Different kinds of defia.., p.1
Different Kinds of Defiance, page 1
Praise for Different Kinds of Defiance
“DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE is a collection of stories that are both tender and explosive, centering resistance towards bleak futures and inaction, collaboration and community, restoration, social justice, environmental impact, and rebellions and risked lives aimed at reparations all told through musical prose written by an experienced hand and polished voice. Bernardo effectively subverts stereotypes and redefines concepts. These stories plant seeds of hope for the future and caution us against what humanity stands to both gain and lose as a result of technology, science, and most of all human-centric thinking.”
—Ai Jiang, Nebula Finalist and author of LINGHUN and I AM AI
“In DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE, Renan Bernardo highlights the best of humanity against the backdrop of a world destroyed by humans. These stories are full of emotion and spirit, and are absolutely delightful.”
—Lesley Conner, editor-in-chief of Apex Magazine
“In DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE, Bernado pulls off a feat of fierce and riveting storytelling, with a glimpse of a world that is at once torn and ravaged, yet full of hope. It’s no baseless reassurance, but a call for the hard work to be done, to hold on to what we love. From pushing back against damage in “A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity,” to the unlikely alliances and innovation of “Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Build and Hospital,” and the ways our lives and love adapt in “When It’s Time to Harvest.” While the geek in me enjoyed the technical details of the tatuí bots and the organisation structure of the farming collectives, DkD is more than just parables for a sustainable future. It’s a brilliant picture of resilience, and a promise that we can and will do better.”
—Eliane Boey, author of OTHER MINDS and CLUB CONTANGO
“DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE offers heart-rending and moving stories of small miracles. In Renan Bernardo’s world, miracles aren’t the deeds of saints, but of everyday people who count on themselves and each other for survival against a harsh landscape.”
—Eugenia Triantafyllou, Ignyte, Nebula and World Fantasy Award-finalist author
“Step into a vibrant yet vulnerable future reimagined in Renan Bernardo’s DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE, where solarpunk visions meet the harsh realities of climate change, weaving human drama of resilience and innovation in a world transformed by environmental challenges.”
—Chen Qiufan, author of WASTE TIDE and co-author of AI2041: TEN VISIONS FOR OUR FUTURE
“The ten stories of DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE are fiercely hopeful and ready to fight for something better. Bernardo’s characters are full of heart as well as defiance. I’d gladly have read ten more like this, and I can’t wait to see what he brings us next.”
—Marissa Lingen
Different Kinds of Defiance
Renan Bernardo
Android Press
“Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Build a Hospital” was originally published in Solarpunk Magazine #8.
“A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity” was originally published in Escape Pod #863.
“Soil of Our Home, Storm of Our Lives” was originally published in Apex Magazine #128.
“Anticipation of Hollowness” was originally published in World Science Fiction #2 – Reloading the Future.
“When It’s Time to Harvest” was originally published in Imagine 2200 - Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (2021).
“Even Though You’re No More” was originally published in Three Crows Magazine #8.
“Look to the Sky, My Love” was originally published in Solarpunk Magazine #1.
“The River That Passed Through My Life” was originally published in Portuguese by Editora Dame Blanche.
Thank you to New Press for the waiving of exclusive publication rights to “When It’s Time to Harvest” so it could appear in this collection.
