climate change fiction
Sep. 1st, 2024 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerakroseToday has been a hot, sunny day, possibly the last of the season, so I took the opportunity to wash my summer duvet, hang it outside to dry, and then put it away to swap it for the winter duvet, which I washed in spring before putting away. (it's a bit soon to swap it out, but I don't mind.) I also washed the mattress protector and the pillowcase (my pillow has a protective case that can be washed) and put on fresh sheets, so my bed is now all fresh.
I've had a very fun discussion about Star Trek TOS and mid-century pulp sci-fi vs modern sci-fi over in![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
scanfic (in Danish/Swedish), which led me to revisit a binding I did last year for a bookbinding competition with climate change as theme. I didn't win anything in the competition, but I had a lot of fun putting the book together. As part of it, I also read a lot of different texts to curate a selection for the book (I believe most traditional binders just choose one existing text and bind it), and wrote forewords. So the binding is unique in many ways. Anyway, the point is to say, I wrote the forewords in a kind of frenzy as I was working to a deadline, but revisiting the binding and the texts I'd curated and the forewords themselves, I thought, hey actually this is pretty good? So under the cut is the foreword for the fiction half plus the links to the (publicly accessible) texts if anybody wants to read along. (the foreword for the non-fic half is very 'I have no brain left and I just need to fill this page', ha.)
Earth Is Missing! by Carl Selwyn, 1947
Planet Stories
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64361
Climate—Disordered by Carter Sprague, 1948
Startling Stories
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68827
Climate—Incorporated by Wesley Long, 1948
Thrilling Wonder Stories
link to the text as hosted on Project Gutenberg via the Wayback Machine as this seems to have been taken off PG. thank you Wayback Machine.
A Being Together Amongst Strangers by Arkady Martine, 2020
Uncanny Magazine
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-being-together-amongst-strangers/
You’re Not The Only One by Octavia Cade, 2022
Clarkesworld Magazine
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cade_02_22/
Why We Bury Our Dead At Sea by Tehnuka, 2023
Reckoning Magazine
https://reckoning.press/why-we-bury-our-dead-at-sea
Foreword
I have always turned to fiction when I’ve wanted to understand the world. Speculative fiction—science fiction, sci-fi, sf, fantasy—has always been there when I went to seek wild ideas and hopes for the future.
When I decided to enter the Elizabeth Soutar Bookbinding Competition in spring 2023 it therefore came naturally to me to look for speculative fiction texts focusing on climate change to bind for the theme: CLIMATE ACTION. These texts are both fiction and non-fiction; pulpy and academic, somber and essayist. As many-facetted as climate change is, as varied are the texts concerning it.
On this side of the coin there is fiction.
We start with Earth Is Missing! a pulpy novella from 1947 taking place in the distant 87th century wherein the earth is encased in mile-thick ice. It has a delightful blend of my favourite elements: space, the very distant future, incredible technology, evil corporations, a plucky detective hero, and best of all: a happy ending. The villains, plotting to steal Earth turn out to be heroes who succeed in their mission; relocating Earth to a sun which still burns brightly. Then we move on to Climate—Disordered and Climate—Incorporated, two works published in the same year in two different magazines, with what feel like fresh perspectives on man’s ability to change the climate. In Disordered, the protagonist manipulates the weather locally via the dispersal of chemicals into the clouds to cause snowstorms with the intention to drive a neighbouring sea side resort town out of business. This has the unintended consequences of the neighbouring town adopting the new wintry climate for skiing and making bank, ultimately thwarting his plans. Incorporated on the other hand has a climate machine that can cause balmy weather in winter—this is widely hailed as a commercial success until is discovered that the climate machine was really a time machine. There is a juicy sideplot of industrial espionage and theft, with a sprinkle of politics on top, until the machine fails and turns the weather too cold. The machine was channeling future good (and bad) weather into the present, thus implying that manipulating the weather is actually less plausible than travelling in time.
We then move into the present with three modern short stories. A Being Together Amongst Strangers tells the story of a future New York that takes in climate refugees from southern climates with accompanying racial tensions and violence, while You’re Not The Only One delves into grief and disappointment as humanity desperately tries to reduce carbon footprints to continue to live a normal life and explore space–and the solutions it may harbour. Why We Bury Our Dead At Sea explicitly tackles the loss of species and nature due to human greed by focusing on legal injustice in the face of what’s morally right, sparking a new movement of giving back to the ecosystem.
Tellingly, I think, the three mid-century stories—while pulpy, lighthearted, and adventurous—have correctly identified capitalism as the primus motor for climate change towards the worse. Human greed leads to inventions that alter the climate, with disastrous, though not irreversible, consequences. In Earth Is Missing! it is the sun’s natural fading that is the root cause of the ice, but it is capitalism which is dead set against a solution: the company that turns profits on selling expensive lamps to the population of Earth is sabotaging efforts to relocate the planet to a new sun, a plan which would render the lamps useless and drive the company out of business.
Modern climate fiction has crossed a threshold. The world is already changing due to man’s greed and hubris, so gone are the lighthearted adventures and in their place are dystopian scenarios filled with grief, hope, despondence, stubbornness—the starting point of these stories is not ‘what if this machine caused a problem we can fix’ but ‘the damage is done, how do we live with it?’. The pulpy mid-century magazines were looking for fun and wild scenarios that could never come to pass. Seventy years later we don’t have specific climate machines, but we do have the cumulative effect of all of humanity’s machines: an ozon hole, increasing temperatures, a great garbage patch, and new weather patterns. And so modern stories reckon with the damage.
Magazines such as Reckoning Magazine and Grist Magazine with its Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors collections go a step further and ask ‘where do we find hope?’. The final story in the collection is exactly that—one of hope. Of people coming together to effect one, small, change for the environment.
