Climate Fiction

The 'scientification' of climate change, which placed the issue beyond democratic debate by declaring it a matter for the scientific expertise of the IPCC, has not provoked the required political and economic action to resolve it. 'Tipping point' rhetoric and apocalyptic fictions, conveying increased urgency and shaming the present-day, appear also to yield diminishing returns. Instead of representing the present as a binary choice-catastrophe or salvation-a Humanities-informed viewpoint would represent past, present and future in terms of unknowability, frailty, unavoidable interpretation and limited agency.

Adaptation is a crucial practice, both materially and epistemologically. But especially in regards to the latter, the impact of adaptation processes has not yet received the attention it demands. Knowledge production is a central concern of the so-called Anthropocene, because it lays out the frames in which adaptation to climate change and other global environmental crises are realized (or not). By comparing adaptations of climate change in Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) and Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) as well as Solar by Ian McEwan (2010) and Freedom by Johnathan Franzen (2010), this paper aims at demonstrating how narrative adaptation and material adaptation to climate change are intertwined. In fact, these contrasting narratives share a conviction that the gap between the sciences and the humanities and the ensuing failure of communication (within and outside of academia) plays a crucial part in the failure to understand and adapt to the changing conditions on planet Earth. By regarding adaptation as a negotiating practice that is part of knowledge production and representation, this paper aims to revisit expectations and bias on both sides and to point out that neither science nor fiction is entirely determined by scientists or literary scholars. It will show how analyzing the adaptation of climate change can give insight into the cultural framework necessary for an adaptation to global disaster.

The Anthropocene has emerged as the dominant conception of the contemporary moment, centering the human individual as both responsible for and bearing the responsibility to counteract its numerous interrelated socioeconomic, political, and environmental issues including the staggering loss of biodiversity across the globe and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This constitutes a significant psychological impasse that disempowers and disenfranchises humans living in this epoch, discouraging any substantive individual effort. Drawing on the posthuman feminist philosophy of theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Stacy Alaimo together with a reflection of the power of science fiction as a literature of cognitive estrangement highlighting social issues, this paper reads “The Boston Hearth Project” by T.X. Watson as a short story demonstrative of an ethos of community and hope that resists the negative affects and oppressive social structures of the Anthropocene. I argue in the course of this paper that theorists and activists alike must turn to alternative narratives, such as those modelled in the emergent science fiction genre of solarpunk, in order to reject essentializing and individualizing forces and think multiply in order to realize meaningful resistance in a time of increasing fragmentation in society and destruction of the more-than-human world.

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/2

After offering a brief summary of Paolo Bacigalupi's cli-fi novel The Windup Girl, an example of so-called biopunk cli-fi, the chapter explores the themes of the work; the approach to climate change; formal qualities; reception; contribution to public debates, as well as it offers teaching ideas.The aim is to give readers an insight into the text, allowing them to see it in a new way. The chapter is included in a volume intended to appeal to students, scholars, teachers and potentially non-academics.

