THE NEW ATLANTIS
Ursula K. Le Guin
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
November 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-342-3
Copyright © 1975 Ursula K. Le Guin
Foreword
“The New Atlantis” was first published in 1975. So, as of this e-publication in 2013, it’s been around for nearly forty years. It’s middle-aged. Sf isn’t supposed to be middle-aged. It’s supposed to be youthful — the new, the cutting edge — bringing us the future.
Very little of my sf is predictive. It isn’t about how things will be in the future. I’d rather write about ways we might go that are different from the way we’ve been going all my life. ‘The future’ in my sf is mostly just a metaphor for a different way to a different place.
The way we’ve been going all my life is, put very crudely: increasing dominance of corporate capitalism dependent on economic growth; geometrical increase of human population; and (as a result of both) unceasing and increasing abuse of the environment.
These days, growth capitalism has few critics and no real alternatives. The terrific rate of population growth is usually reported as a neutral statistic — 2 billion in 1930, 6 billion in 2000, 10 billion by 2050 . . . . But human abuse of the environment has, finally, begun to be perceived as a problem. The current reactionary denial of “global warming” is a hysterical, last-ditch defense of the almost universal indifference or wilful ignorance of the past three generations.
In the late 1940’s and early 50’s there was a reverse kind of hysteria — people realised the appalling threat of atomic bombs, panicked, and dug backyard bomb shelters. Then they forgot why, and filled them in. Hysteria never does any good. You shriek, you dig, you forget.
Awareness is the useful thing. But you have to work at it.
There were good people working at keeping us aware, and they got to me. I worried. I worried about nuclear power in the fifties, and ever since. I joined protests in in the sixties against the bomb tests that were leaving strontium-90 in our milk and cancer in our bodies. And by the mid-sixties, there was plenty to learn from scientists about what they thought the human population explosion and the uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources were doing to the environment. It’s amazing that such a huge amount of evidence, so clearly presented, could be ignored so long. That ignorance is a great testimony to the power of wishful thinking, encouraged by corporate capitalism for its own ends (short-term profit).
All the same, it surprises me that people are surprised now that I was writing in the mid-seventies about the rise of sea-level, deforestation, the collapse of the ecosystem. It wasn’t inspired foresight. I was just applying the fiction-writer’s imagination to information there for anyone to see.
And what the scientists were telling us got clearer and louder every year: “We are creating environmental disaster, which is already taking place in the following ways. . . .”
“The New Atlantis” seems ecologically farsighted only because our society was so nearsighted.
As regards its social predictions, the story is a weird mixture of blurry telescopy with total myopia. I’d known since the fifties that big business was taking over the management of America, so I had it take over Washington and govern by advertisement. I didn’t realise the corporations wouldn’t have to bother taking over Congress, all they’d have to do was buy it.
All the political jokes are decades out of date. I like my peppy jingle about “Take all your problems to the Nine Wise Men,” but it shows that I didn’t yet believe that feminism might actually be able to pry open that door into the corridors of power.
The whole thing about sex being obligatory and marriage illegal is so far out it’s quaint. What was I thinking?
And of course nobody in the story has a computer or a cell phone. The electronc revolution was one of the extraordinary number of things sf failed to see coming. We simply couldn’t imagine it. Just as most people under forty now can’t imagine that people ever actually lived without TV, without the Internet, without Twitter. It is incredible to them that in those olden days we did communicate, in our primitive fashion. We had no TV, so we painted pictures of reindeer on the walls of our caves. We could not text, so we wrote novellas. . . .
As for the Atlantis part of “The New Atlantis,” that’s something else. It isn’t science fiction. It isn’t wishful thinking. It isn’t even Atlantis, because it’s in the Pacific. It’s a dream, a vision, that arose out of grief, out of yearning.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Portland, October 2013
The New Atlantis
Coming back from my Wilderness Week I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable, at least those that hadn’t yet worked loose from their bolts, so everybody waited inside the bus; besides, it was raining. We began talking, the way people do when there’s a breakdown and a wait. He held up his pamphlet and tapped it — he was a dry-looking man with a schoolteacherish way of using his hands — and said, “This is interesting. I’ve been reading that a new continent is rising from the depths of the sea.”
The blue stockings were hopeless. You have to have something besides holes to darn onto. “Which sea?”
“They’re not sure yet. Most specialists think the Atlantic. But there’s evidence it may be happening in the Pacific, too.”
“Won’t the oceans get a little crowded?” I said, not taking it seriously. I was a bit snappish, because of the breakdown and because those blue stockings had been good warm ones.
He tapped the pamphlet again and shook his head, quite serious. “No,” he said. “The old continents are sinking, to make room for the new. You can see that that is happening.”
You certainly can. Manhattan Island is now under eleven feet of water at low tide, and there are oyster beds in Ghirardelli Square.
“I thought that was because the oceans are rising from polar melt.”
