Liquid water is fundamental to life as we know it. In the industrialised world, we often take this resource for granted, giving little thought to the complex cycle of evaporation, precipitation and transport that keeps water in circulation, let alone the effort required to purify and deliver it to urban environments. In the last blog entry, I looked at stories of flooded Earths, where water was all too abundant. In this second of two parts, I consider the reverse: science fictions which explore the impact of drought on humans and human society [1].

Nuclear Droughts

In parallel with the drowned world stories I discussed last time, the mid-twentieth century saw a burst of narratives in which water shortage drove societal breakdown and catastrophe - and the reasons are the same. The destruction of World War II undermined the sense of security in city life. The subsequent nuclear threat presented an eschatological (i.e. end-of-everything) risk to humanity. The Great Depression and the North American Dust Bowl had already shown how easily an environment collapse. Together these fueled a deep uncertainty regarding the future and a questioning of the foundations on which modern western civilisation is built.

J G Ballard (author of The Drowned World, which we discussed last time) published a novel called simply The Drought (aka The Burning World) in 1965. This novel was one of a series of works by the same author addressing how catastrophe could serve to highlight what made us human and the limitations of our society. In The Drought, years of nuclear testing and pollution has led to a reaction which encases the oceans in a thick protective skin. As a result, evaporation is massively reduced and the planet’s water cycle breaks down. The result for mankind is a global drought which threatens human existence. As in many of Ballard’s books, the characters here are introspective and the narrative as much about the human mind as the struggle for survival.

By contrast, The Tide Went Out by Charles Eric Maine (novel, 1958) is a more visceral novel, focussing on what one man is prepared to do to ensure his own survival. In Maine’s narrative, a nuclear blast cracks the ocean floor. The world’s seas begin to drain away into the mantle and deep crust. At first this is merely an inconvenience - with many ports becoming unnavigable. However it rapidly becomes clear that global drought is inevitable. As a journalist, the protagonist Wade is drawn into the propaganda effort designed to act as a palliative for the doomed but ignorant population, while being promised a place in the limited facilities designed to ensure survival of the elite. At first the situation develops slowly:

Strange, Wade thought, how normal the world seemed on the surface. The mechanics of life went on as before. Here, in the restaurant, for instance, businessmen and office workers ate their lunch and read the National Express over their coffee. Others talked among themselves and joked occasionally. There was no observable symptoms of tension or uneasiness, despite the ever-present threat of earthquakes and the lurid rumours that were undoubtedly circulating all over the country.

However as society begins to crumble, and London begins to burn, he is forced to barbarous actions he struggles to justify even to himself.

I've done things I never thought possible, he thought, in a kind of spiritual desperation. I've killed men - but then, they would have killed me. I've come to accept violence and brutality, and I've desensitised myself to things that would have shocked me into insanity a few months ago. [...] Let's add up the score, brother. The world survives so long as you survive. At the moment of death the world comes to an end for you, and it has no further reality in the darkness of that other strange dimension.

This conflict between societal survival and individual survival plays out in other narratives. Another journalist, this time working outside of the government propaganda machine, is the protagonist of the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961, dir. Guest). Here simultaneous nuclear blasts cause the Earth’s orbit to begin decaying, increasing solar irradiation. What begins as an unusually pleasant summer gradually evolves into months of water rationing, panic, civil breakdown and finally a last gasp attempt to correct the disaster, all seen from the viewpoint of the newspaper man and the young woman he loves. The film memorably ends on the cusp of this effort, with its success or failure left in the balance.

Some years later, the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War continued to keep this theme in the public consciousness. The Mad Max film series began with the eponymous film, Mad Max in 1979 (dir. Miller), in which a policeman turns vigilante to avenge his family, against a background of social unrest. The reasons for societal collapse have always been kept a little obscure - and have evolved over time as the film series developed [2] - but combine warfare with environmental damage (either as a result of nuclear war or climate change). Set in the already-arid Outback of Australia, water becomes a vital commodity for the surviving communities - one worth killing for [3].

A Managed Resource

Alongside stories that focus on the impact on society of catastrophic drought, an interesting strand of science fiction has looked instead at the enormous problems inherent in water management and avoiding such shortages.

The Day New York Went Dry by Charles Einstein (novel, 1964) was written as a cautionary tale regarding an all-too-plausible scenario. Set in the (then) very-near future of 1967, it imagined what would happen if the vast city of New York was faced by a number of consecutive years of low rainfall (a continuation, in fact, of the actual drought that struck the region in the early 1960s). As reservoirs run progressively lower and lower, a local congressman, together with a news-wire manager, struggle to convince an indifferent population that a problem is looming. The situation deteriorates to the point where first a hosepipe ban and then an advertising campaign attempt to convince New Yorkers to use less water: 

"Use the name. Always use the name. Arthur the Otter. Once the people accept the name, they'll accept him, no matter what he looks like. How many people ever saw a stupid otter to begin with?"
"He's always turning things off. Faucets. Valves."
"We'll have him an employee of the city water system."
"A guy and a girl will be eating in a restaurant. The waiter comes in. He pours water for them. Then another waiter comes, only this time it's Arthur the Otter, dressed as a waiter. He takes the water away, pours it back in a picture."
"Then we see the pitcher being poured back into the water supply."

