Forecast for the Future: Cloudy with a Chance of Apocalypse - How Speculative Fiction Can Change the Future
Can speculative fiction change the future? It certainly has in the past. Every single day, we interact with inventions that were imagined in movies and books long before they became reality. The mobile phone, tablets, automatic doors, touch screens and smart speakers are just a few of these inventions.
This doesn’t mean the world of speculative fiction has been a perfect roadmap to the future. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! takes place in 1999, and the film adaptation, Soylent Green, is set in 2022. Although some of us are living off liquid meal replacements – some of them literally named Soylent – we don’t seem to be at immediate risk of needing to cannibalise each other for nutrition. The most extreme inventions may never be possible. We can’t learn by plugging into a computer like Neo in The Matrix. Although some neuroscientists won’t rule it out as a future possibility, we are still many decades away from understanding enough about how the brain works to attempt programming it with new data.
But this is where it gets interesting: although it’s currently impossible to program the brain or take a trip up the M5 in a hovercar, some people are thinking about how to bring these inventions into reality. The tech world, NASA, Space X, Silicon Valley and garage workshops all over the world brim with fans of speculative fiction. When imagining the future, we all draw inspiration from images we’ve seen in film and on TV, as well as in books we’ve read. Space travel, flying cars and single-drop diagnostic blood tests are what we expect, and what we work to make happen.
But for many of us, the future we imagine is getting bleaker by the second. Especially the looming threat of climate change offers a menacing backdrop for dreams of a world filled with even more gadgets and consumerism. Can speculative fiction help us here? Enter our possible hero: Cli-fi, or climate fiction. Books, film and media where climate and the effects of climate change form the plot, background or conflict we’re presented with.
Let’s take a quick look at definitions: journalist and climate activist Dan Bloom coined the term Cli-fi in 2004, referring to the emergence of books dealing with climate change and global warming. Literary theorists have since used the term in various ways, some pointing back to early titles dealing with droughts, floods or nuclear wastelands as starting points for the genre. But for the sake of this article, let’s stick to fiction from the past 50-or-so years; books written after scientists began warning us that our behaviour and actions would have devastating consequences. But does reading or seeing these narratives change our attitudes and behaviour? The answer is complicated.
In 2004, the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow was the sixth highest-grossing film of the year. In it, climate scientist Jack Hall discovers that we’re on the brink of a climate disaster that could lead to a new ice age. At a conference of the United Nations, he begs for immediate change to save the fragile environment. In true villain style, the Vice President of the United States replies with words that could be lifted out of a climate discussion today. He says: ‘Professor Hall, our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment. Perhaps you should keep that in mind before making sensationalist claims.’ Of course, no one listens to poor old Jack, and before you know it, New York is covered in ice and Jake Gyllenhaal is fighting for his life in a library.
The climate science magazine Environment surveyed moviegoers a week before and a week after watching The Day After Tomorrow, and compared their answers to a group who didn’t see the film. The report concluded that the film had a significant impact on the intentions and climate perceptions of those who saw the film, but that there was no major shift in the public’s opinion. The impact was naturally limited by the number of people who saw the film. How effective the impact of the film was can also be discussed. Despite the narrative of global warming having had broad consensus among scientists since the 1980s, the moviegoers found the prospect of a “new ice age” almost twice as likely as those who hadn’t seen the film.
This is, of course, a potential problem with these huge block-buster disaster films. Although they are very popular, and reach many people, they depict the consequences of climate change as sudden, violent and enormous. The slow creep of the coastline that forces people to pack up their things and move inland rarely makes for thrilling action scenes. Luckily, the tone and range of climate fiction spans far outside the constraints of disaster movies.
Besides dealing with fatal consequences and scorched-earth scenarios, Cli-fi also offers more subtle narratives of people surviving in the consequences of climate change. The consequences are often dark and dystopian, but they feel realistic and natural. They make everyday life harder and vast areas of land uninhabitable. But this is rarely the focus. Instead, these imagined futures have to tackle the effects on society. In particular, increased violence and racism as climate migration becomes common, desperate and unavoidable.
In John Lancaster’s The Wall, water levels have risen to a level where there are no more beaches left on Earth. Completely encircling the coastline of the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Defence has built an immense wall. Young Brits have to spend two years on the wall before going off to university or work. Two years of staring out into the sea, protecting the country from Others - anyone who comes from anywhere else. We see similar discussions in Maggie Gee’s The Ice People. As the northern hemisphere becomes increasingly uninhabitable, African countries close their borders – they don’t have room or resources to deal with all these desperate Europeans migrating south.
These stories feel like near futures, and they allow the characters to be angry and frustrated. In The Wall, the two years of guard duty becomes such a formative experience in young people’s lives, it’s impossible for them to relate to their parents who never served on the wall. These are people who dropped them in this mess by ignoring years of warnings from scientists,nd now they sheepishly sit at home, watching nostalgic shows about beaches on TV – beaches that this generation will never get to experience.
We know that reading fiction changes the way we perceive other people and the world. We accept what the pages show us and the character’s experience of their reality. By reading these depictions of what could be our children’s everyday life, we can more easily transfer the theoretical “climate change will be bad” towards the realistic “climate change will affect every aspect of everyday life, and I can imagine what that would look like.”
And Cli-fi is not all doom and gloom. Many of its most popular narratives offer elements of hope. In some books, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, alternative forms of society and collaboration emerge from the dried or flooded ground, respectively. In Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, a viral video opens people’s minds and offers a hope – however small – for change.
This is how Cli-fi changes the world: by giving us the forecast for the future, it encourages us to change, to have empathy with the coming generation, to imagine new deserts and rising tides as our own thumbprints on the ground. By sharing these stories, talking about their beautiful words, moving narratives and wonderful characters, the realities of climate change can slowly spread through our community and help us take greater action. Business owners, corporations, politicians and inventors are also readers. This brings us hope.
Written by M. Amelia Eikli
M. Amelia Eikli is a Norwegian artist, writer, translator and financial literacy advocate. She loves to-do lists, 30-day challenges and a never-ending parade of hobbies. She lives with her wife and over-filled bookshelves in Weston-super-Mare. Her socials are all @ameliabilities
Recipe
