The figure of the child has frequently been seen as central to discourses about the future; this chapter argues that its importance is trumped by the sensorially rich individual body. In Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015), the child introduces a temporality of change and is associated with collectives that can only appear as a threat. In The Rapture (2009) by Liz Jensen, climate events intensify embodiment, while the desolation of apocalypse finds its true aetiology in the compound spectre of parenthood and the public realm. Her (2014, dir. Spike Jonze) is oblivious to climate change but shaped by a valorisation of the human body ensconced in domestic comfort, as it is threatened by the spectre of the mass. In all three fictions, the turn to the body is the denial of a fundamental equality with an Other both within and without the state. The chapter closes by showing how John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) passes from a nationalist dystopia to the germ of a utopian collective in which the legacies of colonialism are finally overcome, to an isolation buoyed by material comfort, in a manner that updates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for the Anthropocene.

Focusing on Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel Gold Fame Citrus (2015), this chapter explores the dialogue between speculative climate change fiction and ecocriticism. Watkins’s narrative itineraries emplot some well-trodden themes, settings, and motifs of climate change fiction that have to some extent characterized the Anthropocene and the literary genre itself: desertification and extreme weather, toxic landscapes, uncontrollable environments, socio-economic and ecological collapse, the disposability of life, the prospect of extinction, and an imperiled future, all of which have been well theorized in ecocritical discourses. This chapter argues that the novel’s narration of climate change and the Anthropocene reads as theoretically informed, and, as such, anticipates (indeed provokes) its own paradigmatic theorization. What might be provoked in particular by navigating this generic terrain are theories of “reproductive futurism,” nonhuman agency, and scalarity, and, along with them, the opportunity to reflect critically on the limits and possibilities of the theory of climate change fiction, thereby revealing Watkins’s work as a form of meta-critical fiction. What emerges from this novelistic self-reflexivity are ecocritical complicities in the Anthropocene’s reification and histories of environmentally mediated violence and injustice, and the anthropogenesis of environmental catastrophe, otherwise screened by theory.