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} }) </script> </div> </form> </fieldset> <article class="entryArticle content STeditorial"> <header class="entryHeader icon-theme"> <h1 class="entryTitle">Weather Control </h1> </header><p class='tagLine'>Entry updated 20 June 2022. Tagged: Theme.</p><div class="browsingBtns"> <span> <input class="button PNI previous" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?id=p&entry=weather_control'" value="Prev" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI next" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?&entry=weather_control'" value="Next" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI incoming" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/incoming.php?entry=weather_control'" value="About This Entry" title="What links to the entry; contributor initials explained; how to cite; other information" /> </span> </div><p style='float:right; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:10px; position: relative; top: 3px;'> <a href='/gallery.php?id=Bova-Weathermakers.jpg' target='_blank'> <img src='https://x.sf-encyclopedia.com/gal/thumbs/Bova-Weathermakers.jpg' alt='pic'></a></p> <p>The human dream of controlling the weather is an old one. It appears in <a href="/entry/proto_sf">Proto SF</a> in Samuel <a href="/entry/johnson_samuel">Johnson</a>'s <i>Rasselas</i> (<b>1759</b>), in the unreliable words of a <a href="/entry/mad_scientist">Mad Scientist</a> astronomer: "I have possessed, for five years, the regulation of weather, and the distribution of seasons: the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed, from tropick to tropick, by my direction; the clouds, at my call have poured their waters...."</p> <p>Jane <a href="/entry/loudon_jane">Loudon</a>'s anonymously published <i>The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century</i> (<b>1827</b> 3vols; rev <b>1828</b>) envisages weather control as something to be taken for granted in the indicated century; she may yet prove to have been right, although in real life, weather control is in its infancy. A <a href="/entry/genre_sf">Genre SF</a> habit of thinking weather control might be obtainable by <a href="/entry/technology">Technological</a> fiat (see <a href="/entry/cliches">Clichés</a>; <a href="/entry/hard_sf">Hard SF</a>) dodges a fairly obvious condition: that before weather can be controlled, it must be predicted, which is to say understood. Models for predicting weather seem to have been first seriously generated by the physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862-1959), whose equations, though sound, could not be solved without computer power. Only in the twenty-first century has weather prediction begun to augur practical detailed understanding of how weather works: control may come later, in the world. Earlier attempts to influence real weather are in fact attempts to induce weather events, which is a far cry from control in an sf sense. Cloud-seeding with silver iodide sometimes works, and such control of rainfall was practised by the US army for strategic reasons during the Vietnam War (as "Project Popeye") in attempts to damage enemy crops and supply routes. Reverting to the nineteenth century, John Jacob <a href="/entry/astor_john_jacob">Astor</a>'s <i>A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future</i> (<b>1894</b>) features a proposal to eliminate seasonal weather variations by straightening the Earth's tilted axis. An established European weather control system is disrupted in Albert <a href="/entry/robida_albert">Robida</a>'s <i>Le vingtième siècle: La vie électrique</i> ["The Twentieth Century: The Electric Life"] (<b>1891</b>; trans Brian <a href="/entry/stableford_brian_m">Stableford</a> as <i>Electric Life</i> <b>2013</b>). Weather control is a moderately common feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopias</a> boasting advanced technologies.</p> <p>A great deal of sf simply assumes that weather will be controlled in the future, without going into too much detail, although Ivan <a href="/entry/yefremov_ivan">Yefremov</a>'s <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopia</a> <i>Tumannost' Andromedy</i> (<b>1958</b>; trans as <i>Andromeda</i> <b>1959</b>), in which the Russian steppe has a far more equable climate than today, suggests some means of doing so. Many other <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopias</a> assume permanent temperate weather as part of the package. Ward <a href="/entry/kimball_ward">Kimball</a>'s animated Disney documentary <i>Eyes in Outer Space</i> (<i>1959</i>) includes some speculations on this subject. The commonest form of weather control in sf is the building of great domes over <a