Waterline

Chris Else

Quentin Wilson Publishing

Otago Daily Times, December 7th 2019

As a life-long Sci Fi fan, I was delighted to be sent not one but two works of speculative fiction from New Zealand authors: Lawrence Patchett’s The Burning River, and Chris Else’s Waterline. Whether through coincidence or zeitgeist, both novels explore the social and physical consequences of technological and climatic change-induced disruption.

Where Patchett’s novel is set in the distant future in which the factors precipitating the loss of ‘civilisation’ are unknown, Else’s provides an all-to-believable account of the first stages of decline in a world that differs from today in degree rather than kind.

With climate change obliterating coastal communities and more and more functions of government outsourced to faceless AI, people are retreating into gated communities and virtual worlds. As the daughter of a wealthy family and trophy wife, Stella is sheltered from life’s grim realities until the family’s multi-million-dollar Wellesley mansion is swept into the sea, and they are forced to relocate to the much less salubrious Southern town of Byte.

When she runs into trouble during the move, Stella accepts the help of an obliging stranger called Geordie, unaware that, as the leader of an off-the-grid community called Garrison, he is classified as a major security risk by local law-enforcement algorithms. This interaction triggers a Kafka-eske chain of events leading to her husband Brian’s arrest and extradition. Guilty by association, Stella and their children are evicted from Byte and join Geordie in Garrison, where they become drawn into a feud between the settlement and an inner-city gang of techno-evangelists. This conflict splits the community between Geordie, who wants a negotiated peace, and his brother Krey, who wishes to take an eye for an eye and has no compunction about sacrificing ‘outsiders’ for the cause.

The story passes back and forth between characters and subplots, from Brian and Stella’s attempts to reunite the family to the battle for control of Garrison, and the blossoming romance between Stella’s son Luke and Geordie’s daughter Tara. We also get glimpses of life in Byte and Garrison through the eyes of Stella’s former neighbour, Billie, and Geordie’s 2IC, Red. These multiple perspectives paint a partial but comprehensive picture of a setting “In a place and time not far from here and now.”  This approach alsoprovides multiple entry points for readers, some of whom will empathise more with one narrator than another. For me, this was Stella, who discovers unexpected leadership qualities as she faces the twin challenges of protecting her family and finding a place within a community whose customs and social hierarchies are unfamiliar and long-established.

Waterline’s depiction of ecological and social disintegration could be dismissed as alarmism, but the issues it raises concerns are far from academic (see, for example, the Guardian’s series on automating poverty or climate change). However, despite depicting a country whose inhabitants are slowly but surely sleepwalking towards oblivion, the novel retrains the seeds of hope. Else makes clear distinctions between those who surrender in the face of an automated bureaucracy or the temptations of the virtual world and those who use technology as a tool rather than a master. Allowing communal cooperation and environmental sustainability to take precedence over expedience and passive despair could, he suggests, offer an alternative way forward.