Novels have been concerned with environmental degradation and climate change for quite some time, especially in the realm of science fiction. Indeed, important American novels that have relevance to climate change go all the way back at least to Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), a book that can be and has been read in all sorts of allegorical ways, as when C.L.R. James envisioned life aboard the Pequod as a sort of workers’ utopia. Ahab can also be seen as a sort of Frankenstein figure, with his unrestrained quest for the whale paralleling the good doctor’s excessive zeal in the quest to create life. It’s also a fascinating Menippean stew of different kinds of generic fragments, from relatively realist narrative segments, to high-seas adventure, to proto-modernist textual shenanigans, to Ahab’s fierce Shakespearean rants, to Kim Stanley Robinson–style information dumps (though Robinson’s information tends to be more reliable).
As far as climate fiction is concerned, knowing what we know now it is hard to resist reading Ahab’s arrant desire to destroy the whale that took his leg as a parable about humanity’s all-out assault on nature. The book itself seems skeptical that whales are really endangered, though it does note that some people were already concerned about that even back when the book was written. Those people, of course, were correct, and the near extinction of whales thanks to whale hunting of a kind that is central to Moby-Dick became one of the key foci of environmental activism in the second half of the twentieth century. The success of this activism has led to the current situation, in which the whale population as a whole is now on the upswing. And, of course, the ultimate fate of Ahab and the Pequod reminds us that assaulting nature is a fool’s game. Indeed, the book is ultimately a sort of revenge-of-nature narrative that sees whales (read nature?) as immortal, likely to survive long after the flooding of the world has killed off humans, survive, swimming the seas to “spout his frothed defiance to the skies.”
Many of the classics of American fiction actually deal with climate and the environment in important ways. Another example of this phenomenon is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in many ways the crowning work of the wave of proletarian fiction that was so prominent in American literature in the 1930s, largely due to skepticism toward capitalism caused by the Great Depression. The Depression is crucial to The Grapes of Wrath as well, of course, but there are many ways in which climate and the environment are also central to the novel, which thus becomes a major work of climate fiction as well as one of the central works of the American literary tradition.
The Joad family of this novel fall victim to the economic hardships of the Depression and are forced to move to California in search of economic opportunity, encountering there, not the golden California of the American dream, but violence, bigotry, and oppression. Meanwhile, their initial predicament as farmers in Oklahoma is exacerbated by the extensive drought that brought “Dust Bowl” conditions to their region of the U.S. The novel thus reminds us that, even in the advanced modern world, we are still very much at the mercy of the elements. In this case, though, the negative effects of bad weather have been significantly worsened by poor land and crop management, as farmers like the Joads have been forced by economic conditions continually to grow cash crops such as cotton, rather than rotating their crops in ways that would have enriched the soil and helped protect their farmlands from drought conditions.
In a more significant and profound way, though, The Grapes of Wrath deals with the relationship between humanity and the natural world and with the ways in which modern industrial capitalism has crippled that relationship, leading to a situation in which humans attempt to use modern technology and techniques to master and control nature rather than attempting to live in harmony with it. In particular, the Joad family has, for generations, had a close relationship with the land, a relationship that has now been lost, delivering a psychic damage to them that is, in many ways, more painful than the economic hardships they encounter in the novel. Thus, Donna Seaman has suggested that Grapes is a novel that shows a “profound ecological awareness,” while Robert DeMott, in his introduction to the popular Penguin edition of the novel, argues that novel shows a
sustained indictment about a natural world despoiled by a grievous range of causes—natural disaster, poor land-use practices, rapacious acquisitiveness, and technological arrogance. Failure of genetic engineering and industrialized nature “hangs over the State like a great sorrow,” Steinbeck laments in chapter 25, and the “failure . . . that topples all our successes” stems from misconceived values— manipulating nature and misunderstanding man’s delicate place as a species in the biotic community. (Steinbeck’s ideas, indebted to Ed Ricketts’s ecological training, paralleled those of pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold who proposed a viable land ethic in A Sand County Almanac.)
DeMott then goes on to suggest the value of reading the character Jim Casy within an ecological framework, a reading strategy that adds a whole new dimension to Casy’s obvious function as a sort of reform of Christian ideals to actually help the poor, rather than to oppress them even farther. Thus, for DeMott, Casy’s journey in the novel from preacher to radical union organizer also includes his realization of the importance of “deep ecology,” an egalitarian, biocentric, nonsectarian view in which all living things are related and equally valued.” As Casy himself puts it in the novel, “There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.” DeMott then concludes that The Grapes of Wrath attains a new relevance for our ecologically conscious age when we realize that it is “at once an elegy for and a challenge to live in harmony with the earth.”
In addition to such classics of literary fiction, there is also a long tradition of ecologically conscious work in both British and American science fiction. For example, serialized in 1952 and first published as a single volume in 1953, The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth,is a remarkably prescient novel that envisions the runaway growth of consumer capitalism, leading to widespread social and environmental collapse. Indeed, the book’s environmentalist vision, coming a decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) helped to found the American environmentalist movement, is probably its most forward-looking feature, reminding us of the way science fiction often anticipates developments in the real world. Of course, The Space Merchants is a work of satire that is not meant to be literally predictive so much as it is meant to provide warnings about the potential consequences of current social and technological trends. Unfortunately, the warnings contained in the novel do not seem to have been heeded in the real world, but the book has exercised a considerable influence on the genre of science fiction. A full discussion of this novel can be found here.
By the end of the 1950s, science fiction was growing in influence as a literary genre, though many—including science fiction writers themselves—felt that the genre was paying too much attention to thrilling futuristic adventures and not enough to literary quality or seriousness of theme. In the 1960s and 1970s, a movement known as science fiction’s New Wave sought to counter this tendency. Among the serious political issues addressed by writers in this movement was environmentalism and the climate. For example, the British novelist J. G. Ballard, in The Drowned World (1962), envisions a world so torn by global warming and the consequent rise of global ocean levels that only fifty million people remain alive on earth, mostly in the polar regions. In this, the warming is caused by atmospheric and solar phenomena that do not appear to be caused by human activity (Ballard would envision that in the 1964 follow-up The Burning World, in which industrial pollution causes a global drought), but the novel was nevertheless a key moment in the birth of climate fiction because of its stark reminders that the climate of earth could, in fact, change and become quite inhospitable to human beings. Ballard isn’t for everyone, but his evocation here of a flooded, superheated postapocalyptic London is highly effective, while his exploration of the impact of these conditions on the psyche of his protagonist, biologist Robert Kerans, achieves a psychological depth that made an important contribution to the development of New Wave science fiction.
Perhaps the weirdest aspect of The Drowned World is its suggestion that the change in the global climate has essentially restored prehistoric conditions, causing both plants and animals to revert to their prehistoric form. Humans, meanwhile, are beginning to draw on their subconscious inheritance from the distant past as well, making this novel something of a degeneration narrative, even if it does not quite literally imply backward evolution. It’s an idea that doesn’t strike me as scientifically sound, though it is metaphorically interesting. It also makes this novel a direct forerunner to Louise Erdrich’s recent climate novel Future Home of the Living God (2017), which employs a similar conceit of backward (or at least haywire) evolution. In any case, Ballard’s novel makes the point that human psychology might operate differently under different circumstances (and not necessarily in a good way), even if the specific vision of this change presented here might not be literally believable.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is probably the single most important novel by the British New Wave writer John Brunner, standing at the center of the sequence of important dystopian narratives that he produced at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. Other novels in the sequence include The Jagged Orbit (1969, which focuses on racism and the criminalistic tendencies of the military-industrial complex) and The Shockwave Rider (1975, which focuses on the impact of a worldwide communications explosion). These novels also include The Sheep Look Up (1972), a brilliant political satire that focuses most specifically on the mutual involvement of environmental degradation and political repression in the U.S.). That novel is discussed in detail here.
Stand on Zanzibar, meanwhile, is an ambitious novel that employs a variety of science fiction tropes and modernist literary strategies to project an early 21st-century world in which many of the social and political tendencies of the late 1960s have been extended, with results that are approaching the disastrous. It won the 1969 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the only Hugo won by Brunner in his career. The central emphasis of Stand on Zanzibar is on overpopulation, and its title refers to the fact that, in the 2010 world of the novel, the global population has, for the first time, reached the level where it would no longer be theoretically possible for all of the world’s people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the island of Zanzibar. Partly due to the growing population problem, resources are scarce, and international strife is a fact of life, with the United States and China engaged in an interminable war of attrition that bears obvious similarities to the war in Vietnam, ongoing when the book was written.
Though Brunner was British, the book (like much of his fiction) is set mostly in the U.S., still the world’s wealthiest nation in the world of the book, but one with growing social problems, as the gap between the rich and the poor keeps most urban areas on the verge of riots. Strict eugenics laws have been enacted to try to quell population growth, and many young women, unable to have children under the current circumstances, are reduced to the status of roving sexual objects, or “shiggies,” drifting from one man to another, providing sexual favors in return for food and shelter. Pro-Chinese terrorists further destabilize life in the U.S., as does the fact that the pressure of living in this world have driven many individuals (known as “muckers”) to snap and run amuck. The general population copes with these pressures via strategies that include mind-numbing drugs, casual sex, and popular culture, thus recalling earlier dystopian works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The complex literary form of Stand on Zanzibar has been compared to that of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, and Dos Passos was a clear influence on Brunner during this period of his work. Meanwhile, the novel relies less on plot than on these devices and an array of details to present a complete and compelling fictional world, which includes not only the U.S. and China, but crucial subplots set in the Asian island nation of Yatakang and the “backward” African nation of Beninia, though the representation of the latter fails to overcome a number of colonialist stereotypes. The inhabitants there, for example, are poor but happy, partly because of their calm communitarianism and partly because they bear a mutant gene that causes them to secrete a substance that suppresses the normal human (masculine) tendency toward aggression—thus making them (and anyone they encounter) behave in peaceful and cooperative ways.
The 1970s, among other things, saw the rise of a new wave of environmentalist activism that exercised a significant influence on American literature and film. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) is one of the central texts that grew out of this context. Informed especially by the insights of the then-emergent environmentalist movement, Ecotopia describes a secessionist utopian state on the west coast of the United States, organized according to largely socialist principles and dedicated to respect for and preservation of the earth’s natural environment. In a classic utopian motif, reporter William Weston travels to Ecotopia to do a story for his newspaper, and his observations reveal the society to readers as well. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ecotopia is the disavowal of growth. It is a zero sum “stable state” society that maintains stability—but not stagnation. That is, zero sum means no net growth but it in no way implies the absence of change. This stable state is furthered through a variety of environmentally friendly policies, such as an extensive recycling program. Liberal education and penal policies help to maintain humane conditions for all citizens, while sexual attitudes generally reflect the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Anticapitalist economic measures have driven most U.S. corporations out of Ecotopia. The remaining economic system, though it retains some elements of free-market capitalism, has numerous socialist characteristics, including relative economic equality for all citizens, worker-owned companies, reformed working conditions, and universally guaranteed social services. Ecotopia was followed by a less successful prequel, Ecotopia Emerging (1981), while Ecotopia itself has shown surprising staying power as a text that is still read and studied nearly half a century after its initial publication.
Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) is another entry in the 1970s wave of environmentally conscious science fiction. This book is very forward-looking in its vision of a global holocaust caused by environmental pollution and climate change, leading to the destruction of civilization and almost all humans. One group survives, though they are all sterile. Luckily, they have developed a viable cloning technology, which they hope will keep the human race alive until normality is restored. However, the clones decide to maintain cloning as the norm, producing themselves in batches of identical “brothers” or “sisters” in a move that eventually leads to the loss of all individuality. This also leads to a loss of all creativity and ingenuity and to the destruction of their colony, though a few rogue individuals survive. Thus, the whole narrative eventually (and ironically) collapses into a pretty conventional and unoriginal celebration of individualism and individual creativity, though it does so in some interesting ways that explore a utopian/dystopian dynamic with considerable sophistication. The narrative is a bit hard to latch onto, but it does explore a number of ideas that should be of interest especially to those who like postapocalyptic science fiction.
David Brin’s Earth (1990) is a particularly wide-ranging look at global environmental degradation, nearly leading to the death of the planet (though featuring a deus ex machina rescue in the end). Like most of this author’s fiction, this novel is brimming with science fictional concepts; it also features a number of particularly accurate projections of the future, especially with regard to the development of the Internet and to the evolution of global warming and rising sea levels, which have, at the time of the novel (c. 2040), wrought worldwide devastation. Brin, however, presents this future world in the context of a high-concept science fiction narrative involving artificial black holes (sort of), aliens, and an artificial intelligence that comes to inhabit the Internet and to save the planet, subsequently establishing contact with other planetary minds around the galaxy. It’s a pretty good tale, but I think it might be more effective as climate change fiction if it had maintained a focus on the climate instead of all the fancy science fiction motifs. In addition, one major subplot of Earth involves an eco-terrorist who decides to try to exterminate most of the human race as a means of saving the environment, a motif that might be more at home in a James Bond or Marvel film. In addition to being just plain silly, this motif is also offensive in the way it misrepresents the actions and motivations of environmental activists, who have generally sought to save both the environment and the human race—and by almost entirely peaceful means. Any violence committed by so-called “eco-terrorists” has certainly not been aimed at mass-extermination of humans, and any representation of them in this way threatens to deliver exactly the wrong message.
T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2005) is seemingly an attempt to treat the issue of climate change in a mode of black comedy. Boyle’s energetic prose and amusingly ironic stance certainly seem comic, and the book even has a happy ending of sorts, though most of the events narrated within the book are downright tragic. The events of the novel take place in two different time frames. The present-day action, narrated in first person by protagonist Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tierwater, takes place in a mid-2020s world when climate change has virtually destroyed the natural environment, making most animal species extinct and making human life difficult indeed. Tierwater is trying to get by as a sort of caretake living on the estate of an eccentric Michael Jackson-like pop star who has collected a number of near-extinct animals for his private menagerie. In the second time frame, mostly set at the end of the 1980s, Tierwater remains the protagonist, though events are related in third person. Most of the action of this earlier time frame has to do with Tierwater’s involvement in environmental activism, spurred on by the dedication of his second wife Amanda. It also features Tierwater’s daughter Sierra (from his first marriage), who becomes an even more dedicated activist, occupying a platform in a giant redwood for three years to prevent the tree from being cut down. Her story, based on real-world tree-sitting activism from that period, ends tragically when she falls to her death. In the present-day narrative, a seventy-five-year-old Tierwater is just trying to survive, his years as an eco-terrorist (leading to several years in prison) now behind him. Tierwater and Amanda end up together in a derelict cabin they had occupied decades earlier with Sierra, trying to rebuild the cabin (and their lives) amid a destroyed forest.
Boyle’s depiction of the effects of global warming is certainly vivid, if a bit too colorful, considering the somber topic. For example, Tierwater describes his struggle just to get his aging body from his car to the inside of a restaurant amid the heat that now ravages California: “The whole world’s a pizza oven, a pizza oven that’s just exploded, the blast zone radiating outward forever, particles of grit forced right up my nose and down my throat the instant I swing open the door—accompanied by the ominous rattle of sand ricocheting off the scratch-resistant lenses of my glasses” (319). The weather is also excessively violent and unpredictable, and conditions are generally hellish, though one might argue that Boyle, in search of that comic mode, depicts life as going on just a bit too normally. Tierwater, for example, really seems more concerned with the difficulties of dealing with his aging body than with climate change—and he does so in a highly amusing way with which most people over sixty-five or so can probably identify. All in all, it’s an enjoyable read, but the postapocalyptic future (which is almost our present) seems both exaggerated in the extent to which global warming has wrecked everything and underdeveloped in the extent to which little attention is paid to the social and political impact of such change. The past narrative about eco-activism, based in reality, is probably more effective, but that topic is handled much better in Richard Powers’ The Overstory.
Powers, one of America’s most distinguished novelists, showed evidence of an ecological awareness even in his early, sometimes playfully postmodern novels. But issues related to climate change moved to the forefront of his work with The Echo Maker (2006), winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. As is typically the case with Powers’ fiction, this novel interweaves several different narratives related from the points of view of several different characters. And point of view is crucial in this novel, in which one of the major themes is human perception of reality, something shown here to be heavily mediated through complex brain mechanics. The principal figures include Mark Shluter, a young Nebraska slacker who flips his truck on a remote stretch of road and experiences serious brain injuries, and his sister Karin, who returns to Kearney, Nebraska, to care for disabled brother. The third (and probably most important) point-of-view character is neuroscientist Gerald Weber, famous for his Oliver Sacks-like popularizations of case studies of the effects of brain injuries. (At one point, a man on a plane apparently mistakes him for Sacks.) Weber comes to town to investigate Mark’s unusual condition, which includes a case of “Capgras Syndrome” (a real thing) that causes him to believe that the woman claiming to be Karin is actually an impostor, which is somewhat ironic, given that Weber himself is suffering from a serious case of impostor syndrome as his public reputation wanes.
The story of Mark’s neurological disorder plays out against the background of a mystery narrative concerning the cause of his accident and a major ecological crisis taking place in the wetlands near Kearney, a major stopping-off point for migrating sandhill cranes, whose habitat is seriously threatened by development in the area. Karin’s boyfriend Daniel Riegel is an environmental activist who struggles (unsuccessfully) to stop the development, in a narrative that makes some important points about the power of the capitalist forces that are lined up against nature, with relatively ineffectual activists such as Riegel as nature’s only advocates. This narrative gives Powers a chance to do some lovely nature writing in describing the beauty and majesty of the cranes. It also gives him a chance to make an eloquent plea for the importance of saving the cranes. At one point, for example, Karin watches the birds and suddenly thinks that humans fail to recognize their kinship with us just as her brother fails to recognize her: “the whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors.” (347–48). Very much in the same mode, Weber’s musings on the workings of the brain include a number of reminders, not only of how strange those workings can be, but also on the fact that our preposterous human brains separate us from other animals far less than we think.
