Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century

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A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations a novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson

"If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a

notebook and a pencil, is truth?" - VIRGINIA WOOLF Daily doses of bright light markedly improve the

mood of people suffering from depression, so every day at eight in the evening Frank Churchill went to

the clinic on Park Avenue, and sat for three hours in a room illuminated with sixteen hundred watts of

white light. This was not exactly like having the sun in the room, but it was bright, about the same as if

sixteen bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. In this case the bulbs were probably long tubes, and they

were hidden behind a sheet of white plastic, so it was the whole ceiling that glowed. He sat at a table and

doodled with a purple pen on a pad of pink paper. And then it was eleven and he was out on the windy

streets, blinking as traffic lights swam in the gloom. He walked home to a hotel room in the west Eighties.

He would return to the clinic at five the next morning for a predawn treatment, but now it was time to

sleep. He looked forward to that. He'd been on the treatment for three weeks, and he was tired. Though

the treatment did seem to be working - as far as he could tell; improvement was supposed to average

twenty percent a week, and he wasn't sure what that would feel like. In his room the answering machine

was blinking. There was a message from his agent, asking him to call immediately. It was now nearly

midnight, but he pushbuttoned the number and his agent answered on the first ring. "You have DSPS,"

Frank said to him. "What? What?" "Delayed sleep phase syndrome. I know how to get rid of it." "Frank!

Look, Frank, I've got a good offer for you." "Do you have a lot of lights on?" "What? Oh, yeah, say,

how's that going?" "I'm probably sixty percent better." "Good, good. Keep at it. Listen, I've got

something should help you a hundred percent. A publisher in London wants you to go over there and

write a book on the twentieth century." "What kind of book?" "Your usual thing, Frank, but this time

putting together the big picture. Reflecting on all the rest of your books, so to speak. They want to bring

it out in time for the turn of the century, and go oversize, use lots of illustrations, big print run-" "A coffee

table book?" "People'll want it on their coffee tables, sure, but it's not-" "I don't want to write a coffee

table book." "Frank-" "What do they want, ten thousand words?" "They want thirty thousand words,

Frank. And they'll pay a hundred thousand pound advance." That gave him pause. "Why so much?"

"They're new to publishing, they come from computers and this is the kind of numbers they're used to. It's

a different scale." "That's for sure. I still don't want to do it." "Frank, come on, you're the one for this!

The only successor to Barbara Tuchman!" That was a blurb found on paperback editions of his work.

"They want you in particular - I mean, Churchill on the twentieth century, ha ha. It's a natural." "I don't

want to do it." "Come on, Frank. You could use the money, I thought you were having trouble with the

payments-" "Yeah yeah." Time for a different tack. "I'll think it over." "They're in a hurry, Frank." "I

thought you said turn of the century!" "I did, but there's going to be a lot of this kind of book then, and

they want to beat the rush. Set the standard and then keep it in print for a few years. It'll be great." "It'll

be remaindered within a year. Remaindered before it even comes out, if I know coffee table books." His

agent sighed. "Come on, Frank. You can use the money. As for the book, it'll be as good as you make it,

right? You've been working on this stuff your whole career, and here's your chance to sum up. And

you've got a lot of readers, people will listen to you." Concern made him shrill: "Don't let what's

happened get you so down that you miss an opportunity like this! Work is the best cure for depression

anyway. And this is your chance to influence how we think about what's happened!" "With a coffee table

book?" "God damn it, don't think of it that way!" "How should I think of it." His agent took a deep

breath, let it out, spoke very slowly. 'Think of it as a hundred thousand pounds, Frank." His agent did not

understand.

Nevertheless, the next morning as he sat under the bright white ceiling, doodling with a green pen on

yellow paper, he decided to go to England. He didn't want to sit in that room anymore; it scared him,

because he suspected it might not be working. He was not sixty percent better. And he didn't want to

shift to drug therapy. They had found nothing wrong with his brain, no physical problems at all, and

though that meant little, it did make him resistant to the idea of drugs. He had his reasons and he wanted

his feelings! The light room technician thought that this attitude was a good sign in itself. "Your serotonin

level is normal, right? So it's not that bad. Besides London's a lot farther north than New York, so you'll

pick up the light you lose here. And if you need more you can always head north again, right?"

