For those who missed it, or those who want a refresher, here
are the notes from ‘From The Bottom Up: The Fantastical World of Human Waste’
delivered at Loncon on 17 August, 2014.
Disclaimer: The words
that actually came out of my mouth may or may not bear any resemblance to the
original plan!
***
Hello and thank you to everyone who has not only stuck it
out until 9pm but also chosen to come to a talk about toilets over going to the
Hugo Awards Ceremony!
I expect this makes you all extremely intelligent interesting
and classy people, so I hope we’ll eventually get on to a rousing discussion
about the role of science fiction in inspiring new real world innovations. But
first I’m going to speak for a bit about why I pitched this talk, and my own
research into the subject.
I currently run London Loo Tours, which is a walking tour of
public toilets. The whole thing started as a joke. If you have been around
London you’ll know that a lot of the public toilets here cost anywhere from 20
to 50p to use… which if you are a poor and miserly student like I was when I
moved here can sometimes be dinner money! I thought the tour might last a month
and that would be that, but a year and a half later it is more or less my full
time job, and I have found the topic more bottomless than I could have
imagined. It encompasses such a wide range of topics; health, history,
sociology, anthropology, psychology…
(and many other things ending on –ology!)
But when a friend suggested I pitch a talk on the subject
for Loncon even I was initially a bit
stumped. In my experience science fiction and fantasy tend to be about space
ships and dragons… Not sewer systems and poo!
But then I came across the following quote from the website
of the Bill and Melinda Gates re-invent the toilet challenge which was launched
in 2011 to encourage engineers to find new solutions to global sanitation:
“Although we can fly people to the
moon, 40 percent of the world’s population - 2.5 billion people - practice open
defecation or lack adequate sanitation facilities.”
~ Dr. Doulaye Kone
I want you to picture the scale of the problem for a moment…
imagine that a third of you aren’t allowed to use the toilets in the ExCel
centre. When you have to go, you’re going to have to go outside and find as
private a place as you can. Most of you are going to end up practicing open
defecation (which in laymens terms means having a shit on the side of the
road.)
In 2002 the United Nations set a series of development goals
meant to be achieved by 2015. The most off-track of these is 7c: to halve the
number of people without access to a toilet. While sanitation is often the
under-valued ugly duckling compared to it’s much sexier cousin ‘access to clean
water’ it is one of the best investments a country can make.
A
lack of sanitation is the number one killer of children in developing countries,
and leads to decreased productivity and higher school drop-out rates,
particularly among young women.
Coming back closer to the world of Science Fiction: several
months back I saw an interesting headline in the Evening Standard:
‘Young engineers more likely to be
inspired by Iron Man than Brunel’.
A study carried out by Career Academies UK on students ages
16 to 19 had found that the young people tended to cite films such as Transformers,
The Matrix and Star Wars rather than historical figures having inspired them to
pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.
The article took a sort of despairing doom and gloom tone…
what a world are we coming to when young people care more about fantasy than
their history.
But I thought “AWESOME!!!” At last some validation that two
degrees and tens of thousands of dollars spent on learning how to entertain
people might be justifiable from the perspective of social good after all!!!
Science fiction tends to look outwards towards the stars,
and not back. But anyone who is suitably nerdy has probably at some point asked
themselves where the toilets are on the star trek enterprise.
“The brig aboard Starfleet ships
included facilities such as a sink and toilet, which were enclosed behind the
wall until needed. A sign above the toilet read "do not use while in
spacedock." (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)”
According to Jonathan Frakes during
the "Journey's End: The Saga of Star Trek: The Next Generation"
special in 1994, the Enterprise-D had only one bathroom and he proceeded to
point to it on the large cross-section of the Enterprise-D in the main
engineering set.
Or on the TARDIS… this one is harder to find answers to on
forums, but there have certainly been plenty of parodies due to the similarity
of the shape of the Police Box and the portable toilet! In fact there was an
interesting investigation in September 2013 on Tardis Toilet Hire…
a company which had been trading for 15
years. BBC carefully protect their logo and the name, which they trademarked in
1976, but the company argued that his logo was not in any way meant to resemble
the time and space traveling machine (okay, maybe it had a light on top and
windows, but it was
orange so
couldn’t possibly be copyright infringement.)
In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a zero gravity
toilet was included, complete with instructions for use. Descriptions include
devices such as a “Sonvac cleanser” and “the uroliminator.”
In researching this talk I also stumbled across several
forum threads on the flushable toilets in Mass Effect. (see here)
But toilets are usually thrown in as light relief. They
rarely take center stage.
While humans or aliens couldn’t function the same without
them, they are either too taboo to talk extensively about, or too mundane a
part of every day life to be included as key points in the story. So we have to
be content with the fact that they are there somewhere and function exactly the
way they are supposed to (as evidenced by the fact that there isn’t poo sitting
in the hallways or - in zero gravity contexts- floating through the ship!)
One notable exception to this rule of sidelining sanitation in
the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy is of course Terry Pratchett. Pick up
any of his disc world books and you will almost without fail find some
reference to a lavatory, cesspit, or dung-heap. He has even written ‘The World
of Poo” (a companion to Snuff) which features young Geoffery’s adventures
learning about the wonderful world of human waste.
The Pratchet character with whom I have the strongest
affinity is, of course Harry King… Piss Harry to his friends and King of the
Golden River to most others.