Perhaps inevitably, this effort proves insufficient. The situation becomes serious. Desalination of ocean water is considered but deemed infeasible on the scales required. Rolling cut-offs in supply are introduced, New York is declared a disaster zone, a vast effort to ship water tankers into the city by sea and rail is launched, and ultimately the decision is made to evacuate all school age children in the hope that the rest of the reduced population can survive. The end of the novel (which includes characters quoting freely from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner) comes as something of a deus ex machina, which is a shame given the slow build up and genuine tension that Einstein manages to inject into what is essentially a narrative of water supply control and management [4]. The drama in the situation here arises largely from its plausibility - each event and decision (including the decision to do nothing) appears reasonable but their cumulative effect is disastrous.

A more successful, or at least less disastrous, effort at water management is described by author Rick Raphael in a pair of novelettes from the early 1960s - the Thirst Quenchers and Guttersnipe.

The first of these, The Thirst Quenchers (1963) describes an overpopulated future world in which every drop of water must be accounted for and channeled for use. Snowfalls in the mountains and rainfall in the summer are recorded in minute detail. Water is channelled underground to prevent evaporation, and the flow of rivers is dammed and redirected for use before any fresh water is allowed to return to the sea. The supply to agriculture and industry is tightly controlled and regulated through a national grid of regions (the focus here is North America but similar systems elsewhere are implied). Unfortunately a massive earthquake in the American northwest cracks important elements of the system and the two young hydrologist protagonists must come up with an innovative solution to prevent the lost water running down to the sea unused.

The second, Guttersnipe (1964) takes this premise still further. By this point, the water control authority is the only true authority worldwide. As we're told:

"Everybody pays for water and the support of the Authority. And everyone's life is now both conditioned and controlled by the dictates of Water Authority. The man on the street knows, deep down inside himself that we are his only hope of survival. That doesn't mean he's grateful. On the contrary, he's damned resentful of the hard, cold fact that without us, he's incapable of controlling his own greed and filth."

The protagonist is a sanitation engineer, a reviled group who live underground beneath major cities, processing, cleansing and redirecting the water supply that the people above rely on to survive. Again, in this story, it is up to a young engineer to come up with a solution when the water leaving his sector is found to enter another contaminated with radiation and the water supply must be cut off suddenly.

Both stories focussed on under-appreciated young, male civil public servants with detailed technical knowledge (as indeed does a third story The Mailman Cometh, included in the same collection, also called The Thirst Quenchers in 1965). And both assume the routine use of small scale nuclear power on a day to day basis. However unlike in previous examples, the drought here is caused strictly by human overpopulation - which leads to a slight cognitive dissonance: management of precipitation and water processing on a huge scale is considered a triumph of technology, while population growth control measures do not seem to have seriously occurred to this society.

However water manipulation on the scale considered here assumes that humans can fully understand - and in large part replace - the hydrological cycle that naturally moves water around our planet. A cautionary tale regarding such assumption can be found in the children’s television drama series Timeslip. In the serial "Year of the Burn Up" (ATV, 1970), a pair of time-travelling children find themselves in a future in which England is rapidly heating up, water supplies are dwindling and the country is becoming uninhabitable. We learn that this is a result of a global water control effort, in which water is pumped between oceans and global sections at the behest of a world-wide computer model. Unfortunately, the computer model is corrupted by a disgruntled architect of the system who has been sidelined. As a result, the climate of the British Isles dissolves into arid chaos and, when the time travelling children leave, it appears unlikely that anyone will survive.

Climate change

Moving forward in time, as the fears of catastrophic overpopulation and nuclear annihilation began to fade in the western world, the attention of science fictional drought narratives turned towards a new issue: climate change.

While Timeslip enabled travellers to see alternate futures in the early 1970s, the 1990s television series Sliders followed a group of people unwillingly experiencing alternative presents. Having already slid into one parallel world flooded as a result of climate change, the group encountered another alternate in the episode “Desert Storm”. Here the world has become desertified, and water precious. They become caught in a local wrangle over possession of a young woman with mental abilities that allow her to locate water telepathically. As in Mad Max, this is a narrative in which small isolated communities are struggling to survive the consequence of a societal collapse driven, at least in part, by water shortage.

Fortunately for the Sliders they can travel onwards to different alternate realities. More recent climate fiction makes it clearer that we have only one world in which to exist.

