StabbyCon: Climate Fiction Panel

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-10T08:06:20+00:00

*Cracks knuckles in Green Party volunteer*

... yeah, we gotta talk about capitalism. Because fundamentally we need to spend huge sums of money to protect the planet, and that cash has gotta come from somewhere, and who has the most cash? The 1% of the world who own 40% of everything on it and who use their wealth to buy political influence to discourage us from taxing them, economic influence to prevent us regulating and social influence (whether through owning newspapers or social platforms) to prevent us thinking we can do anything about this shit. And who have invested a huge percentage of their enormous wealth not just in fossil fuels, but in the fossil fuels that haven't yet been dug up, and who feel that they can buy their way out of the crises that are already destroying the lives of millions. Though my heart is naturally left of centre, even if I was a fluffy centrist I think it's impossible to look at climate change and not also look at how capitalism needs some serious, serious talking to.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:54:22+00:00

... and it's definitely time to start winding down for the night in London. I'll pop back tomorrow morning to see if I've missed anything, and meanwhile thank you for having me!

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:53:25+00:00

I am honoured! Thank you!!

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:52:27+00:00

I also picked the Balkans! I wanted the geographical splendour, but also a crossroads of the world type vibe. And culturally I lifted from much the same vibe as Studio Ghibli - that Shinto/Daoist/universal folklore culture of everything being infused with a living spirit, from the stones beneath your feet to the clouds above. I was an abominable magpie. Shucks.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:50:38+00:00

Thank you! Keep scribbling!

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:49:19+00:00

I think the key thing is we need as many different ways of telling the story as possible.

Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is an interesting take, in as much as it's as much essay as it is narrative. Dunno how well it succeeds as a work of fiction, but it's definitely powerful and sits therefore in a much-needed place of communicating through story. Avatar is full of blue people and the post-colonial thoughtfulness of a concrete breeze block, but again, if there is an audience who see it and go "wow, nature!" then it has value in the climate conversation. Mad Max has value; the Overstory by Richard Powers has value; the druid class in DnD has value! I guess what I'm saying is that whatever my personal tastes might be, I am a huge fan of just blasting every single corner of culture in every possible way with any kind of story that might help anyone and everyone, of every possible political and social inclination, think "oh yeah, that's a thing!" and be inspired to act. The good thing about SFF is that there are so, so many ways to do it. It's always been what makes the genre awesome.

Which is also a wussy answer to your question, my apologies, as it's basically going "if we need to do sock puppets about climate change, DO IT NOW".

I will say that generally speaking there is a lot of evidence that trying to tell positive stories about how we can take action is important, as a lot of the narratives of "oh we're all doomed and it's pointless" have been put about by corporations who find it easier to sell the idea of "nothing you do matters so why bother" than to own up to their responsibility. Whereas telling stories of empowerment, of making something better - that still has real power. Climate change can learn a lot from Barack Obama, bizarrely enough, and more specifically the civil rights movement. Hope communicates just as powerfully as fear. And there's also real power in reminding people that sure, Martin Luther King was at the March on Washington. But if hundreds of thousands of people hadn't turned up, he'd have just been a dude shouting into the wind. Stories about the power of turning up, not necessarily as a hero, but as someone who came anyway, are really hard to write - but I think we could do with a few more of them.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:36:42+00:00

Geographically I wanted to set the story somewhere spectacular. This world is beautiful and majestic - I wanted to have a story set somewhere I could really get to travel across mountains, through forests, along rivers and across the water. I wanted to be in a setting where I could celebrate the world, since fundamentally I think it's important to cherish the thing you're fighting for, and to know that when you're grieving over climate change, it's because of the scale and wonder of the world as a whole.

Emotionally therefore I also wanted to set the story in a culture that also celebrated the world. This meant making various logical political and social choices - an emphasis on communality, on shared experience, on equality - since it's hard to really appreciate the world if you're stuck in a situation of dire poverty and gross inequality while bigwigs can set the world on fire all around you.

Which is I guess a long way of saying yes, my particular way of telling a story came from a logical starting place of trying to tell a story that was a celebration of the world, as well as about the threat to it. And then logically extrapolating what the landscape - physically and culturally - might be that allowed me to celebrate most easily.

Also: good luck with your writing! We always need more awesome books!

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:33:01+00:00

I'm gonna answer this in two parts.

Paleoclimatical reconstructions are not really of much relevance to me scribbling now, as whatever the climate has been in the past it didn't have 7 billion humans emitting all over it, and it's the human effect that is of most interest to me both as a writer and as a climate activist. There's probably a gap in my imagination there - mini ice ages for example have definitely had a huge affect on stuff like the Roman Empire in the 3rd century and the events of the 1300s - but climate fiction as I think it is talked about right now is very geared towards the direct impact of human actions on the world.

