San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Here’s hoping apocalypse turns out as well for us as in fictional 2020s S.F.
Apocalypse stories are the oldest subgenre of science fiction, and probably the most popular. Every generation has its doomsday prophets, and today most of them are betting on climate change. Their stories are full of melting glaciers, rising seas, freak storms and ecological collapse. It takes a rare futurist to look past the end of the world and see more opportunity than loss.
Octavia Butler predicted a dark future of California wildfires and roving militias, but also a movement that could lift humankind to the stars. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New York 2140,” rising sea levels swallow the streets of Manhattan — but the city becomes a thriving SuperVenice, not an abandoned ruin.
The same spirit of hope shines in Chris Carlsson’s “When Shells Crumble,” which may well be the most optimistic disaster novel you’ll ever read. The events of the plot take place from December 2024 to February 2027 in San Francisco and the Bay Area. The action begins with an alarmingly plausible end to democracy in the U.S., and what follows is three punishing years of martial law, food scarcity, king tides, atmospheric rivers and other natural disasters.
Carlsson’s story is told in prose stripped down to bare bones and plain language. Characters are sketched lightly, scenes are brief, and the focus is always on a person’s actions and reactions, not their inner world. His vision of the unfolding catastrophe is broad rather than deep, and along the way we meet dozens of people who represent a spectrum of age, race, gender, sexuality, profession and social class in the city. His greatest strength as a writer is an intimate and detailed knowledge of San Francisco’s architecture, history and culture. Seen through his eyes, the city in its darkest hour is a layered tapestry of industries, communities, neighborhoods and families.
To those familiar with Carlsson’s
career as a historian, activist and tour guide, the richness of this vision will come as no surprise. The director of the Shaping San Francisco historical project since its inception in the mid-1990s, he has written two volumes on San Francisco’s ecological and labor history, and edited six more. When he describes martial law in the Bay Area, he seems to know exactly which park is likely to become the site of a protest-turnedmassacre, and which airfield will be commandeered to build a detention center for political prisoners. Similarly, when he writes about flooding, there’s no doubt that he knows which levees are most likely to break, and which streets will be underwater when the sea rolls in.
Beyond that, however, this novel can sometimes offer a powerful, poignant snapshot of the city’s soul: Community gardeners dodging Homeland Security to provide fresh produce to a dozen secret neighborhood food banks. Brilliant biohackers working on a designer fungus in the back room of a cannabis grow-op. A young activist running through the streets, blowing his silver police whistle to summon gay men from every direction — men who have been running toward that sound for decades, and who ultimately arrive in time to save him from a government death squad.
Carlsson sees a storm of destruction coming, but he views the future with more hope than despair. His book never brings up a problem without offering a solution, and his fiction covers much the same issues as his nonfiction: urban farming, alternative energy, carless cities, and the future of work and labor.
The ideal reader for Carlsson’s book is a citizen of that future San Francisco, a city reborn and rebuilt even as the old world collapses around it. This book contains the blueprint for that scrappy, cooperative DIY future: If we build it, it will come.