He shook his head again. “That is a factor. Due to the greenhouse effect of pollution, indeed Antarctica may become habitable. But climatic factors will not explain the emergence of the new — or, possibly, very old — continents in the Atlantic and Pacific.” He went on explaining about continental drift, but I liked the idea of inhabiting Antarctica and daydreamed about it for a while. I thought of it as very empty, very quiet, all white and blue, with a faint golden glow northward from the unrising sun behind the long peak of Mount Erebus. There were a few people there; they were very quiet, too, and wore white tie and tails. Some of them carried oboes and violas. Southward the white land went up in a long silence toward the Pole.
Just the opposite, in fact, of the Mount Hood Wilderness Area. It had been a tiresome vacation. The other women in the dormitory were all right, but it was macaroni for breakfast, and there were so many organized sports. I had looked forward to the hike up to the National Forest Preserve, the largest forest left in the United States, but the trees didn’t look at all the way they do in the postcards and brochures and Federal Beautification Bureau advertisements. They were spindly, and they all had little signs on saying which union they had been planted by. There were actually a lot more green picnic tables and cement Men’s and Women’s than there were trees. There was an electrified fence all around the forest to keep out unauthorized persons. The forest ranger talked about mountain jays, “bold little robbers,” he said, “who will come and snatch the sandwich from
your very hand,” but I didn’t see any. Perhaps because that was the weekly Watch Those Surplus Calories! Day for all the women, and so we didn’t have any sandwiches. If I’d seen a mountain jay I might have snatched the sandwich from his very hand, who knows. Anyhow it was an exhausting week, and I wished I’d stayed home and practiced, even though I’d have lost a week’s pay because staying home and practicing the viola doesn’t count as planned implementation of recreational leisure as defined by the Federal Union of Unions.
When I came back from my Antarctican expedition, the man was reading again, and I got a look at his pamphlet; and that was the odd part of it. The pamphlet was called “Increasing Efficiency in Public Accountant Training Schools,” and I could see from the one paragraph I got a glance at that there was nothing about new continents emerging from the ocean depths in it — nothing at all.
Then we had to get out and walk on into Gresham, because they had decided that the best thing for us all to do was get onto the Greater Portland Area Rapid Public Transit Lines, since there had been so many breakdowns that the charter bus company didn’t have any more buses to send out to pick us up. The walk was wet, and rather dull, except when we passed the Cold Mountain Commune. They have a wall around it to keep out unauthorized persons, and a big neon sign out front saying COLD MOUNTAIN COMMUNE and there were some people in authentic jeans and ponchos by the highway selling macrame belts and sandcast candies and soybean bread to the tourists. In Gresham, I took the 4:40 GPARPTL Superjet Flyer train to Burnside and East 230th, and then walked to 217th and got the bus to the Goldschmidt Overpass, and transferred to the shuttlebus, but it had boiler trouble, so I didn’t reach the downtown transfer point until ten after eight, and the buses go on a once-an-hour schedule at 8:00, so I got a meatless hamburger at the Longhorn Inch-Thick Steak House Dinerette and caught the nine o’clock bus and got home about ten. When I let myself into the apartment I flipped the switch to turn on the lights, but there still weren’t any. There had been a power outage in West Portland for three weeks. So I went feeling about for the candles in the dark, and it was a minute or so before I noticed that somebody was lying on my bed.
I panicked, and tried again to turn the lights on.
It was a man, lying there in a long thin heap. I thought a burglar had got in somehow while I was away and died. I opened the door so I could get out quick or at least my yells could be heard, and then I managed not to shake long enough to strike a match, and lighted the candle, and came a little closer to the bed.
The light disturbed him. He made a sort of snorting in his throat and turned his head. I saw it was a stranger, but I knew his eyebrows, then the breadth of his closed eyelids, then I saw my husband.
He woke up while I was standing there over him with the candle in my hand. He laughed and said still half-asleep, “Ah, Psyche! From the regions which are holy land.”
Neither of us made much fuss. It was unexpected, but it did seem so natural for him to be there, after all, much more natural than for him not to be there, and he was too tired to be very emotional. We lay there together in the dark, and he explained that they had released him from the Rehabilitation Camp early because he had injured his back in an accident in the gravel quarry, and they were afraid it might get worse. If he died there it wouldn’t be good publicity abroad, since there have been some nasty rumors about deaths from illness in the Rehabilitation Camps and the Federal Medical Association Hospitals, and there are scientists abroad who have heard of Simon, since somebody published his proof of Goldbach’s Hypothesis in Peking. So they let him out early, with eight dollars in his pocket, which is what he had in his pocket when they arrested him, which made it, of course, fair. He had walked and hitched home from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, with a couple of days in jail in Walla Walla for being caught hitchhiking. He almost fell asleep telling me this, and when he had told me, he did fall asleep. He needed a change of clothes and a bath but I didn’t want to wake him. Besides, I was tired, too. We lay side by side and his head was on my arm. I don’t suppose that I have ever been so happy. No; was it happiness? Something wider and darker, more like knowledge, more like the night: joy.
