Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

Introduction

Since the late 1980s, when it first came to the attention of a wider public,
global warming has been generally (although not universally) recognized as
one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century.
Models of its future development, predictions of its likely political, social and
cultural impact, and proposals for measures to limit the rise in temperature
and mitigate its consequences have been hotly debated over the last thirty
years, and they are likely to remain subjects of contention for the foreseeable
future. This public concern has latterly been accompanied by a growing body
of climate change fiction. The emergence of cli-fi (an abbreviation in analogy
with ‘sci-fi’ apparently coined by the journalist Dan Bloom in 2007) as a new
Copyright © 2018. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

genre of fiction and film, reflecting but also to a degree informing views and
shaping conversations on climate change, was greeted in a series of articles in
the press in the USA and Britain in 2013.1 Climate change fiction has become
the subject of numerous blogs and reading forums on the Internet, and a focus
of growing academic interest.

Defining cli-fi

Cli-fi is not a genre in the scholarly sense: it lacks the plot formulas and stylistic
conventions that characterize genres such as sci-fi and the western. However,
borrowing from and often embracing elements of different existing genres, it

1 For example, Rodge Glass, ‘Global warning: The rise of “cli-fi”’, The Guardian (31 May 2013);
Pilita Clark, ‘Global literary circles warm to climate fiction’, Financial Times (31 May 2013).

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 2 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

provides a convenient term for an already significant body of narrative work

Introduction

broadly defined by its thematic focus on climate change and the political,
social, psychological and ethical issues associated with it. Given the absence
of a precise definition, cli-fi may be best thought of as a distinctive body of
cultural work which engages with anthropogenic climate change, exploring the
phenomenon not just in terms of setting, but with regard to psychological and
social issues, combining fictional plots with meteorological facts, speculation
on the future and reflection on the human-nature relationship,2 with an open
border to the wider archive of related work on whose models it sometimes
draws for the depiction of climatic crisis.3
There are, of course, some novels that do not explicitly mention climate
change, but have been read as addressing it, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road (2006). And there is a larger number of others – for example, Margaret
Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), Sarah Hall’s
The Carhullan Army (2007), and works translated from other languages such
as Peter Verhelst’s Tonguecat (2003), Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of
an Island (2005) and Rosa Montero’s Weight of the Heart (2016) – in which
global warming is just one of a series of ways in which human actions are
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irreparably changing the natural environment on a global scale, it does not

play an important role in the plot, and its causes, consequences and ethi-
cal implications are not discussed. While our working definition leads us to
exclude these, it would logically embrace representations of deliberate (but
usually disastrous) human interventions into global climatic conditions which
predate global warming, such as Jules Verne’s novel The Purchase of the North
Pole (1889) and Alexander Döblin’s Mountains Oceans Giants (1924). We have
chosen not to go down this route in this collection of essays. However, we
do include examples of what Jim Clarke has called ‘proto-climate-change fic-
tion’ in a study of the dystopian novels written by J. G. Ballard in the 1960s,4
although these predate awareness of the effects of greenhouse gases, and either

2 Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Climate Change in Literature and Literary
Criticism’, WIREs Climate Change 2/2 (March/April 2011), 185–200; here 196.
3 Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 8.
4 Jim Clarke, ‘Reading Climate Change in J. G. Ballard’, Critical Survey 25/2 (2013), 7–21.

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 Introduction 3

attribute climatic change to natural causes (Ballard), use it to reflect on the

Introduction
limitations of human control over the natural environment (Max Frisch), or
invest it with other meaning as a metaphor for political developments (Ignácio
de Loyola Brandão). The inconsequence of this choice is in our view justified
by the themes, tropes and generic features of climate change fiction which are
prefigured in these novels.

