Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian thinks climate change is so “dire”, people can only make sense of it with the help of science fiction.
According to The Guardian;
Climate change is so dire we need a new kind of science fiction to make sense of it
Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction.
Build an imaginary world in your mind, hanging in space. Spin it around a bit; kick the tires. Now change one thing about that world. Throw a bug of your choice into the machine. What if the oceans reclaim your coastal cities? What if you can’t support life? What if the life you bear can’t support you?
…
It can be difficult to conceive of something so enormous through facts alone. But the right fiction can be a mirror, a map and a crystal ball, helping us to see ourselves in the world, negotiate our way out of disaster and imagine how we might live differently.
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The point is that Anthropocene fiction isn’t just science fiction; nor is it just climate fiction. 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.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/20/climate-change-science-fiction
I must say, I find the green obsession with frightening the kids with apocalyptic fairy tales, dressed up as predictions, a little disturbing. My parents didn’t let me watch Star Trek, until I was old enough to understand that what I was seeing was just entertaining fiction.
Side bar: The positively WORST Star Trek episode was the one with the galactic hippies. The writers at least made the galactic hippies power hungry and manipulative in the end. But Roddenberry and the writers were all leftist or at least futurist utopians at heart.
Is the Guardian even paying attention to current events? Social upheaval in N. Africa and the Middle East while the desert slowly begins to green is NOT a function of environmental collapse, but of political and social collapse. This will not get fixed until the moderate Muslims can learn to appreciate the meaning of political plurality and the radical Muslims decide that it’s bad to stop killing each other and us non-Muslims. If we could only get them to set their phasers on stun.
Climate Science needs science fiction to better present its ideas?
First there would need to be some science in Climatology.
you can not write science fiction when all you know is fantasy.
What was last weeks quote of the week?
Environmentalists care so much about the planet, they will do anything to save the ecosystem,
Except get a scientific education.
I became a cynical sceptic because I sought to review the science.
I expect that the quotation you’re recalling goes like so:
Thank you that was it.
Team that up with the Description of the fabric in the Emperors News Clothes and an explanation for the groupthink and wilful dismissal of science that is catastrophic Climatology becomes apparent.
No need for crystal balls, did you forget the Pope? lol
Reading all this, I have an image of the most successful scifi writer of all time, L Ron Hubbard, standing on the foredeck in his neatly tailored admiral suit…a small, knowing grin on his face…
Moral: nobody ever went broke selling BS to Americans…
Nothing new about it. They were following that advice back in 1995:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpKbULrB9Z8&w=560&h=315%5D
Ah, thank you for the heads up.
Apparently, the required message for this year in “Correct Science Fiction” is “Kill the deniers.”
Last year, it was “Kill the Jews.”