Weather tends to show up in novels merely as a background detail — all too often as an example of the pathetic fallacy, where e.g. it’s raining because the protagonist is sad. Every so often, it rises to the level of plot device: there’s a snowstorm so characters can get snowed in somewhere. Speculative fiction honestly has a dearth of weather worked into the general description of a scene, despite the fact that any time the story moves outside, there must be some kind of weather in play.

But if that were all, I wouldn’t be devoting an essay to this subject. After all, this Patreon is about worldbuilding, which means not just the physical but the cultural side of a setting. (Given my inclinations, the cultural side more than anything else). So how is weather itself a part of society?

Depending on where you live, you already know some of the answers to that. Weather shapes our houses, our clothing, and our food, in ways discussed in previous essays. It also gives a rhythm to our lives: if you live in a region where afternoon thunderstorms are expected in the summer, or the monsoon blows through at certain times of year, that affects what activities people undertake at what times. But there are other, more directly weather-focused elements, too.

Let’s start with a question we tend to take for granted nowadays: can you see the weather coming?

Weather forecasting as a formal science got started in the nineteenth century, and it began with us more rigorously measuring what the weather even was. You can’t do much in the way of prediction unless you have a mass of data about highs, lows, wind speed and direction, pressure changes, precipitation, and so on. And you need that data to be spread over a large area, because of course weather is never purely a local phenomenon! This included giving scientific instruments to ship captains, since the ocean is a key driver of weather . . . and also the safety of those captains can depend on knowing what the weather is about to do.

Fast communication is key, too. If you hear that an area upwind of you is getting a cold snap or a storm front, odds are good that’s headed your way shortly. What really sets forecasting going, though, is computers — which can crunch huge amounts of data vastly quicker than humans can — and weather balloons and satellites to measure conditions from above. Thanks to those things, especially improved computer modeling, the precision of our forecasts has improved astonishingly: these days, the prediction for four days from now is as accurate as the prediction for tomorrow was thirty years ago.

Of course, people have been trying to predict the weather for a lot longer than we’ve had computers, or even thermometers. This has largely been short-term and based on observations of immediate phenomena: for example, “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning” is accurate for regions where weather tends to move from west to east, as the tint of the sky signals the location of a high-pressure (good weather) system and whether it’s headed toward you or moving away. Or, where I grew up — at the tail end of Tornado Alley — we all learned that a certain greenish cast to the sky meant the weather was ripe for forming twisters.

The thing about that green sky is, it does mean a likelihood of severe weather . . . but not necessarily tornadoes. And that’s the flaw of this kind of weather lore, that it can be inconsistent, or outright incorrect. That whole North American tradition of Groundhog Day, where the presence or absence of shadows seen by a groundhog predicts how much longer the winter will last? It has absolutely no statistical underpinning. Some analyses even give it a negative correlation, showing that Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions are less accurate than random chance! Maybe we need to update our proverb.

But humans are not content merely to know what the weather is likely to do an hour or a day from now. We would really, really love to control it, to suit our own purposes.

And for millennia, people have been promising the ability to do exactly that. This is honestly one of the underpinnings of certain elements of religion: you pray or make offerings to a deity of the sky or agriculture in the hopes of getting the rain or sun necessary for a good crop, or a deity of the sky or sea to get the wind you need for your ocean voyage. Humans can’t control the weather, but gods can, so you ask them nicely for their help. Colloquially, we often call society-wide weather rituals “rain dances,” and dancing is indeed a common element, though not a universal one.

Rainmakers, however, peddle claims of a more direct skill. They assert that they, on their own, can end a drought — or, less commonly, end a deluge that’s causing flooding or drowning the crops. Historically, they attributed their power to magic; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they instead dressed their assertions up in scientific trappings. Charles Hatfield, one famous American rainmaker, used a secret mix of chemicals in evaporating tanks to “attract” rain to an area. His apparent success rate (likely due to him being a good weather predictor, rather than weather-worker) was high enough that he was able to charge the City of San Diego ten thousand dollars — in early 1900s money! — to fill their empty reservoir.

Which promptly backfired on him, as the region experienced torrential rains that broke a dam, killed about twenty people, and caused an estimated $3.5 million in damage. Rainmakers who promised results they failed to deliver could and did get sued for fraud, but rainmakers who “succeeded” too well could also wind up in trouble.

This idea has not gone away. If anything, it’s trying to accelerate into the realm of actual, reliable science. We’ve been conducting experiments in cloud seeding for decades, aiming to encourage rain or snow through scattering material in the atmosphere. Its efficacy is debatable, and people have understandable concerns about the environmental impact of the material used. Other, newer concepts involve things like reflecting some of the sun’s energy back out into space, to slow the effects of global warming.

Science fiction can take these ideas to an extreme. Especially in closed environments like biomes, stories may depict weather as scheduled down to the minute, so characters know to expect a quarter-inch of rain between 3:17 and 4:01 p.m. That’s plausible when the “rain” is actually coming out of ceiling pipes; when it’s the product of natural planetary forces, it’s much more of a stretch. At that point, you’re more in the realm of fantasy, where a sorcerer can summon a storm on demand . . . which would probably have a lot more society-wide effects, especially in military contexts, than most novels take the time to imagine.

With the rise of climate fiction as a subgenre, though, we might expect to see a lot more weather control showing up in our stories. And so, with an eye toward that, next week we’ll take a look at climate change!