DISASTER STORIES: MORE THAN JUST A GUILTY PLEASURE?

I love disaster stories.

I usually explain it by saying that disaster scenarios bring out the best and the worst in humanity, which makes for terrific character-building and storytelling potential. Heroism and sacrifice, but also the self-serving villains we love to hiss and boo at. While fantasy novels let us imagine what it would be like to live in such a world, disaster stories are more than just guilty pleasures: they make us dig deeper, to ask ourselves “What would I do in such a situation?”

That’s my theory. Or maybe I’m just a little twisted. No psychoanalysis, please.

The first SF disaster novel I remember reading was J.G. Ballard’s first novel The Wind From Nowhere. Though he later pretty much disowned it (and it might suck if I were to re-read it now) I was impressed at the time with the image of a world ravaged by an ever-growing wind, and the noble attempts of mere humans to survive it. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids is still one of my all-time favourite books, in which most of humanity is stricken blind and the carnivorous, mobile, and perhaps even intelligent triffid plants gain the upper hand. It’s simply chilling, told in an understated British style. In fact, UK writers seem to have produced many more disaster novels than those from other English-speaking countries. In the US the disaster genre has found its expression more often in the movies (although some, like Michael Crichton’s terrific The Andromeda Strain succeeded on both paper and film). While Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle combined their talents to tell about a mammoth comet impacting the Earth in the 1977 novel Lucifer’s Hammer, it’s probably not as well known as the two movies with similar plots Deep Impact and Armageddon both released in 1998 (because Hollywood likes to run with themes).

Which brings me to my second point about disaster stories. There’s a sub-genre of science fiction that can be called “cautionary tales” that describe how things can go wrong as a warning to all of us. Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 are classic examples. And disaster stories are cautionaries at full blast. While some plots involve a purely natural threat, like a solar flare-up or a killer rock from space, many others (nuclear melt-downs, deadly plagues, and nanotechnology run riot) point the finger at potential man-made disasters. Not only do they warn us about paths we shouldn’t take with our technology, but also how critically important it is to be prepared for when disaster strikes.

Especially since the 1990’s there have been significant efforts to detect and plot the orbits of Near Earth Objects—things like asteroids and comets in our space neighbourhood that could potentially strike the planet with destructive results. And yes, there’s been serious discussion about how to send a rocket crew out to blast a threatening rock away from its collision course, just like Bruce Willis and the boys. The Spaceguard Foundation based in Italy, the UK’s SpaceGuard Centre, and other projects continue to work in the field, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the US recently released a National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy from a working group that involved many different federal agencies. It’s the kind of collaborative approach that’s needed to cope with disasters on a national, or even global scale.

Society’s collective mindset is important—we have to believe that a given scenario is plausible before we will think about ways to protect ourselves from it. Science fiction fertilizes that soil. Perhaps we’re more prepared for crises like the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak because of pandemic-themed stories like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Stephen King’s The Stand, or Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. A huge number of nuclear holocaust novels, from Shute’s On The Beach to Frank’s Alas, Babylon to Zelazny’s Damnation Alley help to keep the pressure on world leaders for nuclear disarmament (apparently Donald Trump doesn’t read). Of course, lots of novels and movies about rogue artificial intelligences and nanotechnology run amuck have ensured a very active public discussion about those areas of research and restrictions that should be considered.

Think tanks and government agencies collectively spend millions organizing brainstorming sessions to prepare for potential disasters of every description. Maybe their first step should be to stock up their SF libraries. Yes, I’m being a little facetious, but I’d like to believe that our literature of the imagination has helped to create a mindset that will save many lives in the centuries to come.

Have I written disaster stories myself? Of course! I invite you to read my collection Disastrous! Three Stories of the End of the World available as a free ebook download from my website bookstore or from Kobo. (I made it free on Amazon too, but they put the price back up!)

Enjoy!

A BILLION BLACK HOLES

This photo, recently released by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows black holes in a portion of the sky about two-thirds the diameter of the full moon seen at night. Chandra collected x-ray data from this small patch of sky for the equivalent of two months and then the data was “stacked” to produce the most detailed x-ray astronomy image ever. The photo shows more than one thousand supermassive black holes—the kind thought to exist at the center of galaxies—in just that small patch of sky. If that zone is typical of the rest of the sky, it means there are more than a billion such black holes out there. But before you get too worried, most of the black holes pictured are close to thirteen billion light years from Earth, meaning not only that they’re much too far away to worry about, but also that the image of them we’re seeing is from thirteen billion years in the past. A billion years or less after the Big Bang that produced the universe itself. Who knows what state they’re in now?

Black holes form when stars with at least three times the mass of our sun burn out and collapse in upon themselves. The material packs so densely together that the result is a fantastic amount of mass in a relatively small area, called a singularity, and within a certain distance of that singularity the force of its gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it (explaining why it’s black!) That point-of-no-return is called the black hole’s event horizon because nothing can be seen beyond it. But the event horizon is also a zone of intense radiation, and often jets of radioactive particles stream outward from it, which scientists can see in the x-ray spectrum.