It is my hope for the future that we—like the protagonists in Earth Is Missing!—succeed and that we save our planet.
---
link to my post on tumblr with photos of the binding.
I've had a very fun discussion about Star Trek TOS and mid-century pulp sci-fi vs modern sci-fi over in
scanfic (in Danish/Swedish), which led me to revisit a binding I did last year for a bookbinding competition with climate change as theme. I didn't win anything in the competition, but I had a lot of fun putting the book together. As part of it, I also read a lot of different texts to curate a selection for the book (I believe most traditional binders just choose one existing text and bind it), and wrote forewords. So the binding is unique in many ways. Anyway, the point is to say, I wrote the forewords in a kind of frenzy as I was working to a deadline, but revisiting the binding and the texts I'd curated and the forewords themselves, I thought, hey actually this is pretty good? So under the cut is the foreword for the fiction half plus the links to the (publicly accessible) texts if anybody wants to read along. (the foreword for the non-fic half is very 'I have no brain left and I just need to fill this page', ha.)Earth Is Missing! by Carl Selwyn, 1947
Planet Stories
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64361
Climate—Disordered by Carter Sprague, 1948
Startling Stories
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68827
Climate—Incorporated by Wesley Long, 1948
Thrilling Wonder Stories
link to the text as hosted on Project Gutenberg via the Wayback Machine as this seems to have been taken off PG. thank you Wayback Machine.
A Being Together Amongst Strangers by Arkady Martine, 2020
Uncanny Magazine
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-being-together-amongst-strangers/
You’re Not The Only One by Octavia Cade, 2022
Clarkesworld Magazine
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cade_02_22/
Why We Bury Our Dead At Sea by Tehnuka, 2023
Reckoning Magazine
https://reckoning.press/why-we-bury-our-dead-at-sea
I have always turned to fiction when I’ve wanted to understand the world. Speculative fiction—science fiction, sci-fi, sf, fantasy—has always been there when I went to seek wild ideas and hopes for the future.
When I decided to enter the Elizabeth Soutar Bookbinding Competition in spring 2023 it therefore came naturally to me to look for speculative fiction texts focusing on climate change to bind for the theme: CLIMATE ACTION. These texts are both fiction and non-fiction; pulpy and academic, somber and essayist. As many-facetted as climate change is, as varied are the texts concerning it.
On this side of the coin there is fiction.
We start with Earth Is Missing! a pulpy novella from 1947 taking place in the distant 87th century wherein the earth is encased in mile-thick ice. It has a delightful blend of my favourite elements: space, the very distant future, incredible technology, evil corporations, a plucky detective hero, and best of all: a happy ending. The villains, plotting to steal Earth turn out to be heroes who succeed in their mission; relocating Earth to a sun which still burns brightly. Then we move on to Climate—Disordered and Climate—Incorporated, two works published in the same year in two different magazines, with what feel like fresh perspectives on man’s ability to change the climate. In Disordered, the protagonist manipulates the weather locally via the dispersal of chemicals into the clouds to cause snowstorms with the intention to drive a neighbouring sea side resort town out of business. This has the unintended consequences of the neighbouring town adopting the new wintry climate for skiing and making bank, ultimately thwarting his plans. Incorporated on the other hand has a climate machine that can cause balmy weather in winter—this is widely hailed as a commercial success until is discovered that the climate machine was really a time machine. There is a juicy sideplot of industrial espionage and theft, with a sprinkle of politics on top, until the machine fails and turns the weather too cold. The machine was channeling future good (and bad) weather into the present, thus implying that manipulating the weather is actually less plausible than travelling in time.
We then move into the present with three modern short stories. A Being Together Amongst Strangers tells the story of a future New York that takes in climate refugees from southern climates with accompanying racial tensions and violence, while You’re Not The Only One delves into grief and disappointment as humanity desperately tries to reduce carbon footprints to continue to live a normal life and explore space–and the solutions it may harbour. Why We Bury Our Dead At Sea explicitly tackles the loss of species and nature due to human greed by focusing on legal injustice in the face of what’s morally right, sparking a new movement of giving back to the ecosystem.
Tellingly, I think, the three mid-century stories—while pulpy, lighthearted, and adventurous—have correctly identified capitalism as the primus motor for climate change towards the worse. Human greed leads to inventions that alter the climate, with disastrous, though not irreversible, consequences. In Earth Is Missing! it is the sun’s natural fading that is the root cause of the ice, but it is capitalism which is dead set against a solution: the company that turns profits on selling expensive lamps to the population of Earth is sabotaging efforts to relocate the planet to a new sun, a plan which would render the lamps useless and drive the company out of business.
Modern climate fiction has crossed a threshold. The world is already changing due to man’s greed and hubris, so gone are the lighthearted adventures and in their place are dystopian scenarios filled with grief, hope, despondence, stubbornness—the starting point of these stories is not ‘what if this machine caused a problem we can fix’ but ‘the damage is done, how do we live with it?’. The pulpy mid-century magazines were looking for fun and wild scenarios that could never come to pass. Seventy years later we don’t have specific climate machines, but we do have the cumulative effect of all of humanity’s machines: an ozon hole, increasing temperatures, a great garbage patch, and new weather patterns. And so modern stories reckon with the damage.
Magazines such as Reckoning Magazine and Grist Magazine with its Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors collections go a step further and ask ‘where do we find hope?’. The final story in the collection is exactly that—one of hope. Of people coming together to effect one, small, change for the environment.
It is my hope for the future that we—like the protagonists in Earth Is Missing!—succeed and that we save our planet.
---
link to my post on tumblr with photos of the binding.
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