Set in the near future, Year of the Flood is a retelling of Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic classic Oryx and Crake from the perspective of characters who were only marginally involved in the massive act of bioterror unleashed by the previous novel's sociopathic Utopian scientist Glenn (AKA Crake). While Glenn and his damaged, upper-class buddies were cooking up a virus to end the world, the peaceful Green separatist Gardeners lived in squats, tending vast urban rooftop gardens. The Gardeners' leader, who goes by the name Adam One, preaches a kind of new agey Catholic environmentalism, complete with days devoted to saints (like Saint Rachel Carson) and hymns.

We follow two women, the young, credulous Ren and the toughminded Toby, after they join the Gardeners. Slowly they learn the skills necessary to survive the social collapse – the "flood" - that Adam One predicts will come about as the result of rampant genetic engineering and pollution. Circumstances sweep the two women back out into the "exfernal world," and they begin lives as service workers – Ren works at a sex club called Scales and Tails, while Toby takes a job managing a spa called AnooYoo that does biotech beauty treatments on wealthy women.

While Ren is relatively happy dressing like a bird and doing trapeze stripping for her clients, Toy stays in contact with the Gardeners via a secret chat room. She knows vaguely that her former brethren have splintered into two groups: Those who prefer Adam One's peaceful ways, and those who work with Glenn on acts of bioterror. Still, Toby is unprepared for what happens next: Trying to purge the Earth of its greatest threat, Glenn creates a human-targeted supervirus that spreads like wildfire across the globe, literally melting people in their tracks.

Ren and Toby manage to survive, but now they have to deal with fighting off genetically-engineered animals gone wild. The pigs with human brain cells and the half-lion, half-lamb creatures developed by Bible literalists who want lions to lay down with lambs are particularly pernicious. The two women inch towards their inevitable reunion across a landscape heaped with the refuse of scientific innovation gone horribly wrong, though we are never certain that they or any humans will ultimately survive.

Unlike Oryx and Crake, whose main characters come across as irredeemable, Year of the Flood is an oddly hopeful book. The Gardeners' odd survivalist wisdom is exactly the kind of belief system you'd need to survive a global pandemic. Members of the group know how to forage in an urban wasteland, and what to eat in the forest. Equally important, they possess a reverence for the ecosystem that's completely missing from traditional Western religion.

It's clear that Atwood has thought a lot about the kinds of helpful myths she'd implant in human history if she could restart the world: That's why every few chapters we hear a sermon from Adam One, along with a hymn. It's an interesting exercise in speculative worldbuilding. If the Gardeners can survive – and seems as if they might – their beliefs could become the moral lifeblood of a civilization founded on renewable resources rather than environmental exploitation.

For this reason alone, Year of the Flood is an interesting companion piece to Oryx and Crake. In the latter, Atwood investigated what it would take to genetically engineer the perfect posthumans. Glenn and his colleagues secretly build these perfect beings by synthesizing hardy, disease-resistant humanoids who eat nothing but leaves, communicate through healing purrs and birdsong, and experience no sexual shame. Now, with Year of the Flood, she imagines what's required to culturally engineer a new human society out of novel mythologies and social structures created by the Gardeners.

We never know for sure whether the genetic or social experiment will save what's left of humanity, and that's a good thing. Atwood pulls us into the lives of her characters so that we're forced to contemplate the true and deadly precariousness of our future as a species. You may not agree with the way she's framed the problem – the science in this novel is fanciful at best – but it's hard to deny that she's asking the right questions.

Year of the Flood via Borders

Imagine what would happen if prices rose, say, to $300 a barrel. Or higher. Not only would it become too expensive to drive unless absolutely necessary, but food would become prohibitively expensive to transport, goods from China would be too expensive to ship, and plastics, which come from oil, would be unaffordable. The cold turkey after more than a century of cheap oil would be painful indeed. For developing countries it would be fatal – many could not afford energy at those prices.

