecting subsequent groups of Antarctic artists, then to give talks and confer. Several NSF scientists spoke to me about their work in interesting ways, and Rita Colwell, the agency’s first woman director, told me things that helped me to write Diane Chang’s story. People there have been generous, and I hope it’s an association that will continue.
At one point after Forty Signs of Rain was published, I went to the NSF building in Arlington to give a lunchtime talk. My Antarctic patron Guy Guthridge had put up flyers next to the elevators that said NSF SAVES THE WORLD! and when the time came, the lecture hall was full. I began by reading the scene where my characters go to a brown-bag lunch talk in the NSF building. As I read the passage that describes those lunches, about people attending one more talk, even after all the years and all the grant applications—just out of a sense of curiosity, that basic emotion at the heart of scientific enterprise—I looked up from the page and sure enough, there they were again. I almost got dizzy, it was so circular. We laughed a lot that day, and though I know that the people there thought and still think that the idea of NSF saving the world is ludicrous, it is nevertheless true that they have good esprit de corps, they punch above their weight, they do good work. I think of them with admiration and gratitude, and as a crucial part of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The scientific community they help to fund and organize may indeed have a big role in saving the world, so reading a story that describes us doing it can be encouraging. At the least it can make you laugh. I was told that one senior person at NSF finished reading the trilogy and immediately sold his house and moved into a camper in a trailer park. That’s taking things too far, probably, but I like the impulse, because we read novels to help create our sense of what the world means, to mentally travel in other people’s lives, and to get some laughs. So whether you light out for the territory afterward or not, read on, reader, and may this story help and entertain you. And thanks.
Kim Stanley Robinson, February 2015
The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one Calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree C. If all this energy were captured by the Earth’s atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees C in one day.
Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time.
A good portion of Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop.
The Arctic Ocean ice pack reflects back out to space a few percent of the total annual solar energy budget. When the Arctic ice pack was first measured by nuclear submarines in the 1950s, it averaged thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. Then one August the ice broke up into large tabular bergs, drifting on the currents, colliding and separating, leaving broad lanes of water open to the continuous polar summer sunlight. The next year the breakup started in July, and at times more than half the surface of the Arctic Ocean was open water. The third year, the breakup began in May.
That was last year.
Weekdays always begin the same. The alarm goes off and you are startled out of dreams that you immediately forget. Predawn light in a dim room. Stagger into a hot shower and try to wake up all the way. Feel the scalding hot water on the back of your neck. Fragment of a dream, you were deep in some problem set now escaping you, just as you tried to escape it in the dream. Duck down the halls of memory—gone. Dreams don’t want to be remembered.
Evaluate the night’s sleep: not so good. Anna Quibler was exhausted already. Joe had cried twice, and though it was Charlie who had gotten up to reassure him, as part of conveying to Joe that Mom would never again visit him at night, Anna had of course woken up too, and vaguely heard Charlie’s reassurances: “Hey. Joe. What’s up. Go back to sleep, buddy, nothing gets to happen until morning, this is pointless this wailing, good night damn it.”
After that she had tossed and turned, trying not to think of work. In general Anna’s thoughts had a tropism toward work. Last night had been no different.
Shower over, she dried and dressed in three minutes. Downstairs she filled a lunch box for her older boy, same as always, as required: peanut butter sandwich, five carrots, apple, chocolate milk, yogurt, roll of lunch meat, cheese stick, cookie. As she got the coldpack out of the freezer she saw the neat rows of plastic bottles full of her frozen milk, there for Charlie to thaw and feed to Joe during the day. That reminded her—not that she would have forgotten much longer, given how full her breasts felt—that she had to nurse the bairn before she left. She clumped back upstairs and lifted Joe out of his crib, sat on the couch beside it. “Hey love, time for some sleepy nurses.”
Joe glommed on to her while still almost entirely asleep. With his eyes closed he looked like an angel. He was getting bigger but she could still cradle him in her arms and watch him curl into her like a new infant. Closer to two than one now, and a regular bruiser, a wild man who wearied her; but not now. The warm sensation of being suckled put her body back to sleep, but a part of her mind was already at work, and so she kept to the schedule, detached him and shifted him around to the other breast for four more minutes. When they were done he would go back to sleep and snooze happily until about nine, Charlie said.
She hefted him back into his crib, buttoned up and kissed all her boys lightly on the head. Charlie mumbled “Call me, be careful.” Then she was down the stairs and out the door, her big work bag over her shoulder.
The cool air on her face woke her fully for the first time that day. It was May now but the mornings still had a bit of chill to them, a delicious sensation given the humid heat to come. Truck traffic roared south. Splashes of sunlight struck the blue sheen of the windows on the skyscrapers up at Bethesda Metro.
Anna passed the Metro elevator kiosk to extend her walk by fifty yards, then turned and clumped down the stairs to the bus stop. Then down the escalator into the dimness of the great tube of ribbed concrete. Card on turnstile, thwack as the triangular barriers disappeared, down the escalator to the tracks. No train there, none coming immediately, so she sat down on a concrete bench, opened her tablet, and began to study one of the jackets, as they still called them: the grant proposals that the National Science Foundation received at a rate of fifty thousand a year. “Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” The proposal’s algorithm had shown some success in predicting which proteins