Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Saga Press, 2015; $16.99 tpb; 565 pages
What are the best ways for science-fiction writers to deal with politics?
That’s the question that every author of “climate fiction”—near-future stories set in a world where global warming has devastated the planet—has to face. The 26 items in this anthology provide valuable lessons for writers wishing to set stories on the ravaged Earth one generation from now. In its expansive survey of the field, Loosed Upon the World gives us examples of both models to follow and those to avoid.
The first lesson is that the best way to discuss politics in fiction is to put politics in the background, not in the foreground. Consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series, excerpted in this volume. From the excerpts presented here—a titanic flood in Forty Days of Rain, an armada gathering in Fifty Degrees Below to drop tons of salt into the Gulf Stream to attempt to return the current to its safer, pre-2000 flow—you would think that Robinson’s trilogy is full of action. You’d even be pleased that, in an act of prescience, Robinson named his flood “Tropical Storm Sandy.”
But Robinson’s great weakness as a writer is that he loves to write conversation novels in which characters talk and talk while very little happens. The unfair, but accurate, description of Green Mars is that it consists of 550 pages of committee meetings and lyrical descriptions of the evolving Martian landscape and a final 50 pages of belated but furious action.
Much of the Science in the Capitol series consists of endless scenes where program officers of the National Science Foundation persuade themselves to become political activists. Robinson can carry off these scenes because he is a skilled professional, but writers less talented than he will turn their novels into second-tier policy analyses. It is overall better for writers to begin with the setting of a planet under stress and save the political arguments for their blogs.
A second way to write bad climate fiction is to include any passage where characters complain that if only we had done something in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the world would not be a mess today. Consider this passage from Seanan McGuire’s “The Myth of Rain” (from Lightspeed, 2015):
Thing about lies is that no matter how often you tell them and how often you believe them, they’re not going to become true. “Fake it until you make it” may work for public speaking and falling in love, but it doesn’t stop climate change. By 2017, it had become clear who the liars were, and they weren’t the scientists holding up the charts and screaming for the support of the public. By 2019, it was clearer that we had listened to the lies too long.
This anger leads to self-pity with the doors bolted and the reader unable to escape. The tragedian’s mask rarely fits the writers of our time and is often itchy.
It is far better for an author to channel his or her anger about the state of the planet into satire. Laughing at your political opponents is a far more effective method of persuasion than screaming at them—and produces better stories.
Here, the model for writers to follow is John Brunner’s great eco-catastrophe novel of 1972, The Sheep Look Up. What propels the plot is that readers keep asking themselves, “How bad can the future get?” and the answer always is, “Much, much worse.” This is the novel where a television presenter (comparable to Katie Couric or Meredith Vieira) has to wear a wig on camera because the one salon in Manhattan that guaranteed that it used untainted water flown from the Andes brings in hair-destroying water by mistake. Many writers of the 1970s imagined that oxygen vending machines would be common in the future, but only Brunner would say that the rubber masks on these machines were “like an obscene animal’s kiss.”
Two stories in Loosed Upon the World are effective satires. In “The Day It All Ended” (from Hieroglyph, 2014), Charlie Jane Anders describes DiZi Corporation, which seems to specialize in useless junk consumers are compelled to buy. The company’s motto is “Beautiful products that are fundamentally useless.” But Anders here, in a story that is both climate fiction and a critique of consumerism, shows that DiZi’s products aren’t useless—and have hidden benefits.
Sean McMullen’s novelette “The Precedent” (from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2010) begins, “Even when the climate crime is so serious that death is not punishment enough, one still gets an audit.” That’s because in 2035, there’s a star chamber in session every day, and “tippers”—those whose reckless use of energy in the 1990s propelled the planet toward disaster—are subject to trial before the World Audit with death or lengthy sentences the result if a guilty verdict is delivered.
The protagonist is someone whom the World Audit wants to find guilty but who is continually shown to be responsible in his energy use. (For example, he is accused of using a motorcycle to get to work, but he provides evidence that a motorcycle uses less energy than public transportation.) McMullen, an able writer, deftly skewers some of the authoritarian excesses of environmentalism.
A second way to approach climate fiction is to write adventure stories. Gregory Benford’s “Eagle” (from Welcome to the Greenhouse, 2011) describes a plan to “spray megatons of hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere.” The hydrogen sulfide would then bond with water vapor to reflect sunlight and cool the Arctic. The story is told from the viewpoint of environmental activists fiercely opposed to the plan and determined to stop it. By making the story a simple tick-tock—will the environmentalists blow up the bombers or won’t they?—Benford delivers a hard-edged story solidly grounded (as one would expect from him) in good science even if moving beyond what is currently provable.
Tobias S. Buckell and Karl Schroeder’s novelette “Mitigation” (from Fast Forward 2, 2008) is about a real place—the depository of the world’s seeds located in Svalbard, an island off the coast of Norway. Russian gangsters hire the protagonist to break into the seed bank and genetically sequence as many rare seeds as possible in order to provide new crops that could save that nation from an agricultural disaster. Here, again, the plot is a straightforward adventure—how do you break into an impregnable fortress?—but the reader gets a good deal of information about the Svalbard seed bank and its importance.
A final effective way to write climate fiction demonstrated here is as family drama. Nancy Kress’s “A Hundred Hundred Daisies” (from Asimov’s, 2011) is about Daniel Hitchens, a Midwestern boy who’s suffering all sorts of teenage trouble. His math grades are terrible, he gets into fights all the time, and he’s been arrested for trying to destroy a giant pipeline that is going to transport water from Lake Michigan to the parched Southwest. But the pipeline’s construction is, wisely, in the background; the plot is about Daniel Hitchens and how he deals with his parents and the courts. We learn about the construction of the pipeline and why the Southwest has dried up, but the story’s center is on the family conflict not the engineering, making it much stronger.
Sarah K. Castle’s novelette “Mutant Stag at Horn Creek” (from Analog, 2012) is also a family drama, set in a crumbling Grand Canyon National Park. Budget cuts have reduced the number of rangers to five, and one of them, Sue, is on the verge of retirement. In this story, climate change has made the Southwest much wetter, but the newly created streams and lakes are contaminated with acid leached from long-closed mines. Most of the park is closed to hikers, and the animals in the park have mutated.
Sue takes a trip into long-closed areas of the park with her niece, Katy, who hopes to film exclusive “killer content” of fighting mutant beasts that she can sell to Hollywood and make her fortune. Castle shows how Sue and Katy change when faced with the surprises they discover in an environmentally degraded Grand Canyon. Readers who still have lingering prejudices that “Analog stories” are about heroic engineers conquering the universe with brute force and duct tape will find Castle’s story surprisingly warm and humane.
What do the best stories in Loosed Upon the World tell us? That “climate fiction” is as legitimate as any other form of sf, provided that writers realize that readers want to read stories, not opinion pieces, blog posts, or sermons.
Martin Morse Wooster lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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