The Way the Future Blogs

Bluefin tuna: Threatened with extinction.

So far in the history of life on Earth there have been five Great Extinctions. One was caused by the giant meteor that hit what is now the coast of Mexico, two by freezing in the oceans and the lowering of the sea levels, one by huge, widespread volcanic eruptions, one (probably) by gigantic meteorite showers.

They were all many millions of years ago — all but the sixth Great Extinction, which has barely started. That is the one the scientists are calling the “Holocene,” and its cause is annihilation of species of birds, animals and — especially, for example — edible fish.

And the cause of that is Us.

How do we cause extinctions? Oh, we have lots of ways. For fish, we harvest the tastiest ones en masse until there are none left (it’s estimated that we have removed nearly 90 percent of large fish from the sea). We destroy habitats. Most of all, we cause global warming. Anyway, our work in this matter has gone far enough for scientist to refer to the present as a new age, the Holocene.

One of my favorite Italian dishes was scaloppine al limone, a fried cut of veal with lemon juice. Second favorite would be any other scaloppine, but it’s been a couple of years since I tasted any. See, the trouble is, they’re made with veal, and the way veal itself is made takes all the fun out of eating any.

If you think too much about the ordeal all of your meat dishes go through on their way to your table, it does nothing to help your enjoyment of even fried chicken or a pork chop. But with most meats, the animal at least gets some kind of life before the chop-chop. The calf gets nothing. At birth he goes into a wooden crate too small to turn around in. He never tastes his mother’s milk. That’s pumped away to sell, while the baby is given a formula that is liberally mixed with streptomycin, penicillin and four or five other antibiotics, for the purpose of making him grow faster. Their secondary effect is that they also give him constant diarrhea, which no one cleans away, so the calf lies in it for most of its life.

Oh, and they have one other effect. They contribute to that exercise in controlled breeding that the farmers of the world have been carrying on for some generations now, in which their antibiotics kill off all the weaker bacteria, leaving the stronger — and better able to resist all known antibiotics — in each generation to become the dominant varieties. This, in turn, has its own effects, one of which is that my personal resident bacteria are now immune to all known antibiotics except to those few that are almost as toxic to large mammals — like me, for instance — as to the bacteria they are meant to control.

This, of course, means that, if and when I pick up any future serious infection, my doctors will have to guess whether the antibacterial properties of one of them outweighs its toxicity. Or whether, on the other hand, the effect of injecting me with it would resemble the effects of infecting strychnine.

But enough about me.

So tell me: do you still really enjoy veal? Or, to look at the problem from a different angle, should we go on letting the veal manufacturers grow the little calves in total misery when they could at least give them clean crates?

Hannes Bok, 1941.
 

There were a couple of things about Hannes Bok that we didn’t mention last time, but they were important to him. One was his love of music. Indeed, when young Wayne Woodard, as he had been named by his parents, started working out the name he wanted to live his life under, the names he started with were all variants of those of the great early master Johann Sebastian Bach. First it was Johan, then Johannes, then he modified the spelling and came up with Hannes Bok. (Which was a little odd, actually, because Hannes’ favorite composer wasn’t anyone as old-fashioned as a Bach, but the quite modern Finnish master, Sibelius.)

The other great passion of his life took up even more of it than music — and was less sympathetic to most of his fellow fans. That was his passion for astrology. Hannes didn’t just believe in it, he studied it with the same intensity that a disciple might have given to the works of his 12th- or 14th-century master. Hannes went so far as to work out complete astrological readings for a few of his friends. They were detailed and — inasmuch is there is anything that could be called trustworthy about the study of astrology in general — quite trustworthily prepared. Looked at as art objects rather than useful tools, they are in fact well worth hanging on your wall. Which is what I did — way back when, with mine — but it’s long lost now and I can only wish that I had it still.

During the years of the War and just after, Hannes had been having his most prosperous period, doing over a hundred covers for Weird Tales and a dozen other science fiction and fantasy magazines, plus interior black-and-whites for them and covers for Ballantine and many of the semi-pro book publishers that were springing up. Most of them didn’t pay very well, and Hannes had a self-defeating habit of putting in long hours of experimentation on new techniques of enhancing the color on each job. But he was eating, and relatively happy.

