The Power of Research

To write her bestseller Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Octavia Butler plastered her office walls with papers about global warming, road maps of California, treatises on edible plants, and news about the decline of education and increase in mass incarceration. Through her speculative fiction, Butler ran a thought experiment: How can we survive what is coming, and what’s already here? This was her “burning question”—one many readers share.

“All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about thirty years to grow into a full-fledged disaster.”

Octavia Butler, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future”

Find the Burning Question

This term is used by academic researchers to describe a question that drives you and that can motivate an entire career. For Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Eric Kandel, a Holocaust refugee, that question was memory—how we form memories, and where they live in our minds.

But “How does memory work?” was too broad to tackle without an entry point, so he narrowed his focus to something specific and manageable that could shed light on the larger question. In Kandel’s case, this involved recording neural activity in sea slugs. To identify your own burning question (or to help your writers to do so), you can try a formula, lightly adapted from Booth, Colomb and Williams’ The Craft of Research:

I am researching (story) because I want to know (question) in order to better understand (topic).

Note that whatever question your team frames should yield specific key terms useful for database research and site visits. Connecting your story to a larger topic will allow you to articulate its relevance and stakes to a wider audience.

Research with Scientists and Disciplinary Experts

Arguably the most famous climate fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson (known as KSR) builds his worlds on cutting-edge scientific research. For his bestselling novel, New York 2140, KSR relied on legendary climate scientist James Hansen’s paleodata to rationalize and give credence to the 20-foot sea-level rise that turned every NYC street into a canal. KSR regularly reads academic papers on economics and geoengineering and attends STEM conferences.

Even without taking such a deep dive, here’s how your team can approach research through the lens of building interdisciplinary relationships:

Find an Expert Consultant

  • To find an expert consultant, identify a major voice in an academic conversation. It’s helpful to search Google Scholar by key term and consider how many times the paper has been “cited by” other researchers (if a thousand, you are looking at significant research).
  • You can also find an expert via a topic search of recent publications that center climate reporting, like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg and The Guardian, and note the experts interviewed. You can also look at climate-and-environment specific publications, including Yale Climate Connections, Carbon Brief, Grist, and Inside Climate News. At the same time, be aware that major media often ignores the work of women and people of color in the sciences. Try Reflect Reality to find a woman expert in any field, and The Open Notebook to find diverse sources for science stories.
  • Consult with professors in the universities closest to where your story takes place and contact them directly. In doing so, you may also find an on-set expert specific to your location. This local expertise can be crucial when storytelling is about places that are underrepresented.

Work with an Expert Consultant

  • Come prepared, as if for a media interview. Do a media and social media search to see what recent research topics interest the expert and how they are positioning their work. Read their professional website, review any lay-friendly translations of their research, and, yes, dive into the papers. The abstract and introduction should be informative and relatively accessible. If not, you can consider using a platform like Google’s Notebook LM to create a lay-friendly translation. Please note that the use of generative AI is both a personal and ethical choice. The Producers Guild has issued a “Top 10 Questions Producers Should Ask When Utilizing AI.” (Writers and any team member involved in the writing process must document AI use.) As you read the paper, see if you can locate the expert’s research problem and “burning question.”
  • Come curious and get personal. Ask the expert what they are researching now, and why it’s important. How did they come to this research problem and this field? You’re there not just to understand the science, but to hear the expert’s anecdotes, questions, doubts and plans–all of which can inform the fiction (or character) you’re creating. Ask for visual references and analogies to explain abstract concepts. Try to visit a lab or tag along to a research site.
  • Explain your story’s purpose and be open to feedback and potential criticism: Climate scientists may be rightly sensitive to stories that distort the science, given current disinformation and even vilification of climate researchers like Michael E. Mann. You may consider giving a scientist the right to review portions of your scripts related to their work.
  • Consider asking the expert for referrals to their research partners or colleagues, or recommendations for conferences to attend. This conversation can be the beginning of a deep engagement not only with a single expert, but also with a field or a potential creative partnership.

Research and Climate Fiction

Climate films show depth of research from world to character, from the car-free streets and biodiversity-rich urban landscape of Wakanda in Black Panther to the “stillsuits” of Dune. In Don’t Look Up, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character was closely modeled on embattled climate scientist Michael E. Mann—even though DiCaprio’s scientist studied asteroids.

These films exemplify the generative power of research: to transform ideas into stories that break through where science has struggled. Writers of all dramatic genres reach across disciplines and use fiction to elevate real-life stories that mainstream media has often failed to humanize.

Several of the novels below have been optioned for screen adaptation, showing the strength of this research-based approach:

  • Henry Hoke’s Open Throat features a queer mountain lion trying to survive his journey through Los Angeles’ scorched Griffith Park and surrounding streets. Hoke based the story on a real displaced mountain lion, P-22.
  • Stephen Markley’s magisterial novel, The Deluge, tells a story woven from the perspective of six protagonists, with key characters ranging from an ecoterrorist to a policy wonk to an actor-turned-televangelist. To write it, Markley needed to delve into climate activism, ecoterrorism, economics and politics, as well as what climate models tell us (nothing good).
  • Imbolo Mbue’s ecocritical novel How Beautiful We Were is the story of one young woman and her community trying to stand up to an oil company in a fictional African country. Mbue said she did a lot of research on climate activists for the book, citing parallels to the Niger Delta oil conflicts, Chevron’s case in Ecuador, Standing Rock, and the BP Oil Spill.
  • Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, cited by stalwart activist Bill McKibben as the most important climate novel ever, takes on dozens of perspectives from a UN diplomat, closely resembling the former Irish president and well-known climate advocate Mary Robinson, to climate refugees, to scientists attempting to halt the flow of Antarctic glaciers. He did the research to match.