The Guardian quotes the International Energy Agency as stating the world needs to find an extra 64 million barrels of oil per day by 2030 — or around six times Saudi Arabia's production capacity — to meet demand. But nobody knows where that oil is going to come from. [Guardian]

RFID tags, sometimes called "smart tags," hold a small amount of data and contain an antenna (that's the curly shape you see) that allows RFID reading devices to read at that data remotely. A reader can be a handheld device that people wave over the tag at the checkout counter, or a device hidden in a doorway that checks the tags on your clothing as you walk down the street.

According to a release about the ABI Research brief:

Previously limited to a small number of large-volume pilot tests, adoption of item-level RFID is beginning to permeate throughout the apparel sector and is increasingly evolving into full-scale implementations. According to Liard, "While installations at Marks and Spencer in the UK, American Apparel in the US, and Charles Vögele in Switzerland remain the largest contributors to market growth, scores of companies are now in various stages of implementation. RFID in fashion apparel is undoubtedly here and now."

Just remember, kids, all your American Apparel clothes contain antennae that broadcast information about you. And in 5 years, three times more "apparel items" will be likewise tagged. Neat, right? Let the zombie infestation begin!

via ABI Research

Niccol, was also responsible for S1m0ne and The Truman Show, is writing and directing The Cross, which features Orlando Bloom, Vincent Cassel, John Goodman and Olga Kurylenko as residents of a grim, future city from which they cannot escape:

Mylar (Bloom) and his younger brother Castro come to a town to cross the border in search of a better life. The two travelers, full of hope, all too quickly realize that their journey leads them to an inescapable world full of doom. The enigmatic border is strictly enforced under the command of a guard, Guideon, who prohibits anyone from ever leaving. Castro doesn't make it alive past two weeks, but Mylar defies all odds and becomes the first to successfully cross the border. And he also becomes the first to come back… all for the love of a woman, Vera. Mylar must now devise a plan not only to set himself free, but all of his fellow citizens as well. But perhaps crossing the border is not the answer. Perhaps the key lies in altering the border and whatever it may represent…

You can check out more concept images by artist Jean-Vincent Puzos at Quiet Earth.

The study, published today in PLoS One, is the result of work on climate modeling based on likely climate change in California's Central Valley. Researchers project that the region will lose more than half its winter chill by the year 2100. From the study:

Winter chill determines the ability of many deciduous trees from temperate climates to break their dormancy in the spring. Each species or cultivar has a specific chilling requirement, which if not met results in erratic growth patterns and economically unsuccessful fruit or nut production.

The authors used modeled temperature records for two past and 18 future climate scenarios and calculated the amount of safe winter chill that will be exceeded in 90 percent of all years for each scenario. Their findings indicate that imminent climatic change is likely to make most of California's Central Valley, which annually produces 1.2 million hectares of tree crops with chilling requirements and produces valued at about 9 billion dollars, unsuitable for many crops such as walnuts, cherries, prunes and peaches. Pistachios and almonds might also be affected.

What this means is that one of California's greatest sources of income will be strongly affected. Plus, many other regions will suffer since so many communities depend on California exports for fruits and nuts throughout the year.

Professor Minghua Zhang, whor worked on the study, said:

Depending on the pace of winter chill decline, the consequences for California's fruit and nut industries could be devastating.

Get ready for the post-farm California apocalypse. Without fruit exports, the main export from Central California could become some futuristic crystal meth. Of course if we're lucky, scientists will come up with GMO fruits and nuts that can bloom even with warmer winters.

via PLoS One

Image by Bill Sharp.

The smile-evaluating software takes a picture of Keihin employees every morning and assigns smile values to various parts of the face. It then adds those values and delivers a smile scan score. According to an article today in the Mainichi Daily News:

The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer.

For those with low scores, advice like "You still look too serious," or "Lift up your mouth corners," will be displayed on the screen.

Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.

This just sounds like a workplace shooting incident waiting to happen. If I had to pretend to have the perfect smile on every morning - and got criticized if I "looked too serious" - I would definitely go Joker after a while.

via Mainichi Daily News (thanks, Klebert!)

Said Piercy, the impulse that drives us to imagine a utopian future is the fact that "You have to have a way of imagining a society you want you or your children to be able to live in." On the other hand, dystopian fiction asks the question: "If this goes on, what is going to happen?"