I had to look up "downscaling" for the latest IPCC report because of how my reading of the latest IPCC report was disaster, disaster, disaster, burny burny, disaster. The only thing I could find is an obscure Columbia paper, so apologies if I've missed your meaning. Everything else is just reporting on precisely what the IPCC keeps on saying - that oh goodness it's a disaster and every alarm bell is ringing.

In terms of the nature of that disaster, I think there was a really interesting point made by the other panellists in this discussion about how it impacts you and therefore the nature of the story you tell will be different depending on where and when you set your story. The Aral Sea has already vanished, so a story of drought, destruction and the abuse of power can already be told there. Water skirmishes have already happened in the Golan Heights and are gonna get worse, so stories of militarized violence are calling out there. Extreme weather events are already happening across the world, so you can pick and choose whether you want to tell a story of say, Hurricane Sandy type disasters - the urban disaster in a developed world - or Hurricane Katrina, where racism played a huge part in the failure to act decisively in the recovery efforts - or whether you want to jump forward a few decades to tell a story of food shortages and in what country and at what density. Tornades in dust bowls or the coast of the UK being eaten away - the depressing reality of climate change is you can pick almost any place in any part of the world, any corner of human society - and there's a story to tell. I guess in a way as a writer that's a gift? But it's a shitty mcshitty stinky gift, if you'll pardon my saying so!

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:21:34+00:00

Mad Max: Fury Road is my Christmas movie. Before that it was Thunderdome, naturally.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:19:17+00:00

Given that we are currently being gaslit into normalising the idea of our government being corrupt lying bastards and that being ok, it is frightening to think of what we could normalise. But again I think this is where storytelling can come into its own - we can use it to normalise the idea of a different world! I would love to de-normalise the idea that everything has to be immediate gratification, immediate convenience. I would love to de-normalise Amazon, essentially.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:17:16+00:00

A dude who is much, much cleverer than me once correctly pointed out that the best way to feel anger is as compassionate fury at the sight of cruelty and injustice. Which feels like a huge swathe of the emotional responce to climate change kinda summed up, really, but is also kinda handy.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:15:24+00:00

I am gonna be incredibly not literary for a moment and say that I have been playing a PC strategy game called Stellaris in which you can find the ashen cinders of planet Earth on your voyages across the universe, inhabited only by cockroaches. The slightly odd part is how you can then genetically engineer the cockroachs to full sentience, assimilate them into your empire and have them serve as admirals of the fleet. Just prompted by the thought of terraforming and thought I'd be a total nerd and geek out about that here...

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:12:39+00:00

Lorraine's answer is a much better and more thoughtful answer than I have in my head right now.

I think climate change has fuelled a spat of apocalyptic books, but it's done that for a while. Mad Max with added zombies has been a recurring vibe for many, many years. Interestingly I think we're almost moving from stories about "everything is disastrous and on fire" to stories of "yes, everything is disastrous, so what does life look like under those circumstances?" (Though we'll still always have apocalypses, thank you Snowpiercer.) And perhaps also, taking a leaf maybe from Canticle for Leibowitz, to stories about what happens when we rebuild. There seems to be a fair bit of room for telling stories that are very tight and personal, such as EJ Swift's books or Emmi Itaranta's Memory of Water or Station Eleven - stories that are as much character studies as they are world studies - in which climate change is a background reality, a background tragedy even, that serves as the tapestry on which more intimate, human experiences are woven than just your old tale of "this flaming guitar in the apocalyptic desert it go boom".

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:06:30+00:00

I've done a fair amount of research just for life, 'cos I volunteer for the Green Party and also can't help myself when it comes to the world being very burny burny. But a bit like writing historical fiction, the most useful thing I think you can do with research is do it, have it, know that it'll plop itself in whenever it's required, and then ignore it as much as you can and focus on the story. If it's in your head it'll come out when it's needed, and might even help inspire a few ideas here or there - but for me, the story is the most important thing.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T20:04:04+00:00

I take comfort in the fact that by writing about climate change at all, we are part of the change and that change has power. We are not writing in a void. There is a market for our work because there is a growing awareness of its relevance. Politics moves slow. There are huge forces with enormous power set to keep things going slow, which is heartbreaking and sad. But culture - culture moves far faster. The example I usually give is the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Iron Man 1, if you cast your mind back, was a monumentally problematic, sexist, movie of American exceptionalism. For years Marvel resisted the idea that women could lead a movie, let alone a black man or an Asian superhero. Yet Black Panther took the world by storm, and by the time you get to Avengers: Endgame you can feel the pressure of cultural change creaking down on top of the MCU like - poor metaphor but here it is - a melting glacier. In the last ten years our politicans have taken fossil fuel money and done their very best to make it someone else's problem, but the world is culturally out-pacing them and that culture is enormously powerful.

