APRIL 22nd was Earth Day and reading eco-fiction is a great way to honour the day. One of the most intense eco-fiction novels I've read is Stephen Baxter's 'Ark' (2009).
'Ark' is a story of human survival in the face of global disaster. In the novel, sea levels rise five times their volume and a great flood drowns the world.
As the swelling oceans wash away cities and entire continents, a massive human tragedy unfolds.
Billions become refugees in their own countries, and nations collapse under the strain of supporting countless internally displaced people.
Before humanity goes extinct, it must endure terrible privations, poverty and starvation.
With land fast disappearing, the space programme is resuscitated. A space-going Ark is constructed to save a remnant of the human race by sending them to colonise a new planet.
To maximise genetic diversity, a crew of 80 astronauts is selected exclusively from children, who will be in their 20s when the Ark is finally launched.
Holle Groundwater and her friends know the extreme pressure and privilege of being humanity's only hope of survival.
They must sacrifice their childhood to the ruthlessly competitive space programme, which trains them to survive the interstellar journey.
Throughout Baxter's novel, the crew has fascinating debates about ethics and they confront uncomfortable moral dilemmas. For the crew is a micro-society confined to a tiny environment, and must resolve conflicts without outside help.
As humanity's sole survivors, Holle and her crewmates are uniquely positioned to decide what aspects of human society to preserve or abandon. One memorable debate is the place of religion on the Ark.
The Ark's social engineers want a sectarian crew. They fear the risk of intra-faith conflict in an enclosed community.
But Holle and her friends argue that having a common faith will give them a unifying and comforting bond to cope with the trauma of losing Earth.
The survivor's guilt and prolonged isolation and confinement take a heavy toll on mental health. Lead engineer, Zane, develops multiple personality disorder and loses the ability to comprehend reality rationally.
Troublingly, Zane's crewmates are forced to treat him without a qualified psychiatrist.
Another interesting dilemma confronting the crew involves family planning. To optimise the next generations' gene pool, Commander Kelly decrees that crew members must have children with at least two partners.
Kelly insists that "We'll have to separate partnerships for companionship from partnerships for procreation".
The crew is outraged because this policy interferes in their personal relationships and denies their right to control their bodies.
Unfortunately, the children born on the Ark grow increasingly alienated from the adults and angry with the mission. They rightly claim that they never had a choice and are wasting their youth on the ship.
The situation becomes dangerous when the kids start listening to Zane's elaborate conspiracy theories.
They believe his claims that they never left Earth and the 'space' outside is a computer simulation by Nasa to trick them.
The teenagers stage a rebellion and decide to prove the 'truth' by opening the Ark's airlock, with disastrous consequences.
Many are killed or injured during the nightmarish decompression and the Ark loses precious and irreplaceable resources.
The survivors must decide how to deal with these teenaged rebels. The awful question is whether execution is justified when their numbers are so small.
Also, how are they to deal with Zane, whose freedom of speech endangered them all by corrupting the kids with paranoid misinformation?
After surviving insurmountable odds on their decades-long journey, the Ark's crew arrives at their destination — new Earth.
But they face the final and most distressing challenge yet. After the teenagers' rebellion, the ship lost half its landing shuttles. Since the Ark was never meant to land, only half the crew can be brought down to the new planet.
Holle is tasked with the hardest decision — who to save? She decides that just like the Ark had no families, new Earth will be a world of young people with no parents.
Holle knows the crew will hate her for separating families, but she must prioritise the mission and give the next generation its best chance.
Ultimately, the adults who trained so hard as children to become astronauts must accept the bittersweet reality that although they will never walk on the planet they dedicated their lives to reaching, their children will restart human civilisation.
The crew comfort themselves knowing that they at least got to travel among the stars.
The writer hopes to share insights into books and films to inspire appreciation for the power of stories
© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd
from New Straits Times https://ift.tt/4aWiPGe
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