Climate Fiction and the World Literary System

The chapter opens with a discussion of two early instances of global warming cli-fi, Arthur Herzog’s Heat and George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, and argues that both are more or less oblivious to the wider world beyond their respective national frontiers. It proceeds to elaborate an account of the place of SF in the world literary system, understood in Wallerstein and Moretti’s terms as comprising a core, semi-periphery and periphery. This model is then applied more specifically to cli-fi, distinguishing between structural and conjunctural determinants of the evolution of the sub-genre. The main structural determinant, it argues, will be the world SF system. But this may be either countered or reinforced by one or more of three main conjunctural factors: the degree of perceived vulnerability to extreme climate change of any particular national political economy; the salience of Green politics within any particular national polity; and the salience of climate change within broader environmentalist discussions in any particular national culture. The chapter concludes with critical accounts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja.

The Problem of Fatalism in Dystopian Climate Fiction

This chapter explores the logics of fatalism in climate fiction as they variously function in the classical dystopia, the critical dystopia and the time-travel story. For the classical dystopia, the examples are Maggie Gee’s The Flood, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja. For the critical dystopia, the examples are Emmi Itäranta’s Teemestarin kirja, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and James Bradley’s Clade. For the time-travel story, the examples are Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again, Wolfgang Jeschke’s Das Cusanus-Spiel and Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia. The chapter concludes by observing that time travel, whether physical or psychic, is perhaps the most improbable novum in the whole of the SF repertoire, and that it might therefore seem strange to worry about its real-world implications. But the fatalist conclusion that there is little we can do to offset anthropogenic warming, and that our efforts might even make matters worse, does have such implications, and these might well be regretted.

Cli-fi in Other Media

This chapter explores cli-fi in other print media (short stories, published poetry, comics and graphic novels), recorded popular music (folk and rock), and audio-visual media (cinema, television and videogames). It identifies rhetorically effective instances of cli-fi from a wide range of media, notably Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Keep It in the Ground’, Brian Wood’s The Massive, Anohni’s Hopelessness, Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. But it concludes, nonetheless, that it is in cli-fi novels and trilogies, especially those that deal with mitigation and negative or positive adaptation, that the major effort to respond to the climate crisis has taken shape. The more general conclusion, then, is that longer narrative forms seem best suited to climate fiction.

Ice, Fire and Flood: A Short Pre-history of Climate Fiction

This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous. This flood motif continued to be important in American pulp SF. Cooling and warming are more recent preoccupations, dating from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory and greenhouse theory in the late nineteenth century. For most of the twentieth century both science and SF were more interested in cooling. But in the closing quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, widespread scientific concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling led to the development of contemporary ‘cli-fi’, concerned primarily with the effects of global heating.

The Classical Dystopia in Climate Fiction

The chapter opens with a discussion of the distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘critical’ dystopias, as developed by Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini and Lyman Tower Sargent. It then proceeds to an account of classical cli-fi dystopias that exhibit, by turn, each of five ideal-typical responses to climate change: denial, mitigation, negative adaptation, positive adaptation, and Gaian deep ecological anti-humanism. The texts analysed include Liu Cixin’s 地球往事‎/ Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, Arthur Herzog’s Heat, Michel Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île, Will Self’s The Book of Dave, Bernard Besson’s Groenland, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Maggie Gee’s The Ice People and Jean-Marc Ligny’s Exodes and Semences. The Chapter concludes by explaining that the sixth substantive responsive to climate change, fatalism, presents peculiar problems for the kinds of fiction overwhelmingly intended as warning and postponing its discussion until a later chapter.

Changing the Climate: Some Provisional Conclusions

The chapter opens with an account of the ‘value relevance’ of the authors’ own loosely ‘Green’ beliefs and of how these led them to search for a cli-fi version of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. They conclude that no such text exists as yet, but note the operation of what they term an ‘Off-Shute effect’, in which the cumulative weight of many different cli-fi texts could have a cumulative effect on real-world behaviour. One of their more striking unanticipated findings, they explain, was that none of their climate fictions, not even those by avowed socialists like Kim Stanley Robinson, depict the organised working class as the social force most likely to prevent anthropogenic global warming. They hypothesise that this is an effect of the persistence into the twenty-first century of ideological residues of postmodernism and stress that the term ‘Green’ as a political signifier derives from the Australian ‘Green bans’, that is from organised labour. The book and the chapter end with an insistence that climate fictions are warnings, rather than predictions or prophecies, and that warnings are there to be heeded and acted upon.

The Critical Dystopia in Climate Fiction

This chapter develops an account of critical cli-fi dystopias that exhibit, by turn, each of five ideal-typical responses to climate change: denial, mitigation, negative adaptation, positive adaptation, and Gaian deep ecological anti-humanism. The texts analysed include Ian McEwan’s Solar, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Aurora, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jean-Marc Ligny’s AquaTM, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy and Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm.

A Theoretical Interlude

This chapter begins by discussing the relationship between SF and what Daniel Bloom dubbed ‘cli-fi’. Cli-fi, it argues, is best understood as a sub-genre of SF and the crucial shift between the pre-history of climate fiction outlined in the previous chapter and this contemporary sub-genre has been the development of a near-consensus amongst scientists about the potentially disastrous effects of global warming. It proceeds to a critical account of how the notion of the Anthropocene was developed in the sciences, misrepresented in ecocriticism, and challenged in the social sciences by rival concepts, such as the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene. As an alternative, it proposes a sociology of literature derived from the work of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The chapter then proposes an ideal typology of climate fictions arranged around five measures of formal utopianism, which derive substantially from the work of Tom Moylan, and six measures of substantive response to climate change, derived from real-world discourse. This results in a grid of thirty logically possible types of climate fiction. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of narrative strategies and tactics available to cli-fi, citing Nevil Shute’s nuclear doomsday novel On the Beach as a model.

Base Reality Texts and Eutopias

The chapter opens with the observation that there seem to be far fewer climate eutopias than climate dystopias, but adds that there is a case to be made that these are likely to become more culturally significant as the climate crisis develops. It then proceeds to a discussion, by turn, of base reality texts and critical eutopias. The texts analysed include Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth, Umoya Lister’s Planetquake, Robinson’s New York 2140; Dirk C. Fleck’s MAEVA! trilogy and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam. The chapter proceeds to argue that, by comparison with William Morris’s News from Nowhere, there is no real intratextual plausibility to the mechanisms by which eutopia is achieved within these novels. The chapter concludes with a survey of the study’s findings on cli-fi narratives.