Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

The "other" ERE. Societal aspects of the ERE philosophy. Emergent change-making, scale-effects,...
7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Miss Lonelyhearts:

Yes, that is a perfect example of my general observation. In 2021, intelligent novelists and intelligent characters in intelligent novels, even those largely concerned with the "trivialities" of sex and friendship, are having to offer some consideration to The Situation. This was not so much the case just a few years ago.

Distraction is not the worst coping mechanism, especially in situations where you lack agency. I think the character's comment is indicative of acceptance of the situation combined with denial of agency. Obviously, this is going to have to be a common response for relatively affluent 1st World residents, because "dismantling and restructuring the basis of the socio-economic reality of the last 150 years" does not immediately seem like anything an individual could tackle. Unfortunately, the world would quite possibly be better served if more of the "white women feeling overwhelmed*" described in the article did take initiative in addition to the guys in the "Patriots" novel (although we all may have our part to play.)

*This made me think of when I was a young mother of two toddlers living in a graduate student part of town. My tots were weaned off of breastmilk, but still drinking gallons of cow's milk every week, and the recycling tote I was given was very small (appropriate for single grad student), so I could never fit all the empty milk jugs into the recycling, no matter how I smushed them. So they kept piling up in a closet in our very tiny apartment. Finally one day, my ex just blew his top and threw them all into a couple garbage bag.

chenda
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by chenda »

There has been some historical fiction written about Doggerland, the inhabited land now under the North Sea which may have some contemporary resonance.

Time Song: Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn has been very well reviewed.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by mountainFrugal »

@7Wb5 (or others if interested) We could just collaborate on a short comic series and define the ERE/Permaculture futurist literature.

[edit] I like the direction and potential world building of the solar-punk genera as a starting place.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@mountainFrugal:

That sounds like a fun project. I'm not very familiar with the comic genre myself, but it seems like it would be a good match for the anarchist bent of solar punk. I am also still wallowing in very conscious high degree of incompetence in the realm of permaculture, so likely not the best Master collaborator candidate.

One big problem with imagining realistic solar punk future is that current production of solar panels with high degree of efficiency and relatively low cost (actually cheaper than feeding potatoes to human workers in terms of energy units per acre) is dependent on the fragile complexity of the global supply chain for materials, cheap fossil fuel energy to fuel production, and availability of expert technicians. So, imagined future would have to either retain global supply chains, which would kind of negate the highly individualist/anarchist punk aspect of imagined future OR some mechanism for localized production of solar cells would have to be imagined OR the imagined solar future would have to be based on simpler solar technology.

Actually, I think the more basic question that might be asked of any imagined lower energy future would be whether or not electricity will still be available. Of course, this is kind of a !st World question, because there are obviously still realms where electricity has not yet been widely made available, and in those realms it is currently less expensive to make use of modular solar, but something, something...the transportation systems China is building in Africa where half of Generation B is projected to be born, so maybe in 30 years only a small minority of humans will remember grid electric as taken for granted... etc. etc. Dunno.

In "American War", one of the first scenes imagines a boy in the 2070s struggling to use half a wooden ladder to gain access to some very old salvaged solar panels which his semi-refugee family depends upon. In "Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Futures" an anthology of works I just started reading, the first story, "Caught Root" imagines an anecdote of diplomacy towards resolution of tension between a High Green Tech community and a Low Tech community. I guess I am personally pretty agnostic about such matters, except that it bothers me when either the math doesn't work and/or the human psychology doesn't work.

Speaking of projecting math into the future. I also recently read "Radical Simplicity:Small Footprints on a Finite Earth" by Jim Merkel, which Jacob rated as being at the same level as "ERE." For better or worse, Merkel goes into much more detail than Jacob about how you might calculate your own version of Ecological 1Jacob Spending Level equivalent based on your own preferences for such things as how much of the planet's acreage you would like to reserve for other species if everybody did what you do projected out to 2100, etc. Of course, one problem with making such a projection is that everybody else may not do what you do, so 10 or 20 years down the road you will either have to further limit your own spending or accept less rosy future outcome scenario. I very much liked "Radical Simplicity" because it reminded me of how I attempt to make calculations for my permaculture project.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by mountainFrugal »

@7Wb5 I may be reading your reply as a polite no, which is fine, BUT no need to be a master. Mastering something by writing narrative fiction about it seems like a good punk rock way of doing things. Combine a few chords with some drum rolls... add in a few angst/angry/fast lyrics... and start performing/shipping your art is also what I was getting at for the punk rock vibe of things. Amateurs seeing a need for something and then just figuring it out along the way.

