Camestros Felapton

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Contrarian-CliFi 0.02: The premise

Climate fiction attempts to address the current issues of human-caused climate change via fiction. As a major aspect of 21st-century life, climate fiction is not necessarily a sub-genre of science fiction but in lists and definitions of the genre, notable science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson are often cited as examples.

As readers of this blog know, I’m very interested in the science of global warming both as science and as a major political issue. Living in Australia, the issue feels not speculative but immediate. The apocalyptic experience of the 2019/2020 bushfires felt like a very real avatar of the more abstract process of forced warming for greenhouse gas emissions causing climatic shifts. We’ve been spared further fire seasons of that intensity, only to be pummelled by multiple seasons of disastrous flooding. The political impact of climate change has been further complicated in Australia by the size and political influence of the mineral resource industry. Australia is not just a country but the bulk of a continental landmass where massive fortunes can be made from digging up the rocks underneath. The fossil fuel lobby has had an outsized influence on Australian politics and the fight over action to limit global warming has led to the premature departure or multiple Australian Prime Ministers.

My other interest is bad ideas. Ideas that are bad morally, politically, empirically, psychologically, scientifically, and logically as well as the extent to which each of those axes can work together. Contrarianism about climate science as a means of delaying or undermining policy to limit climate change is arguably the most politically successful form of science denialism. The dubious success was won through industry lobbying, rat-fuckery and a cloud of blogs and internet activism. However, culturally it has generated little in terms of fiction or art.

I don’t typically pitch ideas for essays to other outlets (mainly out of laziness) but when an opportunity came up to write about climate change and science fiction I thought that there was an obvious topic that I should be writing about: the role of the contrarian/denialist perspective on climate change within science fiction.

There was one obvious book to write about. Michael Crichton’s 2004 novel State of Fear remains one of the few notable examples of works sold as fiction that presents itself as being in opposition to the mainstream scientific position on anthropogenic global warming.

To look deeper at this role of contrarian (or self-styled “sceptical”) positions on climate change expressed through fiction, I spent time hiking through the snowy lands of climate change “sceptical” blogs. While State of Fear often gets a mention, there is another novel that rivals it. At one of the key sites for contrarian views on global warming and climate science, Watts Up With That, frequent contributor Eric Worrall describes 1991’s Fallen Angels as “prescient”.

Prescient: 'Fallen Angels' – a 1991 satire of climate alarmism

Meanwhile, libertarian-conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds has been making references to Fallen Angels for many years. Whenever there is unusual cold weather, discussion of solar minimums or news stories about potential future ice ages, Reynolds asks rhetorically “FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS?” (more alarmingly he even compares its predictive qualities to the notorious far-right anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints here https://instapundit.com/215160/)

Fallen Angels is a 1991 novel by Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven and Michael Flynn. It should not be surprising to see Pournelle’s name associated with a novel beloved by a conservative libertarian. Pournelle was never shy about promoting his paleo-conservative views and here and long-term collaborator Larry Niven have been notable parts of the right wing of modern science fiction. Michael Flynn has also made no secret of his scepticism about the human influence on climate. Despite their combined talents, Fallen Angels is not widely regarded as one of the better Pournelle/Niven collaborations. What makes the novel notable in science fiction circles is not its lasting influence of right-wing bloggers but rather the unusual way it turns the idea of “fan writing” on its head. If the classic science fiction fan writer wrote non-fiction about science fiction authors, Fallen Angels is a fiction piece about fans.

So two books: one from 2004 and one from 1991? Two points give you a straight line regardless but the shift from Pournelle et al’s tongue-in-cheek satire to Crichton’s overhyped paranoia isn’t really a history.

Luckily, co-author of Fallen Angels, Michael Flynn had written extensively about the influences on the book. One was an article by George Harper: “A Little More Pollution, Please!” in Analog (Oct 1986) which I will cover later. Flynn cites two other sources for the science behind the global cooling in Falling Angels. The popular science book Forecasts, Famines, and Freezes by John Gribbin (1976) and Gribbin’s follow-up novel The Sixth Winter (with Douglas Orgill) (1979).

