The 1% view will kill us all

02. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change, COVID-19, Science Fiction
A wide angle picture of the Birmingham Catacombs
Some tombs which could do with being visited more often: The Birmingham Catacombs – excellent tour available at Birmingham Walking Tours

I am currently reading The End of Everything by M John Harrison, which I will be talking about at greater length in a future post. But one aspect I want to pick up now is how the response of the characters to the disappearance of many of the familiar landmarks post apocalypse is to lose their cognitive bearings. Thoughts come and go, often not joined up. They struggle to understand what other people are saying to them.

I think this is a much under-explored aspect of a period of change. Our ability to think about what is going on, to plan, to anticipate is affected. Many of us experienced this during the pandemic. Psychology as a discipline changed significantly as a result of World War 2.

This is also an aspect that speculative narratives like this one often miss. Told from the vantage point of 2100, it has humanity in despair in 2046:

I imagine that today’s world must have seemed like an impossible dream in 2046, when my parents were born in Charleston. Then, an estimated 60 million people had just died in the Great Hunger. The world had warmed by 2 °C, relative to its average temperature in the late 19th century. Ecosystems were collapsing, led by coral reefs.

Instead there is a scenario of an international climate agreement (“The Geneva Climate Compact”), followed by accelerated climate breakdown leading to emergency geoengineering (mostly solar radiation management) which stops global warming by 2080.

International agreements, emergency sessions of the United Nations (even the idea that such a session in 2047 would be the first such session since the pandemic!) and even the European Union is still present and correct in this otherwise devastated landscape. The problem with these sorts of projections is that everything the projector is not looking at (in this case everything except average global temperatures and their direct impacts) is assumed unchanged. Many climate models do the same thing. Indeed a perfectly valid use of climate models is to change one variable and keep everything else the same to try and measure the impact of that variable.

However to really think about the future you need to look to your novelists. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is a case in point. In it global sea levels have risen by 50 feet. Everyone lives in tower blocks connected by sky bridges which occasionally topple into the canals which were once streets.

I used to think that money markets would not survive events like this, but Robinson posits what I now believe is a more likely future scenario. The Intertidal Property Pricing Index is developed instead, carefully constructed to be reasonably stable despite the instability of the actual real estate being valued, and people bet on it. And soon everyone is fixated on what this index is saying daily rather than the buildings collapsing around them. This is exactly what our finance sector will do of course. There will be money to be made out of such activities after all. And so expectations that they will, in any way, be a leader out of the climate emergency are, in my view, unrealistic.

But also is the idea that our institutions as currently constructed will lead us out of catastrophe, or that a top down maintenance of international institutions will be a dominant feature of a post-apocalyptic world. Any plans we have for the future must be robust against the possible loss of central authority.

This does not lead us towards survivalist prepping, holing up in some remote area with canned foods, bottled water and armaments. As Alex Steffen teaches in his “ruggedization” classes:

I would put to you that if you find yourself in a situation where you’re having to let off some rounds to protect your canned goods, you’ve already failed, you have not understood the assignment.

It means the opposite. Remember another thing about the pandemic: people rose to the occasion, just as politicians sunk to it. People checked on the elderly in their neighbourhoods. In Birmingham for instance:

Within weeks of the crisis unfolding, near on 4,000 mutual aid groups registered on the mutual aid website with an estimated 3 million participants stepping forward to support their neighbours and communities. Widely heralded as the ‘early responders’ to the crisis, these groups – alongside thousands more neighbourhood groups – played a fundamental role in ensuring that local residents received immediate support.

This included “food distribution, errands, shopping and picking up prescriptions for those shielding”.

The truth is we all need each other, we all need back up and connecting with your local community is the most effective way that you can “ruggedize” your life. The characters in Harrison’s book have become isolated from each other.

In Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp makes the case that the collapse of the “Goliaths” (large imperial powers which dominate the landscape as now) are often linked with improvements in markers of human flourishing like height, life expectancy and equality. This is because, assuming you can avoid the violence associated with the groups scrabbling for status in the ruins of a collapsed state, the main contributors to that flourishing in the past have been local communities rather than at the state level. He worries that, in our current globalised inter-connected world (Ed Conway’s recent article about The 30,000-mile fish finger is one memorable example) this may not necessarily be our experience the next time. As Kemp says:

It is difficult to see through this fog of uncertainty which groups would fare best post-collapse. For now, being poor in wealth but rich in friends is a better strategy than being a suspicious billionaire under siege in a bunker. Not only that, but cultivating bonds of solidarity and mutual aid rather than ruthless self-interest means that the survivors are more likely to help recreate a world that is worth preserving.

If you want a thought experiment about what happens to the billionaires post-collapse, by the way, I recommend Naomi Alderman’s The Future and Cory Doctorow’s novella The Masque of the Red Death (not that one!). Both dark and hilarious in equal measure.

The future is all of ours to make, but we really need to think about it independently and not necessarily along the tracks that the political class funnel all discussions down. That is a 1% world they are discussing. I will leave the last word to Luke Kemp:

Our greatest achievements are not because of the 1 per cent; they are collective endeavours. As George Eliot once wrote, ‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts…half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ It’s time to drop the 1 per cent view and start paying attention to the unmarked tombs and unknown heroes upon whose shoulders we’ve built our world.

The Vogons are coming for Birmingham Science Fiction Group!

13. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Science Fiction
The Friends of the Earth Warehouse on Allison Street – home to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group since January 2024

Like many people, when I first heard about it, I assumed it was something to do with HS2. HS2 has been quietly munching its way through tonnes of cement, hard core, steel and oh-so-much-money that the site – part sandpit, part go kart track in appearance – has become part of the landscape on entering and leaving Birmingham. But no, this is in fact one of those unsexy transport infrastructure projects that have in the past seemingly been shelved whenever they had the misfortune to be located outside London as a result of the ever ballooning HS2 budget. It obviously is linked to the increase in traffic anticipated as a result of HS2, but as this video explains, this is an independent project whereby the already creaking rail capacity of Birmingham is to be expanded via a more coordinated use of New Street and Moor Street stations, with the traffic to and from everywhere else distributed via the newly constructed East and West Chords. At the expense of Bordesley station and a large swathe of Digbeth.

