Circular Motion by Alex Foster

I had several reviews in the May issue of Locus, and the first of them is now online. Alex Foster’s debut novel Circular Motion joins the increasingly crowded ranks of climate fiction, but with a twist that is both original and bracing.

The novel’s near-future setting has birthed a mi­raculous technology: pods that launch passengers into low Earth orbit, where they can embark onto vessels traveling from east to west, returning to the ground at almost any location. Travel becomes virtually instantaneous. You can live in Alaska but meet a friend in New York for lunch; work in London and go out clubbing on a Friday night in Berlin or Bangkok.

Foster gives us a few chapters to revel in the possibilities of this technology – and perhaps to imagine how our own lives might be transformed by it – before dropping the other shoe. As the novel’s chapter titles inform us, the Earth’s rotation is speeding up, shaving first minutes, then hours, off each day.

…

As a metaphor for climate change, this on the nose but also effective. If our society possessed a technology as revolutionary, as instantly habit-forming, as the transport pods, I think it’s hard to argue that we would not give into denial and short-term amelioration rather than give it up, even in the face of eighteen-, nine-, and seven-hour days. As the novel eventually reveals, there are entire industries designed to encourage such behavior, and even make it seem virtuous.

There’s been a lot of pushback in recent years at the talking points that urge people to take “personal responsibility” for climate change. That’s obviously justified—we now know that heavily polluting industries invented concepts like the personal carbon footprint to make it seem as if the solution to climate change was atomistic and individual, and to discourage legal and regulatory approaches. But it increasingly feels to me as if the rhetorical pendulum has swung too far. The meme that only a handful of companies are responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions is true, but it elides the fact that almost all of us (and certainly almost all of us in the industrialized world) use those companies’ products, whether that’s fuel for our cars, beef on our tables multiple times a week, or food flown around the world in our supermarkets. Circular Motion is a smart, disquieting examination of how we convince ourselves to ignore that culpability, and of how immense works of social engineering are dedicated to encouraging that behavior.