Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 2016,
Vol. 36(1) 28–37
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0270467615622845 bst.sagepub.com Article
Climate Change Imaginaries? Examining Expectation Narratives in Cli-Fi Novels
by Andrea Whiteley , Angie Chiang and Edna Einsiedel
Andrea Whiteley is a PhD candidate and researcher in the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on access to knowledge and the public good. Whiteley is in the Department of Communication, Media and Film, Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. N.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. Email: amwhitel@ucalgary.ca
Angie Chiang is a PhD candidate and sessional instructor in the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Additionally, she is a freelancer working for various industries in film, television, and interactive in communications and marketing.
Edna Einsiedel is an emeritus professor in the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her extensive research career focused on technology assessment and the role of publics and stakeholders in public policy deliberations and decision-making in the areas of biotechnology, genomics and climate change.
Andrea Whiteley, Department of Communication, Media and Film, Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. N.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. Email: amwhitel@ucalgary.ca
Abstract
A new generation of climate fiction called ''Cli-fi'' has emerged in the last decade, marking the strong consensus that has emerged over climate change. Science fiction’s concept of cognitive estrangement that combines a rational imperative to understand while focusing on something different from our everyday world provides one linkage between climate fiction and science fiction.
5 novels representing this genre that has substantial connections with science fiction are analyzed, focusing on themes common across these books: their framing of the climate change problem, their representations of science and scientists, their portrayals of economic and environmental challenges, and their scenarios for addressing the climate challenge.
The analysis is framed through Taylor’s ideas of the social imaginary and the sociology of expectations, which proposes that expectations are promissory, deterministic, and performative. The novels illustrate in varying ways the problems attending the science-society relationship, the economic imperatives that have driven the characters’ choices, and the contradictory impulses that define our connections with nature.
Such representations provide a picture of the challenges that need to be understood, but scenarios that offer possibilities for change are not as fully developed. This suggests that these books may represent a given moment in the longer trajectory of climate fiction while offering the initial building blocks to reconsider our ways of living so that new expectations and imaginaries can be debated and reconceived.
Keywords: climate change, climate science fiction, sociology of expectations, social imaginary, science and publics
Over the past decade, a strong consensus has emerged over climate change posing risks that could end civilization as we know it (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). “Doomsday,” “Orwellian nightmare,” or “apocalypse” are no longer surprising descriptors for this impending calamity that some suggest has already begun (see Abrams, 2015; McIntosh, 2010; Skrimshire, 2010).
Not surprisingly, astrong cultural response in the form of climate fiction or “clifi”has developed.
While primarily motivated by our current climate crisis, such writing also has its roots in ancient myths and parables such as Christianity’s story of the Flood in the book of Genesis, as well as in science and speculative fiction from the past century inspired by nuclear holocaust (Brians 1987, Dowling 1986) acid rain and holes in the ozone (Gold, 2001; Trexler, 2015).
''Climate fiction'' aka cli-fi (hereafter called CF) is particularly interesting because it is a cultural response to mostly scientific and policy discourses that offers a way of exploring dramatic social change through the perspectives of individual and social group experiences by way of fictional narrative.
The connection between CF and science fiction (SF) can be understood using Suvin’s (1979a) concept of SF as “cognitive estrangement,” combining a rational imperative to understand and focusing on something different from our everyday world.
His distinction between SF and fantasy (Suvin, 1979b) allows our consideration of climate change as both lived experience and otherworldly, a projection of a credible future. This connection is sometimes very strong where the SF elements are obvious, or weaker because the narrative is closer to the present, plausible and somewhat familiar.
We analyze 5 CF novels that were written in the last decade and noted as exemplary of the genre in various articles on CF in the popular press:
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood, 2004),
Memory of Water (Emmi Itaranta, 2014),
Solar (Ian McEwan, 2010),
Flight Behavior (Barbara Kingsolver, 2012),
Odds Against Tomorrow (Nathaniel Rich, 2013).
We were interested in a diverse representation in terms of authors, examining books from both male and female authors, and who represented different regions (Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Finland).
Our analysis takes a sociological, cultural, and communications approach rather than literary to the study of CF, answering Trexler and Johns-Putra’s (2011) call for a “new literary and critical climate” to study CF that goes beyond the single-work analysis common in literary criticism or the focus on place in ecocriticism, recognizing the strengths of different approaches (p. 197).