Overall, the tone of this novel is rather melancholy, and it offers relatively little hope for the future of the planet, as opposed to the note of hope that sounds so clearly in Powers’ later climate fiction. One reason for the somewhat solemn tone is that this novel was written fairly soon after the 9/11 bombings, an event that, in fact, hovers in the background of this novel throughout: the action begins soon after those bombings and ends just as the ironically named Operation Iraqi Freedom is beginning in the Middle East. At the same time, Powers’ struggling and damaged characters, all barely keeping their heads above water from one day to the next, still keep trying, with a certain odd courage and nobility. Indeed, Colson Whitehead, in his review of the novel, called it “a wise and elegant post-9/11 novel,” and concluded that Powers “accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms.”
The Road (2006) is a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, another one of America’s most distinguished writers. The novel focuses on a man and his young son as they struggle to make their way south to escape the encroaching winter, traveling through a blighted landscape in which nature has been almost completely destroyed. Human society has collapsed as well; most of the population seems to have already been killed by the catastrophe that has occurred, while many others (including the boy’s mother) have committed suicide, unable to cope with the postapocalyptic conditions that now prevail. The remaining humans mostly battle against one another for the scraps that still remain. Indeed, food is so short that a large portion of the survivors seem to have resorted cannibalism, regarding other humans simply as a source of food. Throughout the novel, it is clear that the man is dying and that he only hopes to live long enough to get his son to a warmer climate, where he might have some hope of surviving the winter. The book gains a great deal of emotional power from this situation, which reduces so much of the action to an essentially primal level.
The Road is a sort of all-purpose postapocalyptic novel that is concerned more with the aftermath of the apocalypse, the exact nature of which has never been made clear. Indeed, it is mostly a sort of survival story, with the attempts of the man to find resources to help him and his son survive often being reminiscent of stories such as Robinson Crusoe. Most critics, though, seem to have read The Road as a climate change novel, largely because of the blighted condition of nature in the novel—and, of course, because climate change is the most obvious apocalyptic threat that we currently face in our world. Meanwhile, the novel is very pessimistic about our ability to deal with any event that leads to the collapse of our normal social structure and means of social support, suggesting that it is more likely that individuals would turn against one another rather than banding together to help each other. Thus, the inability of humans to organize to deal with the crisis can clearly be seen as a commentary on our inability thus far to take any sort of effective action against climate change. The Road is certainly an emotionally powerful novel that reminds us of all the things we have to lose if we don’t begin to mount a strong opposition to climate change. However, the fact that it does not explicitly identify climate change as the source of its apocalypse does limit its effectiveness as a climate change novel. The Road was adapted to a film of the same title in 2009.
It is worth noting, by the way, that McCarthy’s highly respected (by highly controversial) Western novel Blood Meridian (1985) also has strong implications in terms of climate change. Set in the wake of the Mexican-American War of 1848, as a result of which most of the Southwest was taken from Mexico, the novel makes clear that Mexicans and Native Americans were treated as obstacles that had to be crushed in the Americanization of the West. But the natural environment was also treated as an enemy to be subdued. The main villain of that novel, Judge Holden, is a sort of allegorical character who represents all of the worst aspects of the American national project, including the brutality with which much of the West was ultimately “tamed” and made a part of the United States. Noting the collection of specimens that he has compiled in his travels, he makes clear his view that nature is meant to be controlled and dominated by men such as himself: “These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth” (209).
Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) is another multi-purpose postapocalyptic novel that can easily be read as a commentary on climate change. It has this (as well as having been written by one of America’s most distinguished novelists) in common with The Road. It is sometimes also reminiscent of the film Don’t Look Up (2021) in that it uses a different (and more easily visualized) apocalypse as a stand-in for climate change. The comedy isn’t as broad as that in Don’t Look Up, but (for a novel with such grim subject matter) Zone One is narrated with a certain bemused, sardonic humor. (We never learn the real name of the protagonist, for example, because he is referred to throughout the book by his nickname, “Mark Spitz,” with which he has been ironically tagged because he can’t swim.) It also employs a great deal of satire in terms of its treatment of official attempts to deal with the zombie outbreak, which basically involve a combination of government attempts to apply conventional thinking to a very unconventional situation and corporate attempts to figure out how to monetize the crisis.
Zone One is a deceptively complex novel that addresses a number of different things, but it does openly invite readers to view the zombie outbreak as a stand-in for climate change. The zombies are repeatedly referred to as a kind of “weather,” for example, and at one point the zombie horde overwhelming New York City is overtly described as a version of the flooding that has long been expected as a result of global warming: “The ocean had overtaken the streets, as if the news programs’ global warming simulations had finally come to pass and the computer-generated swells mounted to drown the great metropolis. Except it was not water that flooded the grid but the dead” (302). Even when the zombie apocalypse is contrasted with climate change, it still becomes a comment on our complacent failure to deal with climate change when we had the chance: “That other, less flamboyant, more deliberate ruination altering the planet’s climate had been under way for more than a hundred years, squeezing milder winters into the Northeast. People got used to it” (240).
Many postapocalyptic novels show human beings succumbing to their worst impulses under pressure of the collapse of the supports provided by modern civilization—that confidence in the availability of a “policeman around the corner” that Conrad’s Marlow felt blinded his privileged British listeners to the realities of life. Zone One also does this, and it does it particularly well, sometimes describing this effect in a way that seems chillingly predictive of the plague of violence, hatred, and stupidity that seems to be spreading unchecked through the populace of our own America in 2022: “The plague touched them all, blood contact or no. The secret murderers, dormant rapists, and latent fascists were now free to express their ruthless natures” (245).
Another unusual climate novel from 2011 is Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, about the impact of 2005’s Hurricane Katrana on the poor black Batiste family in southern Mississippi. This novel does not really address the larger problem of climate change, largely because all of its events are related from the point of view of the narrator/protagonist of the novel, Esch Batiste, a fifteen-year-old girl who shows little awareness of such things. Esch is, however, intelligent and thoughtful, providing some very astute insights. She also has an interest in literature, frequently comparing herself with the mythical character Medea.
Still, because it is limited to her knowledge and point of view, Salvage the Bones is a bit weak as a climate novel. The winner of the National Book Award, Salvage the Bones is at its best when it is simply relating the day-to-day lives of the Batiste family, which consists of Esch, her abusive father, and her three brothers, the mother having died in childbirth with the third brother. It’s a look at a cultural milieu that has received little attention in American literature. It’s also an unsanitized look, and Ward never tries to sanitize or heroize the Batistes, putting a great deal of focus, for example, on the participation of Skeetah Batiste in the reprehensible practice of dogfighting (while treating that dogfighting in an oddly nonjudgmental way, as if it is just a normal part of life). There are also some compelling action scenes when the hurricane finally hits, destroying the family home, though all of them survive. The book thus does an excellent job of reminding us of the impact that extreme weather can have on people’s lives—and especially on the lives of the poor. Ward never suggests in Salvage the Bones that extreme weather events have become more likely (and more violent) as a result of climate change, but then we pretty much all know that by now.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is one of the most compelling dystopian visions in American literature, one that has been made all the more relevant by political developments in the early 2020s. It focuses on the experiences of Offred, a young woman who has been conscripted as a forced sexual partner for a powerful man as part of a supposed effort to boost the birth rate in the theocratic dystopian regime of Gilead, in which the novel is set. This regime has been made possible partly by the collapse of the United States, a collapse that seems to have been mostly political (as a result of the growing political power of the religious Right), but that is also facilitated by environmental decay that has weakened the country (and lowered the birthrate to crisis levels). Thus, Professor Pieixoto, the (male) historian who compiles (and edits) Offred’s journals to produce the main body of the novel, notes that Gilead arose in the
“age of the R-strain syphilis and also of the infamous AIDS epidemic, which, once they spread to the population at large, eliminated many young sexually active people from the reproductive pool? Stillbirths, miscarriages, and genetic deformities were widespread and on the increase, and this trend has been linked to the various nuclear-plant accidents, shutdowns, and incidents of sabotage that characterized the period, as well as to leakages from chemical- and biological-warfare stockpiles and toxic-waste disposal sites, of which there were many thousands, both legal and illegal—in some instances these materials were simply dumped into the sewage system—and to the uncontrolled use of chemical insecticides, herbicides, and other sprays” (304–5).
Otherwise, we learn very little about the environmental crisis in this novel, other than that some regions of the U.S. (known as the “colonies”) are virtually uninhabitable, in the process of being cleaned up by crews that are assigned there largely for punitive reasons (particularly women who have failed to obey the strict, hyper-patriarchal rules of the Christian dictatorship of Gilead).
Almost twenty years later, in Oryx and Crake (2003), Atwood would pay much more detailed attention to issues of climate and the environment, though this novel deals with so many issues that its concern with climate is again somewhat obscured. Actually, Oryx and Crake is two novels in one, of two different genres occurring in two different time frames. The narrative of the earlier time frame describes a dystopian society in which America is crumbling beneath the weight of climate change, growing levels of pollution and disease, and a general collapse of the educational system and other government services. At the same time, American society is informed by increasing privatization and the growing dominance of major corporations. Class differences have been exacerbated by the retreat of major corporations and their most valued employees into secure walled “compounds,” while ordinary citizens live and work in the increasingly lawless “pleeblands,” thus resembling the “Proles” of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Meanwhile, Atwood’s novel makes it clear that environmental decay and climate change are absolutely central to the decline of American civil society. In short, the entire situation looks very familiar from the perspective of the 2020s.
The second narrative, in the present time of the book, is a postapocalyptic narrative that takes place after the human race has essentially been exterminated. What complicates this novel, though, is that the near-extinction of humanity does not occur as a direct result of climate change. Instead, it occurs because a mad scientist (the “Crake” of the title) has intentionally infected the world with an engineered killer virus that wipes out almost everyone. However, the reason Crake wipes out humanity (the novel asked us to wonder whether he is really mad or simply coldly rational) is that he has become convinced that humanity is a threat to all life on the planet. In the meantime, he has also engineered a replacement race of posthumans (referred to by the novel’s actual protagonist, “Snowman,” as “Crakers”), who lack the destructive tendencies that Crake believes are inherent to humans. For a full discussion of this novel, click here.
Oryx and Crake is followed by two sequels to complete what has come to be known as the “Maddaddam” trilogy. The first sequel, The Year of the Flood (2009), is primarily narrated by two of the Gardeners, both female, thus adding a new dimension to the text. Indeed, we gradually learn that one of these narrators, Brenda (generally known as “Ren” to her acquaintances), was Jimmy’s high school girlfriend, and her heartbreak over the way he treated her gives us a new perspective on him. The other main narrator is the somewhat older and more experienced is Toby, who has drawn the ire of a psychotic killer named “Blanco” and thus leaves the Gardeners before their demise for their own protection. By the time Crake’s virus strikes, Toby is managing a fancy spa run by the AnooYoo corporation, while Ren is working as a sort of exotic dancer at Scales and Tails, a combination strip club and bordello. Toby and Ren eventually join forces, along with Ren’s friend Amanda, once a marginal member of Gardeners.
The end of The Year of the Flood merges with the end of Oryx and Crake, which had seen Jimmy come upon two of Blanco’s associates, with a badly abused Amanda as their captive—though we do not fully understand this situation until the end of the later volume, when. Now Jimmy joins forces with Toby and Ren to free Amanda and tie up the two thugs, as a group of Crakers approaches in the distance. As the next volume, Maddaddam (2013), begins, the two thugs escape—and will torment the protagonists throughout the novel, until they are finally killed near the end. All in all, though, this third volume is by far the lightest in tone of the three—and is even quite funny in places, especially in its flashback descriptions of the pre-apocalyptic adventures of Zeb (who eventually marries Toby late in the novel). Though both Zeb and Toby are dead by the end of the novel, there are signs that more and more humans have survived the apocalypse, including the formation of a strange alliance among humans, Crakers, and intelligent, genetically engineered pigs that almost moves the story into the realm of fantasy. There are also numerous births that point toward renewal, including the births of a number of human-Craker hybrids.
Ian McEwan is one of the more prestigious novelists to have tried his hand at climate fiction, and his novel Solar (2010) is clearly the work of a master craftsman. In addition, while McEwan is no Kim Stanley Robinson, he has taken the trouble to familiarize himself with the issues surrounding climate change and the physics of solar energy. The problem is that Solar really isn’t all that interested in climate change, which is just used as a plot device to help present to us the foibles and tribulations of the book’s protagonist, one Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who seems more gifted at getting into personal trouble than he is at science. The novel is set in the interval from 2000 to 2009 and is narrated completely from Beard’s perspective, beginning at a point several years after his Nobel, which he won (apparently deservedly) for an elaboration of Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect.
In the course of the novel, Beard turns to climate science after he realizes that the work of one his postdocs points the way toward a new and highly economical way (based on the photosynthesis of plants) to use solar energy to generate electric power. The problem is that the postdoc has by this time been accidentally killed during a confrontation with Beard after the latter discovers that the postdoc was having an affair with Beard’s fifth wife. Beard then co-opts the younger man’s work and passes it off as his own, henceforth dedicating himself to developing the solar energy concept—when he isn’t busy womanizing, over-eating, and over-drinking, even into his sixties. However, the opportunistic Beard pursues this new project more out of the hope of striking it rich than of saving the earth, which is just a sort of byproduct. Pretty much everything eventually goes wrong for Beard, as all his problems run together at the end in a colossal comic disaster. Solar is an entertaining and amusing book, but that’s part of the problem. The book seems more interested in comedy than climate, and (just like Beard himself), it seems more dedicated to furthering its own project than to fighting climate change. And the fact that Beard is such an unlikeable mess is also a problem, especially as it tends to cast those who are fighting against climate change in a bad light, which is not really helpful.
2010 also saw the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, another somewhat half-hearted climate related novel. Most of this one is typical Franzen: family drama involving seriously flawed Midwestern characters. In this case, one of those characters is Walter Bergland, a lawyer who devotes himself to environmentalist causes, including animal conversation and population control. However, he’s pretty ineffectual; he ends up devoting himself mainly to trying (not very successfully) to defend the birds on his own suburban property from the neighborhood cats. This one doesn’t really make all that much of a contribution to our understanding of climate change or of the overpopulation problem (on which Walter actually spends more energy), but it does indicate the way in which an awareness of climate-related issues is gradually filtering into our mainstream literary fiction—because it is becoming such a prominent part of the world in which we live.
In Franzen’s case, it’s also relevant that he himself has written quite a bit of nonfiction about climate change, including one particularly controversial 2019 New Yorker essay (“What If We Stopped Pretending?”), in which he argues that we have passed the point of having any chance to prevent climate catastrophe; therefore, says Franzen, we should stop talking about preventing climate change and start concentrating on finding ways to help human civilization survive the coming catastrophe, while doing what we can for suffering animals along the way. (Most climate scientists, incidentally, responded angrily to Franzen’s essay, pointing out that he doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about with regard to climate change and wondering why the New Yorker doesn’t devote its valuable space to publishing someone who does.)
Another noted British novelist to have tried his hand at climate fiction is David Mitchell, a gifted writer of impressive novels—though some critics have complained that those novels seem primarily designed to impress readers with what a gifted writer he is. In The Bone Clocks (2014), at least, he tries his hand at politically responsible fiction by imagining a future world in which civilization is largely in a state of collapse due to the effects of climate change. Here, though, Mitchell maintains his tendency toward formal fanciness, returning, in fact, to the complex form of his best-known novel, Cloud Atlas (2004). The novel essentially consists of six interlinked novellas in a variety of styles and with a variety of narrators, though they are all tied together by the presence of one Holly Sykes, who appears throughout the novel and who narrates the first and last segments, as a 15-year-old in 1984 and as a 74-year-old in 2043, respectively.
The Bone Clocks can be quite funny, though in a nasty, sardonic way, especially in the segment narrated by aging novelist Crispin Hershey, who seems largely to be based on Mitchell himself, with a dose of Martin Amis tossed in for additional nastiness. Hershey has largely lost his powers as a novelist, but he still has a way with words, and other characters are constantly pointing out that he talks like a novelist. For example, he describes another character as attempting to look “jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence” (316). In general, the individual novellas are quite compelling when they stick to a relatively realist mode, though Mitchell also weaves in an important fantasy element that strikes me as just plain silly. Moreover, he doesn’t really get around to the climate change motif until the sixth novella, though that segment’s depiction of an Ireland spiraling back into the Middle Ages (though other places, especially China, are doing better than most of Europe and America) is very convincing. By labeling this period of decline the ”Endarkenment,” Mitchell sets it against the Enlightenment, suggesting that these periods essentially bookend the period of modernity.
Mitchell also makes it clear that the decline of Western civilization he depicts in the book is caused by climate change and by a failure to take action to deal with climate change. He also insists, through Holly Sykes, that climate change was caused by irresponsible human behavior in the first place. In the final segment, Sykes expresses “grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles.” She also notes of climate change that “we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid” (560–61). All in all, The Bone Clocks has a great deal of merit as a novel, but it isn’t the strongest climate change novel, partly because the fantasy elements (and Mitchell’s self-indulgent literary play) threaten to undermine the seriousness of its climate warnings.
Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) is another very accomplished novel that deals with issues relevant climate change. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this novel approaches climate change through the optic of animal experimentation, which is relevant to climate change because it addresses a specific aspect of humanity’s baleful history of brutal and destructive treatment of nature in general. Some reviewers described the book as a comic novel, and it certainly has its comic moments. But it is mostly tragic and profoundly sad, a powerful reminder of the way we humans have built and continue to build our hegemony over this planet on the pain, suffering, and death of other animals. It’s a family drama, to some extent a demonstration of Tolstoy’s old saw that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it also has widespread implications for the way we conduct ourselves as a society and as a species.
