Last week, I picked up a copy of the newly reissued 1971 Ursula Le Guin classic The Lathe of Heaven, which takes place in dystopic, post-collapse Portland, Ore., circa 2002 or so. It's typical brilliance from Le Guin, of whom I can't read enough, but I was interested to see that the novel begins by describing Mt. Hood devoid of snow due to the greenhouse effect. The climate is entirely different from that of the 1960s, with blue skies a thing of the past and rainfall patterns completely shifted.
It's the earliest "popular literature" mention of global warming I've come across. Le Guin is often way ahead of her time (she invented Harry Potter and Hogwarts in 1968's A Wizard of Earthsea, for example), though perhaps there are earlier instances of authors adding climate change to the collective body of literature.
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
Why the ‘SuperFreakonomics’ global-warming chapter is worth your time
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 1:51 pm
28 May 2008
Ecological catastrophe has been a theme in science fiction for more than a century, and traces its roots back to ancient works like Gilgamesh and the Bible. Victorian writers imagined the destruction of London from poisonous coal smoke, as in Robert Barr's The Doom of London.
Through the first half of the twentieth century the most common fictional manmade global disasters were caused by war and weapons, and the movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) continues that tradition. With an intelligent script, decent acting and impressive effects considering the shoestring budget, it remains the best movie about global heating (in this case caused by a nuke test).
JG Ballard focused on global climate change in The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought, a.k.a. The Burning World (1964). In the latter, human pollution creates an impermeable layer on the oceans that prevents evaporation and causes a global drought. I seem to recall a Gristmill commenter who frequently promoted that theory.
The Global Warming Timeline has an interesting collection of newspaper articles going back to the 19th century. It wasn't until the publication of Silent Spring (1962), I think, that these articles changed from passing entertainment about zany scientists to reports about a possible threat that should be taken seriously.
Brian Stableford's essay Science Fiction and Ecology has some very interesting thoughts about the field, its history and its relation to current climate developments.
Ped Shed Blog
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Tasermons Partner Posted 3:03 pm
28 May 2008
The Dark Materials series talks some 'bout global climate change and climate refugees as well (though not so much due to GHGs as it is those trans-dimesional dust particles).
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caniscandida Posted 5:02 pm
28 May 2008
My husband snatched my copy out of my hands as he prepared to visit his mother in Missouri, a couple of weeks ago. He did not like the Earthsea trilogy much, but he said he liked this book a lot.
It is very possible that I read Lathe of Heaven, back in the 1970s. But if I did, I am afraid I do not remember it.
I DO remember "The Wizard of Earthsea," vaguely: the inadequate geography, economics and history, which do not hold up in comparison to the creations of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; the Jungian psycho-cosmology, which is rather more interesting.
And yes indeed, Earthsea has a school (or at least a loose educational system) for boys and girls preparing to become accredited wizards and witches. But there are so many differences between that world and the world (closely parallel to our own) of Harry Potter, and between the tone of that book and of the Harry Potter books, that we should hesitate before suggesting that J.K. Rowling was doing something derivative.
As for prescient dystopias with an environmental background, we just saw the 1990 movie "The Handmaid's Tale," with Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and Aidan Quinn, based on Margaret Atwood's novel. It is very well done, and very closely tied to current social realities in the US. The basic situation is, following some sort of catastrophe in the US government (my husband tells me that in the novel, Islamic extremists blow up the Capitol, with most of the government inside), a break-away Christian fundamentalist racist militarist republic is struggling both to cleanse itself of violent dissidents, and to deal with the unnatural sterility of most of the women, brought on by some terrible sort of pollution. The "handmaids" are the fertile women, who serve as sex-slaves, more or less, to the men in charge.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 9:47 pm
28 May 2008
Le Guin does in fact finger CO2 and industrial activity as the cause of the warming in the novel:
"Very little light and air got down to street level; what there was warm and full of fine rain. Rain was an old Portland tradition, but the warmth - 70 degrees in March - was modern, a result of air pollution. Urban and industrial effluvia had not been controlled soon enough to reverse the cumulative trends already at work in the mid twentieth century; it would take several centuries for the CO2 to clear out of the air...New York was going to be one of the larger casualties as the polar ice kept melting and the sea kept rising..."
Erik
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:56 pm
28 May 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg&eurl=http: ...
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LennyM Posted 10:37 pm
28 May 2008
I think that I'm remembering the novel correctly; I'm fairly sure the movie reflected this also.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 11:12 pm
28 May 2008
The 1970 film of the book (same title) was pretty bad, but it definitely left an impression on me at the time.
These are only my personal opinions.
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JMG Posted 12:49 am
29 May 2008
The 5% Project
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Storm Dragon Posted 8:13 am
29 May 2008
With regard to the Earthsea books-as charming as the Harry Potter series may be, the Earthsea books have always seemed to me to belong to a much higher class of literature. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to put them in the same category.
Let the jaguars return!
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