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He called Charles and Rya Dowland to ask if he could stay with them. It turned out they were leaving for

Florida the next day, but they invited him to stay anyway; they liked having their flat occupied while they

were gone. Frank had done that before, he still had the key on his key-ring. "Thanks," he said. It would

be better this way, actually. He didn't feel like talking. So he packed his backpack, including camping

gear with the clothes, and the next morning flew to London. It was strange how one traveled these days:

he got into a moving chamber outside his hotel, then shifted from one chamber to the next for several

hours, only stepping outdoors again when he emerged from the Camden tube station, some hundred

yards from Charles and Rya's flat. The ghost of his old pleasure brushed him as he crossed Camden High

Street and walked by the cinema, listening to London's voices. This had been his method for years: come

to London, stay with Charles and Rya until he found digs, do his research and writing at the British

Museum, visit the used bookstores at Charing Cross, spend the evenings at Charles and Rya's, watching

TV and talking. It had been that way for four books, over the course of twenty years. The flat was

located above a butcher shop. Every wall in it was covered with stuffed bookshelves, and there were

shelves nailed up over the toilet, the bath, and the head of the guest bed. In the unlikely event of an

earthquake the guest would be buried in a hundred histories of London. Frank threw his pack on the

guest bed and went past the English poets downstairs. The living room was nearly filled by a table

stacked with papers and books. The side street below was an open-air produce market, and he could

hear the voices of the vendors as they packed up for the day. The sun hadn't set, though it was past nine;

these late May days were already long. It was almost like still being in therapy. He went downstairs and

bought vegetables and rice, then went back up and cooked them. The kitchen windows were the color of

sunset, and the little flat glowed, evoking its owners so strongly that it was almost as if they were there.

Suddenly he wished they were. After eating he turned on the CD player and put on some Handel. He

opened the living room drapes and settled into Charles's armchair, a glass of Bulgarian wine in his hand,

an open notebook on his knee. He watched salmon light leak out of the clouds to the north, and tried to

think about the causes of the First World War.

In the morning he woke to the dull thump thump thump of frozen slabs of meat being rendered by an axe.

He went downstairs and ate cereal while leafing through the Guardian, then took the tube to Tottenham

Court Road and walked to the British Museum. Because of The Belle Epoque he had already done his

research on the pre-war period, but writing in the British Library was a ritual he didn't want to break; it

made him part of a tradition, back to Marx and beyond. He showed his still-valid reader's ticket to a

librarian and then found an empty seat in his usual row; in fact he had written much of Entre Deux

Guerres in that very carrel, under the frontal lobes of the great skull dome. He opened a notebook and

stared at the page. Slowly he wrote, 1900 to 1914. Then he stared at the page. His earlier book had

tended to focus on the sumptuous excesses of the pre-war European ruling class, as a young and clearly

leftist reviewer in the Guardian had rather sharply pointed out. To the extent that he had delved into the

causes of the Great War, he had subscribed to the usual theory; that it had been the result of rising

nationa lism, diplomatic brinksmanship, and several deceptive precedents in the previous two decades.

The Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the two Balkan wars had all remained

localized and non-catastrophic; and there had been several "incidents," the Moroccan affair and the like,

that had brought the two great alliances to the brink, but not toppled them over. So when

Austria-Hungary made impossible demands to Serbia after the assassination of Ferdinand, no one could

have known that the situation would domino into the trenches and their slaughter. History as accident.

Well, no doubt there was a lot of truth in that. But now he found himself thinking of the crowds in the

streets of all the major cities, cheering the news of the war's outbreak; of the disappearance of pacifism,

which had seemed such a force; of, in short, the apparently unanimous support for war among the

prosperous citizens of the European powers. Support for a war that had no real reason to be! There was

something irreducibly mysterious about that, and this time he decided he would admit it, and discuss it.