A brief overview of literary production

The warming effect of increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere was first identified and progressively understood by scien-
tists such as Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius in the nine-
teenth century. However, the ‘discovery’ of climate change only came when
renewed attention was paid to this in the 1960s and 1970s. Public concern
about human impacts on climate emerged alongside widespread unease over
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other environmental impacts, over-population, pollution and acid rain – all

concerns that led to the organization of the first Earth Day in the US in 1970.
Paul and Anne Ehrlich mention the greenhouse effect in The Population Bomb
(1968), for example. By the early 1980s, the cumulative work over the previous
decades – by scientists such as Charles Keeling, Roger Revelle, Wally Broecker,
Reid Bryson and Stephen Schneider, presented at forums including the World
Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979 – was increasingly penetrating the
public consciousness, as evidenced by high-profile news reports and popular
science books, such as Howard Wilcox’s Hothouse Earth (1975) and Schneider’s
The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival (1976).5
Literary engagement with the phenomenon appears to have started in
1971 with Lathe of Heaven, a short sci-fi novel by Ursula Le Guin, author of

5 For more on the modern history of climate change science, see Mike Hulme, Why We
Disagree about Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 42–60,
and Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008).

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 4 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

the young adult fantasy Earthsea novels and other works of sci-fi distinguished
Introduction

by their thoughtfulness. It picked up only gradually, with Arthur Herzog’s

thriller, Heat (1977), and the Australian critic and novelist George Turner’s
The Sea and Summer (1987), before experiencing a first flowering around
2000 with Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998), Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse
Summer (1999) and T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000). As these titles
suggest, issues associated with climate change were, from the outset, com-
monly fictionalized within the framework of popular genres, namely sci-fi
and, to a lesser extent, the thriller. We shall expand further on the question
of generic influences and strategies below, but note here the role played by
genre fiction in making early cli-fi marketable, appealing to a specific reader-
ship and serving as a resource helping readers think through complex issues.
At the same time, it should be recognized that, in some cases, generic expecta-
tions of plot and character might distort or distract from the issue of climate
change. For, where the appeal of a novel resides mainly in its status within a
particular genre (or even within the oeuvre of a particularly popular writer
of genre fiction), this can circumscribe readers’ understanding of potential
solutions to the problems it presents. Though sci-fi novelists from Le Guin
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and Turner to Kim Stanley Robinson and Paolo Bacigalupi have produced
relatively sophisticated treatments of climate change, generic norms weigh
heavily on thrillers such as Rock Brynner’s The Doomsday Report (1998) and
James Herbert’s Portent (1992) (which, as a ‘chiller’, draws on both horror and
thriller traditions), starting a trend that continued with Michael Crichton’s
State of Fear (2004) and Clive Cussler’s Arctic Drift (2008). In contrast, the
novels of Gee and Boyle are early examples of writing that draws on generic
expectations (mainly from sci-fi) but seeks to avoid the limitations imposed
by the popular genre templates. They do so, on the one hand, by complicat-
ing stereotypes, introducing ambivalent characters and ironically subverting
expectations, and, on the other, by foregrounding the links between human
handling of the natural environment and issues of social justice, gender and
sexuality, and individual or collective agency.
Cli-fi took off in the first years of the new century, paralleling Al Gore’s
success in raising the profile of climate activism, initially with novels from
Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Liz Jensen, in addition to Robinson, Crichton
and Cussler. In his survey of Anglophone literature, Adam Trexler writes of

