ADAM TREXLER tweets to Claire Evans:
| Adam Trexler author of ''ANTHROPOCENES FICTIONS''
@trexlera
| Aug 20 |
@theuniverse nice piece in the @guardiannews You might read ''Anthropocene Fictions'' (U. of Virginia Press) on same topics.
| |
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The Guardian oped by Claire L. Evans on ''the rise of cli-fi'' was not her headline, but the Guardian editor's headline and it was wrong she says, the opposite of what the piece was about, telling a friend: "the headline is misleading, and I didn't choose it. The piece is actually about the opposite.''
Margaret Atwood in Huffington Post: "Novelists, filmmakers and other creators have been registering these changes for some time. There's a new term, cli-fi (for climate fiction, a play on sci-fi), that's being used to describe books in which an altered climate is part of the plot."
 | Alex Trembath
@atrembath
| 9h |
"What we really need is more dystopian science fiction." I give up. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
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@TheUniverse aka CLAIRE L. EVANS says to Alex:
| 3h |
@atrembath ''the headline is misleading, and I didn't choose it. The piece is actually about the opposite.''
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GET ME REWRITE: In recent years the term cli-fi has emerged to refer to works dealing explicitly with climate change. Margaret Atwood has championed the term, which has since been applied broadly, and even retroactively, to writers like JG Ballard and Jules Verne. Cli-fi, with an emphasis on global warming and its attendant anxieties, goes some of the way toward the ideal of ''Anthropocene Fictions'', a new academic book by Adam Trexler, PHD, in Oregon, but it’s too narrow a designation. Even the books most often cited as examples of cli-fi – Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Paolo Bacigalupi’s THE WATER KNIFE, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake – address issues beyond climate change. They envision futures dictated by human recklessness: as Atwood said this year in an interview with Slate, it’s not climate change; it’s “the everything change.”
GET ME REWRITE: The point is that ''Anthropocene Fictions'' by Adam Trexler isn’t just about science fiction; nor is it just about cli-fi. It’s both those things and more. It is all the stories we should tell our children: near-future tales of ecological systems, collapse, responsibility and possibility along with visions of long-term cohabitation with our own environment. The point is to show them not just how the story ends but how we might get through the middle – while we still have a shot at changing it.
GET ME REWRITE: The stories we tell ourselves can help us understand, and maybe even adapt, to this new world. But the dour dystopias and escapist fantasies of our current science fiction diet just won’t do. We need something new: a [new form of genre] fiction that tackles the radical changes of our pressing and strange AGW reality. We need [cli-fi.]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/20/climate-change-science-fiction
01"Sci-fi" has often been a pejorative term. Even if not intended pejoratively, its use suggests to sf fen [sic] that the writer/speaker is not very familiar with the genre.
Some climate-fiction works:
J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World
J. G. Ballard, The Burning World
Ronald Wright, A Scientific RomanceReply |
01This is bloody amazing. Do it for one climate change gas and there will be ways found to do it for all. This is not a licence, this is a breakthrough in its embryotic state but please, let's follow it! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b065xcgyReply |
01One of the most prescient books I read about the climate eco-geddon was Whitley Streiber's 'Nature's End'. Not only because it picked up on many of the fears of the current global warming consensus very early (it was published in '87 or so) but it also predicted the internet (calling it the 'dataweb' as I remember). The main character is a licenced 'convictor'. A 'conviction' in this context, being the creation of a virtual representation of a politician's personality and belief system, based on all available information about him/her, that will answer any question put to it by a member of the public, fully and honestly.Reply |
12I'd say the best climate change book is already in the public conscious. Game of Thrones perfectly encapsulates the uncertain but overwhelming danger that climate change poses (the others/white walkers), and how few people understand the implications of it and how even fewer are willing to do the necessary to prevent (really only Jon Snow, who doesn't know anything anyway).Reply |
12Just off the top of my head, here's three SF oldies
Make Room, Make Room!
The Word for World is Forest
Dune
from the Sixties that deal with ecology, the environment, and human impact.Reply |-
23So you want to start by rewriting Atlas Shrugged, to show the poor dying at the hands of the rich, to show that the rich are parasites that die when they kill too many, that the rich are not immune to climate change but must drain the poor all the more to keep up with it, that Ayn Rand's vision of luxury and ease for the rich is true - at a cost she conveniently ignored, that as the last of the poor and the last of the environment are consumed, the rich have nothing on which to feed but each other. And cannot stop, even if/when they realize, for by then there will be nothing renewable on which to rely. Perhaps the last few generations will be in agony, finally understanding a fate that was the choice of their ancestors. Maybe not, the Maya and Khmer rich reverted to primitivism rather than face facts, although some Mayan descendants appear to now actually get it. Mind you, they'd not totally destroyed their worlds, just mostly. There was enough left for them to actually endure.
