Dreaming in Sci-Fi

Addressing climate breakdown will require transformational shifts in our politics and culture. A few lessons from science fiction’s imaginative explorations could help.

In times of crisis, we turn to stories. “Art is one way to make sense of a world which, on its own, does not make sense,” says writer Ted Chiang on the Fiction Science podcast. Nowhere is this truer than with climate change, a phenomenon that defies individual comprehension. It’s altering every corner of the world, in our back yards and in places we’ll never encounter - now, in the next few decades and over millions of years to come.

But the nature of climate breakdown also resists storytelling, just when we need it most. In Climate Lyricism, Boston College professor Min Hyoung Song points out that the nuts and bolts of conventional narratives, like a singular villain and a triumphant hero, don’t fit with the scale and complexity of the climate crisis. Writer Amitav Ghosh argues in The Great Derangement, that the modern novel has failed to sufficiently grapple with the changing climate, owing to self-imposed limits of realism and a rigid sense of time and space. This failure, he writes, makes the climate crisis “also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”

If traditional forms of narrative have failed us, then maybe it’s time to get a little weird. Within the offshoots of mainstream fiction lies another world of possibilities: science fiction. It’s a genre in which, according to the great sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, “There are no closed doors, no walls. You can look at, examine, play with anything, absolutely anything.”

In sci-fi and speculative fiction, the impossible becomes possible. A corpse becomes reanimated (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein); aliens land in Lagos, Nigeria (Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon); the universe infinitely reduces in dimensions across millions of years, until it ends and another begins (Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy).

In a novel like Lagoon, there are no villains or heroes. Alien sea monsters destroy oil pipelines, but also gift new technologies to humans. Human characters facilitate peaceful negotiations with the aliens, but also incite violence among themselves. And sci-fi certainly doesn’t concern itself with realism, nor with limits on time and space. Instead, as writer Kathleen Alcalá tells me: “Writers of speculative fiction spend most of their time asking ‘What if?’ and then going in search of the answers.”

Asking “What if?” is an exercise in imagining how society would respond to seismic changes or operate in an alternate reality. By defying the limits of realism, sci-fi frees up room to explore events as inconceivable and expansive as climate change, and the transformational shifts needed to address it. If we are to muster the necessary political will for collective action, the “What if?” practice may become essential. Especially when it comes to tackling the climate crisis: ​​“We don’t know everything yet, so there needs to be room for even more speculation,” says Alcalá.

Sci-fi is often called the “literature of change”; yet, at its best, sci-fi is the literature of subversion. In breaking the boundaries of conventional fiction, sci-fi also has the capacity to push against the hierarchies and systems that have come to define life as we know it. “The gift that speculative fiction gives us,” writer Chinelo Onwualu tells me, “is this ability to take our world and shake it like a snow globe, and suddenly everything looks different.”

Sci-fi and speculative fiction stories - particularly ones rooted in movements like Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, and those by people of colour and marginalised groups - aren’t afraid to question the norms and power structures we take for granted. Racism, capitalism and the extraction and exploitation of the planet and its people not only drive climate breakdown, but block us from taking meaningful action. As Song puts it, these “habits of exaggerating human difference, and placing them in these kinds of hierarchical relationships, prevent us [from achieving the] greater levels of cooperation required, not only to address the underlying problem of climate change, but also to withstand its effects.”

In Everfair, author Nisi Shawl directly challenges imperialism and capitalism, two fundamental drivers of the climate crisis. The novel rewrites the history of colonialism by positing an alternate world where the real-life Fabian Society socialists and African American missionaries purchased land from King Leopold II in the Belgian-held Congo, creating a liberated nation. “Everfair questions the inevitability of colonialism’s triumph. Questioning the inevitability of the status quo can really cheer an activist up!” Shawl explains.

Questioning the inevitable pokes holes in the idea that history has always moved in a linear direction toward progress. As Shawl tells me: “When we de-privilege whichever version of history we’ve been taught, we’re freer to work with the possibilities we want to work with, freer to imagine where we want to go and how we want to get there.”

This capacity to imagine where we want to go is fundamental to Afrofuturism, a movement that uses the “the imagination as a space of resistance,” according to author and filmmaker
Ytasha Womack in her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture. Through art forms like sci-fi, music, visual art and film, Afrofuturism “values the power of creativity and imagination to reinvigorate culture and transcend social limitations.” Afrofuturists often subvert racial hierarchies and envision a more just world. “At the very least,” Womack writes, “they create a future with people of colour integrally involved - a demonstration that counters pop culture’s relative failure to do so.”

