Day of the Triffids

Science Fiction is an entertaining way to write about social politics, often with robots and lasers. It sets up extreme situations with no parallels in real life, and watches what happens to the fictional characters trapped within its pages. Whether we get a child manipulated into committing genocide through a virtual world, a rogue who uses his mutant ability to control emotions and run an empire or a spaceship manned by dolphins, sci-fi can cover some interesting (if convoluted) possibilities. Most serious novelists shy away from it, but there is more to imagination than middle class suburban angst.

The Day of the Triffids sets up a classic scenario by colliding two improbable events; first, that man would breed giant aggressive plants for their vegetable oil, and then an unexplained meteor shower would blind everyone that watched it. Now the slow walking plants have the measure of a crippled humanity.

Does this controversial risk followed by a disaster sound familiar?

Compare the triffids to nuclear power. Compare the blinding fireworks to a 9 magnitude earthquake followed by a 10m high tsunami hitting coastal Japan. Of course, John Wyndham was more interested in how society - polite British society, naturally - could re-assert itself in the face of very bad luck.

But the Japanese people have accepted their disaster movie events with the very definition of stoicism. Many aspects of Japanese life have ossified since the heady days when Nippon was on top of the world. Many parts of Japanese public life are too secretive, with a government that seems extraordinarily inflexible and introverted given how rich the nation still is.

The Fukushima nuclear reactor problems have come after one of the worst tsunami death tolls in history. And yet the ancient reactors, which are not much evolved from electric kettles, did not melt down to the Earths core, or poison the country for a thousand years. With no malice, the world's press were fearing a catastrophe, but none has come.

The story rumbles on; leaking radioactivity is still an invisible threat that will turn up uninvited in water and food for a while longer. But it seems that the real story is how difficult it has been to get aide to the tidal effected villages. In this context, the problems in Fukushima are more macabre sideshow than main event.

The infrastructure of modern life - mobile communication, social media - mitigates against the isolation that many fiction disaster scenarios describe. TV news has a choice of videos to show of the wave coming in; this will never be a forgotten event.

And after a cold hard look at the situation, I suspect a lot of governments will realize that nuclear power should remain part of the modern energy source mix. As George Monbiot pointed out in his Damoscene conversion, given the size of the disaster, nuclear power has not proved unworkably dangerous. At present it is wind, solar and wave power that remain the real science fiction.