In dieser Masterarbeit habe ich mich der Frage nach dem Diskursbeitrag von Blockbusterfilmen zum Klimadiskurs gewidmet. Dabei ging ich von der These aus, dass die Darstellung der Natur und des Menschen sich angesichts eines anthropogenen Klimawandels vom klassischen modernen Hierarchieverhältnis lösen müsse, da die Implikationen eines menschengemachten Klimawandels die Inszenierung der Natur als domestiziert ebenso versperren wie die reine Darstellung der Natur als Antagonistin des Menschen. Aus dieser Annahme leitet sich die Frage nach den Diskursstrategien der Cli-Fi Blockbuster im Umgang mit diesem Paradox ab. Um den populären Climate-Fiction Filmen adäquat begegnen zu können, entwickelte ich eine ‚Narrativ-Analyse‘, die sich an Siegfried Jägers Kritischer Diskursanalyse (2012), Albrecht Koschorkes narratologischem Ansatz (2012) sowie Werner Faulstichs Filmanalyse (2002) orientierte.
Die Analyseergebnisse aus den Untersuchungen der fünf Filme „The Day After Tomor-row“ (Emmerich 2004), „The Day the Earth Stood Still“ (Derrickson 2008), „Into the Storm“ (Quale 2014), „Interstellar“ (Nolan 2014) und „Geostorm“ (Devlin 2017) ließen sich unter die sechs Kernthemen und Narrativ-Topoi Wissen/Wissenschaft, Technik, Natur, Göttlich-keit/Transzendenz, Politik/Gesellschaft und Zusammenhalt/Liebe versammeln. Ich zeige, welcher unterschiedlicher und gemeinsamer Narrative sich die fünf Filme bei der Positionierung zu den sechs genannten Begriffen bedienen. Anschließend bündele ich die Muster der Filme unter drei Thesen: (1) Die erste These ordnet die Filme in die hegemoniale Gesellschaftsfigura-tion der Normalisierung ein (vgl. Jürgen Link 2013) und interpretiert ihre Darstellungen und gewählten Narrative im Sinne eines Krisenbewältigungsangebotes, welches der Angst vor Denormalisierung begegnet. (2) In meiner zweiten These widme ich mich der Fragestellung nach dem Mensch-Natur-Verhältnis angesichts der Kollision des anthropogenen Klimawandels mit klassisch modernen Natur-Rezeptionen. Hier schließe ich, dass die Filme der Paradoxie entgehen, in dem sie zum einen die Natur (wieder) in ein sakrales Bedeutungsschema eingliedern (vgl. Viehöver 2008) und zum anderen den anthropogenen Hintergrund des Klimawandels weitgehend ausklammern. (3) Meine dritte These wendet sich schließlich der Frage nach dem dominanten anthropologischen Narrativ in Cli-Fi Filmen zu. Hier argumentiere ich, dass die Blockbuster eine Anthropologisierung des Resilienz-Gedankens vornehmen, um sich so einer aktivistischen Präventionsaufforderung zu entziehen und vielmehr die grundlegende resiliente Potenz des Menschen zu betonen (vgl. Bröckling 2017b, 2017c). Durch die Konstruktion dieses homo resiliens lässt sich der moderne Fortschrittsgedanke, der in der Spätmoderne seine Vormachtstellung einbüßen musste, im Heldenmythos wieder eingliedern.

The Drought is the third work in a trilogy of climate fiction novels published in the early 1960s. As the primary examples of climate fiction, The Drought stands out in the series as the novel in which the catastrophe is fully caused by human activities. Thus, suitable for ecocritical analysis, this article analyzes The Drought from a social ecological perspective in specific. Moreover, social ecology is a philosophy and movement that emerged The Drought from a social ecological perspective and reveals the implications that the author foresaw concerning the future of our planet. While criticizing the global climate crisis is also mentioned as a possible solution to maintain a harmonious existence that end, it has been concluded that Ballard targets the capitalist world order by exposing the devastating consequences of a climatic cataclysm caused by excessive industrial activities.

This short story placed second in a contest called Envisioning the Future run by the Narrative Storytelling Initiative at Arizona State University. The contest asked for stories which present an "idea of what the future holds, given the environmental and societal changes underway". The winning stories were chosen by an interdisciplinary group of judges with expertise in climate science, sustainability, creative writing, and environmental literature.

In my story, the narrator speaks from a time when the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic is intersecting with the escalating ecological crisis and economic depression. The narrator reflects on the social, envronmental and climate injustices driven by these intersecting crises, and describes how a grassroots movement of people came together in response, inspired by ideas of degrowth and dual power.

The article focuses on the psychological dimensions of readers’ engagements with young adult climate change fiction. It argues that that the embodied simulation of a fictional climate-changed world can offer much more than simple entertainment or escapism. Instead, it has the potential to impact teenagers’ understanding of the social, economic, and ecological risks associated with climate change and to give them a better sense of the vulnerability of their current lives and lifestyles. By way of example, the article draws on research in cognitive literary studies, neuroscience, and the psychology of fiction to examine the narrative strategies of Paolo Bacigalupi’s YA cli-fi novel Ship Breaker. It demonstrates how the novel’s depiction of a dystopian future cues both negative emotions and more positive emotions in in order to warn about the future risks of climate change and still make the reading experience pleasurable for young readers.

Embodiment of apocalyptic imagination has been a major theme in which many writers have pointed it out especially from the midst of twentieth century onwards. Earth today is vulnerable and would be so dangerous for future generation from now on. Although, J. G. Ballard's narrations do not create an ordinary apocalyptic apprehension of human abolition, but he enters the core of the apocalyptic theme by intertwining our world with an altering people's psyche who try to develop a new relationship with nature. This paper examines Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) from the view of the human psyche in an apocalyptic setting. It follows and analyzes the characters of Dr. Robert Kerans (a biologist) and his team in which they are transformed in the story – both mentally and physically.

