This is part 23 of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
To finish off the literary part of this series, we’re going to take a quick look at some of our more recent literary history of dealing with world-breaking events.
The World Wars and Atomic weapons left a big mark on the arts. That legacy is now influencing how people approach climate change, for both good and ill. It’s important to know what that influence is, and how our present moment differs from the past.
This will be just a quick overview of what is an otherwise enormous subject.
THE WAR
Many people living at the time really did see the World Wars as world-ending collapse-of-civilization events.
Prior to 1914 the world was divided almost entirely between the colonial empires. People had very particular expectations for how the world should work in economics, politics, religion, culture, everything. By 1950 all of that had been obliterated, and in the most horrific ways imaginable.
Here’s some of the ways people responded artistically.
The Dystopias
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is an era when dystopian fiction really got going.
The previous era had actually seen a wave of utopian fiction, particularly socialist utopias, much of which were straight up evangelism for Communism. That was roughly the same time as when Karl Marx was around, and then a bit later when guys like Lenin were getting started.
By the 1920s people started looking at those utopias very differently. HG Wells was still writing utopias in this time, but we don’t remember them.
What we do remember is Brave New World (1932), a deliberate parody of the stuff HG Wells was writing. We also remember Orwell’s 1984 (1949), which features “ingsoc“ the dystopian degradation of socialist optimism into totalitarianism.
Dystopia = Totalitarianism is very firmly embedded in the cultural imagination. This shows up in pop-culture to this day, notably in the Star Wars franchise were the Empire are basically space-Nazis.
The Death of Meaning
Blowing up the world really messed with people’s sense of meaning. This translated into the arts too.
Dadaism rejected more or less everything which had just gone bang. Whatever counted for logic, reason, or beauty they ditched. Instead they embraced absurdity. They saw the old order burning, and decided to add gasoline to the fire. We also got good old Kafka, confused and terrified, a sort of combination of totalitarianism with absurdity.
All this is fairly similar in function to what we looked at previously with the Weird.
Portraits of an Era
A lot of authors left us much more straightforward stories of their times as they saw it. Such stories humanized those involved, as well as confronted society with who we were. As John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath (1939) put it:
“I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.”
We might say he succeeded too.
The authors of this period have informed our ideas about what life back then was like, and how and why it all happened. Notably, war stories like All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) have significantly influenced modern ideas about what war is and what it means. The kids these days are much less keen on getting shot than they were in 1914.
Heart Warmers, Entertainment, and More
While it’s a side issue for our purposes, not everyone was writing about war and economic ruin. This is also the period that gave us Mary Poppins, The Little Prince, Agatha Christy crime novels, Cthulhu, and The Lord of the Rings.
While every era is awash with entertainment of all kinds, some at least in various ways either reflect or respond to the needs of the times. In the case of the wars, novels and other entertainments even got sent out to the troops, bringing both comfort and much needed distraction.
The War VS Climate Change
Many classic works were created during this time period. This era has had an enormous influence on us.
Given the complexity of those times, and the significant overlap in social issues, a lot of that is positive influence. Wars, fascists, inequality, economic crashes – all these are part of our current moment too.
However, if we want to explore climate change specifically, they don’t have as much to offer us. Climate change is something profoundly different and new. Thanks to the War years we are over-sensitive to the issues of the past (e.g. Nazis, economic crisis, and war), and almost blind to new issues only now arising.
We can’t just copy-paste 1984 for dystopia, or Grapes of Wrath for economic chaos. We also have grapple with all the things we’ve been discussing in this whole series, much of which just didn’t exist for an Orwell or Steinbeck.
THE BOMB
Nuclear weapons were the first big cultural moment when we really had to contemplate the possibility of global self-annihilation. The Cold War gave us nearly fifty years of nuke-themed artistic output, which has now solidified into persistent tropes and cliches.
Atomic Monsters
Nuclear war, in its infancy was an interaction between The USA and Japan. Both countries produced noteworthy Atomic Monster movies, where that recent war was reflected in metaphor.
The general premise is something we’ve actually encountered already when we looked at HG Wells’ Things To Come (one of his interwar era utopias). We might call this theme, The Eternally Recurring Apocalypse of Techno-optimism.
The basic idea is this:
The power of science and the military has created a terrifying threat which threatens to destroy civilization. However, the power of science and the military is able to defeat this threat, allowing the progress of civilization to continue. Rinse and repeat.
Japan gave us Godzilla (1954), an ancient monstrous radioactive being which we may have understood in the past but can now only kill. Godzilla is angered, stomps around, before being tragically euthanized by the use of a dangerous new technology. It’s much a more sensitive film than what the Americans gave us.
Them! (1954) is a story of giant mutant ants who threaten to engulf the planet with exponential reproduction. The scientists are called in. Then the military is called in. A combination of expertise and flamethrowers saves the day. The film ends with an ominous warning:
> The job will be done when these are destroyed.
> Okay, burn them out.
> Pat, if these monsters are a result of the first atomic bomb in 1945... ...what about all the others that have been exploded since then?
> I don't know. Nobody knows, Robert. When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we'll eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.