The date should be a clue. Gribbin is a science writer and for much of his career in recent decades he has had a stance promoting the legitimate science of climate change. Strictly speaking, he’s not a climate change denialist…but a pop-science perspective on climate change from the 1970s? That is an interesting point in the history (or pre-history) of contrarian climate fiction.

To cap things off I wanted a fourth book. There have been a number of State of Fear style novels promoted by contrarian blogs over the years but the cultural impact of these clones has been non-existent and often I wasn’t even able to find copies. The revolutionary vanguard of right-wing science fiction aka the Sad Puppies, have not explored the topic of climate change via fiction in any notable way. However, an (dis)honourable mention must go to John Ringo, whose 2008 novel The Last Centurion also jumped on the global cooling bandwagon and yet would prove to be surprisingly prescient on another matter…

So this series is the story of four novels and some non-fiction:

  • 1979 The Sixth Winter
  • 1993 Fallen Angels
  • 2004 State of Fear
  • 2008 The Last Centurion

The middle two are the topic of the an essay that will be published elsewhere…

camestrosfelapton

45 responses to “Contrarian-CliFi 0.02: The premise”

  2. Ironically *Fallen Angels* takes place in a universe where humans can and have altered the climate with their actions.

    I think there’s an explicit reference to the Sixth Winter in FA

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  3. I took a look at the early chapters of Fallen Angels, read something to the effect that the feminist-dominated government had crushed science fiction because girls think tech is just yucky, whereas fantasy thrived. That was enough for me to put it down.

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  4. Footfall also had some blatant tuckerisation from Niven and Pournelle.

    As Andrew has already mentioned Fallen Angels assumes that CO2 is a climate-changing greenhouse gas. It requires a fair degree of wishful thinking to imagine that anthropogenic emissions merely maintain the then contemporary climate in the face of the oncoming glacial cycle.

    Back in the day there was some scientific debate as to whether particulate and aerosol emissions (“the human volcano) or greenhouse gases would have the larger impact on the climate, though this was fairly rapidly settled in favour of the latter. (Residence times means that CO2 would win out in the long run if business continued as usual.) There was also the belief that we were approaching (on a centuries to millennia timescale) the end of the current interglacial, and interest in rapid onset of glacial phases (the “snowblitz” model). (As I understand, the current view is, that even absent anthropogenic forcings, the orbitals forcings predict a longer than average interglacial, making the forthcoming glacial period much less imminent). Apart from The Sixth Winter, John Christopher wrote a snowblitz novel (The World in Winter), though he concertinaed the transition to a single year.

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    • …the current view is, that even absent anthropogenic forcings, the orbital forcings predict a longer than average interglacial, making the forthcoming glacial period much less imminent.

      That’s pretty much the takeaway* from climate scientist David Archer’s terrific book The Long Thaw: the Earth’s orbit is more circular at present than average, which has the effect of reducing the variation in solar forcing and thus increasing the interglacial period, from the ~10,000 years seen in the last ice age to more like 50,000 years.

      *Strictly speaking, his verdict is that (absent anthropogenic forcing) it’s too close to call, not only because we don’t know the trigger level (the low in solar insolation at which an ice age begins) accurately enough, but because contingencies (the natural fuzziness of weather systems, in terms of amount and duration of snowfall, temperature fluctuations, etc) matter: we might have had an ice age begin in about 3000 years (when Earth will get very near the trigger level), or we might not.

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          • The most obvious racism boils down to the fact that the villainous band of roaming cannibals was, at its core, originally a black-dominated LA street gang. The heroes, of course, have to make and deploy mustard gas to defeat them.

            The pedophilia related to the band of “lost boy scouts”. The main character’s son was away with his boy scout troop at a campout when the comet hits, and a long-running subplot is the main character trying to find his son.

