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Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 20, 2015
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110 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 7, 2015
Policy wonks, eco-alarmists, and right-wing denialists dominate the climate change conversation with boring reports, deafening polemics, and forgettable op-eds. The mound of non-fiction reaches to the moon, and we’re no closer to a collective response to a warming world. In contrast, the number of novels written with climate change themes might not reach the top shelf in your living room.
Where are the novelists, author Adam Trexler asks? Where are the imagineers using story to organize, illustrate, and give emotional meaning to the nearly invisible fact of a heating planet? They’re out there, he says, but they’re lurking among the paperback thrillers in airport newsstands and on science fiction shelves in mega-bookstores. With a few exceptions, the “serious” literary world is completely ignoring the most important challenge to Homo Sapiens in 10,000 years.
Trexler builds the title of his book, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, published the University of Virginia Press, on a relatively new argument: humanity is the most potent geological and ecological force on the planet since the last Ice Age. The Anthropocene Era started with the invention of agriculture, but it picked up steam in the 18th century with the burning of coal to fuel industry, which turned the atmosphere into a dump for waste carbon. When a real-life “greenhouse effect” was first identified by science in the mid-20th century, intrepid sci-fi and thriller writers found fertile ground for storytelling.
Trexler and others cite the first novel with global warming as its central theme as J.G. Ballard‘s 1962 The Drowned World, which describes a Britain submerged by rising seas caused by sun-driven heating. From then on, the bulk of novels with climate change at least in the background are either thrillers such as Werner Herzog’s Heat and Clive Cussler’s Arctic Drift or science fiction and speculative fiction, such as George Turner’s The Sea and Summer and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
Trexler, an independent scholar and former researcher at the UK’s University of Exeter, has little praise for a writer who’s become the doyenne of climate fiction in North America, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake he calls “unfocused.” In his view, her Year of the Flood is more about the “economic hegemony” of corporations than a response to climate change. On the other hand, Trexler heaps pages of analysis on Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy, which imagines the National Science Foundation as the planet’s climate savior. In this world, bureaucratic savvy and good data win the day.
Counting as many as 150 novels as his source material, Trexler finds common tropes and themes running through them, such as the reliance in thrillers of ad hoc teams of scientists and civil servants who come together more or less secretly to circumvent the political dolts and get ‘r done. One of the most interesting threads is the use of the flood metaphor to bring home the effects of the warming climate. Some people saw the recent Russell Crowe vehicle Noah as a climate change movie with its warning against disobeying God’s command to be good stewards of his creation.
As a literary phenomenon, the first generation of climate change novels probably reflect the general immaturity of humanity’s response, certainly in the United States, to the threat. When Trexler examines common political themes, they’re heavily weighted toward dystopia. Climate change novelists, as a rule, are dispeptic pessimists. It’s hard to argue with Trexler’s analysis, but he either missed or chose not to mention The World We Made, by environmentalist Jonathan Porritt, a cheery novel that describes a new, less wasteful economy powered mostly by wind.
In the last few years, Trexler sees literary realists finally taking up the subject explored primarily in genre novels. Examples includes Barbara Kingsolver in Flight Behavior and Ian McEwan in Solar. Trexler complains “serious” writers, however, offer few visions of life actually lived under climate change. It’s assumed that a warmed world is sometime in the future, not happening right now. Science tells us so, but most “realist” writers prefer not to deal with this reality or don’t know how.
Trexler limits his analysis to traditionally published work, which skews his view of climate fiction toward that of publishers interested in selling to a mass audience. He deliberately avoids self-published novels, some of which might address the lack of imagination he laments among literary realists. His academic prose is often opaque, but his call for novelists to construct narratives that illustrate the true-life effects of climate change rings true. Acres of shelved non-fiction haven’t help us figure out how to live with climate change. Maybe a great novel could.
This review first appeared on Joe Follansbee's blog.
Where are the novelists, author Adam Trexler asks? Where are the imagineers using story to organize, illustrate, and give emotional meaning to the nearly invisible fact of a heating planet? They’re out there, he says, but they’re lurking among the paperback thrillers in airport newsstands and on science fiction shelves in mega-bookstores. With a few exceptions, the “serious” literary world is completely ignoring the most important challenge to Homo Sapiens in 10,000 years.
Trexler builds the title of his book, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, published the University of Virginia Press, on a relatively new argument: humanity is the most potent geological and ecological force on the planet since the last Ice Age. The Anthropocene Era started with the invention of agriculture, but it picked up steam in the 18th century with the burning of coal to fuel industry, which turned the atmosphere into a dump for waste carbon. When a real-life “greenhouse effect” was first identified by science in the mid-20th century, intrepid sci-fi and thriller writers found fertile ground for storytelling.
