COAL+ICE Podcast, Episode 7: Sci-Fi takes on Climate Change

April 19, 2022

00:00 Mary Kay Magistad: A good story is irresistible. Fiction takes a reader into different worlds, different lives, different ways of thinking. Science fiction, over time, has helped us imagine different futures – space fantasies, cautionary tales, aspirational visions. Some have actually come to be.

One kind of sci-fi – or speculative fiction – focuses on our future living with climate change.

00:25: Gu Shi: I’m kind of terrified.

Mary Kay Magistad: This is Gu Shi. She’s an urban planner in Beijing by day, sci-fi writer by night – and in other off-hours. 

00:40: Gu Shi: You know, you start to really see the disasters happening everywhere around the world. Also in China, in Beijing, the weather is very much changed. But it’s kind of like a very strong power. You do not really know what you can do. So for the science fiction writer, it’s kind of like a background of the future. The disaster became a background of the future. And you sort of think, how will individuals’ lives be changed?  And where are they going, and how can they survive when they’re facing this kind of disaster?

01:20: Mary Kay Magistad: Grappling with these questions has engaged sci-fi writers around the world – with different takes from different cultures. It’s especially interesting to see what’s animating writers in the world’s two biggest economies, and two biggest emitters – the United States, and China – and what worlds they imagine for us all, going forward.

(Music)

01:43: Mary Kay Magistad: This is the COAL and ICE podcast, from Asia Society, with global conversations about how climate change is playing out around the world, and what we can do about it. I’m Mary Kay Magistad.

And this is the final episode of this series. We’ve looked at problems – coal use, burning the Amazon rainforest, melting ice, loss of biodiversity. And we’ve looked at possible ways forward – how to feed the world, save species, and live sustainably in cities in a climate change future. Which way we go depends a lot on us, on the choices we make now.

And that’s where writers of climate change-related sci-fi or speculative fiction – call it cli-fi, if you like – others have – are great to have around – not just to spin great yarns, though they do, but to stretch our minds, challenge our assumptions, and maybe help us realize we need to course-correct to avoid disaster.

Chinese sci-fi has gotten a lot of global attention anyway over the past decade, with The Three Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin, translated into English by Ken Liu. Ken Liu also writes his own speculative fiction. And his translations have opened the door to more Chinese sci-fi and speculative fiction writers  – including Gu Shi.

Gu Shi: For science fiction – it’s getting more and more important in China. But in fact, the people from other countries are paying more attention on Chinese sci-fi. That is really interesting, because I believe they’re really curious what’s going on in China, and what will China be like in, maybe, 10 years or 15 years.  Because if you have been here for 15 years, you know this country has changed a lot. But when you’re here, you’re believing change is happening all the time.

So in China, the novels that are most popular are not sci-fi. Liu Cixin is one exception. And, like, my stories only sell maybe 10,000 copies. That’s not really much. And I’m already an award-winning writer.

But when I’m talking about this phenomenon with people around the world, and they’re saying, like,  ‘oh, the rise of Chinese sci-fi’ – it seems to be very important. But in fact, in China, when I’m talking to my friends and saying, ‘oh, I’m a science fiction writer,’ it’s like ‘I like to play football.’ It’s very similar. (Laughs)

Mary Kay Magistad:  It’s like a hobby?

Gu Shi:  Yeah. It’s not that important.

Climate change is not that popular. Because it’s about daily life, but it’s kind of not something you can really fight against. So you have to do a lot of things day by day, but you don’t know if that really works. So that’s a problem. I think that’s why people are not really talking about it.

Mary Kay Magistad: But that may yet change, as more Chinese sci-fi writers emerge, and join the global conversation on just what our shared future may be, and how we may yet be able shape it.

So follows is a really interesting conversation I had on that with two acclaimed speculative fiction writers, one American, and one Chinese. Eliot Peper has written almost a dozen novels, including Veil – in which someone has hijacked the climate, and the future of civilization is at stake. The novelist Kim Stanley Robinson said about it: “This is the best kind of science fiction, in which the overriding issue of our time, climate change, is addressed with vivid characters serving as exemplars of the roles we need to take on in the coming decades, all gnarled into a breath-taking plot."

