Total Oblivion, which has been getting rave reviews so far, deals with the problems of refugees pretty directly, as you can see from the synopsis:

In the summer between Macy Palmer's junior and senior year of high school in Minnesota, Scythians, Thracians, and other ancient European tribes invade the Midwest. America becomes a ravaged land where modern technology barely works, a strange plague is rampant, and American citizens flee for their lives. Many end up doing what the Empire – which comes equally out of nowhere to keep the peace – tells them to do. Macy and her family find themselves torn from their ordinary lives and in a refugee camp just outside of Minneapolis. They end up making a desperate journey down the Mississippi River, which has mutated into a dangerous waterway.

Macy loves her dysfunctional family but has to make difficult decisions about them during almost unbearable times. Through her journeys, she finds medieval skyscrapers and fast food joints run by horse lords, befriends an enigmatic submarine captain on the river, and stumbles onto a bizarre religious festival called Promcoming. None of those wonders, however, challenge her as much as just growing up, and keeping her compassion intact while doing so.

So DeNiro decided to combine his promotional efforts for the book with fundraising for Mercy Corps, which helps marginalized populations, including refugees, all over the world. But that's not all. If you make a donation to Mercy Corps via DeNiro's fundraising page, he'll write a special story fragment from the world of Total Oblivion, just for you. DeNiro explains:

In order to provide a more direct engagement with the book, in whose spirit this fundraiser is taking place, if you make a donation on this page, drop me a quick note (adeniroATgmail.com) and I'll send you something extra: a one-of-a-kind paragraph of ephemera and apocrypha set in the world of the novel, made just for you! It could be anything. And I can send it by post or email. I'm easy. (River transport of mail post is forthcoming.) Just let me know which you'd prefer and I'll get it out to you in about a week. So hopefully we can, in some small way, assist others in making an impactful change.

The screenplay for The Tourist was written by Clair Noto and, like a darker, sex-charged Men In Black, revealed a secret alien world in Manhattan, including a secret alien club call the Corridor, where various aliens from all over the universe meet, have sex, and commiserate about being stuck on Earth. Grace Ripley, a beautiful corporate executive who happens to be an alien in disguise, seeks a way to get back to her home planet while being drawn into the bizarre world of the Corridor.

The first pass at The Tourist, which began in 1980 at Universal, was plagued by personality clashes and creative differences. Noto's New Wave-influenced script deliberately employed a non-traditional structure, and under the eye of director Brian Gibson, various writers attempted to revise the script. HR Giger, fresh off of Alien was asked to invent the aliens Grace would encounter in the Corridor. But when production failed to move forward, Noto was able to exercise a rare clause in her contract and take the script to another studio. The screenplay briefly found a home at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studio, where director Francis Roddam fell in love with the strange tale. But financial issues at Zoetrope left the project stalled, and when Universal came back claiming ownership issues, it fell entirely by the wayside.

Today, all that's left of The Tourist is Noto's original screenplay, Giger's dark artwork, and plenty of tales of development hell, though Universal still owns the rights, and every now and then interest in the script is renewed. But for now, it's one of those long-dormant projects that may simply never be.

Download the Script for The Tourist [via Scriptshadow — Thanks to Zack Smith]
The History of The Tourist [HR Giger]

Researchers from Columbia University, the United Nations University, and CARE International issued In Search of Shelter to highlight the broad impacts of previously expected rising sea levels due to warming water and the new consensus that shows ice melts in Greenland and Antarctica. The two forces, combined, are expected to increase greatly the amount sea levels will rise by the end of this decade — warming waters alone are expected to contribute to a nearly 2 foot rise in sea levels by 2100.

The increased sea levels and ice melts are expected to cause flooding in India and the Himalayan foothills; droughts in Central Mexico; and massive human displacements throughout much of the world. According to the reports' authors, the numbers of climate migrants will reach epic proportions in our lifetimes.

Estimates of the likely numbers range from 25 to 50 million people by 2010, while the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has pitched a figure of 200 million by 2050.

The authors expect that much of this movement will be from rural to urban areas within affected countries, straining already strained cities and governments.

The authors of the study paint a pretty bleak portrait of the warmer years to come:

Unless aggressive measures are taken to halt global warming, the consequences for human migration and displacement could reach a scope and scale that vastly exceed anything that has occurred before. Climate change is already contributing to migration and displacement.

All major estimates project that the trend will rise to tens of millions of migrants in coming years. Within the next few decades, the consequences of climate change for human security efforts could be devastating.

Plus, as everyone knows, Waterworld really sucked.

Floods, droughts to unleash climate exodus [Cosmos]

[Image via UNHCR]

The alien visitor from a doomed world:

The most famous refugee in science fiction is probably Superman, who gets sent to safety when his home planet Krypton is destroyed. It's no coincidence that Superman is also the posterboy for assimilation — his "real" family is the Kents of Kansas, and he thinks of himself as an American. He gets to live the refugee's dream, being totally accepted into a prosperous new world — plus he's physically and mentally superior to everyone else around him, which is a plus. He's the embodiment of the melting pot, even as he has the power to melt you. (And of course, his creators Siegel & Schuster were the sons of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, mainly Lithuania and Ukraine.)

Doctor Who, meanwhile, has the same alien-world story as Superman, but without the assimilation. The Doctor, in the early episodes from 1963, drops hints about being on the run and in hiding, but doesn't explain further. The show's creators had a vague sense, originally, that he was fleeing a space war. But by the time it's explained in 1969, the explanation is much more benign: the Doctor's species are dicks. (No, not Terrance Dicks. Just dicks.) It's not until the show's 42nd birthday that we get back to the idea that he's fleeing a space war (upgraded to a time war.) And his planet has been destroyed, just like Superman's. But like I mentioned, he doesn't assimilate with Earth/British culture — even though he constantly takes on weird British affectations like jelly babies or cricket, they only make him seem like more of an outsider. He's like those Indian immigrants in the TV show Goodness Gracious Me, who anglicize their names and try to be more British than everyone else, only to look more out of place than ever. In many ways, the Doctor is the anti-Superman.