Perché è difficile tradurre il cambiamento climatico in narrazione? Se lo chiede l'antropologo e scrittore indiano Amitav Ghosh nel suo saggio di grande impatto uscito nel 2016 dal titolo The Great Derangement, partendo dalla premessa che la regolarità della vita borghese impedisce di considerare credibili scenari apocalittici. Ghosh affronta una questione che è centrale nella sopravvivenza della forma romanzo nel mondo contemporaneo e ne fornisce una doppia risposta. Che impatto può avere questa domanda sulla narrativa italiana contemporanea. In questo saggio analizzo alcuni aspetti della questione.

Under the contemporary ecological threats and human-induced environmental transformations observed in the Anthropocene, water has turned into an irreplaceable natural resource and a valuable asset for human survival. More alarmingly, scarcity of water has been expected to be more severe in the near future, and cause global scale water wars over the possession of it involving many countries. Within a New Materialist theoretical framework, this study, which is based on the ecocritical analysis of Emmi Itäranta’s Cli-Fi novel Memory of Water (2014), treats water as an agential nonhuman element with the capacity to change the morphology of its surroundings as well as having a consciousness enabling water to store “in its memory everything that’s ever happened in this world” (Itäranta 90), both literally and metaphorically. Literally, absorbing the toxic chemicals released by various human activities nearby, water gets contaminated by humans. Its unnaturally changed colour reveals the responsibility of the humans in this contamination. In a similar way, metaphorically, water remembers what has been “done” to it by humans. In this respect, this study argues that water has a mnemonic narrative agency combining human memory and environmental memory. Although water is a vital natural resource for human beings, it is also an independent environmental force that will never yield to man-made chains, as Emmi Itäranta highlights in Memory of Water (2014). Water can never be possessed by humans; it belongs to everyone and to no one.
In Memory of Water (2014), Itäranta envisions a dystopic future –The Twilight Century- challenged by global warming, melting ice-caps, shortage of fresh water, and dominated by water criminals, strict water quotas, illegal water pipes, water guards, black markets, toxic plastic graves, water-related illnesses, and military and political power holders trying to monopolise the remaining fresh water reserves through fear and violence. Although it is not customary for the tea masters to accept women as apprentices, the seventeen-year-old female protagonist of the novel, Noria, is unconventionally trained by her father Master Kaitio to be a tea master; the watcher of water as well as its servant. In such an apocalyptic future, when scarcity of water reconfigures all prevailing discursive formations, Noria tries to survive, to make crucial decisions, and most importantly, to tell herstory as a female voice raised against the history written by the suppressive patriarchal forces. At that point, the memory of water as a versatile, unyielding nonhuman element, and the human memory of a tea master, the watcher of water, are entangled.