And then there’s Chinese novelist Chen Qiufan. His novel The Waste Tide, which came out almost a decade ago, was translated into English by Ken Liu, and was a Locus Award finalist for best first novel. Chen Qiufan has, more recently, been profiled in Wired magazine under the headline: Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan, with the sub-header, “As China’s science fiction authors are elevated to the status of oracles, Qiufan’s career – and his genre’s place in society – have gone through the looking glass.” Qiufan has written several other novels, and has collaborated with former Google China President Kaifu Lee on a book of short stories called AI 2041: 10 Visions for Our Future.  Over to our conversation.

06:38: Mary Kay Magistad: I guess, a big question for both of you, which is when you approach writing speculative fiction or sci-fi, or cli-fi about the near- term future and climate change you can do it for many different–there could be many different things animating your desire to do it, just as an act of imagination, as a way of expressing what you're feeling about where we might be heading, as a way to provoke thought, maybe to provoke action. How would you describe what it is that motivates you to do the kind of writing you're doing, specifically about climate change? Chen Qiufan, do you want to go first?

07:08: Chen Qiufan: Sure. I wrote the book The Waste Tide back 10 years ago. Intuitively, I tried to portray it as a dystopian story in the near future. But things have been turned around all over—like everything, the pandemic, and also the de-globalization, and also all kinds of protesting around the world, especially in Global South countries.  So right now it feels to me like I would rather create a more positive and bright future on climate change. Especially in the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for our Future, we’re talking about how we’re going to use technologies such as AI and robotics to protect the ocean getting polluted, and also protect the biodiversity there. So I think right now I've been changed a lot. For now, it seems to me more important finding solutions, like what Kim Stanley Robinson did in his previous book and recent books. So I think that's what I'm going to do right now.

08:20: Mary Kay Magistad: But I have noticed that in one of your more recent short stories, it's this group of scientists on a ship that's out at the Arctic and they have to come back because all the money's going into space exploration. It's like, okay, we're exiting Earth. We're out of here.

Chen Qiufan: Right.

Mary Kay Magistad: Which was kind like an elegy. They've been sailing all over the world trying to save the coral reefs, but —

Chen Qiufan: Yeah. That’s reality.

Mary Kay Magistad: That's reality?

Chen Qiufan: Yeah.

Mary Kay Magistad: So some hope, but also some—

08:50: Chen Qiufan: Right. It's about making the story plausible, I think. So you have to create this kind of tension, right? So people grab on some hope, but they have to fighting against a reality for sure.

Mary Kay Magistad: Yeah. So Eliot, Kim Stanley Robinson is a fan of yours. How do you approach your writing?

09:17: Eliot Peper: You asked about how I approached dealing with climate and fiction. And I actually think it's sort of interesting that we talk about cli-fi, or whatever you want to call it. Because to me, if you're writing naturalistic fiction, meaning fiction, that is based in the world that we're living in right now, it seems really hard to write any kind of novel that doesn't somehow involve climate. In fact, if a novel purported to do so you might call it fantasy (laughs) because we now just are living through climate change, and because fiction reflects human experience, I find it almost impossible to imagine writing a novel that somehow doesn't involve that. So I didn't set out with my most recent novel Veil, which really is – it’s about climate geoengineering, right? It plays out that kind of a scenario, but even if it wasn't about, even that wasn't what was driving the plot, we're living in a world where the climate is changing fast and that influences every part of our lives, whether it's the ski vacation you didn't get to go on in Colorado or whether it's that you're living in rural Indonesia and ocean acidification means that you no longer have a fishery, which your entire family depends on.

10:40: What I do is I try to remix the world in my fiction. I always try to think of myself as a reader first and a writer second. And the thing that I love in reading speculative fiction is that it invites me to explore this new world in my imagination, and it opens my eyes to new aspects of the world we live in that I was never aware of before. And sometimes when I'm reading other people's books, when I'm reading the news, when I'm living my life, you start to stumble on something that catches your attention, that sort of sucks you in and makes you want to learn more about it. And that curiosity is what fuels me as a writer. So when I get sucked into something, I then try to transmute that into a story that can let others experience the same sort of vicarious curiosity, I guess, through me that I felt learning about it in the first place.