The scheme boundary Source: https://mrhalliance.co.uk/api/downloadAsset?id=cmr39z4olw57707mn1gf5kz4s

As you can see, the top left end of the X-marks-the-spot gash across Digbeth that describes the scheme boundary contains Allison Street, home of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group (BSFG) since Millennium Point kicked us out at the end of 2023. We were very grateful at the time, and remain so. As a not-for-profit, some might say even a shoestring, organisation there are many venues which are not accessible to us for the same reason that Douglas Adams (more from him below) didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day when hitchhiking in 1971: because we aren’t “in that financial league”. It would be a considerable struggle for us to find another home which offered us as much, including accommodation for disabilities and mobility issues in a central location within Birmingham, but was also in our financial league.

The parallels with Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are almost irresistible (and specifically the announcement of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council, that “the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition”) and Friends of the Earth have not tried to, from A (Weary) Climate Activist’s Guide To The Galaxy by Jane Charlesworth, to the Don’t Panic signs dotted about their website. The latter is a reference to the fact that we have until 2029 to campaign against the details of the plan, rather than the 12 minutes Arthur Dent got.

However the current consultation only lasts until 28 August and details of the current proposals and how you can get involved are here.

In addition to the Warehouse, venues on Lower Trinity Street, including Club Colette, The Night Owl, Luna Springs, XOYO, and Mama Roux’s are also under threat of demolition. Friends of the Earth are careful not to oppose the rail improvements in principle, as obviously anything that increases the capacity of public transport to replace private car use is an environmental win, but are confident that it would be possible to achieve the aims of the project with a significantly smaller project bootprint across Digbeth. They have approached the many groups operating out of the Warehouse such as BSFG to get involved in the campaign to revise the Midland Rail Hub (MRH) Alliance‘s (the consortium of Network Rail and a number of private firms which are driving the project) plan.

Since we moved to the Warehouse, the BSFG have brought numerous science fiction writers and others to Digbeth: from Peter F Hamilton to Alastair Reynolds, Claire North to Wendy and Tim Aldiss talking about our former Honorary President, Brian Aldiss. We have discussed everything from terraforming to the future for human lifespans to the history of Dungeons and Dragons. Celebrating our 55th anniversary this year, we had hoped to remain within the Digbeth community for many years to come, where even the graffiti makes us feel at home:

We understand that the Kilder bar under the arches at Shaw’s Passage is also under threat from these plans. This has been where we have taken our guests ever since we arrived in Digbeth, so has already become part of the SF legacy of the city.

There are obviously many more important groups than us depending upon the Warehouse’s continued existence – it currently houses the BRIG cafe (Birmingham Race Impact Group), Voce Books, Sprocket Cycles, Vivid Projects, BrumRadio and Digbeth Community Garden – but it is important to us. We will be responding to the consultation and hope that as many other people who care about this local resource do so too. It feels appropriate to leave the last words to Douglas Adams:

Many, many light years from here, indeed from anywhere, lies the grim and long abandoned planet, Vogsphere. Somewhere on a fetid, fog-­bound mud bank on this planet there stands, surrounded by the dirty, broken and empty carapaces of the last few jeweled scuttling crabs, a small stone monument which marks the place, where it is thought, the species Vogon Vogonblurtus first arose. On the monument there is carved an arrow which points away into the fog, under which are inscribed in plain, simple letters the words “The buck stops there.”

The inequality of redundancy

05. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Birmingham, COVID-19, Economics, Health, Pensions, Science Fiction

In October 2009, while working as a pensions actuary in Birmingham, I attended the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Joining Forces in Mortality and Longevity multidisciplinary conference at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. The canapés were excellent and, of the plenary speakers, I particularly remember Rudi Westendorp from Leiden University who, in response to the question of whether it was nature or nurture that was responsible for longevity, said it was both.

It was also the first and last time I have used a sleeper train. I had a trustee meeting on the Friday morning south of London and decided that it would be a good idea to get the sleeper from Edinburgh to London on the Thursday night. I hadn’t really researched it in advance and I suppose I was expecting a cabin to myself, but it turned out I was in fact sharing with a German guy who looked like he rode the overnight trains of Europe all the time. There was a set of bunk beds which took up most of the cabin and my memories of that night were of my being thrown around every time the train took a bend down the East Coast mainline, not sleeping a wink while my room-mate snored soundly throughout and then of his taking an annoying amount of time to brush his teeth in the morning. The trustees did not get me at my best.

But I digress. The session from the conference which has stayed with me ever since was by Eugene Milne from Newcastle University. As the blurb for his session A new model of mortality and survival stated:

A new mathematical model mimics patterns of mortality in species from nematodes to humans. Net risk, it suggests, arises from two components, an interactive element accounting for historical falls in human mortality, and redundant decay which shapes lifelong risk. This suggests “intrinsic ageing” is unrelated to the slope of the mortality curve, and is unlikely to have altered for humans in recent centuries.

Eugene Milne went on to become Director of Public Health for Newcastle and took them through the pandemic. The full paper in the British Actuarial Journal from 2009 is here.

