I didn’t get as much done on The Fool’s Illusion as I wanted to even over the Memorial Day
weekend. My parents were in town for my two cousins’ college graduation and I
had a friend’s National Towel Day party to attend. For those of you who don’t
know what that is, it’s a fan celebration day for Douglas Adams’ sci fi satire
series of novels, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy. In the third novel of the trilogy, Life the Universe and Everything, there are scenes that involve a
towel which is one of the major symbols of this hilarious (mock) space epic. I
actually started reading the third installment just for the party (I’ve read
the first two already). As funny as it is, it all centres around the destruction
of the Earth (by aliens) and the rest of the universe. But the great thing
about this series is that it dares to laugh in the face of death, even death of
the entire universe.
With so much crap destroying our world--crap such as war,
crime, social injustice including famine, and pollution--and it’s apparent
increase as the years fly by, with so much bleakness and the sense of doom conveyed
by media, one of the things I truly believe will save us more than anything is
a sense of humour. And that includes humour even in the face of grinning Death.
That’s why satire such as Adams’ and other sci fi fantasy writers’ such as Kurt
Vonnegut’s, or dark humour in movies such as Vincent Price’s The Comedy of Terrors, Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein and Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr. Strange Love are so great. They
laugh at the bleakness of life and of the world around us.
Yet, we can’t just take things lying down (in this case,
lying down laughing). As a society, we must respond to issues that impact us in
order to resolve them. I thought that because we are on the subject of fear of our
planet’s destruction, I would post my article that talks about how science
fiction handles the concerns we have for humanity’s safety. Originally, this
article was going to be for my sci fi column at Examiner.com, but as I implied earlier, life
get’s in the way, as they say, and so I didn’t get a chance to post it on time
for it to be considered news.
The article discusses particularly how sci fi can get us to
think about how we can prevent future destruction of our planet, destruction
caused by problems such as pollution and global warming. And so the authors who
are centred on in this article are Kim Stanley Robinson and Tobias Buckell,
probably two of the best environmental oriented authors today. The first I’m
proud to say resides in my home area of Sacramento Davis
Photo Credit: Amazon
Kim Stanley Robinson: Back to the Prehistoric
Past for a Greener Future
by Steven Rose, Jr.
UC Davis’s Whole Earth Festival on Mother’s Day Weekend was
full of fun activities that emphasized the search for and educating of
solutions for an environmentally sustainable future. One of the events there
was Davis author Kim Stanley Robinson (most known for his Mars Trilogy)
and Ohio author Tobias Buckell’s panel on climate change on Saturday of the
festival. Robinson and Buckell discussed
science fiction’s suggestions of environmental utopic futures.
Buckell, a Caribbean born sci fi author, has been writing
and publishing as early as 2006, some of his works being novels The
Apocalypse Ocean and Arctic Rising, and his short story collection Mitigated
Futures.
Unfortunately, by the time I was able to make it through the vast quad of
festival tents and booths to Young Hall where the panel was held, Buckell was
already reading from one of his books and so I didn’t catch the title.
After Buckell’s reading, Robinson read an excerpt from his
novel, Shaman, set in a prehistoric ice age. But this is no pulp-/Hollywood-
During the two authors’ dialog on the subject of climate
change and science fiction, one phrase Robinson kept bringing up was “utopian
societies”. He referred to the primeval tribal society of Shaman as a
model for a more communal future society that can plan ahead to prevent, or at
least reduce, ecological disaster such as a global meltdown of the ice caps.
Robinson explained how such a society could work in a high tech age: by
utilizing clean energy technology and reforming capitalism to make it more
socially just (though not necessarily communist). Through this idea, Robinson
explained the economic implications and necessary reform for an environmentally
responsible society.
Buckell added to the idea of a sustainable utopian society
a, what he said is, too often overlooked fact: a city is a form of technology.
He said the problem with the concept of the city today is that most people
think of a city as “an accident of trade”. As an example of a holistic society
Buckell talked about an innovative and creative community in the Virgin
Islands. Emphasizing this community’s art, he compared the community to a town
in Ohio that is more utilitarian by capital means and prevents the innovation
that can bring sustainability and clean technology. In relation to this, he
said that the problem with modern day capitalism is that money does not
circulate back into the society and so doesn’t benefit the people as a whole,
two of those benefits being clean energy and technology to create a healthier
environment. He used Walmart as a microscopic example of today’s capitalism.
Both authors discussed how the best type of science fiction
is that which makes readers think about the consequences of future technology.
This topic started when Buckell and Robinson said they felt there were more sci
fi writers as early as 1930s and as late as the ‘70s who wrote stories about
the impact of the atom and nuclear bombs than there are sci fi writers today
writing about the impact of climate change and global warming.
Much more than your Hollywood-inspired space opera and sci
fi-horror reading, Robinson and Buckell’s stories generally depict more
realistic futures and plausible scientific phenomena, commenting on the
technology of today’s societies. Science fiction should be used to help people
think and offer ideas about how to build better futures that work for all
society rather than just certain elitist groups. In the case of Robinson and
Buckell’s work, it does this by offering or suggesting solutions to
environmental problems.
Robinson and Buckell’s presentation on climate change and
science fiction was definitely fit for UCD’s Whole Earth Festival. After all,
how much science fiction deals with future technology and the planets it
effects including our own? If more science fiction like Robinson and Buckell’s
asked socially significant questions, such as the impact of technology on the
environment, as did the Golden Age sci fi writers did with the atom bomb, it
would be more subject for environmental events such as the Whole Earth
Festival. Page-turner sci fi about wars in space or in distant futures can only
contribute so much to the development of a more socially just and sustainable
society. (But don’t get me wrong--we all need a break from thinking at least
once in our lives.)
And here’s a link to a list of environmental science fiction reading.
For those of you that will be in the Sacramento area on
Sunday the second of the month, I will be at Sac-Con and so will my updated Fool’s
Illusion bookmarks which will be free while supplies last. And you must be
sick of hearing about my upcoming book but seeing no book in view. I don’t
blame you. But again, life gets in the way, but it doesn’t have to be in the
way forever. I have completed the book’s introduction and am nearly finished
with the front cover. I will be sending the manuscript off to Amazon’s
CreateSpace by the end of the upcoming week. So please tune in next weekend for
more details on how you can purchase the book and perhaps even receive a free
copy.
Until next time . . .
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