Trexler and others cite the first novel with global warming as its central theme as J.G. Ballard‘s 1962 The Drowned World, which describes a Britain submerged by rising seas caused by sun-driven heating. From then on, the bulk of novels with climate change at least in the background are either thrillers such as Werner Herzog’s Heat and Clive Cussler’s Arctic Drift or science fiction and speculative fiction, such as George Turner’s The Sea and Summer and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
Trexler, an independent scholar and former researcher at the UK’s University of Exeter, has little praise for a writer who’s become the doyenne of climate fiction in North America, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake he calls “unfocused.” In his view, her Year of the Flood is more about the “economic hegemony” of corporations than a response to climate change. On the other hand, Trexler heaps pages of analysis on Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy, which imagines the National Science Foundation as the planet’s climate savior. In this world, bureaucratic savvy and good data win the day.
Counting as many as 150 novels as his source material, Trexler finds common tropes and themes running through them, such as the reliance in thrillers of ad hoc teams of scientists and civil servants who come together more or less secretly to circumvent the political dolts and get ‘r done. One of the most interesting threads is the use of the flood metaphor to bring home the effects of the warming climate. Some people saw the recent Russell Crowe vehicle Noah as a climate change movie with its warning against disobeying God’s command to be good stewards of his creation.
As a literary phenomenon, the first generation of climate change novels probably reflect the general immaturity of humanity’s response, certainly in the United States, to the threat. When Trexler examines common political themes, they’re heavily weighted toward dystopia. Climate change novelists, as a rule, are dispeptic pessimists. It’s hard to argue with Trexler’s analysis, but he either missed or chose not to mention The World We Made, by environmentalist Jonathan Porritt, a cheery novel that describes a new, less wasteful economy powered mostly by wind.
In the last few years, Trexler sees literary realists finally taking up the subject explored primarily in genre novels. Examples includes Barbara Kingsolver in Flight Behavior and Ian McEwan in Solar. Trexler complains “serious” writers, however, offer few visions of life actually lived under climate change. It’s assumed that a warmed world is sometime in the future, not happening right now. Science tells us so, but most “realist” writers prefer not to deal with this reality or don’t know how.
Trexler limits his analysis to traditionally published work, which skews his view of climate fiction toward that of publishers interested in selling to a mass audience. He deliberately avoids self-published novels, some of which might address the lack of imagination he laments among literary realists. His academic prose is often opaque, but his call for novelists to construct narratives that illustrate the true-life effects of climate change rings true. Acres of shelved non-fiction haven’t help us figure out how to live with climate change. Maybe a great novel could.
This review first appeared on Joe Follansbee's blog.
April 3, 2020
This is a very thorough review of climate change fiction spanning six decades. Trexler charts the difficulties that fiction faces in addressing the all encompassing nature of climate change, not least of which is the realist novels tendency to portray individual action and development (what Updike terms the "individual moral journey") against a stable and unchanging nature.
Trexler looks at a how fiction represents a variety of nonhuman actors in the climate change dilemma, capitalism itself, a variety of governmental agencies and activist groups, animals, machinery, as authors struggle to represent the Anthropocene epoch as itself an agent of change.
My kindle is overflowing with notes I made at different points on the various chapters. I did not find this an easy read - it is not the kind of book to skim lightly, but the breadth of works examined is astonishing.
It will take me some time to digest my own thoughts and responses to it and it generates an interesting reading list of those curious enough to pursue climate change fiction. It also rang very resonant as I read it in the midst of the Ciovid-19 crisis in the UK (or possibly at the start of that crisis - only time will tell) and the pandemic response makes a telling allegory for the still greater threat of climate change.
However, here is an overview of structure and some of the exemplar texts referred to
Trexler organises his approach into four main chapters
Truth, looking at the deployment of science in climate change fiction
Trexler starts with an examination of Michael Crichton's State of Fear (justifiably notorious and yet a best selling book where fiction fed into politics with its skewed narrative about climate change science repudiating picked up by a Republican senator.) and goes on to look at Ian McKewan's Solar (where climate change is accepted as indisputable fact and the narrative focuses on one man's hedonistic response to opportunity and genius). Trexler links these science views to Latour's notions of interconnected feedback loops in fashioning an understanding of scientific truth that is more organic than absolute.
