Winter as an Alien Earth
Is it just me -- and just the weather in Chicago -- or has our imagination of disaster, our imagination of otherness turned towards cold? Is winter our vision of choice of an alien planet, or our vision of choice for the end of this one?
I was reading a review of Dan Simmons' new book, The Terror, about an arctic exploration gone wrong, and the reviewer noted that when the monster does appear, it seems redundant: the arctic is already horrible. And it occurred to me that where the reviewer talked about horror, we could talk simply about alienness; at least, it occurred to me that winter makes things different.
As I said, I'm listening to Red Mars, which is all about the cold (and K. S. Robinson's earlier Antarctica shows a certain thematic love of cold in his work), which ties in with this observation. That is, sf used to have a lot of different worlds, but many of them were hot -- jungle-hot Venus, the thirsty deserts of Mars -- but now it seems we mostly have cold worlds, like flash-frozen Mars.
I'm not saying that cold worlds are all that we can imagine now -- one need only point to how the swamp world of Naboo in The Phantom Menace replaced Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back as the alien battleground of choice. But I am saying that, not only has there been a general shift from hot to cold, but that our imagination is more directly caught by those cold worlds.
(For instance, look at the battle of Hoth and compare it to the battle of Naboo: even without the stories, the battle of Hoth is more engaging, in part because the nearly monochromatic palate of whites and grays both makes you work harder to see what's going on, and makes it easier to see where red and black mark destruction. In that way, it's more engaging, which is what I mean by saying that these cold worlds more directly catch our imagination. One could claim that it's impossible to disregard the narrative role of these battles, which is true up to a point, but for much of the battles, named characters are not the focus, which may help us focus on the battles themselves.)
I could be wrong about both the general shift towards cold worlds, and the imaginative importance of them -- if you can think of any examples from your own reading/watching experience where hot worlds are either more common than cold worlds, or captured your imagination more, please tell me.
If I'm not wrong about this turn towards cold (as in the vision of Earth under an ice age in The Day After Tomorrow), what does it say about our imagination of disaster? On one hand, I feel this interest in cold isn't so much of a shift, but rather an expression of something always true about us: dark and cold will always be symbols (or the direct, non-symbolic instantiation) of the unknown and the radically other. Even humans who are other than us are not radically other, because there is always some possibility of crossing the boundary of otherness with our shared body heat.
But if there is a turn to cold in our imagination of the future, what does that mean where the common imagination of our future is heat? That is, where global warming haunts us with the specter of hotter and hotter summer days (and like it or lump it, for most people, global warming means just heat), why are we looking to winter planets? The simple answer is that we look at the challenge of cold worlds as an imaginary distraction to the problems of our world. For our imaginations, cold worlds are the equivalent of turning up the A/C on a hot day.
A slightly less simple answer, I think, might relate to the Heat Death of the Universe (i.e., the increasing entropy of a closed system imagined as the loss of energy) as our greatest fear and our greatest challenge, as we face not just a world imagined as heating up, but a universe imagined as materially closed and increasingly cold -- a universe empty of life everywhere else, and with little hope of life's continuance here.
But as I said, it could just be the weather in Chicago.
I was reading a review of Dan Simmons' new book, The Terror, about an arctic exploration gone wrong, and the reviewer noted that when the monster does appear, it seems redundant: the arctic is already horrible. And it occurred to me that where the reviewer talked about horror, we could talk simply about alienness; at least, it occurred to me that winter makes things different.
As I said, I'm listening to Red Mars, which is all about the cold (and K. S. Robinson's earlier Antarctica shows a certain thematic love of cold in his work), which ties in with this observation. That is, sf used to have a lot of different worlds, but many of them were hot -- jungle-hot Venus, the thirsty deserts of Mars -- but now it seems we mostly have cold worlds, like flash-frozen Mars.
I'm not saying that cold worlds are all that we can imagine now -- one need only point to how the swamp world of Naboo in The Phantom Menace replaced Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back as the alien battleground of choice. But I am saying that, not only has there been a general shift from hot to cold, but that our imagination is more directly caught by those cold worlds.
(For instance, look at the battle of Hoth and compare it to the battle of Naboo: even without the stories, the battle of Hoth is more engaging, in part because the nearly monochromatic palate of whites and grays both makes you work harder to see what's going on, and makes it easier to see where red and black mark destruction. In that way, it's more engaging, which is what I mean by saying that these cold worlds more directly catch our imagination. One could claim that it's impossible to disregard the narrative role of these battles, which is true up to a point, but for much of the battles, named characters are not the focus, which may help us focus on the battles themselves.)
I could be wrong about both the general shift towards cold worlds, and the imaginative importance of them -- if you can think of any examples from your own reading/watching experience where hot worlds are either more common than cold worlds, or captured your imagination more, please tell me.
If I'm not wrong about this turn towards cold (as in the vision of Earth under an ice age in The Day After Tomorrow), what does it say about our imagination of disaster? On one hand, I feel this interest in cold isn't so much of a shift, but rather an expression of something always true about us: dark and cold will always be symbols (or the direct, non-symbolic instantiation) of the unknown and the radically other. Even humans who are other than us are not radically other, because there is always some possibility of crossing the boundary of otherness with our shared body heat.
But if there is a turn to cold in our imagination of the future, what does that mean where the common imagination of our future is heat? That is, where global warming haunts us with the specter of hotter and hotter summer days (and like it or lump it, for most people, global warming means just heat), why are we looking to winter planets? The simple answer is that we look at the challenge of cold worlds as an imaginary distraction to the problems of our world. For our imaginations, cold worlds are the equivalent of turning up the A/C on a hot day.
A slightly less simple answer, I think, might relate to the Heat Death of the Universe (i.e., the increasing entropy of a closed system imagined as the loss of energy) as our greatest fear and our greatest challenge, as we face not just a world imagined as heating up, but a universe imagined as materially closed and increasingly cold -- a universe empty of life everywhere else, and with little hope of life's continuance here.
But as I said, it could just be the weather in Chicago.