Let's look at the five novels in a bit more detail (the sixth, Yoon Ha Lee's far future fantasy Revenant Gun, doesn't even mention planet Earth).
In Rebecca Roanhorse's near future fantasy Trail of Lightning, the waters have risen to drown two-thirds of the USA, leaving the Navajo (or Diné) reservation, which spans the continental divide, as one of the few more-or-less functioning polities in the new "Sixth World". But this flooding is explicitly a supernatural event, acknowledged to be far worse than the worst possible result of ice-cap melting. It owes much to Navajo (and Hopi) myths of cyclic birth and destruction of the world, according to which ours is the fourth world (no idea what happened to world #5). In any case, the flooding is merely a plot prop to restore independence and agency to the Diné, and to their gods and other supernatural beings.
A more central role is played in Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, where her fairy-tale Lithuania is imminently threatened by unceasing winter; but lurking in the background is the more deadly threat of permanent conversion to lifeless burning desert. (A remarkably similar Ice vs Fire conflict is set up in Katherine Arden's debut, The Bear and the Nightingale, set in neighbouring fairy-tale Russia). Doubtless Novik would say that she is both using the real threat to add resonance to her tale, and providing a metaphor for climate change. But as metaphor it has little to offer: the resolution based on fairy-tale tropes of clever bargains and the true love of a queen for her people will surely not help in the real world.
Strangely, the book that comes nearest to Getting It is Catherynne M. Valente's absurdist Space Opera. Here the immediate problem for the survival of humanity in the late 2030s is to persuade Galactic Civilisation not to wipe it out like a particularly noxious infestation, leaving life on Earth to try evolving something more plausibly intelligent next time round. Given that Valente is quite deliberately writing like Douglas Adams on speed, it's no surprise that the case against humanity is made with dispeptic glee, and focuses on anthropogenic mass extinction rather than climate change per se. Here, an alien who could self-efface Kai Lung into a small puddle is giving our heroes a hard time:
"On your planet. Have you got any lions left?"The implicit message is both "you broke it, you fix it", and that fixing it would be straightforward for any species meriting the epithet sapiens.
Oort and Decibel glanced at each other. "Well, no, not...overly," Oort admitted. "No, they went extinct a few years back."
"Please forgive the arrogance of a being who cannot even dream of becoming a hat rack fit for the use of those exalted as yourselves, but strictly speaking they didn't go extinct, you made them extinct. Because they were carnivores. Because they were carnivores and they didn't look like you or think like you or talk like you, and they were a danger to you and yours, or at least they were years and years ago, because you're made of the sort of thing they like to eat."
"I suppose, but..."
"Even knowing that I am a discarded Popsicle stick on the sidewalk of intellectual discourse and thus wholly incapable of higher-order thinking, I beg you to tolerate the shrill and childlike whine of my asking: How about rhinoceroses? Dodo? Giraffes? These are herbivores, so they presented no danger to the continuation of your species, but you wiped them out all the same. To a one."
In Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, climate change is kicked off early, in 1952, by a catastrophic asteroid impact. To some extent, this is merely another plot prop, here aimed at jump-starting the space programme before the advent of electronic computers, thereby making the laborious calculations by (largely female) human computers the key to the first Moon landing. (Apparently the novel was started before publication of Hidden Figures, the book and the movie, made this effort famous.) But there are two points worth making here. The first is that the premise lets humanity, or let's be specific here, western civilisation, off the hook by making climate change a freak natural accident. Given the toxic nature of the "debate" over anthropogenic climate change in the USA, this tweak is going to make the story a whole lot more acceptable to a big chunk of its target audience.
