Canterbury 2100

Agog! Press is pleased to announce a new anthology of speculative fiction to be launched at Swancon 2008. Working title 'Canterbury 2100', edited by Dirk Flinthart, is open for submissions from Australian and New Zealand authors until 1st June 2008. Standard manuscript formatting applies. Payment offered: AUS $30 plus a copy of the anthology. Email your submissions as .rtf or .doc files to Dirk Flinthart

Working Title: 'Canterbury 2100'

Welcome to the project. This document provides the basic material for writers interested in working on the proposed 'Canterbury 2100' anthology. So far, all the research I've done indicates that this isn't just a nifty idea for a shared story space. In fact, near as I can tell (after asking a bunch of people who ought to know) this will be the very first collection of its kind in SF: the first time anybody has tried to put together the fiction of an imaginary culture, as opposed to about an imaginary culture, if you see what I mean. To me, that's fairly exciting. There aren't many "firsts" to be had any more, and the concept underlying it is intriguing.

The project itself: a series of short stories linked by a common framework. Envisioned as a riff off of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" from fourteenth century England, the individual stories will be narrated by individual members of a disparate group of travelers on a pilgrimage of sorts to Canterbury. However, for our purposes it will be the Canterbury of 2108, and the stories need to reflect that.

The goal: Actually, it's two goals. First and foremost, I'd like to put together a collection of interesting and entertaining stories. After all, the premise of the collection suggests that these are stories told verbally, to pass the time on a long trip. Art literature is great, but it's even better when it's actually interesting to read.

Having said that, the second goal is much more literary and clever and challenging, and to me, far more interesting. The aspect of the original Canterbury Tales which continues to delight me to this day is not so much the stories themselves, but the way the stories reflect the 14th century society which created them. In effect, I enjoy learning about C14th England by reading their fiction, and reconstructing the people who created and appreciated it. I find this process fascinating, and delightful, and I'd like to try to build a story-series which allows the same kind of experience of an imaginary future society. Hopefully we can present readers not only with a series of stories which are interesting and entertaining in their own right, but with the added enjoyment of constructing for themselves, in their own minds, the sense of place and time behind the stories.

This isn't necessarily going to be easy. Chaucer, as a single writer, had an advantage in that his was the sole world-view being presented, though he wrote through a variety of narrators. Likewise, because his stories are rooted in a real-history world, he had no concerns about verismilitude - concerns which must be addressed by writers of speculative fiction. In other words, creating that sense of a "real-history world" by imagining and writing the fiction of a shared imaginary setting, represents the real challenge to the writers taking part.

In other words, the stories need to represent not exactly the 'true future history', but the stuff which the people of that imaginary future history would like to believe in. It bears the same relationship to our collective imaginary future that present-day TV series and novels and movies do to our present-day real world, and it's immediate past.

Methods: A very sketchy "future history" spanning the period from now to 2108 is included with this document, and will be available to everybody that participates in this project. As the physical setting for the pilgrimage will be England circa 2108 AD, the information will focus on that region. The future history will deliberately be in broad strokes only. Detailed setting material is up to individual writers. The editor will work to ensure continuity as far as necessary, but considerable leeway is available: the nature of the proposed 'future history' is somewhat bleak and often catastrophic, and it is to be expected that accounts of it might differ from person to person, place to place. Furthermore, oral recounting of stories for entertainment cannot possibly be expected to be "true history". How many of us can accurately recount the story of the first moon landing?

Armed with the 'future history', each writer will create a short story of their own. That idea: "meant to represent stories told for the amusement of fellow travelers" is the key. In creating your story, I'd like you to think about who tells it, and what it says about the people who listen to it, and what it tells you about the society and culture that gave rise to the story. This is the area in which I'll be picky about consistency and continuity.

For example: Chaucer's time was highly Christian. Therefore, there are no Canterbury Tales which feature Satan/Lucifer as a sympathetic character, because the Christian beliefs and principles of the time were basic, unquestioned axioms. I want the same kind of consistency for Canterbury 2100, because it's that consistency which will let readers suspend disbelief and lose themselves in the process of "deducing" the future history and culture of the world.

I think the easiest means of achieving that is to lift from Canterbury Tales once again, and create a distinct and individual narrator for each tale. ("The Knight's Tale", "The Miller's Tale", "The Franklin's Tale", etc). I like the idea of each character being distinguished by their profession, and I'd encourage participants to use that format - at the very least, it solves the problem of what to name the stories, and it helps link Canterbury 2100 to the original. What I would like from each participant would be, as well as the story, perhaps a two-or-three paragraph sketch of the character and what role they play in the future-historic England. That information will then be used to sketch the meta-narration: the story of the pilgrimage itself which joins and sets all the other stories.

