H. G. Wells: The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911)
Lecture 11:
Utopia / Dystopia (ii)
The Country of the Blind
Texts:
- H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind" (1904): from the Course Book of Readings: 176-94.
- Tina Shaw, "Albatross" (2006): from the Course Book of Readings: 196-201.
- Ursula K. Le Guin, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1976 / 1987): from the Course Book of Readings: 203-12.
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H. G. Wells: Complete Short Stories (1966)
The Challenge of Cli-fi
The statements was interesting, but tough.
– Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884)
There’s an interesting episode of the US Prime-time TV programme Newsroom where the show’s charismatic anchorman Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) invites a EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] climate scientist onto his current affairs show as a last-item-before-the-weekend filler.
The smug, self-satisfied anchorman asks the scientist what we should do to avoid climate change. Stop burning fossil fuels? Try to reverse greenhouse emissions?
The scientist agrees that would be good.
But will it help?
No.
Will is unwilling to accept this answer.
The scientist explains that twenty years ago it might have helped. Now it’s too late.
Too late to avoid some of the effects of the climate crisis?
No, just too late.
You can watch the clip yourself here on youtube, if you wish.
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Some of the key claims in the scientist’s gloomy Jeremiad were fact-checked at the time by James West, one of the “smart, fearless” journalists at the alternative news site Mother Jones:
- “A person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet.” Too optimistic, says West: “it’s also arguable that deaths are already and will continue to be linked to climate change events.”
- “The last time there was this much CO2 in the air, the oceans were 80 feet higher than they are now.” Guilty as charged: “The last time the atmosphere clocked 400 ppm it was 3 million years ago – the ‘Mid-Pliocene’ – when sea levels were as much as 80 feet higher than today.”
- “Half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of an ocean.” That might be too rosy a picture, due to the programme’s use of outdated figures from the late 1990s: “According to a more recent 2011 NOAA report, 55 percent of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coast”. Just to make it clearer what he’s implying, the scientist adds: “Humans can’t breathe underwater.”
- “There isn’t a position on this any more than there’s a position on the temperature at which water boils.” The anchorman has demanded what the official Government position on this situation is. Again, the point seems sound: “There’s consensus amongst 97 percent of climate scientists that global warming is happening and that’s it’s a manmade disaster.” Mind you, the boiling point of water does depend on what altitude you’re at.
- “Mass migration, food and water shortages, spread of deadly disease, endless wildfires … storms that have the power to level cities, blacken out the sky and create permanent darkness.” The anchorman has asked what effects his viewers can expect to see. The scientist’s answer may sound a little Biblical, but (as West explains):
All of these things are predicted by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – I mean, not the permanent darkness thing, I don’t think that’s meant to be scientific. But yes, as we reported in May this year, Europe faces freshwater shortages; Asia can expect more severe flooding from extreme storms; North America will see increased heat waves and wildfires, which can cause death and damage to ecosystems and property. Especially in poor countries, diminished crop yields will likely lead to increased malnutrition, which already affects nearly 900 million people worldwide.
Climate change, which has now given rise to its own fictional genre, Cli-fi, is a perfect example of some of the issues discussed in the previous chapter.
How do you alert people to the dangers of pursuing the path our industrial civilisation is following? How can you persuade – or force – them to change their ways?
Clearly this is a tactical rather than an aesthetic question. In other words, it’s in the propaganda basket rather than the realm of art.
What makes a cli-fi novel good? Presumably the degree to which it alerts people to the dangers of climate change. But what should they do once they’ve been so alerted? Unfortunately, there’s a tendency to despair and do nothing in cases where the fear has become too strong, as some recent psychological studies have pointed out.
So how do you get your audience to react intelligently to these bitter truths, rather than panicking and hiding their heads in the sand?
Perhaps you have to assert that there is always something that can still be done, whether you actually believe it to be true or not.
Interestingly, one way of doing that is to make a joke of the whole thing, as Aaron Sorkin does in his TV show. Jeff Daniels is left uncharacteristically speechless by his exchange with the climate scientist, but the impact of the scene somehow transcends the success of the gag.
Alternatively, you could try to frighten people with the barren, dystopic world which will result from our collective inaction, as Tina Shaw does in her ‘Albatross’ story. Confining her cast to children is a calculated move on her part, as threats to our children to tend to move us more than threats to other adults, hopefully for ethical as well as biological reasons.
As a genre, cli-fi does tend to be dystopic in nature – though there are occasional Utopias mixed in here and there. There are numerous precedents for these types of themes in the Apocalyptic fictions of the 1950s, the post-atomic war nightmares of such authors as J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.
In any case, Cli-fi (as it now exists) can no longer be seen simply as a subset of the larger genre of Speculative Fiction. It includes political thrillers such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” series (2004-7, revised edition 2015); mainstream novels such as Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010); and even inventive children’s books, such as How to Bee by Bren MacDibble (2017).
Discussion of ideas and workshopping of portions of text for your final portfolios.
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