What on Earth Can Atlantis Teach Us: Cli-fi and the inconvenient truth behind our pre- history

This article presents and contextualises my recently completed cli-fi novel, Chameleon, which is set during the fall of Atlantis and presents a scenario of extreme climate change some 12,000 years ago. I argue that by referring back to our pre-history we have much to learn and uncover about our earlier experiences of surviving climate change, and of coming to terms with its devastating impact, which has caused us to couch flood stories as myth and legend. Cli-fi has the potential to go beyond narratives of fear and humiliation to show us hope that our planet can survive a climate catastrophe as did our predecessors and live to tell the tale, just as the Atlanteans did.


Shortly after the final instalment of my climate fiction debut, The SeaBEAN
Trilogy, came out in 2014, I was commissioned by The Guardian to write a piece entitled 'What is Cli-fi and Why I Write It'. Cli-fi was still regarded as an obscure emergent genre, so the Guardian's brief was to articulate not only my own motivation for writing climate fiction for younger readers, but also to scope the genre as a whole. This led me to realise the need for climate fiction above all to instil among readers a sense of hope as well as urgency in relation to the plight of our planet, a precept which came up in an article published earlier this year on Literary Hub, entitled 'Can Climate Fiction Be Hopeful?' (DiFrancesco & Shelby, 2019).
Six years on and everything has changed: cli-fi has burst into the mainstream with articles about its ambiguous relation to 'climate fact' popping up everywhere from the BBC ('The Cultural Frontline, What is Cli-Fi?') (2019) to Phys.org ('Scarier than fiction: climate worry driving 'cli-fi' boom') (Marhic, 2019) to CNN ('Cli-fi on the big screen changes minds about real climate change') (Christensen, 2019). This rise in popularity is attributable to the undeniable rise of climate change activism among young people, inspired by teenage activists like Greta Thunberg, who have not only irrevocably changed the debate about climate change, they've taken ownership of it. At the same time, cli-fi has been driven further into the limelight by the fact that world leaders have drawn back from their commitment to a greener future and further enraged an already disenfranchised young demographic all around the world.
While cli-fi is now a hotbed of creativity, spawning novels, films and TV shows, very little real political progress is being been made, and the kind of progressive intergovernmental climate action that is sorely needed is not being implemented. Even now, the United Nation's IPCC website claims that its role is merely to 'provide regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation' rather than propose strategy and oversee its implementation. i This hands-off approach means that it is still up to individual countries to formulate their climate policies in light of the IPCC's findings in the form of 'Nationally Determined Contributions' (NDCs), and there is as yet no global entity providing a more executive role where climate action is concerned.
To my mind, these circumstances give cli-fi a renewed imperative: back in the 1950s during the cold war, science fiction speculatively led the way in terms of imagining ground-breaking technologies and mind-boggling future scenarios, showing us fascinating glimpses of a possible future world and spurring inventors and engineers to try and realise some of it. As time went on, Hollywood blockbusters favoured the dystopian end of the science fiction spectrum for delivering maximum impact. This 'fear Holding. Exchanges 2021 8(2), pp. 120-131 programming' is what we've all grown up with and is what enables influential organisations like McKinsey to implore their clients to shore up their operations against the onset of climate change, as in their September 2019 article 'Earth to CEO: Your company is already at risk from climate change' (McKinsey, 2019).
Rather than play into this theatre of 'climate fear', to my mind cli-fi authors now need to double down and, rather than offer more fear-mongering and reactive 'what-if' stories involving climate change, write in such a way as to assert the need for a more ethical and equitable approach to technology, environmentalism and social engineering where climate action is concerned. In other words, cli-fi needs to foster a change in the way we approach problem-solving. Contrary to what Katy Waldman asserted in her November 2019 piece for The New Yorker entitled 'How "Cli-Fi," Forces Us to Confront the Incipient Death of the Planet' (Waldman, 2018), cli-fi needs to demonstrate that with significant and ingenious acts of intervention, species and habitat decimation is not a given.
The academic community has now accepted that the dinosaurs were most likely wiped out by an asteroid making landfall at Chicxulub in Mexico some 66 million years ago, and new evidence reveals that this colossal impact came after a long build-up of CO 2 in the atmosphere, acidification of the oceans etc, according to recent studies involving calcium isotopes in clamshells from that period, which has lead scientists to concur that 'understanding how our planet responded to past extreme warming and CO 2 can help us prepare for changes due to human-caused climate change' (Cockburn, 2019). However, rather than look back as far as the cretaceous period, there was a much more recent mass extinction event after the last glacial maximum (LGM) at the end of the Younger Dryas (YD) period, when not only were most of the Earth's megafauna wiped out, but the human race almost entirely perished too, around 12,000 years ago.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, first proposed in 2007 by Firestone (et al., 2007), is now widely regarded as the reason for the near total loss of megafauna and also led to 'peak concentrations of platinum, hightemperature spherules, meltglass and nanodiamonds, forming an isochronous datum at more than 50 sites across 50 million km² of Earth's surface' according to a March 2019 article in Nature (Pino, et al, 2019). It is this more recent period of abrupt climate change in our pre-history that has been throwing up some new inconvenient truths in the last few years: huge impact craters have been discovered under the Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland and at the archaeological site Pilauco Bajo in Chile, both large enough to explain why almost every culture in the world has a flood myth and a residue of megalithic sites built by our antediluvian ancestors. These recent discoveries are so stunning that the summary of the research findings from southern Chile, published in Science Daily in March 2019, even sounds like the blurb for a cli-fi novel: 'When geologists set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be.' (Science News, 2019).
