THE OTHER DAY I PICKED UP A BOOK I had on my shelf, one that I’d read a number of years
ago and decided to return to it to see how a second read went. It’s called
The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse.
It’s a sci-fi set in California and is structured as a set of archival journals
and reports from the distant future. There are some recurring characters, but
the book is mostly a collection of tales about a variety of people and settings over time.
Author Dale Pendell takes the long view--very long--several thousand years in fact, and his main focus is on the effects climate change has on the
lands and people of central California over hundreds, then thousands of years.
His 2010 novel articulates the fears many of us have that climate change and
global warming are events we can no longer control. He details possible
scenarios resulting from sea level rise for California, focusing on an area
roughly from the Salton Sea to San Francisco. Over decades, then centuries and
millennia, he writes about how this low-lying area is gradually inundated with rising ocean waters until it becomes a vast, inland sea, and how people
survive and sometimes thrive there. He includes maps of the changing landscape, as well as journal entries and other materials that tell
the stories of various individuals and groups over the years.
 |
| Dale Pendell |
His
stories detail people's lives and the struggles they encounter, and how they left behind legacies. For
example, a camp established by survivors fleeing the violence of dying and decaying
cities becomes, a century on, an important trading settlement for fishing
communities along the shores of the “Great Bay”. One set of communities
gives way to another as the lands, water, plant and animal life, and
climate, change around them. Petty kingdoms and would-be civilizations rise and fall over the
millennia. Pendell uses introductory material at
each stage of his future history and, in broad strokes, tells the story
of the wider world and how humanity fares with rising sea levels,
global warming (and later cooling) and changing climate patterns.
 |
| The Big Bay circa 2130 |
The novel
is set primarily in California, and is structured, as I've said, using 'archival sources' from
different collections, presenting tales from various times throughout
the long 'history of the future' Pendell envisions.
The final
‘entry’ is entitled “The Caribou Hunters” from a time some 16,000 years in the
future. Presumably, some even more distant society arose after this time to
uncover and record the myth of Sengimet, Ridiwyn and Jennith, a man
and two women, from a tribe of elephant hunters living on the Pit River (in northern California). It is a tale that at its core
describes an act of cannibalism during a particularly brutal winter,
with magical elements, and it ends with a cautionary message—a rather bleak one—of
circularity and history repeating itself, over and over. By this
time it is once again an ice-age and humanity lives, like our prehistoric
ancestors did, as hunter-gatherers in a dryer, harsher world. The people
painted on rock faces
"...elephants
and bears, the big horned sheep and the long horned antelopes, the lions and
the panthers, but compared to the art of the Upper Paleolithic the painting had
a chastened quality. Humans were always depicted with the animals, often in
scenes of great pathos, and plants and trees were painted in fantastically
elaborated branchings. The paintings were elegant, but lacked the magical
optimism and the sense of unlimited power that had characterized the paintings
of their predecessors forty and fifty thousand years before them. Class Mammalia
had dodged a bullet and everyone knew it.” (267-8)
Cannibalism, in the myth of Jennith who transforms into a deer to be killed and eaten by the
starving members of her family, suggests a society that is devolving, that is
‘eating itself’ until there will be nothing left. It is a stark and sobering vision,
softened only by the knowledge there exists some greatly-distant, future society
that has managed to arise once more, and is capable of understanding and recording the stories of our long and often troubled history.
In his Afterword,
Pendell is pessimistic about our future:
"And it is unlikely that an apocalypse will
save us. Much more likely is a gradual degradation of the quality of life, and,
for many species, of their habitat and their chances for survival. In late
Roman times, in the European provinces, where aristocratic estates shared the
valleys with the estates of the Barbarians, citizens complained about the
interruptions of the mail service, but went on writing poems in the latest
styles. On the other hand, a storyteller has a certain license, and there is a
mural in the British Museum depicting Canterbury in the seventh century: Saxon
hovels set amid the ruins of the fine Roman buildings; sheep and cattle grazing
the overgrown markets." (271)
There are
many possible futures ahead in store for us and for the world we live in. The
choices we make each day as individuals and communities will decide how narrow
or how broad the range of those possible futures will be.
Cheers,
Jake.
Dale Penedell, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, North Atlantic Books, Berkley, California, 2010.
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