Limits, caveats, whatever: Actually, this is a wide-open brief. We're interested in just about any kind of story, because the nature of the setting will instantly make it science fiction. You want to write a romance? Fine. As long as it can believably be a romance that might be told for amusement by a traveler in Canterbury 2100, it might work. Same with horror, adventure, and just about any other genre you care to name. I can see where a mythic retelling of Gilligan's Island might work beautifully, for example - reflecting a culture in which the Gilligan stories have passed into oral tradition and legend. Way-out post-humanism? Sure: in a difficult, post-eco-disaster world, people might well fear human/machine weapons, or long for the indestructibility of a downloaded life.

Time-frame: We're looking to launch at Natcon in Perth, Easter 2008. I'd say that means we'd hope for final drafts by Christmas, to allow for layout, printing, and all the other bits that go with it. Sooner is better.

In conclusion: Most of all, I'm hoping that everybody who gets involved enjoys the challenge of trying to use fiction to suggest the imaginary world which might create such fiction. Admittedly, it's a self-consciously literary sort of process, but it's also a lot of fun, and I think there's an opportunity here for people really to pull out the stops and play. The original Canterbury Tales is bawdy, earthy, romantic, wistful, raucous - it is the pulp fiction of its time: stories told purely for the enjoyment of storytelling. If we achieve no more than that, I'll be happy. If we can go that extra step and create a living, breathing world behind the stories - well, that would be an accomplishment.

The Future History of Canterbury 2100

Year 2007:

Major trends likely to affect the future -

* Near-complete dependence on cheap petrochemical energy for all aspects of society - food production and distribution, health/pharmacy, transport, domestic living, entertainment.
* Rapid decline in petrochemical reserves
* Increase in social unrest in marginalized economies and societies
* Rapid decline in environmental and ecological factors including buildup of greenhouse gases due to petrochemical usage; deforestation, overfishing, climate change, and sea level rises
* Enormous population growth in Asia, particularly China and India
* US military supremacy used to enforce ongoing US economic position - but that economic position is dependent on worldwide acceptance of the US dollar. US rapidly moving into gigadebt

2015: China is now foremost economic power in the world, and the pre-eminent centre of technical innovation. Oil reserves worldwide are now far below requirements. Increasingly, coal is being used, and marginal oil reserves in environmentally sensitive areas (Amazon basin, Canadian forests/tundra) are being exploited. Nuclear power plants are being commissioned as rapidly as possible by any and every country capable of doing so. No significant progress on fusion power, limited progress on solar and other renewables. Pebble-bed fission reactors provide the safest viable power source. Uranium becomes ever more important as a strategic material. Climate continues to deteriorate worldwide.

2015 - 2025: Sudden, sharp decline in American power due to petrochemical depletion and crash of US dollar. Economic struggles between US/Europe and China played out in smaller, resource-rich nations elsewhere. Minor tactical nuclear exchanges occur on a localized, 'deniable' basis, and deployment of US forces in various fields of combat takes place. China takes a real lead in space exploration, but maintains internal control over its population and that of subject countries including Tibet, Taiwan and Mongolia only by increasing militarization. The US, faced by a powerful external foe and by internal dissent, becomes a virtual dictatorship of a small, wealthy core who claim enthusiastic support for and from the increasingly militant, apocalyptic, and fundamentalist US Christian community. American forces abroad are recalled to reinforce the home situation, a tacit admission that the US can no longer successfully make conventional war against the Chinese and other enemies they've accumulated during their time at the top.

2025-2060: Plague Years: massive influenza pandemic kills twenty percent of the world population. Hardest hit are the very young, the very old, the undernourished and of course, the enormous immuno-compromised populations of Africa and Asia. So rapid is the spread of the disease that chaos and panic ensue, worldwide. Accusations of biowar are made. In short order, secondary plagues crop up in the US and China both, which appear almost certainly to be biological weapons. In the confusion, the US and China undertake a short nuclear exchange. ABM defense systems combined with the deterioration of aging nuclear arsenals make the nuclear war largely a non-event, but the few explosions which do occur sufficiently destabilize both governments that both China and the US descend into confused civil war. Sometime during this period it becomes clear that the global climate change will not be slow and steady, but will follow the usual pattern of a complex, buffered system which has been pushed past the tipping point: 'normal' conditions persist, under increasing strain, until somewhere around 2030. The Great Ocean Current simply stops, and everything goes haywire in the space of just a few years.
Plague and climate change eliminate virtually all central governance in Africa. Indonesia fractures along old ethnic lines. Europe does likewise. Climate change and rising sea levels devastate much of South America as well, leading to starvation and warfare.
Worldwide, disease and warfare play havoc with the remaining social infrastructure, and near-simultaneous environmental catastrophe furthers the damage. Due to the loss of the Great Ocean Current, the Gulf Stream no longer warms the Northern Hemisphere, which paradoxically becomes colder. Rising temperatures melt the Arctic ice cap and dump three-quarters of the Antarctic ice into the oceans, causing a rise of about ten metres. Worldwide flooding, followed by yet more famine and disease, kills roughly seventy percent of the remaining human population. (Since the year 2020, the population has declined from nearly seven billion to just over one billion.)