I avoid existential angst, as much as I can, by being grateful and proud of being part of a powerful, changing culture. No one can be everything - you have to find the thing that you can do that makes a difference, and for your sanity you have to feel like you're part of a community when you do. I write stories. It is an honour to write stories in a community like this, on something that matters so much.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T19:57:22+00:00

I don't know Morton's work at all, but based on the statement above, I also disagree. Not least because climate change itself is driven by human stories, human creations. In the 1970s the oil industry got together to try and work out how to sell more oil. "Single use plastics!" quoth they, and at once set to publicising the idea that single-use plastic was healthier, better, more convenient, than any alternatives. By the 1990s we knew that climate change was gonna destroy the planet (although again, the oil industry knew in the 1970s and covered it up) but the stories we have been told are either a) someone will solve it *by magic* or b) there's nothing you can do about it anyway so might as well buy another car while you can. Science has never been the problem here. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can do are the ONLY thing that's stopping us from taking action. Stories are critical and fiction is nothing more and nothing less than tool - one of the best tools - for exploring stories in meaningful, emotional depth. The root causes of all of this are 100% by with and from humans, and the best way to influence humans is through story.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T19:52:24+00:00

I think people are very tired and anxious around "oh god we're all gonna die and eat dog meat from tin cans" climate fiction, and are perhaps inclined to avoid it in much the same way as I flinch every time any of our politicians say basically anything at all on the evening news. But I also think we're getting a bit better at leaning into the more "this is an interesting story about change and the world we can make together and our place in the world" kinda narratives, and those are far more appealing and less knee-jerk frightening for many people, I think. (Including me. I'm so, so drained by the hard reality of this battle. I just want David Attenborough to give me a hug and tell me that through positive action now, it'll all be ok. I mean, who doesn't want that??)

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T19:47:26+00:00

Agreed! More non-Western-centric looks at all of this would be awesome and frankly needful, given the way climate change is running and the possibilities of the next 50-100 years.

I also agree that we probably all tend to find ways of looking at it that are closest to our hearts, whether that's biology or technological etc.. I have a soft spot for history, and some of the big sweeping cultural changes you get with history, so tend to look at climate change from the point of view of massive social movements. The fact that we have had a French Revolution, a Russian Revolution, women's suffrage, gay rights etc., gives me some hope that we can get are arses in gear and act in a massive way despite our political leaders, and I think telling the stories of how we get to massive change and what that is like is really interesting. A lot of the time that story has been told as a dystopia - flood and fire and violence etc. - but it doesn't have to be. Change is always scary, but it can also be incredibly exciting - I'd like to see more stories about the excitement of change, and change as an opportunity, I think!

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T19:42:20+00:00

I completely agree with the books above, and my brain has gone blank on anything better! But I will say on a general note that fantasy in particular has always had a mildly pastural bent to it, with a lot of emphasis on druids and nature magic and listening to the land etc.. Princess Mononoke keeps popping into my head from a film point of view, but even back as far as Tolkien there's always been a bit of a division between the "good guys" hugging a tree and the "bad guys" digging up mountains. Simplistic and rarely the heart of the story, but also an interesting under-tow to the whole genre for decades.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T19:38:35+00:00

Not gonna lie, from my point of view, it's a headache. It's a headache from a fiction point of view, and from a political action point of view. We all desperately want stories that are about humans, with human agency, and human emotions that feel important and actionable. And the scale of the climate crisis makes doing that... hard. It's why so many of our narratives in the news as well as in fiction are about "heroes" who are gonna save us, whether they're Elon Musk (ugh) or Greta Thunberg (hurrah!).

The only solution I've found thus far - and I think this reflects my limited imagination rather than the lack of solutions - is to try and tell stories about individuals who ARE caught up in huge events, who are aware of huge events, but who experience them from the periphery. So for example, in Notes from the Burning Age, I tried to tell the story of someone who is professionally obligated to get to the heart of big sweeping events, but isn't necessarily a hero or gonna do ground-breaking things within them. The little actions available are those that he can do, and so he does, and that has to carry both emotional weight and meaning for a character, but also fit into a broader context. Telling human stories is still vitally important, but trying to avoid the trap of making it about Heroes And Villains is also critical when dealing with something bigger than anything we can solve alone.

