The sum of our efforts was catastrophe.
Why I wrote a book about discipline taken too far.
There's a particular kind of failure I spent a career reconstructing: the compound kind. Not one thing breaking, but each safeguard failing into the next, so that by the end the cause and the cure are the same object. You run the flow backward and find that every step was reasonable, and the sum was catastrophe.
I finally wrote the fiction version. It's called “We Are Running Out of Time to Do Something About…”, and it's a satire — Vonnegut's the patron saint here — about a civilization that solves each disaster with the thing that causes the next one. A heat shield that overshoots into worse heat. Blowing up the shield to fix that, which poisons the sky. And so on, around the wheel, one lifetime, back to the start.
The narrator is a University that predicts every catastrophe correctly and never once notices that its own cures are the engine. Here's how it opens:
The world is getting hotter every year.
This was the finding of the University of Science at its Thirteenth Annual Global Conference for Better Living. The finding was unanimous. It is worth noting that the finding had been unanimous for thirteen years, and that the world had, in fact, gotten hotter every one of them, which the University offered as proof of its accuracy rather than proof of anything else.
The whole book is written in that flat, official, cheerfully-doomed voice — the register of a press release announcing the end of the world as a public-works success.
Underneath the satire it's about something I care about a great deal: the difference between credential and capability. The institution that knows everything presides over the collapse. The people who can actually grow food and fix machines — the ones with no letters after their names — are the only ones still standing at the bottom of the wheel.
It's a novella, 91 pages, meant to be read in a sitting.
How to read it:
Free on Kindle Unlimited (if you're a subscriber, it's included).
$4.99 to own the Kindle edition.
$9.99 in paperback.
Search We Are Running Out of Time to Do Something About by H.C. Roberts, or use the link below. If you read it, I'd love to know which turn of the wheel got you.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H8456D5S?dplnkId=bd8a9750-35c8-4ab2-9c56-e45b8d551103