            When he does find the boy scout troop, he discovers that they have linked up with a girl scout troop and paired off as sex partners. The middle-aged scout leader who went on the trip intending to commit suicide has also hooked up with one of the girl scouts, who is described as being “maybe 15, maybe younger”. So, basically, a 40 year old guy is shacking up with a 14 or 15 year old girl.

            The main characters hand waves this. His son also doesn’t want to leave the scout camp, which leads to an observation that crops up a lot in Pournelle’s writing “boys were considered adults in Rome when they were 12 years old”. Pournelle seemed obsessed with this little factoid, and used it to justify all kinds of child sex and violence in the books he had a hand in writing.

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            • The number of stories which have that kind of hookup really unsettles me. Back when Storm and Black Panther were about to get married in comics, a retcon series showing their first meeting has them making love when he’s sixteen and she’s twelve. There was zero reason she needed to be twelve.

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              • This is a gross question, but it needs to be asked: has anyone ever done a decent study of pedophilic motifs in SFF through the 60s into the 80s? Remember Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love? I’m not talking about the infamous incest subplot, but the long (long, long) interlude where his protagonist goes to a frontier planet, marries, has a small family in the middle of nowhere, and then decides to address what he sees as the onrushing inevitable sexual tension between his sons and daughter when she’s in puberty. It’s like ‘Oh Noes, I can’t prevent my children from fucking each other!’

                And if I remember correctly, at least some of the post-apocalyptic books, like Lucifer’s Hammer, as well as others had this subtext which suggested that once the rules of society were gone, girls were fair game so long as they’d started menstruating, no matter what their age.

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            • If I recall correctly, it’s somewhat worse than this – the Girl Scouts had been previously captured by a group of adult men, who were then killed by the Boy Scouts and their leader.

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              • Which means the traumatized girls would want NOTHING to do with the boys.
                They would have looked up to the oldest girl in the troop, who might be 17-18 and would fiercely look out for them despite her own trauma.

                But this would have reinforced “boys=icky”. Depending on the age of the boys, they might still be thinking “girls=icky”.

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                • Showing the kids uneasy around other men would trigger the “not all men!” reaction from a lot of readers. And, of course, men are supposed to avenge the women — can’t have girls dealing with that stuff on their own.
                  Still it’s better than “The Warded Man” in which the female among the protagonists gets gang-raped as soon as she goes off on an adventure. Then after the hero saves her, she’s ready to make love to him because he’s that awesome.

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    • I hate to admit it, but I really loved those Niven/Pournelle books back when I was 15 – 20. Even (shudder) Inferno. Big explosions! Torture! He-manly heroes! Complete lack of understanding about how people are! Occasional secondary characters periodically tortured/raped and/or killed to advance the plots, kind of.

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        • I read the first two and rationalized away the misogny (“Sure, she mocked Tarl for not raping her, but she’s just taunting — she can’t want to be raped.”) but the third book’s lecture on how women have evolved to become natural slaves killed the franchise. Other than my personal challenge of “pick up a Gor book, open to a random page and see if there’s a lecture on male dominance.” Never failed.

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          • Some friends of mine used to have a party game of picking up a Gor book, opening to a random page and starting to read aloud; anyone who failed to make it to the bottom of the page without laughing had to take a shot.

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  6. Niven has a bit of background information on Fallen Angels in his compilation “Playgrounds of the Mind” but nothing on the climate side that hasn’t been stated already. Said the story originated with a request from Jim Baen, for what that’s worth.

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    • Oh please. Larry was already famous for ages before that, and had become rich off his own work as opposed to his trust fund.

      He could have easily told Baen to fuck off. But he didn’t.

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  9. Interestingly enough, the mining industry here in Sweden is going the other way. They are the driving force in trying to turn the mining industry fossil free, expecting new taxes and regulations making this a necessity to keep up with the opposition. They are actually working against our right wing government on this.