Unfortunately, it also reinforces the common attitude amongst Republicans that even if real, climate change is natural and unavoidable. These people will be particularly satisfied that the asteroid wipes out Washington DC, well and truly swamping the drain. Kowal's scientists seem remarkably quick to understand the long-term climatic effects of the impact. In our world, even simple global climate models like the ones that told us about nuclear winter relied on (electronic) computer simulations that would never have been possible in the early '50s. But perhaps the sums are simpler for an asteroid strike. At any rate, from the prediction of a runaway greenhouse effect that will eventually boil the oceans, the elite of Kowal's world rapidly conclude that the only option is to abandon ship, and try to set up a colony on Mars. Nowhere is there a discussion of what (infinitesimal) fraction of the world population could make it to this life raft, nor of why it would be technologically easier to set up a habitat on uninhabitable Mars, than one on uninhabitable Earth. In this first book, at least, the possibility of terraforming Mars is never raised, but again, it is almost by definition easier to terraform the Earth than Mars.
The escapist theme is even stronger and sillier in Becky Chamber's Record of a Spaceborn Few, her exploration of life on the Exodus Fleet, the generation starships that took the last survivors from a ruined Earth. Chamber's backstory also features a successful Martian colony which explicitly sheltered the ultra-rich elite, so points to her for realising the implications of that. Because Chambers describes her Exodus fleet in considerable detail it's worth following through the implications. There are 32 of these ships, including the one wrecked in the prologue of the novel; the overall layout of the ships is identical and modular, based on a hexagonal grid repeated over seven successively larger scales, from the seven hexagonal rooms making a family home to the six flat hexagonal decks linked in a ring to form the living quarters of each ship. That gives 6^6 homes per ship, or space for one and a half million families in the fleet, perhaps 6 to 10 million people all together. In other words, by the time the fleet is launched, Earth's population has collapsed to a thousandth of today's.
These ships are self-contained eco-systems, intended to last indefinitely, since the Fleet set out with no destination in mind. Famously, in Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora such a self-sustaining system proves impossible to sustain. Chambers does not address this problem, and probably makes it vastly worse by having a far more restricted set of food plants and far more crowded spaceships that Robinson, whose starship contains dozens of self-contained ecosystems to maintain diversity. But even granted sustainability, the real problems are that:
- Launching anything into space is fantastically expensive (think: 4% of the US Federal budget for several years to get a handful of people to the Moon). Even if the most optimistic projections for improvement in launch tech come through, it will still be hugely more expensive to put anything in space than just to leave it on the ground, so building a survival module on Earth for 100 million or even a billion people would take no more resources than building a space fleet for 10 million. And in addition, there'd be no need to build impossible starship engines or worry about setting up artificial gravity.
- A grounded Exodus Fleet, even on an otherwise lifeless Earth, would be surrounded by natural resources: rock, water, air (even if unbreathable) that would eventually be needed for repair and replacement and in space could only be provided by planets, asteroids, and so on; meaning the Fleet would have to "land" at some point anyway, and would be better off not leaving the Solar system.
- By the time world population falls below a billion people, at the current rate of resource use the human population would no longer be a significant driver for climate change, since net greenhouse gas emission would have fallen by a factor of seven even without introducing more green tech. If the population fall was managed well enough to maintain civilisation at the level needed to build a star fleet, a technological fix for excess greenhouse gases would be child's play by comparison. If current rapid progress in climate science, ecology, and genetics continues, there is no reason why Earth could not be made considerably more habitable and ecologically diverse than it is today.
In short, there is no set of circumstances in which building something like the Exodus Fleet (even without the counter-productive attempt to flee the solar system) would be both possible and not an insane waste of resources in a crisis. Like the slogan says, there is no Planet B. If SF still had the faintest spark of its original role as the great bully pulpit for technological progress, it would be saying in a thousand ways that the climate crisis was made by humanity and can be solved by humanity. And if the literature of social change had any social responsibility it would be much less interested in imagining quasi-utopian communities in space and much more in looking at the roadblocks in twenty-first century society that stall effective action on climate, and imagining ways around them. Kim Stanley Robinson has been doing this with ever-increasing urgency for most of his career, but who else? If SF wants to boast, it needs to step up to the challenge.
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