Keywords: water, the Anthropocene, memory, agency, dystopia, eco-fiction, Cli-Fi

Öz:
Antroposen Çağı’nda gözlemlenen güncel ekolojik tehditler ve insan kaynaklı çevresel dönüşümler altında, su yeri doldurulamaz bir doğal kaynağa, insanın hayatta kalması için gerekli değerli bir varlığa dönüşmüştür. Daha endişe verici olan ise, su kıtlığının yakın gelecekte daha da şiddetlenmesinin ve suya sahip olma meselesinin pek çok ülkeyi de içine alacak şekilde küresel boyutlarda su savaşlarına sebep olabileceği beklenmesidir. Yeni Maddecilik teorik çerçevesi içinde, Emmi Itäranta’nın iklim-kurgu romanı Su Unutmaz’ın [Memory of Water] (2014) ekoeleştirel analizi üzerine kurulu bu çalışma, suyu çevresinin morfolojik yapısını değiştirme kapasitesine, aynı zamanda da, gerçek ve mecazi anlamda, “bu dünyada gerçekleşmiş herşeyi hafızasında depolayabilen” (Itäranta 90) bir bilince sahip insan olmayan eyleyici bir öğe olarak ele alır. Gerçek anlamda bakıldığında, yakınında gerçekleşen çeşitli insan eylemleri sonucunda çevreye yayılan toksik kimyasalları emerek, su insanlar taraından kirletilir. Doğal olmayan bu yollarla değişen rengi, insanların bu kirlenmedeki sorumluluğunu da ele verir. Benze şekilde, mecezi anlamda da, su, insanlar yarafından kendine “yapılan” herşeyi hatırlar. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışma, suyun insan hafızasını ve çevresel hafızayı bir araya getiren bir anlatı aracı olarak hafızaya dayalı bir eyleyici olduğunu iddia eder. Emmi Itäranta’nın Su Unutmaz [Memory of Water]’da vurguladığı gibi, su, insanlar için hayati bir doğal kaynak olmasına rağmen, aynı zamanda da insan yapımı zincirlere asla boyun eğmeyecek, bağımsız bir çevresel güçtür. Su asla insanlar tarafından sahiplenilemez; su herkese ve hiçkimseye aittir.
Su Unutmaz [Memory of Water]’da Itäranta, küresel ısınma, eriyen buzullar, su kıtlığı gibi sorunların meydan okuması altında olan, ve su suçluları, sıkı su kotaları, kanundışı su boru hatları, su muhafızları, su karaborsası, toksik plastic mezarlıkları, suya bağlı hastalıklar ve korku ve şiddet yoluyla dünyada arta kalan içme suyu kaynaklarını tekel altına almaya çalışan askeri ve siyasi güç odakları tarafından domine edildiği -Milenyum Yüzyılı olarak adlandırılan- distopik bir gelecek canlandırır. Her ne kadar, çay üstadları tarafından kadınların çırak alınması geleneksel bir uygulama olmasa da, romanın on yedi yaşındaki ana karakteri Noria, geleneklere aykırıolarak babası Master Kaitio tarafından bir çay üstadı olmak üzere eğitilir, ki çay üstadı aynı zamanda suyun hizmetkari ve de koruyucusu olmak anlamına gelmektedir. Su kıtlığının mevcut tüm söylemsel oluşumları yeniden şekillendirdiği böyle kıyametvari bir gelecekte, Noria hayatta kalmaya, hayati kararlar almaya ve en önemlisi de baskıcı ataerkil güçler tarafından yazılmakta olan tarih içinde kendi dişi sesini yükselterek, kendi hikayesini anltmaya çalışmaktadır. Bu noktada, değişken, zapt altına alınamayan insan olmayan bir öğe olarak suyun hafızası ve suyun koruyucusu görevini üstlenmiş bir çay üstadının beşeri hafızası birbiri içine girer.

Anahtar Kelimeler: su, Antroposen, hafıza, eyleyicilik, distopya, eko-kurgu, iklim-kurgu

Bilimkurguyu Anlamak; son yıllarda edebiyat, sinema ve popüler kültürde ön plana çıkan bilimkurgu türüne dair Türkçe yayımlanmış akademik içerikli kitapların sınırlı sayıda olmasından yola çıkarak alandaki boşluğu doldurmak ve Türkçeye bilimkurgu eleştirisi bağlamında önemli bir eser kazandırmak amacıyla ortaya çıkarılmıştır. Bilimkurguyu alt türler temelinde ele alan bu kitap, bilimkurgunun kısa tarihçesi ile başlayıp türün ütopya/distopya kavramları ile olan ilişkisinden zaman yolculuğuna, siberpunktan yeni dalga akımına, alternatif tarihten uzay operasına kadar pek çok alt türü ayrıntılı biçimde ve eleştirel bir bakış açısıyla irdelemektedir. Böylece bilimkurguyu sadece sınıflandırmakla kalmayıp bilimkurgunun alt türlerine yakından bakma ve türlerin doğasını daha iyi keşfedebilme imkânı sunmaktadır. Okurları yerli bilimkurgu incelemeleriyle de buluşturan kitap, bilimkurgu hakkında süregelen tabu ve ön yargıları ortadan kaldırma niyetinin yanı sıra türün derinliğini sosyal bilimlerin penceresinden ve metin merkezli eleştiriler ışığında gözler önüne sermektedir.

"Victor and the Fish" was selected as runner-up for a global climate fiction contest organized by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination as part of the Climate Futures Initiative. It was judged by a multidisciplinary field of climate fiction experts including esteemed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson.