Copyright © 2024 by Renan Bernardo
Published by Android Press
Eugene, Oregon
www.android-press.com
ISBN: 978-1958121764
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of Android Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Contents
Introduction
EIGHT STEPS TO STEAL A YACHT AND BUILD A HOSPITAL
A SHORELINE OF OIL AND INFINITY
SOIL OF OUR HOME, STORM OF OUR LIVES
DIFFERENT KINDS OF DEFIANCE
ANTICIPATION OF HOLLOWNESS
WHEN IT’S TIME TO HARVEST
EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE NO MORE
TO REMEMBER THE POISON
LOOK TO THE SKY, MY LOVE
THE RIVER THAT PASSED THROUGH MY LIFE
About the Author
Introduction
Rioverse
So, what is the Rioverse? In a nutshell, it’s a version of Rio de Janeiro where the ocean levels rose dramatically due to the unattended consequences of climate change. A series of climate catastrophes disrupted governments all around as the consequence of a chain of bad decisions. In the end, the wealthy and the lucky were able to flee to seasteads, higher grounds, and cities far from the coasts. But our current climate crisis doesn’t threaten only coastal cities. It threatens the very fabric of democracies, the way we live, and how the world functions in general. So, when all “turnarounds” failed, the rich went to the Dandelions, 104 space modules orbiting the Earth—a solution devised to actually “replace” the need for a planet. It’s an extreme scenario, and rather unlikely in the real world, but one that nevertheless lingers in the minds of billionaires all the time. You can read more about the Dandelions and how they were projected in “The River That Passed Through My Life,” the novelette that closes this collection.
The idea of a Rioverse came years ago, when I read a piece of news in The Guardian about what would happen with some cities (Miami, Osaka, Shanghai, and Rio among them) if the average temperature in the world went up only 3C. People forget that the rise of sea levels isn’t only tied to the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, but also to thermal expansion: in higher temperatures, the fundamental particles get more energetic and excited, and water occupies more space. In the article, there was a map of Rio with a simulation of how the city would look like if the water levels rose dramatically, with the ocean forcing its veins through the streets, fusing with lagoons and lakes, blurring the coastlines, and changing its map. It was inevitable to think about how people would survive in this version of Rio.
Despite its post-apocalyptical nature, the Rioverse is also a place full of hope. It can be seen in all three stories in this collection, but perhaps specially in “When It’s Time to Harvest,” set a bit further into the future than the other two. I like to describe the Rioverse as post-apocalyptical moving to Solarpunk and perhaps aiming for utopia at some point in the future. So, despite all the chaos and struggle inherent to a world shook by a severe climate crisis, you’ll surely find hope, fight, and life all around, mainly in the characters inhabiting this future Rio (and hopefully never to be real).
I have four stories in this world, three of which are in this collection and the other one unpublished. I also have plans to write more stories set in the Rioverse. So, you’ll hopefully embark on another adventure soon enough.
EIGHT STEPS TO STEAL A YACHT AND BUILD A HOSPITAL
The first story in the collection is set in the Rioverse. I picked this story to open the anthology because it’s a more fast-paced, kind of action-packed story, but also because it brings together a lot of Solarpunk and Climate Fiction elements that I deem important: cooperatives, food distribution, and healthcare in places impacted by the climate crisis; resilience of minorities; life in a profoundly changed urban environment; social collapse; resilient applications of technology; reclamation of the public space; and non-tolerance to groups based on hate.
What I tried to achieve with this story was to show a Rio de Janeiro severely struggling with the rise in the level of the oceans and the overall degradation of the city, but containing a lot of communities strong enough to unite, make a difference, and to make the city livable. This is shown in the Trepadeira Hospital-Farm co-op, but also in all of the main characters (Hamilton, Monique, and Alex). I’d also wanted to introduce some solutions to problems that are aggravated in the Rio of the story, but that are also problems nowadays: the reach of a functioning healthcare system (including the access to gender confirmation surgery), food distribution (slightly shown in the form of the vertical farm and Alex), organ donation and transplantation, and the striking difference between the wealthy and those who barely make a living.
Men like Fraj0linha are well known both here in Brazil and worldwide: far right, wealthy people who only care about themselves and vouch for a fake illusion of traditionalism. I tried to show his conservative side through his illusive support of a Brazilian Monarchy comeback. Sadly, this is a real, far right movement in Brazil (fortunately verging on irrelevance, though it acquired a bunch of followers in the last few years). I tried to convey the idea that even in the future these movements might still exist, but mainly that they can be fought and resisted.