The global elite won't get that chance. The seas will be toxic to fish, severe droughts in some regions and severe floods in others will wipe out much of the flora. The rest will be cut down to make way for shopping malls. Animal life will virtually cease to exist from the heat, the storms and the loss of primary food sources. By 2100, the rich will live in reinforced concrete bunkers underground, relying on hydroponic farms. All other life will be deep ocean life around volcanic vents. Even they will be suffering, though. It's difficult and dangerous to migrate between vents, although it can be done. Nobody is sure quite how, though. But it's going to be sensitive to conditions. Change the density and pH of the water and the journey may become impossible.
With increasingly unreliable power, no possibility of any maintenance of any kind, and severe genetic bottlenecks, life for the rich won't be much better. Standards will deteriorate within two to three generations. The population will then rapidly collapse from fighting and genetic diseases. The rich can't make, they can only take, so survival depends on pillaging. Once there's nothing left to pillage, no further maintenance is possible and no further supplies can be gathered. Death is inevitable.
In her story where the man wanders off from the collective and calls himself I Am, best to extend that to where he starts suffering rickets and iron deficiency so murders other wanderers and uses them as food sources. He has no skills, no imagination and no tools, and hunter-gatherers never fare well when solitary. He has no choice but to rely on easy prey.
The problem with this is that a cannibal tribe can't expand for very long if relying on random victims. At some future point, they must plunder the city he came from. To avoid retribution, this means total extermination of all men, women and children. Either the attackers fail or the attackers succeed and die when the food runs out.
Ayn Rand always used cardboard stereotypes and made them extreme. Extreme is great, because if you extrapolate, the results are always violently terminal.Reply |
12Thanks for the interesting link Paul.
I think the question the author is trying to explore is perhaps the cost of all this progress. The challenge now is to make this sort of progress without irreversibly drawing down on natural capital. If declining death rates have been partly due to availability of cheap fossil fuels, then it has come at the cost of endangering the ecosphere. So what looks like progress now might not look so good in 200 years.Reply |
01The challenge now is to make this sort of progress without irreversibly drawing down on natural capital.
Why now? What makes now the time to do it and not any time in the last 5,000 years?
So what looks like progress now might not look so good in 200 years.
Can you name progress that fits your description?Reply |
45A new kind of science fiction? In the 1970s I was reading SF describing an Earth destroyed by climate change and/or population growth. The science goes back to the 1970s - certainly the UN-commissioned working party I first read published then. So, nothing new then.
But fiction comments on the scenery - it is science and engineering that alter that scenery, and politics and economics that orders and pays for it. So what we need is not a new kind of science fiction, but a new kind of economics and politics. We have already lost the chance to hold global warming at 2 degrees C, and there is a good chance that we have missed the chance to hold it below 4 degrees C. If that is the case, nothing you say or do will make any difference - this is the end of anything recognisable as our society and possibly our species. Ah well. You can write the epitaph of a rather stupid ape - but do it in advance, because no-one is going to care when the time comes.
If only we had done something about CP Snow's two cultures, hmm?Reply |
12Well, maybe. The latency in global warming is such that nothing we do will be reflected on the global level for 20-40 years (at best). The Amazon, without direct assistance, will take a further thousand to recover, as will the African forests. These carbon sinks are vital to a full recovery.
Humanity stands the best chance of survival if we can halve global CO2 output by the end of the decade and eliminate all fossil fuel production and use by 2050. To do that, fusion research has to reach a breakthrough within 10-15 years at the latest, and coal and gas plants must be replaced by short-term fission reactors.
To achieve both those goals, the current US Congress must approve a two trillion dollar increase to the deficit limit, with one trillion being delivered to each of the two technologies over ten years. That's the kind of money needed.
