Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Sean McMullen This paper is based on a story of mine, ‘The Precedent’, that will be published in The Magazine of Fantasy of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and which is currently being developed as a film script. In the paper, I propose a utopian vision developing whereby the next generation does not try to balance the current western lifestyle with the limits of the Earth to support that lifestyle, but criminalises the concept of growth economics at every level. The idea of utopia is largely social in origin, so that a change in society’s values can throw up a model that we might view as dystopian, yet seems very reasonable to a future generation. In ‘The Precedent’, I have postulated a scenario in 2035 where entire generations of middle-aged to elderly people are put on trial and executed as climate criminals. Driving this utopia/dystopia is the generation that has inherited a poisoned, warming and resource-poor world. It is a version of the Nuremberg trials on a global scale, for everyone born after 2000. Sean McMullen is one of Australia’s top science-fiction and fantasy authors. In the late 90s, he established himself in the American market, and his work has been translated into Polish, French, Japanese and other languages. The settings for Sean’s work range from the Roman Empire, through Medieval Europe, to cities of the distant future.
