On climate fiction, or clifi:

Perhaps the underlying message is that you’re supposed to entertain the reader, but more and more, I greet the question with a weary smile-grimace that reveals the skull of me that’s likely to be buried in the ground sometime in the next twenty to thirty years. The search for hope is hopeless or beside the point. Fiction can’t save us in this particular way, although it can pretend to, but if in a book a heroine survives climate crisis, this has no corresponding nexus or loci in the real world, no matter how strong the will of the reader that it be otherwise. [i]

This is one of the foremost anglophone clifi authors working today, whose work is both consistently influenced by climate crisis and who has achieved a pinnacle of literary fame, Jeff Vandermeer. As a fan of his work, I was extremely excited to read this polemic of his, published just over two years ago in Esquire. In it he traces the lineage of the term clifi and sketches its relationship to speculative fiction, expresses his thoughts and opinions on his own works and other key clifi texts of the past half century, and he critiques Amitav Ghosh, so he really doesn’t leave much to ask for.

         As a scholar who works on econarratology and science fiction in particular, my attention was captured by Vandermeer’s auteurist perspective on this issue in literature, in genre fiction, in the publishing industry, and ultimately in terms of policy and lifestyle. Econarratology and unnatural narratology have offered some really interesting thoughts on how people engage with narratives, from the cultural, the material, to the cognitive turn from the work of Erin James on Postcolonial Econarratology to Jan Alber on unnartual narratology. And while various genres have their theorists and practitioners, it is those of us working in and around clifi that feel a mounting pressure to make the stories do something. Nobody that works on detective fiction is expected to prevent murders.

         But as Vandermeer points out, stories don’t work that way. So here I want to offer some remarks on climate narrative more generally that pushes against the archaic idealism of calls for clifi to provide a solution for the technical issues that surround us in the form hope.

         I offer that a self-consciously fictional genre cannot provide a framework for change. This is because there are all sorts of narratives that work in various ways to influence power structures, politics, and policy, and clifi must be multiply mediated through various metadiscourses to access these power structures, to become political and turn into policy. This transformation relies on methods of narrative dissemination and various registers of affective engagement. Clifi can, over time, provide a conduit for transforming empirical circumstances to artistic representations and finally to ideology, something that can provide a framework of common sense that can interface with the political and economic institutions that can actually avert climate disaster. Maybe.

         Here I identify four types of climate narrative:

         I want to begin with what most people likely think of when they think of clifi, especially in its speculative mode, that is, the dystopia, or as I prefer to think about it, the failed utopia. My example here is the TV series based on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Obviously, this hellscape is no utopia for June Osbourne, but it may be for the various commanders, their wives, and so on. The TV series makes more of the climate catastrophe that haunts Atwood’s novels as we see inside the colonies. Peter Hajdu also points out that “As a cautionary tale, the 1985 novel chiefly warned about the dangers of an ideological climate and a toxic environment metaphorically, but today both that novel and its sequels solicit readings that focus on the literal toxicity of the environment which, lacking a prompt reaction, can bring about answers rather similar to what Gilead did.” [ii]

         Another register of clifi that is neither utopian nor dystopian, so I refer to Vandermeer’s fiction as simply Topian, that is, the narrative takes place in a world where the climate presents challenges to characters through an uncanny flux in literary space and time, or chronotope as narratology might have it. His Southern Reach series revolves around Area X, a place of mystery and danger located in the Florida swamps that evokes the Zone of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s Stalker at the same time as it references the uncanniness and ambient danger of American wetlands.

         Another way of articulating climate catastrophe is through utopian literature proper, and here I want to offer Everything for Everyone, an Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. This book, from an indie press and written in the form of an oral history, adheres to the traditional Jamesonian formula for a utopia: essentially a how-to manual, according to Gabriel Burrow.[iii] The book is way outside the mainstream      With that, I want to transition to the fourth type of climate narrative I wish to investigate, the empirical. First, emergent climate narratives are those that arise from media discourse about climate events: storms, floods, and other catastrophes, but also the technological, legislative, and cultural developments around climate. While each piece of the puzzle is self-contained to some degree, emergent climate narratives cohere with one another to become grist for the mills of other narratives, including the three I list above. The other side of this empirical continuum is the institutional. These are narratives, real or imagined, that are adopted by governments, industries, NGOs, and cultural milieus. As an example, I present Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii’s work on Japanese narratives around CCS technology. The viability of CCS as a means of solving global warming caused by carbon emissions is famously dubious, and although there is strong evidence that Japan, in particular, is not employing CCS technology at anything near a rate that could positively impact climate, the official narrative in Japanese government and industry is one of techno optimisim and techno nationalism. These metadiscourses unite in the story of CCS’s potential to mitigate climate change with the fantasy of leaving the fossil fuel industry intact, uniting environmentalists and capitalists in the myth of a technological curative granted to a uniquely industrious people.[iv]