At a time where actuarial mortality modelling consisted either of projecting observed trends into the future (with no real explanatory power for observed features like cohort effects) or attempted to project a range of causes of mortality based on the likely progress in treating them (which is limited by the quality of information on death certificates), Milne’s model stood out for starting from a biological model of gradually diminishing redundancy within the body. He recognised its limitations, as he said at the time:

As a bridge between actuarial and biological approaches to ageing it falls, as yet, between two stools. The examples in this paper are generated by probabilistic computer modelling. This is clearly not adequate for
actuarial use and the model needs to be developed further to provide a form that will serve that purpose. On the other hand, it describes (as noted in section 4) a biology that would be ‘needed’ in order to construct organismal risk as it is observed. This it does well, providing a coherent account of why mortality patterns appear as they do. Yet its theoretical ‘biology’ is at odds with currently favoured theories of ageing. If the biological quantity described in the NBM [nested binomial model] as redundancy exists, we do not yet know what it is, nor why it should appear to act in so sequestered and consistent a fashion.

But the idea stayed with me, and perhaps that made me particularly receptive to Richard Murphy’s recent article about allostatis, which he describes as “the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them”. As Murphy points out:

If something breaks, a wealthy person can simply have it repaired or replaced. If travel arrangements fail, alternatives can be found. If income is interrupted, there are savings to draw upon. Problems remain, because they always will, but they rarely threaten the stability of everyday life for a wealthy person. In other words, the amount of adaptation required of them is reduced.

There have been a number of attempts over the years to draw attention to how your level of income affects your ability to adapt to your environment.

In George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, he describes the effect of poverty:

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

However Orwell has been criticised, as the temporary tramp that he was, for deciding that meant the end of anxiety. More recently, Jack Monroe used Terry Pratchett’s example of Captain Vimes’ boots, to illustrate how what life costs depended on how much you already had:

A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.

Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.

Jack developed the Vimes Boots Index to highlight inflation in basic food products, which then persuaded the ONS to launch a shopping prices comparison tool.

But to return to the idea of redundancy: it is clear that if you have, say, redundant money which can be brought in to play when things go wrong, then things generally go much better for you. But imagine if you have used up any redundancy quite some time ago and therefore any reverse is a potential crisis. Your stress levels will be much higher all of the time, as your body tenses for the battles it knows lie ahead about anything from a car that won’t start to a boiler that packs up to a hike in the price of bus fares or the basic food products on the Vimes Boots Index. Day in, day out.

At the moment one of the differentials in redundancy is around heat stress. Housing which cannot be cooled without electricity which cannot be afforded. Day in, day out, for much of the summer so far. But in winter the same housing will need far more heating because its occupants cannot afford capital investment like insulation.

And the reason for this enormous inequality in the level of redundancy, is of course wealth and income inequality. The Equality Trust sets out the statistics as follows:

The UK has very high inequality of income compared to other developed countries; the 9th most unequal incomes of 38 OECD countries (OECD, 2022).

The UK’s wealth inequality is much more severe than income inequality, with the top fifth taking 36% of the country’s income and 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth have only 8% of the income and only 0.5% of the wealth according to the Office for National Statistics.

And this stress, day in, day out, means that people also die earlier, as shown below in the House of Commons Library research briefing on Inequalities in life expectancy, using ONS figures (and honestly they’re not picking on Blackpool):

And yet the most likely way for you to hear the word redundancy is when some company is planning to get rid of some of its workforce.

The trouble with people is that you don’t need them until you do, as Jonn Elledge has written here:

There are substantial differences between the US military and the NHS: but what both have in common is that, when they need something, they really do need it. The entire notion of “efficiency” is misplaced.

Similarly, in Nate Hagens’ latest interview, with biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant, they explore:

…how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the “safety net” of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation.

Until the resources stopped being so abundant.

And then there is the kind of workplace sustained redundancy programmes create, as Seth Godin says in a recent blog post:

“How few people can we get away with?” That’s a question many bosses think hard about. Automate. Streamline. Improve productivity and take humans out of as many tasks as possible. It’s a time-tested way to create profits and to increase a certain kind of reliability. Claude Code is popular with many organizations for precisely this reason.

“How can we include more people into this process?” is a less popular but often more valid way to create value. In an organization that is in the business of bringing insights, humanity and care to problems, more involvement from people creates better outcomes. The challenges make it far more valuable.

Which sort of organization would you like to work for?

And what sort of society do we want to have? One that supports the people in the bottom quintile with no redundant capital, so that they might have the resources available to maintain the stability of everyday life and reduce the adaptation required of them? Or one which keeps demanding more and more from those it allocates less and less of national wealth to. To quote from another Orwell book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, from the mouth of O’Brien, Big Brother’s Grand Inquisitor:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

I think we can all come up with better pictures of the future than that one.

Reservoirs: this raises the question of what is meant by “safe”

24. June 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change, Media & Politics, Regulation, Risk

This week I attended one of the National Emergency Briefing screenings near me. While I wasn’t a fan of the Celebrity Gogglebox presentation style, with Chris Packham on the sofa seeing what Jennifer Saunders and others thought about the climate emergency, it did give me enough of an idea about the individual presentations to want to follow them up, and there is a really good website to do so here.

The two points which struck me particularly were the following:

  1. Professor Tim Lenton warning about what would happen if the weakening Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) hit a tipping point which, in some models, “shows that London would be -20°C in three frozen months of the year, and Edinburgh would be -30°C in five and a half frozen months of the year. And yet the summers will still be hotter than today because it’s a 2°C warmer world.”
  2. Professor Hayley Fowler warning of the risks of mega floods: “These storms can produce two thirds of a year’s rainfall in just a couple of days. Over London, that would mean about 35cm of rainfall falling over a large area. A flood of this scale will be a national crisis. Recovery would take years.” She also warned that by 2050 1 in 4 properties – 8 million in England – will be at risk of flooding.

