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Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Brad Tyer - Opportunity, Montana

Early on in Brad Tyer's book about the town of Opportunity he makes a telling point about the brochures that advertise the tourist mecca of Montana. It is supposed to be an "otherworldly landscape filled with bears and wolves", but both those species and the iconic bison only survive because of direct and regular human intervention. Bison, for instance, are preserved mostly because they are good for eating. The point Tyer is making, is that Montana's nature is not natural, but an artifical construct.

The same is true of many of the rivers. Tyer is a canoeist. He relates to the landscape through the waterways he travels, and Montana's waterways have always been famous. Think of the flyfishing of the film (and story) A River Runs Through It. The film was made far away from the actual location, because that's not natural enough - too many industrial buildings and homes. The story ignores these too. But Montana's rivers have also had an important role in creating the United States. On them steamboats ferried the Seventh Cavalry to their ill-fated meeting with Sitting Bull's forces and, more importantly for the environment, boats moved the copper ore and mining materials in and out of the state. Some of the mineowners might have needed ships to bring in their profits.

The mines have also become repositories for pollution - heavy metals like arsenic and lead, and the muck that falls from the skies. Montana's mines made America, particularly the mines of Anaconda and Butte. But the poisonous waste had to go somewhere, and its ended up in tailings ponds and barely beneath the ground in what has become one of America's largest polluted areas - a superfund site that sucks in millions of dollars to create what is supposed to be a safe environment.

Opportunity is a tiny town, just outside Anaconda. It has become the tragic dumping ground for the legacy of nearly 100 years of copper mining. The people there have various diseases - likely caused by the pollution. There's been a campaign, on and off, by various people to clean it up. But many of the residents, tired of fighting, or worried about their pensions, aren't fighting back. Opportunity, Montana has become the dumping ground in order to preserve the wealthier and more tourist friendly parts of the state.

The Clark Fork River is supposedly being restored to it's "natural sate", but the millions of tons of toxic soil has to go somewhere. And like poor, working class towns from South America to China, Opportunity was chosen. It barely even got mentioned in the presentations about the work.

Part personal memoir, part traveloge, Brad Tyer's book is an unusual look at the consequences of big business being allowed to get away with murder. The big mining companies made billions in profits, yet have been made to give a tiny percentage back to the communities they ravaged. They were happy to suck the life out of their workers' and kill the very earth around the state, yet they're barely accountable for the horror they unleashed.

Tyer's a great writer, and a decent journalist. He's good with people, and his interviews with locals, industry insiders and environmentalists are fascinating. He's a touch to cynical though - perhaps because he's seen it all go to hell before. I'd like to think we can make the bastards pay. Still, this is a great book for opening the curtain on the real Montana, which I finished a few short hours before flying there to see Butte, Anaconda and the rest.

Sunday, April 21, 2024

James Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn

James Donovan's A Terrible Glory is widely described as the definitive account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It certainly is a readable account that does its best to use first hand accounts to tell the story of the battle as clearly and vividly as possible. Unfortunately it feels as an account of the US Cavalry. The book suffers greatly from a lack of the Native American perspective - not just on the battle itself, but on the context for the battle.

Given the annilation of the men with Custer at the end, there is a natural tendency for the author to focus on the experiences of the survivors. As in many other histories of the Little Big Horn, this means that historians and authors tend to tell the story of the commands of Reno and Benteen. Donovan does this well, giving a real sense of how the troops there, a few miles from Custer's position, had little understanding of what had happened, and their terrifying nights defending their position while being unsure what had happened to Custer's force.

Donovan places pride of place to Benteen here. Benteen, hated by Custer, is built up here as a brave tactician, able to step in when Reno fails and loses control. Benteen's ability to organise the defence and a fighting retreat after Weir's unsuccessful attempt to reach Custer probably saved the companies on the hill. Reno himself is depicted as a coward and a drunk, though Donovan is perhaps less critical that other historians of the man himself. There's no doubt that Reno's initial charge was met by a heavy force, and could not have survived a full scale attack on the Native American village. In the aftermath of that collapse, Benteen could save the men, but there was an utter failure of collective leadership. The real failure of command however, was Custer.

