Page 49 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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 for-
eign 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:

Now to be quite frank, we simply want to make money, and incidentally, increase
the fertility of the world by turning deserts into paradises, for which, of course,
we should expect to be paid, though not extravagantly. As the work develops we
should also hope to put a stop to war . . . by just freezing the fleets of the belliger-
ents up in their harbours, and producing such a degree of cold on any given battle-
field that fighting would be impossible. (73–74)

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 Brit-
ish 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 ves-
sels 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 mil-
lennial reign of global peace and prosperity. The Syndicate is generally consid-
ered 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 fic-
tion, 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.

32 | StorieS of Control