Cautionary tales stretch back into antiquity. Their messages still resonate.

For instance, remember the overconfident rabbit who loses a footrace to a plodding tortoise? Or the mischievous boy who cries wolf once too often and is devoured as fed-up rescuers fail to respond? Or, finding sweet grapes out of reach, a fox conceals his disappointment with sour derision? And so on.

Usually told to wide-eyed children by semi-serious caregivers, stories like these survive in adult folklore, usually as fables of payback and retribution.

You may have heard the one about a drunken nature-vandal who pumped a shotgun shell into a majestic saguaro, only to have it crush him as it fell. A similar fate met the aspiring vending-machine thief, another dipshit, who pulled the heavy contraption over on himself while trying to extract a candy bar. (This one, apparently true, netted the hapless bandit a Darwin Award.) Noisy vaccine skeptics who succumb to the very same communicable disease that they have been scoffing at fall into this category.

Tales of awful warning also populate our literature; science fiction has been the main vehicle. On the familiar fantastic end, earthlings cower before the alien onslaught. Or some force, perhaps an errant mini-black hole, shatters our Moon, and Earth’s surface blisters under the impacts of a swarm of debris.

Not much we can do about these apocalyptic wind-ups other than wait for the end. Exciting as these stories prove, and some scare the pants off us, they are yet mostly not very interesting as a result.

The World may End in Fire; Some say in Ice…

One exception to the usually dreary doomsday scenario, Kurt Vonnegut’s comic/mordant novel Cat’s Cradle, tells of an oblivious, amoral physicist who invents a catastrophically self-propagating variant water molecule that freezes at 114° Fahrenheit. (Spoiler alert: no end of trouble ensues.)

Other, more complex and thought-provoking stories return readers to that naïve psychology when, as children, we first heard those instructive tales.

These adult fictions range across a landscape of dire possibility, some immanent in the real world: disasters arising from inequities of class and gender, the rise of tyrannical governments which control thought and information, the unintended consequences of technological advance, or runaway laboratory slate-wiper viruses that lay waste to humankind. Then, too, speculative fiction explores the long-term manmade ecological collapses prompted by atmospheric pollution. Their imaginations playing freely, authors followed the paths of instantaneous catastrophes of nuclear winter and longer-term genetic mutation arising from radiation poisoning.

During seventh and eighth grades, ripe for stories like these, I read single-mindedly through a long shelf of speculative fiction that the local library held in its collection. Many of these hopefully projected a technologically innovative Earth that had surmounted divisions of class and race and national ambition. In these stories things were looking up. There was a bright, big, beautiful tomorrow waiting at the end of every day.

Prophets of Doom

But in these volumes speculations sometimes darkened as authors became prophets of doom, recruiting the future to sharpen critical thinking about the vulnerable present.

For nineteenth century audiences just beginning to digest Charles Darwin’s insights, H.G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine (1895) flipped the usual script of evolutionary progress. His time-traveler spins forward into a degenerated future divided grotesquely by class. A surface population, bovine in its tranquility, live a contented life—save for the cannibals who dwell underground and raise them for food! Somewhere between Wells’ hierarchical fin de siècle present and the retrograde far-future, the lower depths must have rebelled to give the gentry their just desserts.

More entertained than worried, most American readers trusted democratic principles and a built-in sense of fairness and decency to save them from class warfare.

George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984 (1949), a grim parody of repressive societies in the East, gave us the word, doublethink for the mental gymnastics compulsory for the citizens of a future authoritarian surveillance-state England. In the Orwellian future all news was fake news as a deceitful “Ministry of Truth” generated a torrent of misinformation.

American readers believed themselves insulated from such totalitarian outcomes by their confidence in the checks and balances of a free press, an independent judiciary, and a belief in the common decency that immunized civic virtue in this exceptional country.

Defense Mechanisms

No such refuge avails in Octavia Butler’s searing Parable of the Sower (1993) which envisions the disastrous accumulating human-caused effects of a sharply warming planet. Like other “cli-fi” novels, Butler’s extrapolates a future plagued by interlocking climate disasters—crop failure and food insecurity, economic collapse, government dissolution, and a reappearance of sexual slavery. Humanity itself becomes an endangered species.

As our real world faces record shattering heat waves, unprecedented wildfire seasons, rising sea levels, and rapidly intensifying “once-in-a-hundred-year” storms that appear yearly, a cluster of influential conspiratorialists deny the plain reality of planetary warming. Unsurprisingly, much of this denialism rests on vested economic self-interest.

But for the most anxious and hypersensitive, the immanence of threat engages a psychological defense mechanism against intolerable feelings. As the Australian professor of clinical psychology Bruce Wilson summarized, such denial “becomes the refuge to keep these thoughts and feelings sequestered.” Thinking positively, ordinarily good advice but in this case no better than willful ignorance, itself courts disaster.

Apocalyptic Thinking and Mistrust

Like the eye-rolling that today’s sophisticated kids perform when yet again hearing the tale of children, who when warned not to skate on Farmer Giles’ pond, and did and drowned, a pervasive skepticism against the bearers of bad news has set in for millions of adults. A remarkable turn, because this country formerly led the world in decisive optimism.

Speculative fiction anticipated the kind of popular confusion, misinformation, despair, and hostility to science that grew in the wake of the recent COVID pandemic.

One of the most eerily familiar examples, H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, debuted nearly a century ago. His screenplay for a 1939 film version pictured the worldwide aftermath of pandemic and governmental collapse. (This future wreckage looked roughly like the present-day Middle East.) It is scientists and adventurers who begin to rescue civilization from disorder and warlordism. On the eve of their greatest success, however, a fear-fueled populist insurrection, mistrustful of expertise, nearly topples their triumph.

When powerful warnings like these lay spotlight impending disaster, they inoculate us against the paralysis and fear that inhibits remedy.