Custer's luck ran out at the Bighorn. It is noticeable that many of those who survived with Reno (thanks to Benteen) assumed that Custer must have survived - he was considered unkillable. But that reputation was built on luck itself. Indeed what's really noticeable in contemporary accounts such as Donovan's is that the massacre of the Seventh Cavalry took place because Custer's command decisions were frequently made on the basis of his personal animosity and factional fighting in the regiment. Ironically, Custer took his friends and family with him, leaving his antagonists with Reno. They're the ones who lived.

Despite starting decades before, James Donovan's book is focused on the battle to the exculsion of much interesting contemporary material and suffers from a lack of Native American material and voices. It is interesting to compare and contrast the account of the Little Bighorn told in Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America. Which is entirely from the perspective of the Lakota forces on the day. Donovan's book would have been much stronger had it used this approach alongside the well worn tale from the Cavalry's side.

In the final third of the book Donovan tells the story of the recriminations and blame after the battle. Here the reader is likely to be disappointed. The survivors banded together, for the good of the regiment, and everyone failed to learn any lessons. Many of those who survived however suffered badly - what we would today call PTSD led many to drink, and tragic deaths. The Native Americans celebrated, but were rounded up and destroyed by a beligerent US and so it is right that Donovan finishes with the horror of Wounded Knee - making it clear how the US Army saw this massacre of men, women and children as revenge for the Custer's death.

A Terrible Glory is a readable account of the Little Bighorn fight. But readers will likely find themselves wanting more than James Donovan offers here. Readers looking for a first book about this subject might find Nathanel Philbrick's The Last Stand a better introduction.

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Peter Blickle - Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany

What was the Reformation? A simple explanation would be that it was the movement of reform inititated within the Catholic Church by Martin Luther's 1517 criticisms of the Church's sale of indulegences. A movement of Reform that led to a schism and essentially resulted in two distinct branches of Christianity. None of this is inaccurate. But it doesn't really explain what the Reformation was in terms of a movement. How did it manifest itself and propagate, and why did it actually take off in 1517?

Today the historian Peter Blickle is best remembered (when he is remembered at all) for his controversial description of the German Peasants' War as a "Revolution of the Common Man". His book Communal Reformation takes the analysis he laid out earlier and applies it to the Reformation. What results is a much bigger imaginging of these periods of rebellion and reform as an interlinked, and reinforcing process. In particular he makes the strong argument that the Reformation could not have taken place without a longer historical process of class struggle that culminates in the Peasants' War, and indeed the Peasants' War fundamentally transforms the Reformation itself.

For Blickle, it was the struggle of "communal organistation" for self-identity and emancipation that led the lowest orders to drive forward change in town and country. As he writes, "with the help of communal organisation - and only in this way - did peasants and the burghers learn to say no, ro protest, to question the demands of lordship and the claims of the authorities. The protest of the faithful against the church in Rome was rehearsed in the protest of the subjects against their lords."

This insight is important. It makes the Reformation and extension, as well as an expression, of the class struggle against the ruling orders. Obviously it was intensely ideological. The criticisms of the Church unleashed by Luther were taken up and extended into criticisms of the system itself, as well as the established church. But as Blickle says "the common people... developed concepts of the reofrmation that were identical to their basic principles". He continues:

The common people in country and city listened to the reformers when they talked about the people in country and citiy and listened to the reformers when they talked about the realisation of ecclesia, they listened to the southern German reofmrers when they talked about the realisation of the hospel, but they wer enot merely imitators. Their struggle for the Christian Republic was a the qualitative leap from the throry of the intellectuals, who shied away from responsiblity, to the concrete day-to-day practice of the ocmmon peple. And this practice was not nourished by religious faith; tather, its explanation lies in the acutal living conditions, in the village and the city, in the political culture of the late Middle Ages.