A significant literature has already explored the works of Margaret Atwood, including Oryx and Crake (see, e.g., Bergthaller, 2010; Glass, 2013; Howells, 2006), and some recent attention has also analyzed Ian McEwan’s body of work (Groes, 2008) as well as that of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels (Wagner-Martin, 2014).
Trexler’s (2015) recently published extensive examination of CF includes commentary on Oryx and Crake, Solar, and Flight Behavior, among many other selections. Further to our analysis, we read these novels in light of the sociology of expectations literature (Brown, 2003; Borup, Brown, Konrad, & Van Lente, 2006; Quet, 2014; Selin, 2007; Tutton, 2011), with its theoretical roots in the notion of the social imaginary (Taylor, 2002, 2004), and the understanding of climate change as a “wicked problem” that defies easy solutions (Rittel & Webber, 1973).
On a broader level, the intersections of climate change fiction and SF build on the latter’s interests in the apocalyptic and themes of the utopic/ dystopic (Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011; Trexler, 2015) and the understanding of the world through change, sometimes constructed as the dark side of progress (Landon, 2014). Our aim is to explore how climate change is framed in these novels, investigate the themes that provide templates for describing climate change as lived experience, and identify and understand the expectations that might underlie scripts of the future.
Climate Fiction and Science Fiction
Authors, literary critics, and readers alike sometimes struggle to classify literature according to genre categories. One of our authors, Margaret Atwood, has resisted the classification of her work as SF, preferring the label speculative fiction (Atwood, 2005, 2011), while other SF writers call her one of their own (see Le Guin, 2009). Dan Bloom (2013), a blogger and climate change activist, coined the term “cli-fi” in 2007, although climate change has centrally featured in various literary and cinematic forms in over two decades (see Trexler, 2015; Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011). Recently, the term “cli-fi” has been adopted by the popular press, and stories about this burgeoning genre began appearing in various media outlets, such as The Guardian (McFarlane, 2005), The New York Times (Kormann, 2013; Bloom, 2014; Cullen, 2014; Heigeartaigh, 2014; Marshall, 2014; Telotte, 2014; Thomas, 2014) Popular Science (Gertz, 2014), and National Public Radio (Angela Evancie, 2013).
In the summer of 2014, Dan Bloom lobbied the The New York Times ''ROOM FOR DEBATE'' forum section online online and asked the editors to create a discussion page in its online opinion section asking the question “Will fiction influence how we react to climate change?”, inviting Bloom and published authors and climate change activists alike to comment and debate.
Some saw the works as a catalyst to reflect our anxieties about climate change (Telotte, 2014), while others saw fiction as a way to make the issue more palatable to the general public in order to motivate them to take action (Cullen, 2014).
As part of a marketing campaign for a CF novel, Bloom (2013) initially identified cli-fi as a ''subgenre'' of SF, but merely to please those in the science fiction community. For Bloom, Cli-Fi has always been, in his mind, a standalone, separate, independent genre.
Trexler and Johns-Putra (2011) maintain that while a variety of earlier novels on climate change starting in the 1960s could be considered SF, more recent CF falls into several genre categories, including thriller and literary fiction (see Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011).
The contours of SF have been a focus of many debates and commentaries that are beyond the scope of this article (see, e.g., Booker & Thomas, 2009; Canavan, 2014; James & Mendelsohn, 2003; Milner, 2012; Parrinder, 2000; Rieder, 2010; Thomas, 2013).
While there may be disagreement about the fiction family to which individual CF novels belong (see Atwood, 2013; Haq, 2013; Trexler, 2015; Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011), there are important connections between CF and SF that allow us to discuss the former within the SF domain. We start from the understanding that the boundaries of SF are “historical and mutable” (Rieder, 2010, p. 22) and “continuously reinvented” (Milner, 2012, p. 39; see also Mendelsohn, 2003).
At the same time, SF has features that make it better positioned to explore the political, scientific, and cultural dimensions of climate change (Tuhus-Dubrow 2013; Trexler & Johns-Putra, 2011).
CF’s connections with SF are amplified through the latter’s ability to portray futures at planetary scales (Johns-Putra, 2010) and make connections between global threats and individual lives, a pointed weakness in the environmental movement (Clark, 2015).
SF’s trajectory has also focused greater attention on the “what-if,” echoing Suvin’s novum or thought experiment, a way of imagining the world that unites speculative and SF (Csicsery-Ronay, 2008) and a potential bridge to considering imaginative ways of how we “adapt” or “mitigate” beyond the confines of policy and scientific thinking.
