New Atlantis

THE NEW ATLANTIS

Ursula K. Le Guin

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
November 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-342-3
Copyright © 1975 Ursula K. Le Guin

“The New Atlantis” was first published in 1975. So, as of
this e-publication in 2013, it’s been around for nearly forty years. It’s
middle-aged. Sf isn’t supposed to be middle-aged. It’s supposed to be youthful
— the new, the cutting edge — bringing us the future.

Very little of my sf is predictive. It isn’t about how
things will be in the future. I’d rather write about ways we might go that are
different from the way we’ve been going all my life. ‘The future’ in my sf is
mostly just a metaphor for a different way to a different place.

The way we’ve been going all my life is, put very crudely:
increasing dominance of corporate capitalism dependent on economic growth;
geometrical increase of human population; and (as a result of both) unceasing
and increasing abuse of the environment.

These days, growth capitalism has few critics and no real
alternatives. The terrific rate of population growth is usually reported as a
neutral statistic — 2 billion in 1930, 6 billion in 2000, 10 billion by
2050 . . . . But human abuse of the environment has,
finally, begun to be perceived as a problem. The current reactionary denial of
“global warming” is a hysterical, last-ditch defense of the almost universal
indifference or wilful ignorance of the past three generations.

In the late 1940’s and early 50’s there was a reverse kind
of hysteria — people realised the appalling threat of atomic bombs, panicked,
and dug backyard bomb shelters. Then they forgot why, and filled them in.
Hysteria never does any good. You shriek, you dig, you forget.

Awareness is the useful thing. But you have to work at it.

There were good people working at keeping us aware, and they
got to me. I worried. I worried about nuclear power in the fifties, and ever
since. I joined protests in in the sixties against the bomb tests that were
leaving strontium-90 in our milk and cancer in our bodies. And by the
mid-sixties, there was plenty to learn from scientists about what they thought
the human population explosion and the uncontrolled exploitation of natural
resources were doing to the environment. It’s amazing that such a huge amount
of evidence, so clearly presented, could be ignored so long. That ignorance is
a great testimony to the power of wishful thinking, encouraged by corporate
capitalism for its own ends (short-term profit).

All the same, it surprises me that people are surprised now
that I was writing in the mid-seventies about the rise of sea-level,
deforestation, the collapse of the ecosystem. It wasn’t inspired foresight. I
was just applying the fiction-writer’s imagination to information there for
anyone to see.

And what the scientists were telling us got clearer and
louder every year: “We are creating environmental disaster, which is
already
taking place in the following
ways. . . .”

“The New
Atlantis” seems ecologically farsighted only because our society was so
nearsighted.

As regards its social predictions, the story is a weird
mixture of blurry telescopy with total myopia. I’d known since the fifties that
big business was taking over the management of America, so I had it take over
Washington and govern by advertisement. I didn’t realise the corporations
wouldn’t have to bother taking over Congress, all they’d have to do was buy it.

All the political jokes are decades out of date. I like my
peppy jingle about “Take all your problems to the Nine Wise Men,” but it shows
that I didn’t yet believe that feminism might actually be able to pry open that
door into the corridors of power.

The whole thing about sex being obligatory and marriage illegal
is so far out it’s quaint. What
was
I
thinking?

And of course nobody in the story has a computer or a cell
phone. The electronc revolution was one of the extraordinary number of things
sf failed to see coming. We simply couldn’t imagine it. Just as most people
under forty now can’t imagine that people ever actually lived without TV,
without the Internet, without Twitter. It is incredible to them that in those
olden days we did communicate, in our primitive fashion. We had no TV, so we
painted pictures of reindeer on the walls of our caves. We could not text, so
we wrote novellas. . . .

As for the Atlantis part of “The New Atlantis,” that’s
something else. It isn’t science fiction. It isn’t wishful thinking. It isn’t
even Atlantis, because it’s in the Pacific. It’s a dream, a vision, that arose
out of grief, out of yearning.

— Ursula K. Le Guin
Portland, October 2013

Coming back from my Wilderness Week I sat by an odd sort
of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and
he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler
trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over
thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with
Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable, at
least those that hadn’t yet worked loose from their bolts, so everybody waited
inside the bus; besides, it was raining. We began talking, the way people do
when there’s a breakdown and a wait. He held up his pamphlet and tapped it — he
was a dry-looking man with a schoolteacherish way of using his hands — and
said, “This is interesting. I’ve been reading that a new continent is rising
from the depths of the sea.”

The blue stockings were hopeless. You have to have something
besides holes to darn onto. “Which sea?”

“They’re not sure yet. Most specialists think the Atlantic.
But there’s evidence it may be happening in the Pacific, too.”

“Won’t the oceans get a little crowded?” I said, not taking
it seriously. I was a bit snappish, because of the breakdown and because those
blue stockings had been good warm ones.

He tapped the pamphlet again and shook his head, quite
serious. “No,” he said. “The old continents are sinking, to make room for the
new. You can see that that is happening.”

You certainly can. Manhattan Island is now under eleven feet
of water at low tide, and there are oyster beds in Ghirardelli Square.

“I thought that was because the oceans are rising from polar
melt.”