That, however didn’t last. Hannes had developed another self-defeating habit, this time of becoming pretty quarrelsome. Sadly, a lot of the people he quarreled with were the customers for his artwork. One after another of them quietly took Hannes’ address out of their card file — which had the effect of cutting down on his income — which had the lock-on effect of making him still more quarrelsome.

I saw very little of Hannes in that immediate post-war period. The only contact I remember is running in to him by accident at someone’s office, I think perhaps John Campbell’s. He didn’t seem particularly thrilled at meeting me again, and I wasn’t overly charmed by his manner. It was quite a while after that that I went up to his desolate little flat and saw him for the last time.

It happened that I had met with Don Wollheim for some reason, maybe for lunch one day, and as I was getting ready to leave he said, “What I have to do now is go up and see Hannes Bok to talk to him about some artwork. Want to come along?”

“Sure,” I said, before I could change my mind. The apartment was pretty far uptown, but the subway got us there quickly enough, and Hannes was buzzing the door open before we even rang his bell.

“I was sitting by the widow, and I saw you guys coming, Have you got my checks?”

Donald’s reason for coming, he had explained to me, was to buy a couple of drawings that he hoped to be able to use in his job at Ace Books, but he shook his head at that. “No checks till we get the art,” he said. “I told you that. Have you got the drawings?”

Hannes complained briefly about that, but he went into the room that he called his studio and came back with two flat packages wrapped in newspaper. “When will I get the checks?” he asked Donald.

“As soon as I can get them signed,” Donald said. “You know what it’s like.”

Hannes gave him a bitter grin. “I do,” he said. Then he turned to me. I guess I’d been looking him over pretty closely. He was a lot skinnier than I remembered and quite a lot surlier.

“Is something the matter?” he asked.

I lied. “No, nothing,” I said. But what I had seen in that quick snarling grin had been a real shock. The man had no teeth at all, not even dentures.

I didn’t take much part in the conversation for a while after that. I was doing my best to understand what it would be like to have no teeth. Hannes wasn’t much older than I was. Under forty, anyway. By no means old enough to be the toothless grandpa he had turned into, and by no means as old as the oldest old fart I’d ever had the actual experience of living with. That particular old fart was my own real grandpa, briefly occupying our back room before Ma had managed to shift him off onto the care of Aunt Marie, who had a bigger house and a bigger yard and a hot, dry attic where he could cure the backyard-grown tobacco no one would give him money to buy.

That was when I figured out that you didn’t have to have all that many calendar years behind you in order to turn into Grandpa. Or worse.

Continue reading ‘Hannes Bok, Part 2: The story with the unhappy ending’ »

Diagram of the workings of The Plant, an urban aquaponics farm in Chicago.

The idea started with Chinese rice farmers long ago They had learned that rice grew best when they flooded the fields, then drained them to harvest the crop at the end of the season. That was good farming, but why waste all that water that was doing nothing for all those months? One of them got the idea of throwing a bucketful of baby tilapia into the fields when they planted the rice seedlings, and, sure enough, then when they harvested the rice they also harvested a handsome crop of eating-sized fish,

That was what first started the tilapia boom a couple of decades ago, but an Illinois city farmer named John Edel has carried the idea a lot of steps farther. When tilapia eat they also excrete, and the water is fouled; when the are marketed they have to be degutted and beheaded, producing more waste. Edel puts the waste water and its polluters in a tank that he seeds with bacteria. The bacteria eat the waste and turn it into high-grade fertilizer … which, of course, is what closes the circle by making his next year’s rice crop grow so abundantly.

His objective, as Edel puts it from his indoor factory farm, The Plant, in Chicago’s old Stockyards district, is, “Nothing leaves the plant but food.”

If you happen to be in Chicago on May 7, you can tour the place, during its open house.

L. Ron Hubbard, left, and John W. Campbell

Part 6 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Pohl: I’ve just realized something very significant. Of all the science fiction writers in the English-speaking world who began in the late ’30s and ’40s who have survived since and done reasonably well, there are only two who were not largely and directly influenced by John Campbell. That’s you and me!

