Climate Change and Science Fiction

This fall semester of 2018 I’ll be a teaching assistant for Boston University’s honors college course on climate change, an opportunity for which I’m extremely excited.  Participating in the class not only gives me a chance to discuss a topic of personal and professional interest with BU’s honors students, but to sit in on a seminar led by five wonderful professors from various fields (Biology, Earth and Environment, English, Humanities, and Political Science).  In fact, prior to joining the honors college team, I’d been organizing my own course on climate change and contemporary fiction for my school’s writing program.  During the planning phase of the course, an unexpected and somewhat unsettling question dawned on me: where the hell are all the climate change novels?  This isn’t to say that climate change fiction doesn’t exist (it even has its own shorthand, “cli-fi”), but that there are fewer examples than one might expect to find during an era when climate change discourse is so extensive.

In fact, climate change fiction has been around for a while, but has been largely relegated to the genre of science fiction; early examples include J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964).  Beyond science fiction—a genre long sidelined as “lowbrow”—literary treatments of climate change have been rare until recently; and even now, there are surprisingly few.  In all likelihood, the paucity of cli-fi reflects our culture’s unwillingness to seriously engage with the topic at hand; and while I look admirably upon the science fiction that dares to grapple with the complexity and consequences of climate change, it’s not farfetched to imagine that many readers equate “sci-fi” with the fantastic, if not the impossible.  Casting climate change as a topic worthy of science fiction means that many readers subconsciously view climate change as fantastic, if not impossible.  Climate change becomes science fiction—an interesting thought experiment, but not an actually pressing concern.

Of course, such a reading remains blissfully unaware of the utopian potential that informs science fiction’s representation of topics such as climate change, or the genre’s empowering political investments.  Effective science fiction presents its readers with what Tom Moylan calls a critical utopia: an often dystopic or otherwise objectionable vision of social relations that reflect our own social situation through a glass darkly.  Contemporary cli-fi explores how fictive fantasies of ecological collapse and apocalypse sprout from current climatological conditions.  Such fantasies need not be apparent in the world around us (although many are becoming increasingly apparent, as far as climate change is concerned), but need only suggest how our world potentiates such fantasies.  Cli-fi is only fiction in the sense that it performs unrealized possibilities; its premises are all-too-factual.  Take Kim Stanley Robinson’s appropriately glacial (in terms of pace) Forty Signs of Rain (2004), the first installment in his “Science in the Capital” trilogy, and frequently applauded as a “realist” account of climate science and politics.  The novel eventually presents its readers with the much-anticipated disaster event, but only after introducing and extensively elaborating on the statistics that point toward global destabilization.  Robinson carefully structures the narrative conceit through the use of historical facts, luring readers into a situation in which catastrophe is inevitable.

Perhaps more than any other premise, climate change illustrates the paradoxical kernel that drives science fiction: that a mode of writing often associated with the fantastical in fact concerns itself habitually with the factual.  It isn’t merely trying to get its readers to think “Hey, what if this speculative thing that happens on the page actually comes to pass?”—it’s trying to get them to wrestle with the very real conditions that give rise to the speculative thing in the first place.  As Fredric Jameson has said, sci-fi asks readers not to imagine some distant future, but to imagine the present as the history of a yet-to-happen moment.  In the introduction to their deeply unsettling The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), Naomi Oreskes and Erik write that “Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past.  Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present.”  This is the contemporary challenge that climate change presents, and that fiction accepts—science fiction quite explicitly.  A recent poignant acknowledgement of this acceptance occurs not in a science fiction novel, however, but in Ben Lerner’s quiet yet troubling 10:04 (2014).  As the narrator (one among many projections of presumably the same figure) prepares for a “large cyclonic system with a warm core” that rolls toward New York, he contemplates the storm’s temporal effect: “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different—nothing in me or the store had changed […] but, as the eye drew near, what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs, however briefly—in the passing commons of a train, in a container of tasteless coffee.”

In these lines of Lerner’s novel, the narrator zeroes in on the overlap between science-fictional utopianism and critical demand of climate change.  The dismissal of climate science derives from an ideological faith that the science must be wrong (or worse, an apathy toward science itself), and that “everything will be alright.”  Yet the emergence of many possible worlds in conjunction with Lerner’s impending storm complements fiction’s capacity to craft narratives.  The future is not given.  Everything will not be alright, and certainly not of its own accord.  The utopian stakes lie not in imagining wholesale a future world disconnected from ours, but in recognizing the impetus for imagination already embedded in the present.  The demands of global climate change press this imagination upon us, compelling us to address the conditions that already plague our world so that the future, although never given, remains possible.

For those interested, here are just a few recent works of cli-fi literature to check out (in addition to those mentioned above):

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife
James Bradley's Clade
Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior
Richard Powers's The Overstory
Jeff VanderMeer's "The Southern Reach Trilogy" (technically not about climate change, but definitely expressive of climate change and ecological shift)

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