The Warning Function of Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

2019

Thesis Eleven, 2015

Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst conservative politicians and journalists, there is a near-consensus amongst scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Like the hole in the ozone layer as described by Bruno Latour, global warming is a 'hybrid' natural-social-discursive phenomenon. And science fiction (SF) seems to occupy a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. This paper takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom dubs 'cli-fi'. It seeks to describe how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. It argues against the view that 'catastrophic' SF is best understood as a variant of the kind of 'apocalyptic' fiction inspired by the Christian Book of Revelation, or Apokalypsis, on the grounds that this tends to downplay the historical novelty of SF as a genre defined primarily in relation to modern science and technology. And it examines the narrative strategies pursued in both print and audiovisual SF texts that deal with anthropogenic climate change.

The Golden Line: A Magazine of English Literature Vol. 5, No. 1 ISSN: 2395-1591 (Online), 2023

Science Fiction, abbreviated as Sci-Fi, falls within the literary genre of Speculative Fiction. Works of Sci-Fi amalgamate scientific thought and prognostic foresight. In the current Anthropocene epoch, which is also termed ‘Capitalocene’, humans are causing the cataclysmic degradation of the environment by bioengineering the planet, satiating an unceasing lust for material gain, and disrupting symbiotic alliances with other organisms. Hence, it is imperative to inculcate ecological cognizance in human beings and this purpose is effectively served by dystopian sci-fi. In fact, utopia is sustained in dystopian fiction. Dystopian discourse envisions a future world characterized by bleakness, desolation, misery, and despair caused by environmental catastrophe in an ultra-technological world. The main objective of this literature is to resist the apocalypse by warning readers of the impending eco-disaster when climate denial persists in a political framework. This research paper explores dystopian sci-fi through the lens of ecocriticism to understand its effectiveness. For this study, two texts namely The Road by Norman McCarthy and The Ministry for Future by Kim Stanley Robinson are extensively investigated. Keywords: Science Fiction, Eco-dystopian Fiction, Utopia, Anthropocene, Ecocriticism

2019

The fundamental aim of this essay is to explore the phenomenon known as that of the Anthropocene, concisely the period of time in which human activity has had an impact on the planet. With an understanding of this period and its effects on literature and human society, it will be interesting to note how this moves in correlation with those changes connected to the event and their influences upon one another. For example, does the existence and legitimisation of the Anthropocene era act as a stimulus for literature, and does therefore the power of literature influence in turn the development of the climate and human in/action? These phases of human history can certainly help comprehend the growing canon of ‘World Literature’ and what this means in an interconnected, global 21st century.

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology, 2021

This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and mass extinctions. Although the philosophy of technology has traditionally examined the forecasting of technological risk and arguments about whether to embrace or reject the growth of technological mediation of human lives, the field has yet to fully investigate environmental futurisms and imagination. To begin a conversation for the philosophy of technology, philosophies of science fiction narrative discuss the different roles that imagination plays in projecting our concerns with the present onto futures that have not occurred and future generations who are not yet living. One of the key issues that the chapter explores is how science fiction imagination is based on assumptions and values about the history of technological change, including industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism. These issues reveal ways in which technology, future narrative, and climate justice are related.

UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, 2014

This article explores how Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy narrates crisis, the ‘zero hour’, and a potentially post-anthropocentric future, as the trilogy moves in a complex dialogue cum polylogue from the biotechnological creation of a global apocalypse, first to its immediate aftermath and a transition period, and then to a potentially utopian version of pioneering and a variety of species’s co-settling of the remains of the planet. I read the trilogy as part of the emerging subgenre of Anthropocene fiction, essentially a speculative literature grounded in sciences that shares some features with environmental and climate change novels and the utopian/dystopian tradition. The trilogy offers a twofold relational vision of ‘culture vs. nature’: the human induced change of and impact on nature on the planetary scale, the Anthropocene, and the transformation and commodification of lifeforms on the molecular level, the genetic manipulation of animals, humans, and posthumans. Atwood’s double-vision of the present’s crisis and the beyond of potential ‘natureculture’ futures suggests a heterophoric posthumanism that stresses the necessity to locate the posthuman in both the future and the present simultaneously. Atwood’s narration of our world in crisis emphasizes the link between survival, narration, and an understanding of nature as a network that includes humans.

Fiction writers who try to do justice to the vast temporal and spatial scales and the enormous complexity of climate change are faced with the problem that the phenomenon exceeds human perception and that it is not dramatic in the traditional sense. In this article we explore the formal challenges that arise when fiction takes on the temporality of climate change by examining three very different novels that seek to capture the geological timescale. We analyze Richard McGuire’s time-bending graphic novel Here (2014), Dale Pendell’s fictional future history The Great Bay (2010), and Jeanette Winterson’s cautionary science-fiction tale The Stone Gods (2007) through the lens of Barbara Adam’s concept of the timescape, Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence, and Timothy Clark’s notion of destructive doubles to see what kinds of literary innovations and translations the timescale of climate change has provoked. In doing so, we ponder Clark’s question, posed in his recent book Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015), whether humans are constitutionally incapable of imagining the Anthropocene—the new geological epoch defined by the action of humans of which climate change is the most salient manifestation—or whether authors can adequately depict and convey it by disrupting conventional modes of representation. We conclude that while each of the three novels ultimately falls short in this regard, collectively they do chart possible pathways for successful literary treatment of the most pressing ecological threat of our time.

PRZEGLĄD KULTUROZNAWCZY, 2021

When formulating proecological strategies, social imagination is devoted relatively little attention. Contribution of the humanities to the management in the age of the Anthropocene is most often perceived as explaining threats that we and the future human and non-human beings will have to face as a result of irresponsible environmental policies. Hence, the presumed task of the humanities (and social science) consists primarily in analyzing and presenting the causes and the processes which culminated in the climate crisis and the decline of biodiversity. However, such an approach does not allow this knowledge to be actively engaged in constructing alternative, proecological attitudes. Consequently, I argue in this paper that in order for the state of affairs to change one requires not only new scientific tools (methodology, language), but also new sensitivity and aesthetics. The author argues that the challenges of the current times, resulting from environmental change, destruction of habitats and ecological disasters, direct our sensibilities and aesthetics ever more tangibly towards the fantastic: horror, science fiction, or fantasy. However, while ecohorror mainly exposes the negative aftermath of the Anthropocene-culminating in the inevitable disaster-science fiction offers leeway for a more speculative approach, enabling one to construct such visions of reality in which multispecies justice will be observed and cultivated. It is therefore suggested that there is much need for a science fiction aesthetic and narration that would be capable of guiding us out of the anthropocentric entanglement and the Anthropocene into the Chthulucene (as conceived by Haraway).

The intersections between environmental destruction, apocalyptic themes, and the bildungsroman are re-examined here in a move to re-position how environmental apocalypse treats with transitional movements as opposed to the finality of a so-called "End." The paper focuses on re-thinking how we consider "environment," arguing alongside other recent thinkers that a separation between the human world and the natural is neither productive, nor representative of the real world: through the literary-critical lens, the paper indicates that in these particular novels, the characters are wholly invested in symbiotic relationships with their surrounding environments, whether those be the backwoods of Nova Scotia, the human press of New York, a teenage basement hideout called "the Bunker," or small town living. As the various environments change in response to increasingly speculative threats, so do the characters -- and vice-versa, as those characters overcome their hurdles and affect the world around them. Through an examination of both novels, this paper demonstrates that the real threats to continued human existence are not simply those we often see on the surface, but really those that are deep-rooted in how they affect our living environments; even then, the two works suggest that we are entirely adaptable and capable of perseverance.