Climate Fiction

Space Energy Missions

It was 10 years ago that I wrote my first "Cli-Fi" story, Fly Paper. In that story I imagined that Interventionist agents helped Earthlings solve the global warming problem.

I first wrote about global warming in this blog three years ago, and that was only a mention of Fly Paper. At that time I was just beginning to develop Exode and I imagined that very little of the Exode story would involve Earth.

About two years ago I started finding ways to include global warming in the Exode Trilogy. Initially, I imagined that the issue of catastrophic sea level rise would only be raised in my story as a problem for the future and it would not play a major role in the plot. Then I started imagining a larger role for global warming in Exode. Space Energy Missions was brought into existence as an Earthly effort to find a technological solution to global warming.

Postcard from the future.

By the end of 2013 I had decided that catastrophic sea level rise would be a serious problem in the Ekcolir Reality during the 20th century. In the Ekcolir Reality, the pace of technological advance was somewhat quicker than in our Reality. I imagined that Thomas put a lot of effort into getting Isaac Asimov to take global warming seriously. As someone who had lived in the Ekcolir Reality, Thomas knew the importance of global warming and he had also been informed that Asimov would play an important role in the Buld Reality helping Earthlings deal with catastrophic sea level rise.

Three options: nuclear war,
global warming, the Buld.

In 2013 I fell in love with the idea that Earth was in the grip of a bistable attractor that caused either catastrophic sea level rise or nuclear disaster. In the Reality before the Ekcolir Reality, there was an atomic war on Earth. In our Reality, the Final Reality, also known as the Buld Reality, we Earthlings (particularly the folks at Space Energy Missions) try to get help from the Buld so we can stop global warming.

By the end of 2013 I was also contemplating the possibility of an advanced technological solution to global warming that would be interpreted by ignorant Earthlings as a "natural" cooling of the sun.

The Mercury Project

Hierion antenna array for the Mercury Project.

Ivory's account of
Project Mercury

Early in 2014 I devised a plan that could be jointly carried out by Space Energy Missions and the Buld. The Buld would construct a solar energy collector on Mercury and transmit the collected energy to Earth using hierions.

Promotional poster for The Mercury Project.

It would be the responsibility of the Space Energy Missions team to construct an antenna to receive this "free" energy on Earth, leading to termination of burning fossil fuels for energy.

Luri negotiating for
Space Energy Missions

However, by this point during summer, a year ago, I had abandoned the idea of allowing the Buld (working in collaboration with Space Energy Missions) to provide a solution to the global warming problem.

The fundamental problem that arises from allowing Earthlings to obtain knowledge of hierions is that it soon leads to other types of technological disasters such as out-of-control nanites. Thus, while the efforts of Space Energy Missions were well-intentioned, their Mercury Project could never be allowed to be implamented.

Star Dance

This year I devised a sequence of events that would allow Earthlings to provide their own solution to rising carbon dioxide levels. This "solution" allowed me to write Carl Sagan into the Exode Trilogy.

Triatoms

Most recently, I'm imagining a "dual solution" to the problem of global warming. Under the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact,
1) humans (with some help from Interventionists) will provide the "triatom solution" to carbon dioxide

The Aquarius Trilogy

and

2) a "hierion injector" will be secretly used to cool the Sun, compensating for other green house gasses like methane.

Related Reading: Climate Fiction by J. K. Ullrich at io9. Anthropocene fiction.
Climate fact. take 2 Climate Change and the Unthinkable  Solarpunk. 2020: Speculative Climate Fiction

Next: Into Deep Time for additional novels by Jack Vance.

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