The book deals with an experimental project in which a psychology professor and his wife attempt to raise an infant chimpanzee alongside their own human daughter (the book’s central character), treating them as siblings. Via this project and associated information delivered within the very readable narrative, Beside Ourselves provides some powerful reminders of just how alike humans and chimpanzees really are. The project turns to tragedy, though, because chimpanzees cannot be made into humans simply by proper training. Ultimately, this book delivers a powerful plea for us to respect animals and treat them humanely, partly because they are our kin. But it also asks us to grant and respect the Otherness of animals and not demand that they be like us in order to be treated with kindness and decency. It also provides a reminder that the important issue of animal rights is a crucial part of the more general issue of climate change and our relation to the natural world.
2013 also saw the publication of Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, a novel that appeared in the wake of the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on the New York area in 2012, even though the novel was actually written before Sandy. It deals with math whiz Mitchell Zukor, who becomes adept at predicting disasters and developing scenarios for dealing with them, a talent he markets to corporate clients through his work for an unscrupulous financial consulting firm in Manhattan. The novel thus deals with two central notions that are highly critical of our contemporary capitalist system. First, it suggests that powerful corporate forces are perfectly well aware that climate change is real and that it can bring devastatingly violent weather events but choose to do nothing about it other than trying to protect their own financial interests. Second, it suggests that some firms are even willing to feed on the effects of climate change, building their business out of cashing in on catastrophe.
The plot of the novel is driven by the arrival of a massive hurricane (eerily anticipating Sandy) in the New York area, converting much of the novel into a rousing survival adventure in which Zukor must make his way safely out of a flooded Manhattan swarming with dangers. He eventually does so, barely escaping with his life. In the process, he begins to question the system in which he had previously worked, ultimately becoming a Crusoe-like individualist survivor, setting up his own compound in an area near the city that has now been deserted as a result of the hurricane. It is not clear whether his new hermit-like existence is a particularly good response to the climate crisis, but (in what reviewer Annalee Newitz described as a sort of new Occupy Movement) we also see other survivors moving into the area, building a new community based on revised values that will hopefully be less damaging to the planet.
Maja Lunde’s elegant Norwegian novel The History of Bees (2015) deals with some very different animals but makes many similar points. It also has a great deal in common with The Bone Clocks, without the fantasy tack-on, with less pretentiousness, and probably with less verbal dexterity (at least in the English translation). It makes bees the center of its story about climate change, which is told through three interweaving narratives, focusing on three different families: one in mid-nineteenth-century England, one in America in 2007, and one in China in 2098. The English story is set in the early days of bee keeping, as humans seek to “tame” bees for their own profit. The American story is set at the beginning of a crisis in bee keeping, as the bees begin to die off. And the Chinese story is set at a time when the bees have long been thought to be extinct, but then suddenly reappear. The stories are interlinked, not just by bees, but by the fact that the English family is revealed late in the novel to be the forebears of the American family, while China and the world are potentially saved when the mother in the Chinese family discovers a book (entitled The History of Bees) written by the son in the American family. Meanwhile, the book also tell the story of the decline of human civilization, largely due to the collapse of food supplies caused by the unavailability of the bees to pollinate crops (though other aspects of climate change contribute as well).
The emphasis in this novel is on family and on the relationships between fathers and sons in the English and American stories and the mother and son in the Chinese story. For me, the story is a bit marred by the fact that the English father (a failed naturalist studying bees) is not very likeable, while the American father (a failed bee farmer) is downright unlikeable. The Chinese mother fares better (and her narrative is the most compelling), though one distinctive thing about this novel is the vivid depiction of the sad state of decline in which China finds itself in the 2098 setting of this part of the novel (though China is still in better shape than the rest of the world, as it seems to be in most fictional projections of the future these days). Despite this emphasis on the human families, though, the real story of this novel is the relationship between humans and bees—and, by extension, between humans and nature. The bottom line is that the Chinese mother, inspired by the American book, is able to convince the Chinese authorities to treat the re-emergent bees with respect and to let them live in ways that are natural to them, rather than attempting to tame and control them. This lesson is obviously meant to be extended to nature in general, though the novel ends before we learn whether this new attitude will catch on and be successful.
Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015) is a dystopian climate change novel that imagines a future California (and American Southwest) blighted by drought and rising temperatures, adding in the novel feature that the entire region is being engulfed by a gigantic, slowly moving sea of sand dunes that devours everything in its path. In short, this one eschews the imagination of a believable future in favor in favor of a kind of allegorical representation of climate change. It also draws extensively upon the mythology of California as the place where people go to pursue their dreams, or—in the case of Hollywood—to manufacture and market dreams. As such, there is a lot of interesting material here—and some very cynical satirical treatment of the American Dream (with California as its focus). This satire is enhanced by the portrayal of an array of characters who have been shaped by the myth of the American Dream and who show no ability to think beyond it, despite the radically changed circumstances that have arisen in their world. Structures such as capitalism and patriarchy remain intact, even as California does not. Unfortunately, this strategy also means that the characters in the book are generally unlikeable, while the world they live in seems dreary and hopeless. The book’s lack of utopian energy and its nonliteral depiction of the results of climate change seriously limit its value as a work of climate fiction. The dark vision might be entirely appropriate, of course, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone is going to be moved to take climate change more seriously by reading this book. Read apart from the urgency of the climate crisis, it’s a pretty good read, but ignoring the climate crisis is not exactly what we need to be doing now.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015) is a near future dystopian novel in which climate change has led to increasingly critical water shortages in the American Southwest, leading to an almost total collapse of existing social structures. The United States still exists, but the federal government seems to have insufficient resources to deal with the problem, intervening only in the most dire of emergency situations. Mexico has completely collapsed and has degenerated into fiefdoms ruled by drug cartels. Texas has completely collapsed as well, leading to large numbers of Texans fleeing westward, where they are definitely not welcomed by the locals in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. California, of course, is the most powerful of these western states, and it wields that power rather ruthlessly, making California seem like a menacing presence to the other western states in the novel.
Most of the action of the novel takes place in Phoenix, a city that is crumbling into chaos due to water shortages, especially because Las Vegas, across the Nevada border, has been much more successful at getting organized to grab more than its share of the meager water supplies available via the Colorado River (which runs along the Arizona-Nevada border) and other sources. The term “water knife” refers to the agents who work for Las Vegas enforcing their control of the local water supply, often by very violent means. The title refers specifically to Angel Velasquez, a water knife who is a key operative for Las Vegas water magnate Catherine Case (though he runs afoul of Case in the course of the novel). However, Angel is only one of three major protagonists, plus several secondary protagonists. The other two main protagonists are Lucy Monroe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been covering the situation in Phoenix and has developed a commitment to the city, and Maria Villarosa, an innocent young woman refugee from Texas trying to make her way in the hostile environs of Phoenix.
The Water Knife isessentially an ultraviolent crime thriller, and Bacigalupi certainly knows how to tell a compelling story. There is, however, much more to this novel than violent action. For one thing, it does an excellent (and believable) job of depicting just how bad conditions might get in the very near future if we continue to fail to take strong action against climate change (with politicians in states like Texas and Arizona, which are the most at risk, leading the way in opposing any strong action). In addition to its credible projection of a future world severely damaged by climate change, The Water Knife is also a well written novel that successfully employs some very sophisticated literary techniques. Of these, my favorite is the play with narrative voice. Most of the chapters are narrated in indirect free style, with the third-person narrative voice relating events essentially from the point of view of either Angel or Lucy or Maria. Many chapters feature two or more of these characters together, with continuous sequences of action sometimes consisting of multiple chapters, some narrated from the point of view of one character and some from the point of view of another character, essentially giving us multiple perspectives on the same events. This device is very effective at showing how different the same characters and events can seem from different perspectives. All in all, the violence in this novel might not be to the taste of some readers, but there are some hopeful moments of connection among the characters and the novel does suggest some possible hopeful directions, but it also makes it clear that climate change is likely to become more and more of a horror show going forward.
Bacigalupi’s most important climate-related novel, though, is the 2009 Hugo Award–winning The Windup Girl, which takes place in a vividly imagined future Thailand in which the texture of life on earth has been dramatically impacted by climate change, the depletion of the supply of oil, and a series of devastating plagues affecting both humans and their food resources. A full discussion of The Windup Girl can be found here.
Omar el Akkad’s American War (2017) is something like the evil twin of The Water Knife. A dystopian novel with a strong climate fiction undercurrent, it apparently sold a lot of copies, it seems to have been influenced by young adult dystopian fiction, except that it contains horrors that no young adult audience should be forced to confront. Set in the late twenty-first century, it imagines a world that has been deeply affected by global warming and the accompanying rise of ocean levels. It also imagines a United States that has fractured into blue states and red states, leading to a second civil war, based mainly on the refusal of the people of the red states to give up fossil fuels. It is easy to see that el Akkad derived this notion from the current political situation in the U.S. in 2017, though his overall depiction of the future state of American politics is mostly just silly and bears no relationship to any future that might actually be imaginable. So it doesn’t work very well as a cautionary tale. El Akkad’s vision of global politics is no better. The Arabian peninsula has been rendered uninhabitable by climate change, but the entire peninsula has been covered in solar panels, helping the “Bouazizi Empire,” which has arisen from revolutions all over the MENA region (and seems to have forgotten all about Islam, becoming very modern and enlightened) to somehow become the most affluent and advanced polity on earth, while Europe has collapsed and its citizenry is scrambling to get into the Bouazizi Empire as refugees. It’s a bit like the colonialist reversal in Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and some of these political developments are no doubt satirical and aren’t meant to be literally believable. For example, the book is told almost entirely from the perspective of Southerners, with whom the book seems to sympathize, describing the treatment of the Red States by the Blue States in ways that seem to be a weird combination of the Southern Confederate fantasies of victimhood at the hands of the North and Middle Eastern fantasies/memories of mistreatment by the U.S. For example, Sarat, the book’s “protagonist,” if you can call her that, is a Red operative who is captured by the Blues and sent to a prison where she is interrogated and tortured, especially via a technique that is essentially waterboarding. On the other hand, most of the opinions expressed in the novel belong to various characters, and almost all of the characters are despicable, so it is difficult to ascertain what el Akkad is trying to tell us.
In any case, one character, who seems vaguely sympathetic at times but turns out to be pretty untrustworthy, comes as close as anyone to defining the book’s distinction between the Reds and the Blues: “I sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather” (142). The Blues win the war, but then the Reds (who are only four Southern states, anyway, which makes no sense at all, like most things in this novel) get their revenge. Inspired by operatives from the Bouazizi Empire, Sarat transmits a deadly contagion to the North and virtually wipes out the whole United States, as if that is somehow supposed to be justice. Apaprently the Empire isn’t so enlightened, after all. This book seems to revel in suffering and consists mostly of lurid descriptions of the horrible experiences of characters in an emiserated and fractured United States. Misery is the keynote in this future world. The mighty have fallen, but the previously downtrodden who replace them don’t seem to be any better.
As for the climate fiction aspects, American War is an example of a climate novel that probably does more harm than good. El Akkad doesn’t understand climate change and clearly didn’t bother to do any research on the topic. He seems to have just tossed it in as another vehicle for making his characters miserable. But his treatment of the topic is shockingly uneven. At times, climate change is truly serious and is one of the central determining factors in the texture of life in el Akkad’s future world. At other times, he completely forgets that climate change has occurred and will go for long stretches describing a world in which climate change doesn’t seem to be a factor at all. Meanwhile, the oceans seem to have risen along the East coast of the U.S., wreaking havoc and moving the coastline inward by hundreds of miles, focing the capital to be moved to Columbus, Ohio. North Africa, though, seems not to have been affected at all by the rise of the oceans. All in all, his treatment of the topic of climate change is so unbelievable that it might serve to make some readers suspect that climate change itself is a fiction, which is about the worst possible thing a novel could do at this point in time.
Ashley Shelby’s South Pole Station, published in the same year (2017) as el Akkad’s American War, is about as far from that novel as a climate change novel could be. For one thing, it is set in the present and makes no extreme forecasts about the potential damage from climate change. It also differs from American War in that, while Shelby is no Kim Stanley Robinson, her science is pretty accurate and her understanding of climate change pretty good. South Pole Station not only doesn’t have a sweeping dystopian vision, but it has little in the way of a large-scale social vision at all, except for one important depiction of an evil scheme by the oil industry. South Pole Station concentrates, in a mostly semi-comic mode, on a loveable gang of misfits and their interactions with one another. Those misfits, though, just happen to be the scientists and workers who inhabit the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, including several artists and writers sent there on an NSF grant. Much of their work involves climate change, where Antarctica is such a crucial locus.
No shocking scientific discoveries are made, and, in a sense, not much really happens. There is, however, one crucial subplot involving a climate change denier with sketchy scientific credentials who has been sent to the South Pole due to pressure from right-wing Republican Congressmen who are, of course, in the pockets of the oil industry. Indeed, the most important aspect of South Pole Station is the way it outlines an extensive plot by the oil industry to cover up the reality of climate change so that they can continue to make obscene profits from destroying the environment. The foibles of the climate change denier are made clear (his scientific publications turn out to be mostly either plagiarized or total nonsense), though he is treated much too generously by Shelby, who could have depicted him much more harshly rather than essentially portraying him as a decent guy who just got in over his head. In any case, the real scientists quickly get rid of the denier, then avoid the consequent fallout by agreeing to allow climate change deniers to come to the Pole to do research as long as they have legitimate academic credentials and real (non-plagiarized) publications in respected peer-reviewed scientific journals—which, of course, no climate change deniers have.
Zero K (2016) is a very unusual novel by Don DeLillo, who would be one of the most important American novelist to write a novel devoted to climate change, except for the fact that Zero K is not really that sort of novel. A strange narrative that some critics have compared with the work of writers such as Franz Kafka, Zero K actually focuses on the common science fiction motif of immortality treatments. Its central character (and narrator) is Jeffrey Lockhardt, the son of billionaire magnate Ross Lockhardt, who uses his vast wealth to help develop a facility that cryogenically freezes the newly dead toward a time when they can be revived and repaired via advances in medical science. DeLillo is not much interested in scientific verisimilitude, instead concentrating on a variety of techniques for endowing this project with a sense of strangeness, including having the facility driven as much by weird religious visions as logical scientific ones. The novel also includes the requisite implications concerning the usual problem that this immortality project would mainly benefit the very wealthy, though it doesn’t seem very offended by this notion.
Where this novel engages with climate change, though, is its recognition that it won’t do the wealthy clients of this facility much good to be frozen awaiting medical advances if climate change makes the earth uninhabitable in the meantime. Unfortunately, instead of putting resources into fighting climate change, the movers and shakers of the facility in this novel deal with this problem largely by locating the facility in a remote location in Central Asia and making it as self-sufficient as possible. Apparently, they plan to let the world go to hell, then emerge and pick up the pieces. It doesn’t sound like a very good plan, but that seems to be the point—those with the resources to fight climate change have typically deployed those resources for other purposes, apparently feeling that somehow their wealth will protect them, regardless of what happens to everyone else as a result of climate change. In short, Zero K is mostly a story about the arrogance and cluelessness of the rich, though it doesn’t propose any solutions.
Despite being so unusual and seemingly like nothing else, Zero K is actually quite reminiscent of at least one other novel—DeLillo’s own Cosmopolis (2003), in which billionaire investor Eric Packer spends the whole novel trying to get across New York in his white stretch limo to get a haircut, while struggling against traffic, anarchist demonstrators, a would-be assassin, and a disastrous recent financial bet against the Japanese yen. On the way, he has a full physical exam and some vigorous sexual encounters, while seemingly arranging the end of his weeks-long marriage to a wealthy, beautiful poet. This novel is at least as strange as Zero K, but perhaps even more focused on how out of touch, soulless, and arrogant the rich can be. It’s also even less of a climate novel, though it does acknowledge that Packer’s lifestyle is helping to destroy the environment for others, as when his would-be assassin complains that Packer’s limousine “displaces the air that people need to breathe in Bangladesh” (202). Incidentally, Cosmopolis was adapted to film by David Cronenberg in 2012. The adaptation is extremely faithful, with much of the dialogue lifted straight from the novel—though the changing conditions of global finance lead Cronenberg to replace Japan with China and the yen with the yuan. Meanwhile, Robert Pattinson’s performance as Packer helped boost him into more serious film roles (and also helps the film to be possibly better than the novel, which is itself quite good—and better than Zero K).
Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016) is an epic historical novel that traces American history (with an occasional excursion into Canada) from the colonial days of the late seventeenth century all the way up to 2013. The novel deals with a number of different issues, but the focus of this historical account is on the unremitting effort to build America (and to build personal and family fortunes) by dominating, controlling, and often destroying nature. Most of this focus is concentrated on the lumber industry, which stands in for the exploitative practices of American capitalism as whole—though Proulx actually seems to blame this impulse as much on Christianity as on capitalism. Many people are mistreated and abused as well, beginning with the indentured servants of the early parts of the novel, and including Native Americans, women. Indeed, the novel makes it clear (even if it does not state it directly) that the ruthless drive for exploitation and domination that led European colonizers to attack the American wilderness with such fervor was part of the same logic of entitlement that has driven slavery, racism, sexism, and classism throughout American history. Meanwhile, Native Americans sadly look on, shaking their heads, unable to defend the forests they love. The settlers, meanwhile, tend to feel that the Indians are simply wasting the land that god gave them. As one priest in the novel puts it, “They do not understand that the White Man who struggles and strives to reduce the Forest’s grip has exerted his God-given Right to claim the cleared Land as his own” (180).