And since flooding often follows a heatwave such as the one we are currently experiencing, I thought I would look at the risk of long-term flooding in a bit more detail, which is when I came across the government’s check the long term flood risk for an area in England website. When you put in your postcode, it assesses your flood risk under four different categories:

It then explains how they measure the risk and the kinds of things which tend to affect it. All in all a good resource, and the modelling behind it is what the 1 in 4 properties at risk of flooding by 2050 is based on.

In July 2021, several European countries were affected by severe floods. The floods started in the United Kingdom as flash floods causing some property damage. Later floods affected several river basins across Europe including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania and Switzerland. At least 243 people died in the floods, including 196 in Germany, 39 in Belgium, two in Romania, one in Italy and one in Austria. It was thought that some of the affected regions may not have seen rainfall of this magnitude in the last 1,000 years.

A study using climate simulations on a grid of 2.2km squares published in June 2021 had come to the following conclusion:

Intense rainstorms are expected to be more frequent due to global warming, because warmer air can hold more moisture. Here, using very detailed climate simulations (with a 2.2 km grid), we show that the storms producing intense rain across Europe might move slower with climate change, increasing the duration of local exposure to these extremes. Our results suggest such slow-moving storms may be 14× more frequent across land by the end of the century. Currently, almost-stationary intense rainstorms are uncommon in Europe and happen rarely over parts of the Mediterranean Sea, but in future are expected to occur across the continent, including in the north. The main reason seems to be a reduced temperature difference between the poles and tropics, which weakens upper-level winds in the autumn, when these short-duration rainfall extremes most occur. This slower storm movement acts to increase rainfall amounts accumulated locally, enhancing the risk of flash floods across Europe beyond what was previously expected.

As Professor Fowler says:

Our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists. Raised reservoirs, drainage, housing and transport were designed many years ago when extreme rainfall was rare and less severe. As rainfall intensifies, risks such as dam overtopping and cascading failures rise.

The government also produces monthly reports on rainfall, soil moisture deficit, river flows, groundwater levels and reservoir levels. This includes a wonderful map of the year’s rainfall:

What struck me was that the report looked at exactly the same things (river levels, groundwater levels and reservoirs) but, because they were concerned with low levels of rainfall, did not even mention flood risk. The rainfall scale only goes up to >125mm rainfall within a month as a maximum, which looks hilarious when compared with the 271.5mm of rainfall over 48 hours in parts of Belgium in 2021.

There have been no new reservoirs built in the UK since 1992, just another one of the gifts of water privatisation discussed previously. The government announced last year that it had “seized control of the planning process” to build two reservoirs due to be complete in 2036 in the Cambridgeshire Fens and 2040 near Sleaford in Lincolnshire respectively.

Professor Fowler says the probability of dam overtopping is increasing. So how’s the review of reservoir safety going?

In 2019, there was a failure of a dam at Toddbrook Reservoir in the Peak District. The operation to pump water out of the reservoir to safeguard Whaley Bridge seems to have been dominated by concerns about the fish. The independent review commissioned into the incident identified the rather alarming fact that:

“…the reservoir and its Owner can be compliant with the legislation without the reservoir necessarily being safe.”

Among the report’s recommendations were the following:

  • There is a systematic review of how the current Reservoirs Act, and the associated Regulations and Guidance, are implemented. This should consider the roles and responsibilities of qualified engineers, whether compliance with the Act is sufficient to ensure safety, and how safety is formally assured.
  • The potential of an Inspecting Engineer issuing a Certificate of Safe to Operate be explored. This should include a review of practice in other safety critical infrastructure sectors. It should also consider liability implications and whether some form of qualifying statement may be needed to accompany the certificate.
  • The statutory maximum period between inspections is reviewed to determine if it is still appropriate in every case in the light of the ageing reservoir stock.

In his follow up report looking at the reservoir system in general in 2021, Professor David Balmforth made this extraordinary statement:

This raises the question of what is meant by “safe”. In other infrastructure sectors and with reservoirs in other countries, safety is assured by managing risk, and by reducing that risk so far as is reasonably practicable – the terms “reasonable” and “practicable” being well understood in practice and in law. For a reservoir, risk is defined as a combination of the likely failure of the dam (or other reservoir structure) and the impact that an uncontrolled release of water would have on the area downstream, particularly the likely loss of life. I have therefore recommended that in future the assurance of reservoir safety should be managed on the basis of risk, and that the amount of effort (and cost) associated with that process should be in proportion to that risk. In this way the public can be assured that the hazard posed by reservoirs is being managed in an objective and transparent way.

It would appear that reservoir management is playing catch up on the whole concept of risk management.

What has followed is a policy paper from the Environment Agency on the launch of a reservoir safety reform programme. However the public consultation on the proposed reforms has already been delayed until later this year. And the page about the consultation process does not suggest anyone is in any hurry.

Katabasis – following your PhD supervisor into Hell

27. May 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Book reviews, Education, Science Fiction
This review originally appeared in the May issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (lightly edited) by kind permission

This book is so many things: a work of fantasy, a literature review of every major work about the journey into hell, a love story, a wicked academic satire, a philosophical musing on the meaning of life and a love letter to Cambridge. Or perhaps the title itself, which means both a retreat to the coast, in this case to the banks of the River Lethe, as well as a descent into Hell. Like its Oxford counterpart before it – Babel – its central leap is that magic (here referred to as magick, ie the academic discipline stretching back to the alchemists and beyond) sits alongside the other subjects at Oxbridge colleges. The magic we see practised, taught, researched and dissertationed feels very mathematical. So we are unsurprised to hear that the mathematicians hate the magicians.

Alice Law is the Chinese-American PhD student of the great Jacob Grimes, who (accidentally?) sends him to Hell and then, with her once-friend-now-mortal-enemy and Grimes’ other PhD student, Peter Morgan, sets out to bring him back. So that Grimes can pass their dissertations, because that’s a good enough reason to journey to Hell and sacrifice half of your future lifespan. And so the quest begins.