These practical demands manifested in all sorts of ways, but particulary in what I would call a democratic impulse to extend control over aspects of village life, particularly the role of priests who were those who propogated the gospel, as well as the ruling classes' ideas. One revealing example of this comes from the Franconian village of Wendelstein, in late 1524, the earliest time of the peasant uprising. The community told their priest his duties and role:

Thus we shall not recognise you as a lord, but simply as a servant of the parish. You do not command us, but we command you. And we order you henceforth faithfully to preach to us the gospel and the Word of God, pure and honest in accordance with the truth (untarnished and unobscured by human doctrine).

The demand for communities to elect their own pastors or priests, was a central part of the Reformation, and one supported by Luther at the start. It was the "essence" says Blickle, of the peasant conception of the reformation. But even in this early period of the Peasant War one gets a sense of a much more powerful impulse coming from the community. It certainly feels like a group of people seeing their priest as an instrument of their community, not an authority figure to be obeyed at any cost. It is, as Blickle points out, precisely why Luther's Reformation buckled and strained under the enormous impact of the Peasant War, and why the Reformation became, after 1525, a Reformation of the princes and not the masses. And also why the slaughter of the peasants by the nobility at the end of the Uprising saw the "end of the Reformation in the countryside". The people who carried the Reformation through were broken and destroyed in revenge for taking it too far. Blickle argues that this was driven through to the fullest extent:

Peasants and burghers voiced the demand - an uncompromising demand - that authority submit itself to the gospel. All incidents of rebelliousness in city and countryside, from the sacking of monasteries by the peasants to the expulsion of recalcitrantly Catholic councillors by the burghers, had no other purpose than to push through this demand. Submission to the gospel became the stamp of legitimacy. Lordship as such meant nothing... The communal reformation posed a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of political authority.. This was a significant by-product of the communal reformation.... the rebellions in city and countryside were also much more fundamental and deep reaching than ever before... Where the authorities were deaf to the gospel, peasants' and burghers' reformations could merge into a revolutionary movement.

But what does "communal" and "community" mean in this context? Here Blickle is a little unclear. Firstly it is not clear to me that he includes women in this. He explores the meaning of "community" (Germeinde in German) as it is reflected by Luther - the "Christian community". But what I am interested in is how does this manifest itself on the ground. What was the community of Wendelstein who so admonished their new priest in 1524? Note that it included the mayor. Blickle explores how groups of leaders were selected and chosen from within the village/town to represent, decide and collective approach their lords. But this was not democracy in a mass sense. The "community" that Blickle argues drives the Reformation forward "had no real place in the political structure o f estates or their theoretical underpinnings". But the Reformation gave it a "theological justification".

Essentially "community" for Blickle means all the people in a village or town who acted and lived together, and shared common interests - expressed he says "in the analogous uses in 'common Christendom' and 'common weal'." Its nebulosity comes, I think, from Blickle's particular interpretation of "common man" which he uses as "a general term for townsmen and villagers". But did not include "male and female servants, mercenaries, beggars and vagrants". It is a class term, but only by exclusion, "above the common man were the lords, lay and clerical, and below him were the lower social classes and those groups entirely ouside the hierarchy of social estates." It was, Blickle says, by the later half of the sixteenth century, a term interchangeable with "peasant" and "subject". It is noteworthy that never discusses whether or not "Common Men" includes women.

Does this help us understand the Reformation and the Peasant War? I think it does, in as much as we have to recognise the difficulties of understanding rural peasant communities as essentially being an amorphous mass. Marx wrote that the French peasantry was a "simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes". Its a helpful, if rude, metaphor, that recognises that the peasantry was a varied collection of wealthier and poorer households.

