Monday, February 27, 2012

What would that take?

This week's Strange Horizons has not only a new installment of Vandana Singh's Diffractions Column, but also a roundtable discussion among science fiction writers about Writing Climate Change. The panel, moderated by Niall Harrison, includes Vandana Singh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Joan Slonczewski, Glenda Larke, Tobias Buckell, Maggie Gee, and Julie  Bretagna, all writers who've written about climate change.  Vandana's column, I might also note, concludes with a call to writers:
Assume that the planet must be saved. Not that we won't suffer the effects of global warming for a long time to come, but let us assume that we can do what it takes to limit it as much as possible so that one day it could be reversed. That is, less than 2C of warming. What would that take? What kind of action, re-thinking, re-imagining everything from technology to how we live to what we write and what we read—what would it look like on the way to saving the world? Science fiction is full of end-of-the-world stories, apocalyptic hereafters. It is so much more difficult to imagine and to bring to paper or screen the messy, complicated, partial, unsatisfactory, creative ways and means that might affect a solution. But it is a task both necessary and urgent. If we are the imagineers of the world, we must imagine, or re-imagine it in ways that involve other paradigms as well as other technologies.

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