11:33: Mary Kay Magistad: To what extent do either of you or both of you think while you're writing about—how is this going to land? What impact would I like this to have? What kind of an imaginative journey do I want to take the reader on? And what do I want to leave them with in terms of maybe a shift in their thinking and maybe even in their actions?

11:50: Chen Qiufan: Right, so I can go first. After the book The Waste Tide got translated into English and some other languages, I got so many response and feedback from readers all around the world, especially from southern Africa, from India, from Southeast Asia. So especially when I went to some kind of event or some people like environmental activists, they will come to me and they say we need to do something. I got an email from a U.S. reader who lives in Bakersfield in California, which is the most polluted town in the U.S. And he, Anthony Martine, that's the name of the reader, he said, I didn't realize this kind of thing before, like how you the U.S. ship all this kind of electronic waste to the rest of the world and create so much damage to the environment and also to the people.

So he decided he wants to keep all his electronic devices by himself, not to cause more damage to the planet, which is totally amazing to me because through this kind of storytelling you can touch, you can make someone relate to the story and feel for this total stranger living on the other side of the planet. And finally it got to change their old behavior, like consumerism habits and living style, for sure. So that's totally something fascinating to me.

13:38: Eliot Peper: I love that. I love that. You know, the thing I think about most when I'm working on a new novel is frankly just telling a good story. That's my first job. It needs to be a story that makes people feel, that people can connect with, that invites them to explore a new world, that keeps them turning pages along the way, and that feels surprising and inevitable when you reach the conclusion when you leave it. And you're like, yeah! Maybe you’re left wanting a little more or feeling a little nostalgic that you wish you could start it again, or that you want to share that experience with a friend or a loved one who might connect with it. And that might sound pedantic because, I mean obviously, I'm writing novels. That's part of what novels are supposed to do for you. But it is the thing that I try to keep foremost in my mind, because I know that anything that goes beyond that can only succeed if that succeeds. Like any ideas I have that I inject into the novel or that I weave into the world the novel takes place in, will only resonate to the extent that the story resonates with readers and that they turn into its ambassadors to others, right? That that story gets passed around.

14:50:  And I think there's something else that's really interesting about stories as a form. So if you think about fairytales or parables, you have these stories that have been told and passed down generation to generation for thousands of years. And they evolve along the way. Like they're not a static thing, that we're hearing the same version that was told 2000 years ago. Every generation reinvents it slightly, remixes it for the world they're living in. And that adaptability of story I think is really key. Because something that's easy to forget if you're a writer, is that readers bring at least as much meaning to a story as the writer does. Like I've had books, like Veil, which is this near-future novel about climate change. Some reviewers review it as dystopian. Some reviewers review it as utopian. And I don't know who's right. Like both of them were surprising to me, because I didn't think about it in those terms going in.  But I think that it's really important to understand that readers bring so much to a story.

15:50: So I think about the stories first, and then the other thing that I think fiction can do really well, and in novels in particular—even more than say necessarily short stories or other forms that have different strengths—what fiction is really powerful at is complexity. You’re not just describing an idea, like in an essay or an op-ed. You're not just setting up a situation. You're not just telling a joke. You're actually able to see ideas made flesh in the characters’ lives, made real over time and how you have all these complex interaction effects, with social relationships involved, all of that kind of stuff, I think that's a unique strength of novels.

16:30: And so one thing that I try to think about when I write a novel is I want to find a hard question and have that hard question be at the heart of the story, where in a way it's a question so hard that I've been grappling with it long enough that I don't have an easy answer. And so the novel is me attempting to share that hard question, with many different angles, so that others, people who are smarter than me, can enjoy the story. And maybe that inspires them to try to develop answers for themselves. So that's often what I'm thinking about when I'm working on a new book.

17:12: Mary Kay Magistad: And have you heard that coming back to you from your readers, that yes, they are thinking about those hard questions and maybe shifting their way of thinking a bit or at least thinking more deeply?

