The Damage We've Done

 We need to go to Mars. Not for a footprints-and-flags mission, to take some photos and return with a few Mars rocks, but to colonise, and to stay. It won't even be as expensive as most people think. The SpaceX company can launch a normal satellite today for ten times less than NASA did it with the Shuttle. It's possible and affordable.

 Still, it's a big project. People will probably die to achieve it. So why bother?

 For me, the main reason is that we can't save Earth's environment. That should be obvious by now. For all the international deals, right back to Rio in 1992, the ecosystem is still being destroyed. Forget climate change, even. The bigger problem is the simple destruction of species and habitats, and we can't stop it. Even when we try we just cause a new disaster. Bio-fuel was meant to reduce fossil fuel use, but instead it only smashed the forests where orang-utans live, as land was converted to farms to grow the bio-crops. Now orangs face extinction. We tried to be good, and instead just shifted the disaster to another place.

 The problem is too many people. Everyone born needs - at a minimum - water, food, clothes and a roof. That's before we think about jobs, or cars, or healthcare and all the other basic needs. All of that means humans have to exploit the Earth a little bit more. Globally we now use more than 50% of the fresh water first, before any other species. That means everything else put together has less water than humans, which is a recipe for catastrophe. We make 100 million new pieces of clothing every year, which works out at a bit more than 12 per person - not a huge amount, but the total is enormous. It's very hard to see how these numbers can be reduced without a population drop.

 But that's not going to happen. Nobody will vote for a government that plans to limit births. Even people who know the risks won't. I know a man who understands the risks of over-population, is dedicated to Green issues - and has 4 children. That's how the world reacts to this; they agree we need to reduce human numbers, but then assume the need doesn't apply to them. And the result? The UN used to say world population would be 9.5 billion by 2100. Then 10.2 billion. Now it's 11.1 billion, because birth rates are just not dropping very fast. And remember, we need population not to stabilise, but to go DOWN, or sheer pressure of numbers will see the world driven to ecological disaster.

 And so, Mars. It's so far away that large numbers of people will never be able to move there, however advanced technology might become. But we can move trees there, and animals, and build copies of the habitats on Earth. The various species will survive, and perhaps in a thousand years we could re-seed the Earth, and repair some of the horrendous damage we've done.

 Humans don't learn. Sumerians, early Chinese, Maya, the first peoples of North America... they all pillaged their environment until it collapsed. This time we're doing it world wide, but we have a way to save something from the wreck. In doing so, we can save ourselves too.

Cards in the Dark

 Last time I talked about how not having time to actually write has meant lots of new ideas shooting about in my head. And guess what? Got another one.

 This time I have a chap named Trist, who left his home city years ago and has since travelled around becoming an expert swordsman and do-gooder. His companion is a phoenix called Feng, who insists he uses minimum force and always tries to do the right thing. He's in the middle of dealing with a drug dealer when his ring glows, which means his old girlfriend is in trouble and he has to keep a promise to go home and help her.

 I started writing it! Yes, I've snatched time on my breaks at work, a few minutes when I get home, anything to get words on the page. I'm fed up of not writing, and this idea has caught me the way few do. So I'm suddenly writing longhand, which I haven't done for decades. So far I've got one chapter done and am starting on the second. It's quite weird, because the tone is sort of half noir and half tongue in cheek, which is new for me.

 It's also weird because I can't recall ever reading a noir book, so I'm sorta playing cards in the dark here. I'm getting The Big Sleep for Christmas. That should get me in the right place, quite apart from being a bloody good read.

 There are interesting themes, too. Homecoming is one of them, parents another. In the book all phoenixes are female and they're born pregnant, though can choose when to let the eggs develop. Of course they immolate themselves to hatch the eggs, so no phoenix ever knows its mother. Trist had a tough childhood and at one point Feng says she sometimes envies humans their parents... and sometimes doesn't.

 Writing is fun. I'm so glad to be back.

Hunting Rabbits

 You've probably seen all those posts on Facebook and Twitter that go, "You know you're a writer when...". They end with something ironic like "when your best ideas come just as you're dropping off to sleep." Well, here's mine.

 You know you're writer when your brain just will not stop working out ideas and problems, even when you have almost no time to write.

 With my shift pattern at the moment, and with two small children, my time is tight. For the first time I'm not writing every day. I'm doing an edit/rewrite, but even that is catch-as-catch-can, an hour one day and ten minutes the next. So I'm not actually creating new work... and my mind won't shut up.

 I've got a new idea for a story set in a growing empire, one just realising that the old government systems aren't capable of managing the new, larger realm. Blocked that out yesterday. I've got an idea for a trilogy set in a place like ancient Egypt, where a band of adventurers set out to find the source of a foundation myth. There's the Heikegani crab idea, where crabs with shells like human faces turn out to be the carriers of wronged souls. Also I've thought of a story for a tribe of plains folk, who've heard rumours of a new people to the east and who then begin to die of a disease they've never seen before. Ideas all over the place, and no time to write.