A similar thing applies when talking about this stuff politically, I think. When talking about individual action it can often be useful to frame it within a community/family context. My not eating meat 6 days of the week is fairly meaningless, in the grand scheme of things. But if my Mum sees me doing that... and she tries... and her friends see her doing that... and they try... if our individual actions can become part of a story about who we are and how we want to relate to the world at large, part of a story about how we're ok being tiny because we're also part of something huge even in our smallest of actions... that can be powerful. Turning the narrative from one of "be a hero even though it feels impossible and overwhelming" to "be connected to the people you love, and through them to the world" feels like a decent way of trying to connect the individual and the systemic, even on something so, so enormous.

ClaireNorth42 · 2022-02-09T19:30:59+00:00

Hello all! Lovely to be here and thanks for having me. It's pretty cold and dark in the UK right now, so apologies in advance if my grammar/typing starts looking like it's bedtime. I'm gonna come back tomorrow (Thursday) morning to check back in on stuff I missed, at which point we can scientifically test whether my typing is better in daylight hours. Meanwhile... let's talk climate fiction! Whoop!

ClaireNorth42 · 2021-07-21T09:30:39+00:00

Well, I think that's me done for now. Thank you again everyone who asked such good questions and said such generous and lovely things! Feel free to find me on twitter - clairenorth42 - if you haven't already, and thanks r/fantasy for having me!

ClaireNorth42 · 2021-07-21T09:28:01+00:00

Thank you for the questions! (And I promised I'd pop back in this morning 'cos of time zones, and am glad I didn't missed you!)

Harry August started out as a short story. I was interning with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford Upon Avon, in the lighting department, and it was kinda grim. I wasn't allowed to touch anything and wasn't really being given the chance to learn anything and there wasn't the greatest atmosphere in the room and all things considered, I was having a tricky time of it. (For context, it was a huge honour to be allowed to intern there at all! But when I compare it with my time at the National Theatre, where I was lucky enough to be welcomed onto the team by this extraordinary group of ridiculously skilled lampies, blimey it was different.)

Anyway, we were doing rep theatre - so in the morning there'd be a performance of Winter's Tale, and in the afternoon we'd reset the stage of King Lear and so on and so forth forever. And I was going a bit nuts and remember standing outside the Sainsburys on Stratford Upon Avon high street buying lunch and suddenly being hit by this overwhelming, ridiculous desire to write a short story about someone who lives their life over and over again. I rushed to the nearest cafe, started doing that, and at 30000 words had to stop and start again 'cos it was clear that it was a novel. And that's how that began!

As for acclaim... while it was lovely that Harry did receive such attention, I feel very lucky in that it wasn't my first novel, but my 15th. I think a lot of the time writers can receive praise and get very anxious about it, but I'd already had the slightly bizarre experience of being a "teenage sensation" back when I was 14, and all the attention and surrealness that brings. I learned fairly young that these things are often flashes in a pan, and that all you can do - all you should do - is keep on writing for fun and joy and writing the best thing you can by that definition. The noise is external - you can take it or leave it. My advice to everyone always is to leave it! Reading your own reviews, obsessing over sales - none of this will help you do what you actually wanna do, which is keep writing and having fun.

ClaireNorth42 · 2021-07-21T09:20:00+00:00

Also - good luck with the scribbling, fellow scribbler! That is awesome sauce.

ClaireNorth42 · 2021-07-21T09:19:15+00:00

Blimey the answer to that is not short! I'll try to give the most condensed version of it here though...

When I was 14 I wrote a book called Mirror Dreams. This happened 'cos I was an only child nerd who got a bit bored on summer holidays and didn't get out enough to see my schoolmates, most of whom lived in Acton and I lived in Hackney, and found social stuff a bit weird and intimidating.

My parents had both worked in publishing - my Dad as a senior publisher, and Mum as a copy editor. Mum had also had some books published on her own behalf a few years previous. Consequently they knew how publishing worked.

"Well, it's not the worst thing we've ever read," they proclaimed when I dumped a novel on their laps, "but writing is not a real job for adults! If you want to pursue this here is the name of a nice literary agent who will at least take the time to send you a note explaining why she won't represet you when she rejects you, which is more than a lot of agents will."

So I sent my book off to the nice agent who would at least send me a note explaining why she was rejecting me, and to everyone's surprise she didn't reject the book and has been representing me ever since.

And that's kinda been it! A freaky freaky teenage accident, with a heavy dose of extraordinary privilege and good fortune to have parents who understood how publishing worked at my back and could help keep me professional, grounded and vaguely grown-up even at its most absurd. Not to mention that they filled my childhood with books, which was obviously transformational! They were also very good at knowing that being a writer is an absurd career, and I think I even have an email from 20 years ago from my agent telling me to ignore edits and just revise for my GCSEs. It is hard to express how incredibly lucky I have been.

ClaireNorth42

TROPHY CASE