‘It’s not climate change, it’s everything change’: sci-fi authors take on the global crisis
Some of the biggest names writing in the genre have tackled the climate crisis and its apocalyptic or dystopian consequences – Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather.
But a new generation of writers now believes it is impossible to write “near future” sci-fi without putting the climate emergency at the forefront of their speculative fiction. For many, this is because they are living through the crisis and can imagine all too easily what may happen if real-life behaviour doesn’t change.
A major sceptical criticism of the orthodox climate narrative is the fictional aspect. The last sentence is an obvious example - For many, this is because they are living through the crisis...
Nobody is living through the crisis because there is no crisis. We only observe what we have always observed - good, bad and normal weather. Sometimes the impact is serious, usually it isn't - as always.
The fictional aspect is interesting, as if there are people who do not want to see a clear difference between real life and fictional stories.
Why do so many intelligent people dislike the Guardian? It seems to be the stories. It is too obvious that they are stories, too obviously fictional for an adult world. It is embarrassing that adults read them and think they reflect a genuine aspect of reality.
7 comments:
One of the common themes in Sci-Fi a couple of decades ago was the world being run by big corporations - corporatism or neo-liberalism.
You would have thought that such stories would find a ready audience but for some reason few make it into print. I wonder why?
DJ - I read very little fiction published after WWII so I don't know the answer. I can't see publishers avoiding stories about a world being run by big corporations if they sell, but I can imagine such a story being very difficult to write without seeming stale.
Sci Fi used involve Sci.
Then it evolved into Fantasy. All rules went out the window.
Then Sociology became a "science."
End of story.
"It’s not climate change, it’s everything change"
I hear that sex change is very popular these days.
Doonhamer - as I remember it, the evolution of science fiction into fantasy brought an end to my interest in it. I'm often tempted to revisit older science fiction to see if it is as I remember it.
Sam - although it often goes no further than dressing up.
Although fascinated by sci fi stories as a boy (started when finding a tattered copy of The War of the Worlds on a caravan holiday in the 50's), leading to a voracious sci fi appetite, I eventually discovered that modern sci fi is ordinary adventure stories with different settings and began questioning them.
How did Wells' Martians, who had no hands, let alone ones with opposable thumbs, build the rockets and death machines?
How did his time traveller survive, when it would meant the earth, and the rest of the universe, accelerating through space, and why didn't he see the Morlocks as the slaves of the parasitic Eloi (future Nazis and concentration camp prisoners?) - something also suggested in Lang's "Metropolis").
How did Verne's lunar explorers withstand the sudden acceleration of being fired out of a giant cannon?
Even modern stories, such as Star Trek (Wagon Train in space) and Star Wars (every western film you have ever seen), fail to address how different species, are all at the same level of progress, living in earth like atmospheres and gravity, and displaying human characteristics.
Giant ants, spiders, and crabs wouldn't be able to move in an earth like gravity, as twice the size means four times the mass, and so on.
Politics, and 'the hidden menace' also played a part in sci fi stories and films, such as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" or the later version of "The Thing".
Would the lungs of the prehistoric monsters of Jurassic Park be able to cope with the much thinner present day atmosphere compared to that of the cretaceous period?
One of the best sci fi films I have ever seen was "Dark Star". No villains, no heroes, no politics, no hidden messages. Just a group of hapless innocents dealing with a decaying ship (where the toilet is backed up), a planet busting missile which develops consciousness, and a weird creature which keeps hiding (apparently made out of an inflated surgical glove!). Sheer bliss.
Penseivat
Penseivat - I began to pick holes in the stories too. Time travel doesn't make sense, how does a super voracious predator find anything left to eat? Why is the Dalek design so uselessly impractical? The Jurassic Park dinosaurs would probably run out of vegetation to eat and so on and so on. I always thought the Time Machine went much too far into the future because the Eloi were still too human.
I haven't seen Dark Star but I quite enjoyed Galaxy Quest.
Post a Comment