 I think the two things are linked. Because my mind isn't occupied with the tangles and plots of a novel, it's spending all that nervous (creative?) energy on ideas. It's better than spinning its wheels to no purpose, isn't it? But it's frustrating as all hell. I'm really keen on the Crabs, that's a great idea, and the Egypt story just bursts with potential. And all I can do is block them out for the future. It's like being a cyclist with no bike, his legs pumping on pedals that don't exist. A dog hunting rabbits in his sleep.

 (Hmm. Saying "I'm really keen on the crabs" could be taken the wrong way.)

 Now, as of this morning, I have an idea for a prodigal son who left the city years ago, but promised to return if the girl he loved (and married someone else) needed help. Now he gets the call and returns, laden with knowledge gained in the world, and finds things are not at all as he thought they'd be. I can juxtapose a normal, humdrum city (sorta) with the mysteries and wonders - and even fantastic beasts - of the wider world. Cracking idea, simple as you like but teeming with possibilities. So it's back to blocking out, even though I won't be able to start it until New Year at the very least, and probably spring.

 Bugger.

 But... the old mill is still churning, eh?

The Weird Ones

There's an advert on TV at the moment which says there are 3.5 billion women in the world, and no two are the same.

 The truth is that almost all of them are exactly the same, in every way that matters. All people are. They want the same things, dream the same dreams, eat the same foods. They fit into society as though moulded to it, which of course they are. Governments spend a lot of time and money teaching children to be good little adults, so we grow up to pay our taxes and not cause trouble. And so we're all made to be the same.

 Strangely, small societies tolerate differences better than large ones. A hunter-gatherer clan of 200 people will accept little Bobby's weird habits, because someday he might see something everyone else missed. But a nation of 65 million is harder to manage, the leaders don't want people shooting off on their own all the time, so they tell Bobby to stop it and be quiet. We're taught to conform. Fit in and don't make a fuss, right?

 But you know, the people who do make a fuss, who shoot off sideways the moment they see something interesting... those are the fun ones.

 They're the ones we write about. JK Rowling once said she stopped the Potter books because nobody wants to read about Ron, Harry and Hermione playing bingo at Hogwarts when they're 60 years old. What's interesting about that? Nobody would read the story of Anna Smith, a Hufflepuff in Harry's year who isn't mentioned because she never does anything. And the truth is we're nearly all like Anna. We're here, but we make up the ranks. The faceless extras of life, filling the background and no more unique than a sardine in a can.

 (Yes, I include myself in this. Henry David Thoreau once said only one man in a million was truly awake, and he'd never met one. Neither have I. And I think one in a billion might be a closer estimate.)

 But the most interesting of all? The ordinary person who is thrown into something big, and finds out he/she isn't ordinary after all. Like Harry Potter, who's just an ordinary wizard (yes, I know), quite talented but no genius, with nothing to make him stand out except Voldemort. These are the people we write about, or read about. They're the ones I like in life too - the wounded, the misfits, people with stories written on their faces and told in the things they do.

 Most of the time they're called the weird ones. You know, the people who make us say, "everyone's got one friend like that." But I like 'em.

 Keep not fitting in, folks. It would be boring without you.

Leave no Footprints

 There was a report this week that in the Cerrado region of Brazil, the savanna is being cleared for fields to grow soybeans. Huge areas are being burned all the time. It's doing enormous environmental damage and driving species to the edge of extinction.

 It made me think about the idea today that we can save the world if we go meat-free two or three nights a week. But we can't. If we abandon beef the fields will just be converted to grow soybeans, or sugarcane for bio-fuel. That's already happening - the orangutan is in critical danger because of forest clearance for bio-fuel crops. So we reduced fossil fuel dependence to save the world, and instead smashed the ecosystem of Borneo.

 The truth is that there are simply too many of us. Too many humans. We need too much land, too much water, and using one product instead of another only moves the disaster to somewhere else. We have to reduce our demands on the land, not just change them. And we know it can be done, because there are cultures from the past which did it. Most famous of these are the Plains Indians, whose ancestors slaughtered pretty much everything except the buffalo, leaving a threadbare ecosystem to their descendants. The Indians learned to take what could be taken without damage - "leave no footprints", they said, no mark that you'd been there at all. In a different way the Garamanta of North Africa did it too, living in one city amidst the Sahara as they did. It must have meant tight restrictions on water use and on food, and population control too.

 Those are our choices. We could leave fewer footprints, by taking less from the land. It means a drastic reduction in standard of living; we'd have to use half the energy we do now, half the water, and much less food (at least in the developed world). Or we could reduce population, globally, by several billion people.

