Babel Clash

You know, Morgan, you’re probably asking the wrong person about this stuff.

But off the cuff, I’d point out that all of the disasters you cite are simply not going to happen.  They’re storytelling tools of fantasy.  They’re broadly designed to disengage a reader from the here and now and carry them far away. Which is great.  And it’s also why stories of this type, and apocalypses and disasters of these types, will remain highly popular.  Zombies/Machines that Take Over/The Oncoming Prophecy of Doooooom!  They’ve been popular for decades now, though the zombie increase recently has been rather astonishing.  Read someone like John Joseph Adams zombie anthology The Living Dead to get a good taste of brains, er, treatments of zombies in literature.

But I have to think that even though we can point to a few environmentally-related collapse stories, we aren’t very serious about it, and it doesn’t gain much ground in literature precisely because it’s a little too real.  To the extent that environmental stories become absurd action stories (what was that global warming movie a few years ago? I’ve already forgotten, and the ebola-like outbreak movie? bleh.) you see environmental topics showing up as a factor, but mostly it’s to provide an action set-piece (Water World. ugh.)

The extent to which the environmental aspects of a story are relevant and uniquely connected to the plot makes for a much smaller subset of books. Mostly, it comes across as the old science fiction cliche where a the trusty six-shooter becomes a ray gun and the white horse becomes a star fighter. If you could do the story with the environmental components flipped to something else, then it’s not really an environment story. It’s just another action thriller.

And really, I doubt that more genuine stories of environmental collapse will gain much ground. The more relevant they are to our present, the more disturbing they are, which destroys their function as escapist literature. I’m sure we’ll be telling stories about zombies around our campfires while we ride camels through the desert of whatever real apocalypse we actually encounter, but we won’t tell stories about how our daughter got H1N1 and died miserably.

So books that I’d recommend? They’re all non-fiction. Read something like David Quammen’s astonishingly good exploration of speciation and extinction in Song of the Dodo. Read Jared Diamond’s fascinating Collapse.  James Howard Kuntzler’s worst case scenario meditations on peak oil.  Read Alan Weisman’s end of the world examination in The World Without Us.  Those books do what good science fiction does.  They will change the way you look at the world.

And as horror goes, they aren’t bad, either.