Science fiction is fiction. It is not true. But because, at its best, it contains a healthy dose of science, sometimes you read things that feel uncomfortably like prophecy. Consider the following:
“Despite the situation [Labrador] and the time of year, which was October, the temperature was sticky warm due to the hothouse effect of the carbon dioxide in this Earth’s dead atmosphere.”
This is not a quote from some modern piece of speculative fiction. It’s a quote from the Isaac Asimov short story, Living Space, first published in 1956. The story has nothing to do with climate change or global warming, it’s just a throwaway paragraph from an author who was also a chemist by training. An author who understood, like other scientists at the time, that carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the planet.
Asimov, like all of us, was a product of his time. A lot of his short stories feature men who wear trilby hats, and smoke pipes, and who are married to mousey housewives who wring their hands on the periphery of the action. (Although, in fairness, he did also create one of the first great female characters in all of SF: the formidable Dr. Susan Calvin. If she were really out there, Dr. C. would now be 39). Nonetheless, reading those mid-twentieth century words on an idle afternoon in the twenty-first, there is a hammer blow of recognition. Followed by the depressing realization that we’ve known about the warming effects of carbon dioxide for a very long time. And that we’ve failed to do anything about it.
Unlike Living Space, The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi, is a modern piece of speculative fiction, penned in 2015. It portrays a “wild southwest” of the United States, where a catastrophic shortage of water has impoverished the entire region. Semi-autonomous, heavily armed states face off (and commit murder) over water rights. In this overheated dustbowl, the Colorado river has shrunk to a trickle, the Central Arizona Project has almost no water, and the states with the most senior water rights do the best. California is the Promised Land, Las Vegas, Nevada is holding its own, and Arizona, holder of the most junior water rights, is royally screwed: there is frequent reference in the book to a fictional twitter hashtag, “#PhoenixDowntheTubes.” It is a compelling near-future thriller, and had I read it back in 2015, I would have enjoyed it immensely.
But I didn’t read it in 2015. I read it last week, and it was terrifying. With wildfires raging in the west, triple-digit temperatures in “temperate” Oregon, and the first ever “shortage” on the Colorado requiring “junior” Arizona to sacrifice more water than its neighbors, it felt to me like The Water Knife was coming true in real time. We weren’t paying attention in 1956, we weren’t doing enough in 2015, and if The Water Knife (or worse) is to be avoided, we will have to do significantly better moving forward.
At bottom though, I remain an optimist. I have faith in science, and I have faith in human ingenuity. And if SF can sometimes identify problems coming down the pike, it can also highlight solutions. To that end, I look forward to a near-future thriller involving the removal of gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere. With olive farmers in Scotland and Alaska taking desperate measures to preserve the status quo.
Stranger things have happened.