Just Finished Reading: Nature’s Warnings – Classic Stories of Eco-Science Fiction edited by Mike Ashley (FP: 2020) [315pp]
Long before present concerns about Global Warming or Climate Change hit the headlines, and long before even the 60’s and 70’s Green Movement became news Science Fiction authors were looking at future ecological catastrophes and humanity’s reactions to them. This is a collection of some of those stories running from the 1920’s to the 1980’s.
Whenever reviewing a book of short stories, I normally preface things by saying that such collections are, rather inevitably, a bit hit and miss quality wise. This is no exception to that rule. Whilst generally there are few poor stories, I was disappointed that, being classics of the genre, there were fewer impressive stories than I’d hoped for. Three in particular did impress me though. The first was ‘The Man Who Hated Flies’ by J D Beresford (1929) where a solitary scientist is determined to rid the world of that useless pest with dangerous unintended consequences, ‘The Gardener’ by Margaret St Clair (1949) where the ‘spirit’ of an alien forest hunts down those who damage the trees under its care and extracts a particularly fitting form of retribution, and ‘Hunter, Come Home’ by Richard McKenna (1963) where a planet being ‘terraformed’ learns to fight back and gains some human allies along the way. This was the best of the collection and couldn’t help but remind me of the original Avatar movie. A few more where definitely above average including ‘Drop Dead’ by Clifford D Simak (1956) where a planets ecology and especially its singular wildlife is just too good to be true, or safe and ‘A Matter of Protocol’ by Jack Sharkey (1962) where an innocent survey mission causes an ecology to go into radical imbalance merely by landing their ship on the surface.
Overall, this was a reasonable read with a few highlights. I’m glad that I picked it, and several others, up from my fave Indie bookshop a few months ago. This is part of the British Library Science Fiction Classics series. More to come.
6 comments:
Oooh! Did this mention that book "Garbage World", or something like that? It' early eco-SF. I stumbled on it via Resolute Reader a few weeks back and was thinking of reading it for Halloween.
No mention of 'Garbage World' in the Intro - at least I don't think there was, definitely no 'bells' going off. Does this kind of thing interest you?
If it's done well or expressed in interesting ways. I'm a firm believer in environmental stewardship...I just don't idolize windmills & solar plants the way many do, and regard climate change as something we're better off adapting to than trying to stave away. Against human stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain..
So, you don't think we should try to do anything to 'fix' it - rather than simply coping/adapting to it? Most of the Climate Change we're living through now seems to be caused by our own actions, so, if we change our behaviour maybe we won't need to adapt so much... Especially when such adaptations will cost a great deal and won't be equitably distributed across the globe.
Depends on the proposed fix. I'm against geoengineering because we've proven we don't know what we're doing and are far too enthusiastic about doing it. Witness the nuclear testing in the fifties. Some climate proposals mesh with general quality-of-life improvements. Getting away from coal, for instance, is a fairly good goal because it means cleaner air and more security down the road, because we're not dependent on an exhaustible fuel source. I'm ALL for restructuring our urban development to be less car-dependent, but that's not what we're doing. Instead, we're just trying to replace affordable vehicles in an inhuman environment with far more expensive vehicles in an equally inhuman environment, and taking away MORE human agency to boot. These days nearly the ENTIRETY of anything environmental is this obsession with Co2, which is classified as a pollutant despite that it's not, and is in fact salutatory for most of the life on the planet. I don't buy into the doomsday Venus scenarios. I've seen too much confident forecasting, and more importantly I watch what the government does as opposed to what its says. The technocrats all fly to these conferences to lecture us on how to save the planet, when they could easily zoom in to say the same. They're not serious. The DC elite all preach about sustainability while spending decade after decade of military intervention in wide theaters, and nothing on this EARTH is climate-unfriendly than military machines. They're not serious. They claim to be worried about the environment, but they're engaging in facile nuclear brinksmanship, as a nuclear exchange wasn't bad for the environment. They're. Not. Serious. They're like the lockdown politicians who took their masks off as soon as the cameras were off, and went to parties while the rest of us were told to stay inside and watch netflix.
And even if they were....most Co2 and methane are coming from China, not the first world. Do you think other developing countries are going to hamstring themselves for a proposed threat?
I think overall you seem to be conflating political action (or serious inaction) with the underlying science. The science is pretty solid that Global Warming is indeed happening and that we are, largely, responsible for it. Most of the warming is caused by 'greenhouse' gases that we've been pumping into the atmosphere at an ever growing rate since the Industrial Revolution. The most obvious way to 'engineer' our way out of the problem is to reduce as much as possible our CO2 and other emissions whilst trying our best to take out of the atmosphere as much CO" and other stuff as we can. As well as that we're going to need a shit-ton (technical word) of action on climate mitigation and adaptation from flood defences, early warning systems, improved drainage especially in urban areas and a whole lot more. The science is there. Our governments and big business just need to get off their collective asses and do something about it. Of course *eventually* they'll be forced to do just that but it'd be nice to get slightly ahead of the curve *before* we start having to abandon our coastal cities.
Agreed about China and the so-called '3rd world'. It's a global problem and will have to be treated as such. No one is immune from its affects and we'll all responsible. It's just a choice about how many people need to die or get displaced before we fix it. Or decide not to and face the consequences of course... There's always that option.
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