Technically, yes, that is possible. In practice, convincing global warm deniers that they need to spend trillions on eradicating the very industries that pay for their re-election, in total violation of the closely-held superstitions of their entire voter base... Good luck.Reply |
34A book that might fit the article's description, and one that I enjoyed very much, is Rivers by Michael Farris Smith. The Gulf Coast of the United States has become so bad, with one hurricane after another and never ending rain, that the government has given up on it. Those who refuse to evacuate are left with no police, no fire departments, no military, and only theft or the black market for things like gas or batteries.
It happened to be raining a lot when I read this book. The book scared me so much that I was jumpy whenever it thundered and I thought, "It's coming."Reply |
01When today’s sci-fi blockbusters address ecological issues, they tend toward the dystopian. Mad Max: Fury Road is an unflinching portrait of the world after water; the frozen tundra of Snowpiercer is the consequence of a failed climate-control experiment; even Godzilla rises from a warming sea. But purely apocalyptic stories don’t help us reckon with reality’s slower, but equally devastating, emergencies – forests that vanish acre by acre, sea levels that rise a few millimeters each year, demand for consumer goods that gradually leeches the planet’s resources.
I'm in the midst of writing a new novel at the moment where submerged urban zones have become utopia rather than dystopia. The future is not always bleak, but it is always... unexpected...Reply |
12Much of recent science fiction has been about climate change.
It certainly has not been ignored. The majority of it now takes
place 200-300 years from now after the earth has been rendered
near uninhabitable. Generally people are not tying to prevent or
adapt to climate change. They are merely trying to get off of this planet.
I read about 1 book with these scenarios every month.
Currently, I am reading Stephen Baxter's 'Proxima' (2013).Reply |
12Well, I admit that my post that you can stop disaster by spending a couple of trillion on developing fusion and building (very rapidly) lots of fission reactors is unrealistic. Not because of science or technology, but because that's not how right-wing governments do things.
Oh, and you need large amounts of very pure vanadium, but as soon as you can generate vast amounts of energy, that's easy.
Scrubbing the atmosphere is difficult, but it might not be necessary. Enormous amounts of electricity and zero fossil fuel usage (globally, for anything) by 2050 is achievable. The problem is, by postponing any real solutions since this was first known about (1890 for the theory, 1963 for experimental evidence), there's less available time to make a much bigger difference, and that costs a lot more money.
Although I'm speculating on a couple of trillion, it would probably be a lot more than that in practice. Every country in the world, including ones nobody likes, would need a nuclear reactor in every city. Built very, very fast - about half the normal construction time. The power grids would need improving accordingly. And the people in those nations would need rapid education, as they'd need convincing to shut down ALL coal and gas power plants. That's not going to happen if they feel a foreign power controls their energy.
It's probably going to be closer to a quadrillion dollers before it's all over. No individual nation is going to invest that sort of money. (Hundreds of quadrillions were traded in derivatives at any given moment in 2007, but that's ok because that was to get rich quick, not save the world. The fact that the world didn't have that much didn't matter, because you could borrow against predicted earnings of future derivatives, which were always for more than the last lot and therefore always paying for it.)
However, one could reasonably argue that the future earnings of a dead planet are zero, putting a dent in profits, and that this is a bet against global future earnings, putting (say) western civilization up as collateral. That should be sufficient to convince the banks to provide a loan big enough to get fission everywhere and working fusion in a significant number of places.
But to pay off a loan that large, education would need massive improvement. You've basically got until the first repayment is due to increase GDP three orders of magnitude. The energy will help, but to get the advances in science and technology, you need the education.
There's no inflation risk if there's an equal sized deficit, since the sum total in the system hasn't actually changed. It's a bit like quantum foam, the money is merely a statistical anomaly, it doesn't exist in aggregate. It's how national deficits work (which is why countries should never live within their means) but on a much larger scale.
The hole naturally grows, due to inflation, and in order to keep the sum at zero or positive, the cash must grow just as fast or faster. Which it's allowed to do in the financial equivalent of Hawking Radiation.
However, any hesitancy or religious distraction would spell doom. It is extremely likely America, France and Italy would be owned by the banks at some point. They'd be debt slaves until they'd paid their way clear or unless others paid for them. Britain should be in the clear but would likely run very close to the line. Germany is also likely to be on the edge. Spain and Greece would be fishing bait.
But the world could be saved. To actually save it would require some global engineering, but you'd actually have the time and the energy to do the work.Reply |
01You have completely forgotten that the Greenpeace-Guardian partnership
will not accept any kind of nuclear power. They also don't want to see any
new hydro dams on the planet. Current dams should be removed, the land
reclaimed and given back to the serfs. For health reasons they don't want
people in developing countries using cattle dung and wood for cooking and
heating. And of course, no fossil fuels.
