We Asked Sci-Fi Writers About The Future Of Climate Change

The day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Wired reported on a story that could be misconstrued as a thrilling work of eco-fiction. Anticipating the new president’s ambivalence towards climate change, scientists raced to back up their research, fearing that years’ worth of online evidence and solutions could be erased or otherwise marred. The pressure was on. Trump’s team had at this point confirmed that some data would be taken down from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website. So, data was pitted against rhetoric, fact against alternative fact. Of course, as sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out last week in a letter to The Oregonian, alternative facts are different from fiction. “A lie is a non-fact deliberately told as fact,” she wrote. “Santa Claus is a fiction. He’s harmless. Lies are seldom completely harmless, and often very dangerous. Fiction, on the other hand, can entertain, inform, and speculate. In the case of science fiction, it can provide human context for facts and data, supporting it rather than refuting it. Possible solutions to urgent issues such as climate change can be explored. Though speculative fiction authors — including Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Barbara Kingsolver — have flocked to the topic in recent years, climate change has been addressed in fiction for decades, dating back to J.G. Ballard’s imagined natural disasters. In response to th...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news