Another Life

I read this novella on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a thread about Hugo drama. It’s a quick, straight forward, breezy read. I genuinely admire Ulibarri’s political optimism on display, and I found the character, plot, and style enjoyable. I have to say one thing rubbed me the wrong way. The book seems to want to take on sticky questions that swirl around “great people”, which is a subject I find important and worthy of deep probing. Thomas Jefferson was an eloquent and effective champion of the rights on man, and also a slaveholder apologist and rapist. Abraham Lincoln “freed the slaves” and was also deeply racist. Martin Luther King Jr. was a hugely effective champion of social justice, and a philanderer. This sort of thing runs deep. I’m not sure anything is untouched by it, and it is worth asking what it even means, ends aside, to be “good” if nobody really is. To me this calls into question the very words we use, or the very idea of some kind of summation of a human being.
Ulibarri seems to want to talk about this, or something like it, but she’s unwilling to give her protagonist any flaws. Instead, she invents a sort of genetic soul in an attempt to associate the heroine with a problematic past. But in-universe it doesn’t seem sensible that anybody would rightly bear any culpability for such a past. I think this is the point she’s making, in a round about way, but to me, it falls flat. It reminds me of a superman film, where the hero is in icon, and we’re forced to humanize them externally. It’s something that for better or worse I never find convincing.

But setting my personal hangups aside, I’m glad I read this book. It introduced me to the genre of “solarpunk” and gave me a chance to hear from someone who’s thought hard about ideas of communal living and justice in one particular way.

Solarpunk’ is the term used to categorize fiction that speculates on post-radical-change life, and does so on the assumption that there will be survival, however radically changed. It is fundamentally optimistic about the continuation of human life, and life with a ‘civilized’ aspect; that is, concerned with more than brute survival. In Another Life, Ulibarri presents a very convincing vision of how the post-climate-collapse society organizes itself materially. The circumstance presented is of a community established after the planned flooding of Death Valley.returnreturnThe need for an alternative way to live became pressing after Thomas Ramsey’s Planet B project failed spectacularly. His plan, and its collapse, is indicative of the sort of grand scale, grand theft, great lie consumer capitalism that preceded the social as well as climate collapse from which the Otra Vida community arose. There is no real presentation of the kinds of structures that make people like Ramsey possible, so he comes across as a ‘Big Bad’, a sui generis villain rather than the logical extreme of a particular, and profoundly complex, set of priorities, assumptions, and indulgences.returnreturnThere are two storylines in Another Life, one personal and one political. The former concerns the implications of a scientific discovery, and the second arises from ideological conflicts.returnThe discovery itself is a clever one, based on theorizing a holographic universe, and on reincarnated material having unique markers that can be genetically tracked under certain circumstances. The storyline arises from implications of reincarnation—what your previous life implies about your current self—which feel naïve, rather than profound. A significantly more interesting possibility—a human reincarnated from animal, a human with past experience but no experience of being a human—is raised, but resolved only in terms of human emotion. returnreturnThe Otra Vida community experiences some conflict with police, and with opposing ideologies from those outside, but there is no sense of actual threat. We see plenty of evidence of fair-mindedness in the community, of capacity for reflection and an impulse to honesty. But there is none of the sort of dogged, tough-minded persistence that, being necessary to push through any kind of unpopular change even at domestic rather than global scales, must surely be a characteristic required to sustain radical change within a radically destabilized society. returnreturnIt is this that gives Another World a specifically utopian, rather than purely speculative, feel: it isn’t that the possibility of such a community under significantly altered circumstances feels unconvincing, it is that everyone is so nice about it. In twenty years, there has been only one ‘rival’ for Galacia’s role of Mediator. The worst anyone inside Otra Vita does is kill a hornet, and even they are just ‘crass’. All the real threats are outside. A utopian slant is not a criticism, but it does not come across as well-secured.returnreturnOne thing that is oddly lacking is any depiction of the landscape after the Oil to Water Project flooded Death Valley. There is a reference, during the backstory of the community, to the positive environmental impact, the possibility of increasing biodiversity, and of ameliorating the decline of desert wetlands. These are never mentioned again. The focus is very much on human survival. This is not to suggest that a work of fiction is responsible for addressing the implication of every circumstance it describes. At the same time, there is here arguably a perpetuation of the sort of anthropocentrism that is at the heart of our current crisis (or crises).returnreturnWhat works very well is the development of the Otra Vida community and its practices, which are closely bound to structures familiar from contemporary society. The ways of surviving massive temperature increases seem reassuringly likely: reading as practical implementations, or logical extensions of, alternatives already at least theoretically possible. The community is very thoroughly planned and clearly presented, the characters are both human and humane; as a whole, the Otra Vida reads like a very realistic manifestation of Galacia’s motto “Their way of life wasn’t built for us, so we built another life.”

My first foray into solarpunk. Interesting to read not long after reading LeGuin's The Dispossessed, the classic 'ambiguous utopia'. And in both novels, the supposedly-non-hierarchical social system is marred by implicit power structures, and the proportedly-autonomous communities do have some dependency on non-utopian other worlds. I found Another Life very readable and enjoyable--a real page-turner--and although I wasn't convinced by a lot of the imagined technological solutions to (carbon capture is a distraction and continuation of business-as-usual rather than a way forward, and artificial lakes in Californian deserts don't have great ecological precedent...) the exploration of power in social movements was really interesting for me. I felt that Ulibarri was using birth/reincarnation as a conceit for talking about the flipside of charismatic and competent indivudals' exalted position in so-called leaderless movements. As someone who has held roles of responsibility in non-hierarchical grassroots groups, I really appreciated the treatment of Galacia's ambivalence towards her role: both pride and burden.