John Campbell is the fellow who took science fiction by the scruff of the neck in the late ’30s and changed it. Made it much better. And people like Isaac Asimov and van Vogt and Bob Heinlein, and almost everybody else who really became significant writers around that period owe a great debt to Campbell. They were published primarily in his magazine and got a great deal of advice and guidance from him. And I know I didn’t.

John Campbell was a good friend of mine but he had this one tacky personality trait — be never bought any stories from me! I kept trying but he never would buy them. How about you, Alfie?

Bester: Oh, I had an experience with Campbell! As Fred has said, he really took science fiction by the scruff of the neck and shaped it into something really worthwhile. Up until then it had just been hack writing by guys who were translating westerns into science fiction. Campbell changed all that. He was a great man. I worshipped Campbell, of course.

I wrote a story called “Oddy and Id.” The premise of the story simply was that we are not consciously in control of our actions but this deep Id, this well of primal urges within us, is really in control. I submitted the story to Campbell and got a phone call from him — I’d never met him.

“I want to talk to you about the story. I want to buy it but I want some changes. Will you come and see me?”

“Oh God, yes, Mr. Campbell.” It was when their office was out in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Now, you’ve got to picture me, a guy from Madison Avenue writing scripts; all I know is the networks, the advertising agencies and all that jazz, it’s what I’m used to. I’m also used to the rates that they pay. But I have to meet Campbell.

I go out to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I come to this goddamn printing plant, this factory, expecting to be ushered into the great office of this great man. But I go into this tacky little office which is about two feet by four feet and here is this guy who is about the size of what we would call in American football, a defensive tackler. He’s about 19 feet high, 47 feet wide, a towering guy. He sits behind his desk and I squirm into the one visitors’ chair.

He says, “Now about your story. Freud is finished!”

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie, Part 6: John W. Campbell and Dianetics’ »

Shrimp farmed near Golconda, Ill. (Photo by Leah A. Zeldes.)

A few months ago, in the interests of full disclosure, we published a gourmet recipe for lobster bisque which may have made it unlikely that some of our readers will ever eat lobster bisque again. We now turn our attention to shrimp, perhaps the fastest-growing foodstuff we obtain from the seas in this 21st Century of ours.

If you’re not eating a lot more shrimp in your family’s diet these days you are out of step with the rest of the world. Shrimp are not only as tasty as all get-out and a great source of protein but they have proved beautifully easy to farm; over the last few decades the world’s farmed shrimp production has grown from under 100,000 tons a year to well over 3,000,000.

That is, it’s easy if you don’t trouble yourself about “externals” — that is to say, that sometimes large class of business costs that businessmen don’t usually worry much about, since they aren’t the ones who have to pay the bill. (For example, smoke damage to public health or fish-killing runoff from old-fashioned factories. See my essay on the subject, “Fossil Fuels and Bad Bookkeepimg.”)

In the case of the shrimp farms, almost all of which are set up in warm climates on the shore of a saltwater bay, the two biggest externals are ocean pollution (China’s coastal waters receive 4 billion tons of wastewater from industry every year — and 43 billion tons from shrimp farms) and destruction of mangrove forests, which are cut down to provide sites for the shrimp farms. (A bad business tactic. Those mangrove forests are where many kinds of food fish avoid predators in their earliest youth. Absent the forests, the baby fish die.)

Some of the higher externals are the costs that all us animals have to pay — shrimp, mighty elephants, cuddly kittens and you and me. That is, we eat and therefore from time to time we have to, excuse the expression, poop.

You might think that for shrimp that couldn’t matter much. They aren’t very big. In fact, they’re what you might call shrimpy, not that much bigger than my thumb.

But there are a lot of them, you see. And they all keep themselves busy all day long, eating and pooping, and the end result (sorry) is tons and tons of shrimp feces that have to be somehow disposed of.

Something needed to be done, right?

Something was. But before I tell you what that something is, I have a suggestion. If you enjoy dropping in on a Red Lobster on one of their all-the-shrimp-you-can-eat days — and especially if you have a weak stomach — I suggest that you postpone reading the rest of this to a later date. Maybe much, much later.

Continue reading ‘Want Some Seafood, Mama?’ »