Echoes of this kind of thinking turn up for climate change with talk of Geo-engineering.
Radioactive Superpowers & Other Fun
Mutants aren’t all bad though. Atomic power is a wild and godlike power, and we kind of like it. During the Cold War, the USA’s geopolitical dominance found expression in comic book mutant superheroes. Here mutation is strength. The bomb is power. Exposure to radiation allows you to become a deeply reactionary vigilante crime fighter.
We also got the Bikini, compliments of the irradiated ruins of Bikini Atoll. In other words, anyone who could react to the Bomb, had a reaction – even if it was a fairly silly one.
Atomic Art Movements
Various entire movements also sprang up in response to the atomic era. This is a similar story to things like Dada (although not necessarily the exact same response as Dada had), with artists declaring, “The old world is dead! Everything must change!”
It’s called EAISMO, ie moving the Atomic Age (E, A, ism) because the discovery of atomic energy is concerned by EAISTI as the acquisition of a principle that can revolutionize our conception of the universe, and then alter that ‘sentimental moral balance that it was his support and his justification, and therefore able to put us in the face of incalculable problems….
- Manifesto of Eaismo (1948), by Voltolino Fontani
Ominous Warnings
Many people have been strongly anti-dying-in-a-fiery-nuclear-apocalypse. Therefore we got three styles of work that aimed at scaring the bejezuz out of everyone.
The first was the Warning.
A few notable films included:
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which suggested we should cede power to a robotic Hobbesian Leviathan of benevolent peacekeeping machines.
Dr Strangelove (1964), which satirized the whole nuclear military system.
WarGames (1983), which suggested automating doom might be a bad idea, unless you can teach a computer that some games just can’t be won.
All these looked at the precursors to pressing the Big Red Button, and tried to give some constructive criticism around the whole planetary suicide pact thing.
Those Nightmare Films Where Everyone Dies
Next in the Please-Don’t-Press-the-Big-Red-Button genre we got all nightmare visions of what pressing said button would do. Lots of fire, dead babies, radiation, annihilation of all humanity, etc.
Famous films included:
The Day After (1983), which showed many people dying in the USA.
Threads (1984), which showed a lot of people dying in the UK.
Post-apocalypse
If after all that, you’re still interested in pressing the Button, we got further nightmares about life after said button pressing and fiery doom. The world is now a wasteland, a place of ruins, contamination, and mutation.
This very much mimics the Biblical apocalypse, and fits that theme much better than climate change does. The Bomb has therefore reinforced this earlier religious vision. Before VS After. Salvation VS Damnation. The Wasteland as a secular version of Hell.
Post-apocalypse has established itself as a genre which is continuing strong (e.g. the Fallout games, and several billion YA novels). When it merges with dystopia = totalitarianism, and you get something like the Hunger Games.
The Bomb VS Climate Change
Our imaginations have been shaped by decades spent grappling with the bomb. The forms used don’t necessarily match up all that well with the reality we now face. Nuclear war and climate change are two profoundly different things.
Stopping nuclear war means making nuclear war unthinkable.
The aim is to inhibit. Stop. Shut down.
Mutually Assured Destruction is a situation where decision making rests with very few people. Almost everyone else is powerless, expect to the extent they can oppose war itself (or the arms race, nuclear testing, etc).
Climate change is the opposite.
Action needs to be motivated. Start. Change. Create.
Decision making rests with billions of people. True, some have more power than others, but dislodging those roadblocks also requires mass action.
That Atomic dystopian fear needs to be actively unlearned, or at least limited to where it belongs – actual nuclear war. At the moment our apocalyptic and dystopian tropes may be actively preventing people from understanding climate change and responding appropriately.
Conclusion
We carry a huge heritage of tropes, clichés, plot lines and more inherited from centuries worth of people wrestling with the crises of their times. Some of those still apply today. A lot of them don’t.
Next time you find yourself drifting towards imagining a future of nuclear apocalypse Nazis, maybe have another think.
Next time we’ll start getting into politics. Because, oh boy, does this stuff get political.
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Thank you - this has been a longstanding interest of mine, particularly the ways tropes have morphed as literature refocuses from nuclear apocalypse to climate. I'm a science fiction and fantasy writer, so I'm most familiar with how this has worked in genre - actually particularly in Lovecraftian fiction. I would argue that a lot of Lovecraft's stories do reflect the disruption of WWI, with recognizable PTSD from experiencing Horrors that looks a lot like reactions to the shifting political and military reality. Charlie Stross's more recent Laundry books started with a Cthulhoid imminent apocalypse that clearly reflected the Cold War, and then shifted to an "it's not an event, it's an era" model that's more climate-change-like.
In genre more generally, another of my interests is the cozy apocalypse in which people like the author just happen to have the right skills to thrive in the post-whatever world, and rebuild in their image. I think these did a lot of harm during the Cold War in convincing some people that nuclear apocalypse would be survivable and maybe even desirable. Perhaps because of the politicization of climate change as something to anticipate at all, I see less of this now, though there's an argument to be made that some solarpunk futures depend an awful lot on a sufficient threshold of people deciding to think like the author.