Science fiction is valuable for its freedom to conduct thought-experiments which illuminate our present by showing us possible futures. As I’ve said before, utopias beckon us along a particular path while dystopias hold up warning signs saying, “Wrong way – go back.”
Conflict develops character and drives narrative so there are strong literary reasons for the preponderance of dystopias (nuclear war, pandemic, climate collapse, etc – choose your own disaster!). That can be depressing but at least the best of them do point to ways to avoid whatever crisis they describe. The Ministry for the Future, in fact, aims to do exactly that.
William Gibson has done as much as any other SF writer (any other writer in any genre, in fact) to look into the future we’re creating but he’s not very optimistic. Here is a good introduction to his work for those who don’t know it, and here is my review of his Jackpot Trilogy.
All my other book reviews are listed on this page but for some years now I’ve also been sharing brief notes about environmental SF as ‘Comments’ on various articles. This page brings them together.
Tchaikovsky: Saturation Point
Saturation Point (novella, 2024) is further proof that Adrian Tchaikovsky, who I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is a writer to follow. Set perhaps around 2100, it sends us on an expedition into a tropical jungle made deadly by extreme heat and humidity. The jungle holds hostile creatures and the expedition itself is plagued by internal mysteries and betrayals, so the first-person narrative is as much horror as SF; but it’s good (plausible) SF and an interesting (scary) extrapolation of our ongoing climate predicament. Highly recommended.
Winton: Juice
Tim Winton’s latest novel, Juice (2024), “imagines a world where an inhospitable climate has made life precarious.” … “It’s a post-apocalyptic world where the winters are hot and the lethal summers are spent underground. The climate catastrophe has made large tracts of the globe unviable and rendered other parts unfamiliar, from the Arctic swamp to the Former Republic of Utah. Civilisation has fallen and criminal clans wield the most power.”
Winton says “it’s the ‘nightmare’ that might result if we fail to curtail climate change,” so it’s not going to be an easy read, but he has a good track record as both novelist and environmentalist so it should be good. More at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-05/tim-winton-new-book-juice-review/104421118 and a rave review from a SF/fantasy magazine.
Chan: Every Version of You
Grace Chan offers a different and (equivocally) more positive prediction of a degraded and depopulated world than some. In Every Version of You, almost the whole human population uploads to the cloud in the 2080s, to live there in virtual-reality communities. Back in the real world, the global population drops to a few thousands while the computing infrastructure is maintained and extended by androids. It’s a very good book but its real focus is identity rather than the environment so I’ve witten (a little) more about it on my other blog.
Vadnais: Fauna
Fauna, by young Canadian author Christiane Vadnais, is a sequence of a dozen linked scenes in a world which reminded me of Vandermeer and Ballard. The mood is dark, phantasmagorical, even nightmarish. Nature invades the human world (our bodies as well as our civilisation) and everything is subject to corruption and dissolution although there are avenues of positive change as well, as a young Canadian reviewer explains at understoreymagazine.ca/2021/03/fauna-by-christiane-vadnais/
Schmidt: Under the Sun
Gavin Schmidt, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has ventured into fiction with a short story (2018) which you can read online at Motherboard. As he says in this introduction, it’s a spin-off from serious work he was doing on the possible longevity of civilisations.
Chait: Our Memory Like Dust
Here’s another dystopia: Our Memory Like Dust, by Gavin Chait (2017). It is based firmly on the present reality of African climate refugees’ mass migration into Europe, fast-forwarded 20 or 50 years, and is a very good novel in which conflict between solar farmers in the Sahara, evil fossil fuel producers and an ISIS-like rebel army is crucial.
It reminded me of Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife more than of anything else I’ve read recently but is much more positive in its outlook, showing that we can potentially solve the worst of our problems through a combination of engineering and government policy. Too optimistic? Perhaps; but we need optimism.
For more about the book, see Goodreads; to sample it, visit the author’s site.
- To be continued!