Greenpunk.net

Archive for September, 2009

This image, from Oregon State University, shows diatoms–single-celled marine lifeforms have been modified to create nanotech-backed solar cells. As explained in an article at greendiary.com, “Rigid shells of diatoms are attached to conductive glass creating a grid into which a soluble titanium dioxide is fed. Through dye-sensitized technology photons in the film bounce around striking dyes and producing electricity..” This is just one example of the spectacular new ideas that nanotechnologists are dreaming up to find ways of creating renewable energy that may one day be cheap and accessible to everyone. I am convinced that off-the-grid ways of getting electricity is going to be key to survival and success in a GreenPunk world.

I also recently heard of another experiment underway to create “organic solar cells” from a polymer which could be literally painted onto the roofs of buildings or transported like a roll of plastic wrap as a mobile power source. It’s going to be interesting to see how GreenPunk storytellers incorporate some of these wild news technologies into their fictional futures or dream up even weirder ones.

Let’s review, in case you are new to the GreenPunk site:

GreenPunk: a technophilic specific movement centered on characters using and being affected by the use of DIY renewable resources, recycling and repurposing. GreenPunk would emphasize the ability of the individual – and his or her responsibility – for positive ecological and social change.

First, let me tell you a short story. Last fall, bought a new DVD player that at my budget, felt like state of the art. A shiny black Toshiba that was going to max out the images and sounds onto my television for a long, long time.

The DVD player died last month; it didn’t even last longer than 9 months. It cost originally about 100 dollars. Getting an estimate and fixing it would actually cost probably double of what I paid. Unlike appliances from our parents’ generation, these new devices are essentially disposable. Now I have to find out who I or where I can donate my shiny black DVD player.

I bought a new player today. I tried to find the cheapest DVD player possible at Target. 40 bucks, this time a metallic grey, and it does all the stuff the old one did. Now, when it dies and my heart turns even more brittle than before, my pocketbook won’t feel so bad. But what about the materials and the parts of these devices? Are they useless? Why do we think it’s just okay to throw stuff out so easily?

Ah, the agonies of the developed world.

The point of my story is not to tout my techno-fetishes. It is this: As writers, GreenPunk writers, what are our responsibilities to make sure that the tools of our trade are also reusable and renewable? Should we work only online, avoiding printouts on paper and ink consumption? Should we seek used computers to type out our essays and short stories for this Web site? Should we promote writing software, tools and computers that comply with green and sustainable practices? I’d love to start a discussion in the comments below on these topics. Writing is no longer a process that comes from notebooks and typewriters and reams of bond paper. Well, that’s being too hyperbolic. Many of us, I included, still write on paper. But should we be thinking harder about not using paper? Should we use our technologies to not only write interesting words and stories, but to also push further the ideas of GreenPunk?

You. Tell. Me.

Cesar Torres is a Chicago writer. His blog “Urraca” chronicles his process and efforts in publishing. He writes fantasy, science fiction and other speculative fiction; He also blogs about bugs, birds and music.

When GreenPunk becomes more fully developed, and when there eventually exists a large body of new fiction in the subgenre, I would imagine that it’s inevitable that certain tropes and character archetypes will come to be associated with it.  I do not mean that as a negative thing, just an interesting likelihood. For example, today I thought of a GreenPunk protagonist-type that I started to think of as the “Philosopher-Mechanic.”

I heard a re-broadcast of an installment of the Diane Rehm Show (on most NPR affiliates) in which she interviews Matthew Crawford about his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford is, in fact, a PhD-holding philosopher, but his main work in life is running a motorcycle repair shop. After trying employment in more academic and “officey” professions, he had the revelation that he wasn’t really suited for a desk job and that he got the greatest satisfaction out of fixing and making things. He makes the excellent point that a viable, sustainable economy needs to somewhere, somehow produce something and that there are all kinds of works opportunities that need to happen on site and can’t be sent offshore (like getting your motorcycle fixed). Also, he notes that in the same way that a lot of large manufacturing operations moved abroad for cheaper labor and laxer environmental laws, a lot of intellectual labor is doing the same thing. A doctor can look at an American patient’s MRI from India just fine, thanks to the internet. Where the real work is, says Crawford, and where the greatest pleasure can be found for a lot of people is in those things that can’t be done over a wire.

This all sounded a lot like a good attitude to have in a GreenPunk world. Repurposing the detritus of civilization, remediating ecological damage, breaking free of Big Energy constraints on human activity, adapting and innovating technology to new and better uses—all these things involve somehow doing stuff and making or repairing things. So this GreenPunk archetype that I am daydreaming about, the Philosopher-Mechanic, is probably a highly intelligent, highly inventive intellect who is also completely hands-on with his or her work and is making things happen in visible, tangible ways in his world. He or she understands that the line between intellectual work and hands-on work is bogus. It doesn’t exist. In a GreenPunk world, the winners and the heroes are probably not going to be the people seated behind desks all day. Maybe they’ll be people with dirty hands and a clean conscience.