In our CF sample, some novels work in the near present, with climate change disaster as imminent if not already here (Flight Behavior, Odds Against Tomorrow, Solar); whereas others are set further in the future where estrangement is greater (Oryx and Crake, Memory of Water).
Oryx and Crake, mentioned on the GoodReads (n.d.-a, n.d.-b) website as the number one cli-fi novel, uses climate change as backdrop to the chronicle of an apocalypse, told through the story of the last living human, Jimmy, nicknamed Snowman.
It is set in a not too distant future where powerful biotechnology companies control almost everything, the environment is critically out of balance, and the disparity between rich and poor is strictly maintained.
His relationship with Crake, a brilliant but mad scientist, implicates him in Crake’s plan to replace humans with an improved humanoid race Jimmy calls “the Crakers.”
Jimmy is left with the task of protecting the new species and creating a new mythology to answer their existential questions.
Also taking place in a postapocalyptic, SF backdrop, Memory of Water (Itaranta, 2014) focuses on a water-parched earth set in a distant future without oil, where climate change has melted the ice caps, but humanity has survived and mostly adapted. The story follows Noria, a young girl about to take over her father’s role as Tea Master in a small village, as
well as the guardianship of a secret and illegal fresh water spring.
When the secret gets out, Noria’s life is endangered but so is the power of the military to maintain its control of fresh water. In contrast, Solar (McEwan, 2010) is firmly set in the familiar present and follows Nobel Prize winning physicist Michael Beard, a professor with gluttonous appetites whose scientific accomplishments are long past and whose personal life is also a failure. Beard steals the ideas of his postdoctoral student after the student accidentally dies, to create an energy source that mimics photosynthesis.
The satirical portrayal of Beard provides for some humorous scenes about how people react to climate change, cultural aspects of the scientific community, and the difficulties of engaging in global issues amidst his personal turmoil. Beard’s complicated personal life contributes to the failure of his brilliant solar energy project.
The scientist as dangerous, insane, or obsessive has frequently featured in SF as well (Luokkala, 2014). Also set in the near present, Flight Behavior (Kingsolver, 2012) focuses closely on the interconnections among domestic life disturbances, religion, environmentalism, and the contradictions within scientific practices and values through the life of Dellarobia Turnbow, a young mother with a high school education. The thought experiment here centers on her small Appalachian community becoming the site of the miraculous arrival of colonies of monarch butterflies far from their wintering region in Mexico.
Ovid Byron, a scientist, and his team, arrive to study the monarchs and their population’s response to an unpredictable climate. Woven through the novel’s storyline are the tensions between public expectations about science and the scientific community’s norms as well as the contradictions from class differences embedded within environmentalism. Finally, Odds Against Tomorrow chronicles futurist and peerless statistician Mitchell Zukor who is obsessed with calculating risk. When a devastating earthquake rocks Seattle, resulting in thousands of deaths and even more lawsuits, the young Zukor is drawn to working for a company that insures businesses against disaster and is pulled deeper into a miserable existence of paranoia and fear.
After a period of severe drought, New York also experiences its own calamity, a massive flood, which turns Zukor into a prophet in the media because he had advised several of his clients of the coming devastation. As he is caught in the flood, he faces the choice of returning to the business of ensuring against the disasters that climate change will bring or changing his perspective for his own survival.
The projection of CF as a “new” genre (or subgenre of SF) may be indicative of the urgencies of the climate change issue in the last decade and a half despite CF’s longer historical trajectory. Such labeling is also reflective of the naming of SF— and, by extension, CF—as a joint enterprise among writers, readers, journalists, and marketers, suggesting that “attribution of the identity of SF to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception” (Rieder, 2010, p. 200). Climate Fiction and the Sociology of Expectations We frame our closer reading of these novels through the sociology of expectations literature that proposes that imaginings or expectations are both generative and performative. That is, they guide actions, invite legitimation, reshape roles, and offer new directions for behavior (Borup et al., 2006). Using this approach, we explore how expectations are reflected in the cultural diffusion of climate change science and the politics that surround this highly complex problem.
Some pronouncements about the CF genre have promoted the idea that such works, rather than simplistically “educating” the public, try to represent our deepest cultural fears (Telotte, 2014) or reinforce the views of the skeptics (Marshall, 2014), while others claim they change minds (Cullen, 2014). “Sci-fi is all about expectations and perspective shifts” (Stableford, 1987, pp. 72-73), and such expectations are open to further investigation through these novels. This can occur in the context of climate change represented as “an idea of the imagination” (Hulme, 2009, p. 340).
