Yellow Coal by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

A new energy source that can save the world from climate crisis and destruction has been discovered: yellow coal, the harnessed energy of human spite. But how long will it last, and what happens when people start to get happy? Written in the 1920s, and rejected by publishers for not being "contemporary", this surreal and darkly comic short story by the "unsung genius" of Russian fiction, describes an anti-utopia that resonates today.


1 - The economic barometer at Harvard University had continually pointed to bad weather. But even its exact readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its energies. Oil wells were running dry. The energy-producing effect of black, white and brown coal was diminishing yearly. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snow-caps, melted by the perennial summer, could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine-generators would stop.

The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun's yellow whips, it whirled round like a dervish dancing his last furious dance.

If nations had ignored political strictures and come to each other's aid, salvation might have been theirs. But adversity only exacerbated ideas of jingoism, and soon all the New and Old World Reichs, Staats, Republics and Lands — like the fish on the desiccated bottoms of erstwhile lakes — were covered with a viscous sheath, swathed in borders like the filaments of cocoons, and raising customs duties to astronomical levels.

The one agency of an international sort was the Commission for the Access of New and Original Energies: CANOE. To the person who discovered a new energy source, a motive power as yet unknown on earth, CANOE promised a seven-figure sum.

~ more... ~