Sophia Kelly Audiobooks Podcast - People of the Rock

This week’s second 12 minute segment contains two scenes. We first see the disappearance of two Vancouver women, one of them Lucy, through the eyes of a Vancouver police detective, Barbara Stamwick. It briefly mentions the Picton murders, but there is nothing likely to be triggering other than that name, I think.

After we hear from Barbara, in our second scene “A baaad awakening’ we discover that Brenda has also been taken to the future, and is being stalked by a herd of goats. She has had a very different experience of the future than Lucy.

Here’s a link to the Timbuk 3 song “The future’s so bright” she’s thinking of as she wakes in a sunlit field to the protests of goats.

No future sustainability content in this piece, but I promise there will be a lot more.

I’m going to record this chapter’s segments more quickly, and release the edited entire audio chapter to my awesome paid subscribers once it’s done. You will still be able to listen to the entire book in small installments without subscribing or paying the $5 a month if that’s not a fit.

Marija takes our time traveller Lucy home to meet the family. Lucy is half horrified half delighted to be made to share a bedroom with her crush Marija.

Marija has 18 parents and 5 siblings - this is my future’s answer to the need for population reduction to make sure that the local farmland can feed everyone who lives in the region. When writing this, I was thinking about how to reduce the population to levels that could be equitably housed and fed locally (as my hypothetical future Vancouverites would need to do) without destroying the planet. I calculated the carrying capacity of Greater Vancouver, based on, if I recall correctly, one person per half hectare of fertile land. In order to feed all our people locally, even including crowing food on urban land alongside housing and a mostly vegetarian diet, we’d have to cut the current population of Greater Vancouver in half, and my reading indicated that having slightly fewer children wouldn’t drop the population quickly enough.

If we were cut off from transported food (as we were recently by floods taking out roads and railways), half of us would die in short order.

I saw as one of the problems in reducing the population that people (particularly straight acculturated people) want ‘their own’ children, by which they mean ones they are biologically related to, rather than being aunties or uncles to other people’s kids. Similarly, people who birth biological children are both overwhelmed with the workload and at the same time unwilling to share the title and perks of being the official parent of their children. In the story, I tried to construct conditions where it would be normal to be full socially recognized parents of children that were not biological relatives, and for many people to share the work of child-rearing equitably while also sharing the social status accorded parents.

The solution I came up with is based it on childrearing practices I am aware of in my own queer community in Vancouver, where a lesbian couple might team up with their besties, exes and gay friends to conceive and rear children. Lesbians are such social innovators. I expanded it to give formal status to the non biological parents, which I think is a missing piece.

The chapter also talks about the futures transportation and trading patterns, based on sustainable transport.

This short scene introduces the character of Detective Barbara Stamwick, who is investigating the disappearance of Lucy and Brenda. Are they a couple? Are they roommates? Is Michael Lucy’s boyfriend? murderer? Why do they have a picture of the world’s largest pirogi on their fridge? What is/was going on in the past? (Time travel makes verb tenses tricky, which is a big part of why the book is written in the present tense throughout. No matter where and when you are is ‘now’ to someone.

Photocredit: Tourism Alberta, Worlds largest pirogi in the village of Glendon, Alberta.

* Permission is expressely forbidden to use any of my voice recordings or content anywhere, but including the recording and content on this page, to train artificial intelligence, or to publish it in any format in whole or part elsewhere without my express and informed consent.

* Coming in the next couple of weeks, paid subscribers will get access to high quality single chapter recordings of the entire book, fresh of the microphone. The cost is $5 a month, which is the lowest substack allows for paid subscriptions. You’ll still get these shorter segments for free, but the longer ones might be more fun.

This is the segment of People of the Rock that many people have told me they love because of the hope and the first glimpse into a vision of a positive future where things are done well, both ecologically and socially.

We continue with the appropriate technology in the form of local transportation and look at the way urban design would be changed by the transportation changes. We get another view into the gift economy, which some would say is traditional to the Pacific Northwest. Gift economies were documented in BC in pre-colonial times. I found it satisfying to reinstall them in ‘old’ Vancouver in this scene.

Here’s a video by Meena Ray on Facebook that does a good job of explaining indigenous economics and how it works/worked. (You don’t have to log in to see the video.)

Photocredit: Flying Penguin, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1620098

* Permission is expressely forbidden to use any of my voice recordings or content anywhere, but including the recording and content on this page, to train artificial intelligence, or to publish it in any format in whole or part elsewhere without my express and informed consent.

* Coming in the next couple of weeks, paid subscribers will get access to high quality single chapter recordings of the entire book, fresh of the microphone. The cost is $5 a month, which is the lowest substack allows for paid subscriptions. You’ll still get these shorter segments for free, but the longer ones might be more fun.