Harry’s fortunes are based from enterprises dealing in human
waste. To quote from The Truth:
“The real foundations of his
fortune came from when he started leaving empty buckets at various hostelries
around the city… he charged a modest fee to take them away when they were full
[… ] in a small way, making the world a better smelling place.” (The Truth,
107)
But Harry doesn’t stop there. The passage goes on to say:
“There is very little, however
disgusting, that isn’t used somewhere in some industry. There are people who
want large quantities of ammonia and salt petre.” (ibid)
It’s a model not dissimilar to the Roman urine collectors
who used to leave pots at the corners of streets, which they could then sell on
for tanning, dying and whitening teeth (there is excellent Latin poetry about
how if someone had a very white smile you knew exactly what he had been
gargling!) The practice was so common
that the Roman Emperor Vespasian actually imposed a tax on Urine in the year
70AD.
Pratchett’s sources are reasonably grounded in History. I
pestered his publisher awhile back to see whether he could enlighten me on the
matter and he very kindly wrote back to tell me that sources included Henry
Mayhew’s Labour and the London Poor
and Dorethy Hatley’s Water in England
(Not Vespasian as far as he knew… but I still think there is some resemblance
in the business model!)
Anyone who has read the Diskworld books will be aware that
Ankh Morpork bears a striking resemblance to 19th Century London.
This is, coincidentally or not, about the time when the flush toilet started
becoming popular. While the flushing toilet was in many ways one of the
greatest life-saving devices ever invented it also served to divorce humans to
some extent from their excrement.
Have you ever stopped to think about how cool toilets
actually are? You go for a poo or a wee in a porcelain bowl (and how often do
you even eat off porcelain), push a
button and it magically disappears never to be seen again (at least by you!) We
do this five or six times a day, flushing over a third of the clean drinking
water in the UK!
We can do this largely because in the year 1858 London faced
the Great Stink, when the pollution of two and a half million humans became too much
for the city to handle. It was a very hot June and the Thames heated up and
smelled so bad that the problem could no longer be ignored. The man called upon
was engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette who built London’s Sewer System, which
carried all the waste out of London to the east (where they still actually
dumped it directly into the Thames, but at least not in the city centre, and it
could be washed out by the tides.) This is the same system we still use in
London today, though it is now treated before it is released back into the
wild.
It was the beginning of a new revolution and sanitation as
we know it today, but the end of night soil men, gong farmers and urine
collectors, and in some ways the end of a natural and practical recycling loop.
There is a second reason I am fond of Terry Pratchett in
addition to his un-squeamishness when it comes to the scatological. It is the
way he constructs his worlds, and the rules which they follow.
A key idea Pratchett often speaks about is Narrativium.
“Humans add narrativium to their
world. They insist on interpreting the universe as if it’s telling a story.
This leads them to focus on facts that fit the story, while ignoring those that
don’t.”
(Science
of Diskworld I:233)
Narrativium is
how we make sense of which facts of our world to take into account. In
Diskworld things happen in particular ways because that’s how it makes sense for them to work. A commonly cited
example is that dragons breath fire not because they have asbestos lungs (or
similar such nonsense) but because everyone knows that’s what dragons do.
I find it singularly appropriate therefore that such a
practical approach is taken to bodily functions and what happens to the waste.
It makes a good kind of sense. It is a harmonious recycling loop, where
nutrients come back round.
As a general rule this sadly cannot be said of our
round-world narrative. Re-using our own waste is no longer seen as a natural
idea, but something rather odd and a bit gross.
This may well be changing over the next few decades.
Though no entrepreneurs have yet plumbed the depths of Harry
King’s monopoly on the market entrepreneurs are beginning to show an increased
interest in the subject. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s ‘Re-invent the toilet’ challenge not only
focused on finding new non-waterborne means of waste disposal includes a remit
to:
“[Remove] germs from human waste and [recover] valuable
resources such as energy, clean water, and nutrients.”
A current example of award winners are a group of researchers
at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory who have developed a means of charging
mobile phones using urine. The researchers say:
“One of the problems is going to be
people’s perception to actually using their own waste as a potential source of
fuel. There is a definite yuk factor.”
I wonder whether story telling might serve as inspiration
not only for engineers and inventors but for influencing our every day
behavior.
There are over 7 Billion people living on
earth. On average it is estimated that the world’s population can produce 2.8
billion gallons of urine in a day: enough to fill up 4,200 Olympic swimming
pools! So whoever can find a way to harness that resource and reuse it will be
onto something fantastic indeed!
I leave you with the following question, though of course
our discussion may take many additional directions!
1) How has science
fiction inspired you?
2) What role do you
think stories, films, games and fantasy worlds might have in influencing real
life behavior?
3) And of course just
for fun… any favorite science fiction toilet moments?
There followed a
hugely engaging 45-minute discussion with many contributors from the audience.
I was not able to transcribe most of it, but have included a very few highlights and
notes below (and may add more as time allows.) A tremendous thank you to all who shared stories!
Do feel free to continue the discussion
in the comments section, on twitter (@londonlootours #lonconloos) and over the
dinner table!
Further mentions of toilets/scatological in Science Fiction:
Babylon 5 includes a scene at a urinal.
Robocop includes a toilet scene (viewable here)... note the CCTV in the toilet!
The Martian by Andy Weir stars an astronaut, botanist and engineer stranded on mars who must improvise with the available resources (including human waste) to survive.
The Dark Light Years
by Brian Aldiss deals with human encounters with Aliens called the Utods who worship their own feces.
A further Terry Pratchett influence is The Specialist.
The mysterious origins of the word 'Loo':
The origins of the word “Loo” are frequently attributed to
the Medieval cry of “Gardy-loo” (derived from French “Gardez-l’eau… the polite
thing to shout before emptying a chamber pot out the window.)
This was called into question, and an audience member
supplied a link suggesting more recent origins.
Museums and
Exhibitions worth visiting:
Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke on Trent
National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC
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