The Climate Fiction I Want Doesn’t Exist Yet: Part 1

Or Please Stop Writing Goddamn Dystopias Thanks

Hey friends

Today I’m talking about what climate change fiction is, why there isn’t very much of it, a new thing I’ve just invented called climate coding, and also touching on pacemakers, Godzilla, and a whole bunch of apocalypses (apocali?).  

There’s a lot I wanted to cover but a bajillion words in one go is perhaps too much, so I am restraining myself. Hark, my incredible restraint! But I will revisit this topic and turn this bunch of words into a series where I explore topics such as ‘no, but utopia sounds shit’, and ‘The hero’s journey is fascist’ and ‘we need to be more, not less irrational’, and ‘the problem of a single hero’.

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So look, we all know how this works: climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity and yadda yadda yadda. That means it’s time for the artists to get to work, right? That’s what we do. Become the King of Geats¹ ? Get down with yo Beowulf self. Do some wars? Create an endless body of work to bore high school students interminably. Land a man on the moon? Go off, sci fi queens. Accidentally and then intentionally change the entire biosphere of your only habitable planet? Err. Wait. There was the thing with the ice? No. Um. Wait. Bueller? 

This isn’t new news. People have been lamenting the lack of climate fiction for at least the last twenty years. From divestment kingpin and enviro-writer Bill McKibben in 2005: “It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?”² to novelist Amitav Ghosh in 2017:

“considering what climate change actually portends for the future of the Earth, it should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over – and this, I think, is very far from being the case.”

That’s not to say there’s literally no climate change fiction at all. There is! Barbara Kingsolver did the one with the butterflies! Ian McEwan did the one with the obnoxious solar panel guy! Margaret Atwood exists! It’s just that there isn’t really anything that hits the spot, ya know? There’s nothing really getting right down into the nitty-gritty crux of the matter. There’s not the huge body of work tackling this extinction level event in any genuine or serious way and the fiction we do have simply isn’t good enough.

So what gives, writer types? Welp. Stand back, I’ve sub headings! 

What is climate change fiction?

The short answer is any kind of fiction about climate change. The long answer is… Literary genres are slippery beasts. When does crime become mystery? When does thriller become psychological thriller? When does sci fi become fantasy? Lol don’t @ me. 

Broadly speaking climate fiction has come to sit as a sub-genre of speculative fiction, that is: fiction that extrapolates forwards from where we are now and thinks about what might happen when the shit really hits the fan. Fiction that goes big with the climate schtick and burns everything to the ground to see what those pesky humans do next. 

It has also become, almost by default, dystopian. This is of course entirely reasonable because — lol — look around you. The future is bleak. The escape routes are not clear, if available at all. It’s all kind of terrifying out here, ya know?

But there is also so much to talk about beyond awful visions of a dystopian future — how might we live in the future? How do we live now? How might we genuinely change now? How do talk about our relationships to each other and power? — and the whole thing has become disappointingly myopic.

Forget for a moment the standard refrain that we need to imagine the future we want to create. As a reader, never ending dystopias are kinda boring. Honestly? It’s starting to feel like no one’s even trying, and I don’t have any desire to hear the voice over guy telling me again that we’re in a world ravaged by <insert terrible event here>.

I recently visited the Science Museum’s Science Fiction: A Voyage To The Edge Of The Imagination exhibition which explored “how scientists and science fiction creators have imagined and built new worlds to better understand our own”. There’s some cool moments, like the display that shows how Earl Bakken was inspired into a career in medical electronics in part due to his love of Frankenstein films and ended up making the first pacemaker³ , or a video of double amputee Tilly Lockey discussing her sci fi inspired bionic arms. But mostly I was struck by how there wasn’t really anything about climate change, save for a faux AI tour guide asking if humans were going to make it (spoilers: ummm…). How is it that in 2023, when half the world is literally on fire that there is simply no iconic climate fiction?

The Cold War (sorrynotsorry)

It’s important. I’ll make it brief. 

Early 1990s: the Berlin Wall is gone, the Soviet Union dissolves, the Cold War ends, the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction recedes, and the United Federation of Planets makes peace with the Klingons. 

As the existential threat of global thermonuclear war drops away, the long term impacts of humans on the climate suddenly swing into view. 

