Pollen from a Future Harvest
by Derek Kunsken
2015, reprinted 2021
Pollen from a Future Harvest is a scifi novella set in a distant future where control of the few wormholes that allow instantaneous travel has elevated totally new nations to Great Power status. The 100 page tale unfolds among members of the Sub-Saharan Union (formerly Zimbabwe), who are a client state serving the Venusian Congregate (formerly Quebec), or rather, they were clients until recently, when the Union discovered their own new wormholes, which give them a opportunity to gain independence from the Congregate.
To do that though, first they're going to have to survive, which means laying low until they can figure out how to use their wormholes well enough to weather the inevitable Congregate attempt to recapture them and their newly found fortune. These wormholes are a pair - one sends objects back 11 years in the past, the other receives objects sent back from 11 years in the future.
One complication is that the trip is harrowing; no human can survive it, and most information storage devices end up so scoured that, so far, they come back unreadable. The other complication is that the Union scientists are afraid to do anything that cause a paradox. So, suppose I decide on June 1st that I want to do something - run a science experiment or write a computer program or something - and I want to send the finished product backward. So first of all, since I know I didn't get the result yet, my future self can only send the results back to June 2nd at the earliest. And second, whoever gets the results had better be sequestered from whoever's actually doing all the work. The payoff would be, with the correct organization and multiple teams building off each other's work, you could get like, sixty years of science done in a decade.
The final complication is that humans are not alone on the planet that hosts the wormholes. There are Vegetable Intelligences here, sentient plants who send pollen back in time and receive pollen from the future. And, oh yeah, the most immediate crisis, the pollen from the future just stopped flowing. So what's going to go wrong, 11 years from now? And what, if anything, can be done to mitigate it, without causing a paradox that might, as far as anyone knows, have even more disastrous consequences?
We follow Major Okonkwo, the auditor assigned to try to figure this out. Okonkwo initially suspects sleeper agents, still loyal to the Congregate, trying to sabotage the Union's bid for independence and signal their patrons to come reconquer them. She's also hurting because her senior husband, who was also the Union's best auditor, just died. The Union practices triple marriages, arranged to create families that are also functioning offices. Kunsken draws some compelling parallels between the triple marriages and the Vegetable Intelligences' relationships with their past and future selves, and the way the halting of the future pollen mirrors the loss of the senior spouse.
The resolution of the mystery and the handing of the time-travel elements were both fine, but I felt most interested in how much detail Kunsken could share about this world in such a short book. The idea that discovering a new basis of power and wealth catapults some groups far ahead of others feels somewhat true to our real history, and allows him to depict a future that is as alien to our present as our world today would be to someone from, say, 1490. We learn a lot in a concise way. When combined with the frozen planet and strange alien intelligences, it reminds me just a little of Charlie Jane Anders's The City in the Middle of the Night.
I've never read any of Kunsken's writing before, but it appears this novella takes place in between the timelines of his two major book series, one of which is about the early days of the Venusian Congregate, and the other about the Sub-Saharan Union after it's fully established as an independent power.
To do that though, first they're going to have to survive, which means laying low until they can figure out how to use their wormholes well enough to weather the inevitable Congregate attempt to recapture them and their newly found fortune. These wormholes are a pair - one sends objects back 11 years in the past, the other receives objects sent back from 11 years in the future.
One complication is that the trip is harrowing; no human can survive it, and most information storage devices end up so scoured that, so far, they come back unreadable. The other complication is that the Union scientists are afraid to do anything that cause a paradox. So, suppose I decide on June 1st that I want to do something - run a science experiment or write a computer program or something - and I want to send the finished product backward. So first of all, since I know I didn't get the result yet, my future self can only send the results back to June 2nd at the earliest. And second, whoever gets the results had better be sequestered from whoever's actually doing all the work. The payoff would be, with the correct organization and multiple teams building off each other's work, you could get like, sixty years of science done in a decade.
The final complication is that humans are not alone on the planet that hosts the wormholes. There are Vegetable Intelligences here, sentient plants who send pollen back in time and receive pollen from the future. And, oh yeah, the most immediate crisis, the pollen from the future just stopped flowing. So what's going to go wrong, 11 years from now? And what, if anything, can be done to mitigate it, without causing a paradox that might, as far as anyone knows, have even more disastrous consequences?
We follow Major Okonkwo, the auditor assigned to try to figure this out. Okonkwo initially suspects sleeper agents, still loyal to the Congregate, trying to sabotage the Union's bid for independence and signal their patrons to come reconquer them. She's also hurting because her senior husband, who was also the Union's best auditor, just died. The Union practices triple marriages, arranged to create families that are also functioning offices. Kunsken draws some compelling parallels between the triple marriages and the Vegetable Intelligences' relationships with their past and future selves, and the way the halting of the future pollen mirrors the loss of the senior spouse.
The resolution of the mystery and the handing of the time-travel elements were both fine, but I felt most interested in how much detail Kunsken could share about this world in such a short book. The idea that discovering a new basis of power and wealth catapults some groups far ahead of others feels somewhat true to our real history, and allows him to depict a future that is as alien to our present as our world today would be to someone from, say, 1490. We learn a lot in a concise way. When combined with the frozen planet and strange alien intelligences, it reminds me just a little of Charlie Jane Anders's The City in the Middle of the Night.
I've never read any of Kunsken's writing before, but it appears this novella takes place in between the timelines of his two major book series, one of which is about the early days of the Venusian Congregate, and the other about the Sub-Saharan Union after it's fully established as an independent power.
No comments:
Post a Comment