We must concentrate on improving the 1% of global energy supply that remains.Reply |
23Here we go: The Wounded Planet edited by Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd, 1973 with an introduction by Frank Herbert. An anthology of science fiction about the 'ecological crisis'. Contributors include Robert Silverberg, AE Van Vogt, Poul Anderson and Andre Norton. Screenwriters could probably find lots of material in need of technological updating but still solid when it comes to the basic science. For some hard background check out Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward (Ph.D Paleontology), published in 2007.Reply |
23I initially thought the header was 'the state of climate change science is so dire....' but then i got it. Another narrative and fiction will solve everything.
How about:
a) admitting science is inherently uncertain on subjects this complex
b) not resorting to instant ad hominem with anyone who disagrees with either the prognosis or (and this one i find truly bizarre) agrees with the prognosis but suggests different solutions.
Then you might get closer to a majority pushing for policies such as those you think are necessary.
I honestly don't know enough about the 'science' to know if its right or wrong but i know enough about human nature and scientific inquiry to know that if a AND b are present there is some profoundly faulty thinking at work, so i can trust neither prognosis nor solution until i see something different.Reply |
23You want something different? I can show you something!
In 1856, Eunice Foote, a climate researcher, preformed experiments using 2 identical glass cylinders, with thermometers suspended inside, one with normal air, the other had CO2. When exposed to Sunlight, she found that the cylinder with CO2 got much hotter inside. So the CO2 was heated directly by incident, solar, infrared radiation.
According the Greenhouse Effect theory, that can't happen, because according to the theory, CO2 is supposed to be transparent to incident solar radiation so according to the greenhouse theory Mrs. Foote's CO2 cylinder, should not have gotten warmer than the other.
So, although Mrs. Foote disproves the greenhouse theory, she does prove that CO2 could have an affect on climate.
It is just NOT a greenhouse effect!
And until we understand the true mechanism at work, we can not say whether it will be good or bad for the future.Reply |
12What on earth are you talking about?
1. No one is suggesting the atmosphere is not warmed to some extent by incoming solar radiation (part of which is IR after all).
2. The experiment you refer to is a good demonstration of the greenhouse effect (and variations of the same are used in classrooms around the planet to this day).
3. The experiment does not prove that all the heating is from direct incoming radiation (far from it) ... but I'm sure you can provide your own theory which eliminates energy being absorbed by the cylinder and re-radiated as IR that in turn is absorbed by GHGs like CO2 and re-radiated - hence the difference in the temperature of the two bottles
This the very simple primer you need.Reply |
45The Guardian publishes stuff that ignores most of the science on climate change on a daily basis.
The current piece is similarly ignorant about the sci-fi literature. No dystopian future in older syfy? Must have missed Priest's Fugue. No ecological collapse in earlier syfy? Must have missed Brunner's Zanzibar.Reply |-
12Well everybody else does! Come on, get on board. Everyone else is. They can't all be wrong. Forget logic, forget science, forget reason, just go with the flow. You're probably going to have to be hysterical, to jump off the cliff!
Don't give in to thinking for yourself, it will only lead you away from the herd.Reply |
01Hysterical? With laughter.
The desperate
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comments (203)
23Which is precisely what humans have done for the last 5000 years, at least.
It's what all conscious animals have done since they became aware of the world and their place in it. It has to do with planning and expectation. If an animal makes a tool that's evidence of having a model of the world in the imagination. Crows have been observed making and using tools.Reply |
23Welcome to the Greenhouse is a collection of short science fiction edited by Gordon Van Gelder, publisher of the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.Reply |
23Alice earns a low wage as an internet propaganda bot for a major corporation. But this is just a cover. In order to buy the illegal antibiotic needed by her father (antibiotics are phased to reduce evolution of resistance), she makes good money forging biometric citizenship records for migrants who are escaping from deserts.