Eliot Peper: Oh, yeah. Like, the former Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change to the UN bought copies of Veil for his entire staff. So there are really cool things like that, and hearing from people. And really, obviously that's  someone who's very high up in the policy-making hierarchy around these issues, but hearing from people in southern India, where a number of scenes are set, and how it reflects things they're living through over the course of the last monsoon season. Like those are, as a writer, one of the weird things about writing novels as an art form is that if you're a standup comedian, you see your audience, right? You're testing jokes, you get to see their reaction. You have this fast feedback loop, so you practice –

Mary Kay Magistad: You get to die on stage.

18:10: Eliot Peper: You die on stage, but then after you die three times you get your Netflix special, right? And that's your best material. But as a novel there's this very long feedback loop, and it's very indirect. Like even you could easily publish a book and never have a direct conversation with a single reader, if you were really a recluse, right? I actually really appreciate hearing from readers because that's – it's a gift. As someone who puts this kind of work into the world, it's a gift to hear it reflected back at you and see how other people are putting the ideas or the feelings that piece of art gave them to work in their own lives.

18:50: Mary Kay Magistad: Yeah. So sci-fi and speculative fiction over time have been somewhat prescient, for instance like, Philip K. Dick wrote about a number of things, technologies etc, that eventually came to be. I realize neither of you are engineers by training, but as you're thinking about these possible futures, are you thinking about futures that you think aren't just necessarily cautionary or aren't just a good story, but might actually be a way forward?

19:10: Chen Qiufan: Yeah. I try to push forward the limit of speculative fiction to go beyond binary, because we always have this kind of positive-negative thinking about the future, and also like pros and cons on technologies or whatsoever. But I think the reality is more complex than that. It's not going to be easily simplified into one or the other narratives.

20:00: So what I'm trying to do here is try to create as much as I could to build up this kind of authentic and nuanced world-building, with this kind of complex narratives on different layers. For example, in the book AI 2041 we attached different kind of technologies of AI together with different societies—for example, India, Nigeria, Southeast Asia, Australia. So we have tapped into different historical, social issues, which might be amplified in the future with the help of technology.

20:40: So I try to build up this kind of layer by layer, and try to make it coherent as a whole. So then people have their different takes. I really like what Eliot just mentioned. Each different reader has their own takes on one single story. They have their own understandings as well, and their own feelings are totally unique. So my forthcoming book – it's for kids, it's about carbon neutrality in the future, because everyone knows China’s government committed to this kind of 2060 net-zero emissions. But in my ideal, the kids, the next generation, are those who going to live through this kind of process. And they're going to be the ones who make the real contribution. And if they couldn't understand what’s the real connection behind the scenes with climate change, biodiversity issues, there's no way we can achieve this kind of historical mission. So it took me so much time to do all this kind of research across the field because as you know I’m not an engineer background —

Mary Kay Magistad: You were a literature major undergrad, right?

Chen Qiufan: Right. Literature and film art. So basically very humanities. So I have to reach out to so many scientists and scholars and researchers, to try to understand what they're doing and what their takes on this specific issue in the domain. So then I can suck in so much information, and try to transform it into storytelling. And then backward, I put it out, give it to all this kind of experts, and they’re going to tell me if it’s going to work or not. So then I’m going to revise a little bit. So it's kind of like I'm working in the collaborative way to try to create a whole scenario for the kids.

22:40: Mary Kay Magistad: Eliot you've been nodding while Qiufan’s been speaking. That sounds familiar to you as a process?

Eliot Peper: Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of interesting. As science fiction writers, I think, we often get asked about prediction, for obvious reasons, right? It's like these are books, stories that take place in the future. You have to come up with a future. If you think about people who invent futures for a living. So statisticians, economists, there are many, the IPCC doing climate change projections, right? One unique aspect of writing fictional futures is that you can't present a range of possibilities in a single story. You have to commit to a specific future in the story you are presenting. That’s a big constraint. That's a creative challenge. You have to be specific. You have to be concrete. You have to make the world feel real and nuanced and complex and plausible. And that's hard to do. But when people say prediction I usually think almost like some kind of oracular version of that, right? Like someone has unique access to additional information that gives them the right answer about what's coming next.