Until very recently, geological and tectonic theories have steered a uniformitarian course set by Charles Lyell ii and Charles Darwin, away from notions of catastrophism, by insisting that any shifts in our bedrock and even in our evolution must have taken place very slowly over millions of years. Their narrative has been so successfully implanted that for the last 200 years we have not only failed to question the lack of crucial evidence to support it, we have also overlooked the abundance of hard evidence that would lead us to draw the opposite conclusion: change can take place on Earth so fast and so suddenly, that as noted by several peer-reviewed articles (Ghose, 2014;Robinette, 2013), mammoths were frozen solid within seconds in the permafrost with fresh buttercups still in their mouths, preserved until now at latitudes far from their original habitat.
A much more calamitous version of our geological past was explained and evidenced in meticulous detail back in the 1950s by writers like Charles Hapgood (1999) and Immanuel Velikovsky (1950Velikovsky ( , 1955, but despite even Albert Einstein's words of support, their work was seen by the scientific community as worryingly heretical; it was simply too challenging and controversial to accept that momentous and unstoppable events like crustal displacement or celestial bombardment could threaten our sense of security when we had other more pressing global issues to deal with. When I came across these ideas for the first time, my mind started racing with new questions about our pre-history and how little we really know about what earlier generations might have lived through many millennia ago. I began looking in earnest for alternative answers and uncovering more inconvenient truths than I had previously thought possible.
The result of this voyage of discovery is my new novel, a YA title set during the fall of Atlantis entitled Chameleon, which comes out later this year. I am curious to see whether, like the work of Hapgood and Velikovsky, it too will be regarded as controversial or heretical in the sense that it 'holds an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted', because in this story I have worked on the assumption that Atlantis was lost during a previous episode of extreme climate change some 12,000 years ago, precipitated by extra-terrestrial impact which humanity almost didn't survive. As far as I am concerned, this is not fanciful supposition on my part, but stems from a disparate but compelling weight of evidence which supports Plato's detailed descriptions of the location, orientation, layout and life of Atlantis that taken together, indicate that it really did exist. iii In constructing Chameleon as an antediluvian cli-fi narrative, I used a familiar framing device whereby an archaeologist, Dr Camille Warden, unearths at different sites three ancient documents, each written in the same pre-cuneiform script and describing a climate catastrophe that brought about the destruction of Atlantis. Dr Warden, confounded by her discovery, appeals to a prominent climate change scientist, Professor Ian Clyffe, who is well known for challenging the consensus view of the Anthropocene era and is prepared to consider alternative theories about the underlying causes of climate change, and as a result an unlikely research collaboration is initiated.
This epistolary structure gave me the opportunity to present Chameleon as a series of recently translated archaeological artefacts, 'the Dogon Scrolls', 'the Sphinx Codex' and 'the Sirian Disks', which when juxtaposed corroborate startling insights about how Atlantis disappeared and how its citizens struggled for their survival. I then ended Chameleon with a fictional journal article from the year 2024 entitled 'What On Earth Can Atlantis Teach Us?', in which a journalist interviews Warden and Clyffe about their joint research, on the eve of an important climate summit in Cairo. This fictional interview functions as a coda to the novel and allowed me to imagine and characterise the contemporary reaction to the fact that Atlantis was destroyed by the last bout of extreme climate change. By locating this interview in the near future, I was able to present the two fictional researchers reflecting on the upset in scientific thinking brought on by the realisation that, as recently as 12,000 years ago, our planet was thrown into unimaginable turmoil.
By turning to our pre-history as a useful precedent rich in narrative potential, cli-fi can in some small way impel the science community to review the inconvenient truth of our ancestral survival at the end of the Younger Dryas period, bringing fresh insights that allow us to extend the scope of the causes and consequences of climate change. Then we might see the kind of breakthroughs that climate activists like Thunberg so desire. As a cli-fi author, I am trying to push the boundaries of our understanding by adopting a greatly expanded perspective on cause and effect, which allows for extra-terrestrial impact and intervention by races from other solar systems, but I account for this by way of ancient Dogon tribal knowledge that is well-documented within the anthropological community iv and recent ideas about the true purpose and age of the pyramids at Giza v which are now being put forward. CW: Like the Atlanteans, we need to evacuate our people permanently away from vulnerable coastal locations; we need to build hundreds of new cities in safe locations and find novel ways to ensure our survival. There is already a seed vault in Svalbard, north of Norway, containing the means to grow food again should all our plant species be wiped out, and many museums have created watertight, impact-proof vaults to store important artworks and artefacts, but without our survival this is all somewhat pointless. As individuals, we are not as resilient as we would like to think we are. We do not have the practical life skills that our predecessors had. Many of those who survived climate change back then did so by virtue of being at high altitude with access to fresh water and natural shelter. We can do better than this. We have the insight and the intelligence to secure an even better outcome than the Atlanteans. Our survival doesn't have to be a case of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

KC: Lastly, what do your findings have to teach us about the future of renewable energy?