1. Stealing a yacht
How naive of Hamilton to think stealing would be the hardest part of his plan. Not to say that his belly doesn’t flutter with anxiety as he waits for Alex. After all, it’s the first time he’s stealing—looting first aid kits and medical equipment isn’t stealing. But what he’s doi ng is for a good cause, he tells himself over and over.
“It is,” he says out loud as if that’ll make it truer. He’s sitting on a dock that juts out of the window of a deteriorated building. All around him, other flaking, overly-patched buildings cast shadows along the floodstreet. The lucky ones surviving above the waterline.
Sweat drips from Hamilton’s flimsy beard. The day is scorching—what day isn’t in Rio de Janeiro, right?—but his agitation has a part to play in it too. The floodstreet is empty except for a boy rowing with a drone buzzing at his side. Alex should be there by now, along with the muscle from Trepadeira Vertical Farm he promised would come to help with the theft. But he isn’t. How can you hope to pull off a crime if you can’t even keep an eye on the clock?
Hamilton has visuals on the PatriotiKat. The 98-meter, white-hulled, five-decked yacht is parked exactly where a luxury sports car would have been parked a century ago, perhaps situated in front of a clubhouse or, most likely, merely placed as a showoff to passersby. But the yacht is meters above the old street level, softly swaying along with the littered, miry tide. Leblon, once a wealthy neighborhood, is out of fashion. It’s now a bay of rooftop islets, lichen-embraced buildings, and lone treasure seekers.
Another thing out of fashion is rich, far-right influencers. Fraj0linha, a weapons aficionado and the yacht’s owner, has lost its precious boat in a set of fuzzy bureaucratic proceedings devised by Alex. All Fraj0linha wanted was a complete, high-quality hulljob—cleaning, painting, dry blasting, antifouling—which Alex promised to provide in his small dummy corp, all prettified to attract easy money.
“You okay with it, garotão?”
Hamilton turns back, staring up at the bulky man standing behind him on the dock. Alex is wearing his usual suspenders, smudgy with the Trepadeira’s fertilizer and dirt. Must’ve been dealing with the gourds and cauliflowers that the Trepadeira yield this time of year. His mustache is misaligned on his face due to a scar on his left cheek.
“You came alone?” Hamilton asks, squinting at the building’s window to see if there’s anyone else there.
Alex snorts. “C’mon, garotão. That thing is already stolen. It’s only a matter of sailing it back to the hospital.”
Hamilton’s eyes widen. It can’t be that easy. In his worst nightmares, he’d depicted gunfights, ambushes, blood—even his own—reddening the floodstreets. He overanalyzed it multiple times, knowing he’d eventually convince himself to go on without feeling guilty. He’s doing it for Monique, he keeps telling himself. For her and for everyone that goes through the same things they went through years ago, in the Day. He and Monique had to dash through the Atlantic-poked floodstreets in an autoboat toward a faraway clinic where she could have her liver transplanted in an emergency unit. At the time, he was a woman with a name amazingly out of place, and Monique was only a friend. Now his body and name fit into him, and Monique is his dear wife.
And that yacht over there, lined up with photovoltaic cells along with its five decks, will be his way of bringing health where it’s virtually unavailable. His revenge against the Day.
“You okay with what we’re gonna do, boy?” Alex says. “Stealing from that babaquinha is totally fine by me, but I’m not sure if you’re gonna sleep at night.”
Hamilton pinches his lips. Most certainly he won’t sleep for a while. But Alex doesn’t need to know that. He nods firmly, trying to convey he’s fine with stealing the yacht.
Monique, on the other hand, won’t be. She is the head doctor at Jerônimo General Hospital, the place where they’ve worked and lived for almost ten years—another of the good things that came after the Day. He’s a nurse, even though everything he learned of the trade was by reading books and seeing other people doing the job. But that’s how it is these days, right? Better to have an unskilled, non-graduated nurse than no nurse at all.