The idea of climate change has different meanings and implications that are in the process of taking hold, becoming a catalyst for rethinking the status quo, and pushing us to construct new imagined worlds. The extrapolation and expansion of ideas about this world-changing problem are arenas for analysis. Studies drawing on the sociology of expectations have primarily focused on new and emerging technologies, and their accompanying discourses typically project imagined futures (Selin, 2007).
From biotechnology (Brown, 2003) to nanotechnology (Selin, 2007), biopharmaceuticals (Hedgecoe & Martin, 2003) to stem cells and xenotransplantation (Brown & Michael, 2003), the anticipation of technological futures has been couched in rhetorics of expectation that rest on the power of science and its various technological fruits to produce material futures (Selin, 2007). Such expectation studies have demonstrated the role of “fictions” in shaping actions by key players in the development of new technologies and in elucidating the twists and turns of various technological developments, from the trajectories of research support to the side roads of niche technologies.
Taylor’s (2002) notion of the social imaginary provides a useful starting point for understanding how the sociology of expectations might be relevant to climate change. This involves the ways in which people imagine their collective social life, “how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (p. 106).
Such social imaginaries go beyond Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1994) or the individual’s mental frame that incorporates his mental schemes, sensibilities, tastes, and dispositions. While existing social orders might have originated in explicit doctrines or theories about why things are the way they are, new theories might evolve and take hold of a social imaginary in
processes that are slow and complex (Taylor, 2002, p. 106), allowing for change to evolve. As Taylor explains,
What exactly is involved when a theory penetrates and transforms the social imaginary? For the most part, people take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices. These practices are made sense of by the new outlook, the one first articulated in the theory; this outlook is the context that gives sense to the practices.
And hence the new understanding comes to be accessible to the participants in a way it wasn’t before. (p. 111) Are “new theories” represented in CF? Jasanoff (2010) has suggested that the crisis of climate change requires a complex social imagination requiring the problematizing of human experience on four levels, including the communal, political, spatial, and temporal.
This multivalent need provides for rich fictional possibilities for the CF genre, providing an opportunity to explore “the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature” (Jasanoff, 2010, p. 233). Expectations are promissory, pointing to ideal or model futures to come (Brown & Kraft, 2006). They may also be promissory of disaster, striking a theme resonant in SF novels focused on various calamities, from plagues to comets striking earth to nuclear catastrophes. In the context of climate change (and other dire scenarios), apocalyptic scenarios may still offer negative but plausible possibilities that may motivate change, enlist activism, or instill fear in a skeptical public. On the other hand, O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole (2009) suggest that negative expectations in the form of apocalyptic scenarios may not necessarily function to positively engage the public in climate change issues or activism.
While this study might be better grounded in studies of negative expectations, far fewer studies have been carried out based on such a framework (see Quet, 2014; Tutton, 2011). These studies have emphasized the dark side of predictions, exploring, for example, the stated limitations and potential pitfalls of strategic investment plans for new technologies (Tutton, 2011) or examining the negative possibilities of the new genetics (Quet, 2014). Expectations can also be deterministic—in holding up a preferred future, they at the same time, dismiss other alternative visions.
The problem of climate change is built on a foundation of expectations for the future. “Expectations are . . . obligatory and open up the potential for present-day promises to be held to future account” (Borup et al., 2006, p. 7). Rather than accentuating the positive to generate goodwill and high hopes for promising (technological) futures; highlighting the climate change problem relies on sketching dark futures, generating blame, or mandating sweeping changes. Finally, expectations are performative (Brown, 2003; Eames, McDowall, Hodson, & Marvin, 2006), persuading audiences to particular beliefs or actions—or dissuading them from specific paths or practices. Studies of hype that accompany new technologies “tells the audience what the situation is, how they should feel in relation to the situation, and what they should do” (Guice, 1999, p. 81). This could be salutary or potentially problematic for CF where readers might avoid these dystopic stories or reject solutions for their difficulties or irrelevance.
Climate Fiction, Wicked Problems, and Complexity
Climate fiction goes beyond simplistic expectations because it does not merely address climate change but investigates potential and complex human reactions under situations of stress and change. The novels in our analysis present a broad diversity in character, plot, and setting. The complexities are demonstrable in the representations of the changing climate, the framing of science and scientists, the economic underpinnings, and the environmental dimensions and themes that we found were common in these books which we explore further.