In other words, one is more based on our hopes for our children's future. The other is based on our actual observations about the way the world is, and how it appears to be developing. [UNM Today]

Above you can see concept art from The Matrix Revolutions, when the Machines attack the free human city Zion.

Note: the proper link for the artist who did the "Walking Tree" image is at Urus28.

Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, researchers from Austin-based economic development consulting firm TIP Strategies created a map that uses simple but effective visualizations to help people understand the way economic disaster spreads geographically. If you visit their site, you can watch the map slowly slide through each quarter since 2004, with job gains and losses ballooning outward when various sectors grow or shrink.

It's worth quoting at length from their analysis:

The timeline begins in 2004 as the country starts its recovery from the 2001 recession, following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. At first, broad economic growth was apparent across most of the country. Two notable exceptions are the Bay Area - the hub of the tech boom that drove job growth during the prior decade - and several metropolitan areas within the Midwest. The map reveals that much of the industrial Midwest never fully recovered from the previous recession, as manufacturers continue to shed jobs while other parts of the country were adding them in large number.

Equally telling is the short-lived expansion of construction- and real estate-related job growth in Sun Belt states, such as California, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona, during the middle of the decade as the nation's appetite for new homes increases. During this period, the map also captures the dramatic job losses in New Orleans in 2005 as a result of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the city's slow recovery driven largely by construction-related employment.

By 2007, regional evidence of the coming economic downturn starts to appear. Employment growth in California and Florida starts to wane, with the first signs of actual losses beginning in the middle of the year in Los Angeles and Tampa. At the same time, layoffs accelerate in the nation's manufacturing heartland. By the first quarter of 2008, job losses in the Southeast and Midwest begin to spread, setting off a chain of losses in neighboring areas until the two regions unite in recession. The same pattern appears on the West Coast, with the epicenter in Los Angeles marching eastward to the Front Range of the Rockies.

Check out all the maps, and the full study, on the TIP website.

io9 pal Ed Grabianowski gushes about the book, and the dystopian scenario it supports:

It's a few hundred years in the future, humankind has warped and splintered, society has devolved into walled city-states glaring at each other through their bristling defenses, and cosmic aliens walk the Earth alongside demons. Yeah, it was that kind of apocalypse. What does this world desperately need? I'll tell you one thing, it probably doesn't need zombies or hostile robotic children, but it's getting them anyway . . . Each creature in the book gets a full-color image. Not some little pencil drawing, either - a big, evocative, awe-inspiring image like the Augmented Sentience Killer above . . . The creatures themselves are really quite weird (and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order). You've got the aforementioned AI kid-bots; freaky little mutants that are part living Cabbage Patch Kids, part post-apocalyptic cannibal hobbits; giant alien warbeasts; demon dogs; super-zombies and hideously mutated abominations that look like a casting call for a Tool video.

Want to get the full story on this welcome addition to your gaming universe? Check out Ed's full review at Robot Viking.

The US is negotiating with the pirates who took the freighter Maersk Alabama. Though crew retook the ship, their captain is still being held in a lifeboat by pirates while the ship itself is being escorted by crew from the US destroyer Bainbridge to safer waters. Over the past five years, hundreds of ships have been attacked by pirates off the coast of East Africa, as you can see using the International Chamber of Commerce's live piracy map (a snapshot from today's map is below). France has even gotten into intense firefights with some of them, sparking UN debate.

Sea-going piracy is back, and is likely to grow into the foreseeable future as government controls in countries like Somalia weaken. Late last year, the BBC reported that pirates are working with radical Islamic groups in East Africa, helping them smuggle weapons and training them in maritime battle techniques. You could say piracy is a symptom of unstable governments and a growing population of people who are stateless. In the absence of national identity, it makes sense to claim a pirate identity, which has elements of tribalism and a kind of rogue internationalism.

