Seven years ago Amitav Ghosh asked ‘Where is the fiction about climate change?’. Since then climate change fiction (cli-fi) continues to evolve and grow as a genre of its own, bending the rules of storytelling as the theme weighs down on the characters and disrupts the plot arcs. In creative writing studies you learn to ‘show, not tell’ your story and to avoid preaching to your audience. But this advice is sorely tested with such technical and political subject matter.
‘Given the near-certainty of catastrophic climate injustice, it is worth asking, as historians will in the decades to come: how did art, literature, and media, including climate change novels, represent the climate crisis as it unfolded?’ asks Mathew Shneider-Mayerson in Whose Odds? The Absence of Climate Justice in American Climate Fiction Novels.
Literary fiction with its emphasis on character development, risks ambiguity. Sci-Fi skips ahead to the techno-future, missing out the messy transition part. Who is going to address the climate issues of our lifetimes? The slow erosion of coastal towns, the job losses, the exhaustive international meetings?
‘Disentanglement from communities of place’ is how Schneider-Mayerson describes the actions of two wealthy American protagonists in ‘Odds Against Tomorrow,’ by Nathaniel Rich, as they buy their way out of an unfolding climate catastrophe. The poorer, marginalised people around them are stuck in their communities, dealing with the crises. Most authors are also disentangled from communities of place as omnipotent observers, and this is often reflected in their storytelling.
The stories from those who will be at the sharpest end of climate change - very much entangled in their communities - are rare to find in mainstream outlets. But this is where the most imaginative and useful solutions are likely hidden. We know the stories of terraforming Mars and able bodied heroes venturing through icescapes, but what of the single parent caring for a relative or the migrant farm worker reacting to policy changes.
Karen Bell says: ‘the wealthier are less likely to be impacted by the environmental crises because they can change their dwelling places, jobs and other aspects of their lives in the face of risks and crises. Without such options, working-class people may be the first to be impacted by these crises [however] those who have no vested interest in the current structures of power can find it easier to see when the system is not working…and may, therefore, be more likely to identify what needs to be addressed and changed.’
Some novels, like Lloyd Jones’ ‘Water’, and Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’, confront some of these concepts: being stuck in a place, or forced to move, creeping seal levels, crop failures, climate grief and inter-generational tensions. I’m currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry of the Future,’ its plot unfolding from the failures of global climate policy, its protagonists conflicted by the impossibility of their tasks.
In my rural town we hosted futuring workshops: ‘what will our town look like in twenty years, in a safe, 1.5℃ world,’ we asked? We kept it positive, focused on food growing, solar panels and plastic free oceans. No one wanted to risk getting too specific about how everyday life might change and unfold. The same, but with more renewables, we said, our imaginations constrained by our day to day realities.
Staring into the sun is painful. Grappling with the here and the now, and next tentative steps is complex, politically and socially. I’m not sure what this will look like in terms of storytelling and fiction. Ken Loach style tension between people in supermarkets? Brechtian narrators who step out of their role as author, revealing themselves as participants? A merging of ethnography, metaphor and autobiography?
We are living through the Anthropocene, the time that will change all of us and all of our surroundings. It will just as surely change our storytelling methods.
Right here, in our communities of place, making eye contact and small talk with our neighbours, imagining new tomorrows together, could be one of our key tasks as climate writers.
"California Wildfires" (CC BY 2.0) by Justobreathe