Bad Land / New Flower - Cli-fi novel excerpt
Today’s post is something a bit different. I am working on a climate sci-fi / espionage novel set in Australia and Ethiopia, working title “Bad Land”. This is an excerpt, potentially the beginning of a chapter called “New Flower”. Fiction is new for me, so I am definitely interested in thoughts/feedback as harsh as it may be.
New Flower
I looked out the porthole coming into land, a FiFo worker’s ritual. This was my first time leaving the Australian continent, a privilege forbidden for my entire lifetime. Addis Abeba, “New Flower” according to my mission briefing, glittered beneath me in silvers and blues and greens. The flowers there did seem new, even from the sky. Vast swathes of the city had surrendered to nature. Ethiopia, with a “P” that explodes out of the lips, was an ancient empire called Abyssinia. This gleaming city, though, appeared quite unlike anything I knew about our own ancient indigenous cultures.
The pilot announced our approach, same as always. Fixing my eyes on the horizon, I braced myself for a bumpy and swervy arrival. I always hoped for a smooth transition back to earth, but in my experience, it was better, safer, to expect the worst. The pilot, mercifully well-trained, delivered us to the terminal intact. I paused to take my customary deep breaths of calm, before pulling all my belongings to me, ready to leave. Ready to arrive. I was very conscious that I was alone, and only a fistful of people in my government knew I was here. I felt very far from home.
I eventually stood, ready to meet my chaperone. As soon as I disembarked the aircraft, in the ominous tunnel to the terminal, I was fulsomely greeted by a voluptuous woman, bedecked in a long, white dress. Her forehead bore an ocean-coloured symmetrical cross in its centre and mysterious markings were tattooed across her cheeks and chin. She had braids tight against her scalp, intricately woven with gold rings, unravelling once they left her head, wave upon wave of curls falling down her back. I didn’t know what I had been expecting but it hadn’t been this. I certainly hadn’t expected a woman.
“Selam nao,” she said brightly, extending her right arm out firmly, her left hand tucked into the nook of her opposing elbow. She nodded, adding, “Dena nesh?” She glanced down at her waiting palm, looking up at my face again, nodding and smiling. I reached out with my own right hand, thinking she would shake it. Her hand enclosed around mine, and she pulled me into her. The smell of coffee and incense forced its way into my nostrils as she pressed her right shoulder to mine, slowly, before pulling away again. She kept hold of my hand and kept hold of my eyes. I couldn’t look away.
“Endi nesh?” she inquired, sweetly. She pulled me into her shoulder again, throwing me off balance. “Hulun-m teru nao?” she asked, spitting out the “T” violently yet serenely. She pulled away and nodded and grinned again, still imprisoning my hand. “Lisa, it is a pleasure to meet you. I hope you had a good journey,” she switched to English. My body instantly relaxed with the familiarity. She shook my hand once more, in the Australian style, and freed me from her grip, chuckling to herself. “So they didn’t teach you the Amharic greetings yet? Ishi, we’ll teach you in time, chugur yallem. Don’t worry,” she assured me.
I realised I had been speechless during this entire exchange, even though my mind convinced me that I had understood, almost like telepathy. I mumbled, “Yes, I would be honoured to learn more about your culture,” before bowing my head meekly, embarrassed by my linguistic failings.
She laughed again, a tinkling noise that chased itself around the corridor, and turned to lead us away. “Come on,” she said. “There’s much we have to show you today.”
This woman, I still had not learned her name, led us through the viscera of the airport. All the walls were grey, the lighting dull and gloomy. No outside weather was visible. Soon the corridor opened into a glass hallway. I could now see many layers of passages. There was no one in our passageway, but below, above, all around us, I could see other walkways through the glass, filled with people all in motion. They all looked incredibly different.
There were people who I supposed were Ethiopians, for they were all dressed and decorated like my greeter, celestially floating to their destinations. There were others dressed in suits like Australian businessmen, with the same determined expressions but all sorts of different faces and physiques.
The majority were Africans. In Australia, we had relatively few African migrants. Although the community was diverse, we often heard most about Somalis and Sudanese, refugees from wars in the early 21st century. From my briefing notes, these people would now be considered Ethiopians – their land now stretched from Sudan in the west, to Eritrea in the North and Somalia in the East. Djibouti was the sole, stubborn hold-out, protected by the Chinese and Americans. But Ethiopia had access to more seas and ports than they knew what to do with, and could concede this small plot of land to keep a neighbour friendly.
The Africans milling around the airport came from beyond just from the Horn. Some were dressed in incredible colours and brilliant patterns, I presumed from West Africa. Others donned Arab robes and head coverings, I assumed from the North.
The next largest group were Asians, whom I was more accustomed to seeing in Australia. A large portion were Indian, also dressed in business suits, though some more casually, as if they were on a holiday. There were Chinese, and South-East Asians as well, dressed in plain clothes, not quite for leisure but not quite for high-powered business either. Perhaps residents.
I noted a few white people in the halls, but not many. I guessed that they included latinos from the mining nations in South America, bankers from Europe, and the occasional private military contractor from America.
The ease with which they had all arrived at this one place, from their corner of the Earth, was astonishing. I wondered why they were all here. Why I was really here.
After another few minutes walking, mesmerised and silenced by the variety of people I could see, we emerged from the snaking grey-glass corridor into the daylight, suddenly outside and breathing real air. I hadn’t noticed until now how perfectly air-conditioned the building had been. I was blasted by rich, intense sunlight. In Kakadu, the heat would always find you, and the red dusty haze in the sky burrowed itself into every surface it encountered. Here, the air was nourishing, the warmth tempered by the altitude. The day was clear, crisp and bright.
