The Heat Death Of Sci-Fi


The Age of Stupid blurs science and fiction to chronicle the enviropocalypse.

The Heat Death of Sci-Fi

I first analyzed cli-fi in 2009, inspired by director Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, a work of science and fiction.

Starring the late, great Pete Postelthwaite as an Arctic archivist of an humanity that dumbly extincted itself (verb intended), Armstrong’s patient merge tripped over the consensual hallucination, paraphrasing Neuromancer author William Gibson’s cyberspace, that there exists a boundary between science and fiction. Anchored in Gibson’s foundation and materialized beyond language, cyberspace became capitalized and weaponized by devolving superpowers sundered by ecological collapse.

But the point of there being a point between science and fiction passed long before The Age of Stupid arrived, warning like Cassandra of impending apocalypse.

“I like exact labeling,” Margaret Atwood once told me, as I probed the parameters of proper speculative terminology. “Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.”


Margaret Atwood, apocalyptic optimist.

According to Atwood, the genetic structure of sci-fi proper was first sequenced in H.G. Wells’ millennial invasion, The War of the Worlds. By the Anthropocene’s increasingly alarming standard, from which War of the Worlds‘ origin story hasn’t significantly deviated in the decades following its 1897 serialization, our technocratic exhaustion is nearly spent.

“We can do the lineage,” Atwood explained. “Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Out of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea came Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, out of which came We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, then George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

A mechanized wish-fantasy of patriarchal annihilation, H.G. Wells’ total war was built upon the British Empire’s foundation of merciless colonization, anticipating our post-millennial depersonalization like undead prophecy. If pure sci-fi is what happens when futurists follow technological disruption to its logical conclusion, War of the Worlds exposed technology’s inherited predisposition to perpetual war, mirroring the Anglosphere’s darkest, dumbest hearts and minds.

From that bombshell debut to our burning moment, War of the Worlds’ influential exhaustion spawned proliferating iterations. Steven Spielberg’s technical reboot; Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day franchise, a recurring nightmare I’ve analyzed since the ’90s.


The Iron Giant, sci-fi’s rare gun with a soul.

Some have been quite underrated revisions, like Warren Ellis’ Justice League episode, “Dark Heart,” whose nanotech infestation nearly exhausts DC Comics’ hero roster. More rare is the hopeful exploration, such as Brad Bird’s epochal The Iron Giant, which mines Wells’ traumatic projections of resource war and authoritarian personality, waged with evil in service of the greater good.

In scientific history, War of the Worlds is also credited with influencing the Space Age it so horrifically envisioned. Wells’ classic inspired the young Robert Goddard, inventor of the first fuel rocket. Indeed, there is much rocketry, among other weapons of mass destruction, red-glaring in director George Pal’s 1953 film adaptation, a xenophobic Cold War iteration anchored to the systemic estrangement of Wells’ immortal introduction:

“Across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

Yet in art, as in life, science and sci-fi succumb to climate and cli-fi, in closure.

Wells’ alien executioners, depersonalized machines, are “slain after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” Microbial infection.

Blind to the earthy microbiome — and the cryosphere, the biosphere, the ignorosphere, and beyond into further terminology — technocratic science and sci-fi are redundantly outmatched. Sifting through both across time, we (re)discover failed sublimations of shock and awe, propagated by runaway industrialization, executed in fantasies of catastrophic realism.


Children of Men, patriarchal annihilation up close and personal.

In contrast, cli-fi cannot be shaken. Whether we fashion ourselves as humans or aliens, masters or slaves, cli-fi comprehends that Earth is our executioner in the final analysis. Whether we see it coming, or not.

Quite like the science industry’s resource wars, sci-fi is driven by exhaustion and extinction — of nature, of culture, of hope — and rarely rarely by a search for love and community. War of the Worlds’ narrator spends his invasion aftermath in a haze of post-traumatic stress disorder, until he is finally reunited with his wife, a cli-fi inversion of sci-fi’s conventional deus ex machina.

Harrowing and hopeful analogues widely range, in less bombastic but harder-hitting visions like Alfonso Cuaron’s harrowing adaptation of P.D. James’ Children of Men, or Terry Gilliam’s riotously prescient Brazil. The existential irony is rich, given that Brazil is a nation under mounting industrial and political duress, whose precious Amazon, a critical carbon sink, is storing less carbon dioxide as oligarchs engineer coups to accelerate deforestation.

These intersecting exhaustions, and too many more, are the creaking joints upon which sci-fi breaks down. Expressions of invasion and capitalization, parsed as exceptionalism and innovation, can be easily found in the postmodern canon. Touchstones like A Trip to the Moon, Metropolis and Things To Come; ubiquitous franchises like Stars Wars and Star Trek; subcultural influentials like the slipstreaming La Jetee and Gilliam’s millennial reboot, 12 Monkeys. From Akira to The Matrix, which closed out our war-torn 20th century in a hail of bullets and bullet-time — the last century, cli-fi notes, humanity could experience Earth beneath 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide — sci-fi has sadly been mined to collapse.

“The Heat Death of Sci-Fi” breaks down that spectacular entropy.