24:00: And at least for me, that has nothing to do with my process of writing a science fiction novel. The way that I feel—okay. So imagine you're in your kitchen. And you need to make dinner. And like many of us, maybe you just finished your day at work. You don't even know what to make yet. So you're opening your cupboards.  You’re like, what ingredients do I have? Do I have flour? Do I have noodles? And when I'm writing a piece of speculative fiction, I try to look at the world that way. So I think of like news articles that I read, scientific papers that I read, the interviews that I might do with a scientist, or a conversation that I had with a friend over a beer, or something that happened to me last week or something I learned in a history book that explains a new system that I had never been introduced to before. All of those are ingredients. And there are tons of ingredients. Like it's what comes up next in your Spotify playlist. It's literally—your experience of the world are your ingredients.

25:00: And then what I try to do is I try to make a weird experimental meal. I try to make something new. Make something creative. Every once in awhile, it works. And you're like, wow, oh, this is something I now want to cook for friends. And that's how, to me, it feels to write speculative fiction. It’s not –what’s the most likely result – or who gets to decide that is a good question.  I'm trying to say, what's the most interesting meal I can make with this? So that's how I look at this sort of future part of, how do I imagine a possible future to depict in a story.

25:40: But I also think that's one of the fun things about reading speculative or science fiction. It actually serves as a reminder that reality is a kitchen. That no, you can't predict the future, you have to invent it. And that as science fiction writers, we're doing that in a very literal way by writing a story. But the same is true of a high school teacher or a policymaker or a farmer— that your life experience is the only material you have to choose what to do next. And for better or for worse what humans do next has enormous implications for what happens to the planet next.

26:15: Mary Kay Magistad: So on that. You each speak each other's languages and you've each spent time in each other's countries. I'm wondering whether you have, in terms of the ingredients that you're drawing from, for each of you, what you found interesting in the sci-fi and speculative fiction that Qiufan, you've read coming from the U.S., and Eliot, that you've read coming from China. Qiufan?

26:40: Chen Qiufan: Yeah, sure.  I started my life as a sci-fi fan from watching Star Wars, Star Trek, Asimov, Heinlein, Clark. So that's how I start to think and write my own science fiction stories. Especially I used to work for Google for a couple of years. I've been traveling a lot in the U.S. and all around the world, so definitely I got so much thoughts from the Western cultures. And I put so much stuff in my own writing.

27:20: Science fiction is a Western genre, which was introduced to China back 100 years ago. So we have to learn a lot—the pattern of narrative, the structure. But now we’re going to think beyond that. We can think how to create something connected to our tradition, to our ancient history or mythology. That excites me, because we have so many different narratives from minorities, from indigenous people, from sexual minorities as well. So yeah, I think everyone's supposed to have their own takes on telling a futuristic or speculative story. But the most important thing is you have to find your own voice, your perspective to the world. So that's something I'm still figuring it out, but I think, yeah, almost there.

28:20: Mary Kay Magistad: As you said, there have been sci-fi readers in China for a century, but an explosion over the past decade or so. Why do you think that happened now, over this past decade? And how is it being received within China?

28:40: Chen Qiufan: Right. I think it's a historical dynamic change, because from the external perspective, China is uprising [a rising] superpower on the world stage. And economically, technologically, everything is on the rise. So I think people start to think about okay, are their lives actually deeply embedded with technology? So science fiction definitely will be the mainstream narrative. So that's how people going to transit their old fashioned Kung Fu or those Eastern fantasy stuff towards the science fiction. I think that's one point.

29:25: And the other point is I think because of Three Body Problem. It created a phenomenon attention across the world. And also this kind of vibe right now in China is increasingly huge, no matter from the states level, from all those tech companies perspective, they all try to use science fiction as quite a great tool to communicate with the people, especially the younger generation, because it's cool. It's related to technology and innovation for sure. So that's what the country would pretty much love to see in the next decades or so. So I think all of these factors create this kind of new hit on science fiction. The writers’ scale is smaller, because compare in the U.S., here, you have thousands of writers, professionals, but in China, maybe I'll say like a couple hundred professional writers in the community for now.