A fifth theme was also worth examining: What solutions or approaches were featured that were designed to address the problem? Climate Change Scenarios Simply put, in these novels, climate change is about change. The five novels set the problem of climate change in different ways. In some, climate change is a lived reality; in others, it serves as backdrop to the excesses of a highly technologized society. The characters also have different levels of understanding or beliefs about climate change, not unlike the landscape of opinions among different social groups.
In Flight Behavior and Odds Against Tomorrow, the characters are caught up in strange and catastrophic events, but they do not all understand or believe that climate change is the cause. Characters in Memory of Water live with the consequences of climate change as they navigate through the severe social stresses of a world with limited water and oversight by a military power. Oryx and Crake presents a world that is helplessly ravaged by the climate, but the government is too corrupt to care.
The novelists also construct climate change through characters who exhibit varying degrees of skepticism about or engagement with the issue. The sense of uncertainty and discord regarding climate change is found in most of our novels. Kingsolver poses these “discordant conversations” most directly in the exchanges between Dellarobia Turnbow and Ovid Byron, or between them and others in the community. In a confrontation with a reporter who is trying to push the story that the scientific community disagrees about climate change, Byron pointedly clarifies: What sci
The glaciers that keep Asia’s watersheds in business are going right away. . . . The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, the canary is dead. (p. 367) In Memory of Water, where climate change has happened in the past, doubts about its causes remain because “a lot of knowledge was lost during the Twilight Century, and there are those who think that people changed the world, unintentionally or on purpose” (p. 78). This observation suggests a deeper dual cultural crisis reflected in a destitute sense of history as well as possibilities for the future.
The “discord” on climate change in Solar is found within the protagonist. Beard, the flawed scientist, reflects the conflicting imperatives of the idealist desiring a climate change solution and the realist, driven by materialist interests and concerns, highlighting that anthropogenic climate change is, at the core, a consequence of human fallibility. McEwan writes, “Beard . . . knew that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbed energy in the infrared range, and that humanity was putting these molecules into the atmosphere in significant quantities” (p. 34). This reductive picture of climate change reflects the frequent framing of climate change in the cold impersonal vocabulary of science and further provides the psychological distance required to allow Beard’s marketdriven impulses and overconsumptive predilections to rule, a sardonic reflection of human inclinations.
Oryx and Crake turns the deep sense of loss from climate change into something humorous if not cynical, when seen through the eyes of younger generations who are told about catastrophic fires, loss of arable land, and food supplies. As Jimmy tells the story, “everyone’s parents moaned on about stuff like that.” (p. 63) Framing Science and Scientists Science fiction often interrogates unforeseeable consequences of scientific and technological innovation and the central role of scientists (see Broderick, 1995). In the books we examined, the novelists do make a pedagogical inquiry into the science and the role of scientists in the climate change debate, exploring the actions of scientists and the varied public perceptions of the scientific community. Flight Behavior scrutinizes cultural responses to climate change as well as responses from the scientific community through conversations between Turnbow, the high-school educated young mother, and Ovid Byron, the Harvard-educated senior entomologist. Byron is the traditional stereotypical scientist who shuns the limelight and takes refuge in his lab. He avoids public engagement with the issue because “having a popular audience can get us pegged as second-rank scholars” (p. 324). He is adamant that “Science doesn’t tell us what to do. It only tells us what is” (p. 320). However, this core belief runs aground against the very recognizable looming catastrophe that he already knows well and has also despaired about.
This complicated scientific imaginary echoes Taylor’s (2002) portrait of the social imaginary: “This understanding is both factual and ‘normative’; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go” (p. 106). Odds Against Tomorrow portrays a statistician with a strong belief in the calculability of risks and acting on mathematical odds. This feature of our “risk society” in late modernity so aptly drawn by Ulrich Beck (1992) portrays a globalized economy built on scientific and technical knowledge, where political structures and policies are similarly an outgrowth of the ever-expanding need for calculability and control.