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 Introduction 5

over 150 novels,6 and there are dozens of films in the category.7 Imaginings of

Introduction
the future impact of climate change typically involve desertification, drought
and water shortage, floods and violent storms, the spread of tropical diseases,
climate refugeeism and the collapse of a society divided between rich and poor
into lawlessness and armed conflict. Against this background, human dramas
of hope and love, betrayal and despair play out in action-driven plots peopled
by journalists and scientists, politicians and climate activists, and ordinary
people struggling to live in the worsening circumstances. The changing climate
is often one source of anxiety among others, alongside unsustainable levels
of consumption and population growth, concerns over the role of science in
society, genetically modified foods, genetic engineering and geoengineering,
and more generally what is perceived as the slide into ever more individualistic,
virtual and ‘unnatural’ forms of life.
After the ‘Climategate’ controversy of 2007 (when leaked emails from
the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were interpreted as
evidence that global warming was a scientific hoax) and the failure of world
leaders to reach agreement at the UN’s Copenhagen conference in 2009,
concerns about climate change circulated in an atmosphere of distrust, not
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just of scientific expertise but also of the formal agencies tasked with deal-
ing with it – from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
to the UN and to domestic politicians. There was a desensitization, too,
resulting from exposure to multiple apocalyptic scenarios. A second cluster
of novels which appeared after 2010, including titles by Ian McEwan, Ilija
Trojanow and Barbara Kingsolver, reflected and responded to this shift in
public opinion, by seeking to understand the reasons for the seemingly irra-
tional unwillingness of the public and politicians to take action in the face of
the predictions of climate science, and beginning to explore the realities of
living with climate change. Other titles published since 2010 in countries from
Finland to Australia include: Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer, Alexis Wright’s

6 Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, 7.

7 E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). See also Michael Svoboda, ‘Cli-Fi
on the Screen(s): Patterns in the Representations of Climate Change in Fictional Films’,
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 7/1 (2016), 43–64.

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 6 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

The Swan Book and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (all 2013); David
Introduction

Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Simon Ings’s Wolves, Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake,
Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water and Johanna
Sinisalo’s The Blood of Angels (all 2014); Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Clare
Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, James Bradley’s Clade, Elina Hirvonen’s
When Time Runs Out and the Saga anthology of short climate fiction, Loosed
Upon the World (ed. John Joseph Adams), all published in 2015. Cli-fi con-
tinues to evolve (publications in 2016–17 include Maja Lunde’s The History
of Bees, Robinson’s New York 2140, Ashley Shelby’s South Pole Station and
David Williams’s When the English Fall), with a small number of novelists
(Robinson and Bacigalupi, in particular) focusing their production on depict-
ing climate change, and poets and playwrights contributing work such as
Frederick Turner’s epic poem, Apocalypse (2016), and plays in the UK from
Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker (1994) via Steve Waters’s The Contingency Plan
(2009) to the multi-authored Greenland and Richard Bean’s The Heretic in
2011, and Duncan MacMillan and Chris Rapley’s 2071 (2014).8
While most cli-fi originates from North America, Britain and Australia,
it is (unsurprisingly, given the global reach of climate change) a transcultural
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phenomenon, with films such as the Korean action movie Snowpiercer (2013)
and a significant production of novels in Germany and Scandinavia.9 The
small number of non-Anglophone works presented here reflects the paucity of
English translations of foreign climate change novels. The absence of transla-
tions ruled out practically all the French contenders (works by Antoine Bello,
Julien Blanc-Gras, Jean-Marc Ligny, Jean-Christophe Rufin and Philippe
Vasset), some thirty German novels, and influential Latin American writ-
ing by Homero Aridjis and Rafael Pinedo. Scandinavian novelists, who have
fared better in translation, are represented with titles by Jostein Gaarder and
Tuomainen. Not only in the English-speaking world, then, climate change

8 See Stephen Bottoms, ‘Climate change “science” on the London stage’, Wires Climate
Change 3/4 ( July/August 2012), 339–48.
9 See Axel Goodbody, ‘Telling the Story of Climate Change: The German Novel in the
Anthropocene’, in Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan, eds, German Ecocriticism
in the Anthropocene (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 293–314; and the essay by
Reinhard Hennig in this volume.

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 Introduction 7

stories have become popular vehicles for reflection on our values and way of

Introduction
life, on patterns of material consumption and the tensions between individual
self-fulfilment and responsibilities towards others, giving expression to feel-
ings of anxiety and guilt, and asking what sort of future we want ourselves
and others to live in.