30:30: Eliot Peper: You know, you made me think about how—if you look at the history of science fiction as a genre, it really started to be invented almost coincidentally with the scientific revolution in Western Europe. And so you have these like very early examples of —there's one famous story that took place on the moon, that I think was written in the 1700s. And then you get, obviously through Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, you have this whole history of science fiction. And to me that makes perfect sense. And the reason it makes perfect sense is that if you zoom out and you think about what it was like to live at different times in human history, in 99 percent of human history, or much more than 99 percent, it was almost guaranteed that your life would be very much like your grandparent's life, and that your grandchildren's life would be very much like your life. You might have a different chief, or you might have to flee a certain area and move to another area, or there's a drought and, so there are external factors that can change, but like the basic rules and the basic shape of your life was pretty consistent across generations. And that's true for almost all of history until very, very recently, and only in specific places, even relatively recently.

32:00: My grandparents would not recognize what I do as a job. And their grandparents wouldn't have recognized what they did, really. And like my grandchildren, I have no idea. Hopefully they read your book, and it inspires them to work toward carbon neutrality. So I think that one of the reasons why science fiction is resonating in the culture right now in a new way, and I don't even mean—I just mean globally, why it has become a larger piece of our shared culture. I think is because more and more people are experiencing more and more fundamental change in their lifetimes. And they see how their kids are going to have different lives and how their grandparents have different lives. And so suddenly, when you go to read a book and it describes a different world, that's actually more realistic than reading a book that describes your present world because, guaranteed, in a few years, your present world is the only one that can't exist anymore

33:00: There’s a novella called Folding Beijing that I just loved. that I've read numerous times. It's just a really beautiful story with many layers of meaning in it. But one thing that your question also made me think about is I spent a year in Taipei studying Mandarin. And that was a very formative experience for me. And one thing I really loved was reading classical Chinese poetry. And I'm realizing now, through your question, how that's influenced some of the things I try to do on a craft level.

33:40: So one of the really lovely things about it is how much, compared to English, how much meaning can be contained in a very short poem. And many layers of moral significance and many layers of concrete imagery—clear imagery that like paints pictures in your head—as well as the rhythm of the language itself. All of those three things, there are just so many examples of.  And sometimes it makes me realize the limitations of English, or the relative strengths of these different languages.

34:10: And last year I was listening to a wonderful interview with Derek Thompson, who’s a writer at The Atlantic. And apparently Derek, when he was in college, was a Shakespearian actor. And the host asked him, why do you think Shakespeare is so influential within Western literature? And Derek said well, obviously if you study English, you read Shakespeare. And he's like, so many scholars talk about how Shakespeare is just able to tap just the fundamental human psychology, like what it means to be a human, the social dynamics that we live through, and just speaks to these truths of the human experience. And he's like, that may be true as far as it goes. I can't really speak to that. But as a Shakespearian actor, what he believed was part of Shakespeare’s lasting influence on Western culture was simply that Shakespeare is insanely quotable.

35:00: There are epigrams taken from every play that are quoted, in movies, in music, in literature constantly, at the opening of chapters, He has these one-liners that are just perfect. They just capture something in such a poetic way that really paints the picture for you.

To me, that's something that classical Chinese poetry has a lot of, and that I am a hopeless amateur at trying to implement in my own work, but it does make me think about the language level differently, of how can in a complex, long story that is a novel, how can you also capture some key element of it in a single sentence or in a single paragraph?

35:50 Mary Kay Magistad: That's really interesting. So much of a culture is embedded in the language. I would imagine as well to at least some degree, a culture is also embedded in the approach to speculative fiction. I think there can be a wide range within a particular culture, within the United States, within China, in terms of how it's approached. But I'm wondering if you, as you're reading translations, or reading in the original language where you see something that is a pattern that feels different, interestingly different, from what you'd see in your own country?

36:25: Chen Qiufan: Because I can read both Chinese and English, so I read my own translations in different languages. So you can totally feel the differences in different versions. So I think one thing which is totally fascinating to me is about the tense of languages. Because in English you have all this kind of different tenses, but in Chinese, actually there is basically there's no tense. So that means our writing process, how we cognitively try to counter the storyline as non-linear. Because I read those versions. My editor from tour, Lindsay Hall, she's a fascinating editor. She told me, okay, we, might need a little rearrangement on the timeline, because it seems to me a little bit confusing. It seems like you're jumping in between different timelines from the past to the present and to the future. It’s kind of mixed up.

