ABSTRACT
Fiction allows us to temporarily climb out of a real world that all too often seems mundane and unpleasant. Disaster science fiction takes us to events and locations that may never exist, adds emotionally disturbing horrors, introduces individuals and groups that are caricatures of good and evil, courage and cowardice, and brilliance and stupidity. Once a semester, I give undergraduate students passages from a few of the books and movies described in this chapter, and then we connect the passages to the science we know, highlighting the areas of overlap and places where writer creativity replaces reality. The students enjoy the exercise, sometimes as much as I do. A few times I have given them an assignment of reading a disaster sci-fi book or watching a movie and writing a short essay about it. For risk analysts, a good science fiction novel and movie should not only be
entertaining and mind stretching, but also provoke us with challenging hazard events, memorable images of human and ecological damage, captivating albeit not necessarily effective risk management solutions, and unacceptable economic and political consequences. Movies have the additional attributes of stirring images and sounds, which may be what people remember more than the plot, which I think too often can be shallow. The chapter is divided into three parts. I begin with a review of some sci-fi
books. Some of the text from the book section was originally published in Risk Analysis, An International Journal as an essay (Greenberg 2011). I received many positive comments from colleagues who recommended that I expand it to movies. Movies are where most of our students encounter disaster sci-fi. The third section of the chapter lists common characteristics that I have observed in disaster science fiction, including an unflattering characterization of how scientists are characterized in nearly every movie.
