A light-hearted climate change adventure story about an insurance salesman at the end of the world.
After a thirty-year rationing plan called “The Effort” the prime minister declares VC Day: “Victory over the Climate”. But chronically depressed insurance salesman Jeremy Chutter knows it’s all hot air. The end is nigh — and he can’t wait!
Then Jeremy’s world gets turned upside-down…
After a thirty-year rationing plan called “The Effort” the prime minister declares VC Day: “Victory over the Climate”. But chronically depressed insurance salesman Jeremy Chutter knows it’s all hot air. The end is nigh — and he can’t wait!
Then Jeremy’s world gets turned upside-down…
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Climate change: you can’t go a day without hearing something about it in the news. An ice shelf breaks off here, a species becomes extinct there, someplace or another is on fire. It’s enough to make you go numb, but the issue is far too important for that.
I heard George Monbiot talk twice in 2007 when he was promoting his excellent book, Heat. It dawned on me as I sat in the auditorium, hearing this material again, that I needed to figure out for myself what I thought about the topic – since I was going to be inundated with it regardless.
The best way I knew how to do this was to let all this sink into my subconscious and see what came back out in the form of a story. (Also known as mythopoesis, if that’s not getting above myself.)
I wanted to write a comedy, but after several months of research I was left with the stark realisation that… this just isn’t funny. Still, I didn’t want to fall into finger-wagging or trying to make a scientific argument, because, aside from being wildly unqualified to do so, that seems to be all we’re getting about this topic. We need our imaginations on this one, to dream forward and really understand what we’re contemplating here, and to make a conscious decision about how we want to proceed.
So I wrote Finitude. Hopefully it’s a fun ride, even though it’s set against this looming iceberg of a subject.
To make sure I steered clear of any obvious nationalism or politics and concentrated on the story, I set the novel in an imaginary parallel world facing the same problems we are, just a little further along.
Beyond that, I really didn’t have to make much up, just stitch things together in my imagination. The real challenge was getting it finished before everything in it actually happened!
I heard George Monbiot talk twice in 2007 when he was promoting his excellent book, Heat. It dawned on me as I sat in the auditorium, hearing this material again, that I needed to figure out for myself what I thought about the topic – since I was going to be inundated with it regardless.
The best way I knew how to do this was to let all this sink into my subconscious and see what came back out in the form of a story. (Also known as mythopoesis, if that’s not getting above myself.)
I wanted to write a comedy, but after several months of research I was left with the stark realisation that… this just isn’t funny. Still, I didn’t want to fall into finger-wagging or trying to make a scientific argument, because, aside from being wildly unqualified to do so, that seems to be all we’re getting about this topic. We need our imaginations on this one, to dream forward and really understand what we’re contemplating here, and to make a conscious decision about how we want to proceed.
So I wrote Finitude. Hopefully it’s a fun ride, even though it’s set against this looming iceberg of a subject.
To make sure I steered clear of any obvious nationalism or politics and concentrated on the story, I set the novel in an imaginary parallel world facing the same problems we are, just a little further along.
Beyond that, I really didn’t have to make much up, just stitch things together in my imagination. The real challenge was getting it finished before everything in it actually happened!
- Review: Taipei Times
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Hope for the best and prepare for the worst
In Hamish MacDonald’s Finitude, humankind teeters on the brink of extinction after failing to clean up its environmental act and save the planet
By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Taipei Times
Sunday, Jan 10, 2010, Page 14
Over the past few months Taiwan-based journalist Dan Bloom has become more and more concerned with climate-change issues, notably the prospect of humanity retreating to new cities built in the polar regions to escape rising temperatures elsewhere. So when he strongly urged me to read a new novel, published online and set in an environmentally devastated future, I felt duty-bound to take a look.
E-books are the modern version of self-publishing. Contrary to what many choose to think, this is an honorable way of issuing works, and one with a long history. William Blake printed and colored his own books, Shelley had pamphlets privately printed and then tried to hand them out to passing citizens, and Ronald Firbank self-published all his novels, now considered by many as classics, in the 1920s. Even James Joyce’s Ulysses was self-published in a way — brought out by a friend who ran a Paris bookshop rather than by an established publishing house.
Hamish MacDonald stands in this august tradition, writing novels and issuing them online, but also hand-printing and binding them in his own workshop. This combination of the newest and one of the oldest technologies feels like the true mark of a dedicated indie publisher.
Finitude is set at an unspecified time in the future. Two men, Jeremy and Victor, are heading for somewhere called Iktyault in search of Jeremy’s parents. On the road they encounter other travelers, plus whole societies, that have responded in different ways to the horrors brought on or threatened by climate change. “Terraists” roam the land, frozen ground is thawing and releasing methane that’s waiting to ignite, there are Non-Reproduction Benefits, compressed air cars (now obsolete), something intended to be edible called Mete (“no amount of cooking was going to make it better”), a city of the blind, a sea of plastic, gangs, looting and, needless to say, wars over resources.
This is essentially a novel of ideas. None of the characters is particularly memorable, and you wouldn’t lose much sleep if one of the major players disappeared in a flash of light — an ever-present possibility. But the ideas are strong — sometimes ingenious, but more often just humane. Others had “spent the wealth of the world,” says a warlord, Tydial Lupercus, in a memorable phrase; once a farmer, he began to move north as his topsoil turned to dust. Disaster struck because people debated the science of the situation rather than simply caring for the planet, argues another. And carbon trading was intended to help poorer nations, but when one of them didn’t play ball the world government (the “International Coalition”) simply invaded, and so on.
There’s some grim humor, too. The pair arrive at one destination and a character offers a toast to “the ultimate survivors.” Jeremy, however, “wasn’t sure if he was referring to them or the cockroaches.” And the permafrost is thawing, the ice in the oceans melting, and if the trapped methane suddenly erupts the planet is going to become “a big, lifeless rock.” To which a character replies: “Suddenly the fact that I’m feeling hungry doesn’t seem so important.”
The government and its efforts are viewed with considerable skepticism. It had announced a “VC (Victory over the Climate) Day,” and was now planning to launch a rocket to block the sun’s rays and so reduce the Earth’s temperature. Little goes according to plan, however. Yet the book ends on a slightly optimistic note, with any final collapse at least temporarily delayed, and the now reunited family setting off by boat towards some sort of viable future. The author doesn’t give many credible grounds for their optimism — someone mentions the possibility of a 50-year reprieve — and you feel that this ending was adopted in preference to a bleak one of total collapse, or an ecological equivalent to Orwell’s Room 101.
One curiosity is that there’s a casually-treated gay element in the story. Maybe the lack of comment by other characters is meant to represent a likely characteristic of society in general in the future. Certainly it’s never explained in any other terms.
Finitude stands in the tradition of dystopian novels like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. These offered visions of nightmarish futures with the implicit message that this was how things might turn out if we didn’t take action to change our ways. Huxley warned of eugenics, or tampering with the genes of our descendants, and Orwell of the totalitarianism that was inseparable, as he saw it, from communism. In the place of these fears, Finitude offers unchecked global warming, the danger almost everyone is now focusing on. The strange thing is that we haven’t been deluged with novels on this theme already.
This book reads more like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy than the science fiction it would have been classified as 10 years ago. Science fiction is supposed to deal with future events that are, from a rational viewpoint, never likely to happen. Finitude, by contrast, feels more like ecological prophecy.
This is a coherent, lively and fast-moving attempt to put a widely feared future into imaginative, fictional form. It’s all the more attractive for being available free of charge online for prospective readers to sample at their leisure. All this author’s novels are available in a format that can be downloaded to e-book readers at hamishmacdonald.com/novels/novels.html. Finitude can also be read online at hamishmacdonald.com/novels/novels/finitude.html, and hand-bound copies ordered from the home page of the same Web site. - Review: Climate Activist Danny Bloom
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Hamish MacDonald has seen the future and written it down in a picaresque new novel called Finitude. It's not about the end of the world, but almost. It's about climate change and global warming, set in the near future in a parallel world which has fallen into chaos — and is borderless and nameless. It's Mad Max meets The Road. It's Douglas Adams on acid. It's a world that very well might be, and it incorporates the very real headlines of today to create a very realistic world of tomorrow. It's not a pretty picture, but it's very well written, very well plotted, very well paced and with a cast of characters that will keep you turning the pages until the very end. And it ends on a happy note, a positive note... Sort of.
Read Finitude and you will never be the same person you were the day before. It's that powerful. It captures the anxiety and fear that permeates today's world of rising CO2 emission and worldworld climate problems.
But don't worry. MacDonald's novel is set in a completely different time than today. Merely as a novel, it's a fun and captivating read. Pure entertainment and escapism. But on another level, this book speaks volumes about the future that may very well be coming down the road. Read it and weep.
Remember, though, it has a happy ending. Sort of. It's not an end of the world endtimes book. It's about the future, and it imagines a better future as well.
[Mr Bloom has also written a longer review.] - Review: Performance poet Sandra Alland
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Speaking of the End Of The World As We Know It, I’m reading a book by an amazing micropress publisher who hand-makes all his (gorgeous!) books. He’s Edinburgh’s Hamish MacDonald, and the book is Finitude. It’s not really the kind of book I’d normally read… speculative fiction, sci-fi, end-times kind of thing. But the confession is — I’m really digging it.
The world is ending because of humanity’s environmental abuses. But our anti-hero — a gay salesman who just wants to save his own ass — makes it superfascinating and not preachy.
MacDonald knows how to tell a story well, and has an imagination on par with some of the most famous science fiction writers out there. The characters are well-painted and the action is downright filmic. Thumbs up for making me read something out of my normal range… and like it. - Reader Comment: Lara Celini
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"I loved Finitude. A most enjoyable read, and it managed to deal with a serious issue in a way that was both very funny and depressing! Sometimes I didn't know whether to laugh or cry!"
- reader Lara Celini
Inspiration from Grist.com:
"What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art… Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?" Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, has called for playwrights, poets and artists to create works which will place climate change deeply in the imagination.”
"If the scientists are right, we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture."
"What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art… Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?" Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, has called for playwrights, poets and artists to create works which will place climate change deeply in the imagination.”
"If the scientists are right, we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture."
