In Defence of Hopelessness in Fiction – Unsettling Futures - Issue #14
"Climate doomism helps absolutely no one."
Last week I woke up and the sky tasted like smoke from the wildfires that are burning a significant chunk of my home province, the IPCC report on the climate crisis fresh in my mind. And over my lunch hour, I rage-typed A Visit From the Last Tigers Brigade, a near future flash fiction in which nihilistic, pointless revenge is the only response remaining in the face of a collapsing climate.
It is not a positive story. It is not a story designed to give anyone hope or inspire people to take individual or collective action to confront the crisis. It is not a story that has a moral.
It's a story instead of a scream.
Every time there's a big new climate report, or a heat wave, or a superstorm, or a tornado cell that flings a Midwestern neighbourhood skyward, we get the message:
"Don't give in to hopelessness! If you give in to climate doomism, you're just helping them!"
Them is, of course, the nebulous but very real alliance of oil companies, foaming-mouthed climate change deniers, fanatics with "This Car Will Be Unoccupied In Case of Rapture" bumper stickers, and smug grifters taking cash from any/all of the above.
This no-doomism attitude has spread into science fiction publishing. There are multiple solarpunk anthologies, there are people arguing over whether hopepunk is a thing, there are magazine and anthology submission calls for hopeful stories, positive futures, visions of change. Plenty of submission guidelines are tilted towards the positive, and editors often say their readers prefer happy endings. This implied to be helping, at least in part. Writing better tomorrows to give us hope now to make better tomorrows in reality. Maybe it does help.
But the flip side of that is, again, a kind of message that we shouldn't be writing despair and apocalypse. It's not a can't, but it's often a strong, implied shouldn't. We aren't helping if we're miserable cusses who write the futures where we don't get our shit together, full of extinct megafauna and dried-up aquifers. Nobody likes a Debbie Downer.
I have some issues with this position
First, on a practical level, whether I or any other individual is hopeless or resolute has no bearing whatsoever on whether the climate crisis is solved (for whatever value of solved we can manage at this point).
The same people who will share memes about how a dozen billionaires are responsible for 99.87 percent of the world's carbon emissions will also loudly exhort us to not give up hope, as though hope had proved itself a potent source of energy that, like oil, might prove non-renewable.
Often this is framed as a two-step process – we must maintain our hope in solutions to climate change, and then we must use that motivation to effect political change.
Well. I live in a country where we elected a government that made pious promises to protect the climate and a couple years ago they spent $4.5 billion to bail out a project tripling the size of an oil pipeline carrying bitumen (through my town) to the nearest port, so forgive me if I think the connection between voting intentions and government action might be a little shaky.
And, just as one individual losing hope is not going to damn the world, we have to acknowledge: science fiction is not going to save the planet.
SF, literature's red-headed stepchild, has had a chip on its shoulder since the days of the pulps. The field's defenders have often tried to justify its existence by giving it some utilitarian or moral heft. We warn people of dystopias! We help teach basic science! We encourage people to go into STEM! We predicted the cell phone and the communications satellite and microwaveable Hot Pockets!
Well, maybe SF does those things, a little bit, but science fiction magazines and anthologies with sales in four or five figures are not going to magically change hearts and minds sufficiently to achieve some tipping point that leads us to climate victory.
Science fiction can't save the world.
Stories can't save the world.
But.
Stories do save people. I believe that happens every day.
Sometimes they save you for the rest of your life, sometimes for a season, sometimes just for that day, or that hour. That's the workaday miracle of fiction; the right story in the right hands can keep you going when you don't think you can anymore.
And that right story, isn't always a story of hope.
Sometimes you don't want a story that's aimed at straightforward uplift you any more than you always want a sentimental love song on the radio. Sometimes you need some goddamn Scandinavian death metal, some spitting-mad punk rock, a raw-throated scream that the world is broken.
Sometimes you need The Last Flight of Dr. Ain, or The Road, or Station Eleven, or On the Beach.
You need to stare the worst in the face and at least know that someone else is feeling the same things you are – scared and angry and standing at the cliff edge of despair, toes out over the long drop.
When I posted A Visit From the Last Tigers Brigade, I referred to it as something I needed to exorcise. I doubt I'll ever fully do that, not when we have "fire season," when the weather app on my phone will inform me the forecast is for smoke, when we run out of names for hurricanes, and while environment ministers defend constructing new pipelines as necessary to fund for the fight against climate change. That anger, that fear, is part of me. It's how I feel, and that means sometimes I'm going to write about it. That's what fiction has to be for, before it can fulfil any secondary purpose to proselytize or move public opinion.
Hopeful stories are great. Sometimes we need those. Stories where everything burns… sometimes we need those too.
Further Reading
One of my favourite stories – one I return to a couple of times a year at least – is Theodore Sturgeon's The Man Who Lost the Sea. Go and have a listen to the excellent Escape Pod production if you have a few minutes.
It's a story that tells, in a roundabout way, of a catastrophic triumph. It's complicated, in other words. If science fiction is supposed to be uplifting and educational, if it's supposed to inspire you to want to become an engineer and go to space and invent things… well, it's not a story that's likely to do that in any kind of direct, straightforward way.
It's not a complete downer, but no editor would ever call it a an uplifting tale, even if that's how I take it. And it's sometimes the story I need. Maybe it's the story you need, too.
Reminder, if you liked this post, you can like or subscribe or share, but I recommend instead you inscribe your own tale of hope or despair in cuneiform, sealing it with the royal sigil of the kings of Uruk, and burying it in the vast wastes of the desert, for future generations to ponder.