A strong faith in technology to address environmental problems also underlines Beard’s world in Solar. Despite his misgivings about its shortcomings, he tries to convince bureaucrats and investors of the necessity of his photosynthesis-based solar technology and jets around the world to speak on climate change while promoting his financial ventures. In Atwood’s fiction, scientists attempt to redesign a natural environment devastated by climate change with further disastrous results. Scientists have mastered genetic engineering, and they justify their research by claiming its necessity for everyone while masking the financial gains to be realized. Oryx and Crake has been called a “morality tale” and Atwood wrote it with the question in mind, “what if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope?” (2005, p. 330). Economic Imperatives The novels also explore different aspects of how economic concerns regarding the effects of climate change, investments in research and technology, and materialist attitudes intersect with the possible solutions for imagined futures.
Hulme (2009) points out that another reason we disagree about climate change is because we ascribe value differently (p. 112). The characters are all caught within the boundaries of an economic system that structures their reactions to climate change. The choices between private gain or collective benefit are given some attention in the novels. In Flight Behavior, the Turnbows are divided as a family on whether to sell the property where the monarchs are wintering to a logging company. Michael Beard’s choice to develop solar energy technology featured in Solar is not necessarily “for the sake of the planet” but for his own self-aggrandizement (p. 391).
By contrast, in Odds Against Tomorrow, the protagonist Zukor is initially perfectly poised to “bank on disaster,” relying on predictions of worst-case scenarios to calculate the costs of future calamities—for those with the means to escape them. This is a clear echo of Klein’s (2007) portrait of “disaster capitalism” at work, where the wealthy are able to buy their safety, and the structures of assistance require making money to help the poor.
Memory of Water portrays a system controlled by the military, and wealth is measured by access to water. Noria’s family’s secret spring allows them to trade for goods, run a business, and even take more frequent showers. The social conflicts that arise from water rationing occur within families, between friends, among neighbors, and between the community and its military governors. Even in this futuristic portrayal of society, individual greed and grasping after the good life is still at the root of the system.
Oryx and Crake presents the most critical view of capitalism, where the author uses negative expectations to envision a society on the brink of collapse. Corporations that specialize in offering aspects of the good life for the few who can afford it control what research takes place, and science is harnessed to support the logic of accumulation. Money determines whether you are able to escape or survive the effects of climate change. Atwood’s book imagines such power shifts, expecting the negative results of the moral slippery slope rather than the positive ones presented by economic forecasts. Manufacturing Nature The crafting of the novels examined go beyond common expectations about climate change as they do not fall neatly into the ecology box, showing instead the complexities of being “green.”
These novels are not manuals for environmentalists nor do they blithely promote the environmental cause. The novels do not necessarily take the earnestness of the environmental movement seriously, and there is a selfconscious awareness of the extreme dedication required to live sustainably and the frequent contradictions that emerge. In a humorous scene from Flight Behavior, an environmental crusader travels the United States trying to convince people to make good environmental choices like “eating out less” and “using air travel only when necessary.” When pressed to sign his petition, Dellarobia points out that she does not need to sign because her low-income status means she already makes a small environmental footprint, never having been on a plane and very rarely eating out. Memory of Water’s scenarios of the conflicts waged over water, while set as dystopic future, are today already playing out in drought-ravaged California. Noria, the tea master’s daughter, is confronted with the dilemma of their secret water supply while seeing the challenges of deprivation in her best friend’s family.
The divergent reactions to the different calamities by its protagonists indicate the complexities of knowing what to do in the face of disaster. Sometimes, the response is too much work for some. This is reflected in a scene from Solar when Beard’s girlfriend tells him that to take climate change seriously, she “would have to think about it all the time,” and this was simply not possible (p. 470). There are different portrayals of our conflicted relationship with nature. In one, nature is commoditized, with water serving as currency (Memory of Water). It is also an economic good when trees are either timber fodder or potential tourist attraction with their masses of butterflies rather than ecological animal sanctuary (Flight Behavior). At the same time, nature has also served as important signifier of place and a source for marvel and inspiration in these novels—the butterflies are “a miracle of unearthly beauty . . . like the inside of joy” (Kingsolver, 89). Alternative Futures? The possibility of finding solutions to the problems posed by climate change is something that readers might take for granted when picking up a CF novel. The authors provide different scenarios for considering the climate change problem that reflect on human and institutional limitations. Flight Behavior offers the scientific lens for illuminating the interconnections gone awry between humans and nature.
