Philip Temple’s Mistory: Kiwi Cli-fi (Environmental Book Review #4)
MiStory
Philip Temple (Font Publishing, 2014)
New Zealand’s 2014 general election was one of the most bizarre in the country’s history. There was a sense of inevitability in the landslide victory for the National Party and incumbent Prime Minister John Key over the bland David Cunliffe leading the major opposition party, Labour. However, there was plenty of oddness and paranoia to offset the result.
Early in the year, journalist Nicky Hager published Dirty Politics, an exposé of the relationships between particularly vicious internet blogger Cameron Slater and the National Party, raising questions about appropriate political behavior and violations of privacy. Overhanging questions about whether the National government was violating the privacy and democratic rights of citizens pervaded the election, with the left querying the expansions of power built into reforms of search and surveillance legislation and the emergency laws created after the Christchurch earthquakes. Most spectacularly, ostentatious internet billionaire Kim Dotcom started “the Internet Party” and recruited a coalition of left-wing politicians including a full co-option of the Mana Party, the more strident of New Zealand’s two parties advocating for rights for Maori. Just before the election he organized an event called “the Moment of Truth” which promised to expose connections between the Key government and the US government spying revelations of Edward Snowden. Despite featuring Snowden, lawyer Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange, the event failed to reveal anything damning. The National Party won a crushing victory and the hybrid Internet/Mana party failed to win a single seat.
Despite the worsening state of New Zealand’s environment at the time, issues such as water quality, climate change and biodiversity took a back seat to the dramas over privacy, billionaires and ultimately the popularity of the major party leaders. This was disheartening for environmental activists at the time (Disclosure: Philip Temple dedicated MiStory to New Zealand youth climate change organization Generation Zero, a group I was heavily involved with in 2014) and I remember a bitter Russel Norman, leader of the Green Party, giving an angry interview after the election as his party failed to improve their standing despite innovative policies on carbon pricing and green investment.
During 2014, Philip Temple published MiStory, a dystopian science fiction novel which reflects the political preoccupations of the time. As with the election, privacy, surveillance and democracy are priority issues in the novel. Environmental problems are in the backdrop, so much so I wasn’t sure if I should consider it an “environmental book”. However, it’s fairly clear the problems presented by the book stem from the environment: although climate change only plays a superficial role in the actual narrative, with the occasional flood or mention of ice disappearing, the whole world has descended into a major state of war, and my interpretation is this is largely due to resources running out and the impacts of climate change. To me, the dystopia is answering the question of how the politics of the Key Government would play out in this kind of world.
The context and plot of the book clearly lean on the legacy of 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale and at times The Hunger Games and Australian teenage series Tomorrow, When the War Began. New Zealand has descended into an impoverished surveillance state, joining a war with “Eastasia” alongside the remains of the USA and Australia. Millions of refugees have arrived in the South Island and it’s not clear who can be trusted. The novel is written as a series of journal entries by a man named John and his sister Sophie. This style generally plays out well, although the plot points didn’t always work for me, particularly towards the end as a lot of the world and characters fall away and are replaced by negotiations in the inside of government command buildings. There’s no attempt at subtlety in the politics: the leader of New Zealand is “John Locke” and the general of the military is “General Brownleigh”: this written when John Key was the Prime Minister and Gerry Brownlee was one of the most powerful government ministers.
The novel needs to convince its readers that this kind of scenario is plausible, and it gains a lot of believability from the voice in which it is written. Protagonist John is a normal kiwi bloke from Dunedin, who likes hunting and tells it like it is. He makes clear that he isn’t a political type, and if you encountered him in 2014 New Zealand you would probably find him fairly skeptical of the left-wing claims around privacy issues and the environment. The story illustrates how his relationships with the more idealistic women in his life and his straightforward sense of right and wrong guide him into fighting back against the government. He’s a recognizable and sympathetic character, and exploring his politicization is captivating and adds a genuine New Zealand take on otherwise familiar genre tropes. This is qualified by the story being an indisputably Pākehā one, with explicit references to Dunedin’s Scottish heritage. A whole different novel could be written within the same world about the Maori separatists referenced in the far-away North Island. That said, the voice of John and the unfolding of the plot through the journal entries make the book an enjoyable read.
The political predictions in the novel aren’t always successful. Two years after it was written, in 2016, John Key abruptly stepped down as Prime Minister and National ultimately lost power in the 2017 election. He and Brownlee have not become permanent dictators. Political concerns have changed as well — although we’re hardly out of the woods on surveillance and internet privacy, the nature of that debate has changed to become more about the role of big data and internet monoliths like Facebook and Google. Environmental consciousness seems to have increased. One smaller feature of the dystopia is a bit more prescient — there are sporadic mentions of deaths from “monkey flu” which at some time or another appears to have swept through New Zealand. No global lockdowns are mentioned though.
But asking whether science fiction accurately predicts the future is generally missing the point. The political thesis of the novel is better found in John’s observation “it was obvious we were now living in a kind of casual police state, if there can be such a thing, a police state kiwistyle”. John Key’s style of political communication was generally to project a relaxed demeanour and minimize the sense that anything really significant was ever happening. Just a bit of surveillance, a few soldiers in a war, a bit of poverty, a bit of damage to the environment — nothing serious going on here. Although failed statements like “the Moment of Truth” didn’t help, progressive political movements generally struggled to succeed in provoking outrage at any questionable policy direction the Key government took because it was difficult to project earnestness against this “everybody relax” communication style. Temple’s book poses the idea that this could easily develop into a full-blown police state if we just went along with it. I don’t think his take would bring around many people not already convinced that John Key was basically evil or incompetent. To me, the greater issues of the Key government were in the problems that were unnecessarily allowed to continue at the time, such as increasing poverty, the worsening state of the environment and the erosion of public services. I’m not saying the dystopia in Temple’s book couldn’t exist, just that it’s not an obvious extension of Key’s politics. The novel wasn’t popular enough for its political message to be influential at the time, and I think it might have been better for Temple to give his fictional political villains more of a life of their own, so the writing could be more about the ideas than distract the reader with obvious references to real-life politicians.
On the other hand, MiStory does convincingly depict a world where New Zealand can’t escape global problems. When it came to environmental or geopolitical problems, the Key government tended to lean on New Zealand’s lack of influence — notably when it came to climate change, where our low emissions and lack of global action became an excuse for rolling back environmental policy. John comes across as the kind of guy who might have agreed with this attitude, but he simply can’t ignore the problems when he’s fought in wars and confronting Scottish refugees. By showing us the world through his eyes the novel’s depiction of the problems arriving on New Zealand’s shores is made believable. That message of interconnectedness is still relevant, whatever happened in the election in 2014.
