The Onuissance Cells: The Age of Responsibility is Coming

Onus \n (ca.1640): Obligation; Responsibility.

Onuissance \ onn-uh-sonns\ n (ca.2280): Historic period known as The Age of Responsibility.

Science fiction has a long-standing tradition involving Earth in the future: Generally, it is depicted as a dirty, gritty, poor, polluted, corrupt, twisted place to live. Very often, the reason people go to other planets is specifically to get away from the scorched Earth. With only a few exceptions, Earth is usually the last place you'd want to visit, much less live on.

Not so in The Onuissance Cells. Maybe it was because I watched so much Star Trek as a kid... or maybe it's because historically there have been many times in which humans banded together, in the face of extreme peril, to improve their lot. And I'd like to believe that capacity is not yet lost in Man... not yet.

Today, scientists and environmentalists are struggling to make the world understand that our present rate of conspicuous consumption cannot be maintained, and in fact, must be cut back. We are severely taxing the planet's environment and resources, well beyond the extent to which we have burdened the planet in the past, and by all accounts, well beyond its capacity to heal itself now. At least, not without a cataclysmic environmental upheaval that our species, and many others, would not survive.

Some people have gotten the message. The current efforts to curb greenhouse gases and lessen our reliance on polluting power sources, to recycle and preserve valuable resources, and to mitigate the damage done to the Earth, are slowly making progress. From the Kyoto Protocol to An Inconvenient Truth, politicians are trying to get onto the same page, and work together to save our planet.

And in individual homes, people are experimenting with solar electricity and heating, homegrown fuels, hybrid vehicles, energy-efficient appliances, renewable and recyclable building materials and clothing, and more responsible lifestyles.

It's a start. It could be a better one, though... the Republican-dominated administration is pretending denial of the problem (financed, as they are, by the very culpable Big Oil and American Auto interests), and holding the United States back in its efforts to improve itself. And today, China is building an infrastructure that makes them look like the U.S., 70 years ago... including the wasteful and irresponsible planning, energy use and resource burning.

But sooner or later, the American people can take it upon themselves to rise up and say, "Enough is enough. It's time to clean up our acts, before it's too late," and they can vote for politicians that will act responsibly and lead us safely into the future.

I still believe that this can yet happen. The Onuissance Cells is my take on what living in America can be like, if we take the necessary steps. It describes an America that has significantly lowered its population, taken every effort to be more energy-efficient and resource-recovering, and found new ways to live sensibly upon Mother Earth. They have turned inward, while reaching out to each other, and they have created a working society on a healthy planet.

These are my earliest stories, written in the 1990s, well after the first environmental flags went up, but well before the recent public interest brought on by the Ozone hole, Global Warming, the Kyoto Talks, the wars in the Middle East, and the rising cost of gas at the pump. These stories were inspired by movies like Silent Running and Soylent Green, the monsters that haunted my generation's nights... and by the efforts to harness alternative energy in the 1980s that were so utterly and efficiently derailed by profit-minded Big Business, and the politicians in their pockets.

These stories provide some insights, and a few solutions, to help guide us along the straight and narrow. But most importantly, they show us the clean, efficient, happy kind of world we can have, without discovering cold fusion or dilithium, without going to other planets, without depending on benign aliens to land and help us out, without magic or miracles. This is a world created by Human Beings, working together, and taking responsibility for their past and present actions, and their posterity.

These short stories are free to download.