Interestingly, sea piracy as we know it got its start with another rogue state - England. During the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth enlisted the aid of "privateers," a term that referred to state-authorized pirates. In return for safe harbor on British shores, these privateers would give the Queen a cut of their booty (often stolen from British rival Spain), and pledge to plunder only ships belonging to England's enemies. Francis Drake was one such privateer/pirate, as was Walter Ralegh.

Other pirates, like the infamous Irish pirate queen Gráinne Mhaol (pictured here meeting with Elizabeth), fought against Elizabeth. Gráinne Mhaol used her booty to fund local Irish rebellions against the crown.

My point is that pirates have a long and rich history of springing up at times when nations are unstable. They are the anarchic military wing of upstart states. It's quite possible that the rise in piracy we're seeing in East African waters may (ironically) be the bleeding edge of a coming stability for the region. After all, pirates brought England the stability it required to become a world power. The allegiances of Somalian pirates and their counterparts from other regions may someday decide the fate of nations.

Top image via Sergent Dupont Sebastien / ECPAD / Reuters. Photo of fleeing Somalian pirates via Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky / U.S. Navy.

And here's an image from Vanity Fair of the rising oceans around New York. Tree Hugger put together a great gallery of what they call "terrifying" global warming images - some real, some photoshopped.

This final image is not touched up in any way. It's a glacier in Patagonia, Argentina - the top image is from 1928 and the second from 2004. Basically this juxtoposed image, put together by Greenpeace, shows that the glacier has melted almost entirely away in less than a century.

via TreeHugger

Recently re-released by Golden Gryphon Press as a trade paperback, Budayeen Nights is a vivid collection of nine tales set in the futuristic Middle Eastern city Effinger created for the Marîd Audran novels he penned from 1987 to 1991. Marîd is hands down one of my favorite science fiction anti-heroes, but more on that brain-blazed bastard later. Richard K. Morgan's writing often captures a similar noir sensibility, but his gritty underworlds can't quite match the Budayeen. Effinger really put the Punk in Cyberpunk. Virtual realities and mirrorshades are swell, but you only get a fully realized urban hellhole from a writer who's really lived one.

The Budayeen is a neighborhood in an unnamed city somewhere in the Levant of the 23rd Century CE. This is a future where the nations of the West and the Far East have torn themselves apart into myriad tiny squabbling fiefdoms leaving the Muslim world supreme. Thronging with thieves, prostitutes, lunatics and hustlers of every stripe, the Budayeen is a thinly disguised version of New Orleans' French Quarter, and some of it's seedier denizens who Effinger knew and loved. The residents of the Budayeen are the cast-off or disaffected from across the globe. Whether a member of the Transgender Continuum, an artist desperate for a muse, or just dedicated to an extralegal career path; they all find an uneasy oasis amidst the stringent demands of Islamic culture. There are no mosques in this anything-for a-buck neighborhood, but plenty of bars and graveyards that never lack for custom, "Business is business, and action is action", is the oft-repeated mantra here. In a swirl of drugs, crime, and decadence, people can live as they choose - but probably not as long as they'd like.

Along with his cultural twist to the film-noir setting, Effinger had a unique take on computer/brain interfaces that makes these stories stand out from (and age better than) the many offerings of the Cyberpunk style of the 1980's. Virtually every aspect of life in this dystopia is affected by the ubiquitous chip-in brain augmentations. Barbara Hambly describes the origin in her introduction to the story "Marîd Changes His Mind":

The technology itself, [George] said, had been designed for treatment of neurological damage. But like all technology, it was immediately seized upon and exploited by the entertainment and pornography industries so that its original intent was almost forgotten.

With an add-on or "daddy" plugged into the back of your skull, you temporarily can possess any knowledge. Need to speak perfect English or Bantu for that big meeting, repair a sewage treatment plant, or bone up on Transoxanian tax codes? No problem. There are even special daddies that turn off your body's need to eat or sleep. The more comphensive "moddys" go in the anterior implant plug at the top of your head. With one of these you can suddenly be a fearless super-soldier or plow through hours of filing and data entry without becoming bored. Total personality moddies transform you into your favorite fictional character. No surprise that the porno moddy industry is enormous. Recordings of superstar Honey Pílar have been voraciously enjoyed by over five billion fans. Moddy addiction begs the question: are these people even whole individuals anymore, or just frameworks for elaborate scripts to run on?