The book is written in an extremely accessible style—or, actually, styles, since the diction varies quite a bit through the novel. Some critics have complained about the variations in tone as well, which can go from abject horror to whimsical comedy at the drop of a hat. One could argue, though, that both individual lives and collective history vary quite a lot in tone and style as well, which means that the book’s fluctuations are just a form of realism. And the book is largely written in a mode of realism, which means that the cast of characters changes constantly over time—with many of them meeting untimely deaths. But there is a certain continuity in the theme, and even the characters of each segment tend to be related to the characters that came before them, by blood, friendship, or business affiliation. Indeed, the bloodlines of two French indentured laborers in America are traced throughout the novel. Moreover, each generation tends to show a powerful influence on the lives of the ones that follow them: the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And many of those living join the dead in grisly ways. Still, many of the characters are quite colorful and eccentric, with the large cast allowing for a great deal of variety, if not a great deal of psychological depth. Still, the novel makes clear that people can be a lot of different ways—such as the old “woman” who dies after four decades of marriage and only then is discovered to have been a man all along.
Barkskins is very readable, as well as quotable. For example, French colonist Monsieur Trépagny nicely declares near the beginning of the book that “we are here to clear the forest, to subdue this evil wilderness” (17). And that attitude persists through the century, though with a much more monetary impulse going forward, as the value of those vast, unspoiled North American forests becomes more and more clear. As one character notes, “there are a hundred thousand fortunes all around us the like of which the world has not seen since the days of Babylon” (66). Others, however, simply want to destroy the forests to make room for farms and towns. Some of the white characters, though, take a dim view of the rampant destruction being wrought by the settling of the American wilderness. One of them, Lennart Vogel, compares the settlers to birds of prey picking the meat off a corpse (455). He then goes on to suggest that part of the problem is that America has attracted the most rapacious scoundrels from Europe: “In some European countries there are laws and prohibitions against free cutting of trees, and the more rebellious peasants who chafed under those rules now are here, and released from those ukases, they go mad with the power of destruction. They are like no people seen on the face of the earth before now. They are like tigers who have tasted blood” (456).
Barkskins does a pretty good job of tracing the gradual westward movement of the destruction of America’s natural environment, as well as indicating the gradual modernization of American society from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. At that point, however, Proulx seems to get in a hurry to finish and basically zips through the past hundred plus years, almost totally losing touch with historical events as she hastily takes the story well into the twenty-first century. The final part of the novel focuses on a group of environmentalists who have a lot of discussions about deforestation and global warming but never really emerge as relatable characters. One could argue that Barkskins mimicks the rhythm of history by speeding up as it gets later in the story, but one could also argue that the increasing pace of historical change means that many more events have occurred in the past century than in any other, yet that century gets the skimpiest treatment in this novel. This novel’s heart is in the right place, but it misses too much of American history to be an effective historical novel; meanwhile, it never really captures the majesty and importance of trees in the way that something like Powers’ The Overstory (2018) does.
In the realm of climate fiction, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh is best known for his widely cited nonfiction study of that genre, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), in which he excoriates the modern novel to that time for its appalling lack of attention to climate change. And, while Mark Bould, in The Anthropocene Unconscious, has demonstrated that climate change is reflected in modern culture far more extensively than Ghosh seems to realize, Ghosh still does have a point. And he himself has attempted to correct that flaw in modern culture with his own climate change novel, Gun Island (2019). Gun Island is a far-ranging novel that concentrates on both climate change and human migration (with a special focus on the city of Venice and on the Sundarbans, a swampy mangrove region in West Bengal and Bangladesh), delivering a great deal of information about both. Ghosh has a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford, and he puts his learning to good use here. There are moments when the didacticism of this novel is so direct as to be reminiscent of the proletarian novels of the 1930s, especially as the novel’s narrator also has a PhD, as do many of the people he knows. Much of the novel involves academic work, even a bit of satire of academia. Indeed, Gun Island is far from a dry, scientific treatise, employing myth, legend, and folklore to supplement its accurate scientific data in an attempt to capture to enormity of the problem of climate change. Even if Gun Island might not be the world’s most dramatically effective or narratively compelling novel, its heart is certainly in the right place, and Ghosh does a good job of making clear the dramatic impact of climate change on the natural environment and on the lives of humans and animals. Definitely worth a read.
Powers’ The Overstory (2018), sometimes described as a novel about trees, is actually an epic examination of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. A full discussion of that novel can be found here. Meanwhile, Powers followed the epic achievement of The Overstory with a smaller-scale effort in Bewilderment (2021). Like many Powers novels, this one veers into the realm of science fiction and especially into an examination of the potential of advanced computer technologies. But it is fundamentally, once again, about the relationship between humans and their natural environment. It is set in a near future world, though one of the ironies of the novel is that this future world seems suspiciously similar to our own. Climate change is wreaking havoc with the weather, for example, while the political climate is roiled by right wing forces, led by an unnamed semi-literate Tweet-happy president who wants to undermine elections and declare himself dictator.
The narrator and central character of Bewilderment is astrobiologist Theo Byrne, who finds himself the single parent of Robin, a troubled nine-year-old boy, after the boy’s mother and Theo’s wife (an important environmental and animal rights activist) is killed in an auto accident while swerving to try to miss an opossum in the road. Byrne’s professional work involves trying to identify planets that could support life, which also leads him to appreciate the fact that earth is so hospitable to life—or at least was until we started to ruin it. Anyway, this novel’s picture of its near-future America is the real message of the book, though the actual plot is essentially cribbed from Flowers for Algernon, which is prominently referenced in the text, in case you didn’t make the connection. Doctors have been unable to agree on the nature of Robin’s condition, but they all want to throw psychoactive drugs at him, which Theo resists. Instead, he seeks an experimental computer-based treatment that produces remarkable results and puts Robin on the road to becoming an important environmental activist in his own right, following in the path of his hero, young Inga Alder (clearly modeled on Greta Thunberg).
Unfortunately, the anti-science president and his right-wing supporters manage to shut down funding for the project that is performing Robin’s treatments. The result, predictably, is that he begins to regress and to lose all that he has gained from those treatments. Theo’s efforts to deal with this tragedy produce an even greater one. Powers attempts, as he did in The Overstory, to come up with a hopeful ending, though this one is less convincing. What is convincing, though, is Powers’ delineation of the way in which right-wing forces, anti-science forces in American politics are not only contributing to climate change (rather than combatting it), but are doing unmeasurable amounts of other harm, as well. Often quite funny, this powerful novel is ultimately heartbreaking, not only because of what happens in the fictional plot, but because of what it reminds us is happening in our own world.
2019 also saw the publication of Bangkok Wakes to Rain, by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, a Thai novelist who writes in English and has lived extensively in the United States. Bangkok Wakes was his first novel, which sometimes shows, but, in general, this complex novel is very accomplished. It tells a sprawling, multigenerational story that contains several different plot lines that move all over the world and span nearly two centuries of time, from the nineteenth century to the near future. These various plot lines are interesting in themselves, though it helps to have some knowledge of Thailand and Thai history at certain points. From the point of view of climate fiction, Bangkok Wakes provides something of a counterpoint to Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, though most of the novel deals with relatively realist narratives, and the novel as a whole contains very little in the way of traditional science fictional tropes. However, the perilous position of Bangkok, always threatened with flooding even before human-induced climate change, provides an important background to the entire novel, with the city eventually reaching the status of permanent flooding. The Thais persevere, though, and are struggling to survive even after the flooding, among other things hoping to convert their flooded city into a sort of Venice of Asia.
Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (2021) is a near-future science fiction novel that attempts to imagine some of the geopolitical problems that might complicate any attempt to take decisive action to stop or reverse the process of climate change. The basic problem, of course, is that climate change is a global phenomenon, so that any action taken to improve the climate in one region of the world might potentially cause collateral damage in another part of the world. In Termination Shock, meanwhile, this problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the United States is in such a state of disarray that it is in no position to provide anything like leadership in the effort to improve the global climate. As one Dutch character ponders the sheer size of America, the narration announces that this size “had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale” (96). China, though, is represented in the novel as precisely the opposite: highly organized and efficient, the Chinese are very much in position to take decisive action. However, rather than working with the rest of the world, they seem to want to pursue their own agenda, usually in secretive ways that suggest a sort of stereotypical Oriental sneakiness. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is also pursuing its own possible strategies, though in ways that suggest the Saudis might be hoping to weaponize climate engineering in order to strike blows (possibly with the help of the Israelis) against Iran.
However, in what might be seen as a key weakness in a novel so concerned with global politics, Termination Shock tells us almost nothing about the actual workings of politics in either China or Saudi Arabia—or even in the U.S., for that matter. The only country, in fact, whose politics are treated in detail is the Netherlands, largely because the Queen of the Netherlands, Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, is a major character in the novel, which features a fairly large ensemble cast of main characters. We get a great deal of information about politics in the Netherlands, most of which seems pretty authentic, though the effectiveness of this information is tempered by the fact that the queen, who goes by “Saskia” in most of the text, is such an unpretentious and down-to-earth figure that she strains one’s credulity. The Netherlands, presumably, was chosen as a focal point because its low altitude makes it so vulnerable to the effects of climate change. However, the country that figures most centrally in the plot of the novel is actually India. We again get few details about Indian politics, other than that India is engaged in a vigorous and long-standing border dispute with China. And the novel is overtly constructed in order to encourage readers to sympathize with the Indians in this dispute, including the fact that another main character, Deep Singh (aka “Laks”), a Sikh from Canada who travels back to India, becomes a social media hero for his exploits in fighting for India in this border battle.
The plot of Termination Shock is built around the efforts of Texas billionaire T. R. Schmidt, a magnate of mega-gas stations that feature extensive dining and entertainment options, to reverse climate change by seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide. This being Texas, of course, the method he uses involves firing capsules filled with sulfur into the high atmosphere using what is essentially the world’s biggest gun. The sulfur is converted into sulfur dioxide, and the sulfur dioxide then reflects sunlight back into space, theoretically cooling the lower atmosphere. Climate being as complex as it is, though, the effects are not homogenous, and some areas of the world (like the Punjab in India) might actually become hotter or have their climate otherwise changed for the worse as a result of this procedure. This possibility leads India to send Laks (souped up with implanted digital enhancements and backed by an army of high-tech drones) to disable Schmidt’s Texas facility, largely as a media stunt to call attention to the fact that climate change projects must take India’s needs into account.
Laks’s mission is not entirely successful (and he is killed in the process), though the attack on the facility does draw considerable attention. The aftermath, though, is not entirely believable. Everyone in Texas treats Laks with great respect and seems extremely concerned about respecting proper Sikh funereal procedures, given that the circumstances of his death do not allow a conventional cremation or burial. Meanwhile, no one seems at all outraged that a turban-wearing foreigner has attacked an American facility and there seem to be no cries of terrorism. As the novel ends, it is not clear how well Schmidt will be able to proceed with his project, given that his facility in Texas has been seriously damaged, while another facility, in New Guinea, has been taken over by Chinese commandos. But at least something is being done, and there is some sign that the events of the book might possibly lead to increased international action to fight climate change, including the establishment of a new organization of climate-endangered low-lying countries, with Saskia (having handed the Dutch throne off to her daughter) at its head. Meanwhile, all of the other major international actors (the Chinese, the Saudis, the Indians, and Schmidt—but not the dysfunctional U. S. as a country) are still in play, leaving at least some hope that the events we have just read about will trigger some sort of effective action by someone. That someone, by my reading, is most likely to be the Chinese, but given the subtly negative depiction of them throughout the novel, it is a bit difficult to be optimistic that they will try, in the world of the novel, to do what is best for everyone, rather than merely for themselves.
Termination Shock is an ambitious novel, something like an attempt to combine the technical meticulousness of a Kim Stanley Robinson with the weirdness of a Jeff VanderMeer. It includes everything from extensive engineering details on the mechanisms designed to prevent the Netherlands from flooding to a colorful depiction of a herds of wild pigs invading the Waco airport while chased by an alligator. There is also a very positive part-Native American character named “Rufus,” who studies wild pigs and becomes a professional pig hunter after an enormous wild boar eats his young daughter. (He also becomes an expert on drones and the lover of Queen Saskia, the latter of which seems pretty far-fetched.) Rufus’s Native American perspective provides some useful insights, though his theory that today’s Red States inherited their cultural attitudes from the Comanche, while the Blue States inherited their cultural attitudes from the Cherokee and other “Civilized Tribes,” seems spurious. He seems right on the money, though, when he concludes, from his studies of pigs, that “pigs, like white people, were an invasive species from Europe” (19).
Stephen Markley’s massive The Deluge (2023) is a self-consciously big novel, the length of which seems to have been self-consciously designed as an effort to indicate the scope, complexity, and gravity of the twenty-first-century problems it addresses. Climate is central to these, though the majority of the book is really more of a dystopian narrative about political struggles that occur largely as a result of climate change. In many ways, the book begins much like a 1970s disaster film, introducing us to various characters as they go about their lives and participate in various events (such as the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq) in the early twenty-first century, before gradually moving into the future as the problem of climate change becomes progressively worse—culminating in super-typhoons in the 2040s, as the world moves toward a cataclysmic overall temperature increase of 6°C. Meanwhile official attempts to battle climate change remain feeble and ineffective, caught up in corporate greed and political in-fighting.
All of this is conveyed in a straightforward accessible style (though with inflections such as changes in tense and person that add some variety) that introduces us to a large cast of characters, many of whom are scientists and/or political activists attempting to fight climate change and thus save the world. Major characters include Tony Pietrus, a maverick scientist; the charismatic activist Kate Morris; her quiet, conflicted partner Matt; Shane, a single mother who becomes involved in eco-terrorism; Keeper, a recovering OxyContin addict (and eventual eco-terrorist); Jackie, a former marketing wizard; the Pastor, a Hollywood actor turned religious zealot and then political menace; and Ashir al-Hasan (Ash), a gay, neurodivergent mathematician and eventual government functionary. Markley rounds out his narrative with an array of supporting players, while the climate crisis veers toward a potential cataclysm: a six-degree spike in mean global temperatures.
The remainder of the narrative also sometimes reads like a disaster films, as when, nearly halfway through the book, extreme weather events combine to cause an unprecedented series of wildfires that converges on Los Angeles, while Pietrus must dash into the city to rescue his drug-addled daughter. Mostly, though, disaster films deal with a single disastrous event and its aftermath, while climate change is a vast series of interrelated developments that are punctuated by things such as wildfires, hurricanes, and unprecedented snowstorms but whose full impact develops slowly over a long period of time. As a result, this book moves rather slowly and along several different tracks at once. It also participates in a number of different genres, sometimes reading like a political thriller, sometimes like an espionage narrative, sometimes like dystopian science fiction, and so on. There are even inserted extra-literary genres, such as newspaper stories and podcast transcripts that add a sense of verisimilitude.
The Deluge addresses a number of problems in American society, including excessive corporate power, the threat of autocracy, a voting populace so bamboozled that they might fall for almost anything, unscrupulous political and religious leaders, and the conversion of everything (including religion and politics) into marketing and spectacle. There’s a lot of satire of recent events (as well as direct mentions of recent events), as when a fascistic former talk show host rises to national political power. The Pastor is the most sinister figure of all, though the figure of Donald Trump seems to loom over all of the novel’s menacing politicians, as if he has infected Amerian politics in a way that might take decades to overcome. On the other hand, the satire points in every direction (including at those attempting to fight climate change), limiting the novel’s political punch. Moreover, the novel limits its perspective almost entirely to the United States and does relatively little to address the rest of the world, other than to essentially suggest that countries such as China and India are contributing to climate change but not doing their share to fight it, leaving it up to America to save the world, forcing oithers to cooperate where necessary. Thus, The Deluge is a big novel on a grand scale, yet also one that remains oddly limited in its vision and focus. Ultimately, it unravels a bit beneath its own length and complexity, even while leaving huge gaps in its coverage. It also leaves the ultimate outcome uncertain. There are a number of positive signs late in the book that the U.S. government is finally beginning to get serious about combating climate change, but there are also signs that it might already be too late, and sinister right-wing forces continue to work against all efforts to mitigate climate change.
Climate Fiction and the New Weird
One of the most interesting literary phenomena of the early twenty-first century is the innovative combination of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that has come to be known as the “New Weird” (in contrast to the “old” weird of writers such as H. P. Lovelace). Though associated primarily with the fiction of writers such as M. John Harrison, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer, the New Weird has gradually come to encompass a wider cultural production, including films as well as fiction. In his introduction to the anthology that solidified the notion of the New Weird as a genuine literary phenomenon,” VanderMeer suggests that the New Weird can be defined as
a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects. (xvi)
In this same essay, VanderMeer acknowledges that the entire New Weird movement was “crystallized by the popularity of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station” (ix), a book that he believes served “as the lightning rod for what would become known as New Weird” (xii). Indeed, VanderMeer’s definition of the New Weird does seem to apply especially well to Miéville works such as Perdido Street Station, which so exemplifies the pluralism, hybridity, and transgression of boundaries that are central to that movement, characteristics that go well beyond its dynamic combinations of elements from multiple genres.
Perdido Street Station exemplifies the political commitment of its author, a committed Marxist with a doctorate in international relations from the London School of Economics. In his book-length study of Miéville’s work, Carl Freedman notes the political sophistication of Miéville’s fiction, while also noting the dense and believable nature of Miéville’s invented worlds. Perdido Street Station is the first volume of the Bas-Lag Trilogy, which also includes The Scar (2003) and Iron Council (2004). Freedman praises the entire trilogy for
the extraordinary fertility and three-dimensionality of its arealistic world-building. Constructed from the ground up, as it were, in seemingly endless detail and with careful attention to virtually all major forms of human activity (economic, political, military, legal, artistic, intellectual, religious, sexual, interpersonal, et alia), Bas-Lag attains a solidity and a concretely plausible presence that … make even Tolkien’s Middle-earth seem flat and impalpable by comparison. (86)
Perdido Street Station is set in the ancient, teeming city of New Crobuzon, which has much in common with Victorian London, but with many added elements from science fiction, horror, and fantasy. It is marked more than anything by plurality and hybridity. It is the home, for example, to multiple sapient species, though humans dominate the city’s politics and economics. However, despite its great diversity, the society of New Crobuzon is clearly depicted by Miéville as an interlinked whole, each aspect intricately interrelated with every other, even if the links sometimes involve conflict. Indeed, the city itself is a sort of vast network, with Perdido Street Station itself at the hub. As opposed to the Lyotardian celebration of fragmentation and suspicion of totality, Miéville instead embraces the Lukácsian concept of novelistic totalization, which involves the representation of a society in a way that recognizes the interrelatedness of all of its various aspects, even if it is not possible to represent all of the different aspects directly.
