Edged in Blue

Civilization doesn’t collapse;  it just fades away.  But just as the Church stepped in to provide some much-needed authority after the Western Roman Empire stopped pretending to be an empire, so a movement of “green freaks” steps in to take over.

That’s the premise of Metatropolis, a collection of five short stories by five science fiction authors.  The stories occur almost in chronological order.  Almost.  The first story actually takes place a little later in a city called Cascadiopolis.

Cascadiopolis, the creation of Jay Lake,  is barely recognizable as a city.  It appears to be little more than people camping in the woods.  Yet a billionaire living in what’s left of nearby Portland wants very much to infiltrate it to get his hands on its technology.  And yet Cascadiopolis is giving it away.

But the idea for Cascadiopolis actually comes from the resurrection of a city no one would expect to survive:  Detroit.  Tobias Bucknell tells how the suburbs of major cities have become “The Wilds,” law enforcement is outsourced to a company called Edgewater, and the American government is so irrelevant that it can’t even maintain the interstates.  But the greens of Detroit are gathering steam.  They seal off a section of a city, and, under cover of a staged riot, take over an abandoned skyscraper to convert it to a vertical farm.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Motor City is going zero-footprint.

Elizabeth Bear continues the story of Detroit with a bike messenger reruited to help the movement spread.

So how well does this movement work?  Well enough for John Scalzi to set a story in New St. Louis about a slacker who gets a job tending the city’s genetically altered pigs.  This being Scalzi, who famously used fart humor in Agent to the Stars and The Android’s Dream, he amps the scatalogical humor up a notch.  Don’t worry.  It’s all to thwart an act of terrorism.

Karl Schroeder caps off the collection with the story of an arms inspector living in a world where these green, money-free cities have become a nation unto themselves.  But Schroeder’s radiation-hunting Ukrainian gets a glimpse of what’s next when he’s hired to go into a virtual world (think Second Life on steroids) to find a missing shipment of plutonium.

Metatropolis comes across as a loose future history that is both frightening and hopeful at the same time.  Beginning close enough to our own time, it suggests that our current civilization will simply fade rather than disappear in an apocalyptic war.  It also suggests the seeds for its replacement have already been sown.