Alex fetches a crude wooden canoe from the building and slops it on the water. They row to the PatriotiKat. The hull really needs a paint job, and it’s easy to understand why Fraj0linha trusted it in the hands of one of the seemingly outstanding companies Alex devised for his thefts. Near the waterline, the boat is pockmarked by Rio’s brackish mix of lichen and mud, scratched by the barrage of debris and trash the shiny yacht must’ve found in its path. But all the other aspects of the boat scream “Hey, look at me, I’m completely out of place here in this dingy floodstreet.” Out of time as well, since a Brazilian Monarchy flag some 260 years obsolete waves over the bridge. On the hull, a kooky, black-and-white cat with red eyes and green paws clings clumsily to a heavy machine gun. Fraj0linha’s mascot, a paragon of bad taste.
As they climb the rope ladder to the PatriotiKat, Hamilton’s body shivers all throughout. But that’s part of the package that comes with this enterprise: sweat, fear, second guesses, and the implacable desire to jump and swim away from that thing.
“Relax, boy. We do a lot of these man-in-the-middle cons.” Alex laughs, barging into the cockpit as if it’s his bedroom. “We get a lot of stuff from the gated condos in Barra. Sometimes they don’t even notice. We skim the lists of things they’re trying to sell or repair, pose as potential service providers, get them to put what we want where we want it… doesn’t always work, but when it does…” He slides a hand over the varnished wheel and kisses the tips of his fingers.
“And now we just…” Hamilton smiles lamely.
“Turn it on and sail back. We’ve overridden their security bots and any active trackers. Everything else was already turned off ‘for repairs’.” Alex laughs. “There’s a small risk someone might see us sailing this toy. But once we hide it in the harbor and give it a refurbishment… then we’re mostly safe. In a week or so it will be just one more yacht salvaged from an abandoned marina a decade ago.”
Hamilton gulps and nods. He reminds himself it’s for Monique. It’s for his dear wife who puts her soul on the line to maintain the Jerônimo every single day. When they transform that gaudy colossus into a moving hospital, people wouldn’t have to die at home, unreachable for treatment. They wouldn’t perish giving birth as though they were living in the Dark Ages of Rio, desperately sailing around to reach poorly-equipped hospitals or clinics. They wouldn’t agonize through completely treatable diseases or live in bodies they don’t feel comfortable with. They wouldn’t suffer as Monique had, in need of a liver.
“Alex?” His voice is suddenly too loud in the cabin. He cringes and almost whispers the next words, “Don’t tell Monique, please.”
“Wouldn’t even dream about it, garotão.”
Two catamarans join them on the way to the Jerônimo—heavily-armed farm friends from Alex. Just in case.
All the while, Hamilton keeps his teeth clenched and his hands gripping the stern’s railing. But, yes, despite the knot in the pit of his stomach, there’s also a drop—or a few—of hope somewhere within him. They’re going to do it. They’re doing it.
This leads us to the next step.
2. Lying to your loved one about the yacht in the harbor
And that’s harder than part one. Hamilton was never good at lying to Monique, to begin with.
He proposed to her many months before the Day, deciding they needed a beautiful view for that moment, something special to remember. Sunlight glistening on the floodstreets, seagulls showing off their flying skills over neglected buildings, the abandoned seasteads like distant monuments off the coast. A romantic post-collapse date, right? Besides, looking at Rio from up high was always a good way to obscure its problems and muffle your own. So Hamilton led Monique to one of the old trails leading to Vista Chinesa. The high ground where the lookout was located had been mostly spared by the waters, so they spent four hours going up, indulging themselves in the luxury of getting their legs tired. It was perfect. Monique said yes and they spent the night in an abandoned cottage nearby. But of course, Monique knew what he was planning all along. No one went to Vista Chinesa anymore, if not for something special.