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  10. Wrt to Pournelle’s claiming that “boys were considered adults in Rome when they were 12 years old” (I have not personally verified such assertion) this is bollocks.
    Childhood in Roman society was complicated; boys were considered adults at fifteen (‘toga virilis’) but not completely so until twenty five, under the Empire.

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    • Yes, they didn’t get grown-up togas until at least 15-17 and couldn’t run for office until age 27-30, after doing 10 years in the army.

      At least in the Republic. And only if they were rich and freeborn and could count on tons of slaves and freedmen to actually do the work at home so they could go gallivanting off conquering more foreigners.

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      • And even grown-ass men were still legally/technically under their father’s supervision till Pops died. Dad could tell you how to spend your money. and who to marry You could have a 50 year old guy die while his 70 year old dad lived and he’d never have gotten to be 100% his own man.

        The poor, of course, did what they had to at whatever age they could, as they always have.

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  11. As someone who’s been responsible for the care of three different 12-year-old boys over the past four years, I think I’ve got a reasonable perspective on how mature they actually are. (I’m only going to talk about boys here because I have zero understanding of girls.) The first thing is that I was astonished at how mature they actually are. Just comparing a 12-year-old with a 9-year-old, the different is huge. I’d say that 12 is just about the first time you can start treating kids like little adults, in that you should expect to reason with them about things rather than just declaring “because I said so.” Reasoning can work with younger kids, but it’s not as likely to work. In a cognitive sense, it feels like a 12-year-old’s mind is fully formed. (I’m sure this isn’t 100% true, but you do get that feeling.)

    But they are very deficient in knowledge–including knowledge about how to cope with their own emotions. In particular, they’re very sexual, and they’ve got little idea how to cope with that either. Since the kids I’ve known were from foster care, it’s quite possible they were more sexualized than average kids, but, based on what they tell me about their conversations with school friends (and what I remember from my own childhood) I don’t think they’re far off. Another point is that 12-year-olds don’t have enough experience with other people to know when they’re being taken advantage of.

    One way I look at it is that when you’re dealing with a boy from 12 up to 18 or so, sometimes you get the boy and sometimes you get the man. At 12, you don’t get the man most of the time, while at 18 you don’t get the child very much, and this is a big part of what makes adolescence so miserable–they want to be treated like men, but sometimes they need to be boys, and it’s hard for parents to know when to switch.

    So I would say that, in extremis, a 12-year-old can rise to the occasion and “be a man,” but it’s not something that it’s reasonable to expect. I might even argue that a coming-of-age novel is about a boy being forced to become a man before he’s really ready to. I think all men experience this transition as somewhat traumatic, and that’s why we really love those novels–even if they make us cry.

    When I asked Travis his opinion (on whether a society could treat 12-year-olds as adults) he shook his head. “No way. Wait four years.” Although he’s a little young to be an expert, he does spend six hours a day around lots and lots of 12-year-olds. 🙂

    I did have a thought: in a traditional three-generation family, moving from the bottom tier (children) to the middle tier (young adults) is something you probably could do at age 12 because being an “adult” didn’t mean you really got to make very many decisions–even after you became a parent yourself. It was more about whether you could handle any sort of responsibility. E.g. could you be counted on the feed the horses or would you get distracted and end up playing. If you define adulthood down to that level, maybe it really does work.

    In our society, though, we give adults so much freedom and responsibility that it’s arguable that the full age of accountability ought to be 25 (when the brain finishes developing), although it would probably make sense to grant rights and privileges in steps along the way. In that world, I think 12 would be one of the big milestones.

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    • One thing I’ve often wondered over the years is whether it was different back when society did treat you as an adult in your early teens. It would make a great social research project once I get my time machine going.

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    • In a post-apocalyptic world, I still think a boy ought to be 14-16. In our world, I’m still good with 18 or even 21. (Or 25. Or 30.)

      Five minutes after an apocalypse is not the time to make pre- or barely pubescent children pair up, though. Particularly when girls are much more mature than boys at that age (and possibly any age). The girls should have formed a collective brain trust, and told the boys what to do but otherwise keep them away. It’s not like Girl Scouts don’t learn wilderness survival stuff too.

