Intersectional Futures in Climate Fiction

The texts I have selected can be categorised under the banner of speculative fiction, which this book adopts as a broader framework that encompasses science fiction but is less defined by a focus on science and technology, and, including several works authored by women and people of colour, articulates the concerns of a diverse range of people (Lucas 2011; Streeby 2018). Many of these texts fall into the categories of climate change dystopias or eco-dystopias. This does not come as a surprise, climate change having been referred to as a “wicked problem” (Hulme 2009: 335) par excellence because of its complexity, interdependence, and irrepresentability; as argued by Lisa Garforth (2018), climate change “makes utopia so difficult” (125). The dystopian and apocalyptic narratives analysed, however, emphasise the themes of “radical change” and the “necessity for change” (99), creating a space for utopian possibilities while cautioning against the dire consequences that may ensue if transformation does not occur.

Building on the work of Shelley Streeby and Alexis Lothian, the term world-making is used to highlight the transformative dimensions of the worlds imagined in narratives that confront climate change, colonialism, and environmental racism.² Streeby and Lothian draw a distinction between the term world-making and the science fiction concept of world-building, which refers to the creation of plausible worlds (even though Lothian recognises that some science fiction worlds break with the present and imagine radical political change). World-building, claims Streeby, “is often associated with colonization and empire though it also may be used to critically interrogate those structures” (2018: 148), hence she chooses world-making over world-building to discuss transformative portals to futurity and potentiality.

I have chosen novels and short stories with publication dates ranging from the first years of the new century to the contemporary moment, with a particular focus on the 2010s decade. This is indeed when a new canon of climate change fiction has started to be framed, after Dan Bloom coined the term climate fiction in 2007. Within this canon, novels by Paolo Bacigalupi, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ian McEwan stand as key texts, constructing an image of Europe and North America as the white epicentres of climate-related discourse. The specific texts analysed in this book attempt to decolonise the centre-periphery dichotomy of this canon by proposing a diverse corpus of feminist and decolonial global literary voices. To decolonise the imagination, it is essential to engage with the world from a multiplicity of perspectives and to foster conditions that enable diverse viewpoints on the climate crisis to arise from various (and often marginalised) locations across the globe (Borghi 2020). The main works examined in this study include two novels by Australian and Indigenous Waanyi author Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013); Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor; and The Broken Earth Trilogy by American author N. K. Jemisin, which consists of The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017). These authors were chosen because of their specific engagement with the relationship between climate change, global capitalism, and a flat trust in techno-fixes on the one hand, and structural inequalities generated by patriarchy, racism, and intersecting systems of oppression on the other. Throughout the in-depth analysis of these authors’ works, additional writers will also be referenced: among them, American writer Morgan Babst, Métis writer Cherie Dimaline, New Zealand novelist of Kāi Tahu and Kāti Māmoe descent Keri Hulme, Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, Indian writer Vandana Singh, and American writer Jesmyn Ward. American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, who published the majority of her novels and short stories over a decade prior to the other authors analysed, will be mentioned throughout this book because of her profound and undeniable influence on the next generation of sci-fi writers. Her pivotal work is crucial for examining the links between the escalating crisis of climate change and the injustices of the Anthropocene.

My analyses aim to address the following questions: in what ways do contemporary feminist and decolonial speculative fiction challenge and reimagine the concept of the Anthropocene? How do these texts respond to the main tropes of contemporary climate fiction, such as the othering of nature, the prioritising of spectacular scenarios over the “slow violence” of climate change (Nixon 2011), the universalised white maleness and the one-dimensional portrayal of women and people of colour, the tension toward conservatism, and the optimistic neoliberal orientation? The chosen texts are read through a critical approach that draws from feminist ecologies examined in the first chapter, an approach that does not necessarily take gender as a category per se but promotes ecological thinking through feminist situated (Haraway 1988) and trans-corporeal (Alaimo 2016) epistemologies. The first chapter of this book, however, is not conceived as a theoretical framework or a literature review: following the practice of diffractive reading, a neologism elaborated by Karen Barad from the physical phenomenon of diffraction that happens when waves encounter an obstacle upon their path (Barad 2007), this book does not create a distance from the literature review, nor foregrounds any texts as foundational, but aims at creating new insights by reading theoretical and speculative texts through one another (see Geerts and van der Tuin 2016; van der Tuin 2016).

Chapter 1, Feminist Environmental Humanities, starts with an overview of gender equality and sustainable development, with a particular focus on the gendered nature of climate change, the concept of socially constructed vulnerability, and a critique of the eco gender gap. It then moves to explore the tensions and contradictions between feminism and environmentalism, analysing ecofeminism(s), feminist epistemologies, queer ecologies, posthuman feminism, and feminist new materialism, and proposing a cartography of feminist environmental humanities.

Chapter 2, Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Ecocriticism to the Climate Change Novel, introduces ecocriticism and the concept of literature as cultural ecology from a feminist and decolonial point of view. By tracing the rise of climate change criticism alongside ecocriticism, it claims that a new canon of climate change fiction has been developing in the last two decades and delves into its key characteristics. It then explores science fictional ways of thinking about the climate crisis, and the role of ecotopian – or green utopian – literature in proposing visions of better and ecologically sustainable societies, thereby challenging our taken-for-granted unsustainable worlds. Finally, it claims that contemporary projections of green futures are more likely to take dystopian and post-apocalyptic forms; these kinds of narratives, however, are becoming more and more crucial in keeping green hope alive by warning of the potentially destructive consequences of ecological exploitation. This chapter concludes with an overview of the linkages between feminism, utopia, and dystopia, that sets the stage for subsequent theoretical discussions and analyses of the literary texts.