Fictionalizing climate change: Aims and challenges

Literature plays a part in helping us meet the challenges with which life con-
fronts us, by interpreting the past, dramatizing the situations and choices of
the present, and imagining possible futures. Like narratives of gender identity,
the stories told about global warming participate in the organization of our
social reality as ‘regulatory fictions’,10 deploying metaphorical concepts to
define and constitute classes of objects and identities, and thereby determin-
ing how the problem is framed. Stories are forms of collective sense-making
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with the capacity to motivate and mobilize readers. Building on neurophysi-

ological research into the ability of engagement with storyworlds to trigger
real-world emotions and neural responses, and on narratological scholar-
ship on how storyworlds have the ability to initiate simulation of experience
and catalyse a mental and emotional ‘transportation’ of readers, Erin James
and Alexa Weik von Mossner have argued that literature and film can make
new things matter to us, widen our sense of identity to embrace human and
non-human others, and foster a sense of care. They do this above all through
textual cues which invite readers to inhabit a particular point of view, such as
the organization of space and time and the depiction of characters.11 Scholars

10 See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 135.
11 Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective
Ecologies. Empathy, Emotion and Environmental Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2017).

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 8 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

of moral philosophy have advanced a similar argument, the most prominent

Introduction

work in this area being that of Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum proposes that
literature, in calling on the reader to exercise empathy for characters, helps to
widen an individual’s ‘circle of concern’.12 For Nussbaum, ethical understand-
ing and action require compassion; compassion in turn comprises a cognitive
judgement of the scale of another’s suffering, whether it was deserved or not,
and, crucially, of whether the other is a significant part of our future goals and
activities.13 Fiction and poetry encourage us to enlarge this third point, and
to include previously unknown others as important to us.14
Moreover, climate change novels and films might provide what one might
think of as a therapeutic space, in which collective Anthropocene anxiet-
ies are aired, shared and worked through. E. Ann Kaplan argues that the
Anthropocene has induced a global ‘pretraumatic stress’, a macrocosmic ver-
sion of the PreTraumatic Stress Syndrome (PreTESS) that soldiers experience
when assigned to combat. Environmental disaster films, Kaplan suggests,
help deal with such trauma; they become ‘intriguing, if desperate, attempts
by humans to make sense of and find ways around the global catastrophes
already in process’.15
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With its potential for encouraging reflection and motivation, cli-fi might
be seen as a vehicle for protest against climate inaction. But, for authors, the
possibility of galvanizing readers into action must be balanced against the wish
not to alienate them. Invited by the Cape Farewell project to write a climate
change novel, McEwan ruminated in an interview in 2007 on the pitfalls of
polemic: ‘Fiction hates preachiness. […] Nor do readers like to be hectored’.16 In
a similar vein, Gee, speaking at the 2014 Hay Festival of Literature, cautioned

12 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001), 319.
13 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 321.
14 Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal
Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 88.
15 E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Environmental Film and Fiction
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1 and 12.
16 Boyd Tonkin, ‘Ian McEwan: I Hang onto Hope in a Tide of Fear’. The Independent, 20
April 2007.

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 Introduction 9

other environmentally minded authors against being too ‘message-y’.17 Such

Introduction
nervousness is not to be taken lightly. The social protest novel has a proud
tradition, but environmentalist sentiments are widely associated with stridency,
fear-mongering and dogma, risking accusations of what Frederick Buell calls
the ‘Chicken Little syndrome’ and ‘doomsterism’.18 The mixed reception of
Gaarder’s World According to Anna (2013) and Trojanow’s Lamentations of Zeno
(2011) in Norway and Germany – both of which were seen to be marred by
overt authorial intent to drive home the environmentalist message – reflects
this dislike of ‘preachy’ novels.
If cli-fi must avoid what McEwan calls hectoring, it must also be wary
of another kind of lecturing. Climate change, more than simply a cultural
phenomenon, is, of course, a physical one, knowable through scientific mea-
surement and reporting. Cli-fi is therefore characterized by a mix of factual
research and speculative imagination. Although literary fiction is commonly
regarded as a form of writing licensed to depart from the purely factual, one
distinguished by ‘depragmatisation’,19 climate novels often go to consider-
able lengths to integrate scientific information. In Flight Behaviour, for
instance, Kingsolver draws on her specialist knowledge as a trained biolo-
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gist to rehearse the different ways in which global warming might affect
the migration routes of the monarch butterfly, and The Rapture relies on
the short explanations offered by a small cast of scientists to convey the
research insights Jensen gained from her interactions with geologists at the
University of Bristol. That this handling of scientific content demands par-
ticular skill, if the action is not to be interrupted and the reader’s attention
lost, is shown by the impatience with ‘info-dumping’ expressed in many
online comments on cli-fi.