Then the gates of her district close, access to the internet is blocked and the water supply is turned off. After she kills a man in a fight over a bottle of water, a powerful gang, impressed by her viciousness, invites her to join them. It turns out that one of the gang members works for a tax evasion consultancy and still has access to the internet. Now, using only some old viruses quarantined on her tab, she will have to use all her hacking skills to break into the state database and forge new citizenship records for herself and her father.Reply |
01A novel that doesn't easily fit into a science fiction mold but that might well be characterized as "cli-fi" is Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's The End of All Men. Even though the warming it addresses is not anthropogenic, it's among the most affecting depictions of the potential consequences of a warming world that I've read. It well fits Evans' call above for the ways such fiction might address catastrophic climate change in this epoch - despite the book's having been written in 1927.Reply |-
01One of the dangers of ecological sf is that you can end up with a future that is actually quite attractive. Bill Mason in Day of the Triffids remarks that at least he doesn't have to get up in the morning. No bosses, no bureaucracy. What's not to like?
A lot of post-apocalyptic sf is pastoral: After London, The Purple Cloud, etc.
It's about a return to Eden.
Even Wells' Utopias are preceded by apocalypse.Reply |
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23Interesting you mention Cold War fears. I believe the underlying basis of those fears is the threat of nuclear annihilation. Yet today, we smugly proclaim that no one has the moral authority to deny a radical terrorist state a nuclear device. On the contrary, we insist that action is not only not lunacy but it will prevent a nuclear holocaust. (Ah, the satire Kubrick can create with that).
So lets re-release those cold war movies, Twilight Zone episodes and novels. They are back in with the times. Oh... and a thermonuclear device can change the climate in ways that coal-fired energy plants can only dream about. But then again, climate change is all about science fiction anyway -- the only science that exists in computer models and historical data "adjustments".Reply |
78the only science that exists in computer models and historical data "adjustments".
Horsefeathers.
Your entire comment is based on a lie.
AGW is the best, most supported and most robust explanation for what is happening with our climate right now and it is based primarily on deductions from data and observations and physics that's over a century old. Way back in 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, was able to show that fossil fuel combustion will eventually lead to AGW.
Like a cheap amateur magician, you've basically attempted to erase every scientist that's come after who works in climate science and dozens of related fields, a mountain of evidence, tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers, the word of every science academy in the world and millions of eye witnesses.
How long do you think you guys can cover this up?Reply |
1112But then again, climate change is all about science fiction anyway -- the only science that exists in computer models and historical data "adjustments".
No.
The science exists in basic physics that we've known since the 1850s. The computer models don't answer "If"; we already knew the answer to that. If you reduce the amount of heat escaping from Earth's atmosphere by increasing its greenhouse gas concentration, the Earth will get warmer. There's no way around it, and you can calculate the eventual warming quite accurately without models, as Arrhenius did in 1896.
No, the questions they ask (and answer) are things like "How fast?" and "How will regional effects differ?" We are long past asking "Whether."
And your coy use of scare quotes with "adjustments" is just silly. Adjusting raw data for known biases is an utterly routine and completely necessary step in the processing of essentially all scientific data.
If you want to make a point about the adjustments, you're going to have to do a whole lot better than just putting quotes around the word. The existence of adjustments is a "Well, duh" sort of thing. You need to show that the adjustments are wrong, not just that they exist.
Shall we wait here while you gather your evidence?Reply |
12"Horsefeathers." I'll say!
Your entire comment is based on lies (that's lies, that's plural).
AGW is to date the most idiotic, ill-conceived, and unfounded notion in modern time. Their own science PROVES their theory wrong!
It was first publicly proposed by Tyndall in 1859, but in fact had been disproved 3 years earlier by Eunice Foote.
Like a coward, you can't admit you are wrong even when faced with absolute proof.
As for the farce known as peer review, all peer review is, is an "old boys club" way to maintain the status quo and stifle progress and anything new that might disrupt their place at the trough. All peer review should be treated with the utmost contempt, for the obvious and unashamed self promotion that it is.Reply |
56Like a coward, you can't admit you are wrong even when faced with absolute proof.
That's rich.
Putting aside that proof only exists in Maths, where is this "proof" you speak of?
All peer review should be treated with the utmost contempt, for the obvious and unashamed self promotion that it is.
And yet, that is how science advances. All science. I don't suppose you have any use for science?Reply |
12"And yet, that is how science advances. All science. I don't suppose you have any use for science?"
You obviously have no clue or understanding of science. Peer review is just an excuse to raid the public purse, among others. Other than the pursuit of funds, peer review is validation of nothing except a lot of frauds, patting each other on the back and telling us how great they are and what a privilege it is to give them our money.
NOT!Reply |
01You got a problem with that Sunshine?
Do you believe that everything there is to know, is already known?
