Climate Change in Fiction, Pt 1

Climate change! We know it, we hate it, it’s an existential dread that makes it a struggle to get out of bed in the morning. It’s entirely the fault of the 1%. We ought to load all the oil executives and petroleum billionaires onto one greyhound bus and then line ‘em up for the guillotine. 

Right?

My conscience would interject to say, “Shoot the oil executives and save the planet? But the oil executives are only the tip of the whole festering boil of social infrastructure that inches down to your home, your computer, your AC unit. So go ahead, shoot the oil exec. Another one will be along in a minute. Why not shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone, and invade Antarctica?”

But I quash my conscience. No one wants Terry Pratchett quotes at a time like this.

Anyway, I wanted to write about some fictionalized takes on climate change. It’s possibly the major crisis of all human history. One might say that authors are obliged to discuss this— but I’m rather with Oscar Wilde in the camp that authors aren’t obliged to do anything, except to not be boring, and, occasionally, when they can’t avoid it, to write.

But writers do tackle climate change— with interesting results. It’s a big topic, so I decided to break it up into two blog posts. I’m going to talk in some depth about Game of Thrones (the book series and TV series) and Hadestown, the Tony-award winning musical. Let’s get started.

Game of Thrones: 

Winter is coming. That’s the first thing we learn about Westeros.

It’s kind of important. This isn’t snuggly winter, this is an Ice Age to last generations. With zombies. The first scene shows one survivor getting away to tell the tale. He has to warn everyone what is happening.

And when we meet him again, he is executed for desertion by Lord Eddard Stark. 

This opens both the “Song of Ice and Fire” books by George RR Martin, and the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” helmed by David Benioff and DB Weiss.

“Winter is coming,” you’ve heard it again and again. In the backstory (boy, there’s a lot of backstory) the continent of Westeros is prone to very long Winters, Winters which merit the capital letter. Then you’ve got the Grandeur That Was Valyria, utterly destroyed by volcanic cataclysm; that might be the destruction by Fire that foreshadows Westeros’s destruction by Ice. Either way, we’ve got climate change on our hands.

Now, are the Winters natural or supernatural? It’s unknown whether humans have any role in triggering or stopping the Winter. The only thing to do is prepare. 

And prepare they do… not.

No one heeds the warnings about Winter. People are greedy and short-sighted. Politics of courts near and far occupy our attention, with sumptuous costumes and religious uprisings and beautifullest ladies. Obviously, Martin has fun with the political plots, but it works as a creative choice as well. We the helpless audience get to watch these horrible people tear themselves apart rather than unite against the one foe that really matters. 

Yes, reality has borne this thesis out. Kudos to Martin. I hate it.

However, you still need to end a story on this scale.

“Ice zombies eat everyone! All the emotion you invested in this story came to absolutely nothing!” is a possibility.

On the other hand, you can implement a cheat code.

Enter the King of Winter. A sort of Evil Overlord. Kill him off— just this one dude— and the worst of Winter will die with him. No ontological inertia and all that. Very handy for Messiah types like Azor Ahai. 

If you have a shred of artistic integrity left, you can make it clear that Winter Is Still Here, but We Avoided the Worst.

And ideally, if you’re going to commit to “The Winter King is a metaphor for climate change,” his defeat should be something a little more, well, epic than just stabbing him with an above-average knife. 

Still, you’ve got a whole continent to save and five hundred or so plotlines. So, no surprise if Martin is having trouble with the ending. 

But he’s one lucky duck, at the same time— he can look at the ending penned by Benioff and Weiss, and veer in any other direction. 

Benioff and Weiss disposed of the Winter King by having a whole battle at Winterfell, where Bran Stark acts as bait, and then Arya Stark sneaks up on the Winter King and stabs him with an above-average knife.

It’s a bit of an anticlimax. 

Then the writers can move on to the real story they wanted to work on: about how Daenerys Targaryen, a rape survivor and anti-slavery advocate, has been, all this time, a metaphor for the West’s bloody imperialism. Dany, she goes utterly nuts when her boyfriend breaks up with her. City-incineration levels of nuts, so nuts that her boyfriend has to kill her for everyone’s safety. That’s the real story Game of Thrones was building up to, not Winter at all. 

To which I say, Boo and hiss! 

In short, the show absolutely failed in its depiction of climate change. And the books?