Place, looking particularly at deluge and flood stories of climate change impact
Trexler notes these are not the only impacts of climate change but in offering a clear and dramatic notice of change or difference prove a fertile ground for a variety of authors. Looking at J.G.Ballard's the Drowned World, Will Self's The Book of Dave and Maggie Gee's The Flood, Trexler considers literary representations of responses to flooding from a variety of perspectives. The global mobilisation of genii to stave disaster, twin-timelines examining the journey towards climate change flooding and the aftermath centuries later, and a sophisticated network of some 30 interconnected characters. The works of fiction offer many parallels with our own current covid-19 crisis, not least when McGee has a fictional president Bliss threatening a middle eastern war to distract attention from unmanaged and unmanageable flooding.
Politics, looking at how fiction represents political responses to climate change
Here Michael Glass's Ultimatum - about a future American president in brinkmanship negotiations to stave of climate change disaster vies for attention with George Marshall's The Earth Party: Love and Revolution at a Time of Climate Change, in which an extremist party takes over the government and imposes a kind of Khymer Rouge style nationalisation of the state and intrusion on freedoms in an imperfect response to the exigencies of climate change. Trexler draws on Giddens' work in The Politics of Climate Change, in commenting on these and other representations.
Economics, looking at the domestic as well as the global concepts of economics
Looking at works such as Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries and Bruce Sterling's the Carytids in their different representation of the personal or household level of response and a more global corporate response.
Trexler looks at a how fiction represents a variety of nonhuman actors in the climate change dilemma, capitalism itself, a variety of governmental agencies and activist groups, animals, machinery, as authors struggle to represent the Anthropocene epoch as itself an agent of change.
My kindle is overflowing with notes I made at different points on the various chapters. I did not find this an easy read - it is not the kind of book to skim lightly, but the breadth of works examined is astonishing.
It will take me some time to digest my own thoughts and responses to it and it generates an interesting reading list of those curious enough to pursue climate change fiction. It also rang very resonant as I read it in the midst of the Ciovid-19 crisis in the UK (or possibly at the start of that crisis - only time will tell) and the pandemic response makes a telling allegory for the still greater threat of climate change.
However, here is an overview of structure and some of the exemplar texts referred to
Trexler organises his approach into four main chapters
Truth, looking at the deployment of science in climate change fiction
Trexler starts with an examination of Michael Crichton's State of Fear (justifiably notorious and yet a best selling book where fiction fed into politics with its skewed narrative about climate change science repudiating picked up by a Republican senator.) and goes on to look at Ian McKewan's Solar (where climate change is accepted as indisputable fact and the narrative focuses on one man's hedonistic response to opportunity and genius). Trexler links these science views to Latour's notions of interconnected feedback loops in fashioning an understanding of scientific truth that is more organic than absolute.
Place, looking particularly at deluge and flood stories of climate change impact
Trexler notes these are not the only impacts of climate change but in offering a clear and dramatic notice of change or difference prove a fertile ground for a variety of authors. Looking at J.G.Ballard's the Drowned World, Will Self's The Book of Dave and Maggie Gee's The Flood, Trexler considers literary representations of responses to flooding from a variety of perspectives. The global mobilisation of genii to stave disaster, twin-timelines examining the journey towards climate change flooding and the aftermath centuries later, and a sophisticated network of some 30 interconnected characters. The works of fiction offer many parallels with our own current covid-19 crisis, not least when McGee has a fictional president Bliss threatening a middle eastern war to distract attention from unmanaged and unmanageable flooding.
Politics, looking at how fiction represents political responses to climate change
Here Michael Glass's Ultimatum - about a future American president in brinkmanship negotiations to stave of climate change disaster vies for attention with George Marshall's The Earth Party: Love and Revolution at a Time of Climate Change, in which an extremist party takes over the government and imposes a kind of Khymer Rouge style nationalisation of the state and intrusion on freedoms in an imperfect response to the exigencies of climate change. Trexler draws on Giddens' work in The Politics of Climate Change, in commenting on these and other representations.
Economics, looking at the domestic as well as the global concepts of economics
Looking at works such as Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries and Bruce Sterling's the Carytids in their different representation of the personal or household level of response and a more global corporate response.
December 9, 2024
Primer libre acabar del doctorat! Molt inspirador, complet i replet d’obres i fils per estirar. Bàsicament m’ha convençut per analizar les obres de SF des d’una perspectiva literària i STS. Haig de digerir un munt de coses…
January 27, 2018
Some fine foundation-setting work
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews