Fixing the Sky (7 page)

The American humorist Mark Twain opens his book
The American Claimant
(1892) with an outrageous claim: “No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.”
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In an opening section called “The Weather in This Book,” Twain cites the undesirable and “persistent intrusions of weather” that delay both the reader and the author: “Nothing breaks up an author's progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather.” After conceding the obvious—“Weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience”—Twain seeks to keep it in its place, out of the way, “where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative.” So he promises to relegate weather to the end of his book—indeed, to its “climatic” conclusion
and an appendix. With tongue still firmly in cheek, he elevates weather, or the writing about it, to the status of a “literary specialty” and points out to his discriminating readers that it ought to be “not ignorant, poor-quality amateur weather” but the “ablest weather that can be had.”

Of course, talk of the weather dominates the work, just as, in the 1890s, talk of Robert Dyrenforth's experiments in Texas dominated discussions of weather control (chapter 2). In the concluding pages of
The American Claimant
, Twain gives an account of the eccentric Colonel Mulberry Sellers, the epitome of American free enterprise, who seeks to control the world's climates—and sell them—by manipulating sunspots. The colonel has just drafted a long letter explaining his scheme:

The colonel portrays himself as nothing more esoteric than a regulator and (shades of William Ruddiman) holds that climate was manipulated in prehistoric times by Paleolithic peoples—for profit!

Colonel Sellers hopes to patent a “complete and perfect” method for controlling the “stupendous energies” behind sunspots. Wielding this power, Sellers plans to reorganize the climates “for beneficent purposes.... At present they merely make trouble and do harm in the evoking of cyclones and other kinds of electric storms; but once under humane and intelligent control this will cease and they will become a boon to man” (272). His plans for commercialization of this technique include licensing it “to the minor countries at a reasonable figure”
and providing the great empires with special rates for ordinary affairs and “fancy brands for coronations, battles and other great and particular occasions” (272). He expects to make billions of dollars with this enterprise, which requires no expensive plant, and he hopes to be operational within a few days or weeks at the longest. His first goal is improving the climate of Siberia and clinching a contract with the Russian czar, which he confidently projects will save both his honor and his credit immediately. Reminiscent of the purchase of the North Pole by the Baltimore Gun Club, the daffy colonel confides in his friend and former colleague Marse Washington Hawkins, “a stoutish, discouragedlooking man”:

Sellers promises to communicate with Hawkins not by earthbound means such as letter or telegraph, but with a “kiss across the universe” using a cosmic signal sent from the surface of the Sun itself—a vast attenuation of sunbeams that will generate envy even among current proponents of solar radiation management, especially those who propose to cast a shade on the Earth using orbiting space mirrors (chapter 8). Sellers writes:

As he promises, Twain ends
The American Claimant
with an appendix subtitled “Weather for Use in This Book. Selected from the Best Authorities,” in which he presents a rich parody of the type of dense weather writing that he fails to exclude from his own text. Here Twain contrasts the prolixity of
William Douglas O'Connor's “The Brazen Android” (1891), in which purple prose serves to invoke the purple skies of medieval London after a thunderstorm, with the terse elegance of a much greater apocalypse experienced by Noah and his family and recorded in Genesis 7:12: “It rained for forty days and forty nights.”

In
The Wreck of the South Pole, or the Great Dissembler
(1899), by Charles Curtz Hahn, protagonist George Wilding finds himself shipwrecked and stranded in low southern latitudes on a continent of ice. Befriended and guided by what he takes to be mysterious spirits, Wilding makes his way south to warmer climates, to a great city inhabited by Theosophists, who, by practicing mind reading and astral projection, seek to control nature with their minds. There, the weather bureau does not predict the weather—it uses mental prowess to control it: “Their duty is to decide upon the proper kind of weather for certain seasons and days and then see that the country has it.”
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It is a land without droughts or damaging winds. There the police do not arrest criminals—they track and detain suspects who have been placed under suspicion by mind-reading surveillance.