Or maybe you think that "everything" that science believes today, will "never" be proved wrong?
Yes, I am right and they are all wrong!
After all, it is "their evidence" that proves it!Reply |
34So peer reviewed science is useless, as in quantum physics, medicine, biology, mechanics, chemistry, mathematics and all the rest of modern knowledge. Truly you must be a person of genius to know this. Or are you perhaps monumentally incompetent, simply envious of qualified scientists, or both?Reply |
12Since you don't accept science, you disqualify yourself from commenting upon it. Science does not need your imprimateur to validate it; it needs conformance to fact. Nothing whatever gets published in the most prestigious journals, "Science" or "Nature" without peer review, nor in any other respectable scientific journal. By your criterion then, you do not accept any science whatever, which marks you as nothing but a fool. You thus make yourself absolutely clear, and demonstrate your pathological delusion.Reply |
12I am sorry but it is really hard to control my laughter here!........... I just love it when idiots think they have some kind of artistic licence or some such, to just read in, anything that comes into their tiny little minds.
It must be intimidating to live in a world where you consider yourself to be, so inferior.Reply |
67Don't worry, we already have it.
"10-foot seal level rise by 2050 !!!"
Yeah right.
Meanwhile millions of refugees in the Middle East flee death and/or slavery.
(Those are not fictional climate refugees.)
Meanwhile hundreds of millions of workers in the world face unemployment and/or declining wages.
(Those are not fictional characters.)
Meanwhile billions face starvation if fossil fuels are restricted in agricultural production.
(Those are not factional U.N. population estimates of 11 billion.)
Climate extremists are destroying the progressive movement.
The right wing could not create a more effective straw man.
And the right is benefitting politically worldwide.Reply |
56Climate change as part of everything change is part of the Syrian war- a long drought made the lives of poor Sunni farmers that much poorer- and Syria also hit peak oil which is a double whammy in that the loss of export revenue could no longer subsidise food- an issue further troubled by rising global food prices, brought on by the 2008 crash and QE.
And meanwhile starvation and malnutrition exist despite oil being free available as well as enough calories to go round.
but hey, you seem to know more than those scientists.Reply |
23Not surprisingly, you jump to attribute everything to climate change -
Overlooking the obvious.
1. Syria's population has QUADRUPLED in the past 50 years.
In a country with 80% of the land mass either semi- or fully arid.
(Of course, climate extremists almost never mention population threats.)
Syria has a population of 23 million - a population density 50% greater than Romania's.
And has rich alluvial farmlands with sufficient rainfall in most regions.
Of course, the Ceausescus made short work of Romania's food advantages.
Which leads to -
2. The brutality of the Assad regime - Père et fils
In a country already stressed by population pressure and meager economic growth -
The kleptocratic and violent repression of the Assad clique made Syria ripe for internal discord.
You could not be more wrong - -
But like so many climate activists, you seek to validate your preconceptions.Reply |
01What's the title? I'll read it.
I've got my own tome going, tentatively titled Ondranine, that basically discusses how history and development move in waves after social disruptions such as the Black Plague or the fall of Rome. The one surety in all this is that the past is not remembered.Reply |
45John Brunner's Sixties epics Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up used the montage techniques of John Dos Passo's USA to paint a picture of pending global ecological collapse. Fortunately his Shockwaves Rider, which predicted both the Internet and that it could be accessed by mobile phones, proved more prophetic.
Probably the first sf novel to explore ecology in any real depth was Frank Herbert's Dune.Reply |
01The stories we tell ourselves can help us understand, and maybe even adapt, to this new world. But the dour dystopias and escapist fantasies of our current science fiction diet just won’t do. We need something new: a form of science fiction that tackles the radical changes of our pressing and strange reality. We need an Anthropocene fiction.
Real SF has always dealt with this. The author might try reading some...
... about Ursula LeGuin's Ekumen and a climate-ravaged Earth, Arthur Clarke's City and the Stars, Alistair Reynolds Revelation Space and the greenfly. Ken McCleod even described the Heliocene Epoch, the climax human community that (more-or-less) solved the Anthropcene crisis. And so on, and so on...Reply |
01George Turner's The Sea and Summer and Dakota James' It Will Happen in 1997* addressed these issues in the Eighties.
A flooded world is the setting for Kevin Costner's bellyflop Waterworkd and the coda to Spielberg's AI.
