Scaring us with bad science fiction isn’t going to work, either:
Science fiction writers used to focus on the horrors of nuclear war and frightened the willies out of readers for many decades. Public worry much more intense than anything the greens can gin up never got the nuclear disarmament movement over the hump — not because nuclear war isn’t bad, or because people weren’t scared, but because the nuclear disarmament movement’s policy ideas emanated from the same cloud-cuckoo-land that the green fantasies do.
Panic doesn’t turn an unworkable policy agenda into something that people can actually do. It can waste a lot of energy and time and cause otherwise capable people to sink months or years of their lives into leprechaun chases, and it can cause pandering politicians to gesture in the direction of your agenda without ever actually doing anything significant — but that is all. And it is not much.
It is, after all, fiction. Sort of like Al Gore’s book, but more entertaining.
Ugh, the world is filled with hacks. At least objective reality has a way of weeding (most) of these people out of STEM. Okay, maybe just the TEM… 😉
“Analog” has been doing this for fifteen or more years. It’s why I finally gave up my subscription – the humans-are-bad, environmental doomsterism became predictable and boring.
No, not all of their stories were like that, but too many were.
SF has been overwhelmed with leftist philosophy writers and themes. I read less of it than ever. And yes, I know that there are a few fine non-moonbat SF writers.
(Psst…Phil, follow the link on my name…)
But seriously, how do moonbats fly on the airless moon? Like superman, they actually jump rather than fly don’t they? Not the comic book superman. The real one that leaped tall buildings in a single bound before they made that into the nonsense of flying by reactionless what?
Do moonbats taste like chicken? Yeah, I read too much SF as a kid.
‘Until we’ve really understood at some gut level what kind of a threat we’re facing, we’re unlikely to act with enough commitment. Art gets at the gut.”
Unfortunately, artists usually don’t have a clue what they are talking about. Take nuclear war for example – they got that completely wrong also. While Russia, prior to the collapse of their economy, was preparing very realistically to fight the sort of world war that 1st world nuclear powers would have to fight, we were busy burying our heads in the sand with fatalist nonsense designed to ensure we wouldn’t fight back.
Even today, most Americans don’t understand that an initial nuclear exchange isn’t the end of anything, other than a completely unprepareed nation. Most of the country would survive. It’s only the beginning of that sort of world war.
I keep wondering if we’ll even be able to tell if global warming is happening a century from now, much less be inconvenienced by it. The IPCC predictions are something on the order of 1C of warming per doubling of atmospheric CO2. Picking that out of the noise of natural variation would be nontrivial.
Correction, IPCC was claiming 3-5, but that was based on a lot of hypothetical positive feedback loops. NASA and everyone else going off the math was saying 1.5 C per doubling.
“scary fiction that did not change the world.”
I used to have a lot of that before I got rid of most of my collection. I will say that while having to explain everything does weaken the narrative flow of science fiction, it provides a degree of discipline not found in many other forms of literature. If you set up, for example, a phony village with phony characters and hideously contrived dilemmas/circumstances, you’re not going to be questioned by the reader very much. In science fiction, you can contrive or contort the story just as much, but you have to justify it at some level.
And if the story doesn’t rationalize itself good enough, then you’re reading an interesting yarn about ksiksik traders with rayguns from Orion. Far less need to take it seriously than if it were centered in Anon, Pennsylvannia (with SERIOUS characters having SERIOUS issues, according to the newspapers!) and far less effort to defend yourself from any machinations of the author.
I would like to say for the record that I am not the late Australian SF writer named George Turner who wrote “Drowning Towers” about massive global warming induced sea level rise.
George, are the rumors of your death being exaggerated again?
Wildly, Titus. Wildly.
The trouble is, if I wrote a SF book I’d probably have to do it under a pen name because there’s already a bunch of George Turner books on the SF shelves.
Anyway, lately I’ve enjoyed reading Taylor Anderson’s “Destroyermen” series about the crew of an old US four-stacker destroyer that gets transported to an alternate reality, along with a Japanese heavy cruiser. It’s quite fun and non-socialist.
Ugh, the first Destroyermen book doesn’t sound good, George, and it’s blurbed by Roland Green – someone whose name on a book almost always promised that book a sudden deceleration upon the nearest vertical surface in my vicinity. Lemurs and raptors?
And Robinson’s Mars trilogy was what started to move me away from environmentalism. Nothing like the preservation instinct expended upon a dead world’s non-climate to make comprehensive nonsense of sentimental ecology.
Mitch, I had that same reaction a few years ago when a woman in a SF thread recommended “Destroyermen” to me. It sounds so unlikely to be a good book. But she insisted it was a great story, so I read it and got hooked, as did most of the people giving customer reviews at Amazon. It really is a fun series.
I remember slogging through Robinson’s Mars trilogy. I enjoyed some of the SF aspects but his inane promotion of anarcho-syndicalism made me think “What color is the sky on his planet?”
I just finished Niven’s Ringworld series and thought “He shouldn’t write stuff without Pournelle.”
My favorite writer of aliens is still probably Vernor Vinge with “A Fire Upon the Deep.”