“It’s different and it’s new,” said American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson (71), recently visiting Amsterdam. He was referring to catastrophic climate change, also the subject of his latest novel, The ministry for the future (Starfish, 640 pages, €30). But unknowingly, ‘KSR’, as his fans call him, touched on another great drama: the end of science fiction.
The fact is that literary fiction no longer makes much sense if the real life of most people on earth takes place in the same terrible future as that in the novels of the extreme imagination. At least that is Robinson’s conclusion.
The beginning of his story makes you dizzy: a heat wave that kills 25 million people in India. Of course, that didn’t happen, but Robinson writes as if it did. And we feel the same way, plagued as we are by apocalyptic news stories about drought, forest fires and global warming (recently measured wind chill in Rio de Janeiro: 58.5 C).
The rest of the book is about large-scale eco-terror, like Extinction Rebellion, and the efforts of the head of the Ministry for the Future to force nation states to implement the Paris climate agreement through pressure on the international banking system.
This play between fact and imagination has a long history, from Jules Verne who predicted submarines, helicopters and trips to the moon in the nineteenth century, to Edgar Rice Burroughs whose fantasy novels about Mars led humanity to believe in the early twentieth century that there was life on it. the red planet is possible. The latter is not so far away now that manned trips to Mars are becoming a reality.
All in all, the question arises: if the hard, physical reality exceeds the human imagination, what do you do with science fiction? “The genre is dead, come up with something new,” wrote the German-American Lisel Mueller a year before she received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1997. The first verse of her ‘The End of Science Fiction’: “This is not fantasy, this is our life./ We are the characters/ who have invaded the moon,/ who cannot stop their computers./ We are the gods who can unmake/ the world in seven days.”
That last line is reality: the Anthropocene, the era in which the Earth’s climate and atmosphere are affected by human activity, is a fact. Robinson has also come to terms with it, both in terms of climate change and his own switch from fiction to a kind of ‘docu-science fiction’.
What Robinson would appreciate is the currently developing news story from the Icelandic town of Grindavík. There, four thousand residents had to leave home and hearth due to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, probably never to return. “I feel like I’m living in a dystopian novel,” Andrea Ævarsdóttireen, a librarian in Grindavík, told the British newspaper The Guardian.
This makes the challenge for science fiction clear: if life is already a dystopian novel, how do you come up with something that goes even further? Lisel Mueller wrote a poem about a return to the very oldest stories. They continue to give us a credible, human vision of the future. And aren’t Homer, Virgil and the Bible primeval science fiction?
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