When I was a kid, punk rock was a novelty presented by the local media as something strange, weird, wicked, perverse and decadent. Obviously, I loved it from day one, and even though I was too little to be seriously into it, the words “punk rock” entered forever into my dictionary of all that is good and true in this world.

Later, when I first heard of something celled “cyberpunk”, I was hypnotized. What could possibly be wrong with something that sounded so cool? Punk, cyber, computers, hackers, police states, corporations, the struggle of common people against post-industrial society… It soon became a small obsession of mine, and has been one of my favourite aesthetical styles since then.

However, time passes, we grow older, maybe wiser, and over the years I witnessed the name “cyberpunk” slowly turn into a fashionable and senseless cultural label that lost most of its original meaning, if it ever had one. Back in the 1990s, everything had to be cyber-something to look cool and marketable. There were lots of trashy pop cultural products like Cybercops, Cyber Lions, Cybersex and stuff like that, and whatever had virtual reality in it was hot enough to sell.

Lately, Steampunk became another hot trend, as confirmed by the hordes of cosplayers invading the latest conventions. However, the more I see pictures of people dressed up in victorian outfits and carrying golden-coated handguns, the more I wonder if any of those people have ever seen an actual steam-powered engine working.

But what puzzles me is the choice of the word “punk”. Why is it steampunk, and not cybersteam? We must dissipate the marketing fog that obscures the meaning of things and check our good friend, the dictionary, to figure out what this actually means.

The prefix  “cyber-” comes from greek:

• κυβερνητικός (kybernētikos) – Good at steering, good pilot.
• κυβερνητική τέχνη (kybernētikē technē) – The pilot’s art.
• κυβερνισμός (kybernismos), κυβέρνησις (kybernēsis) – Steering, pilotage, guiding.
• κυβερνάω (kybernaō) – To steer, to drive, to guide, to act as a pilot.

The pilot’s art! Isn’t it beautiful?

So, cyber refers not only to machines, but mainly to the control of machines. That would explain why steampunkers are so fond of their costumes and don’t bother much about driving around in steam-powered cars.

Well, then what about the “punk” part? Our dictionary has a lot of meanings for it:

1. A prostitute. (1604, William Shakespeare, ‘Measure for Measure’)
2. The bottom in a male-male sexual relationship.
3. Prison slang: A male used for sex by larger or stronger inmates.
4. A social and musical movement rooted in rebelling against the established order.
5. The music of the punk movement, known for short songs with electric guitars, strong drums, and a direct, unproduced approach.
6. A person subscribing to the movement, a punk rocker.
7. A worthless person.
8. A juvenile delinquent, young petty criminal or trouble-maker.
9. A utensil for lighting wicks or fuses (such as those of fireworks) resembling stick incense. (1907, Jack London, The Road)
10. Various kinds of material used as tinder for lighting fires, such as agaric, dry decayed wood or touchwood.

Well, what a diverse array of meanings. I prefer to believe that cyberpunk is rooted on definition number 8, its outcast characters struggling to survive on a corporate-controlled world. Sadly, over time, many people who embraced meaning number 5 of punk ended up becoming meaning number 1 in order to make a lot of money, leaving their fellow punks from definition 6 feeling like definition 3.

That being said, cyberpunk is the science-fiction based on the struggle of juvenile delinquents against the people who control the machines. Steampunk, on the other hand, is more like pseudo-trouble-makers who like to dress up like people did in the day and age of steam engines.

So… what about greenpunk?

Being a newly proposed “movement”, it’s had to say whatever it will become, but as a newly joined member of its ranks, I tend to believe we should work somewhere around meanings 9 and 10. Not that I want to set fire to whatever we have left of green in this sad blue planet of ours, no… But from all the definitions on that list, “setting fire to something” is the one that really sounds like revolution to me.

You see, the problem with punk rock is that it never evolved as a whole. Each subspecies of the punk rock family developed into something else, thus gaining new names, shapes and colours. The urgent lyrics of the nuclear era can still mean a lot to (some of) us, but the general idea of punk rock became just another fashionistic trend. Thanks to the endless power that media has to turn all that is true and pure into washed-out, clean, safe, family values forms of entertainment, punk rock too became a caricature of itself, losing most of its society-changing power.

As far as I can tell, in our societies, everybody knows we need to change in order to survive and create a healthy sustainable world for our kids to live in. But who is going to actually start this change? We are all apes, and we learn from examples. Rationality is something we take for granted. Every human being is capable of rational thinking, but it takes a long time and a lot of effort. Most people don’t bother much about being rational, as some economists are beginning to prove. And these people won’t act unless someone else shows them what to do, by setting examples to be followed. That is how memes work, and that is how most people chose their clothes, their jobs, and the movie they are going to see on the weekend. They need the example to follow, and they need an authorization to change.

