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14 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 21 DECEMBER 2022 NEWS Chris Pak YOU see the forest of cranes before you reach the coast. In the heat's haze, machinery re- sounds in the middle distance, shifting and tamping dirt with earth-shattering force. Be- yond the construction site, the sea sparkles under the Sun, traversed by ships old and new. It seems the whole city takes its cue from the coast – there is always so much being built, de- molished and rebuilt. Those in power push ahead with their enduring programme to re- shape the world by building new land. This is a society that is being transformed for a particular vision of the future: to build new worlds able to meet the challenges of a soaring population, more space and new modes of living. But what kind of future is being built, and at what cost? This isn't science fiction. This is the real story of land reclamation in 1980s-90s Hong Kong, where I grew up. Land reclamation in- volves the filling of water bodies with soil to extend land or create artificial islands. Housing and in- frastructure on the scale seen in Hong Kong is only possible be- cause of how much land – over 70km² of it – was reclaimed. But this has come at a cost to people, biodiversity and the integrity of wildlife habitats alike. It was during my childhood in this city, part of which was so re- cently submerged beneath the ocean, that I first began to spec- ulate about the drastic ways we transform space – and the unfore- seen impacts this has. As a child immersed in science fiction classics such as Frank Her- bert's Dune, I quickly realised that fiction can help us consider, imagine, and work through these unforeseen impacts. And so it is no surprise that climate fiction – or "cli-fi" – has quickly become a recognised genre in recent years. From Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour to Omar El Akkad's American War, people are clearly interested in imagining possible futures as a way of considering how we are going to get ourselves out of this mess. If there is something that we can be fairly sure of, it is that the fu- ture will be radically different to what we had imagined, and that it will demand adjustment. This is why authors of science fiction are consulted by organisations and governments: to help us think about the risks and challenges of the future in ways inaccessible to other disciplines. As COP26, the delayed 2020 UN climate change conference in Glasgow, approach- es we urgently need more of this imaginative impulse. Science fiction has certainly al- ready played a part in this narra- tive. Harnessing the Sun's energy has a long history in science fic- tion, and Arthur C. Clarke is of- ten credited with coming up with the idea of the solar cell-powered geostationary communications satellite. NASA's satellite system, meanwhile, is crucial for monitor- ing climate change and can plau- sibly be traced back, in part, to sci- ence fiction's capacity for thinking about worlds and systems. And of course, spaceships and space sta- tions – indeed, our expansion into space – is an invention of science fiction. Inspired by my early days in Hong Kong, I went on to shape a career researching science fiction with a focus on technical systems that transform the planet we live on: the idea of terraforming and geoengineering. If terraforming is the modification of other plan- ets to enable habitation by life on Earth, geoengineering can be defined as the planetary modifi- cation of the Earth – such as the deliberate intervention in the cli- mate system. As the controversial debate about geoengineering becomes increasingly urgent given the cata- strophic failure to curb emissions, science fiction about terraforming and geoengineering can help us imagine possible configurations of solutions to the climate crisis and their implications. A closer look at this particular example will also show why embracing this form of thinking is so crucial for the cli- mate crisis more generally too. The power of storytelling Proposals for geoengineering and terraforming are informed both by history and by the stories we tell one another. What science fiction can do is imagine and think through the political, as well as the scientific, implications of the tech- nological choices we make. Sci- ence fiction stories speculate on, diagnose and illustrate the experi- ences and the problems wrapped up in global debates about mitiga- tion and adaptation. The aim of science fiction is not to solve society's problems (though specific works of sci- ence fiction do offer solutions that we as readers are invited to critique, revise, advocate for, and even adopt); nor is science fiction about prediction. We therefore shouldn't evaluate science fiction according to its success or failure in this regard. Rather, the role of science fiction is to speculate on possibilities. Science fiction, then, shouldn't be read in isolation. The fictional space is an imaginative realm for testing ideas and values, and for attempting to imagine futures that could inform our societies now. The genre seeks to push beyond the assumptions of a singular time and place by providing a range of alternative ways of conceiving ide- as, contexts and relationships. Sci- ence fiction asks to be challenged; it asks for us to hold one story up against another, to consider and interrogate the worlds portrayed and what they might tell us about our stances on crucial contempo- rary issues. Reading such fiction can help us to think speculatively beyond the technical aspects of adaptation, mitigation and, indeed, interven- tion, and to understand the stanc- es that we as people and as soci- eties take toward these concerns. This is the idea behind my book, in which I survey the history of stories about terraforming, geo- engineering, space and climate change. What science fiction teaches us is that technologies are not simply technical systems. Science is not simply a theoretical and technical endeavour. Rather, the practice of science and the development of technologies are also fundamentally social and cul- tural. This is why many research- ers use the word "sociotechnical" to describe technological systems. A geoengineered planet In the real – policy – world, fictions inform the imagination. Some imagine a future world cov- ered by machines sucking CO₂ out of the air and pumping it in- to the porous rock below. Others imagine one powered by a port- folio of vast wind and solar farms, hydroelectric and geothermal plants. Some imagine business largely continuing as usual, with only moderate changes in how we produce and use energy, and little to no change to how we organise our economies and our lives. And some suggest we send planes into the stratosphere, pumping out particulates that will reflect sunlight back into space and turn the sky white. It is this last vision, solar radia- tion management (SRM), that has been the subject of particularly in- tense debate. SRM involves con- trolling the amount of sunlight trapped in Earth's atmosphere. A number of scientists, including Ken Caldeira and David Keith (sometimes referred to as the "geoclique") advocate for further research into SRM, but they are strongly opposed by various pres- sure groups. Bill McGuire, a patron of Sci- entists for Global Responsibility and Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at UCL, recently wrote a science fiction novel, Skyseed (2020), which imagines the terri- fying failure of a nanotech-based approach to solar radiation man- agement. This novel describes the impossibility – given our current state of knowledge – of foreseeing the consequences of this specula- tive technology. Proposals for solar radiation management vary enormously, but the most common forms in- volve brightening marine clouds or injecting particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. Doing so, it is proposed, would help to cool the Earth, though it would do nothing to remove carbon and other carbon equivalent gases from the atmosphere, nor would it address ocean acidification. More extravagant ideas include building sunshades in space and placing them in various orbital configurations. If this idea sounds like it comes straight out of a sci- ence fiction novel, that's because it does: such orbital mirrors fea- ture in James Oberg's 1981 work New Earths and Lois McMaster Bujold's 1998 novel Komarr. Transforming planets But what can terraforming tell us about geoengineering and Earth? The idea of transforming places beyond Earth – planets or other spatial bodies – to make them more amenable to human life has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. The necessity of maintaining life support sys- tems in space habitats and space- Climate crisis: how science fiction's hopes and fears can inspire humanity's response