http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/kim_stanley_robinson_explains_why_sci_fi_writers_avoid_geoengineering.single.html
Imagining Geoengineering
Why science-fiction writers find it so hard to discuss climate tech.
By Jacob Brogan <http://www.slate.com/authors.jacob_brogan.html>
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the few sci-fi writers to seriously
consider the actual potential and dangers of geoengineering.
Geoengineering
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/can_we_stop_climate_change_by_tinkering_with_the_atmosphere.html>
occupies a peculiar space in the scheme of tomorrow’s technologies, at
once fundamentally practicable and largely untested. A catchall term for
a wide array of technologies designed to counteract the damage of
climate change, /geoengineering/ has only gradually found its way into
mainstream scientific conversations, often over the vehement objections
<http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/02/nrc_geoengineering_report_climate_hacking_is_dangerous_and_barking_mad.html>
of prominent researchers. Surprisingly, that general neglect extends to
works of fiction: While I was researching pop-cultural representations
of geoengineering for our first Futurography cheat sheet
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/geoengineering_101_a_cheat_sheet_to_the_terminology_the_key_players_and.html>,
I was struck by how scarce they were.
Though geoengineering showed up here and there, it almost always served
as the ironic cause of the very catastrophes it had been deployed to
prevent, sometimes bringing on new ice ages, as in /Snowpiercer
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LFF3MKO/?tag=slatmaga-20>/; sometimes
accelerating apocalyptic weather patterns, as in this short story from
*/Slate/*’s Eric Holthaus <http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hypercane>;
and almost always serving as an agent of chaos. Skeptical as scientists
are of geoengineering, authors and artists seem to be even more so. And
while there are real reasons to worry about geoengineering, it was
rarely those practical concerns that showed up in these more fantastical
sites. How, I wondered, had potentially transformative technologies
become sources of such widespread disdain?
Some of that cynicism is surely a product of hard-won experience. Chris
McKay, a NASA planetary scientist who works on Mars mission planning,
pointed out to me that many of us are all too aware of our poor record
where the climate is concerned. “There’s a perception in the general
public that human influence on climate is always a bad thing, an
implicit assumption that we can’t do anything /but /mess up,” he told
me. That’s probably why science fiction’s rare attempts at imagining
positive climate meddling tend to unfold on other worlds, generally as
stories of large-scale terraforming
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/07/terraforming_the_moon_it_would_be_a_lot_like_florida.html>
rather than simple geoengineering. Here on Earth, McKay joked, we’ve
been the proverbial bulls in a china shop, but on Mars we’d be “bulls in
an open field.”
That more positive experimental spirit mostly holds for the novelist Kim
Stanley Robinson, who’s worked through some of the consequences of
terraforming in his Mars novels
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553560735/?tag=slatmaga-20> and other works
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316098116/?tag=slatmaga-20>. Much of the
science in his Mars books, he told me, “is applicable to Earth.” As
McKay would point out, however, extraterrestrial narratives still
underscore the difficulties of thinking realistically about climate
modification technologies. We could, McKay explains in a document that
he sent to me, bring Mars’ temperature to Earth-like levels within 100
years or so, a time frame that’s comprehensible from the scope of an
individual human life. Giving it a breathable atmosphere, on the other
hand, could take 1,000 times as long.
While geoengineering doesn’t present such daunting issues of scale,
these kind of chronological concerns still present narrative
difficulties. There are, of course, science-fiction novels that play out
over centuries or millennia—Olaf Stapledon’s /Star Maker/
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0486466833/?tag=slatmaga-20>//comes to mind,
for example—but even shorter scenarios can be harder to shape into
stories. “A lot of these things are happening on a decade scale,” said
Robinson, author of /Green Earth/
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1101964839/?tag=slatmaga-20>, one of the few
science-fiction novels to seriously consider the actual potential and
dangers of geoengineering. This makes it difficult for authors trying to
weave scientifically plausible narratives than are also dramatically
compelling. That’s all the more problematic in relation to the more
pressing crises of climate change, which are clearly shaping our lives
here and now in ways that can be terrifying. “My head exploded multiple
times trying to come up with interesting novels about this stuff,”
Robinson said. Similar concerns may have kept other authors from
attempting to tell stories about geoengineering in the first place.
To be fair, geoengineering isn’t the first technology to receive such a
chilly welcome—over the years science-fiction writers have greeted
numerous other technological novelties—genetic engineering, cloning,
artificial intelligence, and so on—with similar concerns and questions.
Robinson describes this attitude as the “Frankenstein response,”
suggesting that it stretches back to the origins of the genre itself.
This has always been science fiction’s paradox—as a first responder on
the scene of new technologies, it at once celebrates their arrival and
worries over their ascendance. Even in this context, however,
geoengineering has encountered uncommon resistance, as Robinson knows
well. Echoing McKay, he links this culture of contempt to the very
novelty of the topic. “It’s so new,” he told me, that we feel “we’re
sure to fuck it up.”
The aura of fatalism that hovers around climate change more generally
further illuminates this popular skepticism. While we are, as Robinson
put it, “just now coming to grips with the climate change problem more
generally,” those who have long paid attention often fear that we’ve
already gone too far to pull back from the brink. In this regard, the
very plausibility of geoengineering may be its undoing. We need a
miracle if we want to make a real difference, the thinking goes, but
there’s nothing especially miraculous about most geoengineering
proposals. To the contrary, most of them comprise large-scale
applications of basic scientific principles and processes, meaning that
for many they tend to feel inadequate at best. In this regard, Robinson
noted, geoengineering proposals may also pose a moral hazard
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/geoengineering_might_give_people_an_excuse_to_ignore_climate_change_s_causes.html>,
since they potentially pull focus from more difficult endeavors like
promoting universal decarbonization.
