Contrarian Cli-Fi 0.04: The Sixth Winter

John Gribbin and Douglas Orgill wrote a near-future climate thriller, The Sixth Winter, published in 1979. The central figure is a heroic climate scientist who goes on a global trotting adventure at the request of the US President to find evidence of a sudden onslaught of ice. The book is far from the first piece of fiction set in a future ice age and the year before Ice! by Arnold Federbusch also published a thriller with a sudden onset ice age. Both novels feature whole towns being suddenly beset by a kind of flash-freezing phenomenon that makes for a more immediate deadly threat.

It’s not unlike the phenomenon used in the bizarre climate disaster movie from 2004 The Day After Tomorrow in which Dennis Quaid battles a sudden ice age caused paradoxically by global warming. The film is partly inspired by Ice! and by the 1999 pop-science book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber but late in The Sixth Winter we get scenes of New York beset by snow and ice that anticipates the 2004 film.

“Meanwhile, in Manhattan, the great skyscrapers – the Pan Am building, the Empire State, Chrysler and the rest – thrust up into a hostile sky, like concrete arrows embedded in the ice. Helicopter pilots who flew above the city wilderness reported a sense of total disbelief at the sights they saw. And the helicopters were busy. In many of the skyscraper buildings, where elevators and power had failed, considerable groups of people still lived in the upper sections … people who had made their way down by stairway to street level only to find the snow-wall outside towering far above their heads.”

Gribbin, John; Orgill, Douglas. The Sixth Winter (Gateway Essentials Book 342) (p. -274). Orion. Kindle Edition.

This theme of survival against an apocalyptic threat emphasises the fragility of cities as emblematic of the broader fragility of modern society. In the same chapter Gribbin tells us:

“In general, the great cities proved to be more vulnerable than the surrounding countryside. In both Europe and North America, small rural communities, even when completely isolated, contrived an existence of their own, with only occasional support by air from central authorities farther south. The loss of livestock, of course, was virtually total – though farmers sometimes hung on to basic stock by taking animals into their own homes, both as a basis for a hoped-for future, and as an insurance against short-term starvation. No such alleviation was possible in cities, where the lack of energy as power-lines collapsed with the weight of ice, or as transformers blew, without hope of repair in continual blizzards, brought gripping, lethal cold. The old died first, in thousands.

Gribbin, John; Orgill, Douglas. The Sixth Winter (Gateway Essentials Book 342) (pp. -275–276). Orion. Kindle Edition.

It’s partly unfair to place The Sixth Winter in a series about climate change denial in fiction. It fits more neatly in with a broader genre of apocalyptic disaster fiction. I’ve read worse stories and it has a rather rose-tinted portrayal of world governments taking climate science seriously amid mounting evidence of catastrophic change. However, it is one piece in a broader aesthetic choice in fiction that carried through into the culture of climate contrarianism, particularly with two ideas:

• that cold is what we should be alarmed about on the grounds that warm weather is better all-round for living things
• that natural changes in climate due to a combination of orbits and changes in solar activity are the primary drivers of climate and that is the right scientific view of climate change — a kind of climate fatalism

Gribbin’s own views would shift as the evidence for global warming became clearer during the 1980s, so The Sixth Winter has this odd feeling of an artefact from a different reality. The Sixth Winter is science fiction of course and to that extent it still works as a novel, if one set in a universe in which global warming was outpaced by cooling effects.

The sexual and racial politics of the novel are very dated as well. The central character, scientist Dr William Stovin (an Englishman living in the US) is joined in the story by an indigenous Alaskan airplane pilot Paul Bisby and biologist Diane Hilder. Bisby is described initially:

The pilot was a youngish man, probably still under thirty. He had blue eyes and black hair, and there was a cast to his face which was unexpected, even alien. He had told Stovin that his name was Bisby, which sounded Anglo-Saxon enough. Yet, thought Stovin in surprise, he could almost be Russian.

Gribbin, John; Orgill, Douglas. The Sixth Winter (Gateway Essentials Book 342) (p. -34). Orion. Kindle Edition.

Bisby, of course, proves to be remarkably capable as the characters find themselves having to survive arctic temperatures in the USA and USSR. Later in the book there is an appalling sex scene between Bisby and Diane which, I assume, is intended to make Bisby seem macho and commanding but reads as rape. Towards the end of the book, after Bisby dies heroically, Diane reflects on events:

“Well, she’d lived for a month or two in the Stone Age, and she’d been mated by Stone Age man. Because surely, in the last analysis, that was who Bisby was? A Stone Age hunter, who’d been to Cornell and who’d learned to fly a jet. No one who’d watched him in that little Eskimo settlement up on the ice-cap could have seen him any other way.”

Gribbin, John; Orgill, Douglas. The Sixth Winter (Gateway Essentials Book 342) (p. -295). Orion. Kindle Edition.

“Stone age man” isn’t intended to be pejorative here, although that doesn’t lessen the racism. I’m including it here not to dunk on awful attitudes from the 1970s but because the book connects manliness to this battle with the elements and specifically with the human battle against the cold. Man can survive the ice age by reverting to the atavistic stone age ideal: the brutal hunter, clad in furs who can battle wolves and hunt caribou — which is anthropological and psychological nonsense of course but part of the appeal of ice-age apocalypses. A time when men were men and women are “mated” after the man has feasted on the meat from the bear he fought earlier in the day^[1].

Actual global warming just doesn’t work for this style of narrative. You can’t fight a heatwave with your fists and rising temperatures don’t bring the promise of having to wrestle returned megafauna. Actual climate change falls into a category that I think of as “disappointing apocalypses” along with the covid-19 pandemic. Disaster has arrived but it has failed to read the script notes from the rugged individualists, preppers and survivalists.

Next Time: More Pollution, Please!

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Footnotes

• [1] I’m not exaggerating, this is the context for the scene in the book