2060-2080: The plagues are largely burnt out by this time. National governments have mostly vanished, replaced by local militarized organizations drawing on irreplaceable stocks of weaponry and supplies which are rapidly deteriorating in any case. A degree of order is restored in smaller, isolated countries with a history of strong social cohesion: New Zealand, England, parts of Australia, Iceland, Japan, etc. In such places, all efforts are turned towards the simple act of surviving the new world - bitter cold in the North, hot in the South, with storms on a scale never before seen in human history. No real rebuilding is possible yet.

2080-2100: Forms of national government begin to re-emerge. Despite the sharp reduction in population, resources are still desperately scarce, and with the loss of hydrocarbon fuels, communications between populated regions is often limited to the most primitive means. A return to steam technology occurs here and there, though in many places the reaction against "dirty fuel" is almost pathological. New religious groups and variations on the old ones spring up, each with different attitudes to the long, slow disaster and to the possible future. Apocalyptic groups are particularly common. High-tech military equipment is almost all gone. Ammunition for the most modern weapons is gone. The ability to produce high-powered propellants is largely gone. Military tactics change to reflect the need for hand-to-hand combat, and the use of relatively primitive explosives, guns, vehicles and artillery. Medicine is largely reduced to a nineteenth century state of practice and technology, albeit with considerably greater understanding and theory.

ENGLAND 2107

London having been largely obliterated by the floods after being evacuated and burned during the Plague Years, the national capital has been moved to Canterbury. The government is still officially headed by a King: Charles V, who plays an important role as a unifying symbol of continuity, more valuable now than for some time in the past. Governance itself is a tenuous thing - the military supporting a Parliament full of Members elected by "Citizens" only. (Citizens are defined by the government according to criteria which change to suit the needs of the government. Landholding, local militia, ethnicity, religious affiliation and sex/gender all become factors.) In many parts of the what remains of the UK, the "government" has almost no influence, and local organizations fill the gap. Churches and other religious groups play an important social role once more.

Wales - hilly, with remnants of coal - is a relatively rich region, much of it once more agitating for "independence". Scotland doesn't have to agitate: nobody wants it, owing to the severity of the winters. Ireland is also much colder, and ravaged by sectarian warfare which has degenerated into something resembling the old tribal habit of raid and counter-raid.

The population of England is now far from homogeneous. English is still spoken across the country, but in many places, cohesive migrant groups such as Pakistanis and Indians have fared better than the older local racial groups. Surviving communities of all ethnic varieties are strongly agrarian, and often highly xenophobic. (Suspicion of travelers and strangers is an ingrained thing amongst survivors of the Plague Years). A valuable function of the government, which it is using to further its own ends, is the protection and extension of trade and travel, primarily by steam-train, and also by canal. Because of the changed coastline and the long disuse of much of the national rail and canal system, as well as depredations by paramilitary or bandit groups, even these simple forms of transport are slow and uncertain -but they're better than what has been available for quite some time.

Owing to the lack of cheap energy, much of the population is pretty well constantly engaged in food production. The government is working to acquire heavy horses, and to disseminate long-forgotten knowledge and skills (ploughing with animals; use of basic agricultural equipment such as seed drills; simple practices such as the reserving of part of every crop as seed stock) but in the main, human labour is vital.
Materials are particularly difficult. Some things are easily acquired: plenty of scrap metal around for the taking. Other things are almost unobtainable - silicone lubricants, high-pressure gaskets, replacement microcircuits, just to name a few. In places, old mines once regarded as 'uneconomic' have been re-opened, but without heavy machinery to work with, their output is low. Once again, human labour has become a vital staple, and skills which had all but vanished in the high-tech cheap energy years are being painstakingly rediscovered.

NOTES FOR STORYTELLERS:

Yes, this is a very sketchy outline. As I said, I want you to be as free as possible to explore your ideas. Within reason, I can envision all kinds of possibilities. For example, I would expect that some of the old nuclear plants might still be in operation, carefully guarded and supplied by the government. Sourcing uranium for them would be a constant worry, of course, but a conversion programme from the old Trident missiles and the like might be feasible. It's unlikely that the wind farms would have survived the mega-storms, however, but we could stretch a point. In any case, a sort of monastic structure, based on a continuing supply of electricity and therefore some lingering ability to carry out high-tech tasks, might easily fit into the picture.

