A month ago, the MIT Techology Review published Paolo Bacigalupi's short story "
A Full Life", which is a crystal-clear picture of the future that's been looming in the dim fog of my darkest fears for my daughters.
It's the story of Rue, the middle class daughter of university-educated parents, who's been a climate refugee since she was eight years old. Her parents are presumably millenials, and among 'the good ones', who "live like people are supposed to live", vegetarian farmers of microgreens who fled urban consumerism to live on the land. But wildfires and droughts spell the end of their utopia, and they're forced back to the city, where unrelenting mega-storms flood the streets, shred the buildings, and give rise to an epidemic.
In the end, Rue is shipped off to Boston, to live with her presumably-gen-X grandmother, who lives in a bubble of memories of a decadent past world, when people drove petroleum cars, ate meat, and travelled to other countries by airplane, which she laments that her grand-daughter can't enjoy.
The punch-line is meant to be the kicker to wake up the boomers and gen-Xers of today. But it's not Rue's anger at her grandmother and her parents, who she sees as all "playing pretend", that I find the most affecting. It's the sense of inexorability. Rue's right to feel angry about her bad ancestors, but it's already too late. Isn't her grandmother also right, that "Life's short. We have to enjoy something."?
On the bright side, it won't be a crew of
Boston kids who beat up my granddaughters for being invading climate refugees.
A dark bright side.
If wallowing in climate dread is your thing as well, check out "
Everything Change: An anthology of climate fiction", published by the Arizona State University's
Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative in 2016, for many and varied bleak visions of our near future.