~
It was dark for so long, so very long. We were all blind. And there was the cold, a vast, unmoving, heavy cold. We could not move at all. We did not move. We did not speak. Our mouths were closed, pressed shut by the cold and by the weight. Our eyes were pressed shut. Our limbs were held still. Our minds were held still. For how long? There was no length of time; how long is death? And is one dead only after living, or before life as well? Certainly we thought, if we thought anything, that we were dead; but if we had ever been alive, we had forgotten it.
There was a change. It must have been the pressure that changed first, although we did not know it. The eyelids are sensitive to touch. They must have been weary of being shut. When the pressure upon them weakened a little, they opened. But there was no way for us to know that. It was too cold for us to feel anything. There was nothing to be seen. There was black.
But then — “then,” for the event created time, created before and after, near and far, now and then —“then” there was the light. One light. One small, strange light that passed slowly, at what distance we could not tell. A small, greenish white, slightly blurred point of radiance, passing.
Our eyes were certainly open, “then,” for we saw it. We saw the moment. The moment is a point of light. Whether in darkness or in the field of all light, the moment is small, and moves, but not quickly. And “then” it is gone.
It did not occur to us that there might be another moment. There was no reason to assume that there might be more than one. One was marvel enough: that in all the field of the dark, in the cold, heavy, dense, moveless, timeless, placeless, boundless black, there should have occurred, once, a small slightly blurred, moving light! Time need be created only once, we thought.
But we were mistaken. The difference between one and more than one is all the difference in the world. Indeed, that difference is the world.
The light returned.
The same light, or another one? There was no telling.
But, “this time,” we wondered about the light: Was it small and near to us, or large and far away? Again there was no telling; but there was something about the way it moved, a trace of hesitation, a tentative quality, that did not seem proper to anything large and remote. The stars, for instance. We began to remember the stars.
The stars had never hesitated.
Perhaps the noble certainty of their gait had been a mere effect of distance. Perhaps in fact they had hurtled wildly, enormous furnace-fragments of a primal bomb thrown through the cosmic dark; but time and distance soften all agony. If the universe, as seems likely, began with an act of destruction, the stars we had used to see told no tales of it. They had been implacably serene.
The planets, however . . . We began to remember the planets. They had suffered certain changes both of appearance and of course. At certain times of the year Mars would reverse its direction and go backward through the stars. Venus had been brighter and less bright as she went through her phases of crescent, full, and wane. Mercury had shuddered like a skidding drop of rain on the sky flushed with daybreak. The light we now watched had that erratic, trembling quality. We saw it, unmistakably, change direction and go backward. It then grew smaller and fainter; blinked — an eclipse? — and slowly disappeared.
Slowly, but not slowly enough for a planet.
Then — the third “then!” — arrived the indubitable and positive Wonder of the World, the Magic Trick, watch now, watch, you will not believe your eyes, mama, mama, look what I can do —
Seven lights in a row, proceeding fairly rapidly, with a darting movement, from left to right. Proceeding less rapidly from right to left, two dimmer, greenish lights. Two-lights halt, blink, reverse course, proceed hastily and in a wavering manner from left to right. Seven-lights increase speed, and catch up. Two-lights flash desperately, flicker, and are g
one.
Seven-lights hang still for some while, then merge gradually into one streak, veering away, and little by little vanish into the immensity of the dark.
But in the dark now are growing other lights, many of them: lamps, dots, rows, scintillations — some near at hand, some far. Like the stars, yes, but not stars. It is not the great Existences we are seeing, but only the little lives.
~
In the morning Simon told me something about the Camp, but not until after he had had me check the apartment for bugs. I thought at first he had been given behavior mod and gone paranoid. We never had been infested. And I’d been living alone for a year and a half; surely they didn’t want to hear me talking to myself? But he said, “They may have been expecting me to come here.”
“But they let you go free!”
He just lay there and laughed at me. So I checked everywhere we could think of. I didn’t find any bugs, but it did look as if somebody had gone through the bureau drawers while I was away in the Wilderness. Simon’s papers were all at Max’s, so that didn’t matter. I made tea on the Primus, and washed and shaved Simon with the extra hot water in the kettle — he had a thick beard and wanted to get rid of it because of the lice he had brought from Camp — and while we were doing that he told me about the Camp. In fact he told me very little, but not much was necessary.
He had lost about 20 pounds. As he only weighed 140 to start with, this left little to go on with. His knees and wrist bones stuck out like rocks under the skin. His feet were all swollen and chewed-looking from the Camp boots; he hadn’t dared take the boots off, the last three days of walking, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them back on. When he had to move or sit up so I could wash him, he shut his eyes.
“Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”
“Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how you got here.”
“Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is to know where you’re going — to have someplace to go. You know, some of the people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. See, my back’s all seized up, now.”
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