The differences between these peasants in wealth and consequent class interests would plague latter day revolutionaries from Marx to Lenin. But in the sixteenth century, these interests were close enough not to matter. To discuss a Communal Reformation and Revolution then, is to recognise that the vast majority of the subject classes in Germany at the time, had a collective interest in breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and fighting for control over their own villages and their wider society. It was a powerful movement that terrified the older order and those whose interests were tied up with the status quo. It explains why the enemies of the peasantry who slaughtered them on the fields of Böblingen and Frankenhausen, were from both sides of the Reformation debate.

As I wrote in my review of his book on the Peasants' War, Blickle's ambguity over the "Common Man" means that he has an ambguity over the nature of revolution itself. Nonetheless the insights in Communal Reformation give us a real sense of the Reformation being a social movement driven from below, whose initators struggled to control until they broke from it and forced through a Reformation from above.

Friday, April 19, 2024

Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

Best known today from the Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt film, Legends of the Fall was Jim Harrison's breakthrough collection of three novellas. The first story, Revenge, is an intricate tale of a man whose affair with the beautiful wife of a Mexican gangster goes badly wrong. Cochran wakes up after being rescued by a Mexican worker who found him in the desert. He's been very badly beaten and would surely have died. Recovering anonymously, he plots revenge against the gangster who has submitted his wife, and Cochran's lover, to the most unspeakable of punishments. The story is well told, tense and unexpected - even if the revenge relies on Cochran having just enough unlikely contacts with wealth and power that seems likely.

Much better is the second story, The Man Who Gave Up His Name which follows Nordstrom from his lacklustre time in college through twenty years of marriage and divorce, while he makes his fortune in business. It is really the story of Nordstrom's growing awareness that there is more to life than money, and that defining himself by wealth is inadequate. But it is also the story of wealthy men and their mid-life crises, and overcoming your inhibitions. Nordstrom, despite, rather than because of his wealth gets a lot of sex. That too is his awakening. I was prepared to dismiss this story as the fantasies of upper middle class mid-life crises, but I really liked the ending and Nordstrom's character arc.

But most people will read this collection for Legends of the Fall. The length of the book and the film are incomparable. The film is much more sweeping and grandoise, even if the story is essentially identical. What is different about the book is the fleshing out of characters. The Montana ranchers are much more buffeted by world history than in the film. Brad Pitt's character is decidedly darker, and their mother is not dead, but living a bohemian life abroad. Global events, like the Russian Revolution are more prominent, as are less well known, but important ones. Pitt's character's capitalist brother is overjoyed when the IWW leader Frank Little is lynched in Butte (though Little isn't named). Russia hangs over the characters in the novella unlike in the film - their mother even has an affair with the socialist journalist John Reed.

The three stories all have some common themes, though they are not at all linked. Montana gets a couple of mentions in the first two stories, and is the setting for the third. But all the stories centre of the lives of strong willed, powerful and usually wealthy men who experience loss of lovers and friends. There's also a common theme of violence - the men all seem to be able to kill and bury bodies in the wilderness with impunity.

Jim Harrison's style needs to be experienced too. It's clipped and free of waffle. Legends of the Fall in particular reads like a film script already. The other two stories would have also made fine films, though perhaps less accessible.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Hamza Hamouchene & Katie Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region

About twenty years ago me, and a large number of other activists, attended an environmental conference in London. One of the workshops at the event included a presentation on DesertTec, a plan to produce vast quantities of energy from solar power by covering large areas of the Sahara desert in soal panels. I think it is fair to say that at the time, myself, and the rest of the activists there, where impressed with this technical solution to the transition away from fossil fuels. Criticism at the time focused on how nation states, and capitalist interests, would prevent this happening.

But since then the work of activists and scholars, including the authors and editors of this important book, have taught activists like myself to think about things differently. What we were essentially told in that seminar was an old lie - that large parts of Africa are essentially empty, ripe for use by the developed world, and in doing this, some wealth might well trickle down into local economies who could use it to improve their situation. It is an old lie, and its shameful that we fell for it then. Today the environmental movement today is much more aware of the need for Climate Justice in the Global South, but there is still much work to do, and this book is an important contribution.