“Lisa, my name is Haimanot,” she names herself finally, her hair jewelry glistening, even more radiant than I had realised. “I will take you to your hotel, and then we will begin.”
She led us to an auto, its doors popping open as we approached. All the way to the hotel, I was struck by how similar this experience was to arriving home in Melbourne after a long shift. Of course, nothing here could ever be quite the same. Though its roots were similar, Australia’s manufactured products had long ago been isolated from the rest of the world. We drove along in a Toyota, spookily quiet, an electric vehicle from a Japanese manufacturer. We drove its relics in Australia, including cars that required driving themselves. We were behind on the latest self-driving models.
The roads, too, were the same as back home, black tarmac baking in the sunshine. They were littered with autos and buses but the vehicles moved seamlessly, as one, through the traffic lights and circles, the colourful signals more for the passenger’s visual experience than because the cars needed them. In Australia, to economise after the Closure, we’d done away with these visual flourishes to ease a passenger’s anxiety. Here it seemed they could afford such luxuries.
Haimanot told me we were driving along Bole Road, pronounced like a bowl with an Australian ay at the end. Before Ethiopia’s Great Rise, this was the home of expatriates seeking to avoid the rougher parts of the city. They lived in their own modern bubble, as modern as it could be with power and cell service cuts. At least they were near the airport in case of emergencies. A long time ago, before they cleared the area for infrastructure, she said some of the roads nearby used to be made of dirt, some people living in shacks with corrugated roofs. She said it like a painful memory, a thing of the past, never to be repeated. I didn’t confide in her about the state of the factories outside Kakadu, where the refugees lived and worked.
On either side of this road, and off into the distance, were immensely tall buildings, taller than anything in our big Australian cities. They were mostly covered in glass. High grade sand and energy were in abundance here based on my resource briefing. It certainly made for a much prettier and dazzling experience cruising through the streets than the steel and concrete structures dominating Melbourne’s skyline. People walked beneath the hulking buildings on the streets, carefree.
We stopped at the hotel, Haimanot allowing me twenty minutes to drop my things and get ready for our tour. My bags had magically arrived in my room, a penthouse on the 60th storey with a floor-to-ceiling panoramic view of the city. I would have to ask Haimanot about the landmarks that I could see. I could only discern the airport, and the hills behind Addis, Entoto, where there were vast fortresses dedicated to Orthodox prayer visible even from here.
Haimanot asked me to meet her on the roof. Our new craft for the tour was an autocopter. We had these in Australia too, but they were intensely rationed, seen as a luxury to be able to travel to wherever you wanted at any time through the skies, polluting the air with traffic just like the land.
“Lisa, I’m first taking you to where I believe our Great Rise began. It is called the Grand Renaissance Dam.” Haimanot began her tale, as we lifted off and banked over the city towards the north-west. “It started as a five gigawatt hydroelectric dam on the Nile River, commissioned forty years ago.” Before either of us were born.
“This project was a part of our national identity. Everyone contributed, through fundraising events and a portion of wages. My grandfather, he always tells the story of how he won a goat in the office Renaissance Dam raffle.
“The dam was commissioned in 2020. Electricity was first dispatched from here in 2022. The dam was finally filled by 2023. In the thirties, we increased the capacity of the dam by another five gigawatts, once our industrial parks required more energy to scale up.”
I nodded along. These facts were all in my briefing book, aside from the goat raffle. Left unsaid was the impact the dam and the subsequent expansion had on their neighbours. Over time, as feared, the dam dried up the waters in Egypt and Sudan. The impact was so severe in Sudan, ravaged by civil war in the twenties, that its people succumbed to Ethiopian sovereignty in return for food guarantees and Ethiopian rights and security.
Not so in Egypt, which waged an unsuccessful international campaign to halt the Ethiopians’ use of the dam. It was too late. The world at that time was so focused on achieving what they called “net zero carbon emissions”. Any attempt to halt progress, at least in less powerful countries, was thwarted. The dam was a pseudo-renewable resource and allowed Ethiopia to power its factories cheaply and “cleanly”. Polluting countries financed the movement of factories to this part of the world to avoid heavy penalties under their carbon taxation treaties. They all had a vested interest in making sure Ethiopia would succeed.
What couldn’t possibly be conveyed from the briefing book was the sheer scale of the construction. Our copter descended over the mass of water, and it was marvelous.
As a child my parents had shown me videos of Victoria Falls, that spectacular African waterfall on the border of what was once Zambia and Zimbabwe. This was equal in spectacle, but the tyranny of concrete guided the water’s flow, removing the unbound, untamed quality of a river and conforming it to man’s purpose. Energy transformation. Energy control.
As we came in to land, we descended onto a platform that spanned the length of a reservoir, with high water on one side, and the unnatural waterfall spouts tumbling over the other. This forced flow through giant turbines powered Ethiopia’s Rise.
“Haimanot, why are we here?” I asked, trying to piece together my brief. I was a mining engineer, and had expected they would take me to the desert, or the mountains, or to an operational mine. Why else would they let me leave Australia?
“I’ll explain back in Addis, Lisa,” hummed Haimanot, twirling away from me to walk down the platform and admiring the river on either side. “Konjo nao. It’s beautiful. Aren’t you enjoying the view?”