How to get global warming through to comic book fans

Elliot S. Maggin, a longtime comic book writer, points out that if this were Krypton and Al Gore were Jor-El...

[Jor-El,] you will recall, is Superman's Kryptonian father, an eminent scientist whom the ruling "Science Council" of his world laughed out of the room when he told them that they were facing a planetary crisis: "Gentlemen, Krypton is doomed."

Like the Science Council, our leaders reacted with guffaws when one of our own rose to sound an earthshaking alarm. As a professional fabulist, by contrast, my reaction to Al Gore's 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," was one of enormous excitement. It had pathos and drama, and extraordinary ideas expressed clearly and simply: a proposal for a new paradigm for the relationship between humanity and the planet.

Fiction, when it's any good, is a fantasy that tells the truth. Given the characters and degrees of suspension of disbelief with which you seed your story, you have to be internally consistent. A hero, for example, cannot choose as a matter of preference to let a bad guy get away with murder — or theft, or extortion, or environmental exploitation. And a group of characters established as a stodgy, priggish oligarchy of entrenched rulers cannot choose to accede to the warnings of an upstart — a rival, really — who makes a case, no matter how compelling, for an extensive and costly solution to a pressing problem. More likely, the rulers would deny that the problem exists.