The protagonist who's fleeing war or genocide:

There are also tons of characters who flee a doomed or destroyed Earth, including Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series. And John Varley's novels frequently take place in a universe where humans have been forced to flee an Earth invaded by aliens, and have colonized the rest of the solar system as a result.

And then there's Hope Hubris, the hero of Piers Anthony's Bio Of A Space Tyrant series. As the first book's title, Refugee, suggests, Hubris starts out as a humble refugee from the moon Callisto, fleeing to Jupiter, where his family gets killed horribly. This starts him on his path towards becoming the "Tyrant of Jupiter."

The rag-tag fleet of humans:

And then there are plenty of stories in which a straggling mob of people flees from a disaster or massacre in space. Maybe the most critically acclaimed SF show right now — if not the most popular — is Battlestar Galactica, where the Cylons drive the humans out of their homeworld not once, but twice: on Caprica, and then on New Caprica. At the end of season three, Lee Adama makes a huge speech in which he says this has changed humanity from a civilization to a "gang," on the run and doing whatever it takes to survive.

Less organized rabbles also turn up, fleeing wars or political unrest, in books like C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station, where swarms of refugees pack into Pell Station in the wake of conflict between the Earth Company and outer stations. And a mob of refugees from a disaster that befalls the H9 colony swarms aboard a cruise ship, only to be exploited by the media, in Eric Idle's The Road To Mars. The TV show Babylon 5 is also full of refugee crises, like the people fleeing the Vorlon attack on Ventari III in "Falling Towards Apotheosis." (We also see a ship full of refugees under attack in the first regular episode, "Midnght On The Firing Line.")

Eco-refugees or disaster survivors on Earth:

Every eco-disaster narrative or post-apocalyptic story includes some kind of refugee motif, with people fleeing the destroyed cities or trying to find a safe haven. Like The Day After Tomorrow, The Postman, Waterworld, or Mad Max. Or Steven Gould's novel Blind Waves. The Martian attacks in War Of The Worlds spawn a huge fleet of refugee ships running away from the carnage. Islanders flee rising sea levels, only to drown or wind up in horrible refugee boat camps, in the 2002 young adult novel Exodus. And of course, there are tons of refugees from the collapsing nations of the world, seeking sanctuary in the U.K., in Children Of Men. Not to mention the Raft of refugees organized by telecommunications magnate L. Bob Rife in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

One of the most arresting moments in the TV show Jericho is when our heroes find the remains of a refugee train a mile wide, made by people fleeing the frozen north. The refugees have left their icy dead where they lay. (Not to mention the whole gaggle of refugees who settle in Jericho, only to face expulsion again.)

Survivalists:

And the survivalist narrative is a huge part of science fiction. Robert Heinlein not only wrote the novel Farnham's Freehold, about people surviving a nuclear war, but according to the source of all lies, he also wrote "How To Be A Survivor" and other essays on surviving nuclear war. Frederik Pohl deals with similar themes in his story "Fermi And Frost." Also, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle write about a group of survivors barricading themselves into a mountain retreat after a deadly comet strike, in Lucifer's Hammer. Plus there's The Survivors, the TV show Terry Nation made between his work on Doctor Who and Blake's 7 (which is also a refugee show, sort of.)

And then there are the narratives about people going on the run from repressive regimes. Like Logan's Run, where Logan flees the non-stop beautiful-people orgy where they kill you when you reach 30, in search of the mythical Sanctuary. (And in the Logan's Run TV series, he's just on the run, every week, with a rogue android. In Roger McBride Allen's The Ring Of Charon, Marcia MacDougal can only escape from the repressive Naked Purple movement, which has taken over a lunar penal colony, by being declared a refugee when her house burns down.

Fleeing from the future:

And finally there are refugees in time — sort of like the Doctor, except they're fleeing a particular oppressive future through time travel. Just type "refugee from the future" into Google (with the quotation marks) and you get a bunch of weird stories — including various X-Men who have journeyed back to our time to escape one of those Mutants-in-concentration-camps dystopian futures.

I feel as though I've just scratched the surface of science fiction's nearly endless store of refugees here — this post could be twice as long. But these seem to be the main types of refugees in science fiction, and I was somewhat surprised by how many of them I turned up when I started looking.

History is full of mass evacuations and displacements, and we've gotten pretty used to the sight of streams of humans struggling across an unforgiving landscape with whatever they can carry, trying to escape from something or other. But it seems pretty likely the 21st century will see more refugee crises than ever before, as the number of humans on the planet continues to skyrocket and there are more ecological disasters and wars over scarce resources. There will be more and more refugees — possibly including you.

And science fiction is uniquely suited to tell the stories of these fleeing people, because the stark reality of the refugee condition is so awful, we need metaphors to cover it. It's easier to think about people running away from an exploding planet than it is to think about grabbing what you can and running from your home before you get ethnically cleansed. A dollop of escapism — or, in the case of Superman, a truckload — helps us swallow the unthinkable.

Note: The illustration up top comes from Wagner James Au's New World Notes blog, from a report about a virtual "Camp Darfur" in Second Life, which was being vandalized by asswipes spouting racist slogans. So a team of Green Lanterns, most of them extraterrestrial, took it upon themselves to guard the site.