 Both options are unpalatable and both are ridiculously hard. No voting public is going to elect a party that limits the right to have children. Even if it did, how do you enforce that abroad, in Africa for example? Or India? As for reducing our standard of living, don't waste my time. Voters opt for whoever they think will give them the most money and gadgets the soonest.

 But here's the kicker. Another report this week estimates that the number of vertebrates worldwide has fallen by 60% since 1970. More than half of nearly every species except humans gone in half a century. And with losses like that the ecosystem will soon collapse, and human beings will see a catastrophic fall in numbers and living standards anyway. And we can't stop that happening, because we won't vote for it.

 In a thousand years there really might be no human footprints left on the Earth.

What Happened?

 What we know about our deep history is outweighed, many times, by what we don't know.

 I'm researching Heian era Japan, as I've mentioned before. The period ended in 1185 AD, not that long ago, yet we know almost nothing about how people lived. We understand most of the social order, the upper echelons of society, but that's about all. We don't even have much of an idea what people ate.

 It's the same everywhere. There's still argument about how the Giza pyramids were built: by thousands of slaves, or by a smaller group of more professional men. No one really knows. People argue over who the Sumerians were and where they came from. Historians and archaeologists bicker over who the Hyksos were, who conquered part of ancient Egypt in 1650 BC and who were "possibly from Western Asia". In other words, the best we can say it that they most likely came from somewhere in one half of the largest continent on Earth. Not exactly precision, is it?

 This tells me that as a species, human beings really don't remember much. Give us two generations and a minor dislocation - a war, a famine, plague - and we forget most of what we knew before. It happens amazingly fast. When Rome fell information was stored in dozens of major libraries across the Empire, but 50 years later nobody knew how to build Roman roads, or even the buildings that had filled every town. The philosophy of ancient Greece was forgotten in Europe completely, and had to be relearned from the Muslims a thousand years later. That staggers me. How can a whole continent forget all that wisdom?

 Part of the answer is that we destroy it deliberately.

 That post-Roman loss was led by the Catholic Church, which set out to destroy any book and all learning that wasn't approved by the clerics. Knowledge came from God, they said, not any other source. The Church did it again in the Americas in the 16th Century, trying to wipe out whatever they could of the former cultures. Rome tried to obliterate all memory of the Druids. History is full of examples like this, and it makes me so angry I can hardly speak.

 That was my heritage. It was mine by right, and these bastards took it away.

 It's important we remember this, and try not to let it happen again. Because we're entering a very tough period now, globally, with the horrendous damage we've done and are still doing to the world. 7.7 billion people is too many for the Earth to support for very long. We use too much water, too much land. I think there's going to be a crash, and the longer it takes to arrive, the harder it's going to be.

 I hope we preserve what we can, because if we forget our past there's nothing to stop us doing the same stupid things again in the future.

Any Hints?

 So research for the new (new) WIP is ongoing. There's a lot of it to do, paradoxically because the Heian period of Japan isn't well understood. We only have a sketchy idea of those times, and almost none of life away from the Temples and nobles. That means I can give myself free rein on a lot of things - make it up, really. But it also means I really have to get the basic points right, because those are the hooks that the rest hang on. If the reader is going to understand where the story is set, he needs those hooks.

 So, I'm very busy not writing. (Doesn't help that we've been a House of Plague for a week. When the girls get sick, they really go to town, and soon everyone else is sick too.) But anyway, I've been working out a social structure, including ranks and offices, sifting through various versions of Buddhism to pick the schism that divides the two main sects, and learning about Japanese mythology. Boy, that last is complex. Their gods are sometimes referred to as the Ten Thousand, and they all apologise for being gods, apparently. I haven't figured out why yet, so any hints.... But that gives you an idea of how time-consuming this is. Research is always tedious. This time it's extreme, but still, it hasn't changed its nature.

 So that makes me wonder, again, how some people manage to write, edit and publish a novel every six weeks.

 I could not do it. Not with the nature of what I do. If I took a cocktail of drugs to keep me awake and functioning 24 hours a day, if I abandoned my family, gave up my job, shut myself in a shack to work and did nothing else, I would still struggle. It's only possible if I abandon research and do no background work at all. But that changes my work beyond what I will accept. Imagine if Tolkien had written LOTR but not bothered to devise an Elvish language and culture, or a pantheon of gods, or any of the history of Middle-Earth. Would the story be as strong? Of course it wouldn't. It would be more like something by David Gemmell, where history is covered in two sentences and then someone gets killed again.

 In a way I admire those prolific writers. But there has to be a trade-off, speed in favour of quality and depth. I think they've chosen to make money rather than to make something of quality. Or to try; god knows I'm no Tolkien or Guy Kay, but I do my best to make something meaningful. I want to write books that people will come back to five years later and read again, and maybe find something new inside.

 I don't write for money. I write for the thrill of it, for the ideas and discoveries, some of which are found in the black pits of research. I'll stick with it.

Pip pip.