Name a few characters. Give them specific goals and short backgrounds/bios, have them interact where their goals are either slightly aligned and cause friction or opposed to cause friction, write a 1 page story summary of all the actions that happen, break those down into individual pages with between 5-6 actions per page, add in small bits of dialogue and we have a working script! Do a bunch of editing and then start turning that into images. :).

I agree that the near future world would need some editing from solar-punk style linked on that web page above, but we could approach it like Ecotopia* where the solar energy part has been solved. Or we have the same tech trajectory now and the characters are trying to figure out the social adoption side of the equation. Or it could be a series of caricatured versions of ourselves trying to figure things out like the details of the Radical Simplicity book.

Thoughts?

*I have mixed feelings about this book. I like the premise and for the time it was published (1975) it must have been really interesting and pushing the orange to green transition (in increasingly common ERE forum jargon), but did not age well.

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by jacob »

Almost forgot:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/023116954X/
... has the most realistic physics/politics of any fictional book published. It was deliberately made so. As such the fiction/story suffers.

For aspiring writers who do not wish to commit a scientific faux pas (like Day of Tomorrow or other giant snowstorm literature ), I recommend https://www.amazon.com/dp/1517799392/

As an example of what has been achieved in the past wrt fiction->reality despite concerns being different, consider https://www.amazon.com/dp/1932100059/

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by Hristo Botev »

jacob wrote:
Fri Sep 10, 2021 3:16 pm
Almost forgot:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/023116954X/
... has the most realistic physics/politics of any fictional book published. It was deliberately made so. As such the fiction/story suffers.
The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and―finally―the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment―the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies―failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.
Goodness. In Catholic fiction, writers who tend to be a little too heavy-handed and overt wrt their Catholic themes are categorized as "pious trash" (i.e., it's a fine line between a Flannery O'Conner short story and some sort of overly preachy story that is downright unreadable, but you certainly know it when that line has been crossed). This Collapse book strikes me as something that might fall into the latter category--the CC version of "pious trash." No one is saying that your worldview and future predictions are wrong; just that your book might be borderline unreadable.

But perhaps I'm wrong--I haven't actually read the book.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by mountainFrugal »

Thanks @jacob for these non-mainstream picks. Environment as character is a another classic way to tell a story. Giant snow storms can make good antagonists even if how they were created is impossible. haha. I agree that has been played up a little too much with climate change specifically. I suppose the bar would be high with this crowd to make anything worth consuming that has both compelling characters and a realistic future world. Another classic challenge when writing. Seems like a fun long term project, regardless of storytelling medium (novel, comics, short film).

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@mountainFrugal:

Are you comfortable with drawing polyamorous perma-culturist sex scenes? :lol:

I actually pulled out the extremely rough version very-near-futurist literary novel I started hacking out during the lock-down last year to see if my off-the-cuff style would at all lend itself to graphic interpretation. My conclusion was a pretty solid "No." For instance, the first sentence of one of my chapters is "As Artie slit open yet another plastic bag full of dog shit, she considered the bleak deniability of her sex life. " How would you frame that in a comic?

OTOH, this novel has very little directly to do with permaculture or ERE, although the characters do think a lot about climate change and related topics, so it's possible that I could make attempt to entirely change gears for the project you suggested. I did have an idea for a polyamorous permaculture speculative erotic novel that might be entitled something like "The Rule of Three." Or another idea might be an interlocking series based on the design principles. Maybe each design principle could be developed along a chain series of polyamorous romances or affiliations? Most speculative fiction tends to take itself too seriously for my taste, so it would likely veer more towards humor if I'm going to write script and that might be problematic.

@Jacob: Thanks for the recommendations. Even though I do not like it when meant to be realistic sci-fi gets the math wrong, I would note that there are some futurist novels that make their point about dangers to humanity very well even if the science is not meant to be accurate or realistic. For instance, many of the works of Kurt Vonnegut (which now that I think about it did include some crude funny drawings. Hmmm...)