37:40: And then I realized, okay! That’s the way I think about the whole thing. It's just like spaghetti—different timelines entangling together. Not very linearly. So that really was a culture shock to me, like ‘oh, I've been trapped in the language for such a long time and now I see it like from a mirror. Now I see what it really looks like and I can rearrange it and restructure it and make it feel more Westernized. So then the reader from the States, or for Europe, they can understand which is prior, which is after. It's more clear. But it's totally something that blew me away. Like when you think about The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang is talking, about how human’s mindset and perception of time and space can be totally changed by the using of language. So that's something really happening when I got translated.

38:35: Eliot Peper: Oh, I love that. That’s wonderful. That's a really beautiful way of saying it. I mean, you even used the word culture shock, right? And reading novels written by people from different places actually has a lot in common with spending time in different places. So for me, one of my favorite things is to step off of, step out of an airport or off a boat or whatever, into a new place where I don't speak the language and I've never been before and I don't have a plan. You don't know what's going to happen next and you just sort of have to figure it out and improvise. You’re out of your comfort zone. Inevitably, things are going to surprise you. And they're not going to be the things you expect to be surprised by, by definition. And that experience can be very, very powerful.

39:20: But the most interesting part to me is actually when I return home. Because then when you return home, suddenly you realize all of the things that you took for granted, all the assumptions you made about how the world worked, are revealed to you through this new lens of seeing that other people do things differently, right? Like you didn't even realize those were choices, until you can see them now. And so to me, literature can do that, vicariously. And I often try to complement any physical trip I take with reading works by authors from there, because inevitably that will add a totally new layer to your experience. There are so many worlds on Planet Earth. And it's really a joy to explore them, whether it's in fiction or with your passport in hand.

40:17: Mary Kay Magistad: So there are so many worlds on Planet Earth, and yet we also are on one planet. And I'm wondering as you’re thinking, not just as writers, but just as people, about the moment that we're in where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a report saying we're even further behind in trying to meet the goals that we need to in terms of reducing carbon emissions, so that we don't face really dire outcomes that are going to make it much harder to live on earth—Eliot, I know you as an undergrad, were looking at how environmental law could be made more effective. This has been a longstanding interest of yours. Qiufan, you grew up in a China that was developing very fast, but also grappling with ‘how do we get the balance right with human health and happiness versus fast development?’ So to step back for a moment from your fiction, how are you looking right now at where we are? And as you're thinking about the past, the present, the future altogether, what do you see as what we're moving into, what you’d like to see? Do you feel hope, despair, some combination? Resignation? A feeling of agency because you're writing? Qiufan, you first.

41:35: Chen Qiufan: Yeah. For sure. Because in the recent years, I spent so much time traveling domestically in China to those minority villages in the mountainous area, also in the Inner Mongolia area. So I try to visit those villages that still preserve all this tradition and belief systems. And they’re still worshiping the holy river, mountain, and tree—that kind of shamanic ceremony. So, I’m actually thinking about—our civilization is actually hanging on the cliff, because everything we were doing, like treating the other species and Mother Nature and the planet as something objectively can be exploited to extract all this kind of value sources out of it, without thinking of any kind of consequences. But I think now it's time, we got to step back a little bit. I mean, from a non-materialistic level. We need some spirituality. We need to pay more respect and appreciate there's something bigger than us. There's something beyond us. So we are just one of the many species on this planet.

43:10: So I think this is something totally transform what (how) I've been long educated and trained in that kind of rational and logical (way of thinking). And next year, I'll join the Aurora expedition to Antarctica, on climate change and biodiversity issues. So all this kind of experience, I think, allows me to rethink about his whole thing systematically. And I think all I can do is use storytelling to deliver the message. I consider myself as a messenger, a medium. I would love to be some kind of techno-shamanism. I have some kind of scientific knowledge, but still I worship the nature. I totally respect the Gaia. So I think now we need to bring the belief system to a new level. So not to go either/or, but to think and act beyond all those binaries. So I think this is something (a way I’ve) totally changed my mind in the previous two years.

