Fritz Lang’s mad scientist, Dr. Mabuse, one of many genocidal fascists hiding behind the Hippocratic Oath.
Anchored to the universal principle that everything is connected, cli-fi blossoms from the failure of science and its fiction, as both degrade through capitalism’s lethal translation.
Such as they are, and were. Redundant apocalypses, destabilizing a balance of internetworked systems and species; colonial technocracies, masquerading as invasion mythologies; ad nauseam. Both our scientific industry and sci-fi have achieved (so far) neither the ambition or execution necessary to communicate Earth’s astonishing singularity, only its exponential devolution and devaluation.
From long before the Bible, to the foundational H.G. Wells, from past plague to future annihilation, science and sci-fi are empowered by exhaustion and extinction. Both have made it (painfully) clear that it is we humans who are the Aliens, the Invaders, the Dead, manufacturing and capitalizing estranged modes of existence for which we are tragicomically unprepared. Chained to an overheating planet by the very technologies and labor meant to free us, humanity has spent reality deploying science and sci-fi to, perhaps irrevocably, transform a paradise into prison.
Cli-fi rebalances that self-administered destabilization.
Envisioning our Earth at its most influential and productive, cli-fi reorients science and fiction by resituating the only life-giving planet we yet know of in the universe at the axis of our discourse. Reclaiming well-known and unknown scientists, spinning off life-saving technologies in a race against time, cli-fi seeks to save us from ourselves, before it is too late.
Song of the Sea, psychogeographic cli-fi classic
“We live in little bubbles, and we’re able now to ignore it,” Oscar-nominated Song of the Sea director Tomm Moore once told me. “But it’s not until water is lapping around our feet that we’re going to believe it is happening.”
“We’ve whittled the world down to the few things we are interested in seeing, which are selected especially for us by algorithms, so we don’t have to face anything too harsh. And that bubble is especially pervasive amongst kids. I see my son growing up immersed in technology that was just arriving as I was growing up, and I see how it shapes how we look at the world. But as storytellers, we have opportunities to broaden the way people think about the world,” Moore added.
As we wind our way through sci-fi and cli-fi’s merge, we find in the Anthropocene’s final analysis of Big Science’s finest minds a failed system of masters and slaves, saviors and machines, spending too much time and money destroying and reconstructing worlds their failed patriarchy cannot stop exhausting and annihilating.
From hanging heretics who dared understand the stars, to incentivizing STEM outliers toward sectors profiteering from pollution, technocracy’s grinding march has been ground down by obsolete models and unsustainable mythologies.
When cries arise in opposition to this heated argument, it takes little effort to simply point out the window, at pretty much anything. Everywhere we find signs of exponential global warming’s terrifying yet predictable dystopia, an all-too-human catastrophe.
Permadroughts, megastorms, and other expanding environmental nightmares; international elections compromised by extractivism and fascism. Bipolar meltdowns, unleashing long-buried assassins the likes of which we may not yet have witnessed in the trophic cascade of horrors both our science and its fiction have so expensively programmed for us.
Christopher Nolan’s destabilized Interstellar.
And what technocratic miracle have we invented and manufactured to deliver us?
Humanity has yet to materially provide a deus ex machina — an off switch, a back button, anything — that could turn back the clock on our lethal terraformation of the only habitable planet within warp speed. Indeed, more often than not, those who do provide revolutionary, planetary solutions are swiftly shorted, oppressed, perhaps even eradicated by those who don’t.
It’s a redundant, vicious cycle, whose unforgivable institutional failure has been predatorily exported to Earth itself. Which, in turn, is quite busily preparing some major payback, because you can’t have the yin without the yang.
“We’re just doing what evolution has pounded into us,” paleontologist and extinction expert and paleontologist Peter Ward once told me. “Produce as many of yourselves as you can. Make sure that, as you produce, you aren’t threatened in your production, and co-opt all the planet’s resources. Kill any competitors and spread to every place that you possibly can.”
“We’re doing all of that,” Ward explained. “We get the prize, ironically, because of the brains that we have.”
Venus, Earth’s dystopian twin, too close within reach..
As a happy human who has analyzed science and sci-fi for over two decades, I am quite sorry that this is the bad news.
My sad and very expensive tale of science and sci-fi’s spectacular failure may not be easy reading, but the good news — and enduring hope — is that the spectacular possibility of climate science and cli-fi can provide our happy ending. From naturalist David Brower’s Earth National Park to E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth, optimistic circulations are among us, within reach.
And what matters is not what we call it, but that we call it at all. Cli-fi can help humanity more capably craft its existential cry for help, so that it may live long enough to close the book on the Anthropocene, and perhaps worse, perhaps for good.
“We’re in a time when we are looking to pull cultures apart, and tell them they don’t have the right to tell their stories, which is the opposite of what we should be doing,” The Breadwinner director Nora Twomey explained to me, as her Oscar-nominated adaptation premiered in Los Angeles alongside executive producer, Angelina Holie. “We should all be trying to tell each other’s stories, to understand and participate in each other’s stories, so that we can learn about each other and have some of hope for the future.”
Let’s get started.
