TimeSplash – The Blog

When you write a sci-fi novel, you often need to think about the future, to make predictions about how things will turn out. I did this when I wrote TimeSplash. In fact, I sat down with a pile of paper for a few days and went through every aspect of our society I could think of, including our sciences and technologies, our political and economic systems, the environment and many others. I drew up charts of how each might reasonably be expected to change, decade-by-decade over the next fifty years. It isn’t easy but it is very enlightening. You should give it a go.

One of the hardest things to work out with all this, is how the various changes will interact with one another. Another is to foresee big change (like the fall of the Soviet Union, or the rise of the Internet). One big change that is obviously going to hit in the next fifty years is climate change, but I used conservative forecasts and, apart from food crises in the third world, the spread of certain diseases to new latitudes, the slow destruction of the insurance industry, and so on, there wasn’t anything particularly world changing going to happen. However, when I looked at peak oil, I saw a major, global catastrophe waiting in the wings.

Peak oil is the moment when oil extraction reaches its maximum level and, thereafter, falls off into terminal decline. It is widely accepted that peak oil in the USA happened in the early 1970s, however, it is hard to say just when it will happen on a global scale. It might already have happened. After peak oil, the price of oil products – especially petrol – will begin to rise as production falls. At some point, petrol will become too expensive for ordinary people to buy and, after that, too expensive for industry to use. Essentially, petrol will no longer be available and economies based on it (almost every economy in the world) will collapse. In TimeSplash, the effects of peak oil culminate in a global economic collapse around 2030. Alternative energy systems are not sufficiently well-developed or widespread by then to compensate. As poverty and starvation spread, moderate governments collapse and are replaced by more authoritarian ones – a pattern often seen throughout history.

In the book, the worst-hit countries are the most advanced and the ones with weakest governments. Regimes in the Middle East, Africa, Russia, South Asia and South America crumble to near anarchy. Hardest hit of all the stable, Western democracies is the USA whose economy I expect still to be absolutely dependent on oil when the crunch comes. Europe is hit almost as hard but, by the time of the action in TimeSplash (2050) has clawed its way back to some semblance of normality. The US might have gone the same way except that at the height of the depression, the religious right takes over – a kind of Tea Party Spring. The first thing the new Christian fundamentalist government does is to dismantle the separation of church and state. New amendments to the constitution ensure that America becomes a Christian country. Later amendments ensure that only Christian candidates from approved churches can run for office. The new fervour permeates all branches of government as the ruling elite ensures their own people are in the top jobs and, pretty soon, every job. The FBI becomes the main tool of the new state’s enforcement of its ideology. McCarthyism is as nothing compared to the new order in the US. As Christian fundamentalism consolidates it power, pogroms begin and opposition leaders are imprisoned or disappeared, the major universities are dismantled or turned into theological colleges, “controversial” science is no longer taught in schools, and so on. America plunges deeper into economic failure, but it is too late to do anything about it. The religious right has a stranglehold on power.

This all seems like a reasonable projection from the present into a potential near future. Certainly other sci-fi authors have postulated a right-wing religious takeover in the US. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is probably the highest profile example. As it happens, all of this is a fairly small part of TimeSplash. I use it for background colour mostly and to provide a pool of cashed up fanatics who might be interested in funding the destruction of secular Europe. The US and Christianity really don’t get much of a mention since the action takes place in Europe. When it does come up, I have one of the book’s most respected characters defend the US, arguing that the American people’s innate good sense and basic goodness can be trusted to bring it out of this dark period and get itself back on its feet again. I didn’t want to offend any Americans, yet I do think there is a strong strain of Christian fundamentalism in that nation that might, one day, take power, given the opportunity. Heck, they almost made it in the G W Bush government and the current crop of Republican candidates are a very scary bunch.

Yet, while I seem to have done a reasonable job of not offending Americans (tens of thousands of Americans have read TimeSplash and I’ve never had a single complaint) it seems Christians are a different matter. Recently, I got a “punitive review” on Amazon from one of these guys. I’ve heard of punitive reviews before but had never seen one. Apparently it is a specialty of Christian reviewers although other readers with extreme views use the tactic as well. Simply, whatever they think of a book, if it offends their religion (or whatever) they give it a one-star review. If enough of these sad creatures are offended by a book, they can shift the overall rank of a book downwards in the Amazon charts so that its sales are affected. It’s mean, small-spirited, and pathetic, but some writers have been very badly affected by it. Unpleasant people are nothing if not organised, these days, and campaigns against authors have been well orchestrated and successful. In the end, it amounts to a form of censorship of the books that these people object to.

The curious thing is that the “Christian” who slapped my virtual wrist for not liking Christians was behaving in precisely the way that he didn’t like me suggesting Christians might behave. He was being repressive and punitive and censorial. He was actively trying to suppress a position he did not like.

I don’t actually have anything at all against Christians as it happens. In one of my recent novels (unpublished as yet) two of the protagonists are devout Christians. One is having some problems with his faith, but the other is absolutely rock-solid in her beliefs and exemplifies all of the best qualities Christianity espouses. She’s an admirable human being, in fact. I don’t suppose that “Christians are evil” at all (as the repressive wrist-slapper suggested in his review), having known tons of them who are perfectly fine people. (I don’t share their beliefs as it happens – but that’s another matter altogether.) So it’s not Christians I object to but people who use their power to restrict the freedom of others.

Some people are very unpleasant people. Some people will latch onto any ideology or theology and use it to achieve power over others and to justify oppression and inhumanity. People have used Communism this way, and Fascism. They’ve also used Islam, Zionism, Christianity, and a host of other belief systems to justify authoritarianism of the most extreme and vicious kind. Some people are – if not actually evil – pretty nasty types. Christians need to own up that they’ve had their share of people like that. In fact, when you look back through time to periods when Christianity was extremely powerful, the abuse of that power was quite commonplace. Think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the silencing of Galileo, and a thousand lesser episodes of oppression, corruption, and tyranny. I’m not saying that Christians are worse offenders than the followers of any of the other major ideologies throughout our history, I’m just saying it has happened, and it could happen again.

Perhaps, instead of punishing me for reflecting human nature in my novel, the would-be censor should examine his own heart and consider where his own intolerant attitude inevitably leads us.