A vehicle moves to pass on a wintery northern B.C. road, catches the fateful rut of hidden ice beneath the fresh snow, and author Edmund Arndt breaks the neck of the first character we meet in his new book.
It might be the only time freezing temperatures are the focus of his latest novel The Burning Planet. This story is a science fiction fable set on rising temperatures but literal and figurative. The politics of our society have been heating up our sense of culture as much as the greenhouse pollutants of our industrialized lifestyle are heating up the physical planet.
In Arndt's not-too-distant fictitious future, populations and resources are critically cut off from one another, pockets of violence send flares of fear into peace-loving societies, meanwhile our climate, thanks to our own consumerist thirst, is responding without mercy. In three interwoven storylines, personal ambitions and troubling secrets are still able to cut into the calamity raining down on the main characters. Positive change is within grasp, but will the players in the play be able to fully realize it?
"There is some fantasy to my story, but there is a lot of reality to it. And there is the entertaining part," said Arndt, who first came to literary recognition with his 2011 novel Dogs On My Heels. "The whole story takes place on my 95th birthday, here in Prince George, in the year 2035. The story has to make a lot of predictions, some of them are far-fetched, some of them seem very likely, and everything is presented as a view of what our lives may be like or what our society may be like if we don't intervene on ourselves. I'm proposing drastic changes, but the environment will make drastic reactions if we don't."
Part of Arndt's hypothesis in the book is a global structure of government. While some writers have used that to create a dystopian society where common people are downtrodden by overlords (definitive works include The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, Brazil, Dark City, The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games).
Arndt's view is of a more democratic world order.
"Pollution knows no borders. These violent conflicts we are seeing now, they don't recognize borders. We have to respond with human efforts to help one another and that can't be blocked by borders either," he said. "We can't keep going on the way we're going on. It's a path to self-destruction. Capitalism isn't helping. The rule of supply and demand has been good, most of the time, but it has to be regulated, and who is doing the regulating? Who are they looking out for? And there is the enormous concern about the distribution of wealth in the world, the richness of some places and the poverty of others. You should read the book to look at these things in a form of entertainment. It's not the news or debates, it's a story that works through these other ideas."
Arndt knows more than a little about the personal toll of violent societies, government that boot-heels its people instead of providing infrastructure, a medical system and rational education, and gruesome displacements of mass populations. Arndt was born into 1940 Poland, grew up in post-war West Germany, and emigrated to Canada in its centennial year with a lifelong dedication to pacifism and environmentalism.
He was also a successful businessman. He founded Prince George Vulcanizing that is still in operation today, among other business activities.
All the while he imagined himself writing. As a retirement hobby he took up the pen, which he hadn't done actively since his youth. It started as an exploration into his long family tree which turned into his autobiographically-based first novel.
Since he had the writing muscles warmed up, he decided to use his leisure activity for something more than an offhand pastime.
He wanted it to produce something substantial. His attention turned next to The Burning Planet's themes and plots, but he sighed with a smile that he is happy with the result and is not already enthralled with a third project. Not yet anyway.
He is looking forward to 2017 as it is Canada's sesquicentennial and his own 50th anniversary in this country. The messages within the pages of The Burning Planet are like a double-barreled anniversary gift.
It's a perfect time in Canadian life - ours and his own - to contemplate what values really matter, how we are connected to each other and our environment, and what change might look like.
Come meet Arndt, get a copy of the book, and have it autographed at a pair of public appearances in Prince George.
He will be at Books & Company on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., then at Coles Bookstore on Oct. 22 also from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The books are on sale now. They are published by Tamarind Tree Books of Toronto.