It's also alluded to in the Eighties exploitation movie Trancers: when our hero is told the bad guy is hiding in San Francisco he suggests sending in a submarine and torpedoing him.
*Spoiler: It didn't.Reply |
23Science fiction to deal with climate change? That would be the sort where a small group of survivors spend all their time locked inside a small building breathing recycled air wondering if it's time yet for their evening supper of arugula and peanut butter. Kind of like being on a space ship only it doesn't actually go anywhere because it's on a bigger space ship that keeps orbiting a star in a hostile universe that doesn't care if we live or die. The passengers just keep worrying about the hydroponic arugula crop and what they're going to do when they run out of peanut butter. Sort of like a really boring version of Red Dwarf.Reply |-
1112Science fiction that is rooted in basic physics that we've known for a century and a half.
Science fiction that is supported by mountains of hard evidence.
Science fiction that is accepted by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and literally every national science academy on Earth.
Right.Reply |
1011refusing to admit the obvious because it dosn't agree with your dogma!
Well, there's another exploded irony meter.
But let's talk about "gullible."
I get science from scientists.
You get science from amateur bloggers, talk show hosts, right-wing politicians and media, and industry-funded "institutes."
But you think I am the gullible one.
Sure...Reply |
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01As George Carlin wisely said: "we are mosquitoes on this planet" .. the only species that will have the pleasure of becoming extinct with some greater purpose is us. And why not? We could solve our problems in a decade, yet we sit around expecting others' to move us forward.
Here's a simple one - don't become vegetarians, but stop eating beef. No cattle, no methane, as good as taking all our cars off the planet. And for what? One extra trip to Nando's? How unbearable..Reply |
23OOOOhhhh yes it is!!!! Opinion and fact are exactly the same thing! Just ask the 97 percent of scientists that claim that they all think the same and so, since none of them, can come up with any scientific facts to support the theory, we can all just treat their opinion as actual fact.
So don't try thinking for yourself, it will just get you in trouble. Just accept the conventional wisdom and believe. Remember, this is a religion.Reply |
01Nope, conflating scientific consensus with opinion polls is an opinion itself, and it is incorrect. Wrong again. So is the misguided belief that there is no evidence. There are REAMS of evidence, evidence visible to the layman who happens to visit the melting glaciers or dying forests, or anyone who owns a thermometer.Reply |
12It is a challenge to argue with that kind of logic, but ...........
Well, what if that doesn't fit my belief system, can I be wrong and still be right?
Okay, so we know all these things are happening but just knowing, is not good enough! We need to be able to predict future events, for any of it to do any good. To do that, to make accurate predictions, you need to have a functioning theory and model. What we have today has never helped predict anything, beyond the fact of global warming but there are plenty of theories about that. Finding a theory that works should be our first priority.Reply |
01Only it's predicted the sea-level rises we've been seeing, it's been predicting increased heat waves and fires and droughts and floods we've had. The effects of the greenhouse effect have been predicted for over 100 years, and we are seeing results consistent with these projections. It'd the deniers who have the constantly shifting theories:
-It's not happening.
-It's not happening and all the world's scientists are part of a sinister conspiracy to make you drive a Prius.
-Ok it's happening, but it's a natural cycle, and all the world's scientists are part of a sinister conspiracy to make you drive a Prius.
-Ok, it happened but it stopped. All the world's scientists are part of a sinister conspiracy to make you drive a Prius.
-Ok it didn't stop, but sun spots or something...
Meanwhile, decades of studies and models and amazing scientific work get tossed out the window because of your slavish devotion to your political opinions, which have been spoon fed to you by known liars and sociopathic free-marketeers.
Your last response was almost unintelligible, you just toss out generalizations as if they were true, when they're not, because you're too lazy and filled with lazy, greedy ideology to think for yourself, while you go around patting yourself on the back for being an individualist.
Well, it's obvious you have no grasp of the difference between opinion and fact. You've learned nothing, and your parents were horrible people for not teaching you basic rationality and logic. Good day sir.Reply |
01Here's something that could make a difference...
About time some serious writers and artists engaged with the biggest issue of our time – maybe all time. These stories show that engagement fully underway!” Bill McKibben, founder 350.org. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26089762-winds-of-changeReply |
01I agree, but sadly - especially in these escapist times we live in - there isn't any money in "bad" news.