An openness to new ideas—symbolized by Turnbow’s decision to return to school and her son’s new-found fascination with learning from having assisted the scientist’s team in their field work might provide one avenue. At the same time, Turnbow has “educated” her scientist mentor about how science has to navigate more fully outside of the laboratory. The boundaries between science and publics are being effaced in these vignettes. Oryx and Crake, on the other hand, uses the dystopic failed environment resulting from run-away science, corporate greed, and consumer wants as signal warnings of our material appetites on the environment. Solar employs satire to highlight the moral failings that contribute to climate change. Only Memory of water offers a glimpse of one lived reality of the scientific and policy communities’ solutions captioned “adaptation” and “mitigation.” Adjer et al. (2009) discuss how adaptation to climate change is contingent on “ethics, knowledge, attitudes to risk, and culture” (p. 335). In Memory of Water, characters are forced to adapt because of militarized control of the scarce resource of water.
The community’s struggles to reconstruct itself are done without the help of lessons evoked from the past because of ambiguous artifacts and sparse records. This inability to learn from the past also features a parallel inability to construct a future. While cognizant of the shared destiny among community members, Noria is also conscious of the desire to look away:
That was what we did nowadays: tried to avert our gaze from the things that were happening, and failed, and then tried to live on as if we had not seen them. All the while, those things stayed with us, made their home under our skin. (p. 209) No sure recipes for survival offered. The deeper understandings of climate change are displayed through the portrayals of contradictions in the human makeup, the satirizing of unsatisfactory solutions, and the collective tendency to avert our gaze.
Situating the climate change problem within the social as the novels do can elucidate the complexities of the problem in ways far removed from temperature charts and other scientific ways of understanding climate change.
Climate scientists have defined climate change as a “wicked problem” in the sense that given its complexity, there can really be no simple “solution” to the problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Levin, Cashore, Bernstein, and Auld (2012) suggest, after several decades of policy deliberation, rephrasing climate change as a “super wicked problem” because time is running out; those who cause the problem also seek to provide a solution; the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent; and, partly as a result, policy responses discount the future irrationally. (p. 123, italics added) Do CF novels offer “new theories” to transform our social imaginaries and revise expectations? While new theories or clear solutions are not presented, what the novels do is outline the complexities of anticipating or living with climate change. They articulate the inconsistencies embedded in our hopes and desires, they make visible the complexities behind the broader circulation of scientific knowledge in society, and they portray the contradictions in expectations about technological solutions. Acknowledging the complexities of this super wicked problem is an important first step.
That there are multiple ways of knowing about climate change is reinforced in these novels, sometimes even through satire. For example, on Beard’s trip to the Arctic with a group of artists (Solar), he describes the absurdity of making penguin sculptures and sound recordings of the wind and questions their effect on the problem of climate change. Yet this concept of art being used to inspire change is self-reflexive of a novel that explores the limits of a single lens to view and understand this epic anthropogenic problem. While these authors do not offer pathways for change, they at least suggest the possibility of creating “new understanding” in the way that Taylor (2002) envisions. In one of his rare flashes of reflection, Beard’s speech to the World Energy Forum in Solar concludes eloquently, In a grave situation, a crisis, we understand, sometimes too late, that it is not in other people, or in the system, on in the nature of things that the problem lies, but in ourselves, our own follies and unexamined assumptions. (p. 325) Each of the novels addresses the imperfections in their characters sensitively and insightfully. The fallibility of the characters is balanced by their struggle to live up to their responsibilities and to be resilient in the face of dramatic change. Two of our protagonists, Oryx and Crake’s Jimmy and Solar’s Michael Beard are highly fallible, foolish, almost without scruples, self-centered, disrespectful of women, and unable to manage their personal relationships, let alone solve the problem of climate change.
Only in the last pages of the book does Beard dimly realize that he may have a reason to care about the planet when he admits he loves his young daughter, Catriona. His sense of protectiveness, while weak, is similar to Jimmy’s sense of responsibility toward the Crakers, the fledgling humanoid species. The flawed, selfmotivated characters, their poor choices, the occasional flashes of humanity, and humility offer the needed points of recognition that become part of the foundation readers can use to think about change. Conclusion Our analysis took the problem of climate change as a starting point, asking the question “how do CF novels construct climate change?” The novels examined the issues surrounding the experience of climate change and explored the potential collective experience of social upheaval in unique ways through individual lives and community experiences, painting the global climate challenges through palettes of the local and the personal.
Some make more use of the climate change trope than others. What unites all of them is the idea of “complexity”. None of the novels resolve their issues in any complete or satisfactory way. There are no happy endings, but survival continues. While the scientific and policy frameworks on the climate have been defined by their formal methods and rules to ensure an “organized subjectivity,” the diverse ways of confronting an issue in personal or community terms that are both complex and, in some cases, divisive are suggested in these CF novels, helping uncover the many meanings of climate change (Hulme, 2009).