This connection to Lukács indicates the strong Marxist pedigree of the kind of totalization involved in Miéville’s representation of New Crobuzon (and Bas-Lag as a whole). But this kind of awareness of interrelatedness is also a fundamental element of ecological thinking. Indeed, environmental and ecological concerns subtly permeate the entire Bas-Lag Trilogy. Moreover, since the publication of the trilogy, Miéville has more overtly addressed issues related to environmentalism and climate change in some of his short stories. For example, in “Polynia,” giant icebergs, exactly mirroring icebergs that had earlier broken off from Antarctica, suddenly appear in the skies over London, affecting the weather underneath. The implication is clear: climate events such as the melting of the Antarctic ice shelf might seem far distant from London, but climate change will eventually (and inevitably) have an impact there. Meanwhile, in “Covehithe,” ruined oil rigs that had collapsed into the ocean suddenly start coming “alive” and lumbering back onto shores around the world, where they even produce new baby oil rigs. Again, the message is clear: our long history of indulging in oil is beginning to come back to haunt us and is not going to be that easy to escape.
In the Bas-Lag Trilogy, the implications of the environmental themes are a bit less foregrounded but still important. The Scar, for example, is largely a seagoing adventure and thus potentially calls attention to the key role of the oceans in climate discourse. However, its most striking environmental theme requires significant interpretive input from readers. In a key scene in The Scar, Uther Doul explains to protagonist Bellis Coldwine that, many years earlier, the “Ghosthead,” colonizers from the “eastern rim” of the universe (roughly equivalent to what would be alien invaders in conventional science fiction), came to Bas-Lag, driven by deteriorating climate conditions (especially extreme cold) in their own world. Their superior technology allowed them to establish immediate dominion over Bas-Lag, building an empire that lasted five hundred years. They were so alien to Bas-Lag, though, that their arrival caused a violent cataclysm that broke open the world and fractured the nature of reality itself. Doul continues,
“Think of the Ghostheads’ power, their science, their thaumaturgy. Imagine what they could do, what they did do, to our world. You see the scale of the cataclysm of their arrival. Not just physically—ontologically. When they landed, they fractured the world’s rules as well as its surface. Is it a surprise that we whisper the name of the Ghosthead Empire in fear?” (350).
The exact meaning of this story (including whether it is even accurate) within the world of the novel is not entirely clear, but an obvious allegorical interpretation presents itself immediately, with both the power and the destructive impact of the Ghosthead clearly resembling the historical impact of colonialism in our own world. In addition, the literal physical impact on Bas-Lag of the Ghosthead intrusion can surely be taken as analogous to the destructive impact of capitalist expansionism on the climate and physical environment of our world. In this sense, The Scar anticipates later award-winning works of climate-oriented science fiction such as “Broken Earth” series of N. K. Jemisin, which began with The Fifth Season in 2015, in which human action also leads to cataclysmic physical damage to an alternative earth. In any case, the Ghosthead motif warns that the impact of human activity on the natural environment is hard to anticipate but potentially immense—and immensely destructive. Meanwhile, the presence of Torque throughout the trilogy reminds us that nature itself is already mysterious and possibly beyond complete human understanding, joining the Ghosthead motif in warning that we should tread very carefully in undertaking activities that might alter the environment in unpredictable, but possibly catastrophic, ways.
If the impact of the Ghosthead intrusion suggests the impact on the natural environment of capitalist modernity, then it is also the case that the strange, unpredictable, and incomprehensible nature of this impact suggests the scope and complexity of the problem of climate change, somewhat along the lines of Timothy Morton’s characterization of climate change as a “hyperobject” that is simply too large and complex to represent or understand directly. That Morton’s work intersects with the New Weird can perhaps be seen from the fact that Morton has recently entered into an extensive dialogue with VanderMeer over climate issues (see Hageman).
Perdido Street Station actually highlights environmental issues from the very beginning. The book begins with a sort of prologue in which the wingless garuda Yagharek (unidentified at the time) narrates his entrance into New Crobuzon and provides his initial impressions of the looming city. These impressions, more than anything, are of filth, pollution, and decay. Not only is the River Tar, via which he enters the city, a veritable stew of sewage and industrial pollutants, but the city itself, he notes, “is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night” (1). This initial account, reinforced by a number of later descriptions of the unsanitary conditions that reign in much of New Crobuzon, announces Miéville’s willingness to grapple with unclean material conditions of a kind that have seldom figured so vividly in either science fiction or fantasy, two of the dominant genres in this complex, multigeneric novel. Indeed, as the narrative proper gets underway, we begin to realize that New Crobuzon is an ancient city, now somewhat in decline, and indeed the book is filled with images of the city’s squalor and decay. New Crobuzon, we learn, “was a huge plague pit, a morbific city. Parasites, infection and rumour were uncontainable.” In fact, the polluted nature of the environment of New Crobuzon is such that the sensitive khepri have to undergo a monthly chemical treatment to avoid developing “itches and sores” (9).
It is tempting to read these indications of environmental pollution allegorically as a sign of the overall air of economic and political corruption that pervades the city, especially as so many other aspects of the novel invite allegorical interpretations. But these conditions are directly linked to climate (and climate change) as well. For one thing, many of the bad environmental (and political) conditions in New Crobuzon are at least partly the legacy of a specific past cataclysmic “weather” event, that crucial “Torque storm” that once devastated the city, sending its history off in a new direction. Meanwhile, the corruption of the physical environment in New Crobuzon and the corruption and oppression of its political system are not simply parallel phenomena operating on different allegorical levels.
In point of fact, these phenomena are closely interrelated, with each feeding the other, both partaking of a narrative of historical decline and decay that runs through the text. For example, at the time of the events of Perdido Street Station, one of the features of the city’s skyline is the “cloudtower,” which contains an aeromorphic engine that was built hundreds of years earlier to control the weather (including Torque storms) but has not functioned for a hundred and fifty years, and which the city now lacks the technological know-how to repair. And the lack of functionality in the cloudtower becomes a particular problem at the time of the events of Perdido Street Station, when New Crobuzon seems to be suffering from what is essentially global warming, with a “prodigiously hot, wet summer” looming:
The spring winds were becoming warmer. The soiled air over New Crobuzon was charged. The city meteoromancers in the Tar Wedge cloudtower copied figures from spinning dials and tore graphs from frantically scribbling atmospheric gauges. They pursed their lips and shook their heads. (205)
Such concerns with climate are typical of Miéville’s broad vision. Meanwhile, if he was the writer in whose work the New Weird most clearly began to take shape as a movement, it is also the case that Harrison, who has continued to produce important work in recent years, was actually around for decades before Miéville came on the scene. Harrison, in fact, dates back to the “New Wave” that was such an important movement in science fiction in the 1960s and (especially) the 1970s, bringing a new level of literary and political sophistication to a genre that was until that time still strongly rooted in pulp adventure stories. Harrison made an immediate mark all the way back in 1971 with The Pastel City, the first novel of the “Viriconium” sequence, which would go on to include three novels and a collection of short stories, covering the years until 1985. This sequence centers on the fictional city of Viriconium, which can clearly be seen as a forerunner of Miéville’s New Crobuzon. Harrison’s Kefahuchi sequence—Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006), and Empty Space (2012)—is an important series of science fiction novels with New Weird tendencies, but his novel with the clearest New Weird tendencies is perhaps The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020), published when Harrison was seventy-five-years-old. This novel well illustrates Harrison’s knack for surprising word choices that lead to a generally out-of-kilter (but delightful) style. It also indirectly reflects climate change, with its general sense of rot and decay and doom. Yet most of the characters continue to plod forward, despite it all.
Perhaps the writer who has worked most consistently in a New Weird mode is VanderMeer, whose “Southern Reach Trilogy”—comprising Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all published in 2014—is one of the most interesting uses of the New Weird mode to explore climate issues. The first volume (with elements also borrowed from the other volumes) was adapted to an excellent film by Alex Garland in 2018, though the film’s details differ very substantially from those of the novel, even if the two works ultimately make many of the points. The anonymous narrator of Annihilation is identified only as a “biologist.” Indeed, the main characters are identified only by their professions, including a psychologist, a surveyor, and an anthropologist, all women. This group, led by the psychologist, constitutes the twelfth expedition that has been sent by an organization known as the Southern Reach into a strange region so transformed by some mysterious phenomenon that the very laws of nature seem to have been changed, making the area uninhabitable by humans.
The previous expeditions (including the eleventh, of which the biologist’s husband was a member) have all met with such bizarre fates that it is still unclear what happened to them in this strange region, how many of the members of the expeditions gradually made their ways back home, or even whether the returnees are, in fact, the actual expedition members, or whether they are some sort of strange substitutes. By the end of the book, only the biologist remains alive among the members of the twelfth expedition, but conditions in Area X are unusual enough that the usual distinctions between things like life and death don’t necessarily apply. Meanwhile, the biologist comes to appreciate the strangeness of the transformed region and even to wonder if the transformation of that area might be an improvement: “The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much” (192).
As Annihilation ends, the biologist resolves to head north, wondering if she might encounter some version of her husband along the way (despite the fact that he has ostensibly died of cancer after an enigmatic return from the strange region). When Authority begins, the biologist has returned and is being held for examination at the Southern Reach. (Indeed, this and several other aspects of Authority are incorporated in Garland’s film adaptation of Annihilation.) Meanwhile, the central character in this volume is John Rodriguez, a man who goes by the nickname of “Control,” which he picked up in childhood. Control is the new acting director of the Southern Reach, appointed to that position (somewhat to the resentment of the assistant director and largely thanks to the influence of his mother, a high-ranking official with the intelligence agency that oversees the work of the Southern Reach). The appointment of this acting director, meanwhile, is necessitated by the loss of the psychologist from Annihilation, who turns out secretly to have been the previous director.
Despite being a direct narrative sequel, Authority is written in an entirely different mode from Annihilation. This second novel still contains a number of bizarre images and events that border on both science fiction and horror, but it is, first and foremost, a bureaucratic satire (with something of the shape of an espionage narrative). It can, in fact, be quite funny, though it can also be very dark, and the overall atmosphere is one of a growing sense that something very bad is going on at the Southern Reach and in Area X. This book can even make a horrifying image out of a herd of white rabbits. If the VanderMeer of Annihilaton is a sort of weird Thoreau, then the VanderMeer of Authority is more in the mode of Kafka. All in all, Control in Authority finds the Southern Reach itself almost as incomprehensible as the biologist in Annihilation had found the transformed region. Meanwhile, the bumbling attempts of the Southern Reach to deal with or understand the region would seem to serve as a general commentary on bureaucratic inefficiency but also as a more specific commentary on our baleful failure to deal with climate change in anything like an effective way. In this sense, the biggest weakness of the book is that it does almost nothing to address the fact that this governmental failure is largely caused by the fact that large corporate interests that are still profiting immensely from destroying the environment have done everything in their power to undermine official attempts to combat climate change. Still, it’s a gripping tale that neatly manages to hold the reader’s interest without really solving any of the trilogy’s numerous mysteries.
Authority ends on a cliffhanger that will bring us back to the region at the beginning of Acceptance, which is described in considerably more detail in this third volume, even if the ultimate mystery of its source and purpose remains unsolved. Acceptance alternates among three different narratives. In one, we meet Saul Evans, the keeper of the lighthouse that is a key feature of the region. His story begins before the transformation of the region, thus providing some information about the origins of the region. Evans himself will eventually be transformed into the Crawler that scrawls the strange living inscriptions on the inside walls of the tower/tunnel of Annihilation. He also befriends a nine-year-old girl named Gloria, who will grow up to become the psychologist who leads the 12th expedition in Annihilation and is later revealed to have been the director of the Southern Reach. The second narrative thread focuses on Gloria/the psychologist/the director, while the third thread focuses on the team of Control from Annihilation and the “biologist” from Authority (who is now known as “Ghost Bird” and who is most decidedly not the same entity as the original biologist from Annihilation).
This third volume contains the trilogy’s strongest hints that the region is an extraterrestrial phenomenon, though the actual nature of the region is still not entirely certain. What seems clear, though, is that the area is beginning to expand past its original border, toward the possible eventual absorption of the entire earth. One thing we do know is that, however incomprehensible it might remain, the region seems to be carefully removing all of the pollution and other negative environmental effects that have resulted from human habitation of the area. This volume contains a great deal of excellent nature writing in its description of this newly cleansed world. It also continues to be quite strange, recalling such classic science fiction films as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), both of which focus on the fundamental difficulty of comprehension in any encounter with extraterrestrial beings. Despite this difficulty, though, the message seems clear: if we do not stop doing so much damage to the environment, eventually we will reach a point of no return beyond that environment will no longer be hospitable to us.
The three volumes of the trilogy are deftly interwoven, and the trilogy is best read in its entirety. On the other hand, even reading the entire trilogy will not solve all of its mysteries, which is largely the point: there are some things that are simply beyond our rational understanding. Whatever has caused the transformation may simply be so different from us that we can never communicate with it or comprehend its purposes. Meanwhile, the trilogy (especially Acceptance) is infused with a genuine love of nature and a genuine sadness for what humans have done to nature. Ultimately, while the best guess at the nature of the force behind the transformation might be some sort of alien, the real point is to suggest that humans need to approach certain things (especially the natural world) with more humility and a greater willingness to accept that we are not meant to dominate and control everything we encounter.
VanderMeer has woven climate-related themes into much of his other fiction, as well. He followed the Southern Reach Trilogy with Borne (2017) and its sequel Dead Astronauts (2019), both of which are very much in the New Weird mode and both of which maintain VanderMeer’s strong concern with issues of climate and the environment. Borne is a postapocalyptic novel that does not explicitly identify climate change as the main cause of a total collapse in the functioning of Western civilization, but there are strong indications. The novel is set in an unnamed postapocalyptic city where virtually everything has ceased to function and where total anarchy reigns. Actually, “post” apocalyptic is not entirely accurate; in this novel the collapse has occurred as a result of a gradual “slow” apocalypse that is still going on, so that conditions continue to deteriorate, thus avoiding the “fresh-start” romanticism that infects many postapocalyptic narratives.
The narrator and protagonist of Borne, identified only as “Rachel” lives by scavenging for various supplies in the ruined city. She lives in a crumbling apartment building (dubbed the “Balcony Cliffs”) with her somewhat enigmatic lover Wick, a bioengineer who formerly worked for the biotechnology company that once dominated the city. Actually, the Company is still a force in the city, even though it no longer functions as a business and even though its out-of-control products seem to have contributed greatly to the collapse of the city. These products include a gigantic, genetically modified flying bear known as Mord (once a human employee of the Company) that terrorizes the city, battling for control of the city against the mysterious “Magician,” a rogue operator who challenges the power of both Mord and the leftover forces of the Company.
If a gigantic flying bear sounds ridiculous, within the context of this novel the concept actually works perfectly well as a sort of allegorical indicator of the blowback that civilization has suffered because of its irresponsible treatment of nature, placing Mord in the company of Frankenstein’s Monster, but with a weird twist. Moreover, Mord isn’t even the weirdest creature in the novel, a designation that surely goes to its title character, a weird, shape-shifting entity that Rachel initially finds tangled in Mord’s fur. Borne grows and is educated by Rachel, who becomes a mother figure to Borne, who ultimately becomes an extremely interesting study in Otherness, both his body and his mind operating in ways that are virtually impossible for humans to understand. (Among other things, human conceptions of gender do not seem to apply to Borne, so pronoun use is arbitrary in this case.)
As Borne learns and grows (with Rachel functioning essentially as his mother), it eventually becomes clear that he is quite formidable and even dangerous, causing him eventually to be expelled from the Balcony Cliffs and into the harsh environment of the city. Eventually, Rachel and Wick are drive from the Cliffs as well, after which they make their way to the ruins of the Company’s local headquarters, where they hope to retrieve some biotechnology that will help them to survive. By this time, Borne has grown powerful enough to absorb Mord into his own body, presumably killing the giant bear (though the exact status of the life forms absorbed by Borne remains a bit unclear). Borne himself returns to his original state as a small plant-like entity, apparently permanently. Meanwhile, by the end of the novel, we learn that Borne, Rachel, and Wick are all, in their various ways, products of the Company, though many details remain unclear.
Lack of clarity is the hallmark of Dead Astronauts (2019), which serves as a sort of prequel to Borne, though it is a standalone story. The first half of the novel is a strange, oneiric collection of details concerning the exploration of the city by Grayson, Chen, and Moss, the “dead astronauts” that had already appeared in Borne. Here, though, they are still alive, sort of, though it is not entirely clear what that means or what sort of beings there are. The fractured bits and pieces of narrative in the first half create a fragmented picture of the city and the company, among other things making it clear that we are, in fact, dealing with a story involving parallel realities, or timelines. What we can also tell is that the three “astronauts” view themselves as enemies of the Company, whose nefarious activities they seek to subvert. The Frankenstein narrative is here as well, as much of damage done by the Company is accompanied to the excesses of a Frankensteinian company biologist known as Charlie X.