17 Diana McCaulay, Michael Mendis and Maggie Gee, ‘The Untold Story: The Environment
in Fiction’, Hay Festival, 29 May 2014.
18 Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American
Century (London: Routledge, 2003), xvii, 244–6.
19 Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (London: Bloomsbury,
2016), 87.

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 10 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

Approaches and forms

Introduction

Particular difficulties in representing climate change in literary or filmic nar-

rative result from the complexity of its causes and manifestations, and the
discrepancy between its enormous spatial and temporal scale and that of indi-
vidual human experience. Anthropogenic climate change is a global ecological
problem which impacts quite differently in different parts of the world, and is
set to affect distant generations incomparably more than the present. The issue
of scale has received much critical attention in recent years.20 Several – more or
less sophisticated – cli-fi responses to this problem might be sketched. Some
texts telescope the time frame, sometimes with a liberal dose of apocalyptic
spectacle (for example, in The Day After Tomorrow [2004], which presents a
similar ‘abrupt climate change’ scenario as Robinson’s trilogy). Others opt for
a non-linear depiction of time that might be thought of as postmodern (for
example, Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and Wright’s
The Swan Book) or otherwise generically innovative (as in the ‘futurist history’
conceit and docufictional structure adopted in The Age of Stupid [2009], where
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short documentary films are placed within the fictitious frame of a narrator
sharing archives from a posthuman future). Still others, grappling with the
ecologically and spatially diffuse nature of climate change, focus on a single
event or setting that stands in, by analogy, for the multiple and multi-scalar
effects of global warming (the monarch butterflies of Kingsolver’s novel, for
instance). Then, there are novels that deploy a montage of different settings
and an ensemble of characters (as in Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy
and Gee’s The Flood). This recalls Ursula K. Heise’s argument that climate
change might best be depicted through the fragmented narrative techniques
of high modernist fiction: Heise cites David Brin’s Earth (1990) as a narrative
montage embracing a large number of characters and episodes, and inserting

20 Two prominent examples are Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects in Hyperobjects:

Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2013) and Timothy Clark’s analysis of Anthropocene disorder and scale effects in
Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury,
2015), 139–55.

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 Introduction 11

fragments of ‘authentic’ discourse (quotations from news announcements,

Introduction
letters, legal texts, books and online newsgroup discussions) into the fictional
story.21 Frisch’s Man in the Holocene (1980) anticipated this technique by
integrating a collage of factual information and reflections on the position of
humanity in the context of geological time, as an alternative way of organizing
and recording knowledge, in the narrative of the protagonist’s mental decline
(which serves as a correlative of the long-term fate of humanity). Novelists have
thus resorted to a range of techniques to render the vast spatial and temporal
scale of global warming meaningful for readers.
Associated with questions of scale are the intractability and open-end-
edness of the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change.22 Too often, the progress
of narrative emphasizes dénouement; indeed, Frank Kermode’s influential
analysis suggests that narrative is defined by the drive towards closure.23 The
result can, however, be that the depiction of the human drama takes prece-
dence over that of ecological process, that the latter becomes a mere symbolic
representation of a turning point in the protagonist’s life, and the intracta-
bility of climate change is subordinated to the requirement for resolution
of the conflict in order to satisfy the reader. For example, disaster narratives
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almost inevitably involve master plots of guilt and punishment, the quest for
redemption, or romance, implying a degree of resolution which sits ill with
the open-endedness of climate change.
Overall, it could be said that cli-fi walks an uneasy line between, on the
one hand, presenting the dimensions, processes and impacts of global warm-
ing in a way that awakens the reader’s curiosity and appeals to her psycho-
logically, intellectually and emotionally – as art generally strives to do – and,
on the other, conveying the enormity, urgency and indeterminacy of climate
change. Timothy Clark has gone so far as to propose that the conventions of

21 Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of
the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 205–10. See also Heise’s essay in
this volume.
22 On climate change as a ‘wicked’ problem, see Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate
Change, 334.
23 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1966).

