Kim Stanley Robinson & Omar El Akkad discuss the climate crisis

November 5, 2021 12:41 PM

Kim Stanley Robinson and Omar El Akkad discuss the responsibility science fiction writers have to address the climate crisis.

See also

If civilization can’t get through the next 30 years without a mass extinction event, such an event will hammer human civilization in ways that are appalling to contemplate.

Interview: Kim Stanley Robinson

Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change

Omar El Akkad

posted by y2karl (12 comments total)

This idea of the wet-bulb temperature is so horrifying that it's almost unimaginable. Which really gets to their point--someone has to do the imagining for us, because the mind slips away from something this big, it can't hold it all. We need stories to tell us how to even think of something like this. The "Faster Than We Thought" piece mentions an archeological find in Kurdistan, for instance, which leads you to wonder...what happens when there's no more archeology? When the places people would like to study, are no longer habitable? How much knowledge will be lost? And that's, just...the tiniest possible example of the way things will go wrong. If the pandemic taught us anything, it's that we're not great at predicting which of our systems will fall apart under which pressure. Climate change has us looking into an even greater unknown. We need stories to help us conceptualize the problems that are coming, desperately.
posted by mittens at 1:04 PM on November 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

The first chapter of Robinson's Ministry for the Future is an absolute gut punch. I had to walk away from the book for a week out of sadness.
posted by MrGuilt at 1:34 PM on November 5, 2021 [7 favorites]

I've been working on a wetbulb related coding project ever since I read the book. It's a good book.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:39 PM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

faster than we thought essay: some beautiful writing there.
posted by 20 year lurk at 2:58 PM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thanks very much for taking the time to read it. It was a tough one to write, both on account of the subject matter and also because, as a kind of psychic self-defense mechanism, it's always been easier for me to not think about how much of the topology of my past is becoming unrecognizable.
posted by Fireland at 4:24 PM on November 5, 2021 [21 favorites]

Omar El Akkad

(MeFi’s own, and itt, no less!)

Have yet to read the links in the FPP, but having become attuned to the question via Amitav Ghosh’s examination of it in The Great Derangement and elsewhere, preemptive thanks for the work put in.
posted by progosk at 5:08 PM on November 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Ha! A MeFi's own and we mostly never knew it -- well sir, you have been hiding your candle under a couple of truckloads of bushels with a mere 6 comments on the blue, four questions and six answers on Ask and a generic Globe and Mail link as your profile website.

For God's sake, link your own damn most excellent website and post and comment in volume -- you are obviously one of the best. Anyone who very deservedly gets equal billing with Kim Stanley Robinson from NPR is someone we ought to be hearing from far, far more often.
posted by y2karl at 5:26 PM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

The archaeological site in Faster Than We Thought reminded me of something a friend told me, years ago, about how there are archaeological sites underwater off the coast of the UK (? I could be misremembering) that are the remnants of communities from the last ice age when the sea much lower. An entire lost continent. It stuck with me as one of those facts that I might know, on an intellectual level, but also feels too much like a fairy tale to really be true.

Which leaves me imagining that, centuries from now, people will look out on a remade coastline, hearing the stories of the cities that used to be out there, and feel the same. Wondering if it's really true or it's all just a story.
posted by selenized at 5:44 PM on November 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

It stuck with me as one of those facts that I might know, on an intellectual level, but also feels too much like a fairy tale to really be true.

That was Doggerland.
posted by y2karl at 6:02 PM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Powerful meditation, Fireland.
Reminds me of the problems facing researches as the world warps.
posted by doctornemo at 6:30 PM on November 5, 2021

Shameless plug for my interview with Stan Robinson last month.
posted by doctornemo at 6:30 PM on November 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

"A flickering violence of a species"

A perfect turn of phrase. Beautiful. Devastating. Perfect.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 7:17 PM on November 5, 2021 [2 favorites]