Science Fiction as Critical Thinking

It should be obvious from a quick glance at the style and mood of my blog that there is a good chance that my personal thoughts and views on sustainability and the environment have been influenced in some part by science fiction.  Well if there was any doubt before let me put that doubt to rest:

It is.

In fact, I would say that having grown up being an avid reader of science fiction has contributed greatly to my love of our planet and my adoption of a relatively long term and big picture perspective towards Earth and the human race that populates it.  Good science fiction (the kind that tries to have scientific explanations for why thing are the way they are in the book's universe) is well thought out and researched.  Often times it is even written by well respected scientists (Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Baxter, and Arthur C. Clarke to name a few) so a reader can't help but absorb some of the ideas put forth by authors of "hard science fiction," because they often make a lot of sense.

Now science fiction writers cover pretty much every topic, philosophy and idea under the sun (or whatever other star applies), but for this blog entry I wanted to highlight a couple books that explore ideas of closed system environments (such as the "spaceship" that I reference in the introduction to my blog) and the impact of being aware of that closed system and acting to take care of it, or not.

The first book I'd like to recommend is Ark by Stephen Baxter.  This is actually the second book of a two part (so far) series and tells the story of a large spaceship (the Ark) that is sent in search of what is believed to be a habitable planet very far away.  This is done in response to the continued catastrophic rise of the oceans of Earth to the point that no dry land remains.

While the response of the people remaining on Earth to the flooding is interesting in itself, it's the story of those chosen to take the Ark on its long (many generations long) trip to the newly discovered planet that really lends itself to considerations of sustainability.  In the closed, and fairly close, quarters of the Ark a society develops where eventually there is no actual memory of Earth.  Generations are born, grow up and die, all on the ship.  This is one of the simplest and most direct examples of how everyone must ultimately act in the best interest of their ship and themselves.  When even a small contingent of people stop believing in the importance of the ship as what is ensuring their survival, it has major ramifications on everyone on the ship.  In this scenario, those ramifications happen much more quickly than they do on our real life Earth, but the analogy is appropriate and provokes the reader to thinks about how we must ultimately view our environment.

Stephen King is a fairly prolific writer; to the point that most people are at least familiar with his name even if they have never read one of his books.  King generally doesn't write science fiction and the science fiction that he does write doesn't generally use a great deal of "hard science" because he is not as intimately familiar with science and scientific thinking as the other authors I've mentioned.  But his recent book Under The Dome still paints an interesting, and unfortunately bleak, picture of how wanton destruction and disregard of a closed system environment can make that environment far worse and essentially poisonous for those within it.

The focus of this story is more about the people involved, as that is King's specialty, but it is played out on a backdrop of a town that suddenly becomes encased in an essentially impermeable dome.  The dome effectively cuts the town off from the rest of the world, creating a tiny microcosm made up of just the town.  It is interesting to see how the environment within this bubble, of unknown origins, changes over time, given that it's no longer capable of having new resources, air or water available. 

I am glad that some science fiction excerpts were used as readings in the Sustainable Urban Development Reader and I think that they provide another useful tool for providing perspective on these issues.  Some science fiction, especially those stories that emphasize the application of science, do an excellent job of distilling specific ideas regarding issues that are facing humanity now.  They provide unique and important "what if" scenarios that can often leave a strong impression on the minds of readers about how we should be treating our world and each other.

At least they have for me.