Imagining Geoengineering

 

Why 'skiffy' writers find it so hard to discuss climate tech.

By Jacob Brogan

 

QUOTE UNQUOTE: er THE RISE OF Cli-Fi

 

(Continued from Page 1)

 

The best representation of this dilemma plays out in a [rising new independent literary] genre that should, in theory, be ideally equipped to grapple with geoengineering. ....''Cli-fi,''  -- which is an independent genre separate from ''skiffy'' -- encompasses a body of narratives — frequently targeted at readers — in which the central conflicts derive from environmental concerns.

 In his new book Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future, the UK science communicator Brian Clegg acknowledges that these narratives almost invariably tend toward the apocalyptic, offering little room for more proactive possibilities. “Climate change rarely makes for enjoyable reading,” Clegg writes in his chapter on apocalypse, “but it has fostered many a disaster novel.”

Clegg noted on in a recent Tweet:
Brian Clegg (@brianclegg) tweeted at 6:59 AM on Sat, Jan 23, 2016:
@Cli_Fi_Books ''I have a wide enough definition of skiffy to include anything climate-related, especially if anthropogenic...''
(https://twitter.com/brianclegg/status/690670171065864192?s=03)
Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

 

Clegg has his own theories as to why cli-fi tends to focus on disaster and its wake. In our correspondence, he insisted that skiffy's apocalyptic fixations are primarily a product of filmic skiffy. Where “movie skiffy, which tends to go for the big spectacle, is over-dependent on large-scale disaster,” he wrote, “skiffy as a whole is a far wider genre, where you will get every possible shade of storyline.” But once you focus in on a topic like climate change, you need a crisis, a central concern to motivate that action. “You aren’t going to have a story based on the impact on human beings of pleasant beach weather,” he told me. Environmental collapse furnishes the necessary narrative drive, serving as the motor that moves the plot along, even if it doesn’t directly steer the story’s course.

Skiffy? see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiffy

 

Here, however, there’s a real risk that climate fiction’s pervasive negativity might actually contribute to broader cynicism about climate change. Some science-fiction writers and commentators argue that the genre has an ethical responsibility to help us imagine plausible scenarios for a better future. As embodied by the Project Hieroglyph, those who take this position—including writers like Neal Stephenson—aspire to resist the impulse toward dystopian visions in the hopes of helping us create a better world. (Disclosure: Project Hieroglyph is administered by Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination; ASU is a partner with Slate and New America in Future Tense.) The idea isn’t that we’ll realize the exact technologies that science-fiction writers dream up, only that those technologies might encourage us to focus on solving problems rather than meekly submitting to them.

Some have suggested that the very act of discussing geoengineering might serve a similar purpose. In an excerpt on Slate from his new book The Planet Remade, Oliver Morton writes: “Thinking about geoengineering is … an exercise in building up the imaginative capacity needed to take on board these deep changes the world is going through.” By generally declining to consider geoengineering, and tending toward the negative when they do, science-fiction writers may be limiting our ability to contemplate solutions. This