Of motivation and impending ecological doom (?): Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff VanderMeer

 This morning, we shall contemplate a bird.  A hummingbird.  Jeff VanderMeer is best known for the Southern Reach trilogy, the first book of which was, I suppose, movie-ized.  Why?  Because the movie industry can do nothing but remake or adapt.  (I have not seen a new movie in years.)  The book trilogy really was outstanding.  I also wholeheartedly recommended Borne, although the sequel, Dead Astronauts, was perhaps a bit too navel-gazy and experimental for the sake of experimentation.  Nevertheless, his stature as an author is generally well deserved, as one of the leading writers in "the new weird."  Yes, that's the term.  Hummingbird Salamander is the first book that I have found disappointing from VanderMeer.  Yet, there are always observations to be made.

Here is the set-up.  In the near future (although there are some technological throwbacks) a woman who works for a security consulting firm is sent some oh-so-mysterious clues that lead her to investigate the life of the recently deceased Silvina Vilcapampa.  Most tantalizing for the first person narrator is a taxidermied, extinct hummingbird.  The narrator (names are pseudonymous and irrelevant) becomes obsessed with Silvina, her life, her death and the various threads around her.  Silvina was the child of a South American industrialist, but she turned away from her family and became an eco-terrorist, so the more the narrator investigates, the more trouble she finds, from the eco-terrorist web, the Vilcapampa family and their attempts to cover up both their own misdeeds and Silvina's, and in the process, the narrator throws away her own life getting sucked into the obsession with the conspiracies.  Also, ecological collapse occurs at a rapid pace, to set the background for a story about an eco-terrorist with some weirdo and not well explained ideas about saving the planet.

The narrator adopts various poses of a noir investigator, and VanderMeer writes as something of an homage to the genre, with the problems stemming from his attempt to merge the genre with something that does not quite fit.

Social science observation the first.  Real people have motivations.  Literary observation the first, stemming from social science observation the first.  Characters need motivations to explain their actions.  When they act without comprehensible motivations, the story suffers.  In noir tales, the protagonist is either a cop or a PI, either paid by a client or assigned a case, so motivation is built into the genre.  Make it personal or not, as you choose.  However, characters need motivations.  Silvina's motives are actually quite interesting.  Dead as she is, she has some sort of sensory issue, making her uncomfortable in urban areas, being oversensitive to stimuli.  Add family tensions, and one can read multiple competing pathways to her eventual decisions.  Yes, she is crazy, and she is still vague, but she is comprehensible after a fashion, given multiple plausible explanations for what we know as the narrator struggles through her attempts to understand Silvina.  There is Silvina's psycho ex, Langer, with his semi-political motivations, psychological dysfunctions and personal connections.  There is a government agent/mystery man in the background, playing games with the narrator, but at least as a government agent going after Silvina and her network, he has a motivation.

Yet the narrator, herself?  She has a family background of abuse, and tragedy, and the reader learns at the end that Silvina did not randomly select her to receive clues and go down the rabbit hole.  Her family had a connection to the Vilcapampas.  Her brother worked for them, and was killed by their enforcer, rather than as the narrator had always thought, by her (their) grandfather.  So, when Silvina decided to start sending clues to someone, she picked the security consultant whose brother had been mixed up with and killed by her family.

The problem is that this is backwards.  Had the narrator known this all along, it would have served as motivation, but it cannot serve as motivation if she does not know it.  And she has no other motive to throw her life away going down the rabbit hole.

You cannot be provided with a motive for an obsessive quest on which you will throw away your life after you have already thrown away your life on that quest, not knowing why.  Having that motivation up-front can give you a motive, but it cannot motivate you if you do not know it.  And since the narrator is not being paid to investigate this case-- indeed, she is fired for wasting company resources on a personal job-- she has no motivation.  It is difficult to overstate how much of a problem this is.  Throughout the entire book, an astute reader wonders why the narrator is doing this.  Why?  She has no reason, no stake, no interest in such issues, and she is staring at a taxidermied hummingbird like it is the most fascinating thing ever.  There is a mention of a salamander, which catches her interest, because as a child, she and her brother used to go out looking for salamanders, but hanging a plot on that?  No.  Nothing in the character reads as randomly obsessive.  We learn that she had spent her life trying to get childhood/familial anger issues under control, but that is no explanation for this kind of self-destructive obsessiveness.

