Author Greg Mosse on science fiction and climate change

When you set your novel in the near future—I wrote The Coming Darkness in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the action takes place in 2037—you surf a wave of fast-evolving news. Before the novel even published, one of my predictions—a terrorist attack on undersea energy and communications infrastructure—had already happened.

The future is neither a closed book nor a blank canvas. Convincing speculative fiction is grounded in now. But our eyes are always on the horizon, looking for what’s coming, judging competing eventualities against what we know and what we can imagine.

I researched The Coming Darkness and its sequel, The Coming Storm, by reading endless articles in the popular press and learned journals. Newspapers and magazines were often categoric; academic sources more nuanced. I studied strategic planning documents from National Health Trusts and annual reports from international corporations. They didn’t provide my plot, but they did sketch the panoramic background for a world tumbling downhill, picking up speed into crisis.

This story-telling territory isn’t mine alone. Novelists from Margaret Atwood to Amitav Ghosh write “climate fiction” (or “cli-fi”), speculative works that imagine predictable and unpredictable consequences from our degradation of the Earth’s biosphere.

Contemporary writers have a harder job than Leonardo da Vinci imagining the helicopter in his late renaissance workshop, or Jules Verne predicting widespread gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, changing gender norms and global warming back in the 1860s. The pace of technological advance—and environmental destruction—has accelerated so much that cli-fi finds it hard to keep up.

In the real world in 2024, we’re in the middle of an AI “arms race”, with profit-driven corporations unleashing an untried technology, chasing short-term financial gain without adequate safeguards on future security. The hero of The Coming Storm, Alex Lamarque, knows the dangers of authoritarian governments and international corporate monopolies, but he also recognises that global resources can be managed more efficiently by synthetic intelligence than uncertain multilateral human co-operation.

When, in 1942, Isaac Asimov conceived the Three Laws of Robotics, he was imagining safeguards to protect humans from decisions based in pure heartless logic. He put it in an imagined future, 2058 AD, that seems already to have arrived. Meanwhile, in the UK, healthcare is rationed on the basis of availability, not need.

Is it possible for a convincing portrayal of future climate catastrophe to inspire scientists, politicians and ordinary citizens to take action before it’s too late? Seeing what’s coming down the track—perhaps “darkness” and a “storm”, perhaps even a “bright new dawn”—can provide a competitive advantage in business, wealth creation and employment. It can provide the welfare state with strategies that respect a government’s duty of care to each individual citizen.

But, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to H G Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, writers have tended to pessimism. Why is that, when they have also predicted some of humanity’s most beneficial innovations? How does that negativity reconcile with the fact that, despite widespread inequality and poverty, more people today live longer, healthier lives than ever before in human history?

We are surrounded by terrifying “extinctions“—of plants and animals and ecospheres. It is impossible, in good faith, to ignore the destruction, to close our eyes to the dismal recognition that—whether or not you or I sort our trash into recyclables and avoidable waste—our efforts represent no more than a tiny drop in the vast flood of human beings’ insatiable, resource-hungry, self-destructive consumption.