Seeing as how art and creative writing have become more and more commercialized over the past 40 years it would take an artist or writer of real integrity to put the truth above what sells.Reply |
12But the problem is that Environmentalists are always too pessimistic. No apocalypse has ever been as bad as they expected.
So for fiction to be interesting it must be even more unrealistic than the campaigners or assume that the scared are villainous scaremongers.
So we get silly schlock horror or 1984.
Yet Bill McKibben doesn't want totalitarianism but cannot propagandise with realism.Reply |
23Are we talking about sci-fi or horror here? If stories are about people, and virtually any significant change in climate is going to result in the displacement, disease and deaths of millions (or billions) of people, then these stories may well be worse than survivors' tales from the Holocaust.
One thing's clear: We alive today are probably getting the luxury of worrying and wondering about incredibly terrible nightmares that won't come until after we're gone. That's our story -- well, that and the fact that we have chosen, collectively, to do nothing to prevent those nightmares from coming to pass.Reply |
01Science fiction is being replaced with science fact, with some models showing that at the current rate of warming, the earth's crust could soon become hotter than its core.
At that point, life will start to become uncomfortable and the fossil fuel company executives will need to reassess what is important to them.Reply |
910You people have absolutely no understanding of Physics or for that matter science in general. It is no wonder clap trap science rules the day.
Seriously? You think that "the earth's crust could soon become hotter than its core" is mainstream science? You think that everyone who accepts what science says about climate change would readily agree with that statement?
Really?Reply |
34Anything the Lady writes is a piss-take. Just ignore.
- AND
Looking beyond your own lifetime is a mistake, an excuse to be objectional, for some mythical higher cause. You see this in politicians all the time. Lose the sandwich boards, be kind to people around you, enjoy your short life, and get over the fact that no-one will erect a statue in honour of your life.
Reply |
34
I've noticed rooftop solar panels spreading across the urban landscape during my frequent California visits. And there's a newly-operational and very massive solar facility in the desert just before one comes to the Nevada state line north on the I-15.
Change is coming, and it's not all reason for despair.
Change is coming, and it's not all reason for despair.
Reply |
67We've got 6, no wait 7.5, soon to be 10-11 billion people all shitting in the ocean (metaphorically), we've got all kinds of other problems besides global warming. Fixing global warming would just get us on a path to be able to even talk about the root causes (late-stage capitalism and overpopulation) that we can't even mention today without freaking people out.Reply |
23That was straightforward projection. US oil production did peak in 1970 and the wold was manifestly running out of oil, given the available technology.
The current abundance of oil is due to the use of technologies that would have been thought, in 1970, to be too expensive and destructive to use - such as deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Or fracking.Reply |
45Mostly, but we could get along with many more people if all those people weren't operating under the belief that their lives will only have meaning if they have MORE. The economic system/cult we are busily exporting around the world puts very near zero value on all the valuable things in the world like human life and nature and water and air and our very biosphere, while making greed and waste and obsolescence and evanescent zeroes in bank computers the highest possible aspiration for any human culture. With our values so screwed up, we would still be slowly murdering the planet with a far lower population.Reply |
12Who let you in here?? ................ Come on, fessup!
That kind of rational thinking is untenable and incompatible with doublethink and must be frowned on by all who follow the "me first" rule (a.k.a. the code of the west {you know, do unto others before they do it to you}).
It is good to know you are there.Reply |
12And now we have a bunch of incompetents meeting in Paris to try to implement world government, in the guise of a fight against climate change and in the process, because of total lack of understanding of the mechanism at work, must ultimately make things worse. But a lot of people will get wealthy along the way. Of course everyone else suffers for their greed.Reply |
01"Of course everyone else suffers for their greed."
Oh, those poor, innocent, completely sociopathic oil-company executives and coal-tycoons who have been getting wealthy along the way for over a century. Far better that the world suffer for their greed, perhaps mortally, than diplomats and democratically elected world leaders meet in, *GASP*, Paris! At least without inviting YOU to advise them of the mechanics at work.
How do you get the internet in a cave, anyway?Reply |
12Uh oh, we have a chemtrail conspiracy theorist here.
Debunked:
http://thevane.gawker.com/chemtrails-dont-exist-and-idiots-are-really-easy-to-f-1580245450
http://thevane.gawker.com/why-i-write-about-and-debunk-the-chemtrail-conspiracy-1581896346
In contrast to chemtrails, climate change is a real problem with overwhelming supporting evidence that's affecting us now and will affect us more in the future
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