I was glad of the inclusion of Effinger's Hugo, Nebula, and Seiun winning "Schrödinger's Kitten," even though this opening story in Budayeen Nights stands apart from the rest of the collection in tone and setting. It portrays a Muslim woman's very personal relationship with quantum mechanics, faith, and history. If her fate is truly fixed by the will of Allah, what does that mean to He who is All-Wise and All-Knowing? Although still brutally violent, this odd and compact little story will open the mind to interesting thoughts.

The most of other stories deal more with Marîd Audran and the Tilt-a-Whirl filled with broken glass that is his world. Marîd starts out a small-time street punk with delusions of adequacy, a pill-popping coward and pansexual libertine. Vain and cocky, he thinks of himself as a rugged individualist and unwilling Defender of the Downtrodden. He's constantly thrust into situations of ever-increasing responsibility and danger by Friedlander Bey, who rules the Budayeen by that whole iron fist/velvet glove method. The two-hundred year old crime lord Bey is both an avuncular mentor and unforgiving master. He effortlessly justifies his vast empire of influence and finance with the teachings of the Prophet, may Allah's blessing be upon him and peace. Bey does not suffer Marîd's moral lapses lightly, and takes pains to enlighten him.

Against all his better instincts, Marîd must become - if not a hero, then less of a screw-up. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest reading Marîd's exploits in the three kick-ass novels When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss. Look for the recent trade paperbacks from Tor/Orbit with the covers by Howard Grossman and gorgeous illustrations by Craig Mullins.

Effinger's original dialouge really blows me away. The hard-boiled action crackles with language inspired by the noble Qur'an and the poetry of Omar Khayyam. The meticulous research of every detail Muslim culture weaves seamlessly with fully realized portraits from the mean streets. Tough-as-nails corrupt cops and transgender hookers conduct their business with all the formalized flourishes of Arabic ettiqute. Like Turkish coffee, it fills the atmosphere with a rich complexity and leaves you more than a little wired.

Two more Marîd Audran novels were planned and tantalizing fragments of both are in the Budayeen Nights collection. Of course, we can only wonder what might have been. George Alec Effinger died in his beloved New Orleans in 2002, impoverished after many years of painful health problems. In her forward and story introductions, Hambly, who was briefly married to Effinger, rather harshly describes some of the flaws and agonies that plagued a smart, decent and all too mortal man. He went to some very dark and strange places, and met a lots of interesting people there. These encounters fueled the creation of the Budayeen and the weird, dangerous and very human beings who still live and breath in these pages. Go ahead, they won't bite. Unless you pay for it.

Grey_Area is known among the robots as Christopher Hsiang. He means you no harm - he's just here for the books.

According to a release on the study:

"This is in part due to differences in exposure, the large variability among the cities analyzed, the differences in adaptive capacity and the vulnerability of populations due to their socio-demographic characteristics, as well as differences in the preventive measures in place," said [city of Rome epidemiologist] Paola Michelozzi. "Moreover, across European countries there is wide variation in healthcare and hospital admissions availability. Although all these differences are important, our results document an effect of high temperature on hospital admissions for respiratory causes in several cities, and this is the strength of the study."

"These findings are important for public health because the prevalence of chronic diseases, such as COPD, is expected to increase in developed countries as a result of population aging," wrote Dr. Michelozzi. "Furthermore, under climate change scenarios, the increase in extreme weather events and certain air pollutants, especially ozone, are likely to further aggravate chronic respiratory diseases. Public health interventions should be directed at preventing this additional burden of disease during the summer season. The observed heterogeneity of the health effects indicates a need to tailor programs for individual cities."

SOURCES:

American Thoracic Society

Eurekalert

New Scientist has a nice gallery up featuring some of the machines the F.B.I. is deploying to Washington, D.C. According to Subtopia's Bryan Finoki, "DC officials fessed to dolling out roughly $50m, while Maryland and Virginia both have pitched in another $12-16m each."

