I’ve published my first short story on Medium, a speculative fiction short story called Water Under the Bridge, set in the Ottawa Valley in the 2050’s. It’s a feel-good story about ecological and general systems collapse. This piece was originally completed in February 2016.
The year 2015 had been marked by the collapse of the oil industry in Alberta, a situation that had been coming on for a while. Alberta oil had always been expensive to pull out of the tar sands. It was well known that if the price of oil dropped to under around eighty dollars per barrel, it wouldn’t be profitable to extract. From over $100, the price then cratered to around $40, and wouldn’t recover again for years, belying local ‘boom and bust’ wisdom in lieu of global volatility.
Over the previous few years, the first real impact storms of climate change had become unavoidably obvious in the mainstream news cycle, including across Canada. I wrote this a few months after returning home to Ontario in the wake of that collapse, in the wake of the release of The Water Knife by Paulo Bacigalupi in the previous year; I loved the deep world-building done in that particular book, in addition to Mira Grant’s writing; those influences are visible in this piece.
I’d also been a volunteer at the Beakerhead festival the previous summer, a city-wide festival advocating STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) in the way that the Luminato festival does in Toronto. (There is nothing quite like witnessing a taxi suddenly finding itself in a game of chicken with a car-sized mechanical spider, following an evening of watching astronaut Chris Hatfield play guitar with a backup band made of robots.) The juxtaposition of the optimism of innovation and the bleakness of climatic disruption was still holding at the time, only really beginning to grow more dissonant outside of environmentally-minded circles. That tension would continue to hold for another year or so, until 2019, when the New York Times released its article detailing just how much worse the situation really was.
This piece is meant to capture the melancholy of watching the present world erode (more apt in 2022), how society would adapt, and what it might be like for a young person living on that sleepy riverbank, in that world.
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