That would require a consideration of the preceding century, the Pax Europeana; which in fact had been

a century of bloody subjugation, the high point of imperialism, with most of the world falling to the great

powers. These powers had prospered at the expense of their colonies, who had suffered in abject

misery. Then the powers had spent their profits building weapons, and used the weapons on each other,

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and destroyed themselves. There was something weirdly just about that development, as when a mass

murderer finally turns the gun on himself. Punishment, an end to guilt, an end to pain. Could that really

explain it? While staying in Washington with his dying father, Frank had visited the Lincoln Memorial, and

there on the right hand wall had been Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, carved in capital letters with

the commas omitted, an oddity which somehow added to the speech's Biblical massiveness, as when it

spoke of the ongoing war: "YET IF GOD WILLS THAT IT CONTINUE UNTIL ALL THE

WEALTH PILED BY THE BONDSMAN'S TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF

UNREQUITED TOIL SHALL BE SUNK AND UNTIL EVERY DROP OF BLOOD DRAWN

WITH THE LASH SHALL BE PAID BY ANOTHER DRAWN WITH THE SWORD AS WAS

SAID THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO SO STILL IT MUST BE SAID 'THE JUDGMENTS OF

THE LORD ARE TRUE AND RIGHTEOUS ALTOGETHER.'" A frightening thought, from that dark

part of Lincoln that was never far from the surface. But as a theory of the Great War's origin it still struck

him as inadequate. It was possible to believe it of the kings and presidents, the generals and diplomats,

the imperial officers around the world; they had known what they were doing, and so might have been

impelled by unconscious guilt to mass suicide. But the common citizen at home, ecstatic in the streets at

the outbreak of general war? That seemed more likely to be just another manifestation of the hatred of

the other. All my problems are your fault! He and Andrea had said that to each other a lot. Everyone did.

And yet... it still seemed to him that the causes were eluding him, as they had everyone else. Perhaps it

was a simple pleasure in destruction. What is the primal response to an edifice? Knock it down. What is

the primal response to a stranger? Attack him. But he was losing his drift, falling away into the

metaphysics of "human nature." That would be a constant problem in an essay of this length. And

whatever the causes, there stood the year 1914, irreducible, inexplicable, unchangeable. "AND THE

WAR CAME."

In his previous books he had never written about the wars. He was among those who believed that real

history occurred in peacetime, and that in war you might as well roll dice or skip ahead to the peace

treaty. For anyone but a military historian, what was interesting would begin again only when the war

ended. Now he wasn't so sure. Current views of the Belle Epoque were distorted because one only saw

it through the lens of the war that ended it; which meant that the Great War was somehow more powerful

than the Belle Epoque, or at least more powerful than he had thought. It seemed he would have to write

about it, this time, to make sense of the century. And so he would have to research it. He walked up to

the central catalogue tables. The room darkened as the sun went behind clouds, and he felt a chill.

For a long time the numbers alone staggered him. To overwhelm trench defenses, artillery bombardments

of the most astonishing size were brought to bear: on the Somme the British put a gun every twenty yards

along a fourteen-mile front, and fired a million and a half shells. In April 1917 the French fired six million

shells. The Germans' Big Bertha shot shells seventy-five miles high, essentially into space. Verdun was a

"battle" that lasted ten months, and killed almost a million men. The British section of the front was ninety

miles long. Every day of the war, about seven thousand men along that front were killed or wounded -

not in any battle in particular, but just as the result of incidental sniper fire or bombardment. It was called

"wastage." Frank stopped reading, his mind suddenly filled with the image of the Vietnam Memorial. He

had visited it right after leaving the Lincoln Memorial, and the sight of all those names engraved on the

black granite plates had powerfully affected him. For a moment it had seemed possible to imagine all

those people, a little white line for each. But at the end of every month or two of the Great War, the

British had had a whole Vietnam Memorial's worth of dead. Every month or two, for fifty-one months.

He filled out book request slips and gave them to the librarians in the central ring of desks, then picked

up the books he had requested the day before, and took them back to his carrel. He skimmed the books

and took notes, mostly writing down figures and statistics. British factories produced two hundred and

fifty million shells. The major battles all killed a half million or more. About ten million men died on the

field of baffle, ten million more by revolution, disease, and starvation. Occasionally he would stop reading

and try to write; but he never got far. Once he wrote several pages on the economy of the war. The

organization of agriculture and business, especially in Germany under Rathenau and England under Lloyd

George, reminded him very strongly of the postmodern economy now running things. One could trace the

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AHistoryoftheTwentiethCentury,withIllustrationsanovelettebyKimStanleyRobinson"IftruthisnottobefoundontheshelvesoftheBritishMuseum,where,Iaskedmyself,pickingupanotebookandapencil,istruth?"-VIRGINIAWOOLFDailydosesofbrightlightmarkedlyimprovethemoodofpeoplesufferingfromdepression,soeverydayateightinthe...

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Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century

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