The Earth has entered a new epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene, in which the actions of human beings are changing the global ecosystem in dramatic and potentially catastrophic ways. With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now over 400 parts per million, Earth’s ecosphere is sliding over the edge of irrevocable destabilisation. Australian writers are using speculative fiction and “climate fiction” (cli-fi) to explore possible ramifications for their island nation, and the world, in a future affected by man-made climate change.
This thesis employs practice-led research to add to this fictive exploration, comprised of a work of mosaic science fiction and exegesis. Both the creative work and exegesis use a bricolage approach, which has structural resonance with the mosaic and the wide-ranging, interconnected elements of climate change. Likewise, the iterative process of practice-led research shares a thematic parallel with the interrelated structures of the mosaic and climate change.
Two core subjects of inquiry underpin the creative work, “Watermarks”: the mosaic novel and science fiction. The mosaic’s interlinked short stories mirror the many interconnected facets that make up global climate change. This format, in tandem with the cognitive estrangement often produced by science fiction (SF), provides an ideal fictional vehicle for exploring possible consequences and responses to climate change. The works of three other Australian writers that use this approach are examined in the exegesis. Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009), Sue Isle’s Nightsiders (2011) and James Bradley’s Clade (2015) demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of this frame. The examination of these works represents a rare comparative study of the mosaic’s value in addressing climate change.
Analysis of the three case studies contributed to the narrative direction of “Watermarks” and its balance of dystopian and utopian impulses. Important to this balance was the aim of fostering feelings of empathy and hope in the reader. Feelings such as these help raise understanding and potentially incite a preparedness to act. In this way, the “Watermarks” novel addresses the cognitive dissonance that climate change engenders due to its size in time and space, its problematic complexity and its challenge to capitalism and neoliberalism. Both novel and exegesis argue that combining science fiction and the mosaic novel is a valuable and effective method of creating climate fiction. They further argue that climate fiction presenting a utopian sensibility, such as through evoking plausible mitigation pathways, can encourage proactive responses to the challenges of man-made climate change.

The paper argues that contemporary climate fiction is a subgenre of sf rather than a distinct and separate genre for two main reasons: first, because its texts and practitioners relate primarily to the sf "selective tradition"; and, second, because its texts and practitioners articulate a "structure of feeling" that accords centrality to science and technology, in this case normally climate science. Not only is "cli-fi" best understood as sf, it also has a much longer history than is commonly allowed, one that arguably stretches back to antiquity. The paper distinguishes between texts in which extreme climate change is represented as anthropogenic and those where it is represented as theogenic, geogenic, or xenogenic; it also provides a brief sketch of the (pre-)history of stories of anthropogenic, xenogenic, and geogenic extreme climate change.

It is perhaps more important than ever for environmental practitioners to grasp that the narratives we/they employ need to accurately describe the political realities of, imagine innovative solutions to, and sustain the most vulnerable through the disaster/injustice that is global climate change. Thus, it is vital for those of us who deal closely with environmental and climate narratives to be able to articulate which texts succeed in these regards both for ourselves and in ways that translate to broader contexts and audiences. In this paper I argue that the visionary (re)descriptive powers so abundant within (post)apocalyptic Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and/or feminist climate fiction are among the right kinds of stories for this work. In addition to considering these narratives' relationships to the practice of climate justice, the paper reflects on the ethical challenges of working with narratives, practices, and practitioners from beyond one's immediate expertise and/or communities.

With a focus on the novel, this chapter appraises three major themes that emerged in the embryonic corpus of climate change fiction. The first concerns the denial, avoidance, and acceptance of the magnitude of climate change in the present and recent past. The second presents cautionary fables of the Anthropocene (the current epoch in which humans act as a geologic force), extrapolating current trends into devastated, depopulated and denatured futures. The third advances this implicit rebuke to the present by exploring the eco-politics of resistance, reform and revolution. I conclude by identifying two rising themes for the next decade of climate change fiction: aiding the ongoing transition to life after oil and depicting the amplified global inequalities of climate injustice.

Contemporary fiction is now investigating the possibilities and limits of story-telling in the era of global climate change. These works, referred to as "climate fiction" or "cli-fi," explore humanity's connection to-and impact upon Earth by asking questions such as: what will human and nonhuman communities look like after sea-level rise, desertification, and biodiversity loss remap our planet?; how might species evolve in response to ecological collapse?; what affects-melancholy, despair, hope-will eulogize a lost home-world?

