By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Remember a popular novel from the 1950s titled On The Beach by the British-Australian writer Nevil Shute? His real name was Nevil Shute Norway, but he used a pen name for his writings. The novel came out in 1957 and was a dire warning about the perils of nuclear war, and a hit movie by Jewish film director Stanley Kramer (1913 -2001) was released a few years later.
Some media and cultural observers say that “On The Beach” — both the novel and the movie — helped wake up the world about the folly of nuclear war in those Cold War days
So could a powerful Nevil Shute-like novel and movie about global warming help change the cultural and political debate over climate issues?
‘On the Beach‘ was a story about doomed lovers, written more than 50 years ago and the novel and the subsequent movie starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins stirred the world’s consciousness about what a so-called ”nuclear winter” might look like. So imagine a strong novel and movie about climate change that could help awaken the world to the dangers of climate change.
Think about it: What if there was a ”cli fi” novel that had the power of On the Beach and could serve as a wake up call for humankind? Words mattter, novels still matter, movies matter even more.
At this point in human history, a novel that explores the human and emotional implications and ramifications of global warming and climate change could go a long way towards awakening humanity to the issues facing the world in the 21st century as we plow along toward the 22nd century. Call the fate that awaits us not “mutally assured-destruction” (MAD) but “climate-assured destruction (CAD).
Someone is most likely writing an early draft of his or her novel right now.
Outlining it, writing a first chapter or so, putting it through its paces as it morphs from a mere idea and vision into a full-fledged novel, expansive and highly readable. And with a warning to the world embedded in its pages. It might be a sci fi novel, it might be a novel of speculative fiction, it might be a hard-hitting literary novel or it might be part of that new genre that has been dubbed “cli fi” (for climate fiction novels).
‘Sometimes, fiction is the best way to win friends and influence people. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine‘ and George Orwell’s classic, 1984′‘come to mind,” climate novelist John Atcheson, who worked on climate issues in the Clinton administration, told me when I asked him about this. ”Each provoked a visceral reaction that galvanized the culture around it, changing forever the way issues such as class and totalitarianism were perceived. Shute’s On the Beach made the consequences of nuclear war real, and therefore, unthinkable.”
”In a scientifically illiterate culture such as ours, these kinds of myth-based meta-narratives may be the best way to communicate complex scientific issues like climate change,” he added. “Myths, as Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell revealed, are not necessarily false, nor are they automatically at odds with science. At their best, they provide another way of viscerally experiencing a truth.
”A spate of novels and movies that feature climate change as either an overt part of the story-line, or an implicit backdrop against which mythical heroes strive may be creating the critical mass for a cultural awakening that allows climate change to be perceived at that pre-rational level — the kind of limbic awareness that motivates change,” he said. “Or so we can hope.”
Is there anyone out there?
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Danny Bloom is a freelance writer and inveterate web-surfer residing in Chiayi City, Taiwan. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com
Good idea. Try my book, Polar City Red. Familiar with it?
Editor’s Note: The following letter was received from Rabbi Judy Weiss of Brookline, Massachusetts:
Thanks for the great article by Danny Bloom suggesting the best way to communicate to people the effects of climate change is via storytelling. In particular, he suggests novelists write “cli-fi” novels to help change our political debate over climate change.
Sadly, the time frame doesn’t allow us to wait for someone to write a great novel, have it become a bestseller, and then be produced as a major motion picture film. The climate crisis is already here, and we need Congress to enact serious legislation within the next year or two in order to prevent tipping points leading to irreparable damage.
However, there is good news. In 1972, John Brunner wrote an excellent, early “cli-fi” novel, The Sheep Look Up, exploring the consequences of water and air pollution, and prophetically described a type of drilling that reminded me of fracking. It would be great if you publish a review of this book to encourage your readers to read it, and perhaps someone would buy the movie rights and produce it.
I’m sure that members of the San Diego chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby would happily write a review of Brunner’s book for you, provide the climate change context, and help readers understand the policy options that will help us deal with our current crisis.
Rabbi Judy Weiss
Brookline, MA 02446
Rabbi, Thank you for the suggestion. We created “The World We Share” category on our daily internet news site to provide a home for stories and articles such as you suggest. If you would like to send us your review of the book in question, we will be pleased to post it on San Diego Jewish World. All the best — Donald H. Harrison, editor
Well done Danny for highlighting how important stories are now, and will be, in helping us understand and come to terms with the now irreversible changes set in train by past emissions of greenhouse gases.
Mr. Bloom is on to something … you can add 1984 and Brave New World to On The Beach as fiction that changed the way society perceived a threat.
My own novel, “A Being Darkly Wise” is a cli-fi novel. It’s been well received with stellar reviews, and I’m at work on a sequel now.
