Of course given our current environmental, population, economic and political problems it would be a rather mixed blessing… but essentially optimistic nonetheless.

I can understand an optimistic ending. We all like living “happily ever after”, but if it is a mainly optimistic thread through the whole story it tends to get on my nerves.

Conflict is what it is all about. Having a mox of viewpoints optimistic and pessimistic in your characters creates conflict which makes for good stories.

However, I can’t really imagine a very good purely optimistic story about global warming…

I think optimism is part of it but I think the most important function of these stories is that they are set during a slow-burning crisis. So far, much of the work about global warming is either hopelessly pessimistic/we’re going to die, or set so long after that it’s merely backstory, positive or negative outcome.

I like the idea of a story that is both optimistic and realistic – parts of the cities and world are damaged by the changes in climate and resource scarcity, whilst others thrive on the changes. Portraying society during this upheaval is the most interesting part. I just submitted a story in this mould to WOTF much rewritten following Jetse’s excellent comments when I submitted it to Interzone. I’m going to explore this subgenre more but I’d also love to see some more established writers do the same.

More than anything I think it’s important we write these things to give people an idea of what the world in climate change will be like. Science and Al Gore documentaries give people the fear, but they don’t give them any idea what their lives might be like in the GW scenario. SF is excellently placed to do that.

I’m pleased to find a blog with interactive comments here. I looked around a couple of years ago after I encountered Paolo’s stories, but didn’t find this.

As a self-professed sustainability advocate, I often feel caught in the middle of a tug o’ war between two factions: people who can’t or won’t imagine the existence of serious problems, and people who can’t or won’t imagine the existence of worthwhile responses.

One contributing factor I notice is that (in daily life) we’re often rather cavalier about converting our perceptions of probability to statements of certainty. As in: This WILL happen. That WILL NEVER happen. Both are casual assessments of probability, but we talk about them as absolute certainty.

As a way to maintain my own sense of coherence when I switch between those two distinct audiences, I try to stop myself from making leaps to certainty. I focus on possibility rather than probability. Ryan’s comment and Paolo and Jetse’s conversation about change suggests to me three separate, but related, concepts:

Possibility of change
Probability of change
Mechanism of change

Making a probability seem concrete and real is one way to think about SF, it seems to me. Describing a plausible mechanism goes along with that. I’d like to think there might be ways to hold up possibilities for examination that might make for interesting prose. Both of the tug o’ war factions I encounter seem to crave certainty, a detailed blueprint for life. But I doubt that our kids need a blueprint for their lives. (I get the impression many don’t want one.) All I want to do is to offer them an option to live differently, to offer them a plausible possibility to modify the default blueprint our culture provides now.

I guess that’s kind of involved for a just-stopping-by-to-say-thanks comment. It’s just coincidence that this current blog post invokes some things I think about a lot and deal with often. I appreciate the quality of your prose, Paolo. I’ll keep reading. And if you find a way to write some stories about possible worthwhile responses, it’s possible that would lead to another audience to appreciate your prose also.

Thanks again, and cheers

Come on man … optimism has nothing to do with reality. Seriously.

If you want optimism go watch “It’s a wonderful life” or better yet “Life is Beautiful”.

Optimism is a state of mind. People for as long as their have been humans have been struggling with, what seems to be, your primary issue here: change.

We don’t have any idea what is going to happen, what horrors we will face, or what horrors our children will face, we only do know that there will be horrors. What would a good SF story be without them?

You, as a SF writer, have a wonderful opportunity to make believe a different future (fantasy). Tailor the characters if you care about optimism. Happiness is always in play no matter what the game.

Have fun, :)

I think we might stand a better chance with farming them for their fur – the meat would just be a useful by-product to feed to our meat-farmed herbivores and posssibly other polar bears. Of course, following this line of thought, it might be only a matter of time before clubbing becomes fashionable, again.

I’m supposing Jetse’s optimism to be about reclaiming the sense of wonder (of various spellings) that people always go on about when talking about the 40s, 50s and 60s sf, without actually redoing it.

We could always do the Antartica = Atlantis idea to death to comfort ourselves over melting ice.

I like that. Write a believable story about successfully mitigating climate change that assumes that people are selfish and short-sighted, and where the mechanics of climate change are such that global warming will cause a gradual destruction of many things we value about the planet, but nonetheless will leave us alive and kicking at the end.

So climate change will wreck a lot, but it won’t kill us; and yet we still step up to save the polar bears.

That’s a challenge, all right. The only way I can see it happening is if we suddenly discover a taste for Artic polar bear bred at the pole, and so we suddenly have to save the ice caps so we can farm more of them. Then we could get the stock market involved, investing in carbon sequestration as a necessary step in order to cash in on the exploding value of polar bear meat. :-)