Reading cli-fi novels, short stories, poetry, and films, this course will situate our texts within the Environmental Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that combines scientific and cultural discourses about the environment with humanistic concerns for social justice. Working through the narrative conventions of the utopian, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, and horror genres, we will ask how cli-fi not only narrates impending disaster on a global scale but also strives to imagine a more just future, one that combines environmentalism and social justice. These texts will be paired with excerpts from philosophical and ecocritical writings which will aid our development of the humanistic methodologies needed to analyze and appreciate this new genre.

Contemporary fiction is now investigating the possibilities and limits of story-telling in the era of global climate change. These works, referred to as “climate fiction” or “cli-fi,” explore humanity’s connection to- and impact upon Earth by asking questions such as: what will human and nonhuman communities look like after sea-level rise, desertification, and biodiversity loss remap our planet?; how might species evolve in response to ecological collapse?; what affects—melancholy, despair, hope—will eulogize a lost home-world?

Reading cli-fi novels, short stories, poetry, and film, this course will situate our texts within the Environmental Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that combines scientific and cultural discourses about the environment with humanistic concerns for social justice. Working through the narrative conventions of the utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic genres, we will ask how cli-fi not only narrates impending disaster on a global scale but also strives to imagine a more just future, one that combines environmentalism and social equality. These texts will be paired with excerpts from philosophical and ecocritical writings which will aid our development of the humanistic methodologies needed to analyze and appreciate this new genre.

This thesis examines settler-Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction (SF) by English-language and Francophone Québécois authors published between 1948 and 1989, in order to investigate how historical settler imaginations of disaster are articulated. This study is in service of several ends: first, to disrupt and interrogate the Canadian literary canon through the study of SF as a legitimate genre with important insights; second, to take a good, hard look at the development of what theorists have called a neoconservative and regressive genre in settler Canada and Québec; and third, to look to the past for strategies to live in an imagined future where worldwide disaster (“apocalypse”) has already transpired. I argue that the visions of the post-apocalyptic future that were prevalent in SF produced in Canada during the latter half of the twentieth century correspond to a singular narrative in SF that is based on and around tropes established by earlier SF and literary writing published in the US. In the course of my research, I found that while most of the forty-four texts in this genre adhere to a specifically Canadian settler-colonial and ultimately instrumentalist worldview, there are several texts that demonstrate divergent attitudes and sociopolitical alternatives to dominant cultural imaginings of the methods of survival in the post-apocalypse. I focus my study on these few texts that I argue depart in significant ways from a dominant post-apocalyptic narrative, subverting the genre and taking it to new places. While doing so, I reference and make note of other texts and use them to illustrate my arguments, comparing and contrasting them with the main texts and tropes under discussion. In chapter order, the main theoretical lenses I employed are: 1. Canadian SF theory and environmental criticism, 2. ecofeminism and feminist posthumanism, 3. post-colonial and decolonial thought specifically focusing on Quebec and Indigenous issues, and 4. affect and queer theory. This dissertation contributes to excavating and highlighting the colonial survival mindset that colours the stories we tell ourselves, and shines a light on the philosophies underpinning our actions as we move forward into the Anthropocene. It is a project that seeks to build imaginative capacity for writers, critics, theorists, and readers of SF. I argue that these scripts both cleave to and depart from reality, and that dominant settler assumptions based on individualism and garrison mentality as a way to survive crises ignore the crucial role of care and healthy community in encouraging human flourishing in its diverse forms. My research shows that, in the post-apocalypse, which more often than not is marked by ongoing crises, people who are able to move beyond disaster survival narratives are the ones that in the end are able to create a life for themselves and others worth living—in non-hierarchical community, in relations of care, and in an acknowledgement of their posthuman entanglement with the non-human world and their environment. My findings from this study are that the imaginary of the post-apocalypse necessarily must incorporate community, connection, and post-anthropocentrism as key facets in order to truly move beyond the fear-driven regressive, exclusionary, and violent impulses of survival. Unsubscribing from the single version of the post-apocalyptic narrative that anticipates the garrison mentality as a necessary corollary of worldwide devastation can allow for a critical appraisal of the present in order to consciously move beyond survival and into the future.

Literary works of fiction about climate change are becoming more common and more popular among critics and readers. While much research has indicated the persuasive effectiveness of narrative storytelling in general, empirical research has not yet tested the effects of reading climate fiction. This paper reports results from the first experimental study to test the immediate and delayed impacts of climate fiction on readers' beliefs and attitudes about climate change. We found that reading climate fiction had small but significant positive effects on several important beliefs and attitudes about global warming-observed immediately after participants read the stories. However, these effects diminished to statistical nonsignificance after a one-month interval. In this paper, we review the relevant literature, present the design and results of this experiment, and discuss implications for future research and practice.

