SOME WRITERS – AND MOM – SCARE THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF ME

By El Ochiis

I didn’t grow up with a television, a fact that my High School English teacher stated made me a more creative writer.  She said I had only my imagination – funny, this was the excuse my mother used to justify the reason we were the only people without a square gadget with images flickering through windows of homes along our street in some non-descript small town.

She would often tell the me the story about a man - Tesla - who dreamed of creating a source of inexhaustible, clean energy that was free for everyone. He, like mom, strongly opposed centralized coal-fired power stations that spewed carbon dioxide into the air that humans breathed. Just how mom was going to harness that lightning bolt to convert it to a form that would power her electric stove which she used to bake bread with flour milled using an ancient, home grain milling machine was never fully explained by the dear woman.

 

Mom’s greatest eco belief was that indoor plumbing was killing the fish because of the sewage being drained into rivers and streams.  When you are a kid, idealistic, off-the-grid, hippie-like parents like my mom were just an embarrassment, and, you as the offspring of such parentage was a recipe for getting chased home by the kids whose parents religiously worshipped showers, sinks, toilet bowls, and, multiple televisions.

 

One night, after my crazy mother had demanded that we save the planet by turning off the electric lights and reading a good book, by candlelight. I picked a book, from one of our five shelves, a novel by Harry Max Harrison, born Henry Maxwell Dempsey, entitled: “Make Room, Make Room “– I guess the pen name had a certain writer’s ring to it over his given one. 

 

Harrison was a citizen of both the UK and Ireland who distrusted generals, prime ministers and tax official with sardonic and cruel wit – he made plain his acute intelligence and astonishing range of moral, ethical and literary sensibilities - ah, the kind of writer whose prose would mirror my mom’s eccentric, erudite lunacy, I thought. 

 

I propped up on two pillows and lost myself in a story that explored the consequences of both unchecked population growth on society and the hoarding of resources by a wealthy minority - set in 1999 – thirty-three years after the time of writing - where the trends in the proportion of world resources used by the United States and other countries compared to population growth, depicting a world in which the global population was seven billion people, plagued with overcrowding, resource shortages and a crumbling infrastructure.  Max’s plot jumped from character to character, recounting the lives of people in various walks of life in New York City whose population had reached 35 million.

 

Then, in 1973, a movie, called “Soylent Green”, was made, based on Harrison’s novel. Perhaps influenced by the 1972 heat wave in the Northeast and the oil crisis of the early 1970’s, Soylent Green imagines a sweltering future where the temperature never dips below 90, Margarine spoils in the fridge and sickly fog, similar to London’s historical “pea-soupers,” hangs in the air, forcing the city’s last remaining trees to be shielded under a tent. The film changed much of the plot and theme and introduced cannibalism as a solution to feeding people.

 

Were these calamities the fault of humankind or a natural disaster?  The film isn’t clear, but, in the source novel, it’s implied to be the former.  After sitting through the movie in college; I rang mom to tell her about it, for which she chimed “Some of those writers are prophesiers.”  She sent me a window solarium so I could grow my own food.

 

I was petrified after reading Max Harrison’s novel, that is, until I picked up Mick Jackson’s “Threads”, written in 1984 – an unflinching account of nuclear holocaust – one that guessed how ugly we might become if we continue to allow ourselves to be run by greed. 

 

The elite of “Soylent Green” had a novel way to unwind:  video games – in luxury apartment of a Soylent board member, a sleek cabinet contains Computer Space, which, in real-life 1971 had become the very first coin-operated arcade game.  Ah, but we've avoided pushing the big red launch button; We're too happy to keep pushing the buttons on our digital devices instead.

 

Mom’s not here to witness the iPhone or the laptop, but she left me a legacy of books by writers who had predicted the future of most of it – and, quite frankly, I am too afraid to stop reading them – though, somewhat relieved mom didn’t take to that 1936 Underwood Model 6 Typewriter she inherited from her grandmother and banged out her own stories – she wasn’t going to call them sci-fi either…