Science and fiction and the truth

February 2025

My family finds it weird, but every new year I count the days until the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences publishes their Doomsday Clock statement. Usually sometime in late January a statement comes out with the image of the clock with its second hand indicating how close humans are to destroying the world.  https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

The history of the clock is interesting in itself, but I find the fact that a group of eminent scientists meet twice a year to discuss the vulnerability of our world due to humans oddly comforting. They ask themselves: Is the world safer or less safe than a year ago? Why? They then go deep into climate, political, nuclear, biological and technological sciences to answer these broad questions and then release their verdict both pictorially on the clock and in shorter and longer versions of their written statement. It’s always sobering reading, but I never feel despair. Instead I appreciate that we have a group of people who can digest all the scary stuff and represent it in way we can all understand.

Another way to look at scary stuff where you don’t have to be an atomic scientist is through art. For me, as a non-starter in the visual art category, this means writing fiction which is not only (hopefully) well expressed and entertaining, but also reveals a truth that is hard to see any other way.

Albert Camus: ‘Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.’

Jessamyn West: ‘Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.’

Robert Frost: ‘We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.’

So, at 89 seconds to midnight, this year I will have these quotes front of mind as I finish and polish a variety of writing projects.