November 2012 Editorial: The Future Is Coming, Good and Hard




As I write this, superstorm Sandy is just under 2 weeks in the past. The spacious world headquarters of Burrowing Wombat Press, situated in Yonkers a mile inland and 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson, was spared direct damage from the storm. We didn’t even lose our power, in large part because the trees in our neighborhood have been pruned of dead limbs by a long sequence of violent windstorms and late fall snowstorms over the past several years. We did lose landline phone service and cable/broadband internet for three days; in a brilliant instance of the LivingInTheFuture experience, we were able to limp around both of these by routing calls and connectivity through my smartphone for the duration.

Others were, of course, not so lucky. Hundreds of humans are dead, thousands of houses destroyed by flood or fire or tree impact, entire communities underwater or left without electricity at the cusp of winter. One close friend ended up with a dock in his living room; another had his home swept off its foundations. Art warehouses in lower Manhattan basements have been inundated.

One expects any day to go to the Times to learn that packs of wolves savaged commuters left waiting on forgotten rail stations out in the forgotten hinterlands of Mt. Kisco or Stony Brook, the bodies covered in inches of snow from Winter Storm Athena a week later.

The longest problem we suffered through personally was the region-wide gasoline shortage. Many gas stations were without power, which left their fuel unavailable for many days, and six of the seven regional gasoline distribution points—where gas is moved from water transport to trucks—were unavailable for most of the week following the storm’s landfall. Widespread use of generators for household power drove gas consumption up. Coupled with the near-total paralysis of mass transit, the lines began at the gas stations on Tuesday morning and have not ended yet; even the most routine errands have become a calculus of estimated fuel efficiency versus urgency of task.

Artist’s representation

The irony, of course, is that we are lining up to pump into our cars the environmental toxin that has caused our ruination. New York City is actually a model of low carbon use—the typical New Yorker uses about a third the carbon that a typical American does—but we’re at the mercy of the rest of you, and this time we got hit hard. Bruce Sterling commented on Twitter, "just compare New York post-9/11 to New York Post-Sandy, and then realize you can’t kill Sandy with drones.”

If science fiction has a purpose, I would say that it’s to examine the present using the imagery of the future, with the hope of making a better future possible. Science fiction has been warning us about this future for at least 35 years, but apparently to get attention sometimes the future has to slap you full in the face, screaming, “Why weren’t you listening?”

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors