“There is no depression more debilitating than knowing that you cannot go back home, even though you’re already there.”
Lynna Dresden
“This is a significant book for our times … creative, inventive, and possibly prescient.”
DAVID CAMERON, Amazon Review
“Profound and brilliant. Scary and comforting at the same time. Life will go on. Water will go on.”
NINA DARRELL Amazon Review
“What if water doesn’t like being owned or ransomed? What if it doesn’t like being channelled into a harsh pipe system or into a smart cloud to go where it normally doesn’t want to go? What if those hurricanes and tornadoes and floods are water’s way of saying that it’s had enough?”
Hilde Dresden
“Thoroughly researched and cleverly executed, A Diary in the Age of Water is a must-read, especially for those who are longing for nature, and touch, while fearing both.”
CARA MOYNES, Amazon Review
“This novel made my heart clench…An extremely detailed and downright terrifying look into the future of our planet. A Diary in the Age of Water will appeal to lovers of eco-fiction and hard speculative fiction.”
GOODREADS REVIEW
“We’ve done terrible things to water.”
Hilde Dresden
“The story like water itself fills you, moves you, hypnotizes you, and eventually, totally engulfs you.”
GOODREADS REVIEW
I recently returned to southern Ontario from a novel-research trip to the Arctic, where I hope next time to see the incredible northern lights (this recent visit was during their midnight sun period; so, no luck with northern lights). But, in the future I may not have to travel north to see them…
My eco-novel A Diary in the Age of Water begins sometime in the future with Kyo, a blue multi-armed being, living in the dying boreal forest of post-apocalypse Canada; Kyo finds a diary by Lynna Dresden, a limnologist from the calamitous time when climate change ravaged the planet and when the Water Twins destroyed humanity. Yearning for clarity about that holocaust, Kyo reads the diary.
Lynna begins her February 24, 2057 diary entry with a definition of the Aurora Borealis:
“Also called northern lights, this is a natural electrical phenomenon caused by the interaction of electrically charged particles from the sun with the upper atmosphere near the north magnetic pole. It is characterized by the appearance of bands of reddish, greenish, and other coloured lights in the sky that follow the magnetic lines of force. The colours differ based on the type of gas particles that are colliding. The most common colour—a pale yellowish-green—comes from oxygen molecules some sixty miles above the earth. All-red auroras are rare and are associated with high-altitude oxygen, up to two hundred miles high. Nitrogen produces blue or purplish-red aurora.”
A Diary in the Age of Water
Lynna lives with her daughter Hilde in now warm Toronto, in southern Canada, where the northern lights had been up to recently only rarely observed. By 2057, this has changed:
Last night after supper, Hilde and I went for a walk along Shaw to Christie Pits, where I used to play as a kid. She wanted to show me the magnificent aurora borealis that had been streaming dramatically for the past several weeks. When I was a kid, auroras this far south were unheard of. Now they are common. The night sky was clear, and we enjoyed the fresh spring air as we ambled down Shaw Street. We parked ourselves on the damp grass among other spectators of the colourful night sky and watched the dancing light show. It was mesmerizing: ribbons of mostly green and pink light rippled as if tugged by a mischievous wind. They danced with a kind of life that brought me back to my childhood.
Northern lights happen when the magnetic field of our planet is disturbed by the solar wind. As the particles slide along the contours of the Earth’s magnetosphere, they glow as they lose their energy. The particles energize the air molecules enough to make them glow in various colours, depending on the composition of the gases.
Earth’s magnetic field is generated and maintained by an ocean of superheated, swirling metal around a solid iron core. These act like a dynamo to create electrical currents, which, in turn, create our magnetic field. But our magnetic field is weakening, and a flip is imminent. In the past two hundred years, the field has weakened by fifteen percent. That’s why we’re seeing these auroras in Toronto. A weaker field creates more auroras. They’ve become common here, particularly during the winter and spring months. NASA predicts that the field could be gone in five hundred years or less and then take another two hundred years to rebuild.
The field will first become more complex and might show more than two magnetic poles—playing havoc with our navigation systems and God knows what else—until it is entirely gone. Then it will presumably build and align in the opposite direction. When the magnetic field goes, so will our shield against radiation. First, the ozone layer—our shield against ultraviolet rays—will be stripped away, and then the atmosphere may lose other key elements and grow thinner. Will we end up like Mars 4.2 billion years ago, when severe solar storms stole its very atmosphere and evaporated all its water?
Mars once had a strong magnetic field like Earth. But then Mars cooled and its conducting geodynamo stopped rotating. In the absence of the protective field, the solar wind surged in and excited the ions in the upper Martian atmosphere to an escape velocity. The solar wind just swept the air away. The surface pressure of the Martian atmosphere dwindled from one thousand millibars to six millibars. Mars lost about the same atmosphere that Earth has today.
Mars is our destiny; it’s just a question of when. We’re all batteries, running dry. I considered this probable fate for Earth as we watched the exquisite example of our changing magnetic field. But I didn’t share it with Hilde, who watched with her mouth open in rapt wonder. If she’s lucky, she will experience no more of this progression than these amazing auroras. The weakening magnetic field and the associated loss of protection and atmosphere won’t happen for a while. I hope.
I shared none of my thoughts with Hilde.
a Diary in the Age of Water
How Auroras Work
The Aurora Borealis is named after the Roman goddess of the dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for north wind, Boreas. According to scientists, the colorful and eerie streams of light known as the Aurora Borealis result from “magnetic ropes” that link the Earth’s upper atmosphere to the sun. Solar winds surf them, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras. NASA researchers describe the “ropes” as “a twisted bundle of magnetic fields organized much like the twisted hemp of a mariner’s rope.”
The earth is constantly immersed in the solar wind, a rarefied flow of hot plasma emitted by the sun in all directions. Auroras happen when charged particles from the magnetosphere collide with atoms and molecules of the Earth’s upper atmosphere (at altitudes above 80 km). Most of these particles originate from the sun and arrive in a relatively low-energy solar wind. When the trapped magnetic field of the solar wind is favourably oriented (mostly southwards) it reconnects with the earth’s magnetic field and solar particles then enter the magnetosphere and are swept to the magnetotail. Further magnetic reconnection accelerates the particles towards earth.
These atmospheric collisions electronically excite atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere. The excitation energy can be lost by light emission or collisions. Most auroras are green and red emissions from atomic oxygen. Molecular nitrogen and nitrogen ions produce some low level red and very high blue/violet auroras. Typically, an aurora appears either as a diffuse glow or as “curtains” that extend more or less in an east-west direction. Each curtain is made of many parallel rays, each lined up with the local direction of the magnetic field lines, suggesting that aurora are shaped by the earth’s magnetic field.
The earth’s magnetosphere is the space region dominated by its magnetic field. It forms an obstacle in the path of the solar wind, causing it to be diverted around. When the solar wind is “perturbed”, it transfers energy and material into the magnetosphere. The electrons and ions in the magnetosphere that become energized move along the magnetic field lines to the polar regions of the atmosphere.
Auroras have been observed on Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars, Uranus and Neptune. The auroras on the gas giants appear to be powered by the solar wind. In addition, Jupiter’s moons, especially Io, are powerful sources of auroras. These come from electric currents along field lines, generated by a dynamo mechanism due to the relative motion between the rotating planet and the moving moon. Io, which experiences active volcanism and has an ionosphere, is a particularly strong source, and its currents also generate radio emissions.
The passage from A Diary in the Age of Water I quoted from A Diary in the Age of Water was based on current science by NASA and real predictions by scientists. It isn’t so much a question of what, but of when… Who will witness the change in the magnetic pole?
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
“The slow violence of free-market capitalism isn’t so much the deliberate and focused actions of a few evil men as the accumulated negligence of an undiscriminating collective of unimaginative humans.”
Lynna Dresden
“In her dystopian novel Canadian limnologist Nina Munteanu employs Solar Punk’s technique of using dystopic descriptions of present ecological catastrophe to predict the end of the world as we know it, and to indicate a utopian future.”
THE SONOMA INDEPENDENT
“A society that does not believe in the objective pursuit of truth—even if it challenges your worldview—is doomed to servitude.”
Lynna Dresden
“An insightful novel…A cautionary tale rummaging through the forgotten drawers of time in the lives of four generations…This whirling, holistic and evolving novel comes alive, like we imagine water does.”
Mary Woodbury, DRAGONFLY.ECO
She imagines its coolness gliding down her throat. Wet with a lingering aftertaste of fish and mud. She imagines its deep voice resonating through her in primal notes; echoes from when the dinosaurs quenched their throats in the Triassic swamps.
Water is a shape shifter.
It changes yet stays the same, shifting its face with the climate. It wanders the earth like a gypsy, stealing from where it is needed and giving whimsically where it isn’t wanted.
Dizzy and shivering in the blistering heat, Hilda shuffles forward with the snaking line of people in the dusty square in front of University College where her mother used to teach. The sun beats down, crawling on her skin like an insect. She’s been standing for an hour in the queue for the public water tap.
The Way of Water
My short story, The Way of Water, which was recently reprinted in Metastellar Speculative Fiction and Beyond (rated the second most popular online sci-fi magazine), is now in The Best of Metastellar Year Two, an anthology of forty-eight stellar short stories previously published with Metastellar.
The Way of Water was first published as a bilingual print book by Mincione Edizioni (Rome) in Italian (La natura dell’acqua, translated by Fiorella Moscatello), and English along with a recounting of what inspired it: The Story of Water (La storia dell’acqua) in 2016. The Way of Water has been reprinted several times, in magazines and anthologies, since its first appearance in 2016.
It all started with an invitation by my publisher in Rome in 2015 to write about water and politics in Canada. I had long been thinking of potential ironies in Canada’s water-rich heritage. The premise I wanted to explore was the irony of people in a water-rich nation experiencing water scarcity: living under a government-imposed daily water quota of 5 litres as water bottling and utility companies took it all.
I named the story “The Way of Water” (“La natura dell’acqua”), about a young woman (Hilda) in near-future Toronto who has run out of water credits for the public wTap; by this time houses no longer have potable water and their water taps have been cemented shut (as was done in Detroit in 2014); the only way to get water is through the public wTaps—at great cost. She’s standing two metres from water—in a line of people waiting to use the tap—and dying of thirst.
“The Way of Water” captures a vision that explores the nuances of corporate and government corruption and deceit together with global resource warfare. In this near-future, Canada is mined of all its water by thirsty Chinese and US multinationals—leaving nothing for the Canadians. Rain has not fallen on Canadian soil in years due to advances in geoengineering and weather manipulation that prevent rain clouds from going anywhere north of the Canada-US border. If you’re wondering if this is possible, it’s already happening in China and surrounding countries.
The Way of Water, in turn, inspired my recent dystopian novel A Diary in the Age of Water, which explores the lives of four generations of women and their relationship to water during a time of severe water restriction and calamitous climate change.
“The Way of Water evokes a sense of awareness about issues of access to water and about the dangers of imbalances in that access.”
Derek Newman-Stille, Speculating Canada
“In a short story in which every word has its weight, Nina Munteanu manages to describe a dystopia with ecological, political, social and economic elements and Hilda’s reactions to her situation with a great emotional intensituy. To avoid thirst, Hilda ends up embracing an extreme idea, a last hope linked to water. The Way of Water is a story of the kind you hope is science fiction but you fear is not.”
Massimo Luciani
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
“The truth isn’t about telling; no one just tells you the truth. It needs to be coaxed, even tricked, out. The truth is carefully hoarded—like water—and only flows among privileged acolytes who have proven themselves.”
Lynna Dresden
“Those of us who are captivated by fear, who despair in a dead zone—we need to consider new ways to tell familiar stories, to envision different endings. A book like this can change the way that you see the world at this moment, can allow formulae to take root in fiction and grow into a different kind of solution.”
Marcie McCauley, THE tEmz REVIEW
“Climate change is larger than all of us. It speaks in the language of finality. And mostly through water.”
Lynna Dresden
“An eye-opening story for those who are still on the fence about climate change. This is the perfect read for both sci-fi readers and eco-interested readers alike.”
ANTHONY AVINA, author, review blog
“Water—Nature’s herald—is talking loudly to us in the language of irony.”
Lynna Dresden
A Diary in the Age of Water is “A book of genuine power.”
BROKEN PENCIL
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 