Chapter 3, The Uneven Universality of Climate Change: Representing Climate Justice, suggests that the absence of climate justice in many novels recognised within the developing canon of climate fiction, along with their one-dimensional representation of gender, race, and the other-than-human, necessitates the exploration of alternative approaches to addressing the climate change crisis. Focusing on speculative fiction that centres on the interconnections of gender, race, and environmentalism, and that diverges from dominant narratives of power and privilege, this chapter introduces postcolonial, Afrodiasporic, African, and Indigenous futurisms: to put it otherwise, work that is all too often excluded from the canon of climate fiction. The central claim of this chapter, which will be further explored in the following ones, is that “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties” (Haraway 2016: 12). This roadmap towards a decolonial feminist imaginary is guided by several references to literary texts (such as novels and short stories published by Morgan Babst, Cherie Dimaline, Keri Hulme, Vandana Singh, and Jesmyn Ward).

Chapter 4, A Crisis of Imagination: Decolonising Climate Change Fiction, analyses the representation of environmental and climate crises in Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright. Building upon the work of environmental humanities scholars such as Heise (2008), Clark (2015), Trexler (2015) and Ghosh (2016), who have emphasised the main challenges faced by authors of climate fiction, the chapter considers Wright’s novels as an entry point to address the climate-related crisis of culture – while acknowledging the problematic aspects of reading Indigenous texts as antidotes to the “great derangement” (Ghosh 2016) – and the danger of a singular Anthropocene narrative that silences the “unevenly universal” (Nixon 2011) responsibilities and vulnerabilities to environmental harm. Exploring themes such as environmental racism, ecological imperialism, and the slow violence of climate change, it suggests that Alexis Wright’s novels are of utmost importance for global conversations about the Anthropocene and its literary representations, as they bring the unevenness of environmental and climate crisis to visibility.

Chapter 5, Multispecies Entanglements and Feminist Co-becoming, analyses Lagoon, published in 2014 by the award-winning author of Africanfuturist science fiction Nnedi Okorafor. The first part of the chapter focuses on the novel’s representation of the tragic impact of oil culture on Nigerian communities and marine ecosystems, of the consequences of neo-colonial developmentalism, and of multiple sites of othering (resulting from gender, racial, and species differences) that intersect with one another. I then argue that Lagoon explores the possibility of a rupture with fossil capitalism and human exceptionalism, structures of othering, and mutually reinforcing dualisms that prevent us from acknowledging the interdependent agency of humans and nature. The novel, indeed, proposes a wide and thorough critique of Anthropocentric values through the representation of several figures of absolute alterity (such as a female cyborg, a vengeful swordfish, and agentic oceanic waters) that concur to celebrate interspecies connections in which the other is never precategorised. Moreover, Okorafor creates a configuration of human and non-human hybridity that resonates with ecofeminist theorisations of inter-species nurturing.

Chapter 6, A Critique of Sustainability, analyses N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (2015, 2016, 2017). The chapter begins by examining the links between the Trilogy and the concept of the Anthropocene. It subsequently delves into Jemisin’s nuanced exploration of oppression, enslavement, and freedom. By linking these themes to the climate crisis, it posits that The Broken Earth Trilogy stands out as one of the rare works of cli-fi that prioritises climate justice as a fundamental concern, potentially serving as the overarching theme across the three novels. The core of the chapter, then, proposes a feminist new materialist reading of the vibrant and living Earth represented in the Trilogy, and a feminist and decolonial critique of the concept of sustainability. I argue that Jemisin’s Trilogy can be viewed as a problematisation of depoliticised sustainability transitions that fail to centre social and racial justice, thereby marginalising minority groups and women from the discourse that shapes the meaning of sustainability.

In its concluding pages, this book seeks to establish a dialogue between ecofeminist reflections on Covid-19 and contemporary feminist and decolonial speculative fiction that challenges and reimagines mainstream pandemic narratives. The Covid-19 pandemic has generated a plurality of reflections on the unsustainability of neoliberal globalisation and the current development model. Different forms of ecofeminism have responded to the current crisis since the very first months of 2020, linking the origin of the pandemic to the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources. Amid a global crisis that also highlights a crisis of care, it is increasingly urgent to expand our understanding of kinship. This shift should move beyond the labor of social reproduction typically undertaken by women within the family, towards a more relational paradigm that rejects market-driven logics and places care at the heart of our interactions with the natural world. The concept of care is indeed linked to that of interdependence between all living things (see Svampa 2015; Haraway 2016; Hutner 2020) but also with that of trans-corporeality developed by feminist new materialism.

In conclusion, my critical analyses aim to show that feminist speculative fiction addressing the Anthropocene not only places climate justice at the forefront and explores the unequal impacts of climate change along lines of social power, but also offers a profound critical intervention. This intervention envisions a rupture from dominant and mainstream narratives of linear progress, drawing inspiration from the radical imagination of feminist environmental humanities. Both frameworks are essential for transcending apolitical approaches to climate action and for recognising the narratives, perspectives, and demands of diverse communities.