One of these days crying may be forbidden. Good girls don’t cry.  Survival will depend on the politics of water.  

 I used to cry a lot when I was very young.  Red, swollen eyes the next day. Calling in sick, because who can go to work looking like that?  But I’m in a different phase now.  Menopause was a gift: I rarely cry anymore.  Was it all hormones?

But I wept a bit after beginning Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, the first of a trilogy.  In the postapocalyptic future, the narrator, Snowman, recalls that they used to have fall. 

That broke me up. I’ve been thinking a lot about fall. Will there be a real autumn this year?

Fall comes later and later. The leaves didn’t change till November last year.  

“It’s not effing Vermont, but I expect something,”  I commented.

The world’s on fire. It’s hot: 95 degrees. No smoke from the wildfires this week, but it might be back. 

“If you’d read science fiction, you wouldn’t be surprised, ” I said to a friend.  To tell you the truth, I am surprised, though. But many SF writers, especially those of the ’60s and ’70s, were able to make sense of what makes no sense. They were imaginative, but they also seemed to have special knowledge. They put together politics with technology and climate change.

And so I’ve been thinking about favorite dystpian novels. I highly recommend Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune (1965),  set on a desert planet.  Herbert focuses on the politics of water. The rich colonists enjoy the luxury of abundance of water, but the Fremen, the natives, must wear special “stillsuits” that recycle  their bodily fluids.  Paul, the son of a  Duke who is assassinated by invaders, joins the Fremen, learns how to survive in the desert, and helps them fight.  There is also an ecologist who has plans  to “green” the planet by scientifically growing certain plants. 

My favorite SF novel, and one of my favorite novels, is The Sheep Look up (1972), by John Brunner.  I also recommend this to fans of literary fiction.  This postmodern classic focuses on the politics of water, the toxicity of the contaminated food chain, and the rise of illness and epidemics. Lakes, rivers, and seas are contaminated, there are Don’t Drink the Water Days, fines for not washing your hands, and a water shortage in Denver, where the the water level of lakes and rivers has dwindled. (That is happening now in Colorado.)  Brunner’s style is brilliant and the structure of the novel is experimental. He’s living in the world of John Barth and Frank Herbert.

I always go back to Doris Lessing’s beautifully-written novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), set in London in a near future, or perhaps a parallel present. Society is breaking down, but the newspapers publish little information. People chat in public and share what they know about where to buy potatoes and other necessities. No one has a clue what kind of disaster has happened, but people are leaving the city.

Parts of this are surreal. Sometimes the narrator senses a life beyond the walls of her flat. And then one day a man enters the flat and tells her she must take care of a young girl, Emily, who is brittle, anxious, and  too vivaciou. Yet she knows more about this new world than the narrator.  Gangs of dangerous young people camp in the streets before going north. All the residents in the neighborhood are terrified. .The narrator knows she and Emily must leave the city, but where should they go?  No one ever comes back. Emily becomes involved with one of the leaders of the young people, and gradually switches roles with fthe narrator.  She is now the adult with access to information and supplies. There is a happy, surreal ending.  There’s no way out without the surreal.

Paradoxically, dystopian novels can cheer us up.  It’s because these brilliant writers see a  complexity of politics and ecology that we could not unravel on our own.  Not that I can unravel it! But without these books I’d be terrified and in dystopian denial.