Do people act strangely?

Yes.  Do they throw away everything, their lives, marriages, relationships with their children, because of a sudden obsession with a taxidermied hummingbird?  No.

Consider, then, the question of rational choice theory and the range of its application.  One of our common answers is that while no one is fully rational, people are more likely to act rationally as the stakes increase.  The problem here is that the stakes were maximal, and the narrator threw her life away.  For no motivation.  Do some people do that?  Yes, but such irrationality generally has a very specific explanation.  A specific motive, mental illness, something like that.  Most of the time, people have reasons, even if they are not utility-maximizing reasons.

Next, let us turn to the doom and the gloom.  The novel is set amid rapid ecological collapse.  Look, I have been writing quite regularly that political issues should be triaged by their stakes.  Most of what we discuss is irrelevant and stupid.  Climate change matters because it has real stakes, but there is a flip-side here, which I am seeing with increasing and distressing frequency.  I wrote several posts in a series called Phobia Indoctrination, and perhaps I will write another one about climate apocalypse.  Yes, climate change is real, and yes, it is serious.  Indeed, it is far more serious than most of the meaningless pablum that draws our attention, or at least tries to claim it.

No, it is not the literal end of humanity.  Get a grip.  Fear-mongering does not help anyone or anything.

To VanderMeer's credit, there is a line in the novel in which the narrator looks about at the rapid ecological collapse and attendant societal collapse-- happening nowish-- and notes that humanity does not go extinct, but she expresses the observation as a kind of shock.

Get a grip.  There is a wide range between "very bad thing" and "end of humanity."

Consider.  A high yield nuke going off in Tokyo, with 14 million people, would be mind-bogglingly bad.  But not the end of humanity.  See my point?

Climate change, for example, will increase the frequency of extreme weather events.  It will raise sea levels, which affects low-lying areas and coastal areas.  I could keep going, and yes, these are real concerns with real lives at stake.  It is, however, possible to overstate what will happen, and if you do that, then you do damage to any progress when it doesn't happen.  If you predict more hurricanes of higher intensity, and we observe them, more lethal heat waves and we observe them, then you look like a concerned scientist whose warnings should be heeded.  If you predict that in a few months/years, the sky will change color (this happens in the novel, because of unspecified disasters) and there will be such ecological collapse in stable areas like North America, rather than just, say, the subcontinent, and that doesn't happen, you look like Chicken Little.

Some portion of the apocalyptic rhetoric comes from people who understand the true level of danger, and exaggerate, and some portion-- the larger, I think-- comes from people who do not go through the process of calibrating their response to an accurate measurement of danger.  Most people are not ecologists, and even "an ecologist" cannot describe the ecological effects of an increase of x degrees on all ecosystems because a) it will not be uniform across all ecosystems, and b) no ecologist studies all ecosystems.  Given those difficulties, how can a reasonable person calibrate his response?  Carefully.

Bluntly, it is disappointing when an author committed to the issue crosses the rationality line, and yes, true, his genre is called "the new weird," so maybe the sky changing color for not-fully-explained reasons having something to do with some unexplained disaster is just within the milieu of VanderMeer, but we still need some level-headedness to avoid the cognitive pitfalls of the very eco-terrorists who are at the center of the novel anyway.  Yes, Silvina thought she was some kind of eco-savior, and if you want to read the vague ending that way, that is your right, but all that is clear in the text about her is that she did some fucked up shit.

Calm down, climate change is not going to kill you.  Probably.  Depending on where you live.  Hypothetically, if someone reads this from the Gulf Coast, a stronger hurricane, strengthened by climate change might kill you, but a) nobody is reading this, so calm down, you don't exist and hence cannot be killed, and b) even there, we are talking about very small marginal increases in probabilities.  The marginal increases are somewhat higher in more fragile locations, but still.  There is a middle ground between Malthusianism and denialism.  Both are wrong.

High stakes call for rationality, because that's how you get the answer right.  The stakes here are high.  Not hair-on-fire high, but the point is that if you think your hair is on fire when it is not, you will make a mistake.  Don't.

Bill Frisell, "The End Of The World," from Nashville.  One of the all-time greats, from his best album.