44:30: Eliot Peper: You know, whenever I read headlines that are really depressing, and there are certainly enough of those, I also try to remember that if given the choice, if as a science fiction writer, I was able to step into a time machine, I would not choose to live at any prior period in history. Despite how much we complain today, I definitely prefer 2022, with all the negatives that come with it, to 1922, 1822, 1722, 16—on and on. I try to keep that in mind in order to put things in perspective. Because I find that I'm often overwhelmed by all the nasty things that people do to each other in the world,  and that we do unintentionally. And so that's one thing I try to keep in mind. The second thing I try to keep in mind is that we didn't get here through a linear process. We look back and—we're good storytellers, right, like humans are good storytellers. We look at history and we try to turn it into a clean narrative. But the reality is that it was way messier, and way more complicated, and many important variables are ignored by any individual history. And so the world is messy. If technology is how we do things and innovation is how we try to do things better or try to do things in new ways, inevitably there are going to be always unintended consequences. The world is that complex.

45:45: And so, my greatest hope is that only 49 percent of those unintended consequences will be negative. If we have 50—we can't aim for 100 percent, but if we can get to 51 percent—like over time, that compounds, right?  And that doesn't just apply to like widgets, or cubits, if you go to quantum computing. It also applies to how we choose to live our lives, to the philosophies we live by, the values we use to guide our actions. Those evolve as well. Culture evolves alongside technology or anything else, about how the world is changing. And so I think that in your formulation of techno-shamanism, that sort of is where storytellers can play a role. Culture is a living thing. It's the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. It's how we make sense of the world. And it can sometimes open a new window into how the world might change. Us writers, whether we're mediums or a channel, we're not always the people in the arena. We're the people talking to the people in the arena and finding out their ideas and then telling stories that might inspire other people to get into the arena.

47:05: And so one of the things I've noticed in the past few years, talking to people who are serious about climate change specifically, is that when I was reading and talking to people 10 years ago about these kinds of issues, there were a lot of very smart people working on the problem, aware of the problem, doing research about the problem, trying to communicate about the problem. But I feel like in the past few years, the dynamic has changed.  And so this is totally anecdotal, it's just the people I've been talking to.  But I feel like in the past few years, I have met way more smart, serious young people who are not just studying the problem, but trying to create solutions that are very practical and scalable. Whether those are cultural solutions or technological ones or political ones, it does feel different. There's a, what is it? A vibe shift or whatever. Like, do you know this company Stripe, this big internet payments company? They’ve had a carbon removal program that was pioneering infunding these new technologies. And they announced a $900 million new initiative just to fund carbon removal projects. Now I've been reading about carbon removal for years, but it's always been limited to academic experiments, or like tiny proofs-of-concept that never had a market. This is literally a major internet company trying to create a market from scratch by being their first customer. That's just different. You couldn't have given an example of that in 2012. So those are the kinds of things where I'm like, oh, this is interesting. Suddenly it went from smart people talking about the problem to smart people seeing if they could create solutions for it. And that's where I find hope.

(Music)

Mary Kay Magistad: And that’s a good note on which to end the COAL+ICE Podcast. Thanks to Eliot Peper – whose new novel, Reaper, is out in May 2022, and to Chen Qiufan, whose children’s book in Chinese, Net Zero China, will hopefully be translated into English and other languages. Thanks, too, to Gu Shi, who’s now working on a novel related to cleaning up oceans.

And thank you for listening to the COAL and Ice podcast, a companion to Asia Society’s COAL and ICE multimedia exhibition on climate change, which has traveled the world over the past decade, including a stint at the Kennedy Center in March and April 2022. The exhibition is co-curated by Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and Dutch exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries. It was conceived in collaboration with Orville Schell, who heads Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations.

I’m associate director there, and the editor and producer of this podcast. Taili Ni is the podcast’s assistant producer.

You can find full transcripts of all seven episodes of COAL+ICE Podcast on our website, asiasociety.org/center-us-china-relations/coal-ice-podcast – put in hyphens separating all words.  Check out photos and videos of the COAL and ICE exhibition over time at coalandice.org. And watch videos of our climate change-related event series – including a conversation between Al Gore and young climate leaders -- on Asia Society’s YouTube channel. Just go to the playlist for the Center on US-China Relations, and you’ll find our COAL+ICE videos there.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. If you have, let others know about it.

And once again – thanks for listening.

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