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 12 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

story-telling are inadequate to address climate change in all its complexity.24

Introduction

More positively, however, this tension might be framed as an opportunity

for the novel to do what it has always done – innovate. Trexler’s analysis in
Anthropocene Fictions is based on the premise that climate change, as a phe-
nomenon comprised of multiple and interlinked kinds of agency, has changed
the very form of the novel. Ian Baucom proposes that, since the Anthropocene
calls for an understanding of human history at the level of species rather than
individual or even political relations, it concomitantly requires a different
kind of historical novel.25
The sheer prevalence of cli-fi might suggest that literary and cinematic
artists are continuing to grapple, in ever greater numbers, with the demands
of climate change. Certainly, the growing corpus of texts provides plenty of
evidence of authors’ response to climate change as a matter of both adopting
and strategically adapting existing generic conventions and approaches, in order
to achieve what we have already outlined – alerting readers to the dangers of
global warming, informing debates, motivating and empowering to think and
act, and thereby facilitating attitudinal and behavioural change, without fall-
ing into various pitfalls. A particularly influential mode of writing has been
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apocalypse, which plays on fears and conveys a sense of the extreme urgency
of radical action, but also prominent is its double, pastoral, which conjures
up images of harmonious living and cultivates a nostalgic feeling of loss and
potential restoration.26 The plot pattern of transgression and redemption (to
which we have already alluded), when set within a world where environmental
plenitude gives way to disaster, echoes the biblical narratives of the Flood, the
Tower of Babel and the Apocalypse. Other genre models include the detective
story (which evaluates clues and exposes criminals), and, similarly to this, the
thriller (which is driven by suspense and the progressive revelation of secrets
as the narrative reaches a climactic end). There is also the Bildungsroman, in

24 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 187.

25 Ian Baucom, ‘“Moving Centers”: Climate Change, Critical Method, and the Historical
Novel’, Modern Language Quarterly 76/2 (2015), 137–57.
26 For a discussion of the relationship between apocalypse and pastoral, see Greg Garrard,
Ecocriticism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 99 and Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of
Planet, 141–2.

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 Introduction 13

which the protagonist learns about the dangers of climate change as part of

Introduction
a wider process of self-discovery. Sub-genres including post-apocalyptic cli-fi
(at times taking on Gothic features, at others adopting the form of the ‘last
man’, castaway or desert island story), ecotopian narrative, techno-thriller and
biopunk have emerged (this last exploring the dark side of biotechnology,
while tracing the struggle of individuals for survival and self-realization in dys-
topian future worlds). Futurist history is a commonly encountered structural
device borrowed from sci-fi. Found in purest form in Naomi Oreskes and Eric
Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), where a Chinese histo-
rian looks back from the year 2373 at how climate change brought civilization
to an end in a great social collapse which decimated the population and forced
the survivors to return to a simpler way of life, this framing of climate change
is also present in Turner’s The Sea and Summer, Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth
and, as we have already suggested, the film The Age of Stupid.
In such futurist histories, the potential for satire – certainly, self-satire – is
evident in the element of self-critique and self-awareness that must inevitably
result from the reader’s encounter with those in the future who regret and
resent humans’ past mistakes. More generally, satire plays a role in novels and
Copyright © 2018. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