While the robot waits patiently above, another bomb squad vehicle carries this explosion containment device. Stick the bomb inside, and hopefully it will go off without doing as much damage. Check out more mobile defense labs in this gallery.

Tanaka was one of the key animators on Akira and was responsible for, among other things, the animation of Testuo’s rapidly mutating arm. His still illustrations draw from similar imagery, telling stories of young people set in a crumbling future, and filled with grotesque experiments and bizarre creatures. The images below come from Tanaka’s art book Cannabis Works.

[Digik Gallery via FFFFOUND!]

Of course, these join other disasters such as toxic spills, vehicle accidents and more.

Updated minute-by-minute in astonishing detail, the AlertMap gives you an interesting perspective on what counts as a "disaster," as well as how they spread across regions. Clicking on each disaster brings up the latest information about it.

Alert Map [via National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications] Thanks, MissMercyStreet!

The couple decided to open their farm to the public for gleaning after hearing people were stealing food from local churches. But they had no idea that the response would be so huge. They had to convert dozens of acres of their farm to parking for the 11,000 cars that people drove to get free potatoes, carrots and leeks. Chris Miller told the Washington Post, " 'Overwhelmed' is putting it mildly. People obviously need food." You know the food riots aren't far away when you hear stories like this.

[via Washington Post]

What first attracted me to the film was Anthony Stewart Head, also known as too-sexy-for-his-age Watcher/librarian Giles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Head lent spectacular and commanding vocals to that series' status-quo-busting musical episode, and he's quite fit to be the lead tenor here as the eponymous Repo Man who steals organs from the poor to give to the rich.

He's also the loving yet unsettling father to sweet, sick Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega). The drama between father and daughter is at the heart of the show, set against the backdrop of a frightening future where health care is so dire that massive conglomerate GeneCo is out to rip the bloody viscera from the chests of anyone who can't front their bills. Among the many screaming denizens of this dystopia, Vega and Head are the talented, charismatic duo that hold this bewildering movie opera together.

Repo! grew out of a ten-minute stage show in 1999, and it's picked up lots of plot along the way: Each character comes with oodles of sizzling backstory and a few racy graphic novel panels that serve as explanation. There's a lot to keep track of here, meaning that devoted fans will have excess material by the boatload to pore over when all is said and done. Appearances by Sarah Brightman and Paul Sorvino lend significant vocal cred to the ensemble, and Terrance Zdunich's creepy Graverobber is the perfect de facto narrator. These five (Vega, Head, Brightman, Sorvino, and Zdunich) are probably the only sympathetic characters here – the only ones to whom the film has time enough to lend a bit of complexity. As for Paris Hilton, if you close your eyes and think of England, she goes away soon enough.

The look of the film is pretty much what you'd expect. The cinematography is heavy with highlights and shadows – Repo!'s landscape uses light only to emphasize the dark, and its indulgent sweeps of a grimy, holographic future city will be a delight to anyone who thrilled at Blade Runner. Of course Victorian goth suffuses every costume. It's no surprise that people were ready with Repo! outfits this Halloween, before the movie even came out. Plus, it features a cool new futuristic drug – the painkilling Zydrate, which can be extracted easily from fresh corpses.

There are simplistic though mildly insightful one-liners – "Why is genetics such a bitch?" croons Vega as Shilo, the girl with the seemingly incurable blood disease. Though it might not achieve the same critical acclaim, it has the Rocky Horror geek perv vibe: Repo is an overwhelmingly odd, shockingly sexual, rocked-out celebration of all that is gory and scary and alive.

So if you've already been keeping an eye on the publicity and feeling a tingle in your throat, trust me, Repo! delivers. It may not be polished or genius, but it's fun – and Hollywood could use a bit of crazy, idea-filled fandom, if you ask me. But if the idea of watching naked women get slashed open to song in a world of corruption and despair – yeah, those parts were not so fun and idea-filled, as Fantasy Magazine pointed out. So if naked gore is a dealbreaker, stick to rewatching Chicago and The Matrix back-to-back this holiday season. For the rest, it's time to shoot some Zydrate and get ready to rock.