There is quite a bit of mathematical fun had despite Alice not really knowing any mathematics, including an Escher Trap, a Penrose Staircase and a hyperbolic geometry which makes the quest very heavy going at times. And so many logic puzzles. Comedy and total horror are nicely juxtaposed throughout, as Alice and Jacob get to understand each other better and start to wonder whether Grimes is worth it after all.

The constant side swipes at the life of a junior academic are often hilarious. Magicians in training are apparently told by all their professors that they should consider careers in other fields or “alt academia”, as they called it:

“…no one really meant it when they said alt academia was just as prestigious (or, more commonly, that there was no shame in it, really). They meant it even less when they emphasized that alt academia paid better, had kinder hours, was less stressful, gave you better job security, made you happier. Oh, magicians do really well in consulting, they said. Employers like critical thinking and problem-solving skills, they said. Fewer people die in industry, they said.”

The most enigmatic character is their not-quite-constant companion, Archimedes the cat, who guides them when he feels like it. All the way through all eight of the Courts of Hell, alongside and across the Lethe and finally to King Yama’s Domain, on a journey which threatens to destroy Alice’s very sense of self. Her catechism, which she repeats at stressful moments:

I am Alice Law I am a postgraduate at Cambridge I study analytic magick

Alice has always felt that if she could just hang on to the delusions which had got her this far until the end of her PhD all would be well, but these turn out to be precisely the things she needs to confront if she is ever going to get out of Hell.

The Slow, The Shine and The Darkness

12. April 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Book reviews, Climate Change, COVID-19, Economics, Media & Politics, Science Fiction

This review originally appeared in the April issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (with light editing) by kind permission

A few years ago the historian Adam Tooze said the following about the times we are living in:

If you’ve been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.

The word he came up with for this experience was “polycrisis”. It described the interplay of the Covid pandemic, Ukraine war and the energy, cost-of-living and climate crises. To that we could now add Trump 2nd term, war in Gaza and now the Gulf.

I am reviewing this book while I have Covid, which has certainly facilitated the kind of inner focus which I think the book is asking for. Because Slow Gods is polycrisis in the form of space opera, but a curiously interior-monologuey kind of space opera, more psychological than boom-boom.

The premise, as Claire North set out for us at the Birmingham Science Fiction Group last June, is that a binary star system is due to collapse which will obliterate all life within an 83 light-year blast radius. Unusually, the populations in the vicinity are warned of this precisely 100 years in advance by a perfect black sphere moving through space at sub-light-speed and known by everyone as the Slow.

The Slow listens to everything, remembers it and will consider it.

We follow the story through the eyes of Maw, who has been killed and has recovered in such a way as to be very difficult to kill after that. Making Maw an ideal candidate for Pilot, the organic sentient needed in the pilot’s seat of any ship wishing to enter arcspace which lets it travel across the universe faster than light, at huge personal cost. Pilots die frequently and each planetary system has its own way of choosing and rewarding its Pilots. Only Maw appears to be able to act as Pilot again and again, which makes the people around Maw nervous.

The main thing about Maw which makes people nervous is Maw’s relationship with “the darkness” which reaches into any ship in arcspace, in many cases sending people mad. Maw, instead, becomes “curious”, exploiting a changing relationship and perception of matter in the darkness to do monstrous things. But, despite all this, Maw is still required to keep running missions, although usually with a mechanical assistant to keep Maw from getting “dysregulated”.

This unusual set up turns out to be a way of observing the psychology of the polycrisis with some clarity. The United Social Venture is an empire where its subjects acquired debt just from being born (measured in Glint):

Everything the Venture gave us – the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in – had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

This economic system was referred to as Shine. The Shine were one of the few systems which used prisoners for Pilot work.

One of the joys of the book is the exploration of difference, lots of details about avoiding giving offence when the Xi of Xihanna ask Maw to pilot a ship to Adjumir to bring out historical artefacts and Maw meets Gebre of the Haalo Institute. Maw finds that Normspeak is regarded as a very crude way of communicating and starts, haltingly, to learn Adjumiri (which is at least in part a click language). So begins a very moving love story.

Gender differences between systems are very striking. The Shine have only two genders – “he” and “she” – although the elite also have hé and shé. The most manly and the most feminine.

There are four genders in Xihanna, but they are not regarded as particularly important characteristics of a person and dispensed with once you know someone well. On Adjumir, there are eight, with very few Adjumiris remaining the same gender all their lives. These differences are picked out by the brilliant use of pronouns, a useful technique in a book full of characters. Even mechanicals, who have no particular interest in gender, are referred to as qe/qis as a mark of respect as “they do not wish to be put in the same category as a bowl of soup or a broken chair”.

We join Maw towards the end of the 100 year programme to evacuate the populations of Adjumir and Hadda to relative safety, with 800 million still on the planets and increasingly desperate. The Slow has effectively taken on a role as God through its massive databases, calculation capacity and sheer longevity. It seeks out Maw as it has plans for him. The Slow has been around so long that qe sees everything in the very long run. Which means that the emotional turmoil and intense highs and lows of individual lives are all averaged out to nothing. Qe calculates in terms of galaxy-level populations on the basis of what qe has come to think of as love.

What calculation would the Slow make about our world, with all our nation states and their often tiny differences blown up to justify war aims? Donald Trump certainly has to have the most Shine of any US President for some time.

Slow Gods moves slowly but relentlessly towards a showdown between Maw and Theodosius Rhode, the Executor of the Shine and executioner of his mother. There is much tragedy along the way and the ending is not straightforward but ultimately very satisfying. It’s an uplifting ride.

