'One of the many things science fiction has in common with religion is a hearty enthusiasm for apocalypses.'

Philip Purser-Hallard believes the recent floods are not a taste of things to come, despite what some church leaders say

Despite the startling pronouncements of the Bishop of Carlisle, the floods experienced across the United Kingdom last month weren’t on the face of them especially apocalyptic.

A lot of rain fell, and did a lot of damage; a great many homes were evacuated; a dam threatened to burst, but didn’t; seven people died; and a bishop said some very silly things about God’s feelings surrounding civil partnership legislation.

Traumatic though the flooding was for all concerned, I shan’t be heading out to B&Q for pitch and gopher wood quite yet.

One of the many things science fiction has in common with religion is a hearty enthusiasm for apocalypses. The Bible, like much of the literature of the Middle East, is full of floods, fires, plagues, famines, eclipses, meteoric impacts and seas turning to blood, and SF has warmly embraced the theme.

The global-catastrophe novel is a well-established and venerable genre, predicting diverse ends for the Earth through alien invasion or nuclear war, rogue black holes or runaway nanotechnology. Like prophets, many SF authors have an acute sense that humanity exists on sufferance from greater forces, natural or divine.

Political climate

However, SF also has the opposing tradition of utopian optimism – a conviction that in the future human ingenuity, and technological progress in particular, will solve all of our difficulties with God and nature, ushering in a new age of peace and contentment for all.

At root, this is equally indebted to the Bible, where the Flood is the prelude to the New Covenant, and the apocalypse the birth-pains of the New Jerusalem.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that SF authors in the United States have weighed in on both sides of the ‘debate’ concerning climate change.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Sixty Days and Counting is the sequel to his Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below: a political thriller where an environmentalist President must kick-start the process of reversing the ecological damage inflicted by his predecessors.

Meanwhile, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear shows scientists and the media conspiring with eco-terrorists to keep the population afraid of spurious environmental threats. Not unexpectedly a number of readers, including some U.S. Senators, have embraced this book as vindicating their political position. As with The Da Vinci Code, the distinction between airport blockbuster and academic thesis seems to be an easy one to miss.

The Two Horses of the Apocalypse

While those who see a cold and inundated summer as further proof (if such were needed) that God is heterosexual and homophobic barely deserve intelligent opposition, those who see it as evidence against global warming are simply failing to understand concepts like ‘chaotic system’, ‘long-term trend’ – and, indeed, ‘global’.

The last book I read on this subject was neither SF nor theology, but history. Jared Diamond’s Collapse examines how over-exploitation of the environment caused the downfall of a surprising number of ancient civilisations from Easter Island to Viking Greenland, and is still continuing today. Some of it makes for horrifyingly familiar reading.

As Diamond points out, however, modern societies are in a more complex position. On the one hand, our civilisation is global. We can hardly move away en masse when our surroundings become uninhabitable.

However we also have an unprecedented quantity of information available, giving us the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others – provided we’re willing to do so.

Diamond talks about a race between two exponentially accelerating horses – our ever-advancing ruination of our world, and our increasingly urgent attempts, based on our growing understanding of the situation, to put it right.

Robinson and Crichton have their bets in already. Like them, any SF author hoping to imagine an authentic future needs to decide which horse they’re backing to win.

• Read Philip Purser-Hallard's blog

Earlier articles

• It’s been unreal
• Santa Claus conquers the Martians
• Getting needlessly messianic
• Through An Orbital Mirror, Darkly
• The Shape of Kingdoms to Come
• Back to reality
• I baptised an alien