Did you know that the concept of being able to travel in time through human consciousness is called chronesthesia? The term was created by Estonian born ( Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Endel Tulving.

I’ve adapted this idea to the character of the Rock, who is in fact, an actual, ordinary-ish rock. I figure if a self conscious rock could exist, as believers in animistic faiths like Wicca and Shintoism might hold, then the ability to travel forward or backward in time is on theme with this idea.

Here’s some more information on the thinking around mental time travel.

* Permission is expressely forbidden to use any of my voice recordings or content anywhere, but including the recording and content on this page, to train artificial intelligence, or to publish it in any format in whole or part elsewhere without my express and informed consent.

* Coming in the next couple of weeks, paid subscribers will get access to high quality single chapter recordings of the entire book, fresh of the microphone. The cost is $5 a month, which is the lowest substack allows for paid subscriptions. You’ll still get these shorter segments for free, but the longer ones might be more fun.

Marija is a historian in the future, assigned to watch Lucy. In this very short scene we see an inkling of her future, non-professional interest in the Rock woman. No worries, I’ve also released a longer scene today.

Future and Eco notes

Appropriate technology

The bicycle is an example of appropriate technology in EF Schumacher terms. It’s a technology that is no more complex or resource-intensive than it needs to be to get the job done, it can be locally produced, repaired and fueled and is non-polluting. The fuel is of course human food consumption, which is available distributed across the planet, and generally exists wherever a human might be and want to use a bike. Aside from the health benefits of exercise, supporting the use of bicycles is good urban design. There is a movement for appropriate technology inspired by Schumacher’s work, focussing on decentralized, community based solutions.

Bicycles and the future of transportation

Here’s an article talking about the future of bicycles as urban transportation that I found interesting called The Bicycle and the Future of Mobility: What To Expect by 2030

* Permission is expressely forbidden to use any of my voice recordings or content anywhere, but including the recording and content on this page, to train artificial intelligence, or to publish it in any format in whole or part elsewhere without my express and informed consent.

* Coming in the next couple of weeks, paid subscribers will get access to high quality single chapter recordings of the entire book, fresh of the microphone. The cost is $5 a month, which is the lowest substack allows for paid subscriptions. You’ll still get these shorter segments for free, but the longer ones might be more fun.

This scene shows the future transportation and we get to know Marija (pronounced Ma-REE-dja) a little better.

For much of human history, commercial and passenger transportation was done using wind power on sailboats. I imagined that given that fossil fuel would be exhausted in 500 years (or we’d smartened up about it) local water transportation in a sustainable, hyperlocal, gift economy society would revert to this easy to implement transportation type. Enjoy!

I’d love it if you would restack this post or any others you like…

Some notes: a 30 foot sailboat can reliably be expected to go 6-8 knots per hour, which is about 15 kph. The distance between Bowen Island and Vancouver is 22.4 km, so a trip between Bowen and Vancouver by sailboat would take between 1.5-2 hours in total, well within reach for a ferry sailboat to make a couple of trips a day. A larger boat has less drag and might go a bit faster.

Permission is expressely forbidden to use any of my voice recordings or content anywhere, but including the recording and content on this page, to train artificial intelligence, or to publish it in any format in whole or part elsewhere without my express and informed consent.

This is a very short but key scene in which we learn a secret. Also set on Bowen Island - called Bone Island in the future.

Note: The entire chapter as one audio file will be coming out soon. The single file will be available to those who subscribe to this podcast. Free listeners will still be able to listen to the scenes one at a time.

This is a very short segment, so I’m posting two today. In this one we get a small glimpse into the mind of Marija (Ma-REE-djya).

Also, I wanted to let you know that if you like to listen to the entire chapter at once, I will be posting the entire chapter as one audio file soon. This premium content will only be available to subscribers, but you will still be able to listen to the scene by scene recordings for free. If you subscribe you can opt to receive an email when the recording is posted.

Link to the next segment: Rosemary

In this scene - Lucy decides whether to go on, or back to the rock.

Some notes:

* Always lift with your legs when you are carrying a full pack.

* Waxed cloth makes great sandwich wrappers

* Permission is expressely forbidden to use any of my voice recordings or content anywhere, but including the recording and content on this page, to train artificial intelligence, or to publish it in any format in whole or part elsewhere without my express and informed consent.

* Here’s more information on the quiet and sturdy mud (cob) buildings Lucy spent the night in. Cob buildings can last 500+ years.

* I’d love it if you would restack this post or any others you like…

An example of a 500 year old cob building in France