         This narrative is indispensable to these institutions precisely because the technology is not working – clifi that is doing some actual lifting. How this works is partially disclosed by Saskia Brill in their article A story of its own: creating singular gift commodities for voluntary carbon markets.[v] Here, Brill points out the peculiar economic form taken by Carbon Credits, which function all at once as commodities, singular items, and autonomous gifts. A crucial aspect of carbon credits is that, contrary to how the characteristic of the commodity form is its neutrality in regards to origin of the product, carbon credits rely upon a certain morality or ethical imperative to grant them value in the first place. It’s almost a rhetorical form of labor that the credits must have access to for their value to be valorized.

         To try and understand this process, the move from emergent to institutional climate narrative and the role in this move played by clifi as a self-consciously fictional genre, I want to stand clifi on its head a bit and disambiguate the metadiscourse of climate narrative writ large. As we’ve seen from Brill’s work on Carbon Credits, and as we see in many facets of the carbon capture economy that perpetuates a fiction – that market interventions can attenuate the worst excesses of fossil capitalism – the stories around these technologies, products, etc. are in some sense real fictions; carbon credits pretend to value in ways that are very similar to Marx’s own ideas of “fictitious capital,” that is, debt, in volume III of Capital.[vi]      

These more technical interpretations of Marx’s key texts coincide with some interesting philosophy that links materialism with the affective and political, and remember that according to Deleuze and Guattari, the arts create percepts and affects.[vii] Jason Read is one philosopher who uses pop culture to demonstrate the link between Marx and Spinoza to understand counterintuitive political phenomena. Read’s work fleshes out a theory of ideology that accounts for the often-self-destructive actions by individuals and institutions. One of Read’s favorite interlocutors, Yves Citton, makes a number of compelling contributions here in terms of the interface of the personal and political vis a vis desire, the importance of the attention economy to late capitalism, and the constitution of ideology through an assemblage of narratives that are at least heterogenous, and often contradictory in his work Mythocratie.[viii] This process of narrative bricolage is a general notion that guides more specific processes outlined above, particularly the case study of Japanese narratives around CCS technology, which harnesses the passions involved in techno optimism and nationalism in such a way as to subvert the obvious contradiction between the CCS’s reality and the institutional narrative of its potential to unfetter a mode of production that is fueled by oil and coal.

         To conclude, Jeff Vandermeer is correct when he claims that clifi cannot and will not save us. Far from a gesture of false humility in acknowledgement of his own centrality in the genre, Vandermeer is pointing to the constructed nature of the subgenre and its subtle and nuanced connections to our climate reality. As Citton points out, there is a metalepsis inherent to narrative that demands we situate ourselves inside and outside the narrative at once, and this metalepsis is all the more pronounced within the framework of self-conscious genre fiction and non-fictional narratives that nevertheless fail to correspond to reality. Emergent narratives about climate, employment, global markets, etc. assail us via social media, curated by predatory algorithms. This becomes the grist for the mill of cultural production, providing the foundations for – and limits to – the imaginary of clifi authors. And while hope itself can never solve a problem of this magnitude, over time narratives of many types are assimilated to ideological persuasions and even adopted by institutions, which can then become essential to legislation, market innovations, and similar interventions that have a chance at saving our skins.[ix]

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[i] “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us,” Esquire, April 19, 2023, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/.

[ii] Hajdu, 305.

[iii] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007); Gabriel Burrow, “The Low Bar: Crisis and Utopia in M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022),” n.d.

[iv] Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii, “Selling Stories of Techno-Optimism? The Role of Narratives on Discursive Construction of Carbon Capture and Storage in the Japanese Media,” Energy Research & Social Science 31 (September 2017): 50–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.010.

[v] Saskia Brill, “A Story of Its Own: Creating Singular Gift-Commodities for Voluntary Carbon Markets,” Journal of Cultural Economy 14, no. 3 (May 4, 2021): 332–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1864448.

[vi] Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes, and David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, V. 1: Penguin Classics (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981).

[vii] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, European Perspectives (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Pr, 1994).

[viii] Yves Citton, Mythocratie: storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2010).

[ix] “The Handmaid’s Tale,” SVOD, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2025 2017); M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022); Annihilation, SVOD, Science Fiction (Netflix, 2018); Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, First Edition, Southern Reach Trilogy 1 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).