The best representation of this dilemma plays out in a subgenre that
should, in theory, be ideally equipped to grapple with geoengineering.
So-called climate fiction, or cli-fi, encompasses a body of
narratives—frequently targeted at young adults—in which the central
conflicts derive from environmental concerns. In his new book /Ten
Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and
Shapes the Future/
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/125005785X/?tag=slatmaga-20>, the science
communicator Brian Clegg acknowledges that these narratives almost
invariably tend toward the apocalyptic, offering little room for more
proactive possibilities. “Climate change rarely makes for enjoyable
reading,” Clegg writes in his chapter on apocalypse, “but it has
fostered many a disaster novel.”
Clegg has his own theories as to why climate fiction tends to focus on
disaster and its wake. In our correspondence, he insisted that science
fiction’s apocalyptic fixations are primarily a product of filmic
science fiction. Where “movie science fiction, which tends to go for the
big spectacle, is over-dependent on large-scale disaster,” he wrote,
“science fiction as a whole is a far wider genre, where you will get
every possible shade of storyline.” But once you focus in on a topic
like climate change, you need a crisis, a central concern to motivate
that action. “You aren’t going to have a story based on the impact on
human beings of pleasant beach weather,” he told me. Environmental
collapse furnishes the necessary narrative drive, serving as the motor
that moves the plot along, even if it doesn’t directly steer the story’s
course.
Here, however, there’s a real risk that climate fiction’s pervasive
negativity might actually contribute to broader cynicism about climate
change. Some science-fiction writers and commentators argue that the
genre has an ethical responsibility to help us imagine plausible
scenarios for a better future. As embodied by the Project Hieroglyph
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/22/neal_stephenson_s_hieroglyph_and_the_dystopian_sci_fi_rut_.html>,
those who take this position—including writers like Neal Stephenson
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dear-science-fiction-writers-stop-being-so-pessimistic-127226686/?no-ist=>—aspire
to resist the impulse toward dystopian visions in the hopes of helping
us create a better world. (Disclosure: Project Hieroglyph is
administered by Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the
Imagination; ASU is a partner with */Slate /*and New America in Future
Tense.) The idea isn’t that we’ll realize the exact technologies that
science-fiction writers dream up, only that those technologies might
encourage us to focus on solving problems rather than meekly submitting
to them.
Some have suggested that the very act of discussing geoengineering might
serve a similar purpose. In an excerpt on */Slate /*from his new book
/The Planet Remade/
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691148252/?tag=slatmaga-20>, Oliver Morton
writes
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/the_planet_remade_and_the_two_questions_to_ask_yourself_about_climate_change.html>:
“Thinking about geoengineering is … an exercise in building up the
imaginative capacity needed to take on board these deep changes the
world is going through.” By generally declining to consider
geoengineering, and tending toward the negative when they do,
science-fiction writers may be limiting our ability to contemplate
solutions. This may be all the more worrisome in climate fiction, a
subgenre targeted primarily at the young, those who will have to
confront the realities of what older generations wrought. With such
works, we may be telling them that their stories—like those of their
heroes—can only ever be tales of survival.
And yet it’s possible that this preponderance of apocalypses isn’t the
end of the world. Ramez Naam has argued
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/09/neal_stephenson_hieroglyph_in_defense_of_dystopian_science_fiction.html>
that “smart, thoughtful, prescient dystopias” can actually stave off
grim eventualities, preparing us to prevent disaster in the first place
instead of turning us into simple preppers. Given that we may /have /to
commit to geoengineering
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/12/14/is_geoengineering_necessary_to_meet_paris_cop21_climate_temperature_goals.html>
of some kind if we hope to meet the accords established at the Paris
climate change summit in December, such cautions may be exactly what we
need. Indeed, we may want to incorporate it into /more/ catastrophic
scenarios—not to dissuade us from trying it at all, but to encourage us
to be cautious when we do.
/This article is part of the geoengineering installment of Futurography,
a series in which Future Tense introduces readers to the technologies
that will define tomorrow/. /Each month from January through May 2016,
we’ll choose a new technology and break it down. Read more from
Futurography on geoengineering:/
* “What’s the Deal With Geoengineering
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/can_we_stop_climate_change_by_tinkering_with_the_atmosphere.html>?”
* “Your Geoengineering Cheat Sheet
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/geoengineering_101_a_cheat_sheet_to_the_terminology_the_key_players_and.html>”
* “The Two Questions You Should Ask Yourself About Climate Change
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/the_planet_remade_and_the_two_questions_to_ask_yourself_about_climate_change.html>”
* “What Experiments to Block Out the Sun Can’t Tell Us
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/experimenting_with_geoengineering_could_have_unintended_consequences.html>”
* “Geoengineering’s Moral Hazard Problem
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/experimenting_with_geoengineering_could_have_unintended_consequences.html>”
* “Why We Should Research Geoengineering Now
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/solar_geoengineering_is_not_a_quick_fix.html>”
* “How Geoengineering Could Affect the Global Climate: An Interactive
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/an_interactive_simulation_of_geoengineering_using_data_from_geomip.html>"
* “These Two Experts Answered Your Burning Geoengineering Questions
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/jeff_goodell_and_raymond_t_pierrehumbert_take_questions_about_geoengineering.html>”
/Future Tense is a collaboration among //Arizona State University/
<http://www.asu.edu/?feature=research>/, //New America/
<http://www.newamerica.org/>/, and /*/Slate/*/. To get the latest from
Futurography in your inbox, sign up for the weekly Future Tense newsletter./
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