href="/entry/cities">Cities</a>, as in the film <a href="/entry/logans_run">Logan's Run</a> (<i>1976</i>), or in Norman <a href="/entry/spinrad_norman">Spinrad</a>'s "The Lost Continent" (in <i>Science Against Man</i>, anth <b>1970</b>, ed Anthony <a href="/entry/cheetham_anthony">Cheetham</a>), in which a plastic dome encases a future and derelict Manhattan, having been built originally to create an oasis of clean air in the middle of the East Coast smog bank; a <a href="/entry/new_york">New York</a> dome (and the fraught <a href="/entry/politics">Politics</a> of its erection) also appears in Frederik <a href="/entry/pohl_frederik">Pohl</a>'s <i>The Years of the City</i> (fixup <b>1984</b>). But domed cities and <a href="/entry/keep">Keeps</a> are much older than this, and indeed were a <a href="/entry/cliches">Cliché</a> of <a href="/entry/pulp">Pulp</a> sf of the 1930s, in both stories and illustration. The best-remembered city in a dome may be Diaspar in Arthur C <a href="/entry/clarke_arthur_c">Clarke</a>'s <i>The City and the Stars</i> (<b>1956</b>).</p> <p>Another area where weather control is commonplace in sf is in the modification of climatic conditions on other worlds (see <a href="/entry/terraforming">Terraforming</a>; <a href="/entry/xenoforming">Xenoforming</a>), the most famous being Frank <a href="/entry/herbert_frank">Herbert</a>'s <i>Dune</i> (fixup <b>1965</b>), in which the <a href="/entry/ecology">Ecology</a> of a water-poor planet is in the process of being painfully altered by various means of water-fixing, including the growth of vegetation. Weather-control satellites are mentioned as an available <a href="/entry/technology">Technology</a> whose use is here avoided. The process is likewise plausibly slow and difficult in Roger <a href="/entry/zelazny_roger">Zelazny</a>'s "The Keys to December" (August 1966 <a href="/entry/new_worlds">New Worlds</a>).</p> <p>Mistakes in weather control can bring <a href="/entry/disaster">Disaster</a> or more slowly damaging <a href="/entry/climate_change">Climate Change</a>. The concept is deliberately weaponized by the <a href="/entry/villains">Villain</a> of Cyril Ranger <a href="/entry/gull_cyril_ranger">Gull</a>'s <i>When the World Reeled</i> (<b>1924</b>). Francis <a href="/entry/beeding_francis">Beeding</a>'s <i>The One Sane Man</i> (<b>1934</b>) features a <a href="/entry/scientists">Scientist</a> who blackmails the whole world through his ability to control weather; John <a href="/entry/boland_john">Boland</a>'s <i>White August</i> (<b>1955</b>), whose title refers to snow in midsummer, tells of an experiment in weather control going catastrophically wrong; another example is Richard Cort <a href="/entry/holden_richard_cort">Holden</a>'s <i>Snow Fury</i> (<b>1955</b>). <i>Hot Rain</i> (<b>1977</b>) by Howard N <a href="/entry/portnoy_howard_n">Portnoy</a> posits a plague of devastating lightning strikes in a US town, the result of inadvertent weather control – alpha-particles from secret underground nuclear tests many miles distant have supposedly (and ridiculously) attracted the lightning. In the animated film <a href="/entry/spriggan">Spriggan</a> (<i>1998</i>), Noah's Ark proves to be an ancient <a href="/entry/spaceships">Spaceship</a> carrying a weather-control device presumably responsible for the biblical Flood.</p> <p>Weather control usually enters sf parenthetically, rather than as a central theme. A small number of stories, however, make it the focus. Peter <a href="/entry/dickinson_peter">Dickinson</a>'s <i>The Weathermonger</i> (<b>1968</b>) is an exciting novel for children, but the weather control here is exerted by mental power, so although the descriptions of the results are enthralling, the methods have nothing to do with real science. Such weather-controlling <a href="/entry/psi_powers">Psi Powers</a> or <a href="/entry/superpowers">Superpowers</a> (likewise bordering on <a href="/entry/magic">Magic</a>) are possessed by various sf characters such as the hero of Roger <a href="/entry/zelazny_roger">Zelazny</a>'s <i>Isle of the Dead</i> (<b>1969</b>) and Storm of the <a href="/entry/x-men">X-Men</a>.