Page 42 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

other thrillers and spoofs of thrillers in recent eras had plot lines involving
weather or climate control. In Our Man Flint (1965), super-duper secret agent
Derek Flint foils an evil cabal of utopian mad scientists who are planning to take
over the world through weather control. At the end of the movie The Androm-
eda Strain (1971), cloud seeding over the Pacific ocean results in the alien
“strain” being washed into the salt water, presumably killing it. The Nitrogen Fix
(1980), by Hal Clement, depicts catastrophic global chemical and environmen-
tal changes in the not-too-distant future triggered by both extractive indus-
try and misguided genetic engineering aimed at increasing the number and
quality of nitrogen compounds. The resulting chemical reactions deplete the
Earth’s atmosphere of oxygen, deposit toxic and explosive compounds on the
surface, and acidify the oceans. Anaerobic bacteria are the only life-forms that
flourish, while humans survive only with breathing apparatus and, since most
metals corrode in this harsh environment, develop a material culture based on
ceramic technology. Jack Williamson’s Terraforming Earth (2001) is based on
the premise that after a devastating asteroid impact, beneficent robots will tend
the human remnant, slowly terraform the Earth, and eventually reintroduce
colonies of cloned humans on the planet, while Kim Stanley Robinson looks
to the utopian project of terraforming the planet Mars in the not-too-distant
future in his trilogy Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996).
In The Case for Mars (1996), Robert Zubrin argues that terraforming Mars for
human habitation would be a relatively simple and straightforward process. Not
to overlook the comedic genre, in the Red Green Show episode “Rain Man” (sea-
son 15, episode 297), title character Red Green sets up a homemade cloud-seed-
ing cannon at Possum Lodge to shoot chemicals into the clouds and alleviate a
drought—with hilarious unintended consequences.
In what follows, rather than overwhelming the reader with the seemingly
endless themes of modern or postmodern, post-1960s science fiction, I have
chosen to present some older literature that most people have not read or prob-
ably have not read recently. This literature, which is dated in many ways, yet
quite relevant and enjoyable in others, strikes many of the thematic and moral
chords that echo through past, recent, and current concerns about weather
and climate control. I am not claiming—indeed, I think it is insupportable to
claim—that science fantasy eventually finds its way into science fact. Instead,
generations of readers, long before the atomic age or the space age, discovered
in science fiction a more subtle kind of wish fulfillment that sets the tone but
not the parameters for what might be expected in the future. The main theme
here is control, but the literary genres are varied. Although some of it is tragic,
much is what we might call “hard path” science fiction (with apologies to

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