Dry, by Jarrod and Neal Shusterman (novel, 2018), echoes the concerns raised in The Day New York Went Dry half a century before. Just as New York state had experienced low rainfall in the 1960s, so California suffered from significant water shortages in the 2010s. In Dry, the situation has escalated through water usage restrictions and a development of a dust bowl in Orange County, until the Colorado river - California’s main source - is dammed by states upstream and domestic supply is cut-off entirely and without warning. With the natural water channels in the state also dry, twelve million people endure a week entirely without water beyond what little bottled supply can be found. Rescue efforts come too late and too ineffectively:

“Nothing but emergency broadcasts, telling people where to go, where not to go, and to remain calm. A one-size-fits-all relief effort that doesn’t actually fit anyone.” (pg 270, 2018 paperback edition)

The adolescent female protagonist struggles to ensure her own survival, and her younger brother’s, as law and order begins to break down in her suburban neighbourhood and the outlook for survival become increasingly bleak. Although the book is aimed at a young adult audience, and has adolescent protagonists, it has been noted for its plausible take on such a scenario, and effectively conveys the sense of aridness and desperation.

The catastrophe in Dry, or at least the narrative view of it, was limited to affluent California (and all the more shocking for that). However in The Water Knife (novel, 2015), Paolo Bacigalupi imagined a more wide-spread future of water shortage, sweeping across the south-western states of the United States. In this narrative a climate-change driven drought has led to open conflict between states over water supplies. The protagonist makes a living as a Water Knife - a deliberate saboteur of water provisions deployed as part of a conflict between local and state authorities. As in earlier stories, the narrative focuses on the survival of individuals and small groups in the changed environment, but this time with added political manipulations and ruthlessness applied to the use of what little water there is.

Thirst Quenchers and Water Knifes

As we saw with drowned world narratives then, water scarcity has been a constant theme through half a century or more of science fiction. And as in the previous case, the causes attributed to this scenario have evolved from nuclear war and natural disaster through to anthropogenic climate change and human mismanagement of the planet.

The tone of these narratives in the 1960 and 70s, while occasionally catastrophic, was broadly optimistic. In The Thirst Quenchers and Guttersnipe, the mastery of man over nature is almost complete - even an earthquake is a mere trial to be overcome. The characters of The Day New York Went Dry keep their city alive, against the odds… at least for a while. The Drought in Ballard’s narrative may wipe out a good fraction of humanity but presents an opportunity for self-reflection and growth. Even in Timeslip, where the narrative strongly favours return-to-nature dreamer Beth over scientistic Controller 2597, the basic scheme to manipulate the world’s climate is seen as plausible and achievable. Its downfall is the human factor - the jealousy and spite of an individual human.

By contrast, later narratives are much more negative and critical of human actions. The inaction that pushed New York to the brink in the 1960s pushes middle-class California beyond it in 2018’s Dry. Humanity is shown at its worst in films like Mad Max, and in the brutal conflicts of The Water Knife, as morality is abandoned in favour of survival. And throughout, the blame is firmly placed on human actions, and even on human nature itself.

The more extreme narratives of global desiccation and a diminishing total amount of water worldwide (as seen in, for example, The Drought or The Tide Went Out) are probably unlikely. Any future climate that results from global warming (the most likely outcome of today’s trends) is likely to feature extreme weather events including both drought and storms or flooding in temperate regions. Increased temperature will increase evaporation and so power stronger storm systems. Some parts of the world may well become desertified and uninhabitable; others are likely to be submerged. Given the geographical distribution of the world’s major cities, a major sea-level rise would indeed cause problems for all except landlocked and self-sufficient countries (which are very rare indeed), but a long-duration drought affecting all major nations is a little harder to envisage. One possibility that might give rise to this is the onset of increased glaciation (as has been mentioned in the context of the Mad Max franchise). This would lock up water as ice and so cause a reduction in rainfall at low latitudes long before the local temperature was affected. However given current climate trends a loss of permanent ice cover (as is already underway) is far more likely than a gain.

The immediacy of water supply problems - the very short time a human can exist without drinking - gives these an added urgency which flooding narratives often lack. The dependence of industrialised society on not just drinking water but also agricultural and commercial supplies (emphasised in The Thirst Quenchers and Guttersnipe) makes the control of water sources a political as well as practical problem (as The Water Knife explores). In many parts of the world, the rights over water sources rising in lands with traditional indigenous people add a further ethical and political complication. What’s more, the increasing number of major cities facing (much less catastrophic but still serious) water supply problems - notably Bangalore, Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Cape Town, amongst many others in prospect (including London and major cities in the USA) - have brought this issue to wider attention. Here cautionary tales such as Dry or The Day New York went Dry are unlikely to seriously influence the policy makers and hydrologists who are well aware of the problems. However similar narratives may help to educate the public over the risks and so ease some of the political hurdles over funding the long term projects required to avoid shortages.

Stories of survival against the odds have always captured the popular imagination. They allow characters to be pushed to their limits, and ask what many will do to ensure their own survival or that of those they love. Narratives in which water becomes the ultimate luxury also allow their creators to critique the value of capitalist goals and luxuries, and refocus the audience on essentials. Stories of drought - whether regional or limited to a single settlement - are only likely to increase in frequency over the coming years in the news as well as in fiction. It will be interesting to see where the thought experiments that form the heart of science fiction meet the realities of our changing climate.

The title of this blog entry and the previous one are drawn from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.