films which reveal the failings of contemporary society through juxtaposition

with alternative realities or exposure of hypocrisies to ridicule. Will Self ’s Book
of Dave (2006) and Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) are examples of cli-fi in which
mockery or black humour plays a major role, serving to avoid heavy-handed
stimulation of fear, hate and guilt.
As has already been suggested, the settings and scenarios of some cli-fi
might be seen as analogies of the larger-scale patterns and effects of global
warming. Going beyond simple analogy, some cli-fi texts explicitly present
their stories as allegory. In McEwan’s Solar, for instance, the protagonist serves
as a modern everyman as well as a particular type of scientist and entrepreneur,
and a transparently allegorical scene set in a boot room on a trip to the Arctic
demonstrates the inability of individuals, however well-meaning, to support
each other and organize themselves harmoniously for the common goal of
contributing to public awareness of the ecological crisis. Use of symbols is
an associated literary technique. In the post-apocalyptic future storyworld of
Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water, water has become a precious commodity
which the military control access to and use to terrorize the population. The

Cli-Fi : A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody, and Adeline Johns-Putra, Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=5840214.
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 14 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

association of water with life, sharing with others, ecological connectedness

Introduction

and the memory of a truth which the authorities seek to suppress enables the
issue of climate change to be overlaid with exploration of personal develop-
ment and gender issues, and beyond these with reflection on the meaning
of life and the ability of art to provide a permanence which human life does
not afford.
In other novels, departures from the human focalization and linear narra-
tive structure traditionally associated with literary realism serve to undermine
Cartesian exceptionalism and reveal the presence and agency of the non-
human. Nature itself can become the narrator, as in Dale Pendell’s novel, The
Great Bay (2010), and anthropomorphism can be a powerful tool ‘for ques-
tioning the complacency of dominant human self-conceptions’.27 In The Swan
Book, Wright draws on Indigenous Australian beliefs to blur the boundaries
between human and non-human agency, aligning the ecological mistreatment
of the black swans of her novel’s title with the injustices visited on her people.
The novel is an explicit critique of what Australian ecocritic Val Plumwood
has called the ‘androcentric, eurocentric, and ethnocentric, as well as anthro-
pocentric’ tendencies of dominant Western cultures.28
Copyright © 2018. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

Teaching cli-fi

The plethora of websites marketing, recommending and reviewing climate

change fiction is only one form of evidence of the considerable popular inter-
est in the subject. In response to this interest, courses on cli-fi are now being
offered at various universities. Perhaps the most obvious question calling
for critical consideration is what part fiction and film can play in environ-
mental education. Readings of cli-fi texts frequently focus on the potential

27 Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 192.
28 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London:
Routledge, 2002), 101.

Cli-Fi : A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody, and Adeline Johns-Putra, Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=5840214.
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 Introduction 15

of narratives and narrative conventions to raise awareness of climate change

Introduction
and initiate a shift of attitude, thereby addressing what Clark has called
‘Anthropocene disorder’.29 Students might examine the use of role models and
identification figures in young adult fiction, and investigate points of view
and other literary techniques through which readers’ and viewers’ identifica-
tion is cued and empathetic and ethical responses are invited.30 They might
study how literature’s eye for detail and sensuous evocation of sights, sounds,
smells, taste and feel make storyworlds real and authentic, thereby develop-
ing attentiveness to nature (in texts from Frozen [2013] to The Lamentations
of Zeno) and countering the anaesthesizing of the senses that has blocked
consciousness of the impact of global warming and our own implication in
its causes in everyday life.
Examination of texts might focus on the extent and reliability of the
factual information on climate change which they convey, how skilfully it is
integrated in the narrative and how effectively it is related to readers’ lived
experience. Or it could focus on tensions between this dissemination of knowl-
edge and interrogation of our ethical responsibility to future generations on
the one hand, and aesthetics on the other. How, and how successfully, is crude
Copyright © 2018. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

didacticism avoided? (It is striking how many narratives adopt an indirect

approach to climate change, featuring cooling rather than warming.) To what
extent does the author seek to feed into public debates, either by providing
information, presenting a particular perception of climate change and its pos-
sible resolution, or perhaps rather by promoting critical thinking?
A second possible approach is to explore the ability of ‘speculative fic-
tion’ (Atwood’s alternative term to ‘science fiction’) to extrapolate from cur-
rent trends and imagine the future,31 by comparing different texts as thought
experiments, working through the consequences of different choices in dif-
fering circumstances and juxtaposing them with non-fiction scenarios such

29 See Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, Chapter 7.

30 See James, The Storyworld Accord; Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies; and Nussbaum,
Upheavals of Thought.
31 Margaret Atwood, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context’, PMLA 119/3
(2004), 513–17.

