This is part 9 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
For a long time I’ve struggled with perfectionism. I’m also a hard sci-fi fan, and I have a head full of arcane facts, and I really don’t like being wrong. When I first tried to write a fictional Climate Change scenario this caused some problems.
I knew I was wrong.
I knew I was doing “bad ecology”.
It’s almost impossible not to.
Climate Change is too complicated to “get it right”, at least not 100%. Let’s take one example, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This is one of those nasty “tipping points” we hear about. In The Day After Tomorrow, a shutdown of the AMOC causes an instant ice age... which is scientifically bonkers.
But how would we get this right?
The last thing I watched on the subject left me bewildered. Yes, slowing the AMOC could cause cooling in Europe and North America... as well as heating in other parts of Europe and North America?... and changes in rainfall?... in the Sahara?... and... and.. and on it goes.
The details and complications are endless. AMOC is just one climate factor. Everything is like this. And they are all connected.
No writer on Earth could get this 100% scientifically accurate. Let’s just list some of the many ways we can be wrong:
We missed a fact
We got the numbers wrong
We misunderstood some process
We focused on the wrong thing
We made our best guess and our best guess was garbage
The numbers we found are actually out of date... or outliers ...or just wrong.
The scientific margins of error were so wide we had no idea which number to pick anyway.
The subject contained too many interconnected variables for any human mind to comprehend.
The future is fundamentally unknowable by any mortal being, and we are a mortal being.
We couldn’t find any information anywhere because no human being on Earth knows the answer.
On it goes.
When I tried writing about Antarctica I found there were just so many things I did not know. What will happen to the penguins? Will wind patterns change enough that they get heat-waves? Will ocean acidification screw up all the fish? Will it actually warm up as much as I think it will, or more, or less, or something strange I’ve never even considered?
Most of these questions range from unanswerable to excessively time-consuming to answer. At some point I just had to... oh dear... here it comes... I just shrugged and guessed.
Suffice to say, chances are we will be wrong. Significantly wrong. But breathe in, breathe out, it’s going to be okay.
As far as “getting it right”, in my view a good fictional scenario will do this:
Say something true about Climate Change
Avoid anything outrageously false about Climate Change
Make peace with its own incompleteness
The rest of the job is to make sure the reader doesn’t notice and still thinks you’re a genius.
The greatest aid to that end which I’ve discovered so far is Strategic Ambiguity. If I don’t know what I’m on about, best to shut up.
Bob and Pam walked along the beach, both making careful note to never tell anyone the precise position of this beach on a topographic map.
“Beautiful day,” said Pam, enjoying the generic level of warmth.
“A stunner!” exclaimed Bob, watching the birds of no particular species. “Hey, would you like some unidentified food items? I got them via a delivery method from a geographic region of planet Earth.”
Pam took a thing from the place, laughing, “Oh Bob, you sure know how to make a woman feel emotions...”
It is entirely possible to write a great climate story with very little solid research under it. One story, if I recall correctly, just referred to the weather as being “climatey”. That’s strategic ambiguity at its most blatant finest! (Might’ve been Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. Apparently he does a similar trick with calling guns “modified” when he has no idea what the gun can actually do.)
Depending on the story, the climate scenario might exist entirely as background. Figuring this stuff out might be necessary world-building - it helps write the story - but almost all of it can be shoved “off-screen”.
If the audience never sees any of it, except in a few story-relevant glimpses, then even the most absurdly inaccurate scenario can appear plausible – provided those glimpses are okay.
It’s worth remembering, science fiction does not exist to predict the future. Even scientific scenarios aren’t predictions. They are plausible What-ifs. They test our thinking, break our assumptions, explore what could happen.
A good scenario clarifies our thinking.
All knowledge consists of simplifications. Sometimes the whole point is to push things to an extreme, just to prove a point or to break some common myth.
We can call this being beautifully wrong, as opposed to just stupid wrong. An insightful simplification, instead of a misleading inaccuracy. Being beautifully wrong can lead us closer to deeper truths by cutting away much of the noise and focusing our attention down on one or two things that really are true.
So far we’ve spent a lot of time trying to get the facts right. That was an attempt to move us away from being stupid wrong. My own feeling is that I don’t actually care much for pedantic accuracy. The facts are a set of constraints on the imagination. Our attempt to play within the boundaries of reality is how we become beautifully wrong, instead of just stupid wrong.
Although, we might decide to drop the reality too, and go completely freaking crazy.
More on that next time.
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