Thinking of the future in an optomistic way

[YankeyMCC]

Someone in the Fiction Books forum (or group, whatever) asked for recommendations on stories about environmental disasters. (let's put aside the fact that classifying these stories as fiction is going to become more and more difficult)

I immediately thought of an author I first learned of last year, Paolo Bacigalup.

And while looking him up and the titles to suggest in that Book forum I came across this Blog entry by the author, it is about how to write an optomistic SF story dealing with climate change but in it he makes some very good points about the real world.

(snip)
...you have to explain how all the yogacizing organic carrot munching Baby Bjorn wearing liberal types who drive four blocks to the video store to get another DVD rental (real person, btw) are going to wake up and smell the coffee. I mean, if a supposedly supportive person (She buys local organic, yay!!!) is still clueless and destructive, how are you going to get the coal miner with the “Piss on Hippies” bumper sticker on his 4×4 (another neighbor of mine) to think sustainably?

Sci-fi’s urge seems to mostly go after the consumer/tech solution, ie we’ll design a better product (we love you Prius) so that we can keep doing our same old destructive things…] but now, automagically, it won’t be bad. Makes me think of artificial sweeteners. Sometimes it’s not a magic bullet, no matter how much we wish it was.

(snip)
In order to surmount this, fictionally, it seems that one would either have to pretend that the majority of people are not in fact lazy, self-serving, and most importantly short-sighted (which seems difficult given that these aspects are precisely what has driven us to the edge of the cliff), or you have to come up with a plausible set of reasons for people to change. Kim Stanley Robinson does this by making global warming a crisis. But what if it’s actually a death of a thousand cuts?

I’d love to see good meaty sf that goes after the big questions about where we’re headed and how we’re going to sort it all out, but I have a hard time believing that it’s going to be done by techno-fix alone. And I have a very hard time believing that we’ll do anything before the damage is already enormous. After all, I’m writing this on a coal-burning computer, which will then be posted to a coal-burning web server, and there’s a pretty good chance that you’re reading it on a coal burning computer at your end, too.

At this point, writing realistic optimistic sf feels like another genre entirely– it feels like fantasy.
(snip)


more: http://windupstories.com/2008/03/10/optimistic-co2-sci-fi/

[Nihil]

1. Unfortunate but so damn true.

Thanks for posting those extracts - he obviously gets it!

:toast:

[Dead_Parrot]

2. Nah, Thinking of the future in an optimistic way is easy...

For instance:

No more worrying about by electric bill
I can cut down on the expensive coffee
No more sleepless night worrying about the polar bears
No more staring at the sea wondering why it's blue
No more queuing for fish & chips. Or pizza. In fact...
...I'll finally loose those extra pounds I've been putting on over the last few years

It'll be great. Granted, there may be a small amount of overhead involved, but I'm now going to stick my fingers in ears and say LALALALALA a lot.