Talking Terraforming in Birmingham

08. April 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Birmingham, Climate Change, Media & Politics, Risk, Science Fiction
Front page of the April 2026 issue of Brum Group News

Three and a half years ago, I wrote a piece likening the rapid climate change on Earth to the fairly well-established science fiction concept of terraforming, but in reverse. So what has happened since? Well last summer, according to researchers at Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, two thirds of the 24,400 heat deaths from June to August across Europe were due to human-made global heating. And a study published last month has suggested that the pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015.

It this point I would like to suggest rehabilitating an old word to describe this process, in the opposite direction to terraforming (which is action designed to make a planet more habitable). Barrenize means to make barren or sterile and was used between the mid 1600s and the early 1700s according to the Oxford English Dictionary, originally in the context of animal husbandry. I think it’s time to bring this word back.

In a week when a US President has threatened, variously, “blowing everything up and taking over the oil” and that Iranians would be “living in Hell”, to last night saying that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”, unless they opened the Strait of Hormuz, it certainly sounds like a commitment to barrenization to me, only at a faster pace than the global warming he is already doing everything possible to accelerate further.

On Friday this week, the Birmingham Science Fiction Group will have Oliver Bettis as its guest speaker. Oliver has been a leading actuary in the field of sustainability for many years. He is one of the authors of a series of publications by the actuarial profession in collaboration with the University of Exeter in recent years.

Climate Scorpion shows how we need to develop a best guess about the worst-case scenarios and make policy on that basis, given our lack of knowledge about extreme climate risk and tipping points.

Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature sets out an approach to civilisational risk management which attempts to address the fact that the severity and frequency of extreme events are unprecedented and beyond current model projections.

Parasol Lost, which we will be discussing in particular this Friday, focuses on the cooling effect of aerosols: a side-effect of pollution from fossil fuel burning. Without aerosol cooling the global temperature would be around 0.5°C higher than the 1.4°C increase above pre-industrial temperature that we have today. It is critically important to recognise that, as air pollution is cleaned up, this may ironically lead to a short-term increase in warming through the loss of aerosol cooling. The question must be asked, can we afford to lose this cooling and if not, should this be replaced by working with nature, using technology or both?

This will allow us to tap into the rich history of science fiction literature on terraforming (and dealing with the threat of barrenization) and whether this can allow us to look at this question in a new way. It should be a lively discussion.

This event will be held in-person at the Friends of the Earth Warehouse, 54-57 Allison Street,
Birmingham B5 5TH and simultaneously on Zoom, with online access opening from around 7.45 for an 8 pm start.

Ticket prices for non-members are £8 for in-person attendance and £6 for Zoom attendance. For members it’s £4 in-person attendance and free Zoom attendance.

Tickets can be purchased on the door or via the Eventbrite link below:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1985958692911

And if this whets your appetite for more science fiction and you think you might like to join the group, just email us at contact@brumsfgroup.org.uk. Hope to see you there!

Peak Birmingham

12. March 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Media & Politics

I have lived in Birmingham for 17 years now, and worked here for 5 or 6 years before that. However I don’t think I achieved my peak Birmingham experience until the other weekend.

I had thought my peak Birmingham experience, probably never to be surpassed, was in November 2024 when I saw Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds on their Wild God tour at BP Pulse Live (formerly the Birmingham NEC) perform Red Right Hand (the anthem of The Peaky Blinders). Surely once you have been one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan designed and directed by his red right hand there is nowhere else to go?

But turns out I may have been wrong.

Last Saturday I headed out to the mess of streets that is Digbeth, partitioned from the persistent remnants of the HS2 project, walking past derelict post-industrialism juxtaposed with pubs, art installations and other small businesses and a big coach station. This is where the Birmingham Science Fiction Group operate out of, courtesy of the Friends of the Earth, but today I was headed for the The Institute.

The Digbeth Institute originally opened in 1908 as a mission of Carrs Lane Congregational Church and, despite its various rock venue reincarnations as the HMV Institute and, currently, the O2 Institute as well as formerly housing a club in its basement (variously operating as the Midland Jazz Club, Jug ‘O Punch Folk Club, Dance Factory and Barfly over the years), it retains an ecclesiastical air at times. It is a place to preach from the pulpit.

The preachers tonight are, first, Good Health Good Wealth (the singer, Bruce Breakey, with his arm hilariously in a sling, delivering lyrics with a poetic flourish alongside the guitarist Simon Kuzmickas), then Black Country duo Gans (Euan Woodman electric on the drums and Tom Rhodes on bass and vocals) augmented to a trio tonight by Tommy Schlugs on flute and saxophone. And, finally, the reason I came, Big Special.

The evening is given an extra resonance by the appearance of Bradley Taylor as MC. Bradley is a great poet and extraordinary performer of poetry for someone so young. I first saw him perform when the Hay Festival did an outreach event in Birmingham last year and immediately bought his book You Missed The Best Part. Between Good Health Good Wealth and Gans he does the one about his Nan’s funeral. Then before Big Special there’s Got A Light and the one where he operates between audience hand claps, which works brilliantly to introduce the band.

Big Special are a Midlands-based duo (singer Joe Hicklin, strictly from Walsall not Birmingham, which is important if you live in the West Midlands, and drummer Callum Moloney) who manage to combine absolute fury with tenderness and an emotional intensity just this side of sentimentality. I first heard them on Radio 6 (and the audience from there is acknowledged on the night by Callum, saying he can smell the essence of craft IPA and Stuart Maconie) and was blown away by God Save The Pony (“I hope you’re never tired, I hope you’re never lonely”) with its, for me, resonances of Neil Kinnock’s speech in 1983 just before Margaret Thatcher’s re-election:

I warn you not to be ordinary

I warn you not to be young

I warn you not to fall ill

I warn you not to get old

They are very loud, very sweary, but touchingly innocent too. Joe has a Chaplinesque quality to his stage presence which diffuses some of the tension racked up by the super-powered drumming and dance tracks. They act their way through the set, bringing on their manager Steve (as in “we’ve got to pay Steve” from their song Shop Music) as a money grubbing man who knows the price of everything.

