Science fiction and climate fiction: contemporary literatures of purpose
The way we believe in the future is intrinsic to the fabric of our storytelling. Authors utilise imagination to situate readers in a different place and time. Science fiction authors are often required to craft and shape entire new worlds complete with functional cultures and economic systems in order to render future projections engaging and believable. Such a skillset is invaluable as we come to the point of requiring new approaches to life on a rapidly warming Earth.
Yet science fiction has a poor track record of accurately predicting the future. Some authors proved more prescient than others: Jules Verne anticipated lunar modules and splashdown capsules in in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and the Nautilus of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) predated modern electric submarines.
HG Wells gave us the battlefield tank in The Land Ironclads (1903). The World Set Free (1914) forewarned of nuclear weapons. John Brunner’s 1968 Stand on Zanzibar included satellite and on-demand TV, laser printers, electric cars, the EU, and the collapse into decay of Detroit. His 1975 The Shockwave Rider presented the accoutrements of computer-dependent surveillance culture back when most computers didn’t even have monitors.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer is arguably the most influential science fiction novel of the past fifty years in that it not only imagined but helped shape notions of cyberspace.
But, Gibson’s work aside, generally a lack of broad cultural impact rendered even successful science fiction imaginings useless as innovations or cautionary tales. Genre taint from science fiction’s lurid pulp heritage entrenched widespread belief in the material’s juvenilia and thus excluded science fiction from much intellectual literary discourse in the wider community.
Science fiction has, almost fatally, failed to conceive of the shaping of the future in grand engineering terms. It missed the transistor, the transformation of the entire world through the rise of petrol-fueled cars, the mostly non-violent fall of the Soviet Union, the end of indoor smoking, the fact that the carbon released since the Industrial Revolution could blow an unforeseen carbon budget, and that the process of creating transformative technology introduced a planetary limitation: that of sustainability.
Not all science fiction is set in the future, nor has its main function ever been to predict future events, societies or technologies, but, rather, to contemplate possible outcomes and to highlight fears contemporary society has about itself and where it might be heading.
By its very nature, science fiction needs to be rooted in plausibility. It promotes or reflects reality and reason. By imagining future scientific developments, science fiction creates the conditions for emergence and commentary on the consequences of certain technological pathways and their likely cultural impacts.
If there’s one thing science fiction definitely excels at, it is imagining what might possibly go wrong, highlighting potentials we ought to fear, the dangers and the possible catastrophic outcomes of technological, scientific and even sociological and political trends.
Lack of global response to the imminent threat of climate change is sometimes blamed on a failure of societal imagination. This despite the fact that science fiction has been imagining various forms of environmental catastrophe since its Pre-Golden Age. The ecocatastrophic alarmism of the 50s–70s focused on the horrors of overpopulation and pollution. Anxiety about pollution and global warming spiked when nuclear fears subsided after the Cold War.
Recent years have seen an unsurprising surge in the popularity of post-apocalypse and dystopian fiction in tandem with rising concerns about global issues such as climate change, the potential of weaponised pathogens, unregulated synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, autonomous combat weaponry, computer hacking, terrorism, species extinctions, religious fundamentalism and the widening gap between rich and poor.
Right now we appear to be standing ankle deep on the threshold of planet-wide human-induced disasters that appear inevitable. Global catastrophic and existential risks make our world seem smaller than ever. We are bombarded daily with news reports and data, but facts and figures are not enough to stir people to action. Never have we had more information at our fingertips, and yet cultures of practical denialism persist. Lack of immediate effect creates a false sense of security and the inability to visualize problems that will impact hard on future generations and locate their source in our own actions. We’re more afraid of losing what we want in the short term than facing dangerous obstacles in the distance. These are failings of culture, not of science.
It is unsurprising to see these rising threats resonating through our art. After all, conflict is the engine driving narrative fiction. In literature as in life, it’s easier to break things than fix them. It is too tempting to view relentless post-apocalypse and dystopian scenarios as a form of contempt pornography. Easier to describe the Earth flooded or parched barren than experiment with solutions, or envision adaptations and alternative pathways such as building new energy economies or the wholesale transformation of quarterly late-stage capitalism.
Traditionally, post-apocalypse stories are less about the end of the world than about overcoming and surviving it. Dystopias highlight heroic individuals gaining agency and fighting corrupt systems, serving as romanticized ciphers for our own personal life struggles.
While much mimetic fiction traditionally focuses inwards on individual identities and challenges, both science fiction and climate fiction take on the task of envisioning physical and cultural landscapes facing uncertainty through processes of transformation and adaptation. Indeed, as humanity becomes more and more integrated and inseparable from technology, the boundaries between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction are becoming increasingly meaningless for readers.
Climate fiction focuses on anthropogenic climate change rather than random natural unstoppable ecological catastrophes, such as supervolcanos, solar flares or large, Earth impacting meteorites. Emerging initially as a subset of science fiction, climate fiction straddles genre boundaries: science fiction, utopia, dystopia, fantasy, thriller, romance, mimetic fiction, nature writing, and the literary, from fast-paced thrillers, to inward looking present day narratives and even historical fiction. It uses real scientific data to translate climate change from the abstract to the cultural. As the field grows, it is expanding its parameters and becoming a contemporary literature of purpose and revolution, forming a bridge connecting scientific information with people preparing to face an uncertain future the past can no longer be relied upon to guide us through.
William Gibson reminds us that all fiction is speculative. Climate change is happening now, and we need a literature of now to address its issues as glaciers melt, corals bleach, typhoons kill and forest fires rage. Climate fiction highlights the hard-impacting economic and interpersonal realities of climate change, encouraging us to understand it as a problem we have brought upon ourselves and that changes to our economic and energy systems are required if we are to survive it.
Canberra, Australia
October 2017