When certain groups of people have historically been denied a thriving future, writing yourself into one can be a powerful way to challenge these hierarchies. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler, a pioneer of Afrofuturism, follows a young Black woman who, in a world ravaged by climate breakdown and severe inequality, reclaims power by leading a religion of her own invention. “My characters, who are often Black and female, behave as though they have no limitations,” Butler said in 2000 at the sci-fi convention Balticon 34, in the US.

And in the Trail of Lightning series, author Rebecca Roanhorse depicts a future where the climate apocalypse gives rise to the rebirth of Dinétah, the traditional homeland of the Navajo Nation in what is now the US. Imagining a future with Indigenous people “might not sound remarkable until you realise how many futures don’t include us,” Roanhorse writes in a Powells essay. Through the unbounded exploration these stories offer, we can start to envision and work toward a better climate future for all.

We can also dare to ask perhaps the ultimate speculative question of our time: “What if we successfully slowed climate change?” In his latest book The Ministry for the Future, author Kim Stanley Robinson envisions the massive reforms needed to answer this call. Nations, central banks and legislators are crucial actors, but so are activists, rioters and eco-terrorists. In the end, climate change becomes a catalyst for creating a future where all living beings coexist in a more just and peaceful world.

Some place Robinson’s work within the realm of Solarpunk, a subgenre of sci-fi that envisions a future where humanity overcomes climate and sustainability challenges. Robinson’s novel and other Solarpunk stories point to another practical use of sci-fi: modelling the future to act in the present. Sci-fi provides “an imaginative space to think about possible futures and then come back and act in the present with a better orientation and vision of what we’re all trying for,” Robinson tells me.

But most sci-fi books concerning the climate crisis tend to be dystopian. Here, the genre treads into potentially misleading territory, as the idea of dystopia often reflects the biases and limited perspectives of those from the west or in positions of privilege. As an editor of African speculative fiction, Onwualu notes that in the stories she reads from the continent - “primarily from Nigeria, and primarily Anglophone […] you don’t see the fear of dystopia quite as much, because you already live in dystopia.” And dystopic conditions are by no means limited to places outside the west. As Roanhorse writes, “Our parents’ lives and our grandparents’ lives were too often the stuff of dystopian novels.”

And despite sci-fi’s focus on the future, climate change is as real now as it will be in the years to come. Even the “science” part of science fiction can present an issue, if described as a panacea for climate breakdown. “It’s not about building a new machine that’s going to take care of this. It’s about rebuilding the systems that our lives are built upon,” Onwualu says.

These limitations reveal how sci-fi still struggles with the deeply rooted biases of the real world. “Speculative fiction has a lot to contribute, but it also has a lot to answer for, because sometimes it does feel like it has been pushing a particularly singular vision for the future,” says Onwualu. “And that’s one that is often still very Eurocentric. It’s still incredibly hierarchical. It’s often very patriarchal, and it’s white supremacist. And it all depends on whose speculative fiction you’re privileging over others.”

Perhaps the greatest limit to what sci-fi can contribute to our culture around climate change is the reader. How much sci-fi and reading can encourage imagination - and fuel the capacity for action - depends just as much “on what the reader brings to the text as much as what the text has to offer,” Song explains.

For readers who feel overwhelmed and powerless when thinking about the climate crisis, reading climate-related literature may compound these emotions. But these feelings are also reasonable: “Feeling bad is probably a sign that you’re paying attention to what’s happening right now,” Song says.

The question Song asks is, how do we channel those feelings of sadness, anger and fear to stay motivated and keep pushing for change?
As Onwualu reminds us, it’s all about whose speculative fiction you choose and what lessons you draw from their stories.

Like us, characters in sci-fi stories face what seem like insurmountable challenges. Yet even in gruelling circumstances, the best protagonists never give up. Their perseverance can serve as a model for action and hope, especially in moments when it feels easier to disengage.

Onwualu defines this attitude in some of the African speculative fiction she reads as providing a sense of: “Of course we’re going to be here. Of course we’re going to get through this.” Song describes it as “persistence”, which he sees in books like Parable of the Sower. “It’s a very, very bleak world, but all of the characters really never stop problem solving. They’re always trying to figure things out. They keep trying to make the world better.”

That’s something sci-fi writers may want to leave with their readers, no matter how scary things get. “I hope that readers will leave my climate change novels realising that no matter how bad things get, there will never be an end that conveniently brings the story to a close - that people in the future will take their situation for granted whatever it is, and then continue to do their best to live a happy life, one way or another,” Robinson says. “I hope people might see that whatever good work they’re doing, even though it’s very small and not enough on its own, can join other peoples’ work in a larger project that might succeed.”