World-building Climate Change (10)
being fantastically wrong
This is part 10 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
So far we’ve been very focused on plausibility. This is because wildly inaccurate scenarios can be misleading. Now we’re going to loosen that restriction. When is it okay leave reality behind?
Let’s take two films as an example:
1) The Day After Tomorrow
2) Mad Max: Fury Road
It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, so I might get details wrong. Anyway, both of these films are fairly ridiculous. In The Day After Tomorrow an instant ice age freezes the world. In Mad Max: Fury Road the whole world seems to be a lifeless post-apocalyptic desert. One of these films irks me while the other one doesn’t. Guess which one?
It’s to do with how the film does, or does not, make claims to plausibility.
One film features a scientist warning the world of impending doom with clear explanations of the causes and consequences of said doom. The other film takes place in a weird-ass parallel psycho-land were playing Death Metal guitar on a high speed moving truck, that also shoots flames, is somehow standard battle strategy.
The Day After Tomorrow annoys me. Mad Max? Not so much.
Two lessons:
1) If a story makes promises of plausibility, then it should probably be plausible (although an element of subjectivity does exist here). The audience has no way of distinguishing what is real and what is ridiculous, unless they happen to be a subject matter expert.
2) A rigorously plausible scenario is only one way to say something meaningful about our changing world.
Sometimes a deliberately ridiculous situation can be a more powerful way of communicating. Here we enter the power of fantasy to create metaphors for subjects which are otherwise too difficult to communicate.
Mad Max might be insane, but it does put an image to our sense of fear and our feeling that this is all connected to oil and energy somehow. Similarly the Jeff Vandermer’s novel Borne is fairly nutty. The key element is a giant flying bear. But that bear embodies much of our fears of having created something monstrous and destructive. Again, the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, by adding just a tiny touch of fantasy, lifts the story into a more poetic and mythical realm.
I doubt anyone gets confused by these stories. At least, I’m not too worried of the day when Mord shall rule the skies over The Wasteland while we all live in fear of The Aurochs breaking into our snow piercing world-train. The fantasy is obvious.
(Side note: I’d like The Day After Tomorrow much more if the future Ice Age prediction had come to our scientist in a vision while tripping on ayahuasca. All following implausible insanity would therefore be forgiven).
Writing such a fantastical scenario sacrifices the ability to communicate The Facts. What fantasy gains is the ability to communicate The Feels.
That feeling might be more important than the facts.
The strict scientific understanding is often far too subtle and complicated. Fantasy can give form to troubling forces we struggle to articulate. An appropriate fantastical metaphor can teach people how they ought to feel about the subject, and even how to think more clearly about otherwise highly abstract concepts.
For example, in online climate communication videos I’ve seen people repeatedly use the scene from Mad Max where all the cars are driving into a giant sandstorm. This image captures the emotional sense that we are running full speed into unfathomable chaos. Is it plausible? Probably not. But this image is emotionally captivating, and (hopefully) we know this is a fantasy. We are not confused or misled about reality by this. Instead we can experience the catharsis that comes with engaging with an unarticulated terror.
Playing around with climate fantasy can be quite powerful. I recently tried writing a story that used fantasy to explore the painful sense of being complicit in our own destruction. The story is utterly ridiculous (A Monty Pythonesque version of climate change happens in a month, and is caused by supernatural beings). And yet, these fantasy elements allowed me to put an image to a horrible feeling I’ve had – the sense that we are doing these environmental changes to ourselves. The actual reality of our individual complicity in Climate Change is far too subtle to show purely using The Facts. Fantasy can make that invisibility visible.
To conclude, I’ve been banging on so long about how to “get the facts right” not because I think everyone should write hard sci-fi. What I care about is giving people a proper understanding of the issues.
Sometimes that understanding needs to happen at an emotional level. Sometimes the best way to communicate to the emotions is with the fantastical.
Next time we are going to zoom out and look at some of the bigger issues, like the End of the World. Nothing too serious…
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Excellent piece! I hope the world (and I) get a chance to read your story about those difficult feelings of complicity. It will be an important one for our present days.