The Great Dissembler, the most advanced Theosophist sage, has mastered a technique for keeping others from reading his mind: “I cultivated the habit of jumbling up my thoughts in the worst mess you could imagine” so no one could fasten on them (67–68). It is he who is both the chief geoengineer and the greatest general. In order to defeat the revolutionary forces threatening his city, the Great Dissembler decides to wrench the South Pole suddenly from its axis to destroy the enemy with a tidal wave and “bring back the old order of things” (72). When he executes this plan, all the climatic zones of the world will change dramatically. Cyclones, tornadoes, and earthquakes will increase in both number and intensity until the temperate latitudes merge into the tropics. With the wreck of the South Pole (a day later than planned, possibly due to the confused thinking of the Great Dissembler) comes an unexpected rift in the surrounding ice walls and unintended consequences described only as “days of terror and suffering” (74). The story ends here abruptly, with no description of the fate of the world but with the assurance that George Wilding, again stranded in a remote and icy cove but cared for and comforted by the astral bodies of his friends, will soon be reunited with them.

Weather and climate control, war, gender, and romance are juxtaposed in
The Great Weather Syndicate
(1906), by George Griffith. In the novel, Arthur Arkwright, a young British engineer, develops a machine that modifies the weather by drilling atmospheric holes to redirect the winds and clouds. This invention promises to make him the “master of the fate of the world.”
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Working through investors in the World Weather Syndicate, Arkwright sets up a chain of mountain stations equipped with “atmospheric disintegrators” that project impulses powerful enough to break up and dissipate clouds while creating partial vacuums or “holes” in the atmosphere. By coordinating its efforts, the Syndicate can determine the direction of winds and weather over any area within the range of its stations. Controlling the weather of the whole world, then, is simply a matter of multiplying the number of stations. The Syndicate “will enable us to run the world's weather and sell it out to the countries which need any particular brand at our own price” (86). For example, the Gulf Stream can be altered by this technique to benefit those willing to pay. Arkwright's love interest, Eirene, the daughter of his chief investor, introduces moral objections:

An opposing syndicate has a “pretty big idea” of its own (15). It proposes to dam the Arctic Ocean across the Bering Sea, Baffin's Bay, and Spitzbergen to stop all the icebergs from coming south and bottle up the Arctic Ocean until ice builds up there. The excess weight will then shift the axis of the Earth and cause a general redistribution of the map of the world—land, sea, and weather all included. If this evil syndicate gains control of the Earth's axis, a struggle will ensue for control of the world's weather, which can “only result in disaster to mankind” (73). Arkwright thus finds himself “at the beginning of a war for the economic control of the world,” and he proposes to win “by any means
within his power” (17), yet Eirene refuses to marry him until she sees how he plans to wield this power.

Eager to prove its dominance over weather, the World Weather Syndicate triggers a snowstorm in London on July 6 designed to impress the British foreign secretary. This time, the voice of Arthur's conscience is his Aunt Martha from Lancashire: “I tell him to his face that it's a sin and a shame interfering with the course of nature. For shame on thee, lad! ... why canna' thee let the good God manage His weather in His own way? Dost'a want to bring a great city like this, and maybe all England to ruin, just to make thy own business pay?” (55).

Arthur replies that he and his investors have altruistic intentions:

Another female voice of conscience, Arthur's sister Clarice, worries about “all the poor people who will have to suffer” if the Syndicate engineers a frosty British winter: “[T]he people who won't be able to get work, and can't pay for wood and coal and oil, to say nothing of proper food” (78–79).

After Arkwright makes a fortune by converting formerly barren areas into arable farmland, he turns his attention to the utopian project of ending world hunger, poverty, and, especially, war. Against the world's militarists, Arkwright calls down devastating snowstorms from the heavens as a kind of meteorological Moses, freezing armies in their tracks, fogging battlefields, and locking naval vessels in ice-bound harbors. “It's weather against war, and weather will win,” he tells the kaiser, after thwarting a German plot to revive the Holy Roman Empire (308).

At least in this science fantasy, techniques of weather control inaugurate a millennial reign of global peace and prosperity. The Syndicate is generally considered to be “a sort of earthly Providence” by the people in marginal lands that it helps. Eirene ultimately marries Arthur (the Controller of the Elements) so that
she
can show
him
“how to manage the climates of the world” (312). In such fiction, as later in actual proposals, the themes of precise and ultimate control of the weather and climate for economic, humanitarian, and military purposes are inextricably blended.

Earlier in their careers, some real-life twenty-first-century geoengineers worked on heroic schemes to deflect Earth-grazing asteroids. They would surely appreciate another of Griffith's novels,
The World Peril of 1910
(1907), in which astronomer Gilbert Lennard discovers a comet threatening to destroy the Earth. In the novel, American money and know-how contribute to the construction of a great cannon built into a mine shaft. The massive shot deflects the comet so that it does not strike the Earth.