</p> <p>It is quite otherwise with Rick <a href="/entry/raphael_rick">Raphael</a>'s "The Thirst Quenchers" (September 1963 <a href="/entry/analog">Analog</a>) which is, characteristically for this author, a tale of competent technicians in action; it is one of several stories by him dealing with a future US Division of Agriculture, at a time when water conservation has become all-important; though it does not deal with weather control directly, it is fascinating about meteorological forecasting generally, and about controlling the results of the weather, as by placing reservoirs underground and covering snow with a black monomolecular film, in both cases to minimize evaporation. In Gordon R <a href="/entry/dickson_gordon_r">Dickson</a>'s <i>Necromancer</i> (<b>1962</b>; vt <i>No Room for Man</i> <b>1963</b>), violent disturbances of previously controlled weather signal the partial collapse of an overprotective technological world-system. Ben <a href="/entry/bova_ben">Bova</a>'s <i>The Weathermakers</i> (<b>1967</b>) is a <a href="/entry/near_future">Near-Future</a> thriller about the political implications of weather control, and is at its most interesting in its accounts of how such control might be achieved. But the classic weather-control story remains Theodore L <a href="/entry/thomas_theodore_l">Thomas</a>'s novelette "The Weather Man" (June 1962 <a href="/entry/analog">Analog</a>), which has been much anthologized. In a well-written version of <a href="/entry/analog">Analog</a>-style sf at its best, he describes the three phases of weather control: the <a href="/entry/politics">Politics</a> (Earth is ruled by a Weather Congress), the <a href="/entry/mathematics">Mathematics</a>, and the <a href="/entry/technology">Technology</a> (the <a href="/entry/sun">Sun</a>'s emission of radiation is controlled by sessile sun-boats which, skimming across the Sun's surface and even entering its outer sphere, have various means of damping or increasing its output). The object of this exercise, typically for the magazine, is to make an old man in Southern California happy by giving him a snowfall before he dies; but this sentimental plot gimmick hardly affects the high drama of the controlling processes themselves.</p> <p>Paul <a href="/entry/posnick_paul">Posnick</a>'s <i>Weather War</i> (<b>1978</b>), written with Leonard <a href="/entry/leokum_leonard">Leokum</a>, explores some possibilities of weather control in <a href="/entry/near_future">Near Future</a> warfare. There are many extravagant variations on the theme, including the notion of harnessing <a href="/entry/gaia">Gaia</a> to discourage invading <a href="/entry/aliens">Aliens</a> with apocalyptic weather as in Philip E <a href="/entry/high_philip_e">High</a>'s <i>Butterfly Planet</i> (<b>1971</b>), a ploy echoed in a colony-world setting in Peter F <a href="/entry/hamilton_peter_f">Hamilton</a>'s <i>Judas Unchained</i> (<b>2005</b>). Bizarrely deadly weather patterns on the planet in Marjorie Bradley <a href="/entry/kellogg_marjorie_bradley">Kellogg</a>'s and William B Rossow's <b>Lear's Daughters</b> diptych – <i>The Wave and the Flame</i> (<b>1986</b>) and <i>Reign of Fire</i> (<b>1986</b>) – prove to result from the conflict of two rival weather-control <a href="/entry/ai">AI</a>s. Another such weather-controlling AI turns on humanity in the film <a href="/entry/storm_watch">Storm Watch</a> (<i>2002</i>). J G <a href="/entry/ballard_j_g">Ballard</a> unusually extrapolates an artform (see <a href="/entry/arts">Arts</a>) from limited weather control in "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D" (December 1967 <a href="/entry/fsf">F&SF</a>). A particularly silly variation appears in <a href="/entry/cloudy_with_a_chance_of_meatballs">Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs</a> (<i>2009</i>), where it rains food to order. [PN/DRL]</p> <p><b>see also:</b> <a href="/entry/command_and_conquer">Command & Conquer</a>.</p> <p><b>previous versions of this entry</b></p> <ul><li><a href='https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/weather_control' target='_blank'>Internet Archive</a></li></ul><br /><br /></article></div> <div class="sideBarsWrapper"> <div class="sideBarsColsWrapper clearfix"> <div class="column sideBar12 clearfix"> <div class="columnForm"><aside id="blogFeed" class="widget"> <div class="content STeditorial clearfix"> <h2>Recently visited entries<span style="background:url(/images/thingSFE2.png) !important"></span></h2><ul style='width: 50%; float: left;'> </ul> <p align=center style="float:right; padding-top:20px; padding-bottom:20px;">ISSN 3049-7612<br /> <a href="/facts.php?id=logo"> <img src="/images/VitMan.gif" width=150 height=150 title="Click for larger version of this SFE logo"></a><br /> <b><a href="/donate.php"><img src="/images/Paypal-Donate.gif" WIDTH="92" HEIGHT="26" BORDER="0" /></a><br /><a href="/">Home/Welcome page</a></b></p><div style="margin-bottom:10px;"></div></div> </aside><aside id="blogFeed" class="widget"> <div class="content STeditorial clearfix"> <h2><i>SFE</i> Special Features<span></span></h2><p style="margin-top: 10px;"><input type="button" value="What’s New" style="width: 150px !important;" class="button primary" onclick="window.location.href='/whatsnew.php'">  Latest entries; 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