Well, Martin might be planning for Mad Queen Daenerys the whole time (he might change his mind) — but I’ll say this for him, I don’t think he would throw Winter out the window just because a shinier plot point comes along. But like I said above— climate change is an existential threat. It is quite “big picture.” It’s no wonder he’s having a hard time figuring out how to deal with it— so are all the rest of us.  

So there’s the screen and page, but what about the stage? 

Hadestown, the musical: 

Hadestown, the brainchild of Anais Mitchell, has undergone a few transformations on its road from small Vermont musical to Tony-winning Broadway hit. The music, costumes, and lingo suggest 1930’s America, with a contrast between the Big Polluted City and Quiet Honest Life in the Country. But don’t be fooled by this pastoral domain: every version of the play is in a post-apocalyptic setting. 

In the Broadway version of the soundtrack, vagabond Eurydice sets the stage, singing: 

“Weather ain’t the way it was before, 

There’s no spring or fall at all anymore; 

It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold, 

Any way the wind blows.” 

There aren’t many gods on the scene: you’ve got the three Fates, you’ve got Hermes at the crossroads, and you’ve got Persephone and Hades. Persephone, no longer the carefree maiden of spring, is now a bohemian of a certain age, patroness of poets, never happier than when someone uncorks a bottle of wine in her honor (or at least in her presence). Hades has expanded his underground kingdom into an industrialist empire. In other words, he’s holding strong as the god of wealth.

Does this entirely track with Greek mythology? I don’t know, but I recognize them as American archetypes— Amanda Wingfield and JD Rockefeller, together at last.

Their marriage is somewhat on the rocks, Persephone and Hades. He stews in a melange of spite and jealousy; she’s hardly better off, with a bottle always ready to hand. When they argue, the winds rise and storms blow up, scattering poor mortals. And the mortals haven’t the strength to fight back. Persephone confirms: 

“In the meantime up above

The harvest fails and people starve

Oceans rise and overflow— 

It ain’t right and it ain’t natural!” 

Just in case you forgot the setting, you know.

Now, the course of the plot sees Hades lure Eurydice, starving and hopeless, to his employment in the mills of Hadestown. Orpheus follows his wife to the Underworld. When he finds her, Eurydice has been transformed; she sold her soul to the company store. Persephone is moved by their plight. Hades, in a sadistic humor, gives Orpheus a chance to sing for Eurydice’s salvation. 

Orpheus sings of the humble young lover who was Hades, and the lass in dappled sunlight that was Persephone. 

Hades’s heart breaks, and he and Persephone clasp hands and dance. 

And then, when the young lovers set off on their ill-fated voyage, Hades turns to his wife and lets her go to the world above, without resentment. She asks only, “Wait for me,” and he says “I will.”

That’s the crescendo of their love, and the promise of spring coming again.

To say it’s very very good is an understatement. Anaïs Mitchell’s music creates a new world, a new vocabulary of love, and she carries it off with flying colors.

But it’s not a great climate change resolution.

Look, if you say “We’re going to defeat climate change with the power of love!” I’m going to give you the side-eye. 

There is a kind of love that is necessary to defeating climate change: agape, that is selfless, transcendent, all-encompassing love. Love for nature, love for the ecosystem, love for people I will never meet on the other side of the world, love for generations of daughters I will never see. 

But eros is romantic love. And it’s powerful, yes, it is healing, but to see it used as a shorthand— as a cheat code, almost— for undoing climate change, it just grinds my gears. Yes, let’s undo climate change in five minutes because two people went to therapy. It puts me in a bad mood; it feels like you insulted my intelligence.

I don’t even mind the Fisher King aspect— the gods’ discord translates into an imbalanced climate— The Lion King did it, and King Arthur does it. It’s a good trope. But to deliberately name oil drums and the fossils of the dead, and how oceans rise and overflow— you’ve just broken the barrier between the theater and the outside world, and for what? For a resolution that works well on an interpersonal scale, but on a macro scale, HA. If you’re not going to deal with climate change as it deserves, maybe don’t invoke it so specifically in the first place.

See, this is why I just tend to ignore the post-apocalyptic setting of Hadestown. The musical works just fine in the 1930’s. 

This concludes my first discussion of climate change in fiction. Stay tuned for a writeup concerning His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Tyme by Megan Morrison, and even a little Shakespeare.

My news is that I will be presenting at LeakyCon West 2022! That’s right, in Denver, Colorado, in mid-October, I will be holding forth on the virtues of Harry Potter fanfiction, and on the art and science of annotating the Potter books. More about that later!