
"The end of the world!"
"Apocalyptic prophecy!"
"Scaremongering!"
"Political brainwashing!"
"Here we go again, trying to make people anxious and worried!"
These are just a few of the many comments found after the first episode of Thomas Vinterberg's new drama series Families Like Ours. A series that deals with climate change and the consequences it can bring with it.
My first novel, MALI, part of a fictional literary series about the Victims of Hothouse Earth, has sparked similar comments. In MALI, it’s not rising sea levels, as in Families Like Ours, that force Danes to flee, but rather the Gulf Stream coming to a halt, causing temperatures in Denmark to plummet.
Let me start by stating one thing clearly once and for all: climate change will not cause the end of the world. This is not an apocalyptic prophecy, like the ones that have appeared throughout recorded human history. Political brainwashing? Well, if you can’t be convinced when the majority of the world’s climate scientists are sounding the alarm and repeatedly presenting scientific data showing that the climate is changing faster than ever before, then maybe it’s because conspiracy theories are simply just that more exciting and entertaining.
But should we then create scaremongering campaigns and make people anxious and worried when talking about climate change? Yes, I actually think we should. However, they need to be mixed with hope, because hope is the lifeline we can reach for when everything else becomes too frightening. But hope in the context of the climate crisis is worthless unless it is accompanied by realistic future scenarios, because without that connection, hope quickly turns into a somewhat naïve expectation that "someone will probably do something before it gets too bad," or into an outright neglect of the crisis’s real magnitude.
And that’s precisely what I’m trying to create in Victims of Hothouse Earth, which so far includes the books MALI and 3 Degrees Celsius—a realistic future scenario. In terms of genre, climate fiction (cli-fi) falls under science fiction (sci-fi), an in libraries, my novels are often also categorised as dystopias. But are they really? Is this where they belong, alongside books about space travel, life on other planets, zombie outbreaks, artificial intelligence, and so on? I don’t think so. In my point of view, it’s realism. I might even stretch it far enough to call it dystopian realism.
True climate fiction is based on scientific facts. It often involves projections of the changes in the world’s climate that we are already seeing unfold before our eyes. It’s not fantasy, but realistic expectations of the life we can expect when temperatures rise. And it can be quite difficult to relate to, and even harder to accept and face, but it’s important to do so if we are to take action in time. Because although the world won’t end, it will become a truly awful place to live.
The climate has always changed. That’s an undeniable truth. Unfortunately, it is happening so quickly now that humanity doesn’t have time to adapt, whether you believe these changes are human-made or not.
Will it be the end of humanity then? No, I don’t think so. Humans are creative. Adaptable. But we’ll face a long transitional period in which we will witness human suffering on a biblical scale across the globe: abnormal refugee flows, famine, death, conflicts, wars, thirst, disease, typhoons, flooding of land masses, wildfires, mudslides—in short, all the misery one could imagine. Most of us have heard this so often by now that it’s easy to become deaf to it. And it’s easy to preach facts, but unless people truly feel the misery, it’s hard to relate to.
And that’s precisely where literature and film can be a powerful pair, because these two mediums can bring the consequences to life and evoke emotions without actually throwing people into a real catastrophe.
(This post is a translation from a post published in October 2024 on the Danish version of my blog)
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