The Arab Region, to use the name from this books title, is simultaneously the origin of the vast majority of the oil that is helping cook the planet, and one of the places where climate change is already causing enormous suffering for ordinary people. But, as this important book explains, the people of the region are not passive victims. They are people who can, and are, fighting for an alternative sustainable future while, at the same time "the Gulf countries are working to ensure they remain at the centre of the global energy regime".

The contributing authors' essays approach this conundrum in various ways by looking at various different countries and experiences. Most essays focus on different aspects of the energy question. These explore a common contradication - that states in the Middle East and North Africa have enormous potential for renewable energy, while frequently relying for their economic existence on fossil fuels. It's a contradication easily exploited by the energy multinationals. This is a point made by Hamza Hamouchene in his discussion on "green" hydrogen in North Africa:

The drive for green hydrogen and the push for a hydrigen economy has already gained support from major European oil and gas companies, which see it as a back door to the continuation of their operations, with hydrogen being extracted from fossil gas (the production of grey and blue hydrogen). It is thus becoming clear that the fosssil fuel industry wants to preserve the existing natural gas and pipeline infrastructure.

He concludes, "it is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move towards renewable energy is to be welcomed and that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, is worthwhile." The problem is, as he points out, not fossil fuels bbut "their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine."

The Arab Region has, of course, been the victim of colonial history and imperialism. The ongoing geo-political reality of this situation means that any transition will, unless capitalism is challenged, "maintain the same practices of dispossession and exploitation that currently prevail, reproducing injustices and deepeing socioeconomig exclusion". Before we agree to such projects, we need to question who, what and why they are being done. With this in mind Hamouchene cautions a younger me about DesertTec!:

This Desertec vision lends itself to the agenda of consolidating fortress Europe and expanding an inhuman regime of border imperialism, while trying to tap into the cheap energy potential of North Africa, which also relies on undervalued and disciplined labour.

Similarly, writing on energy in Sudan, Razaz H. Basheir and Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman, note that the current plan for energy there "relies on the full and unconditional adoption of neoliberal reforms dictated by international financial institutions.

A second aspect to this, is that various regimes in the region are able to use the potential for renewable energy to "greenwash" their existence. Look at how Egypt and the UAE hosted COP27 and COP28 for this reason. But in one of the strongest chapters in the book Manal Shqair explores this with a timely look at the case of Israel. "Israel", she writes,

has always depicted itself as a dry coutnry which, despite this, and unlike its Arab neighbours, has developed the tecnology needed to efficiently manage its scarce water resources and mitigate the climate crisis... According to this narrative... Israel alwasys seeks to put its technology at the service of its prached neighbour Jordan.

Israel and Jordan's agreement to swop water for renewable energy seems then like a perfect match. But it has two consequences. Firstly it legitimises the settler colonial state, and secondly, it forces Jordan to rely on imported fossil fuel, because it is locked into an agreement with Israel to send energy over for water desalination.

Shqair explores how Israel has stolen land, water and other natural resources from the Palestinians, and used these to strengthen its own hand. She concludes:

The dehumanisation of the colonised, and the complicity of Arab states in this, are greenwashed by the EU and Israel as they collaborate in what is portrayed as a transition to a greener future and a lower-carbon economy.

Many authors however emphasise that the people of the region are not passive in the face of this inequality. There are some remarkable accounts of struggle against governments and multinationals against projects that destroy land and displace people, or for more equitable and just use of resources. In an important chapter on the neglected subject of agriculture in North Africa, Saker El Nour writes on the importance of "pressure from below, infoprmed by the needs and aspirations of small-scale farmers, peasants and farm workers, who remain indispensable in a just transition in the region and beyond". Similarly in an account of mining and renewable energy in Morocco, Karen Rignall writes that the "resource conflicts" often allow communities to "imagine and experiment with a different kind of politics or approach to rural governance. This new imaginary can be considered an emergent politics of the commons." She cautions that those arguing for "just transition" cannot ignore these inputs and ideas, and impose a "predetermined frame of analysis" or crutially tries to substitute existing social movements.