In the second half of Dead Astronauts, the story becomes a bit more conventional in places, or at least comprehensible. In fact, there is a long section near the end that is narrated by some sort of “fox” that serves as a sort of allegorical stand-in for animals in general—and even nature in general. This narrative remains chantlike and oneiric, but it makes it clear that, again and again in various parallels worlds, humans have abused nature through entities such as the Company, eventually leading to their downfall when nature turned against them. In this sense, the novel becomes a sort of revenge of nature narrative, while it also has some particularly powerful passages dealing (though with the defamiliarizing distance of the unusual scenario of the novel) with animal experimentation.
The Company of Borne and Dead Astronauts serves as an allegory of the overall destruction wrought on the environment by the greedy quest for profit that has marked the capitalist era. Thus, some of the confusion what is going on in these novels (especially the second) is well motivated, serving to reinforce the idea that companies, in their quest for profit, have not typically worried enough about understanding the consequences of their actions. Thus, while much New Weird fiction warns us that nature is far more complex and mysterious than we have often realized, these novels look at the other side of the equation, warning us that we have typically not well understood even our own actions with regard to their impact on the natural environment. The particularly experimental nature of Dead Astronauts also creates a kind of defamiliarization that helps us to keep thinking about the issues it addresses, avoiding any sort of mind-numbing overload that might occur from the fact that there is so much climate fiction out there.
Finally, VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021) pushes climate fiction in still another new direction by expanding the already capacious generic coverage of the New Weird into the realm of detective fiction. A detailed discussion of that novel can be found here.
Finally, an example of New Weird fiction that trends strongly toward eco-horror is John Langan’s novel The Fisherman (2016), which features a story of personal grief and loss wrapped around a cosmic horror narrative that is wrapped around another cosmic horror narrative. The whole thing, however, is set against a background of climate change, which ultimate suggests that, while the supernatural horrors described in the novel might not be real, we have our own real large-scale horror to deal with in the form of climate change.
Late in the novel, the narrator notes violent events of recent years, including the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Then he notes that “the years that followed the attacks, which seemed to echo and amplify their violence, were marked by changes in the weather. The very atmosphere seemed more turbulent, prone to storms that dumped record-setting amounts of rain on us on a regular basis, swelling our neighborhood stream up and over its banks. Could be, the rough weather was part of a larger cycle” (234). Reading the cosmic horrors of the novel as hyperobjects of the kind discussed by Timothy Morton, Gordon Sullivan notes the novel’s emphasis on climate and weather but also argues that the novel suggests possibilities for human intervention, so that climate does not become an insurmountable hyperobjective horror in its own right.
Planetary Colonization and Climate Change
One of the most interesting ways in which science fiction texts address climate change involves narratives of planetary colonization in which interactions with the natural environment on the colonized planet are particularly highlighted. The most obvious case of this phenomenon is the terraforming narrative, in which humans intentionally modify the natural environment of a planet to make it more amenable to human habitation. Such narratives point out that humans can change the natural environment of an entire planet, while also suggesting that perhaps we should give some attention to terraforming our own planet, which human activity has already rendered less habitable. Such narratives serve a sort of defamiliarizing function that can produce fresh perspectives on the relationship between humans and the natural environment on earth, preventing us from fully appreciating the complexity of that relationship and encouraging an inappropriate sense of human mastery over the natural world. Elements of such narratives are present in virtually all stories involving planetary colonization, though many such stories foreground relationship with the natural way in particularly striking ways. Selected examples of this kind of science fiction narrative follow.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) is generally read as an allegory of the American colonial adventure in Vietnam, and it certainly is that—as well as a commentary on colonialism in general. At the same time, it also centrally deals with issues related to gender and environmentalism, ultimately suggesting that patriarchy, colonialism, and the irresponsible mistreatment of the natural environment are all part of the same ideology of dominance. Here (in a story that was one of the inspirations for the 2009 blockbuster film Avatar), human colonists are engaged in an effort to “tame” (which largely means devastate) the forest planet Athshe (also known as New Tahiti), which is highly valuable as a source of lumber to be sent back to a deforested earth, where wood is now a rare and precious commodity. This novel is part of Le Guin’s Hainish sequence, which features a far-flung galactic federation, the administration of which is enabled by the fact that an ancient advanced civilization from the planet Hain spread human civilization (and DNA) across the galaxy perhaps a million years earlier. There are, however, no humans indigenous to Athshe, though the planet does have some sentient inhabitants, whom the human colonizers refer by the derogatory term “creechies,” regarding them as decidedly subhuman. In an especially clear repetition of the history of the European encounter with Africa, the Athsheans are rounded up and used as slave labor. At the same time, the forests so dear to their culture are systematically destroyed in logging operations.
However, the Athsheans turn out to be more intelligent (and formidable) than the humans realize. In fact, they have a highly sophisticated culture, though the colonizers from earth are unable to recognize it as such because it is so different from their own. The abusive treatment of the Athsheans leads to an uprising in which Smith Camp, a major logging camp, is destroyed, its human inhabitants killed. In the midst of the tensions following this uprising, a starship arrives from earth bearing new women for the colony. The starship is also carrying an “ansible,” a device that enables instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. As a result, the situation on Athshe can be quickly communicated to the League of Worlds, which orders that the Athsheans be left henceforth undisturbed. However, one of the colonists on the planet, Captain Don Davidson, ignores the order and organizes a vigilante effort to wreak revenge against the Athsheans for the destruction of Smith Camp. After Davidson and his men destroy an Athshean town and burn all the inhabitants, the Athsheans launch a major assault on Centralville, the colonial capital. All 500 human women in the town are killed (lessening the chance of a permanent human settlement on the planet), as well as 200 of the men. The other men are captured and held in pens that were formerly used to hold Athshean slaves.
A negotiated settlement to the subsequent crisis confines humans to an already deforested area of the planet and ends all logging operations. However, Davidson, growing increasingly unhinged, continues his guerrilla activities until his own camp is destroyed and he is taken captive. When the starship returns once again, it evacuates the remaining humans, leaving the Athsheans to themselves. However, Selver Thele, their leader, wonders if his own people have been irrevocably changed for the worse by the violence they have experienced in their encounter with humans.
Davidson, one of the central human figures in The Word for World is Forest, is a walking embodiment of the drive for domination and power that made colonial conquest on earth a possibility. Early in the text, he makes his attitude clear when he acknowledges the link between the conquest of Athshe and various earlier colonial conquests on earth, but without any hint of critique or irony. He feels no remorse as he envisions overrunning the planet with humans and their machines, destroying the environment and the “creechie” way of life. Echoing the attitude on earth of many who oppose the goals of the environmentalist movement, he argues that humans are more important than plants or animals: “We’re here, now; and so this world’s going to go our way. Like it or not, it’s a fact you have to face.” In fact, Davidson is unable to imagine living in harmony with nature, as the Athsheans do. Instead, for him nature is an enemy to be conquered. For him, “you’ve got to play on the winning side or else you lose. And it’s Man wins every time. The old Conquistador” (6).
Davidson has no more respect for the Athsheans than he does for their environment. Directly reproducing the Orientalist discourse of colonialism, Davidson declares, “The creechies are lazy, they’re dumb, they’re treacherous, and they don’t feel pain. You’ve got to be tough with ‘em, and stay tough with ‘em” (11). Davidson has little more respect for the humans on the planet who urge that the native inhabitants be treated more respectfully. Chief among these is Raj Lyubov, a scientist who has been studying the Athsheans and their culture (which is described at some length in the novel) and has gained a profound appreciation for their alternative culture and wisdom. This attitude only causes Davidson to despise the scientist, whose name suggests that he is probably part Indian. “Some men,” declares Davidson, “especially the asiatiforms and hindi types, are actually born traitors. Not all, but some. Certain other men are born saviors. It just happened to be the way they were made, like being of euraf descent, or like having a good physique; it wasn’t anything he claimed credit for” (78–79).
Davidson’s savior complex seems to be directed at the humans on Athshe, rather than the Athsheans, but it nevertheless recalls the rhetoric of the White Man’s Burden, which itself has often served as a forerunner, disguised or otherwise, of U.S. foreign policy in the nonWestern world. The links to the Vietnam war are often especially clear, as when Davidson relishes the idea of dropping “firejelly” from the air to destroy the Athsheans’ forest cover (or even the Athsheans themselves), recalling the similar use of napalm by the American forces in Vietnam. Le Guin herself makes the Athshe-Vietnam link quite explicit in the figure of Colonel Donghe, an officer of Vietnamese descent, who commands the human forces on Athshe. Donghe himself compares the difficulty of subduing the Athsheans to the difficulties experienced in earth history by first the French, then the American forces in Vietnam: “You can’t disable a guerrilla type structure with bombs, it’s been proved, in fact my own part of the world where I was born proved it for about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one after the other in the twentieth century” (133).
Davidson’s attitudes, especially his tendency to see the natural environment as something to be conquered and controlled, fought against rather than lived with, again recall the kind of ideology that Horkheimer and Adorno have associated with the Western Enlightenment. Noting the Enlightenment dictum that “knowledge is power,” Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that the scientific impetus of the Enlightenment is informed by a quest not for a liberating truth, but for a power that ultimately enslaves. In particular, they suggest that the emphasis on the power of the individual in Enlightenment thought is related to a drive to dominate nature, a drive that inevitably turns back upon itself and leads to the formation of individuals who are internally repressed and of societies consisting of individual subjects who strive for domination of each other.
From the point of view of this critique, Davidson’s vicious quest for power is an embodiment of the capitalist spirit—and of the entire constellation of ideas that are critiqued in such works as Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Among these ideas, Le Guin consistently foregrounds gender as an issue in The Word for World as Forest. In particular, she identifies Davidson’s attitude as an extreme form of masculinism. A central trigger for the violence between humans and Athsheans was an earlier incident in which Davidson raped and killed the wife of Selver Thele, leading the Athshean to attack Davidson in one of the extremely rare (to that point) instances of Athshean violence. Lyubov broke up the subsequent fight as the much larger and stronger Davidson was getting the upper hand, leading to the ongoing hostility between Davidson and Lyubov. And Davidson’s attitude toward human women is not much better than that toward Athshean women; not only does he regard the women coming to settle on Athshe as chattel, but it is also clear that he regards women in general as objects upon which to exercise his masculine power. As he himself tellingly puts it, “the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man” (81).
Ultimately, of course, Davidson’s sexism and racism are closely related, part of the same complex of attitudes through which the Other is first defined as different, then inferior, then threatening. Such attitudes have provided crucial underpinnings for phenomena such as colonialism and patriarchy in our own history, as well as for the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. Cautionary tales such as The World for World is Forest help to demonstrate what is lost through the uncritical dismissal of alien cultures as inferior rather than attempting to learn from such cultures. And the same can be said for the natural environment. Le Guin is particularly successful at making this point by showing readers some of the richness of Athshean culture, a richness the humans on Athshe have largely missed (and which crucially involves respect for nature). In this sense, her novel points toward a whole family of related science fiction stories—what might be described as “anthropological science fiction”—that have explored the advantages (and pitfalls) of attempting a more serious and respectful examination of alien cultures, while also critiquing the colonialist assumptions that have typically impeded such examinations in our own history.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s major work of the 1990s—and one of the greatest science fiction works of all time—was the magisterial “Mars Trilogy,” which comprises the volumes Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996). Here, Robinson presents a thrilling account of the colonization of Mars that completely eschews sensationalism, focusing instead on very realistic problems and solutions. This trilogy addresses a wide variety of issues related to colonization as Robinson elaborates in great technological and sociological detail an effort to terraform Mars to make it suitable for colonization by humans, thus relieving some of the pressures caused by overpopulation and other pressures on earth. In the meantime, he very deftly explores the various political debates involved in this project to build a new world system that hopefully avoids the previous mistakes made on earth—while fighting off the attempts of earth-based corporations to seize control of the project, potentially doing the same kind of damage to Mars that they have already done to earth.
The “Mars Trilogy” addresses very realistic technological problems related to the terraforming of Mars, as one might expect from science fiction. However, what makes this trilogy truly special is its inclusion of very realistic economic and political problems, as well as technological ones. Perhaps most importantly, the trilogy expresses a great deal of respect for the natural environment of Mars, understanding that the planet cannot simply be developed in the quickest and most profitable way possible but must be developed in a way that establishes a harmonious and sustainable relationship between the new Martian civilization and the planet on which it is evolving. As a result, Robinson’s Mars colonists are able to take advantage of the potential opportunity to build a new and better social and political system on their new world, while avoiding the kind of environmental damage that has been done on earth. A more extensive discussion of the “Mars Trilogy” can be found here.
Perhaps the most exciting recent trend in American science fiction is the rise of women science fiction writers, as signaled by the fact that, in 2021 (and for the first time), all of the nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novel were women. Many of the leading women writers in science fiction in recent years have been women of color, as signaled by the fact that the African American woman writer N. K. Jemisin (1972– ), whose work mixes fantasy with science fiction, while focuses on crucial issues such as climate and gender, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for all three novels in her “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), thus becoming the first African American author to win that award at all, and the first author to win the Best Novel Hugo in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. That trilogy is not, strictly speaking, a narrative of planetary colonization, but it does take place on a planet that is a sort of alternative version of earth and thus involves geological and climatic conditions that are quite different from those we encounter regularly on earth. The Fifth Season, the first novel in that trilogy, is discussed in detail here.
Another very interesting recent novel that involves a narrative of planetary colonization that involves the relationship between human colonizers and the natural environment of a colonized planet is Sue Burke’s Semiosis (2018), in which a group of colonizers flee a future earth that is in a state of political and environmental collapse, hoping to found a utopian community on a distant planet that they call “Pax,” so that the colonists are called “Pacifists.” As with Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy,” though in a less sophisticated way, Semiosis relates some of the internal political disputes and difficulties encountered by the colonists. The focus, though, is on their relationship with the planet’s sentient plant life, especially a massive, distributed “bamboo” plant that they give the name “Stevland” and which (who?) eventually becomes a citizen (and even the co-leader) of their community. Much of the emphasis is on communication between Stevland and the colonists (and also among different plants on Pax, which turn out to be networked in interesting ways, though in ways that are not actually all that different from the ways we are beginning to realize plants on earth can exchange information, resources, etc.). Much of the plot, incidentally, is driven by the relationship of the colonists with another group of colonists, known as “Glassmakers,” who had earlier arrived on the planet and built a city out of glass, which they have abandoned by the time of the events of this novel. The Pacifists discover and occupy this city, then encounter the descendants of the original Glassmakers, who are now nomads. Some of the Glassmakers become allies of the Pacifists, but others launch a murderous assault on the city. The Pacifists suffer heavy losses, but manage to destroy the attacking forces, mainly because of a defense led by Stevland and his plant allies.
Semiosis is a very interesting narrative that is actually quite sophisticated and thought-provoking in its portrayal of plant consciousness and communication. It was followed in 2019 by a sequel, Interference, set about a hundred years later and involving the arrival of a new group of colonists from earth, which had long lost contact with the original Pacifists, whose original technology had long since ceased to function.
Another very interesting story of (attempted) planetary colonization begins with the British novelist Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015). This extremely ambitious far-future narrative involves a massive project in which a number of planets have already been terraformed to prepare them for colonization. It’s a rip-roaring hard science fiction adventure that in some ways looks back to the good old days of science fiction, though it breaks some new ground in the sophistication of its attempt to imagine non-human intelligences. That attempt isn’t entirely convincing, but it does make a convincing argument that we need to do better to understand the points of view of other creatures on our planet. In particular, it argues that we humans need to learn to reach an accommodation with the world around us, instead of simply trying to beat everything we encounter into submission.
As the novel begins, Dr. Avrana Kern, something of a mad scientist, is heading a scientific expedition to one of the planets, which she herself dubs “Kern’s World.” However, rather than colonize the planet directly with earth settlers, Kern plans, as an experiment, to land a large number of monkeys on the planet, along with a “nanovirus” that has been genetically engineered to speed up the evolution of the monkeys in tune with the environment of the planet. This process, referred to in the novel as “uplift,” is clearly derived from David Brin’s series of “Uplift” science fiction novels, in which various promising species are given boosts in their evolution to full intelligence by more advanced species. Indeed, the small habitat that is to be left in orbit around the planet so that a human observer can monitor the development of the planet is even named the Brin Sentry Habitat.
Unfortunately, the mission is sabotaged by a terrorist from the Non Ultra Natura movement, which violently opposes genetic experimentation that would produce biological entities beyond those that occur naturally on earth. As a result, Kern herself is left to occupy the Brin habitat, while the ship bearing the monkeys burns up upon entry. However, the virus makes it safely to the surface, where it infects a variety of creatures already living there (presumably placed there as part of the terraforming), quickly raising a species of spider to an especially high level of intelligence. Left in orbit for thousands of years, Kern is forced to upload her intelligence into the habitat’s semi-intelligent computer and to continue as a simulation.
Jump forward in time: the Old Empire has long since destroyed itself by in-fighting, and a new civilization has arisen from its ashes. Unfortunately, this “new” civilization is so devoted to trying to replicate the old one that they fail to learn valuable lessons and end up rendering the earth uninhabitable. The surviving humans are sent into space on huge “arks,” hoping to encounter remnants of the Old Empire in deep space and find a place to live on one of the terraformed planets. Eventually, the survivors aboard what is ostensibly the last extant ark are forced to try to settle on the planet of the spiders, despite the best efforts of Kern and her spider allies to prevent it. Being humans, their first instinct is to try to eradicate the spiders, so that they can rule the planet on their own. Ultimately, though, the human survivors settle on the planet and manage to form an alliance with the uplifted spiders (and with Kern, whose intelligence has now been loaded into the vast network that constitutes the hive mind of the spiders, providing a link back to the Old Empire). In order to do so, though, the humans have to be infected with the nanovirus, which gives them the ability to recognize their kinship with the spiders as the two species work better to understand each other, combining their skills and strengths toward a promising new posthuman (and, I suppose, post-arachnid) hybrid civilization—and of course, setting the stage for sequels. The lesson is clear: we need to learn to respect our planet and our fellow creatures if we are to survive as a species.
