'Carson looked at the sarcoma on his
arm. Last night it had been half an inch worth of busy. He angled the
box knife and gritted his teeth. Too late for sunscreen now.'
'Blakefield's stomach churned as he
watched the line of tornadoes doing a quickstep across the horizon.
Would they want him as well, small as he was?'
'The djinn's smile lit up as he
stepped off the plane and sucked in the diesel-scented fumes of the
city.'
These are prompts for stories that
still have to be told.
Climate change holds fresh and
interesting possibilities for storytellers in search of foretellings,
creeping rot and post-apocalyptic narratives. Good horror stories
with climate change as a major premise are hard to find.
Science fiction and horror genres vie
neck-to-neck in the apocalyptic stakes. Science fiction has outbreaks
of disease, meteors and sinister technology at its disposal. Horror
has vampiric outbreaks and realms laid waste by eldritch
abominations. Both of them share the zombie. Unfortunately science
fiction is winning the climate change race.
Humanity has never been able to control the climate. It has only been
able to shelter from it, often finding safety in numbers. Now this faces
a renewed challenge. There is no comfort for the modern cave dwellers
huddling for safety from the raging of the storm: population prediction
curves have diverged from the steady incline of the popular curve, and
projections point to 9 billion or 5 billion souls on earth in a couple
of decades. That's a variance of 4 billlion.
Climate change has become part of the human experience for billions already, and an important component of the standard set of fears. Technology and high levels of development offer scant refuge. Food is produced on farms. Floods ignore city limits. The great outdoors is not air-conditioned.
The apparent problem with climate change in the horror genres is that it has not been well positioned as an
individual human reality: it is still a thing of numbers and masses to the horror genre's fears of the individual. If horror
emerges from the human experience, then there must be plenty of
opportunities.
How it might play out will depend on
the approach of the writer. Science fiction is biased towards fact as
an underpinning. It might (does) postulate climate change impacts on
sociology, economics and ecological impacts. Horror genres are more
nebulous.
Although secular rationalism is gaining
in popularity, everyone wants someone to blame. If there is nobody,
or no one thing that can be blamed, then the occult (taken in the
sense of the hidden cause), comes into play. In the non-secular
mindset, there is an ample set of possible beliefs on which to blame
the climate phenomena: rain gods, thunder gods, gods of ice, the sun
and sea. There is an even larger cast of secondary occult creatures:
local deities, fae beings, demons and vengeful angels.
A local setting will be the most
effective way to handle scenarios. What the global statistics don't
illuminate is that the figures are aggregates, and that climate
change effects vary wildly from place to place. For instance one area
might be beset by floods, another area might be affected by drought,
and a third area could be affected by sea level rises (which
amazingly also appear to be variable).
Use of a local mindset or perspective
can free up the storyteller from the trap of a global scenario.
Horror is more often than not reliant
on the same tropes: vampires, zombies and werewolves. Climate change
is an excellent opportunity to introduce a new set of threats,
created by the teller or found in the pages of mythology.
How long it will be before this takes
root depends on how quickly tellers of tales begin to feel the impact
themselves.
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