This chapter argues that climate change politics is characterized by competing temporalities: "warmists" claim time is running out, while skeptics assert that global temperature rise has stopped. In addition, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) process is yielding diminishing returns in terms of public support for emissions reductions, which suggests a broader approach than the purely scientific is required. The chapter examines the specific contribution of Barbara Kingsolv-er's (2012) Flight Behaviour, which epitomizes both "conciliation" of polarized perspectives in the USA and "consilient" integration of scientific and literary knowledge.

Climate Change Science Fiction ("cli-fi") inaccurately portrays the root causes of climate change and thus misleads reader-viewer audiences; moreover, this genre has been dominated by Euro-American male writers who provide only the gender-blind techno-science analysis of ecopolitically-rooted climate injustice. Looking both within and beyond the literary genre, women and artists of color have been vocal in creating "cli-fi" narratives that give a richer analysis of climate injustice's root causes, manifestations, and solutions.

Climate change fiction (cli-fi) is a relatively new and burgeoning genre. As creative writers, this paper's co-authors find many questions regarding how to address our current climate crisis in ways that protest stereotypical representations and oversimplified political systems. In order to develop climate change fiction that engages with the climate as something more than a backdrop for the action or as an adversary for the protagonists, as authors of cli-fi, we need to interrogate the roles of recognisable details, such as food, in our fiction. In this paper, we use Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy as a case study of how cli-fi novels can interrogate climate change by making use of food as a symbolic and narrative device within the work. From that foundation, we argue that reading and research crystallises imaginative prowess and galvanises new ways of writing in the genre of cli-fi.

Dr Sharae Deckard, world literature lecturer at University College Dublin, speaks to Mumbai-based author Prayaag Akbar about his novel Leila, the differences in how climate change is being experienced, and how this affects fiction and publishing.

Part of a special issue of The Lit, Volume 3 (Oct 2020), on "Climate Change and Writing," edited by Ben Smith and David Sergeant, and available at: https://theliteraryplatform.com/stories/climate-fiction-and-the-global-south-a-conversation/

Ian McEwan’s novel about climate change Solar (2010) was
eagerly anticipated by those who hoped for a dramatic shift in public
consciousness of the issue in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Most critics found it disappointing, yet the let-down is complex and
instructive, illuminating the cultural politics of climate in the noughties
and the intrinsic challenges of climate change as a topic for realist
novels. The novel is limited both by McEwan’s choice of satirical allegory
as a genre, and by the topical parables that continually dissipate
the momentum of the allegorical plot. Solar may also indicate the limit
of McEwan’s belief in the capacity of Enlightenment science and liberal
democracy to avert climate apocalypse.

Human migration, a socio-political phenomenon in contemporary times, refers to the journey of people across international borders or within their own country. Such journeys arise from varied ecological, social, political, religious, and economic factors. "In this globalize (sic) world, where everything seems to be global, migration is also changing its nature and forms which it takes" (UKEssays, 2018, para. 4). Even though human migration is not new, "undocumented, unauthorized, or illegal migration is a recent phenomenon" (Donato & Massey, 2016, p. 9). Illegal immigrants who undergo political unrest and social turmoil during migration are often sufferers of identity crisis, imprisonment, torture, and exploitation through bonded labour. Falsification of identity papers, drug and arms trafficking, forced prostitution, and human trafficking are some salient features of undocumented migration throughout the world. Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019) undertakes an exploratory journey into the present globalized world of anthropogenic climate metamorphoses that trigger excruciating illegal migrations from the Indian Sundarbans, the mangrove region. It is also the saga of many other undocumented migrants from various developing countries, who illegally migrate to the West in search of employment and opportunity but miserably fall victims to human trafficking, xenophobia, and imprisonment. The paper focuses on the socioeconomic , political, and climatological reasons for, and the consequences of, the illegal migrations of the underprivileged people portrayed in the text under discussion, by situating them within the framework of the contemporary era of capitalist globalization.

