Climate Fiction, Climate Theory: Decolonising Imaginations of Global Futures

The international politics of climate change invokes the imagination of various potential global futures, ranging from techno-optimist visions of ecological modernisation to apocalyptic nightmares of climate chaos. This article argues that most dominant framings of the future in climate policy imaginaries tend to be depoliticised and linear visions of universal, homogenous time, with little spatio-temporal or ecological plurality. This article aims to convince IR scholars of climate politics that Africanfuturist climate fiction novels can contribute to the decolonisation of climate politics through radically different socio-climatic imaginaries to those that dominate mainstream imaginations of climate futures. The Africanfuturist climate fiction novels of authors such as Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes and Doris Lessing imagine different spaces, temporalities, ecologies and politics. Reading them as climate theory, they offer the possibility of a more decolonised climate politics, in which issues of land and climate justice, loss and damage, extractive political economies and the racialised and gendered violence of capitalism are central.

Managing Fear in a Risk Society: Pretrauma and Extreme Future Scenarios in Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow

An example of near-future climate fiction, Nathaniel Rich’s 2013 novel Odds Against Tomorrow envisions a catastrophic, global warming-related flooding of the New York City area. Despite the novel’s (post)apocalyptic focus, a large part of it can be in fact perceived as preapocalyptic, inasmuch as it explores people’s traumatic responses to potential future disasters, even before they actually happen. The aim of the article is to analyze the novel’s depiction of the culture of fear, which has permeated the modern society as a consequence of it becoming what Ulrich Beck famously termed a “risk society.” In a risk society, human industrial and technological activity produces a series of hazards, including global risks such as anthropogenic climate change. In the novel, Rich shows how financial capitalism commodifies these risks by capitalizing on people’s fears and their need for some degree of risk management. Finally, the paper looks at the text as a cli-fi novel and thus as a literary response to the pretrauma caused by environmental risks.

Rethinking Environmentalism and Apocalypse: Anamorphosis in The Book of Enoch and Climate Fiction

Biblical apocalypse has long been a source of contention in environmental criticism. Typically, ecocritical readings of Biblical apocalypse rely on a definition of the genre focused on eschatological themes related to species annihilation precipitated by the judgement of the world and the end of time. In this article, we offer an alternative engagement with Biblical apocalypse by drawing on Christopher Rowland and Jolyon Pruszinski’s argument that apocalypse is not necessarily concerned with temporality. Our case study is The Book of Enoch. We compare natural history in Enoch to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological analysis of Biblical apocalypse as a way of seeing the world that worries human assumptions about the nature of things and thereby instigates an “anamorphosis” of perception. Following Timothy Morton’s adaptation of Marion’s idea of anamorphosis as an example of the ecological art of attention, we show how apocalypse achieves “anamorphic attention” by encouraging the cultivation of specific modes of perception—principally, openness and receptivity—that are also critical to political theology. In turn, this analysis of anamorphic attention will inform our rethinking of the relationship between environmentalism and apocalyptic themes in climate fiction today, with special reference to Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From.

The Mom and the Many: Animal Subplots and Vulnerable Characters in Ducks, Newburyport

This article examines Lucy Ellmann's encyclopedic novel Ducks, Newburyport (2019) in the context of debates on modernist legacies, animal characters, and climate fiction. It pays particular attention to the text's signature strategy of including anecdotes about nonhuman creatures exposed to distinct forms of violence, anecdotes that reveal the concerns of the human narrator and her daughter but also highlight other animals, their unfamiliar phenomenologies, and their cautious cross-species partnerships. More specifically, the article tracks individual animals across the novel's pages and reconstructs their semiautonomous subplots as they unfold in a world characterized by animal cruelty, species extinction, and industrial labor. By forcing us to consider the perspectives of creatures like Jim, Mishipeshu, Audrey, and Gracia, Ellmann's narrative reminds us that the climate emergency does not just destabilize a shared geological environment but also endangers multiple and heterogeneous biological worlds.

The Anthropocene, Cli-Fi and Food: Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam

This article examines Margaret Atwood’s climate fiction novel MaddAddam (2013), a dystopian cautionary text in which food production and eating become ethical choices related to individual agency and linked to sustainability. In the novel, both mainstream environmentalism and deep ecologism are shown to be insufficient and fundamentally irrelevant in the face of a submissive population, in a state of passivity that environmental studies scholar Stacy Alaimo relates to a scientific and masculinist interpretation of the Anthropocene. The article focuses on edibility as a key element in negotiating identity, belonging, cohabitation and the frontiers of the new MaddAddam postapocalyptic community.

Maja Lunde: între apocalips și speranță

Born in 1975, the Norwegian Maja Lunde, widely known as a gifted children’s writer, surprised the literary world by her first novel, The History of Bees (2015), an ambitious dystopian book meant to put into question some of the greatest challenges our contemporary world has to face: the climatic changes and the threatening idea of a future and hypothetic disappearance of bees. Even if some critics considered her writing dangerously close to non-fiction or an expression of the so called “cli-fi” (“climate fiction”), Lunde proves to be a convincing author, perfectly capable of expressing deep fears of our contemporary Western society, but also able to offer her readers a symbolic solution to many of the major problems of the present. These preoccupations are also to be found in her second novel, The End of the Ocean (2017), where Maja Lunde perfectly succeeds in dealing with some another stringent nowadays issues, namely desertification and water shortages.