The set ends with Shithouse, which they offer as our new national anthem. “Never in a million fucking years did I ever think I’d ever see your fucking face again” it begins. They come off briefly, then come back on, do one more song and then we have…a raffle! For Cancer Research. They have built up Steve’s part so much by this time that he actually gets booed while conducting a raffle for Cancer Research. The prize is a drum skin with, for some reason, the certified blood of the Gans drummer on it. The winner is upstairs, so the prize is frisbeed to him by Joe, narrowly avoiding decapitating another member of the audience in the process.

Source: Instagram – Official Big Special photo from the Birmingham gig

It is chaotic, fun and disarming. As they say:

We have been twice around the world now and what everywhere has in common is that it is totally fucked. And we don’t have any solutions. We are just two dickheads from the Midlands. But what we can do is join with you here to scream into the void.

Joe finally plays a bit of guitar at this point and accompanies himself on a beautiful rendition of Dragged up a hill. And then it’s all over.

This is music of the powerless. I recommend you listen to it.

Football’s coming home in the worst way

14. January 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Health, Media & Politics
The Sun attempts to get a new song going on the terraces. Still not going to be selling newspapers in Liverpool though

Disclaimer: I support Liverpool FC, so it is entirely possible that the following may be a slightly skewed account of recent football history and its implications.

Last week Manchester United sacked their manager after 14 months. Since Alex Ferguson left in the summer of 2013, United have now had 10 different managers (it was announced this week that Michael Carrick was coming back for a second bash at caretaker manager).

This is despite the fact that it is very difficult to establish whether changing managers helps, with most studies citing how many different factors are at play. One masters dissertation concludes that, although it may produce a short term boost, it is generally not enough to save a club from relegation from the Premier League. So why do it?

Surprisingly this leads us into something called Ritual Scapegoating Theory, first cited at least 60 years ago as a possible explanation for managerial succession in baseball. So changing manager may or may not make much difference to performance, but it does make everyone feel better.

And it may be that the catharsis of sacking a Special One every season or so is making Manchester United supporters feel better than the two FA Cups, two League Cups and a Europa League win (that they have managed in the 13 years since Ferguson left) have. In that time Liverpool, with just three managers, have won two Premier League titles and a Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup as well as an FA Cup and two League Cups. Manchester City, with just two managers in that time, have won seven Premier League titles, a Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup as well as two FA Cups and six League Cups.

In the previous 27 years when Manchester United had just one manager, they won 13 League titles, two Champions Leagues, five FA Cups, four League Cups, and the UEFA Europa League, Super Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup, and the FIFA Club World Cup and the Intercontinental Cup. The lesson Manchester United have learned from this apparently is not that they need to minimise manager turnover.

Chelsea are even worse. They have had 13 different managers over the same period. They sacked the current England manager Thomas Tuchel after just 20 months despite him winning them the UEFA Champions League, Super Cup and Club World Cup. They sacked Enzo Maresca after just 18 months despite him winning them the UEFA Conference League and the Club World Cup. That appears to be catharsis on steroids.

Now this doesn’t matter very much when it is just about baseball or football. Despite what Bill Shankly said, life and death and our politics more generally are much more important than football. My fear is that the view that we need to sack someone whenever we don’t get the result we want immediately is leaching out of football into everything else.

Nigel Farage’s favourite phrase appears to be that “Heads must roll”. He has deployed it about the head of children’s services in Rotherham over three children being removed from their foster families in 2012, the whole of the NatWest board when he was refused a Coutts account in 2023, unspecified individuals from Essex Police managing the demonstrations outside an Epping hotel last year, and also last year again feeling that some head rolling was in order in response to the Government’s national inquiry into grooming gangs.

Meanwhile Kemi Badenoch said in 2024 of civil servants “There is about 5 per cent to 10 per cent of them who are very, very bad. You know, ‘should be in prison’ bad”. Last week she called for the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police to go over the decision to ban fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from the Aston Villa ground for their Champions League match in November (which, hilariously, now appears to have been, at least partly, influenced by how badly Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters behaved at an entirely fictional game against West Ham United). Also in November, she called for the people involved in making the Panorama documentary about the Capitol Riots, to be sacked (another “heads should roll” headline). Also in November, she decided other BBC “heads must roll” over the decision to uphold complaints and reprimand a newsreader for altering her script from “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” on camera in a piece about groups most at risk during UK heatwaves.

It feels like the footballisation of public life. Farage and Badenoch are routinely reported as furious about something or other, in addition to the frequent demands for sackings, nearly always of public servants. They can clearly see there are votes in it, but the effects of this continuous vilification of public services and the people running them go way beyond that.

The immediate effect is often to make someone’s job untenable. So both the NatWest and Coutts CEOs left after the Farage complaint. The BBC’s Director General and BBC News Chief Executive both left soon after the Badenoch complaint. Now these are all comfortably off individuals who will no doubt be fine, but the impact on an organisation of the idea that any of its leaders could be hounded out at any moment, not through any regulatory process or indeed any process at all, but by someone in politics with a big mouth can be seen increasingly in our public institutions.

One example would be in the NHS. The HSJ recently published an article on the distribution of tenure of trust chief executives (it required four screenshots to show you just how long a tail can be!). Notice how it is not until half way up the 3rd screenshot (counting up from the bottom) that you find a CEO who has been in post for 50 months, and four of them are about to leave.

Source: https://www.hsj.co.uk/leadership/trust-ceos-time-in-post/7040645.article?storyCode=7040645

As Roy Lilley says:

Public reporting over the last eighteen months points to exits by:

  • NHS England CEO, plus
  • a cluster of senior national directors exiting.
  • At least 10 ICB chief executives stepping down or being replaced.
  • Trust CEO turnover approaching a quarter of posts;
  • implying 50 or more trust-level departures, including permanent and unplanned exits.