IC: We can all do our bit individually, sure, but really, it's down to the big energy companies doing more than simply committing to becoming carbon neutral in the next quarter-century. It's going to take something a lot more visionary and joined up. First and foremost, what the Atlanteans can teach us is not their strategic level of foresight, but their mastery and understanding of renewable energy. They were far more advanced at this than we are. The pyramids are not just extraordinary feats of construction, they were skilfully designed and built to harness, attenuate, balance and distribute energy entering Earth's atmosphere. We don't need to burn fossil fuels to obtain energy. According to our most radical scientists and engineers who believe we're living in an 'electric universe', we don't even need solar panels or wind turbines. We just need to tap into the flow of plasma and electrons in our upper atmosphere. If we do this, we can also boost Earth's magnetic fieldmuch like boosting our own immune system -and protect ourselves from solar flares, mass coronal ejections and EMPs. We might even reduce the likelihood of anything impacting Earth and causing the sort of worldwide climate mayhem the Atlanteans had to contend with. The maths and the science has all been done. It's all up for grabs; we just need to implement it. I say 'us', but really, it's the next generation; they're the ones who are really fired up and angry about our governments' and industries' inaction. They've got the right idea -we just need to step aside now and let them get on with it. (Holding, 2020) vi By ending Chameleon with this final message about the need to step aside and let the next generation 'get on with it', I wanted to sow the seed in the minds of my readers that a better future, a rejuvenated biomass, a resilient, tolerant and conscious global community, and an ethical and equitable scientific and technological agenda are not out of reach. The tipping point of our times will come not when we reach peak carbon, but when we achieve peak open-mindedness and realise we need to relate to climate change in a different way, with more hope and proactivity and less doom and gloom, as Professor Clyffe suggests.
In Chameleon, a group of Atlantean refugees are trying to reach Giza, but it could just as easily have been a tale about a group of survivors heading for Guanches (the Canary Islands), the Basque country or Mexico. Atlantis may still be a mystery, but the tantalising megalithic evidence all around us should inspire a sense of wonder and respect that in an earlier antediluvian epoch, people could construct things we would still struggle to reproduce with today's machinery and computational knowhow. In all likelihood, their cosmological understanding was also much more sophisticated than ours. It that too much for our teleological mindset to entertain? We like to think we are at the forefront of progress, that nothing we have created in our current era has ever been surpassed by the output or knowledge base of a previous one. Would it be so terrible if we were to admit that we know less than our forebears did? Are we still so traumatised by the deep collective memory of this experience that we can only relate to the Great Flood through myth?
In writing a cli-fi story set during our pre-history, I researched many troubling artefacts that are, like climate change, inconvenient truths which have given rise to denial, deprecation and dismissal, which may be regarded as human coping strategies. This lead me to surmise that the events which took place 12,000 years ago must have affected humankind so badly, they were only able to relate to them afterwards as myths. As such, it is my belief that cli-fi also has an important role to play in the demythologisation of our past, in order to prepare us mentally and emotionally for the likelihood of similar events occurring in our future. By re-presenting aspects of our current understanding of cosmology, our historical timeline and our physical reality, cli-fi can help readers to expand their thinking and allow other explanations to come forward and be considered, a practice which is no different to the healthy scepticism embodied in the modern scientific method. I believe that the modern science community is doing itself and us a disservice, in clinging obstinately to earlier so-called 'settled' theories, which scientists like Darwin himself advised should be abandoned should the fossil record not bear them out. We have been encouraged to let our thinking develop in response to the empirical evidence that stands before us, but it seems to me that we have tied ourselves in knots trying to explain away -or turn a blind eye toempirical evidence that did not concur with prevailing hypotheses.
History, they say, is written by the victors. What happens when cli-fi rewrites history from the other point of view is a deep questioning of the received wisdom of our current understanding, raising the possibility of new 'a priori' thinking. Deduced through the speculative literary lens of clifi, we might as a society arrive at fresh conclusions and thereby precipitate more radical solutions to the very real scenario of extreme climate change in which we find ourselves today.
Formerly an architect and academic, Sarah Holding is now a full-time author. Her debut climate fiction title 'SeaBEAN', published in 2013, was a middlegrade time travel adventure set on St Kilda. Sarah has since given workshops and author events at over 150 schools, festivals and libraries and has featured on BBC Radio Scotland. In 2015 she was commissioned to write an article about 'cli-fi' for Guardian Children's Books and in 2016 gave a TEDx talk about 'cli-fi'. Her latest book, 'CHAMELEON' (2020), is set during the fall of Atlantis, which was likely a previous climate change catastrophe.