I am not saying here that we are the best examples one should follow. But we can be the fire-starters of something new.

To close this sorry excuse for an article, I’d like to quote one of the greatest philosophers of the XX century – british crust-punk band Discharge:

The savage mutilation of the human race is set on course.
Protest and survive.
Protest and survive.
It’s up to us to change that course.
Protest and survive.
Protest and survive.

The following is an excerpt from the first draft of a work-in-progress, a novel set several centuries into the future on an Earth that has undergone a severe deformation of climate and ecology. I started writing this thing over a year ago, long before the GreenPunk premise had been formulated, but I realize now that the settings and situations of the story fairly readily lend themselves to a GreenPunk mentality. So it may get more like that if it ever undergoes any revision. The following scene is not necessarily particularly greenpunkish but it takes a peek into what sort of economy this group of people has evolved in a world that is seriously messed up but which still has resource abundance if people can figure out how to repurpose and reuse and recycle.

…Though the old market was dauntingly huge, what always struck newcomers was how it felt both ancient as the city itself yet also new, as if it were in a constant state of renovation and repurposing. It was as old and scabrous as the most decayed city center on the planet, yet also fresh and bombastic and impromptu, like it had just opened for business for the very first time today.

Wandering through this place, Port of Providence’s open-air food market, Kai Jaxon felt entirely naked and ridiculous in the civilian togs with which he and Private Iapetus had been outfitted.  Jaxon’s outfit included pants made from a thick-woven natural fabric, died a pale and streaky blue, stained badly and torn in so many places that the legs were about to separate at the knees. He also wore a similarly ragged button-down shirt made of a stiff gray fabric.  Iapetus was wearing similar pants, but his shirt was a long-sleeved pullover, mustard yellow with a single thick brown strip encircling his abdomen.  They both wore plastic sandals, Jaxon’s orange and Iapetus’s green.

Though these costumes would supposedly enable the Martian soldiers to blend unnoticed into the local population, Jaxon felt just as conspicuously foreign here as they would have been in their full-on Force Ares uniforms, complete with rifles and daggers.  We don’t look anything like these people he thought, gazing at a short pale-faced young man in a silver shirt and black pants with many metal zippers and buttons. Jaxon noted, however, this one was also wearing the plastic sandals.

We won’t sound like them either. Jaxon listened to Silver Shirt’s accent as he bantered with a vendor over the price of what looked like some kind of dry-cured sausages. The local dialect wasn’t that much different from the Martians’ native tongue save for the expected localisms, but it was spoken with a lilting tone and somewhat more languorously than most Martian dialects.  Jaxon decided that he would probably not succeed at plausibly imitating it and expected that he would feel quite foolish making the attempt. “We do not think,” Captain Ikeda had said, “that this town gets a lot of visitors from foreign places, and we would stand out a lot less if we could at least sound more like the locals when we speak to them.” He had encouraged all members of the unit to listen to recordings of local speech samples and try to imitate it as much as possible.

Jaxon listened to Iapetus gamely try the local patois, discussing the attributes of some tomato-like fruits with an elderly female vendor.  Towering over her, the olive skinned, shock-haired young soldier, sounded more like he was making fun of her accent than sincerely speaking in it:  “Tohhh-MAHto, ah inTEResting,” he exuded through his wide grin.  Jaxon turned away and stifled a chuckle.

This was their third visit to this market in as many days.  The first had been spent gathering a sense of how the place operates and what might be available for sale or barter.  On the second day they had spent several hours trying to induce people to purchase some surplus items from their own supplies in an effort to gather samples of the local currency—tinny coins with numbers stamped on one side and, for some unknown reason, old Jando-era imperial crests on the other side.  These they brought back to base and then put their little matter-compiler to work, doggedly forging a pile of counterfeit money with which they could then return to the market and buy food supplies. Many of the vendors preferred to barter goods rather than sell for cash but would, in the absence of an acceptable trade, take money (at what seemed to Jaxon extremely inflated rates—the cash price of Iapetus’s tomatoes, for example, appeared to have doubled just since yesterday).

Since Iapetus seemed to being enjoying the task of haggling with vendors, Jaxon contented himself to hang back with their little push-cart—another dubious fraud that they had made at base—gathering the Private’s purchases as they went. Iapetus dropped a thick bundle of greenery and woody stems into the cart.  A rather intense aroma—not especially pleasant, rather like kerosene—wafted upward.  Sniffing, Jaxon plucked a few tiny flat leaves and wondered what it was.  “It’s either an herb or a salad green,” Iapetus said.  “I don’t know: you’re the cook.  It was dirty cheap though.”  Jaxon smelled it again and thought it reminded him of epazote.   I guess I’ll be making a pot of beans… “Hey, Jono,” he said as Iapetus walked toward the next vegetable stand.  “Keep an eye out for dried beans!” Nodding, Iapetus wriggled his way in between some other shoppers and peered at a heap of what might have been some kind of citrus fruit, round and large as grapefruit, with pinkish, pebbled skins.