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 16 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra

as those of the IPCC.32 It may be instructive to establish and critically assess

Introduction

what they identify as the root causes of climate change, and how they relate
environmental degradation to social inequality or gender relations.
A third group of questions relates directly to aesthetics, and through this,
returns us to questions of ethics. What role do genres such as thriller, disaster
novel and sci-fi play in shaping the account of climate change, what limita-
tions might these impose, and to what extent have given writers succeeded in
circumventing these? How do narrative and temporal structure (and other
mechanisms for relating the present with the future such as memories and
dreams) bridge the gap between the spatial and temporal scale of global warm-
ing and that of the human subject? What work is done by framing through
prologues and epilogues, ambivalent protagonists (as in The Lamentations of
Zeno) and unreliable focalizers (as in Take Shelter [2011]) to complicate and
critique common environmentalist tropes? What use is made of non-mimetic
narrative forms such as fantasy and myth, and of religious and literary allusions?
The wider symbolic significance of such diverse motifs as troubled parent/
child relations, cannibalism, ice, floods and cyborgs similarly invites explora-
tion through comparisons. A focus on reader/viewer identification and ethi-
Copyright © 2018. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

cal response would also facilitate subaltern approaches informed by Marxist,

postcolonial, feminist or queer theory, in order to interrogate what is included
and what is left out in empathetic and ethical invitations, and affective cues.

The shape and aims of this volume

This collection of essays was conceived as a contribution to the the new Peter
Lang (Oxford) series of readers/companions on genre fiction and film. Twenty-
four novels and five films were selected (with some difficulty, given the number

32 Alexandra Nikoleris, Johannes Stripple and Paul Tenngart ask how five cli-fi novels relate
to and complement the IPCC’s latest scientific scenarios of alternative societal devel-
opments in ‘Narrating Climate Futures: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Literary
Fiction’, Climatic Change 143 (2017), 307–19.

Cli-Fi : A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody, and Adeline Johns-Putra, Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=5840214.
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 Introduction 17

of titles to consider and their diversity), as representative of work in the genre.

Introduction
The volume opens with three contributions on proto-climate change fiction:
these show that real and perceived changes in the climate were a matter of
concern before knowledge of anthropogenic global warming, and that cli-
mate change has always been interpreted in the light of human actions, and
invested with wider meanings relating to socio-political concerns. The remain-
ing essays have been divided into five sections, on speculative future fiction
(dystopian and apocalyptic narratives), realist narratives set in the present or
near future, genre fiction (thriller, crime, conspiracy, social satire), children’s
film and young adult novels, and literary modernism. The essays, which were
all written for this volume, were commissioned from an international team
of scholars already known for their work in the field. The contributors were
asked to offer ways of reading/understanding the text (in most cases a single
novel, but in a few, focusing on one novel by the author in the wider context
of their work), and to keep plot summaries as brief as possible, so as to leave
space for an analysis capable of engaging general readers as well as students
and teachers. They were invited to indicate the importance of the work and its
reception, and to provide suggestions for teaching. The academic apparatus of
Copyright © 2018. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

references has been deliberately curtailed, but the volume closes with recom-
mendations for further reading and an index. We hope that this publication
will fill what we see as a gap between longer, theoretically driven academic
studies and the brief descriptive accounts and subjective views expressed in
most internet blogs.

Cli-Fi : A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody, and Adeline Johns-Putra, Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=5840214.
Created from cam on 2021-03-01 04:15:23.
Copyright © 2018. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

Cli-Fi : A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody, and Adeline Johns-Putra, Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers,
2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=5840214.
Created from cam on 2021-03-01 04:15:23.