The first of those sequels, Children of Ruin (2019), directly continues the narrative of Children of Time, though it also includes narrative segments that take place back in the era of the Old Empire, focusing on the attempted terraforming of two additional planets in the same system. One of these planets turns out already to contain life, so the crew assigned to the system decides to study that life, rather than modifying the planet in ways that might imperil that life, given that this is the first life encountered in the galaxy that did not ultimately originate on earth. They do, however, begin to terraform the other planet, which is almost entirely aquatic—something that turns out to be convenient, given that the scientist in charge of the terraforming, Disra Senkovi, happens to have a special interest in octopuses, and happens to have some pet ones on board his ship. He uses the uplift virus, along with other techniques, eventually to raise these octopuses to full sentience, though Tchaikovsky again does an excellent job of portraying their particular mode of intelligence as vastly different from that of humans. Through thousands of years of development, civilization of uplifted octopuses is wildly successful—too successful, in fact, and the most important thing they have in common with humans is that they push things too far, to the point of imperiling their planet, forcing them to look into space for living room:
“They reached the load-bearing capacity of their ecosystem a long time ago, but cephalopod ingenuity stepped up its game over and over, reaching out into the solar system and devising new ways to harvest what they found there, building in orbit for yet more space, stopgap after stopgap; and, just like humans, they are unable to fully confront the problem or take measures to curb it” (376).
Meanwhile, things go badly wrong on the other planet, which turns out to be harboring seemingly malevolent parasitic entities (similar to slime molds) that threatens to take the narrative into the realm of horror, as they quickly inhabit any life form they encounter, generally driving them to self-destruction. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the spider planet (including a highly distributed form of the Avrana Kern artificial intelligence) from the first volume have also launched an ambitious program of space exploration, leading to a clash among the spider people, the octopus people, and the malevolent parasites. It turns out, though, that the parasites aren’t really malevolent, they’re just very adventurous, but their intelligence is so foreign that it has led to consistent misunderstandings. Then everything is resolved and all these different intelligences begin to cooperate to explore the galaxy, especially after developing fast-than-light travel through a technology that involves the warping of space itself. It all sounds a bit silly, summarized so quickly, but is actually handled very well and makes for some smart science fiction with a strong utopian component—while also delivering some clear messages about respecting the Other, including when that Other is just the natural world on which you live.
Children of Memory (2022) extends Tchaikovsky’s terraforming saga to a trilogy. This third volume features a very interesting depiction of a Corvid species that evolves, without uplift, into possible intelligence, though whether they are genuinely sentient remains unclear. (Among other things, the intelligence they seem to display works only in pairs of Corvids, not in individual birds.) Meanwhile, the human planetary colony on which the Corvids evolve fails, but the Corvids join the consortium of explorers from the previous volumes in the trilogy as they continue to seek out intelligent life in the universe. This search brings them to still another planet, where most of the action is set. This leads to a very interesting narrative strategy that creates some genuine interpretive puzzles, though everything is explained in the end. This volume also introduces technology that had been created by an ancient (previously unknown) alien race, which appears to offer possibilities for more volumes in the series. In the meantime, the main narrative largely has to do with just how difficult it is to create a viable ecosystem, suggesting that, rather than rely on finding other planets to live on, we should probably do everything possible to salvage the one we already have.
In some ways, a very similar message is delivered by Malka Older’s compact sf thriller The Mimicking of Known Successes (2023), which takes place, not on another planet, but on a colony of artificial rings built around Jupiter, which the future people of the novel have renamed “Giant.” Life on earth has long been defunct due to climate change, and humans have already managed to render a colonized Mars uninhabitable as well. They hope, however, to essentially terraform earth to the point where they can return it. They seem to be surviving well in their artificial habitat around Jupiter, but the warning about the possible consequences of climate change could not be stronger. This novel packs a number of genres into a small package. In addition to the high-concept science fictional setting, the plot is driven by a murder mystery, as an “investigator” named Mosso attempts to a crime that leads to a bigger conspiracy. The novel also includes some academic satire, as the narrator and the other major character in the novel is an academic named Pleiti. Pleiti is a “classicist” who studies ancient texts, including fictional ones and even children’s books, from earth, hoping to find clues as to how the ecosystem on earth was able to work so well prior to the onset of climate change. There’s also a lesbian romance between Pleiti and Mosso, who work together to solve the book’s central mystery, rekindling a former romance from their college days. The major academic project in this future world involves an attempt to determine the exact mix of species that would be needed to restart earth’s ecosystem and restore to its former condition (the “known successes” of the title). The book’s main mystery involves a plot by some other academics who have grown impatient with the effort to perfectly restore earth’s former ecosystem and want to return to earth with genetic material from a number of species that formerly lived on earth, rolling the dice to restart life on earth without trying to replicate the former ecosystem perfectly. This plan is depicted as highly irresponsible, but the attempt to replicate earth’s former ecosystem perfectly is depicted as problematic as well, with some academic satire tossed in, suggesting that the scholars attempting to replicate the former ecosystem might never actually be able to achieve any practical results. The book suggests that some creativity and daring that go beyond simply trying to re-create the past might be required to restart life on earth. The ultimate point is, though, that ecosystems are incredibly complex and fragile and that, if we destroy the one we have, we might never get another viable one, even with extremely advanced technologies.
Finally, Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers (2023) is a high-concept work of science fiction set over 50,000 years in the future. Now, “human” civilization has spread through the galaxy, terraforming and colonizing numerous planets. However, the incredibly advanced technologies that are now available make it possible to modify humans in all sorts of ways, including ways so fundamental that there are now several completely different species of humans that can thrive in different kinds of planetary environment. Most other animals can now be genetically engineered as well, including endowing them with human-level intelligence, as well as allowing animals like moose to fly and perform various other unlikely tasks. Indeed, living creatures (especially those intelligent enough to be regarded as “people”) no longer reproduce sexually at all, but are carefully designed, constructed, and then “decanted” to serve specific purposes—in something like a souped-up version of the baby factories in Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932). All in all,the technology in this future galaxy seems to have such advanced capabilities as to be indistinguishable from magic, sometimes giving The Terraformers the texture of a fantasy novel. At the same time, it contains a great deal of information about the technology of terraforming, which again makes important points about just how complicated and difficult it is to maintain habitable planetary environments.
The Terraformers also includes a great deal of serious exploration of the political, economic, and social aspects of terraforming. Many aspects of this far future society are extremely sophisticated and enlightened, such as the respect for all living species that has helped to make this future world possible, including saving earth itself from climate catastrophe. Partly because it has been delinked from reproduction, sexuality is extremely fluid in this future galaxy, with a virtually unlimited number of ways to experience gender and sexuality. There is also a great deal of collective cooperation of various kinds, including among different species. The one thing this future seems not to have transcended is capitalism, and much of all this advanced, enlightened activity is still dominated by corporations that can be quite ruthless and unscrupulous in their quest for profit. That might be a failure of imagination, or it might be realistic, or it might just be a way of generating conflict to drive the plot, as the “good” characters battle against corporate evil. All in all, The Terraformers more than makes up for a slightly clunky plot with its daring, science-based speculations on what might someday be achieved if we can just avoid wiping ourselves out when we are just getting started.
The Climate Fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson might be considered the Shakespeare of climate fiction novelists, not because of the soaring power of his prose (though his prose his quite good) but because of his long history of engaging with the subject of climate change in an extremely intelligent and knowledgeable way. Since the 1980s, Robinson has been bringing to his readers compelling stories that deal with the topic of climate change, stories that deliver so much information about the topic that they seem almost like mini-courses on the topic. Robinson pulls no punches in warning his readers about the serious threat that climate change poses to the human race. At the same time, all of his fiction is infused with a strong sense of hope and a conviction that we can still save ourselves from ourselves, at the same time building a society more just and humane than any that has hitherto been seen in human history.
Robinson’s first important sf novel was The Wild Shore (1984), a post-apocalyptic narrative that details attempts to recover from a disastrous nuclear war that had been provoked by American imperialism and capitalist greed. It was followed by two subsequent novels that detail very different pictures of the American future. The Gold Coast (1988) is a dystopian narrative that describes a corrupt and decadent capitalist future in which the policies of the Reaganite 1980s have continued unabated into the 2020s, leading to widespread environmental destruction. Pacific Edge (1990), on the other hand, is a utopian narrative that demonstrates the positive potential of sensible and humane environmental and social policies, detailing an American future in which the rise to power of the Green Party has led to the institution of enlightened policies that have greatly improved the condition of the natural environment as well as establishing a more just and equitable American society. These three novels, which have collectively come to be known as the “Three Californias” Trilogy. They already establish many of Robinson’s basic concerns as well as anticipating the shape of his subsequent career, which has imagined a number of different futures that, rather than constituting a monolithic future history, convey the notion that many different futures are possible and that it is up to us to take action to help move our world in a positive direction.
In 1995, having written the “Mars Trilogy,” Robinson made a trip to Antarctica that had a profound effect on his thinking, moving him to concentrate much more on climate fiction in his subsequent novels, beginning with Antarctica (1997), a novel that grew directly out of that trip. More of an adventure/thriller than science fiction, this book features a plot that centers on a sort of clandestine program of sabotage designed to discourage the exploitation of the continent of Antarctica in ways that could be harmful to the natural environment of the continent. On the other hand, the book (set in the very near future) often reads like science fiction, simply because Antarctica is such a unique place that the exploration of the continent has very much the texture of the exploration of an alien planet. However, Robinson also makes it clear that Antarctica is crucial to the rest of the earth, especially as the melting of the Antarctic ice cover could raise the world’s ocean levels in catastrophic ways. The plot of the novel, however, is mostly just a device for the delivery of information, including compelling descriptions of what it is like to be in Antarctica and to travel about the strange, frozen surface there, as well as a detailed history of human exploration in Antarctica. Some reviewers have complained that the plot of this novel gets obscured by all that information, but the information is the real point. At the same time, there are long segments of narrative that are quite engaging. Meanwhile, this novel also shows the sophisticated awareness of politics and economics that are a hallmark of all of Robinson’s fiction, including a strong utopian component that looks hopefully toward the future. It also includes, in the character of Phil Chase, a U.S. senator so ditzy that he seems to have been included largely for comic relief, though the climate crisis itself will be key in making him develop into a more serious political leader in the “Science in the Capital” trilogy.
That trilogy—comprising Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007)—would be Robinson’s next major contribution to climate fiction. This sequence moves back to the U.S., focusing on the political battle over climate change. The trilogy is a very near future work set mostly in Washington, D.C., though it does bring in other locations, as well. In fact, it is barely science fiction at all, because it takes place in a world that is quite similar to our own, facing threats from climate change that we are already facing. Robinson has described this trilogy as “science fiction and realism mashed together,” something he argues is appropriate given that the very texture of today’s world is made up of a similar combination. “Science in the Capital” represents Robinson’s most urgent and direct engagement with climate change to that time. It is set in the very near future, or perhaps in an alternate reality that is essentially identical to our own except that climate change has proceeded slightly further, precipitating an immediate crisis. In addition, in keeping with Robinson’s typically utopian vision, the American people and political system, with science leading the way, turn out in this trilogy to be up to the task of dealing with the climate crisis, something that, unfortunately, seems considerably less likely now than it did when these volumes were originally published.
In Forty Signs of Rain we are introduced the main narrative characters, who include microbiologist Frank Vanderwal, who teaches at San Diego State University but is spending a year on loan to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington. At the NSF, Frank works with scientist-administrator Anna Quibler, whose husband, Charlie Quibler, works as the main environmental advisor to California Senator Phil Chase, who returns from Antarctica, now as a much wiser and more serious figure. Chase is a minor figure in this volume (though he will become more important later), but Charlie is a key figure who is something of a stand-in for Robinson himself in that he works at home so that he can care for his two young sons, one of whom, Joe, is still barely a toddler and who is particularly prominent because he requires almost constant care from Charlie. (While writing much of the trilogy, Robinson was a stay-at-home dad in the D.C. area while his wife worked there as a scientist.) This volume, though, is as much about science itself as it is about the characters, and Robinson does a superb job of depicting the everyday “work” that scientists do, giving us a look, not only inside the NSF, but also inside the startup Torrey Pines Generique, a biotechnology startup near San Diego that is seeking gene-based therapies for a variety of human ailments.
None of the main issues that are put in place in Forty Signs of Rain are resolved, and the novel reads very much like the first volume in a trilogy that it is. The climate issues that it mentions do assert themselves vigorously at the end of the novel, though, as violent storms wrack both San Diego and Washington, D.C., Frank’s two homes in the novel. Heavy storms lead to the collapse of large areas of the cliffs that line the beaches of San Diego, while an unprecedented flood sweeps through Washington, setting the stage for the dramatic confrontation with climate change that will mark the later volumes of the trilogy.
Fifty Degrees Below is dominated by the adventures and misadventures of Frank as he decides to spend a second year at the NSF, invited to do so by NSF director Diane Chang after he had aired some of his grievances regarding the seeming inability of that agency to take any effective action to combat climate change. Diane and Frank strike up a friendship in this volume. He finds her extremely attractive, but never acts on it, so their relationship remains at the level of friends and colleagues. Frank, does, however, begin a clandestine romantic relationship with a mysterious woman named Caroline who had been assigned to keep tabs on him by an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency. To complicate matters even further, Caroline is in a bad marriage to a man who also works in intelligence.
This volume expands upon an important subplot from the first volume involving the fictional island nation of Khembalung, inhabited by Buddhist refugees from Tibet. Among other things, this subplot allows Robinson to remind us that climate is a global problem, though some parts of the world are much more vulnerable than others. Indeed, in the course of this volume, Khembalung itself is destroyed by a climate-change-related flood just as Charlie, Anna, and their kids are visiting, though they and the major Khembali characters make it safely back to Washington. The Khembalung material also allows Robinson (whose work is quite sympathetic to Buddhism, though he himself doesn’t identify as a Buddhist) to introduce some Buddhist ideas and to establish some interesting dialogues between that philosophy and Western science.
Much of this volume of the trilogy is devoted to Frank’s unusual living arrangements. Damage from the flood has greatly exacerbated the D.C. housing shortage, driving Frank to take up residence partly in a van he has leased but mostly in a treehouse that he constructs high in a tree in Rock Creek Park, a construction that is described with the typical technical detail that Robinson tends to provide in his novels. We also get more details about the day-to-day workings of the household of Charlie, Anna, and their boys, while Charlie’s professional work takes on a new importance when Chase decides to run for president as a Democratic candidate, placing climate change issues at the center of his platform. while Republicans continue to deny the existence of climate change despite the vast and dramatic evidence for it.
Meanwhile, the novel morphs into a political techno-thriller when Caroline pilfers from her husband a copy of software that is intended to attack voting machines in Oregon and Washington, ensuring that the Republican president will win there. She passes this copy to Frank, who passes it on to an associate at NSF who has connections in the intelligence community. We never learn in this volume what is done with this software, but we learn by the end of the novel that Chase wins the election (including winning Oregon), which seems to be good news for the environment. Surprisingly, though, the NSF has by this time already been able to spearhead an effort to get serious action underway to fight climate change, even while the Republican president is still in office. Of course, given the bitter conditions that had hit Washington in the previous winter (the temperatures give the book its title) it is becoming harder and harder to deny climate change.
Sixty Days and Counting, the longest of the three volumes of the Science in the Capital Trilogy, fairly neatly wraps up all of the different plot strands and gives us a utopian ending—though the novel keeps going like the Energizer Bunny even after most of the plotlines are concluded. It even keeps going after a classic comedy ending that features a triple wedding ceremony, though this one is a Buddhist ceremony with the Dalai Lama himself among those presiding. Frank is again the central character, though perhaps the central event is Chase’s assumption of power and determination to prioritize taking strong action to battle the effects of climate change, using Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal battles against the economic depression of the 1930s as a historical model. Charlie moves to a full-time role on the White House staff, forcing Joe into the White House daycare center. Chang becomes Chase’s chief science advisor, and Frank also moves to the White House as Chang’s advisor. Meanwhile, though, Frank’s life complicated by the fact that Caroline’s sinister husband seems to have identified him and is carrying out a campaign of harassment and intimidation, including such acts as sabotaging Frank’s van and cutting down the tree containing Frank’s treehouse.
In response, Frank moves even further off the grid, but he also manages to get into contact with intelligence professionals who help him to outwit Caroline’s husband and his supporters, whom they eventually arrest, leaving Caroline and Frank free to be together (and to be one of the three couples involved in the final wedding. Meanwhile, there is still work to be done, but Chase (who marries Chang near the end of the novel) has attacked the climate crisis with renewed vigor after surviving an assassination attempt, so that effective action is being taken in that realm at last. Meanwhile, the biggest loose end concerns the plot to steal the election by reprogramming voting machines. It appears that Chase’s opponent had arranged to fix the election in his favor, with that plot being neutralized via Caroline’s software. But the novel leaves open just a sliver of possibility that Caroline (and perhaps others she was working with) might, for unstated reasons, have simply fixed the election in Chase’s favor, pretending to overcome his opponent’s fix. All of this makes for some interesting political thriller plot material, but it seems all too relevant (and maybe a bit irresponsible) after all the claims of fraud involving the 2020 presidential election because it seems to suggest that stealing a presidential election wouldn’t be all that hard. And, of course, Robinson completely fails to foresee the possibility that the Republicans would continue trying to steal the election by other means, even after all the votes were counted.
