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E-book The American Climate Emergency Narrative : Origins, Developments and Imaginary Futures

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Penilaian

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In Annihilation (2014a), the first novel of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, a territory known as Area X has been sealed off by a secret, military organization called Central. They have set up a military research station, the eponymous Southern Reach, and from this vantage, they are trying to both contain and explore an increasingly unpredictable and dangerous territory. Plants and animals behave in strange ways, the landscape is inconstant and impossible to map, and the humans who enter it soon begin to exhibit weird and erratic behaviour. Annihilation follows a biologist who is part of one of these expeditions. She soon finds herself under threat both from entities within Area X and from other members of the expedition, even as she is turned into something prob-ably not quite human. Authority (2014b), the second instalment to the trilogy, tells the story of John ‘Control’ Rodriguez, a newly appointed director of the Southern Reach facility. He is from a family that has, for a long time, helped run the clandestine operations of Central, but his attempts to manage the station, and to understand and contain Area X, are fraught with failure. Area X resists all military and scientific strategies, it is expanding beyond the geographical, ecological, human, and civiliza-tional borders guarded by the station. In this future, the natural world is out of control. Miranda Iossifidis and Lisa Garforth (2022) are two of many scholars who have read Annihilation as ‘climate fiction’, because ‘the uncanny atmospheres brought to life by the text, and the affective responses of some of its readers, create new ways of imagining climate futures’ (p. 248). According to standard ecocritical scholarship, climate fiction is a new literary genre primarily involved in the description of the dark futures that will ensue if nothing is done about climate change. As argued by Imogen Malpas (2021), ‘climate fiction provides us with the beginnings of the roadmap we so sorely need to achieve a global society that is both abundant and sustainable’ (np). Climate fiction is supposed to be able to provide such roadmaps partly because it is based on existing climate science. In the words of Gregers Andersen (2020), climate fiction depicts ‘worlds resembling those forecast by the IPCC’ (p. 1), and, by doing so, they provide ‘speculative insights into how it might be to feel and under-stand in such worlds’ (p. 1). Borrowing a concept launched by geologists (who get to name climate events and epochs), climate fiction scholars sometimes also refer to the genre as Anthropocene fiction (Trexler 2015). The Anthropocene concept here identifies the human as the entity that has produced the event typically referred to as the climate crisis. Thus, climate fiction is typically read and studied as a genre that takes people into futures predicted by climate science, where human activity has caused extensive flooding, parching drought, and terrible storms, and where conditions for human life have been drastically altered.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

801 HOG t

Penerbit

Switzerland : Springer Nature., 2024

Deskripsi Fisik

227 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783031606458

Klasifikasi

801

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Philosophy and Theory of Literatures

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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