The thought of billions of black holes (possibly thousands in our galaxy alone) is rich fodder for the imagination. Think of what could be done with them! Borrowing the ideas of various science fiction writers, what if black holes are:

Shortcuts through space/time—these are called wormholes, but some physicists suggest that you could have a wormhole with black holes, like doorways, at each end. Could we use them to travel to far distant places? Well, somehow we’d have to survive the unthinkable gravity and tidal forces, radiation, and other unknown hazards, plus we’d still have to have incredibly fast spaceships to even get to the nearest black hole in the first place. Otherwise…maybe.

Doorways to another universe—but, if so, how will we ever know? Nothing is powerful enough to come back through one.

Portals for traveling into the past—if you could somehow manipulate black holes at the mouths of wormholes, theoretically you could place one at an earlier location in space/time. But then if we had the engineering ability to move black holes around, we could probably do anything we wanted with space/time anyway.

Means to jump into the future—as in the movie Interstellar, being close to a black hole slows your perception of time. Get close enough to a black hole for a few minutes and decades might have passed in the universe at large. A quick trip to the future, yes, but no way to return to your own time to tell about it.

Weapons—locate and manipulate a small black hole, then use it to eat your enemy’s city, or planet, or solar system. Hmmmm, except a black hole would just as happily gobble you as the bad guys. I also think they’d be kind of hard to sneak past galactic security.

Power sources—Star Trek’s Romulans use black holes to power their starships. Mind you, using something that can warp space/time is bound to produce some undesirable side effects, not to mention that if the containment field fails the thing will consume your ship like a fistful of nachos on Superbowl Sunday.

Prisons—in a re-visioning of an Arthur C. Clarke novel, Gregory Benford imagined using a black hole as a prison for an immensely powerful and evil intelligence. Something that you can’t destroy any other way? Yup, I guess that would work. Unless the black hole turns out to be a gateway to another universe, another place in your own universe, or another time, in which case you’ve just shifted the problem.

Personally, I’ve sometimes wondered if black holes—the most destructive forces in our universe—spend billions of years gathering matter and energy because, at the right moment, they’ll suddenly explode in a Big Bang that creates a whole new universe in a different dimension—literally the mothers of all space phenomena.

I don’t know what physics would say about that, but it feels rather poetic to me.

HOW MUCH OF THE FUTURE SHOULD WE TRY TO PREDICT?

I’ve mentioned before that I rarely write stories of the distant future. Readers expect authors to include details of that future society, especially the technology. Will we have flying cars? Hotels on Mars? Robot servants? Everlasting bodies? They want to read about that—they want to see it in their minds.

Not only is that stuff hard to predict with any credibility hundreds of years ahead (how many futurists of the early 20th Century predicted the smartphone/online world we experience now, let alone where that path will take us from here?) But if you do it too thoroughly, the reader of today might not even be able to relate to the image you conjure. Why do Star Trek movies continue to show a full bridge crew manipulating physical controls like sliders on touchscreens at exotically-shaped workstations covered with more multi-coloured lights than a Christmas tree? Certainly the technology of the 23rd Century and beyond will make it possible for humans to be little more than passengers along for the ride while artificial intelligences handle all of a spacecraft’s functions. If there’s a reason for the AIs to feed regular data about the ship’s progress and surroundings to the humans, isn’t it more likely to be an immersive virtual reality experience than current-style readouts, blinking lights, and a big TV at the front of the room? And let’s not forget that brain-computer-interfaces are already a reality—if the humans ever do have to take control of something, they’ll just form a thought to “make it so”.

But that would suck on the big screen.

It would amount to a handful of characters sitting in chairs in some nondescript space, maybe with some kind of headset on (but probably not). We might not even recognize them as fully human. As much as our mechanical technology is changing by leaps and bounds, we’ll also very soon have the ability to make significant changes to the human form itself.

Our societies as a whole are fluctuating rapidly, too. Thirty years ago, who would have predicted the way our world has now been shaped by terrorism and our lawmakers' response to it? Or the new emphasis on equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community? Earlier than that, it was racial rights that were in flux. Gender equality still hasn’t been fully resolved, but then questions of gender identity are expanding all the time. Science fiction of recent decades has offered some striking examples of where biological engineering might take human sexuality—the novel 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson includes some interesting possibilities.

But if we go too far in earnestly trying to describe the bizarre paths the human race could take over the next, say, five hundred years, will the result be as alien as anything that might have evolved on some distant planet? How will we identify with such people? How will they speak to us? The easy answer is to say that such characters will still have an “essential humanity” revealed by the author, but that might be disingenuous. Because we could very well have less in common with these trans-humans of tomorrow than we do with the ancient Sumerians of millennia ago.

There can be benefits in pooling our collective brainpower to predict where scientific developments are taking us, especially in helping us to decide which paths we definitely do not want to take. But our primary purpose as writers is to tell stories—stories that entertain, yes, but also offer instruction, philosophical exploration, and catharsis. To do so they have to touch the core human identity within us. None of that comes across if we can’t relate to the story—if we can’t picture ourselves in it.

So, by all means let’s enjoy creative visions of a far-flung future, but also recognize the practical limitations that fiction for a present-day audience dictates: too much strangeness, even if it’s likely to be accurate, can get in the way. And although it might seem like laziness when an SF writer doesn’t make his or her future world so utterly different from our own, maybe it’s not. Maybe sometimes it’s just good storytelling.