As the novel ends (finally), the battle against climate change seems very promising, including international cooperation between the U.S. and China in this fight; Frank returns to San Diego with a pregnant Caroline, planning (in a move that seems questionable at best, like a lot of Frank’s moves) to buy a house on the edge of a crumbling cliff; and Charlie becomes nostalgic as he realizes that his boys are growing up and an era of his life is thus ending. There are lots of other plot threads in this novel, as well as an impressive array of suggestions on ways to battle climate change and rising ocean levels, though there seems to be little chance that such strategies would actually be enacted given the current political situation in the United States. For those who are interested, we also learn a great deal about things like kayaking, hiking in the Sierras, and camping in cold weather, and we also get an inkling of just how much Robinson admires Emerson and Thoreau, who are constant presences throughout the trilogy.
2312 (2012) is a rousing old-style science fiction detective story that shows Robinson at his most Asimovian, as interplanetary investigators attempt to identify the culprit in a devastating attack on Mercury that led to the destruction of the planet’s one human city. In the course of telling this story, Robinson lays out a vision of a human civilization that has spread throughout the solar system (though with a considerable amount of “Balkanization.” As such, the novel functions as something of a sequel to the Mars Trilogy, though Mars (while still operating in a rather utopian way in its own right) is now somewhat at odds with the rest of the solar system—for reasons that eventually become clear in the course of the novel. This vision of the solar system of the early twenty-fourth century includes a number of interesting science fictional technologies, including extensive (and widely practiced) gender modification techniques, longevity treatments, quantum computer-driven AIs (known as “qubes”), and spacecraft/space habitats that are made by hollowing out asteroids and then custom terraforming the inside.
But 2312 is a far-ranging book that is actually several novels in one, telling several different stories. One of these is an unusual love story involving the book’s most important character, the bird-like Swan, an artist from Mercury, and Wahram, a burly diplomat from Titan. When Swan first meet Wahram he reminds her of a toad, which doesn’t seem promising, until we learn that she actually likes toads. A lot of things about this relationship are surprising, in fact, though in some ways they are a perfect match, including the fact that she tilts female but has many male characteristics, while he tilts male but has many female characteristics. We are even informed that her genitals (a primary vagina and a secondary penis) are a perfect match for his genitals (a primary penis and a secondary vagina), so it’s a win-win in terms of the fit during sex. As the novelist Jeff VanderMeer notes in his glowing LA Times review of the novel, Swan and Wahram constitute “one of the greatest odd couples in the history of science fiction.” The novel even ends on a conventional romantic note as the couple are married atop a volcano on Mars.
Not much else about the novel is conventional, though. The novel includes several different kinds of segments, modeled on those in John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy (1930–1936). Some segments, known as “Quantum Walks,” are composed entirely of modernistic stream-of-consciousness passages. But these passages, at least the way I read them, are apparently taking place, not in the mind of a human, but in the mind of an AI. 2312 is narrated from a future perspective as an unnamed narrator meditates on the fact that the year 2312, when the action of the novel takes place, was something of a turning point in history—and apparently a turning point for the better, though we get few details. 2312 is a sort of future history, but a piecemeal one that leaves much known, especially after the year 2312. This narrator also provides us with a number of “Extracts,” which seem essentially to be snippets of their notes for the novel, which serve as typical KSR information dumps, telling us a great deal about terraforming, artificial intelligence, spacecraft propulsion, planetary formation, and the like. Perhaps the most interesting (and classically KSR) of these is the one labeled “Extracts (6),” which discusses the way late capitalism still dominates earth, but space economies have typically pushed capitalism to the margins, adopting other (better) economic models. Finally, other segments are simply lists of information tidbits on various topics, reading even more like fragmentary notes toward this supreme fiction.
Earth itself is barely involved in the main plot, but it is the focal point of a subplot that involves conditions on the planet in 2312—which are pretty dire, especially in terms of the state of the natural environment. Many former coastal areas, including Manhattan and the whole state of Florida, are now underwater due to the melting of the polar ice caps, wild animals are virtually all extinct (though many species have been preserved in space habitats), and attempts to reverse climate change are in complete disarray, largely because the earth as a whole is completely dysfunctional and thus unable to mount the kind of international cooperative efforts that would be necessary to undertake such a large global effort. (The United State seems especially dysfunctional; among other things, we learn that California is now an independent nation, though the political status of most of the rest of the former U.S. is not made clear.) There are, however, a few localized efforts (including some guerrilla efforts by spacers, without permission from earth authorities) underway to try to terraform earth itself to make it more liveable again, including the large-scale return of wild animals. Ultimately, then, there are some signs of hope, which is typical of Robinson’s work, while the whole subplot involving environmental conditions on earth serves as a contribution to Robinson’s large and thoughtful body of work that envisions the future of climate change on earth.
Robinson’s Aurora (2015) is one of the great generation starship novels of all time, especially in its treatment of the technical details of everyday life on such a ship as it travels far beyond our solar system. As such, it involves earth even less than did 2312. Indeed, it might appear to be an exception to Robinson’s consistent focus on climate change on earth, but it actually addresses climate change in some very interesting and important ways, much in the way that the Mars Trilogy makes important points about earth’s ecology. Perhaps the most obvious of the ways Aurora addresses climate change adheres in the fact that the mission to use the generation starship to establish a colony on a moon of a planet in the Tau Ceti system is a failure, resulting in a final suggestion that the dream of colonizing the stars historically provided a sort of backup that ultimately caused humans to be more lax in protecting the environment of earth. As one character says, late in the novel, “This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place” (450). Aurora does not entirely dismiss the possibility of successful interstellar colonization—several other missions have been launched by the end of the book, and part of the original mission even remains in Tau Ceti, still hoping to establish a colony. Nevertheless, the novel definitely suggests that we should not count on the expedient of interstellar colonization as a way of ensuring the survival of humanity after the environment of earth has been trashed once and for all and that we should probably concentrate on saving the earth. (In addition, Robinson repeats here the “sabbatical” motif introduced by in 2312, suggesting that humans somehow live longer, healthier lives if they at least occasionally spend time on earth, so that we still need earth, no matter how successfully we settle in space.)
Aurora is, though, an oddly optimistic novel, despite the fact that failure is its central theme. For one thing, it ends in the year 2910, and humans have at least survived that long, even if they have significant problems. Indeed, as the novel ends, the humans of the thirtieth century are finally getting serious about literally terraforming the earth to restore its environment to a fully livable state (and to begin to lower the levels of the oceans that have long since flooded most previously coastal areas). But this task, which could have been much easier had it been undertaken earlier (or if humans had decided not to trash the planet to begin with), will be a long and difficult one. Thus, when the surviving main characters return to earth after the failure of the colonizing mission that their ancestors undertook centuries earlier, they learn that “sea level rose twenty-four meters in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries of the common era, because of processes they began in the twenty-first century that they couldn’t later reverse; and in that rise, all of Earth’s beaches drowned. Nothing they have done since to chill Earth’s climate has done much to bring sea level back down; that will take a few thousand more years. Yes, they are terraforming Earth now. There’s no avoiding it, given the damage that’s been done. In this the common era year 2910, they are calling it a five-thousand-year project. Some say longer” (447).
One less obvious way Aurora addresses climate change is in its detailed attention to the difficulty of maintaining the starship’s intricate ecosystem, harder to maintain because the ship is only one trillionth the size of earth. The implication, though, is that ecosystems in general are delicately balanced and that even a planet the size of the earth, though it might be more forgiving than a starship, can be seriously damaged if its ecosystem is abused. And, in typical Robinson fashion, the novel makes this point in great detail, providing huge amounts of information about exactly what goes into balancing the ecosystem of the ship.
Aurora is also typical of Robinson’s work in that it plays very serious attention to politics. Much of the novel, for example, is devoted to political maneuvering on the ship, including one sequence that seems very relevant to our current condition when political differences turn to violence and they have to deal in very serious ways with the problem of healing differences once they have reached that level. In looking to earth’s history for help, meanwhile, they discover “cases on Earth where people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors.” However, it is then pointed out that “in most of those cases, there are fresh or current problems that are being given some kind of historical reinforcement or ratification. If any of these resentful populations were prospering, the distant past would only be history. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present” (253).
This conversation then continues in a mode that seems especially relevant to present-day Trumpism, well describing one reason for the durability of the unlikely alliance between resentment—fueled Trump and evangelical Christianity, even though this novel was published a year before Trump’s election to the presidency. One reason resentments last so long, one character, Aram, points out, is that “people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying. … people do seem to get addicted to their resentments. It must be like an endorphin, or a brain action in the temporal region, near the religious and epileptic nodes. I read a paper saying as much” (253).
Finally, one very science fictional innovation in the form of Aurora involves the fact that much of the novel is actually narrated by the ship’s artificially intelligent quantum computer. This motif is very effect for delivering information, but it is also somewhat humorous in that Robinson’s style has sometimes been accused of being a bit robotic, while his massive deliveries of information often seem like they were downloaded from a computer. Indeed, the computer’s prose style is a bit mechanical, and its narrative is definitely heavy on data delivery. Interesting enough, though, Robinson manages to make the computer itself a rather interesting character, to the point that it actually seems quite tragic that the computer has to be sacrificed in the complex effort to get the surviving humans back to earth. Get back to earth they do, though, and Freya, now over two hundred years old (but still middle-aged thanks to spending most of the trip back in suspended animation after the ship’s system of food production fails), begins to fall in live with the planet of her ancestors. As she experiences an ocean for the first time, from a newly re-engineered beach, she concludes, “What a world” then she “lets her head down and kisses the sand” (478).
In New York 2140 (2017), Robinson shifts into an entirely earthbound mode, focusing especially on the city of New York, while examining the ways in which the global phenomenon of climate change has fundamentally altered the day-to-day texture of life on earth. The basic scenario is simple, due to the melting of the polar ice caps, the world’s oceans have risen by fifty feet—a figure that is currently on the upper edge of the scatter band of current scientific predictions, though it should also be pointed out that these predictions have tended to drift upward in recent years, so that Robinson’s number is certainly believable, if not entirely probable. Meanwhile, this number is a crucial one for Manhattan Island, the northern end of which is approximately 50 feet higher in elevation than the southern end. As a result, the northern end of the island remains dry, while the southern end is underwater, its surviving buildings jutting into the air above the new city level. New Yorkers are resourceful, though, so the submerged part of the island, despite serious difficulties (including the collapse of many buildings not built on bedrock), has become a thriving SuperVenice, while the northern end has become a refuge for the super-rich, who maintain luxury apartments in staggeringly tall “superscrapers” that have been enabled by advanced twenty-second-century construction materials. Most residents of the city struggle to find housing, while these luxury towers remain largely empty, their wealthy owners spending perhaps a week or two there per year, the financial center of capitalism having shifted from New York to the safer confines of Denver, now a bastion of the rich and characterized by Robinson as the most boring city on earth.
In short, one impact of climate change has been a widening of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, a phenomenon we are already beginning to see in our own day. Indeed, one of the strengths of New York 2140 and of Robinson’s work in general is his sophisticated understanding of the complex interrelationships among climate change and a variety of human institutions and practices. As Gerry Canavan puts it (in an enthusiastic review), “Befitting its setting, the ‘eco’ in New York 2140 is as much economy as ecology; climate disaster becomes just another black-swan market event ‘no one could have predicted,’ with winners (mostly rich people) and losers (mostly the rest of us).”
New York 2140 is a highly complex novel whose unusually complicated literary structure (at least for a science fiction novel) parallels the complexities of both climate change and the capitalist economic system, an exploration of which is also a key concern of the novel. The novel employs multiple narrators, multiple styles, and an array of well-developed characters who together constitute a genuine ensemble cast that undermines the typical individualist inclination of the novel as a genre and subtly reinforces Robinson’s committed anticapitalist agenda. It also employs a complex plot with many different interconnected strands, though its strongest moments of action are individual set pieces such as an extended description of the impact of a powerful hurricane that already partly drowned Manhattan in the course of the novel. Meanwhile, the novel delivers an astounding amount of information, even for Robinson, and much of it is not devoted to action at all but to lengthy expositions on subjects such as climate change and the workings of a complex and corrupt capitalist financial system.
Much of the complexity of New York 2140 comes from complexity of individual characters, who tend to display surprising dimensions. One key character, for example, is the seemingly ditzy Amelia Black, a “cloud” star (something like today’s Youtubers, but with a higher profile) who has parlayed a dazzling smile and a perfect body (which she tends to put on full display) into a highly successful media career. Amelia’s videos are made more interesting because they are mostly shot on the airship in which she flies around the world; but her various flights typically involve serious missions, including the relocation of engendered animals to various sites around the globe. Amelia also turns out to be quite insightful and to deliver some of the novel’s most trenchant political commentaries. In one important sequence, she delivers a load of polar bears to Antarctica (where the ice has not entirely melted), only to have them killed by a group of extremists who believe that Antarctica should be kept pure. In response (in a quote with which Isra Daraiseh and I began our 2019 book Consumerist Orientalism), Amelia declares, “We’ve been mixing things up for thousands of years now, poisoning some creatures and feeding others, and moving everything around. Ever since humans left Africa we’ve been doing that. So when people start to get upset about this, when they begin to insist on the purity of some place or some time, it makes me crazy. I can’t stand it. It’s a mongrel world” (259).
Two of the more unusual characters in the novel (typically referred to in the novel as “Mutt and Jeff”) are “quants,” or quantitative analysts, who work in the financial industry. But they have been conducting covert guerrilla actions against that industry, turning hackers in response to its fundamental corruption. As a result, they have been ordered killed, but are saved when Fed Chairman Larry Jackman spearheads a plan to have them locked up in an underwater storage container for their own protection. (Warning: the plot of New York 2140 is not always entirely believable.) Mutt and Jeff, in fact, spend most of the novel in this container, though they don’t know either where they are or why they are there. Their meditations provide some useful information and some interesting moments, including a surprisingly literary one in which Jeff compares their plight to those of characters in Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Kiss of the Spider Woman (147). Mutt and Jeff also have the distinction that a modified form of one of their segments is included (as “Mutt and Jeff Push the Button”) in the rather odd volume An American Utopia (2016), generally attributed to Fredric Jameson, though mostly written by others and edited by Slavoj Žižek.
Another surprising major character is Franklin Garr, who seems through most of the book pretty much like a soulless and narcissistic hedge fund manager, though occasionally displaying a literary bent, as when he describes the beauties of New York’s waterways as informed by the “pynchonpoetry of twilight on the water” (68) or the melvillemood of the Narrows at night, mysterious in moonlight (118). As a result of such moments, it is perhaps made less shocking that Franklin ultimately emerges as a hero, using his professional knowledge and skills to help some of the novel’s more obviously virtuous characters in their plot to crash the economic system and then force the government to respond, not by bailing out the banks as they did in 2008, but by nationalizing the banks and bailing out the people. Indeed, the injustice of that 2008 bailout hovers over the entire text, causing Canavan to declare that “I will concede, however, even as an unrepentant Robinson booster, that the people of 2140 seem awfully well informed about nuts-and-bolts details of the 2008 financial crisis.
The obviously virtuous characters of New York 2140 include NYPD detective Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir, community organizer Charlotte Armstrong, and building super Vlade Marovich, though even these characters are fairly unusual. Possibly the most unusual character, though, is a sort of extratextual commentator known as “a citizen,” who comments on the action, delivers a great deal of information, and provides a fairly cynical counterpoint to the utopian drift of the rest of the narrative. Among other things, he provides a reminder that the remainder of the Antarctic ice might go at any moment, triggering another wave of flooding in coastal areas around the world, including New York. The novel is hardly simplistic in its optimism and Robinson certainly realizes that capitalism and climate change are both formidable foes, not easily defeated.
Still, New York 2140 includes a number of strongly utopian gestures, including its suggestion that citizens can take effective collective action to wrest control of the political and economic systems away from corporations and the ultra-rich. But there are also specific utopian moments, such as a final scene that occurs in a small underground club when the patrons, including Amelia and Mutt and Jeff, give themselves up to the music of a live multicultural band and dance like no one is watching in a moment of communal bliss, somewhat along the lines of the crucial dance scene in the “Lovers Rock” episode of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, which appeared on Amazon Prime in 2020. What makes New York special, according to this novel, is that such moments still happen there all the time, despite everything. As the novel ends, Mutt, Jeff, and Amelia (at this point it is impossible to tell who is saying what, nor does it matter in the communal spirit of this sequence) muse on the fact that there are probably fifty such bands playing to such crowds in New York at this very moment. “It’s true,” one of them admiringly concludes. “Fucking New York.”
Robinson’s work from the Mars trilogy forward already made him the world’s greatest writer of climate fiction, but the publication of The Ministry for the Future brought his work to a whole new level. This novel is simultaneously his most informative, frightening, and hopeful work on the topic to date. Beginning with a horrifying tour de force description of the effects of an extreme heat event of the kind we are already beginning to see happen, Robinson takes us on a complex multi-character, multi-voiced, and multicultural tour of the world of our near future, delivering a thoroughly prepared short course on the causes, consequences, and possible solutions to climate change that demonstrates the potential of the novel as a medium for the delivery of complex information. At the same time, Robinson illustrates all of this information via an overall narrative that is both a geo-political thriller and monster story, with the neoliberal market as a monster wreaking havoc upon the world. This main narrative, already complex, is punctuated by compelling supplementary narrative segments and inserted non-narrative genres in a combination that well illustrates Mikhail Bakhtin’s well-known work on the inherently multi-generic nature of the novel as a genre. Finally, this use of multiple genres combines with the use of an extremely diverse array of narrators (mostly anonymous and some not even human) gives the novel an essentially postmodern form that makes brilliant use of the Bakhtinian notions of dialogism and multi-voicing to convey the inherent complexity of the problem of climate change, while at the same time demonstrating that the novel as a genre is itself complex enough to meet the task of addressing such a complex phenomenon. The Ministry for the Future is discussed in detail here.
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