In the last entry, I talked about pandemics and diseases of a scale so large that there are few people left. We saw the reality of a pandemic in 2020, and while it was horrifying and life-changing, it certainly was not on the scale of the fictional pandemics from King, McCammon, et al. And perhaps that PA cause is a bit overdone? I hope not, because I’m writing two of them.
Fortunately for the PA fiction afficionado, there are many other ways for the world to end. Another issue we are dealing with in our real life is climate change, the resistance to believe it is happening and even if it is, that humans can do anything about it or have any responsibility for it. So this makes it a fertile ground for fictional treatments.
Environmental disasters are one of the larger categories of PA fiction today. One of the earlier ones I’m aware of (and I’m probably missing a lot of them) was shown in the film THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know what happens, don’t read on.
The environmental disaster in that movie is rapid climate change, a topic that is controversial in the political and social (if not within the science) communities. It’s this denial that makes it such a potent source of material for PA fiction writers. When the movie was made, we were used to hearing the terminology “global warming” instead of “rapid climate change” so this movie definitely gave viewers something else to look at. In the movie, instead of the Earth warming up, it freezes. Their premise is fun but does not hold much water scientifically, I’m told. Still, some of the ideas behind it are valid. What we were calling “global warming” did not mean that the entire planet experiences endless summers. It’s an unfortunate term because small increases in global temperatures lead to changes in ocean currents, in salt concentration of the oceans, in changes in weather patterns that can lead to extreme conditions. Is it happening? I’ll leave that to individuals, but I choose to believe the scientists, because I like to think I am a scientist, in a way.
Kelly L. Greene has written several different PA series, most dealing with (from what I’ve read so far) environmental disasters which kill off significant numbers of our population. She has flooding, extreme weather, and a host of other situations leading to these events. What I like about Greene’s stories is that she focuses on the humans left behind. Really, does it even matter what the reasons are? Not so much to the survivors. They still behave like humans behave—good, bad, and indifferent.
Stephen Baxter wrote a series about people leaving the planet to look for a new home for humanity due to extreme environmental changes. ARK is about the journey through space, and it is science fiction at its finest. FLOOD is about what happens here on Mother Earth, and while it has the rigors of SF, it has the trappings of good old PA fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his 40-50-60 DAYS series of books, also tackles environmental disasters with a SF writer’s rigor and discipline as to what is possible and what isn’t.
Sometimes it’s fun to approach things with SF writers’ discipline—it’s like a thought experiment that can be cautionary about our outlook on our real life. But sometimes it’s fun to throw science to the wind and just tell the story you want to tell. I believe that SF writers are, by their very nature, philosophers of a sort. They are taking real-world facts and extrapolating them forward to explore possible futures. They often have an agenda beyond just telling a story, and I think that can be extremely interesting to consider one set of possible consequences to how we choose to deal with today’s issues.
Can PA fiction deal with things like this? Absolutely, as shown by Baxter and Robinson. But does it have to, in order to be entertaining? I don’t think so. Facts sometimes get in the way of a fun story. Stories, by their nature, are “lies” in that the events described are fictional! I think most good stories use these falsehoods to tell a story that illustrates a larger (or sometimes not so large) point that the author is trying to make. Not to mention that often, we do not understand the world around us, nor do we understand everything that occurs in that world. Some things are false—until they are true! (Hard SF is not really like this, but even there, writers use tropes like FTL travel, which is pretty accepted to be impossible in any scenario…impossible, until it’s NOT!)
The comment I’d leave one with is that we can entertain and make people think without being strictly factual and within the realm of possibility. Maybe that means that we leave the SF genre, or at least the hard SF sub-genre) and move into those genres that aren’t as rigorous on those points. Maybe we move a bit into…
Horror?
Our next sub-sub-genre will come as no surprise to horror writers. But I’ll argue that it is every bit as post-apocalyptic as disease and environmental disaster apocalypses. Of course I’m talking about the zombie apocalypse!
To be continued…