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by chenda »

@7wannabe5 - Maybe a children's book might be worth doing instead or as well ? A sort of warning that 'you're probably not going to live as well as your parents and grandparents did, sorry about that...' (Might need to tone down the sex scenes)

Thinking about it a lot of the children's books I recall reading had a vaguely dark and apocalyptic theme to them.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by mountainFrugal »

Image

VERY quick layout sketch. I took one of my other favorite lines that I have read on this forum that perfectly captured the mood earlier this summer when things were beginning to open back up as something Artie was longing for. I think sex scenes are fine, but they would need to serve the story which would make more sense in the erotica genera than the children's book genera. haha.

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by IlliniDave »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Fri Sep 10, 2021 3:35 pm
Goodness. In Catholic fiction, writers who tend to be a little too heavy-handed and overt wrt their Catholic themes are categorized as "pious trash" (i.e., it's a fine line between a Flannery O'Conner short story and some sort of overly preachy story that is downright unreadable
...
Yeah, generally speaking, to be enjoyable to most fiction needs to tell a story that involves character(s) a reader can identify with and hopefully care about. When a "story" is just trumped up vehicle to be a showcase for oncept or ideology, I tend to put them down. Just had one of those up here at the hideout that purported to be a thriller but it got so bogged down with the author dropping 20-line paragraph exposition bombs displaying how much he knew about the technology at every opportunity I couldn't stand it.

Right before that I read a pretty good one that was written about 10 years ago (iirc) about a scientist who discovered an alternative to traditional energy which she also learned doubled as a global thermostat. The story came complete with the requisite palette of villains drawn from the global oil industry, religious people, and the inhabitants of the Southeast US. The "science" was totally glossed over, but the author chose to tell the story through a protagonist who was essentially the woman's bodyguard/security officer for the project. The story was accurate/believable when it came to security/anti-terrorism aspect of it, which was enough for the story. But it was far from a work that would rise to the level of "literary". Just a popular thriller.

What might be interesting and could be handled similarly might be a saga of a third world family/individual who just get a foothold in the "21st Century" through acquisition of reliable/available/affordable energy (and the beginning of all the good things that come with it) and then have external forces dictate loss of the energy source. Could be climate, could be "peak oil", could be a cabal of greedy wealthy western nations maneuvering in their own best interests, could be a virus, etc. If the story of the family is done well on a human level and the writer could use whatever source of dystopia they felt passionate about as long as they used enough restraint with the ideology that the reader is free to follow the story of the characters themselves rather than the global background narrative.

If I were to try it myself I'd just go with a retelling of Mad Max or The Stand or The Road and just start in the dystopian aftermath, but that's just me.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@chenda:

Yeah, although it’s kind of very depressing to think about the book I might write for my theoretical grandchildren on the topic. The novel “A Children’s Bible” I mentioned above goes into this a bit.

@mountainFrugal:

Ha! You did it. That’s great!

(BTW, I am very happy that I did manage to get some in the brief interlude between Covid and own health issues.)

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

“IlliniDave” wrote: What might be interesting and could be handled similarly might be a saga of a third world family/individual who just get a foothold in the "21st Century" through acquisition of reliable/available/affordable energy (and the beginning of all the good things that come with it) and then have external forces dictate loss of the energy source. Could be climate, could be "peak oil", could be a cabal of greedy wealthy western nations maneuvering in their own best interests, could be a virus, etc. If the story of the family is done well on a human level and the writer could use whatever source of dystopia they felt passionate about as long as they used enough restraint with the ideology that the reader is free to follow the story of the characters themselves rather than the global background narrative
I think this would be a great basis for a novel, but as you implied, not necessarily a great basis for a novel meant to make real the dangers of climate change, because just about any dystopian setback could further the touching human theme.

Actually, the fact that novelists and filmmakers often do make use of invented catastrophe to further human drama might generally make it more difficult to make use of literature to convey reality of current situation. King Kong or Climate Change, any intended audience is already fully prepared to suspend disbelief for a couple hours, but then go right back to “Where should we stop for dinner?” , “Gita check my work email.”, or “ Wow, that was depressing. Do you have any more weed?” The accreted structure is solid and inertia is strong.