Indigenous writers of the Pacific Islands have often turned to the ways in which the long history of transoceanic voyaging has contributed to a concept of the “sea in the blood,” a merger of biological and genealogical histories. In this paper I trace out this concept of the sea in the blood and its potential for a dynamic rendering of queer kinship with our nonhuman others by turning to Keri Hulme’s collection, Stonefish (2004), which inscribes the ways in which rising sea levels generate adaptive mutations in plants, mushrooms, and even humans. Through experiments in form, Hulme’s collection makes a vital intervention into these fantastic, utopian, and dystopian visions of the oceanic, rendering the sea, climate change, mutation and the submarine as profoundly ordinary. She depicts creeping sea level rising in terms that emphasize mutation and adaptation rather than the spectacular tone of apocalypse.  Through a hybrid narrative style she parodies heteronormative modes of millenialist fiction, particularly the American nuclear narratives that arose out of the Cold War. By invoking  "anthropophagic oysters," mushrooms that when eaten will collapse human cell walls, and sentient moonfish, abalone, and even plastic bottles, Hulme poses a fluid “waterworld” of queer kinship, an ontology of what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter,” inscribing figures that are deeply tied to the seascape of Aotearoa/New Zealand and the beginnings and endings of Maori cosmologies. The emergence of what she calls an “unseen neural network” inscribes new morphologies for an increasingly maritime world arising from an era of climate change.

This study focuses on an ecocritical analysis of J.G. Ballard’s climate fiction novels of the early 1960s. Ecocritical perspectives, social ecological in specific have been utilized to shed light on the selected three novels of J.G. Ballard—The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Drought. In contrast with the widespread scholarly research of surreal and psychoanalytic criticism in Ballard’s latter fiction, this study contemplates to analyse the author’s very first post-apocalyptic, climate fiction novels through the window of ecocritical theory. These three novels of the renowned British author are commonly considered as primary examples of the sub-genre of climate fiction. This study therefore proposes to analyse Ballard’s post-apocalyptic works of climate fiction by applying theories related to the school of ecocriticism, second wave of ecocriticism in particular. The study thereby aims to criticise Ballard’s oeuvre from the specific position of social ecology. Thus, the research reveals how Ballard dismantles and takes on western anthropocentrism in The Wind from Nowhere, the author’s first work of fiction, often dismissed by many including himself as an experimental work of fiction. Furthermore, the study also intends to criticise The Drowned World from a social ecofeminist viewpoint. Finally, it aspires to expose the social ecological motives behind The Drought, Ballard’s post-apocalyptic vision of a world running out of water. The study refers to a wide variety of scholars and theoreticians but mainly relies on the theories of Murray Bookchin and Karen J. Warren. Focusing on many different issues within ecocritical thought, the study insists on the scrutiny of social ecological motives in Ballard’s trilogy of climate fiction.

Despite increased visibility of diets that reduce meat consumption, global trends indicate that Western dietary patterns, particularly the love of meat, are spreading to the developing world. This burgeoning desire for meat is emerging, however, amidst a backdrop of increased awareness that animal agriculture is damaging to our planet. It is one of the largest contributors to global warming, responsible for 14-18% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, as well as toxic run-off, deforestation and environmentally-vulnerable monocultures.
Cultured meat – that is, meat grown from stem cells in a laboratory – is being developed as a potential solution to this pressing and pressurized issue. Marketed as “clean meat,” its laboratory origins imply sterility, yet is it still deeply enmeshed in cultural systems, including issues of anthrozoology. This is further complicated by the fact that currently it is only possible through the use of fetal bovine serum, and is therefore not cruelty-free.
While contemporary human society is still in the beginning stages of developing an ethical framework for this emerging phenomenon, science fiction has long grappled with lab-grown meat: examples include Chicken Little in The Space Merchants (1952) and vat-grown meat in Neuromancer (1984). SF provides a method of situating the ‘food imaginary’ in a historico- cultural context, while the interrelated genre of climate fiction highlights the urgency with which food solutions need to be found. This paper will therefore examine the potential sociocultural implications of cultured meat through readings of a selection of contemporary SF/cli-fi works, including Elizabeth Dougherty’s The Blind Pig (2010), Koert van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink’s The In Vitro Meat Cookbook (2014), and Margaret Atwood’s text Oryx and Crake (2003). It will ask, is lab meat a utopian solution to a climate crisis issue, or does it perpetuate patterns of anthropocentric thinking that are antithetical to a better relationship with the planet?