Not letting facts get in the way of a good story has always been winning advice to people wanting an audience. That’s never been truer than now, when the means of dressing lies as truth is in everyone’s palm or pocket, and when the world’s loudest liars have everyone’s attention.
We gather facts to secure the food and shelter and society we need to live our lives. They are the anchor points for the stories we create to make sense of the world. Without them we understand nothing, and become fodder for leaders presenting falsehood as truth.
So: science establishes facts, and stories make them digestible. If we want to understand our human condition and where it’s taking us, we need both.
“Our capacity to imagine knows no bounds,” astrophysicist and deep thinker Neil deGrasse Tyson told an interviewer last week, meaning all the stories about UFOs and aliens that keep popping up in societies like ours. He could just as easily have been talking about the future.
Tyson hasn’t yet applied his giant intellect to foretelling the future, but many equally endowed scientists have, including the authors of The Limits to Growth, the 1972 book that accurately foretold how 20th century economic growth would damage Earth’s natural systems.
So too did Barry Jones, one of the rare public intellectuals to reach high office in this country and still going strong aged 93. “Writer, teacher, lawyer, social activist, quiz champion and former politician” is how Wikipedia describes him.
It should have added “futurist”. As science minister in Bob Hawke’s government, Jones sought to apply Australia’s best minds to understanding where we’re headed. He set up the Commission for the Future, which identified climate change as an urgent and existential threat to humanity and life generally.
That was in 1985, three years before the United States Congress learned about that threat from physicist James Hansen and over two decades ahead of Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.
Jones harangued parliamentary colleagues and whoever else would listen about climate change, but he was dismissed as an alarmist. As he later described it, “I was in a category of one.” His Commission for the Future was axed by the Howard government in 1996.
It’s not as if people don’t care about the future. We’re thinking ahead all the time when we mull over things like planning for next week or next year, saving for a home or retirement, raising and educating children. And we do consider climate. Looking up at the sky, we’re all the time asking ourselves, what’s ahead?
Barry Jones is a lot of things, but he’s no storyteller. Getting a handle on something that remains several steps removed from present lives and weaving it into a coherent narrative has proven hard for the best writers, a stumbling block they have wrestled with for many years, with mixed success.
Telling stories is a fundamental human instinct, says Tim Winton – “how we make sense of the world, how we carry others with us, a vehicle of meaning.” He took on the challenge of climate fiction (“cli-fi”) in a 2024 dystopian novel about Australia in the distant future. Juice, which Winton sees as his toughest assignment, sits alongside Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) as a cli-fi benchmark.
Last year, first-time Tasmanian author Susie Greenhill gave that challenge a good shake in her fine debut novel The Clinking. She drew heavily on her own lifelong relationship with Tasmanian nature in her story of a young family in an unravelling society seeking solace and security in the wilderness.
Another Tasmanian, veterinarian Janet Berry, has now thrown her hat into the ring. Kanamaluka Fella (subtitle “Climate Apocalypse 2084”) takes its title from the Indigenous name for the Tamar estuary, Berry’s home territory and the setting for most of the novel’s action.
Finn is a teenage boy whose city life is turned upside down when a food shortage sparks violence and rioting. Under duress, the family travels to a family property in the country where they are forced to reinvent their lives without supermarkets and other mod cons.
This self-published novel is not an easy read. There are many many loose ends and undeveloped concepts. One of these is the always-italicised “brainy”, a device implanted into the bodies of young people to educate them about the world and which, we’re led to believe, may be used to control and manipulate us if we think subversive thoughts at the wrong time.
But every mind, every vision counts. Berry’s book explores how a universal threat will affect us, in our corner of the world, and I couldn’t put it down.