This review can only touch on a few of the articles. But running through all the chapters are two main themes. The first of which is that existing strategies for energy and sustainable transitions are trapped by the logic of a global capitalist system, that sees the region as crucial to the continued accumulation of capital, primarily in the Global North (though China is increasingly imposing its own interests). Thus the interests of the USA and Europe and the fossil fuel corporations that are so closely tied to them, tend to shape what governments across the Middle East and North Africa are planning. This distorts things in a way that rarely offers anything to the mass of the local populations, and in some cases, actively destroys their lives through pollution and displacement. Indeed, the greenwashing associated with energy plans actively empowers the worst states in the region. So Jawad Moustakbal is surely right to conclude about Morocco, in a way that could be applied across the region:

There will be no just transition as long as the energy sector remains under the control of foreign transational companies and a local ruling elite that is free to plunder the state and generate as much profit as it wishes, within a culrutre of authoritarianism and nepotism. The debt system and PPPs are a major obstacle to any model of popular sovereignty, including energy sovereignty.

But there is something else that runs through the book - this is the potential for popular revolt. While few chapters explore the "Arab Spring" in detail, the book carries with it a sense that mass radical change is necessary and possible. As Christian Henderseon concludes the book:

The pressures that led to the Arab revolutions of 2010 and 2011 have not been resolved; deep structural reconfiguration is still needed. It is not too early to foresee how these quandaries will develop but the Guld states are not immune from popular calls for democarcy, equity and redistribution that define the just transition.

I would go further. Without the sort of mass struggles that brought down dictators and rulers across the region, and without those struggles developing into popular movements for democratic control of the economy, we won't see the sort of transition that the region, and the world, desperately needs.

Dismantling Green Colonialism is probably one of the most important books published on climate justice this year. Every activist should try and read it, to learn more about the realities of the Arab Region, the barriers to change and the movements trying to shape a sustainable future.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Michael Punke - Fire and Brimstone

In early June 1917, one of the most horrific mining disasters in history took place near Butte, Montana in the United States. The Granite/Speculator mine was one of the most profitable mines in the world, bringing millions of dollars in revenue from the extraction of copper. At the time the industry was riding high as copper was in heavy demand for munitions. Ironically, the immediate cause of the disaster was as fire started accidently by workers installing a new sprinkler system into the mine to improve safety. Within a few minutes the fire was out of control and hundreds of lives were in danger.

Michael Punke's account of this disaster follows the accident almost minute by minute, from the initial accident to the spread of the fire and the attempts by various heroic individuals to warn and help people out. It is a horrible story, told well and with an eye on the human side of events. Punke draws out the lives of the individuals trapped, the heroism and the aftermath. This was a international immigrant workforce - the men trapped below, and their families above, came from many different heritages, and Punke gives a real sense of how the colonial US was built by workers from across the world.

However Punke does not simply tell the story of the mine disaster. He places it in the context of rising US capitalism and the extractivism that went alonside it. The copper from Butte didn't just fuel imperialist war, it was used to literarily connect America through the telegraph and electric networks. A small number of "copper barons" enclosed almost all the profit from the miners' labour and grew fabulously wealthy. The "war" between these barons to control the mines was often a physical one, but it was also a war that left death, environmental destruction and devestation behind as well. Today, Anaconda and Butte are still horribly scarred by the ecological legacy of the mines and their poison.