In response, Disney speeds up its shedding of major antagonists. In publishing, the move from Other People Are The Problem to The Problem Was Inside Me All Along hurries along. Big Bads are replaced with uneasy peaces and internal struggles. 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the Star Trek universe. The switch is instant: we suddenly stop seeing the good empire (the Federation) locked in mortal struggles with the bad empires (the funny looking guys with foreheads and eyebrows) and immediately see Captain Jean-Luc Picard hijacked to wistfully remember an alien race who died out after their planet got too hot for them to live on (The Inner Light, ST: TNG S5:E25). But it’s not climate change. It’s just hot out there, ok?

We see that climate change is handled very differently to the Cold War. Oh shit, we say, we thought we fixed The Thing and reached the End of History but now there’s a new Thing. We’re fucken knackered, mate. Don’t give us a new apocalypse to contend with pls, comes the cry from the writers’ room. 

Climate Coding, or The Apocalyptic Event Is Always Climate Change 

Last week I wrote that Disney couldn’t stop climate change subtexts emerging in their mega hits because climate change is really the only meaningful topic of conversation that exists right now. 

This Talking About Climate Change Without Talking About Climate Change is part of a phenomenon I’m going to call climate coding, and begins to appear everywhere post-Cold War.

Think gay coding, but make it environmental. Except with gay coding, writers use an existing language and stereotypes to let the audience know a character is queer without incurring the wrath of the censors. In climate coding, the climate stories are there because of and in spite of the writers. When the writers and creators aren’t deliberately using metaphor to mention the unmentionable, they just kind of leak it out by accident, because we simply have no other way of talking about it right now. 

The big 90s disaster films like Independence Day, Armageddon, and Deep Impact all speak to a terror of the destruction of our habitable environment. The aliens in Independence Day are capitalism writ large: voracious locusts that threaten to rip apart our community, violently tear us from our land, and leave the world a barren, depleted husk. In Armageddon and Deep Impact the meteor is the oncoming ecological disaster, hurtling towards us and completely unstoppable. All these films feature a ragtag band of plucky heroes who use their toxic masculinity to save the day - a matter that will no doubt be discussed at great length in later essays. Are manly man directors Roland Emerich and Michael Bay really nuanced badass anti establishment climate fighting rebels? Sure, let’s say they are.  

In the rare instances when we do talk about climate change directly, such as in The Day After Tomorrow, we have to be so absurd, so caricatured, as to remove any sense of realism or meaning from the story. In Snowpiercer, the problem isn’t actually caused by climate change itself, but by humans trying to solve climate change, which comes with an entire eye rolling essay worth of comment in and of itself. Even Don’t Look Up, the film in which everyone cheers on a comet heading directly for Earth, the story isn’t so much about the imminent destruction of the planet but of the media narrative around the event itself. Don’t get me wrong, this an extremely valid take, and an extremely good film, but it’s also not directly about climate change.

The early 2000s trend for YA dystopian novels, such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, in which young female protagonists overthrow authoritarian regimes is like a desperate, panicked call to arms, a collective manifesting of Greta Thunburg into existence

Just breaking up the text with Derpy Godzilla and Katniss Everdeen

Yet these kinds of stories are told as though peering through our fingers - looking but not looking, telling but not telling. Always getting close to The Thing, but not too close in case it burns. 

It’s reminiscent of Japanese genre stories such as Akira, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Godzilla, which all feature some kind of mushroom cloud event that is definitely not an atomic bomb. The trauma of the nuclear holocaust is such that many Japanese writers both can’t and can’t not talk about it. Similarly, Latin American magical realism is the only way those writers could  explore the historical horrors of colonialism and slavery and the very contemporary horrors of dictatorship and dirty wars - it’s too much to touch, but if we come at it obliquely we can capture it just enough. 

This is where we are with climate change. We cannot look directly at it. It’s too big, too much. We are facing an apocalypse and we cannot not be aware of it, so it shapes our consciousness regardless of how creators and funders and censors want to frame it. It doesn’t matter if we end the world with zombies, viruses, comets, aliens, nukes, rogue AI, or an unspecified Event. The apocalypse is always anthropogenic climate change.

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Coming up in part 2: looking at climate change novels and short stories, which ones come close to nailing The Thing, and also my hot take on what climate fiction could and should be.

1. In my head canon this is actually King of Goats which is a whole other kind of story

2. https://grist.org/article/mckibben-imagine

3. I know that Frankenstein isn’t supposed to be an inspirational story. This isn’t a Sisyphus was Inspirational, Actually take.

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