Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.
John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
Do you want Godzilla? Because that's how you get Godzilla.
One small problem - this isn't a bad movie. This announcement is part of a far more threatening scenario for the future than the genesis of Japan's favourite kaiju.
Modern history is full of ecological disasters: Minimata, Bhopal, Love Canal, the Summitville mines, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk, the list goes on and on, each entry with its own associated tally of deaths, birth defects, ruined ecosystems, blighted landscapes, and so on. Fukushima had already made the list, and it seems either blind, stupid, or arrogant - perhaps all three - to decide that the resulting toxic waste is a suitable candidate for aquatic disposal.
Time and time again, science fiction has painted a future in which the accumulated sins of the industrial age have come home to roost. It can be in the background, as in The Postman, the Mad Max movies or The Road, or the focus of the story as in The Sheep Look Up, The Death of Grass, The End of the Dream, The Last Hope of Earth, or a host of other grim outcomes.
Right now, the various crimes against nature have been widely spread across the globe, and relatively small in size, like pinpricks compared to the planet itself. However, it only takes a pinprick to pop a balloon...
Come to think of it, a giant lizard with atomic breath might be the best we could hope for.
- Sid
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