Water Under Everything

It’s 2121 and the sea has reclaimed most of New Orleans. A small number of upper class elites have conquered aging while an underclass of slaves cater to their whims. Largely sequestered in the French Quarter, these elites are oblivious to the encroaching ocean as enclaves of poor, naturally aging humans struggle to subsist on what little land remains in South Louisiana.

This is author Moira Crone’s vision in The Not Yet, a book that imagines the unintended consequences of a culture fixated on technological advancement. What happens to a society in which people can live forever, but in a world that’s giving way to the sea? In Crone’s future, age provides the opposite of wisdom. Impoverished humans clustered on the fringes of land surrounding Lake Pontchartrain experience abbreviated lives but recognize the perils of environmental change, while rich, immortal heirs play in the French Quarter as it crumbles around them.

Author of novels, stories, and essays, The Not Yet is Crone’s first science fiction work. In order to imagine this twenty-second century world, Crone first turned to maps that scientists and engineers had made based on their projections of what the future coast would look like. She also considered solutions that other places around the world, facing similar inundation, had developed. Crone then adapted these solutions and projections to fit within the reality of The Not Yet in a process known as world-building. “World-building is how speculative writers create space for narrative. Some authors take something from another time or place and blow it up or diminish it; others might take a set of social conditions and reinvent them in another world,” said Crone. For instance, Crone spent time in Prague while writing the novel, a city that suffers still from devastating floods by the Vltava River. During the thirteenth century, the city’s Old Town was in-filled in order to raise ground-level, flood-prone areas; and former ground floors now sit several meters underground. Crone extrapolated this paradigm to her world, with New Orleanians living in upper stories sealed from flooded levels below and guarding their homes from passing boats as the water level rises.

World-building begins with an intellectual leap; the painstaking process of filling in the details follows. “You go out on a limb and then you go back and ask yourself, Is this feasible?” said Crone. “This thought process has a real function in our society. It allows us to imagine a possible future when, in reality, we can never fully foresee the consequences of our actions.”

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Architect Ursula Emery McClure imagines South Louisiana’s possible futures professionally. “Most of the work in my firm [emerymcclure architecture] is speculative. As the land and water interact, we imagine potential outcomes,” explained McClure. Crone’s vision of a flooded New Orleans matches predictions of some speculative architects. “Her world is something I’ve worked with before,” said McClure.

McClure, A. Hays Town professor of architecture at Louisiana State University, is part of the college’s Coastal Sustainability Studio (CSS). The studio utilizes a trans-disciplinary and community-based approach to examine environmental issues in the Gulf Coast region, working in conjunction with the goals of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan. After reading Crone’s novel, McClure contacted her to see how the world-building techniques of science fiction writers could also be used in speculative architectural design, specifically at Chevron’s Shorebase in Lafourche Parish.

The ensuing collaboration brought together Chevron’s scientists and engineers, the resources of the CSS, and Moira Crone. “We designed a studio exploring the relationship between energy shore bases and the coastal environment in Port Fourchon, Louisiana,” McClure said. Shore bases supply offshore drilling platforms, serving as a critical link between land and sea in the oil and gas production process. The Chevron base itself is an enormous metal warehouse, routinely flooding more than fifteen feet, so McClure’s students were tasked with imagining alternatives to the current design that could accommodate a watery future.

(pictured left) LSU School of Architecture graduate student Dean Kelly’s final project, AQUEDOCK, imagined mobile shorebase components that attach to each other as well as suspended, retractable supply lines along the mouth of the Mississippi River. Each component acts as its own docking vessel and, when combined, transforms into a complete shorebase.

Students spent twelve days touring the building and the marshes surrounding it. Crone also met with the students early in the semester to explore how world-building connects known elements of everyday reality to the unknown conditions of a speculative world. “Many of my students are not from Louisiana, and the environment is completely unfamiliar to them,” said McClure. “Moira taught them techniques to access something that was outside of their normal life.” When students imagined their designs within a science fiction paradigm, incredible solutions became tenable. 

“The students’ results were fascinating. They were charged with simultaneously making something real and unreal. Something unlike the current Shorebase, something unrecognizable, but, at the end of the day, something that could theoretically be built,” said McClure. In one project, a landscape architect created a giant elevated tube beginning at LA 1 to Venice, with settlements forming along the structure all the way to its termination where land now meets the Gulf, large flotillas supporting it underneath as water levels change. Another project transformed Shorebase into a giant rod-and-reel system, in which various buildings bob like bait during extreme water events. The designs “looked at water as the determining factor before land,” explained McClure.

“When I first drove to Port Fourchon from New Orleans, I realized it was bad. It’s commonplace for water to slosh into your car on parts of the highway,” Crone said. “Herons stand in the shallows covering the asphalt. They no longer recognize where you’re traveling as road—it’s becoming part of the lake.” In response to persistent flooding, a portion of Highway 1 between Golden Meadow and Venice has recently been elevated, a super-highway rising high above the sinking towns below.

The highway also leads to Port Fourchon, through which eighteen percent of the nation’s oil supply flows. Pipelines and canals crisscross a narrow spit of young land built near the end of the last glacial melt with sediment from the Mississippi River. As this sediment washes into the Gulf, floods increasingly threaten coastal communities, as well as oil and gas operations.

The coast is rapidly losing land. The rescue effort has been set into motion with the state government’s fifty-year master plan. Crone’s novel presents one future; myriad other potential outcomes exist. World-building offers one method for envisioning what comes next, and the transmission of these alternate realities into popular culture further expands the realm of possibility. Narrative enters the zeitgeist and spurs technological development.

“Science fiction has a real function,” said Crone. “A lot of [Isaac] Asimov’s projections of the future later created reality. Scientists read him as a child and created solar energy. They decided to go to Mars. We need that kind of outside-the-box thinking now.”

McClure agreed. “The oil and gas industry, humans, workers, we all have to change. We have to stop thinking of our changing coast as a problem and start thinking about how we can survive because the water is coming.”

Details. Details. Details.

The Not Yet by Moira Crone

University of New Orleans Press. 2012.

amazon.com/The-Not-Yet-Moira-Crone/dp/1608010724