Taken together, a guesstimate is between 60 and 80 chief executives and equivalent senior leaders have left their roles across the NHS in the last eighteen months.

As he goes on to say:

High turnover at the top tells the rest of the system that leadership is temporary. Risk is unrewarded and survival matters more than stewardship.

Authority is put at question.

That encourages short-term-ism, compliance and caution. Precisely the opposite of what complex service reform needs.

For those fans of Manchester United’s way of running things who seem to be running things at the moment, that is a hell of a lot of catharsis. Evidence suggests that it is unlikely to achieve much else.

The catharsis never lasts, as at some point the music has to stop, and someone needs to actually be sitting in actual chairs, actually managing the thing. Just ask Chelsea and Manchester United.

Boxes

24. October 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Birmingham, COVID-19, Health, Legal, Media & Politics, Regulation, Risk
The warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark

In the year when I was born, Malvina Reynolds recorded a song called Little Boxes when she was a year younger than I am now. If you haven’t heard it before, you can listen to it here. You might want to listen to it while you read the rest of this.

I remember the first time I felt panic during the pandemic. It was a couple of months in, we had been working very hard: to put our teaching processes online, consulting widely about appropriate remote assessments and getting agreement from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) for our suggested approach at Leicester, checking in with our students, some of who had become very isolated as a result of lockdowns, and a million other things. I was just sitting at my kitchen table and suddenly I felt tears welling up and I was unable to speak without my voice breaking down. It happened at intervals after that, usually during a quiet moment when I, consciously or unconsciously, had a moment to reflect on the enormity of what was going on. I could never point to anything specific that triggered it, but I do know that it has been a permanent change about me, and that my emotions have been very much closer to the surface ever since. I felt something similar again this morning.

What is going on? Well I haven’t been able to answer that satisfactorily until now, but recently I read an article by David Runciman in the LRB from nine years ago when Donald Trump got elected POTUS the first time. I am not sure that everything in the article has withstood the test of time, but in it Runciman makes the case for Trump being the result of the people wanting “Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump.”. And this part looks prophetic:

[Trump is]…the bluntest of instruments, indiscriminately shaking the foundations with nothing to offer by way of support. Under these conditions, the likeliest response is for the grown-ups in the room to hunker down, waiting for the storm to pass. While they do, politics atrophies and necessary change is put off by the overriding imperative of avoiding systemic collapse. The understandable desire to keep the tanks off the streets and the cashpoints open gets in the way of tackling the long-term threats we face. Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.

And it suddenly hit me that this was something I had indeed taken for granted my whole life until the pandemic came along. The only thing that had ever looked like toppling society itself was the prospect of a nuclear war. Otherwise it seemed that our political system was hard to change and impossible to kill.

And then the pandemic came along and we saw government national and local digging mass graves and then filling them in again and setting aside vast arenas for people to die in before quietly closing them again. Rationing of food and other essentials was left to the supermarkets to administer, as were the massive snaking socially-distanced queues around their car parks. Seemingly arbitrary sets of rules suddenly started appearing at intervals about how and when we were allowed to leave the house and what we were allowed to do when out, and also how many people we could have in our houses and where they were allowed to come from. Most businesses were shut and their employees put on the government’s payroll. We learned which of us were key workers and spent a lot of time worrying about how we could protect the NHS, who we clapped every Thursday. It was hard to maintain the illusion that society still provided solid ground under our feet, particularly if we didn’t have jobs which could be moved online. Whoever you were you had to look down at some point, and I think now that I was having my Wile E. Coyote moment.

The trouble is, once you have looked down, it is hard to put that back in a box. At least I thought so, although there seems to have been a lot of putting things in boxes going on over the last few years. The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has made itself available online via a YouTube channel, but you might have thought that a Today at the Inquiry slot on terrestrial TV would have been more appropriate, not just covering it when famous people are attending. What we do know is that Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Advisor throughout the pandemic, has said that another pandemic is “absolutely inevitable” and that “we are not ready yet” for such an eventuality. Instead we have been busily shutting that particular box.

The biggest box of course is climate change. We have created a really big box for that called the IPCC. As the climate conferences migrate to ever more unapologetic petro-states, protestors are criminalised and imprisoned and emissions continue to rise, the box for this is doing a lot of work.

And then there are all the NHS boxes. As Roy Lilley notes:

If inquiries worked, we’d have the safest healthcare system in the world. Instead, we have a system addicted to investigating itself and forgetting the answers.

But perhaps the days of the box are numbered. The box Keir Starmer constructed to contain the anger about grooming gangs which the previous 7 year long box had been unable to completely envelop also now appears to be on the edge of collapse. And the Prime Minister himself was the one expressing outrage when a perfectly normal British box, versions of which had been giving authority to policing decisions since at least the Local Government (Review of Decisions) Act 2015 (although the original push to develop such systems stemmed from the Hillsborough and Heysel disasters in 1989 and 1985 respectively) suddenly didn’t make the decision he was obviously expecting. That box now appears to be heading for recycling if Reform UK come to power, which is, of course, rather difficult to do in Birmingham at the moment.

But what is the alternative to the boxes? At the moment it does not look like it involves confronting our problems any more directly. As Runciman reflected on the second Trump inauguration:

Poor Obama had to sit there on Monday and witness the mistaking of absolutism for principle and spectacle for politics. I don’t think Trump mistakes them – he doesn’t care enough to mind what passes for what. But the people in the audience who got up and applauded throughout his speech – as Biden and Harris and the Clintons and the Bushes remained glumly in their seats – have mistaken them. They think they will reap the rewards of what follows. But they will also pay the price.

David Allen Green’s recent post on BlueSky appears to summarise our position relative to that of the United States very well:

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