He shook his head again. “That is a factor. Due to the
greenhouse effect of pollution, indeed Antarctica may become habitable. But
climatic factors will not explain the emergence of the new — or, possibly, very
old — continents in the Atlantic and Pacific.” He went on explaining about
continental drift, but I liked the idea of inhabiting Antarctica and daydreamed
about it for a while. I thought of it as very empty, very quiet, all white and
blue, with a faint golden glow northward from the unrising sun behind the long
peak of Mount Erebus. There were a few people there; they were very quiet, too,
and wore white tie and tails. Some of them carried oboes and violas. Southward
the white land went up in a long silence toward the Pole.

Just the opposite, in fact, of the Mount Hood Wilderness
Area. It had been a tiresome vacation. The other women in the dormitory were
all right, but it was macaroni for breakfast, and there were so many organized
sports. I had looked forward to the hike up to the National Forest Preserve,
the largest forest left in the United States, but the trees didn’t look at all
the way they do in the postcards and brochures and Federal Beautification
Bureau advertisements. They were spindly, and they all had little signs on
saying which union they had been planted by. There were actually a lot more
green picnic tables and cement Men’s and Women’s than there were trees. There
was an electrified fence all around the forest to keep out unauthorized
persons. The forest ranger talked about mountain jays, “bold little robbers,”
he said, “who will come and snatch the sandwich from your very hand,” but I
didn’t see any. Perhaps because that was the weekly Watch Those Surplus
Calories! Day for all the women, and so we didn’t have any sandwiches. If I’d
seen a mountain jay I might have snatched the sandwich from his very hand, who
knows. Anyhow it was an exhausting week, and I wished I’d stayed home and
practiced, even though I’d have lost a week’s pay because staying home and
practicing the viola doesn’t count as planned implementation of recreational
leisure as defined by the Federal Union of Unions.

When I came back from my Antarctican expedition, the man was
reading again, and I got a look at his pamphlet; and that was the odd part of
it. The pamphlet was called “Increasing Efficiency in Public Accountant
Training Schools,” and I could see from the one paragraph I got a glance at
that there was nothing about new continents emerging from the ocean depths in
it — nothing at all.

Then we had to get out and walk on into Gresham, because
they had decided that the best thing for us all to do was get onto the Greater
Portland Area Rapid Public Transit Lines, since there had been so many
breakdowns that the charter bus company didn’t have any more buses to send out
to pick us up. The walk was wet, and rather dull, except when we passed the
Cold Mountain Commune. They have a wall around it to keep out unauthorized
persons, and a big neon sign out front saying COLD MOUNTAIN COMMUNE and there
were some people in authentic jeans and ponchos by the highway selling macrame
belts and sandcast candies and soybean bread to the tourists. In Gresham, I
took the 4:40 GPARPTL Superjet Flyer train to Burnside and East 230th, and then
walked to 217th and got the bus to the Goldschmidt Overpass, and transferred to
the shuttlebus, but it had boiler trouble, so I didn’t reach the downtown
transfer point until ten after eight, and the buses go on a once-an-hour
schedule at 8:00, so I got a meatless hamburger at the Longhorn Inch-Thick
Steak House Dinerette and caught the nine o’clock bus and got home about ten.
When I let myself into the apartment I flipped the switch to turn on the
lights, but there still weren’t any. There had been a power outage in West
Portland for three weeks. So I went feeling about for the candles in the dark,
and it was a minute or so before I noticed that somebody was lying on my bed.

I panicked, and tried again to turn the lights on.

It was a man, lying there in a long thin heap. I thought a
burglar had got in somehow while I was away and died. I opened the door so I
could get out quick or at least my yells could be heard, and then I managed not
to shake long enough to strike a match, and lighted the candle, and came a
little closer to the bed.

The light disturbed him. He made a sort of snorting in his
throat and turned his head. I saw it was a stranger, but I knew his eyebrows,
then the breadth of his closed eyelids, then I saw my husband.

He woke up while I was standing there over him with the
candle in my hand. He laughed and said still half-asleep, “Ah, Psyche! From the
regions which are holy land.”

Neither of us made much fuss. It was unexpected, but it did
seem so natural for him to be there, after all, much more natural than for him
not to be there, and he was too tired to be very emotional. We lay there
together in the dark, and he explained that they had released him from the
Rehabilitation Camp early because he had injured his back in an accident in the
gravel quarry, and they were afraid it might get worse. If he died there it
wouldn’t be good publicity abroad, since there have been some nasty rumors
about deaths from illness in the Rehabilitation Camps and the Federal Medical
Association Hospitals, and there are scientists abroad who have heard of Simon,
since somebody published his proof of Goldbach’s Hypothesis in Peking. So they
let him out early, with eight dollars in his pocket, which is what he had in
his pocket when they arrested him, which made it, of course, fair. He had
walked and hitched home from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, with a couple of days in
jail in Walla Walla for being caught hitchhiking. He almost fell asleep telling
me this, and when he had told me, he did fall asleep. He needed a change of
clothes and a bath but I didn’t want to wake him. Besides, I was tired, too. We
lay side by side and his head was on my arm. I don’t suppose that I have ever
been so happy. No; was it happiness? Something wider and darker, more like
knowledge, more like the night: joy.