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by jacob »

jacob wrote:
Sat Sep 04, 2021 4:07 pm
Part of the problem is that climate change in terms of action is kinda boring. It's like making a movie about diabetes---long complex and boring. It'll only work according to how deep the audience appreciates how wicked the problem is. For example, for the uninformed Syriana is a muddled, confusing, non-sequtiur that invites getting blamed as "propaganda by the other team". Whereas those very few who have some interest in Great Game geopolitics will find is depressingly fascinating and worth rewatching to appreciate just how much it all ties together.
My money would be on Kim Stanley Robertson to pull it together. Use e.g. the narrative structure of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years ... e_and_Salt where the same characters get reincarnated to tie the story together and you follow them for IIRC ~700 years. Now pick RCP6 and run it out to the year 2300. This already exists in the literature, so it's possible to make it realistic. Now just run the story on top of that background hinting at how the environment opens up conflict or closes down options for the cast, etc. It would be no different than a story of the Roman Empire from e.g. 450 to 750 following e.g. a Germanic tribe.

Unfortunately, the temptation would be high to introduce an intrepid band of heroes who magically solve the world's problems causing everybody to come together over a period of a few years in some kumbayah moment. Possibly space aliens. This would not work well for me because of the lack of realism. But there is a strong author drive to put their faith in either "technological revolution" or "coming together as a community" as proceeding to execute some miracle. One expert---one problem style.

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by IlliniDave »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Sep 12, 2021 5:53 am
I think this would be a great basis for a novel, but as you implied, not necessarily a great basis for a novel meant to make real the dangers of climate change, because just about any dystopian setback could further the touching human theme.
Yes, the difficulty is the trying to make a popular film out of it caveat, which requires people/characters and their story > "science". And I don't see a way around the endeavor being highly speculative in nature. A writer could speculate about a future if certain majority predictions hold true, but in the end it is still fiction and a guess, whether educated or strictly emotional, about a future. And you're right, apocalyptic literature is at least a few millennia old, and there is the "this time it's different" hurdle to overcome.

Generally speaking as an occasional reader one thing I am pretty certain of is that if the fictional attempt were to be hard over one way or another (presented as dogma or as a hoax) I wouldn't finish it. I also think it would be more interesting if told from the perspective outside of a wealthy western one lest it fall into the same tropes that underpin so much readily available fiction. Another tale of mindlessly evil energy corporations or pathological billionaires probably won't move many needles. I think it requires a lot more nuance than is currently allowed on the topic, which is likely to result in its suppression. (ETA, which is likely to enhance its effectiveness, ironically).

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

How about a clever urban raccoon with approximately the same character and vice profile as Charlie Sheen telling the tale. IOW, non-Disney-lovable invulnerable member of different species who doesn’t give a damn about any humans except as sources of easy picking food stuffs. He can eventually be forced by The Situation to become the omnivorous, scavenger, nimble pawed raccoon version of a permaculturist as urban pickings become slim and competition with other animals and humans increases. His take on the “politics” of The Situation will be self-interested yet human level objective outsider. Maybe he will end up being eaten by humans now desperate enough to resort to old gamey raccoon stew.

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by IlliniDave »

I hadn't considered an Animal Farm spin to it. Something like that might appeal to a reader like me, especially if Charlie the raccoon ends up in the pot. Or maybe Charlie the raccoon becomes a scavenger/carnivore because he can't hardly get from one place to another without having to climb over human climate casualty corpses which he finds tastier than turtles and frogs?

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Well, since it's entirely possible that Charles (who has ruled for 7 raccoon generations over the realm of the small strip mall which contains both a Dominos and a Panda Express, as well as the wilderness (small city park) beyond) ate his own littermates during the Unexpected Closing of The Panda Express Dumpster Lid, I am fairly certain that dining upon the fresh corpses of a species he holds in great disdain would not be beyond him.

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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by daylen »

Don't forget about his abandoned son Cheeto who was raised by the downtown ravens into a retropunk assassin. His latest hit being his father, unbeknownst to him, for repeatedly raiding the 6th street brewery during his reign.

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