So Punke frames the story of the disaster in the wider rise of extractivist capitalism, and the battles it caused. Some of these are the war between the "band of brothers", but most interesting are those of the miners' and associated industrial workers of Butte, who fought for a bigger share of the profits and better health and safety. In the aftermath of the disaster, tens of thousands of workers' struck - forming radical unions that broke from the traditional unions that were every much tied to the company. These radical unions led a general strike in the area, that briefly pushed the mining companies onto the back foot. However the mine bosses were experienced enough to "divide and rule" the different sections, and miners had to fight alone. The bosses also resorted to violence - they killed the most radical leader of the IWW in the area, Frank Little, lynching him and threatening other radicals - which helped break the strike movement.

The aftermath of the disaster was marked by countrywide shock and horror, but little lasting change for the miners. While some concessions were wrested from the bosses, mostly things carried on. Punke finishes the story by telling what happened to Butte and Anaconda later in the 20th century, as the industry faltered and collapsed in the area, leaving unemployment and poverty in its wake. The powerful mining companies whose wealth had allowed them unprecedented influence in Montana and national politics, were eclipsed. The workers' were forgotten.

Punke's book is an excellent overview of these events and the trajectory of Montana's mining. But he doesn't really have the politics to tell the story of the mineworkers' properly. For Punke Butte was trapped between the radicals and the bosses. Unfortunately the only people who really had a vision for real change were the radicals, but they are dismissed as merely part of the story. Punke's book falls back on a semimystical idea that Butte's inhabitants always have "hope" which should see them through. But the hope for a better world, as the miners' of 1917 really knew, only comes from struggle. In 1917 these ideas were not abstract - the Russian Revolution was in progress, and workers' were well aware of events. Hope, on it's own, is not enough. Nonetheless, Michael Punke's Fire and Brimstone is a good overview of a crucial period of US history, little known outside this part of Montana and not well enough known outside the country. A good starting place.

Thursday, April 11, 2024

Stephen Baxter - Raft

Stephen Baxter's Raft was first published in 1991 but it bears the imprint of an earlier generation of science fiction which made science and technology the focus of the story and world building, rather than personal characters and plot. That said, Baxter's universe is certainly unique. It is set among the descendents of humans who inadvertantly entered an alternate universe where the gravitational force is much stronger. This means that massive structures cannot exist, there are powerful localised forces - in this world humans could attract each other quite literarily - and planets do not exist. Stars are tiny, and have brief lives.

Most humans live on the raft, which is inside a nebula of breathable air. Some miners live separately, a symbiotic relationship with the raft which seas them mining burnt out stars for metal to be traded to the raft in exchange for food. There are lifeforms that travel through the nebula, and even an exile planet of, well, you'll have to see.

The plot mostly derives from the interactions between these three planets as there is a growing realisation that the nebula is dying. Rees, a miner, comes to this realisation and stows away on a transport tree to get to the raft, where he swiftly proves his scientific ability. The Raft is a technocracy - ruled by scientists who protect and hoard the knowledge of the old spacecraft - its books and machinery, to carefully manage the human population size and share out its limited resources.

Except such sharing isn't equal, and the scientists are resented and hated by small groups of rebels - who eventually, well, rebel. The ensuing revolution is the scene for the end of the novel. Not plot spoilers here.

The problem is that Raft feels like novel that only exists to discuss the universe building. But on closer examination there are some bigger problems. The plot hinges on the role of science and technology, and Baxter appears to be saying that the only scientists are those who are dispassionate and clever enough to run society. In an era when populist politicians and rightwingers are sowing distrust at science and experts, it can feel tempting to support this thesis. But surely the problem with the raft is not the ignorant masses and the clever scientists - it is the material limitations of the society that mean the future is only getting worse. Baxter's only idea in this is that the scientists - through their dispassionate, all seeing knowledge - have the only answers. The masses are ignorant fools who disrupt the natural hierarchy.

It is, sadly, all to superficial. Scientists aren't the best rulers based on their knowledge. It would have been a far better story had Stephen Baxter explored these themes in greater depth and tried to really interrogate what it is about the interaction between society and environment that can produce progress or collapse. Sadly Raft doesn't do the context justice.