It was probably premature to be planning specific menus and recipes yet since the Doc AI would have to analyze samples and make pronouncements as to the edibility and safety of whatever they gathered.  Today their goal was simply to gather as many different kinds of products as possible and get some kind of sense of what things cost here—though that would be difficult to keep up with if the economy was really as inflationary as it appeared to be so far.  Well, the compiler would keep on making more money for them.

As much of a hassle as this attempt at using the local market for supplies was proving to be, Jaxon admitted to himself that it was much better than the alternative: running out what food stores they had salvaged from the Shadow followed by weeks of living off of pre-fab food rations and nutritional supplements.  Captain Ikeda, in the grand tradition of many, many field commanders deployed to Earth before him, had nixed that idea upon arrival.  “I’m not eating that shit,” had been his exact words to Jaxon upon Jaxon’s  sudden appointment as provisions officer.  Jaxon hadn’t recalled ever having told anyone on this mission that he had gone to culinary school before the Force Ares Academy, but he supposed it was in his record somewhere and that their new commander probably knew everything he could know about his men and women by now. “Set up the kitchen and find us some real food before we run out of the stuff we brought along.” It was so ordered, and now Jaxon was grocery shopping.

Also, it did not escape Jaxon’s awareness that his assignment to the food problem had the added bonus of excusing him from the tedious grunt work of securing and fortifying their new compound, a chore in which the rest of the unit was engaged. Yeah, I’ll finish this right about the same time they’re done with that!

Certainly it would have been possible for the Force Ares contingent to simply invade this market and commandeer what they needed, or even announce their presence cheerfully and offer a trade (one that couldn’t be reasonably refused).  It was, however, the long-standing preference of the Martian military, when on Earth, to avoid disruptive interactions with local populations.  These people aren’t the enemy, Jaxon knew, and there was no point in turning them into one. So the first step was the one they were on now: try to fit in and get what you need, hopefully without the locals even knowing who you are.

The morning cloud cover had parted, burned off by the rising sun and Jaxon felt uncomfortably hot.  He removed the gray shirt leaving behind the olive-colored sleeveless undershirt from his uniform. Looking around, he decided that this didn’t look that strange as far as a thing for a man to be wearing here, and so he tossed the costume shirt into the cart and trundled it down to another stand, Iapetus leading the way.

“Hey you!” said a voice from nearby.  “Ah, yo!  Yes sir!”  A short bald man of perhaps late middle age waved at Jaxon.  “I want to ask you something!” Warily, Jaxon approached, leaving Iapetus to watch their cart. The man lifted a meter-long by half-meter wide cardboard flat of some sort of berries.  To Jaxon, they looked like a lot like strawberries with their shiny, seed-pocked skins and bright green tops, but these were of a deep violet color and rather more squarish than a typical strawberry.  “I’ll trade you these crewberries, young man, for that!” He pointed into their cart.

“Grueberries?” Jaxon wondered aloud and immediately kicked himself mentally for revealing his ignorance of what could very well be a commonplace fruit here.

“Crewberries,” the bald man repeated. “I’ll trade you these for that?”

“For what?” Jaxon said, looking at his cart. Something we have in our cart? The cart itself?

“Your shirt!” the man replied with a great broad smile, two large gaps in his front teeth.

Nonplussed, Jaxon looked at his shirt lying rumpled in the cart.  “You would give me those berries in trade for that shirt?” He couldn’t really believe it. He looked at the price board hanging behind the man’s head.  These crewberries, if they were to actually buy the entire flat, were so expensive that the purchase would wipe out most of their cache of coins.  “How many berries for the shirt?”

“All of these!” the man said, again lifting the large flat.

“Hell yeah,” Jaxon said, imagining berry pies.  “A deal is made.”  He handed the shirt to the bald man who turned it over and over in his hands, feeling the fabric and grinning in admiration.  “This is very nice!  It’s so hard to find things this nice around here anymore!” Still grinning, the vendor passed the flat of berries to Jaxon who handed them over to Iapetus. “Enjoy your crewberries, young man!  They are the best of the season.  And I will certainly enjoy my new shirt.”  And he put the shirt on and it was clearly several sizes too large for him.  Not caring, he rolled up the sleeves and went happily back to work, chatting up the next customer.

Jaxon looked at Iapetus and said, “We need to bring lots more shirts next time.”—From Shame, an unfinished novel