Written by Stephen Thompson | 01 February 2011

That extreme weather event was the worst snowfall to hit England since 1963.

A little later I came home to Brisvegas and found myself sheltering from extreme rain. It was almost beyond belief that so much rain could fall so heavily for so longer, and of course that ended in flash floods up at Toowoomba and overfilled dams, which in turn led to the Brisbane River swamping the city.

Being on high ground in one of the flood affected suburbs, I wasn't directly affected, but many a friend was, which brings me to the point of this ramble.

Speculative fiction often creates its tension by building worlds that are dysfunctional, ie, they are run by bad magic, bigots, bloodthirsty individuals or politically abhorrent types. Sometimes the people themselves are the problem, particularly in zombie films (the real sort of zombie, not the sexy and romantic sort). The genre tends to look for overt conflict to fuel its stories, usually epitomised by an evil individual, and, let's face it, there's not a lot of conflict in paradise, nor is there, at least on the surface, a lot of it in people working together for a common cause.

The floods, however, showed that this was not the case. I witnessed first hand (and was even part of it), volunteers appearing before the flood, asking, randomly, who needed help to save their family valuables. They turned up with their vans and utes and trucks, and helped load furniture and white goods for transportation to higher ground, to homes and verandas on safer, higher ground. My own veranda and spare room looked after beds, mattresses, lounges and fridges, sometimes of people I barely knew.

Then the water came. And the mud. And the smell. Then the water receded again, but left the mud and the smell. And the volunteers arrived again, this time with mops and buckets and shovels and generators and high-pressure hoses; thousands of people descending on muddied homes to clean brown ooze from walls and floors and garden plants.

People responded spontaneously to the conflict, a conflict not embodied by a person, but one caused by natural events (in the main), events that weren't even evil. Clearly, drama resides in much more subtle situations than in the deeds of darkly cloaked wizards and nasty ghouls. The drama that unfolded during the flood event was intense, feelings were intense, community was intense, the humanity of ordinary folk was intense.

I've been guilty of, more than once, shaking my head in despair at some of the goings-on of human beings when it comes to politics and culture. I'm probably not going to stop doing that, but I'm far happier with the underlying camaraderie of my fellow men and women. Mutual aid rather than survival of the fittest held sway for a few weeks there.

 This was drama. The genre could learn a bit by adopting such realism into its fold.

The poms, though, complained about everything their extreme weather brought them. Does this show a difference in psyche? Perhaps, perhaps not, perhaps the extreme snow was not extreme enough.

The English still run programmes on television about The Blitz and how the country pulled through and worked together, and that was a terror far more threatening than the rise of a river through a few suburbs.

It would seem that the greater the threat to life, the more likely it is that humans will be selfless and co-operative. Now there's something that often gets lost in stories where dark forces are in the ascendency: people often need little prompting to help their fellow man (or woman).

That's got to be worth some thinking about. In time of conflict it is the people themselves who are most likely to be the heros, not a reluctant individual with some ancient and lost secret.

Let's have more realism in our fantasy. That's where true drama lives.