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    • It’s basically the same for girls except they are dealing with larger hormone changes and the menstrual cycle which requires them to be very adult very fast about some things, especially as anything they are dealing with is discounted as unimportant, hysterical, annoying, etc. by many adults. The menstrual cycle for at least a third of girls brings about regular, awful pain they have to learn to manage, again in a largely unsympathetic world. And sexual harassment begins for most girls on average somewhere between 8-12 — the teaching that this is how the world sees them and the requirements that they make themselves small thereby. But the process is continual — toddler mixed with little kid, then little kid mixed with bigger kid, bigger kid mixed with pre-teen, pre-teen mixed with teen/young adult, and on up. Bits of kid stay with adults forever but the cognitive process does develop in shifting percentages.

      Even when my kid was little, we very seldom did “because I said so.” We’d explain, in terms she could understand at the age she was at, why we needed things to be that way. That did make for a very argumentative kid, certainly, but one who knew how to make a decent argument and that decisions were not capricious and authoritarian but had purpose, that she could also have a voice and boundaries, that compromises could be negotiated on some things, that there did not have to be only a winner and a loser.

      For teen boys, the big problem is the rape culture socialization between key years of 10-15, which tells them that to be a real man and not face harassment and violence from other boys, they must detach emotionally except for negative, violent emotions, must view physical contact as transactional and must dominate and own in whatever area they can so that they are not losers who are targets. This mindset gets stuck in even in boys who in some areas have broken free of it. Teaching empathy to all the kids is the biggest, earliest counter we have to these sorts of stagnant toxicity, but it’s not easy when so many want to punish empathy out of them.

      The thing that, “oh 12 year olds were adults in the ancient/medieval world” pushers do is that they are historically wrong for a fantasy of power and boundary crossing. 12 year olds were not considered adults in Ancient Rome. They were considered to be transitioning to adulthood — probationary. Roman boys were not allowed to become citizens, if eligible, until they were 16 or 17. Girls, if their family weren’t nobles doing a political alliance, were married off on average at around 16-18 years old and not unusual for it to be in their twenties. This was in part because girls often didn’t get a period (become breedable) until mid-adolescence due to malnutrition. And partly because girls were usually helping take care of younger siblings until one of the younger siblings could replace them.

      What kids were, was slave property. Their parents could work them from the time they were four onwards, sell them to others as slaves, would definitely throw them into mines at 12 or younger, and so on. They were bodies and bodies were labor and if they survived, exploiting their labor increased wealth for their owner. An adult son who was a citizen and could vote still had none of his own income unless his father/owner was dead, and could not buy property on his own, could not marry without his father’s permission. His father could kill him and it wouldn’t necessarily be considered a crime. Adult didn’t mean authority in old patriarchal societies. And if you were a slave without family in someone’s household, adult meant nothing.

      So the old men of SF were basically going off a Hollywoodized fantasy slightly tempered by more sneaky mores of the 20th century. But that fantasy is why families still can legally marry off a 14 or 16 year old girl to an adult man in many U.S. states. Because it’s not about adulthood and maturity; it’s about power — political, social and physical. And teens can be easily controlled and exploited as they have little legal power.

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        • For future reference, which parts were the most depressing? 🙂

          I’ll try to avoid some areas where I can. At least it’s not as bad as the medieval historians trying to deal with the “there were barely any black people in Europe” and “colonial imperialism by the West was good actually” takes.

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          • It’s just like, *power* this and *sexualizing minors* that. Why can’t we get back to the good old days, when novels written by paunchy white guys had no problem reminiscing fondly over their societal memories (a.k.a. dreams) of seducing 15 year olds with their masculine prowess? What’s a little inappropriate sexual behavior among friends? Rush Limbaugh knew what he was talking about! Let’s get back to the good old days when life was nasty, brutish, short, and full of sexual attacks, that’s what I say.

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