Heavy industry is very rare. Even if an adequate supply of power could be found, finding the manpower and the resources of metal, etc would be extremely difficult. And of course, exactly what would you do with the results of such industry? Produce cars that can't drive? Aircraft that can't fly? Consumables that can't be distributed, even if there was a consumer base to require them? No: any remaining heavy industry capacity is likely to be strictly held by the military and government, for supply of weapons and ammunition, and possibly for bulk transport such as steam-driven ships and trains.

Of course, none of this rules out future-tech stuff. Certainly, the timeline allows for some serious research for another fifteen or twenty years from present-day levels, and possibly more in certain isolated, protected and well-supplied enclaves. The odd example of breakthrough tech might well become the stuff of stories and legends - and of an absolute certainty, one would expect exaggerated, spooky, and even hysterical accounts of the technology of the pre-crash world. It's even possible that potentially world-changing technologies might have been discovered, but 'lost' in the confusion and chaos of the Plagues and climate change, to crop up with unexpected results elsewhen and elsewhere... but overall, we're looking at a world whose technological peak was reached about seventy years back, and has declined sharply since then.

At this point, you might be thinking this is an unnecessarily bleak picture, and not particularly inspiring as a vision of the future. I'd offero that. The first is that we're creating a kind of reflected Chaucer. His Canterbury Tales were apparently written between 1386 and 1400AD. Note that this is just forty years or so after the first Great Plague, which wiped out about a third of Europe's population in an incredibly short time. Note also that it was a period of sudden, surprising climate change: a rapid cooling which continued until about 1450, and remained as "the little ice age" until the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, over all of Europe the 14th century was a period of warfare, disease, and political instability and uncertainty on a grand scale. In other words, Chaucer's England shares (to a degree) the major characteristics of this imaginary future. The real difference is that by the mid 21st century, there was lot farther to fall than there was in the mid 14th.

The second reason for adopting such a bleak picture of the future is much simpler: failing some kind of left-field breakthrough in fusion energy supply or the equivalent, there is no reason to project anything more positive. Given the facts available to us now, it is quite clear that barring some kind of lucky miracle, this imaginary future is probably as good as we're going to get, and if we're going to write about an imaginary future society, we might as well make it as scientifically believable as we can. In fact, in the present trends of SF, we'll be pretty much cutting our own trail. Nobody else is doing much of this kind of thing.

It's not a wholly hopeless picture. This is a future when the light at the end of the tunnel is just barely becoming visible - travel is again possible, and starvation is no longer an immediate fear for most of the population. The Great Plagues have burned themselves out, and the new weather patterns, while much more extreme than before, are at least settling into some kind of predictability. The sea level is as high as it can get, and now that CO2 emissions are a tiny fraction of what they were, and warm, shallow waters proliferate, plankton and algae can get busy at bringing things back under control in that department. Things aren't good, no: but they've stopped getting worse for the first time in three generations - in fact, the living memory of the world.

If you've not read Chaucer, you might like to take a look. The Middle English is great fun, and once you get the hang of it you can read it pretty easily, but you might like to try a more modern version for a quick look-through. What you will see, despite Chaucer's world of plague and climate change and war, is a riotous, brawling, bawdy, tender, infinitely human book - a book which reflects a society with a great deal of hope, despite the terrors of the age. I'm not interested in influencing your own interpretation of 2107 in either direction, mind you: I'm simply saying that despite the bleakness, I suspect people will go on being people as best they can, and the stories should reflect that. (And if we're looking at mainstream publication, a theme of 'hope' overall is probably necessary.)

To particulars: obviously, there are many possible reasons for travelers to be headed for Canterbury. For example, it would be reasonable for somebody from an outlying district to go there in order to check surviving (now centralized) records to find out what happened to various family members connected with their home community. Religious pilgrimages are definitely reasonable: Canterbury is meaningful to pre-Christian groups as well as Christian, and there's no reason to suppose that groups springing up in the future might not give it special significance. Acting as a centre of government, one might expect people to go there and petition for aid for their communities. Certainly, it would act as a centre of trade as well, and probably functions as the hub of the slowly.

Our travelers are on the last leg of their journey to Canterbury, on a modern steam train. (Much more lightweight than the old steam locos due to the use of reclaimed and salvaged materials including aluminium and magnesium alloys.) The train began its journey in what's left of Newcastle, just south of Scotland, and has worked its way south over a week or so, stopping at dozens of different places along the way, and passengers have been boarding steadily. Now, hours short of Canterbury, the train has been stopped by floodwaters from one of the megastorms, and the passengers in one particular car have begun telling stories to pass the time...

Final Note: We've got plenty of time, folks. Right now, nothing is set in stone. Anybody gets a total brainstorm they want to run past me, I'm all ears. When we're a bit more solid, I'll set up an online group for discussion and development. Meanwhile, it's time to create stories.

Dirk Flinthart,
Editor
June 2007