: Utilities of Fiction : Environmental Fiction :
Theories of Everything and Beyond

from page 24 of "The Flocking Party"

 

from page 31 of "The Flocking Party"

When you get to exit 40, you'll go north on Sparrow Road. There will be two gas stations. Turn left at the Exxon station. There are a couple of hills you'll go over, but when you see the red barn, you'll want to make a left on Hebbets Lane. My house is the second one on the right with the bird feeders in the yard.

Narrative representations can be very helpful, especially when you are visiting unknown territories. Directions, mythologies, and fictions are commonly helpful in this way. These stories explain larger environments and how we might work with them as partners. They make complex environments and processes into simple, portable models. In Greek mythology, for example, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, was a personality that people could associate to the immensity of the land and seasons. When Hades kidnapped her daughter, Persephone, the land grew desolate from Demeter's anxiety creating Winter (Leeming 102).

Mythology did very well at these sorts of environmental explanations until a particularly exacting discipline came along called science. Science helps us to understand details of the environment, but it often falls short at synthesizing them in the coherent way that mythologies and fictions do. The wealth of meaningful details makes it difficult to choose which ones to exclude when telling stories that represent broad domains, leaving us with unwieldy maps of complex territories. Today, perhaps, fiction returns a needed synthesis to our understanding of the environment, whether it is through B-movie genres, epic thrillers, popular literature, or pure science fiction.

I often feel that I am trying to find theories of everything, big sweeping views. I continuously attempt to make creative work that addresses complex systems, but always end up with visual representations that are too visually abstract, lacking clear communication. From this experience I have built an understanding of biological systems, but I also want to share these experiences with people. I've begun to realize that the use of stories with familiar examples can do this effectively. Stories have connections to the way we understand complex territories, because they reflect our sequential movement through a landscape. This is why myths are so good at representing environments, even if the terrain reaches beyond our view. My recent story, “The Flocking Party” uses the examples of birds and biotechnology to convey a tale about the larger systems of nature and technology (Landau).
www.theflockingparty.com