The stories portray our current assumptions and beliefs about this global catastrophic problem and some of its attendant “clumsy solutions,” or the awkward ways of dealing with wicked problems (Hulme). CF as SF also provides an escape of sorts where alternate realities can be explored, allowing readers to become more aware of concepts or scenarios that they had not previously considered (Bainbridge, 1986). Keira Hambrick’s concept of “decoupling” in SF gives us insight: Because the cognitive process of decoupling is so active in the science fiction genre, this allows speculation to assume its full effect—enabling readers to experience an alternative reality and perhaps to thoughtfully consider scenarios that they would quickly dismiss if encountered in a nonfictional text. (Hambrick, 2012, p. 135) Considered in the context of CF, such speculation is “out of this world” only in the context of one’s lived reality being distant from disappearing polar icecaps, rising seawaters, or vanishing species. For some others on this planet, similar conditions are already a given; distances and speculation versus lived realities are all relative. In such contexts, the ideas around expectations that emerge are similarly contradictory and complex.
In contrast
to the sociological literature on expectations examining new technologies and often finding a common promotional chorus (or dissenting refrain), CF has a more diverse set of expectations on array. Different individuals and groups in the novels struggle with their conflicting beliefs and expectations about science and scientists. Rather than presenting clear ways forward, such conflicting expectations highlight stumbling blocks and dilemmas. There are discordant expectations scientists themselves experience as they navigate through conflicting demands for objectivity and the desire to see solutions undertaken.
On a societal level, just as science has raised expectations for the “good life” arising from the fruits of scientific labor, so have such outcomes also been blamed for the ills of modernity, what Plumwood (2002) has called “the double face of science” (p. 38) is also skillfully drawn in the CF novels. This “double face” is further represented in the conflicts between the economics of and material influences on knowledge production and public expectations for disinterested truth telling. Climate change has presented a confluence arena for a wider variety of expectations—from the scientific communities with their pronouncements on a dire planetary future to the policy communities offering competing solutions, and media arenas where differing representations and expectations are on array.
What the CF novels we examined have done is to go one step further, putting such conflicting expectations on full display, satirizing our human predicaments, representing science through a skeptical lens, and “narrating the essential political nature of being human” (Thomas, 2013, p. 185). The performative dimension of expectations in this context forces readers to grapple with such contradictions before avenues for solutions can be reconsidered. Climate change as cultural concept becomes a lived experience rather than a scientific projection, promissory of challenges rather than utopic solutions. The novels are adept at tracing human and institutional shortcomings, but scenarios that might provide some exemplars of the challenges (or opportunities) of living with climate change are not as accessible. Only one of these novels—Memory of Water—offers some intimation of what a future might be like for one community under a climatechanged world.
Oryx and Crake traces the dystopic postapocalyptic future of genetically engineered humanoids, a setting too distant from the challenges of living with the ravages of climate change that might allow consideration of different solutions. The other three novels are primarily proficient at tracing human flaws and institutional shortcomings. Such portrayals of risks, hurdles, or human weaknesses are important building blocks for imagined expectations of the future; they need to be complimented with avenues for imagining solutions. These CF novels may be illustrative of the present cultural moment in CF, a time when more realist scenarios of living under climate-changed contexts are not as frequently used, reflecting “a transition point,” “an evolving literary phenomenon” in the trajectory of CF (Trexler, 2015, p. 234). The situatedness of expectations, both temporal and spatial (Brown, 2003) also call for storylines reflecting other locales and cultures, whose experiences with climate change foreground different trajectories of this global problem. At the same time, these books speak to the function of popular culture through fiction as pedagogical, not only emulating the varied standpoints that exist in the surrounding society, but providing a forum for how they may also serve as a catalyst for reconsidering our ways of living and surviving so that new imaginaries can be debated and collectively reconceived.
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Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author Biographies
Andrea Whiteley is a PhD candidate and researcher in the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on access to knowledge and the public good.
Angie Chiang is a PhD candidate and sessional instructor in the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Additionally, she is a freelancer working for various industries in film, television, and interactive in communications and marketing.
Edna Einsiedel is an emeritus professor in the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her extensive research career focused on technology assessment and the role of publics and stakeholders in public policy deliberations and decision-making in the areas of biotechnology, genomics and climate change.