Dan, great article.
I read On the Beach several years ago. The novel made a nuclear disaster real, horrifying, and sad, and to-date it’s one of the most impacting novels I’ve ever read. The words by major media used to describe the novel were “haunting evocation,” “shocking fiction,” and “we stared into the abyss [of nuclear war] and then stepped back.”
This certainly needs to happen with a climate change novel, but here are some differences:
1. We are already out of time to defer most of the effects climate change will take, because it is upon us now and will get worse no matter what we do. This leads us to a place of hopelessness and powerlessness. What people need to realize is we can still mitigate so many climate change issues if we start doing it now.
2. Climate change is not a one-technology issue like nuclear war, which is easier to point a finger to and stop, but is caused by a carbon-emitting lifestyle that billions of people depend upon to work, eat, play, and shelter themselves. Many people have no choice, if they want to even get to work, to stop driving a car because their location doesn’t provide transit or other infrastructure to reduce driving. We cannot seem to reduce our dependency on oil, and even now, when we should be reducing emissions, we are moving away from lighter-weight cleaner oil to heavier emitting unconventional carbon-emitters such as pollution sands (oil sands) and deep-sea drilling oil sources. (See Keystone XL, Northern Gateway). There’s a real problem with this scenario.
3. There’s a lack of press about these books. See below.
As you know, I run Cli-Fi Books, where I see many great novels being written on the subject. Both bigger name authors and lesser known authors are tackling the subject. Why are so many authors taking on this subject? Not to exploit a hot topic, as Bill Chameides irresponsibly suggested at Care2″, but, as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow wrote in Dissent Magazine, in her in-depth article (after actually interviewing cli-fi authors), authors are doing what they always have: refashioning myths for our age, appropriating time-honored narratives about what’s going on around us, and using that to illuminate enduring truths of the human condition.
So I know it is possible to tackle this very huge issue, whether with a microscopic approach (like Barbara Kingsolver does in Flight Behavior) or a macroscopic approach (as Nathaniel Rich does in Odds Against Tomorrow) or somewhere in between, such as Clara Hume does in Back to the Garden.
Once the media figures out this is a new genre, and it’s an important one, maybe they can get past this elementary academic realization and begin reviewing these books so that the public knows they are there, and why they are there. The media is slow to talk about climate change in fiction, though there are 23 articles (linked from Cli-Fi Books) that have tried–perhaps the articles aren’t quite mainstream enough (I’m not sure).
I don’t think it’s because the right book or books haven’t come along yet, but because these novels don’t get much notice. And why? Because people are still grappling with whether climate change is real, whether big oil and other corporate messaging is true, which downplays or just outright lies about the reality of it all. Getting over these hurdles is a start–and then I think the right sort of magic has to happen, where people want to read a book about climate change and how it will affect our world in the eyes of fiction. And this story has to be a great one, appealing–and it must to be brought to the world by the media, whose job it is to do just that. And, as an aside, I hope if this story hits the big screen, it is not a shallow, forgettable summer big-action movie, but a thoughtful, genuine story that people remember and do something about.
Maybe we can’t stop climate change, but at least our literature can help us understand what is happening to our world. 1984 was a key text in helping the world understand the nature of authoritarianism. What is the key text to help us understand climate change? Maybe this award can encourage someone to write it.
Many thanks for this an excellent initiative, Danny! As Rabbi Judy Weiss wisely observes, we need concerted action to mitigate climate change right now, but a novel such as you are hoping to solicit has the potential to help a wider readership to understand why this will have been so necessary as well as helping them to prepare for the unstable and potentially catastrophic situation that has already been set in train.
Try “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road
From link:
British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the “50 people who could save the planet” in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, “It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem.” This nomination echoes the review Monbiot had written some months earlier for The Guardian in which he wrote, “A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.”
Danny Bloom is an old fighter in the trenches to combat the dangerous effects of climate change.
He just keeps plugging away. Continuously more and more evidence keeps accumulating about this danger to mankind and very little is being done about it. In this country we have had hurricanes, inundations, drought, torrential downpours and yet there are many who deny the scientific facts that climate change is caused by us and by our feeble response to same.
I find the above comments excellent and right on the mark. Keep on fitting, Danny!
Peter Kubicek
Like the other authors above, I’m surprised Danny didn’t list a few cli-fi works that at least attempt to be what he describes. Perhaps none of our work rises to the level of On the Beach, but some are compelling. My story, A Change in the Weather, was recommended by Dr. Jeff Masters (Weather Underground) on his holiday gift list.
We’re short of time, true. But that doesn’t detract from these efforts. Any consciousness-raising moves the issue forward. We can wish for alternatives, we can lament what leaders ought to do, but these books actually take the matter in hand.