This chapter explores the prominence of the arts and their cognate vocations in near-future fiction, and how they act as a way of scaling up the domestic near future to appease the spatial demands of planetary ecological emergency. In Arcadia by Lauren Groff (2013), art acts like myth and climate events in Chapters 1–2, shrinking climate change to the scale of the body. However, in The History of Bees by Maja Lunde (2015) and 10:04 by Ben Lerner (2015), the artwork models the social totality, though this entails both an authoritarian overwriting of individual identity and the desertion of narrative and history. Such a totality suggests Romantic theorisations of the symbol, situating the domestic near future in a literary history in which the symbol has been a compensatory device for a revolutionary history that has painfully faltered. Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017) both provides a glimpse of this revolutionary dynamic and an exemplary desertion of it, as it moves away from an opening centred on latent class solidarity and revolution to become a quest adventure to locate the domestic near future, vested in an artist and their parent–child relationship.

Rather than dwelling on routinely marked distinctions between realist and science fictional modes, this chapter identifies an emergent strand of writing about climate change that it calls ‘critical climate irrealism’. It builds on Michael Löwy’s ‘critical irrealism’ where the irreal – as in the fantastic, oneiric, or surrealistic – erupts within a predominantly realist text. ‘Critical irrealism’ describes fictions that do not follow realism’s ‘accurate representations of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. Critical irrealism is a notable feature of what World Literary Studies calls literature emerging from the ‘periphery’: territories that suffer from the violent extraction of labour and resources by the ‘core’ of the capitalist world system. This chapter argues that a comparable, and sometimes intersecting, process can be seen in contemporary fiction that uses the weird, the Gothic, the uncanny, and other modes of irrealism to engage with climate change. But it also suggests that climate change’s non-local effects and distorted temporalities complicate the core/periphery model. In bringing together ‘critical irrealism’ with a sense of ‘climate crisis’, ‘critical climate irrealism’ describes an important new trend, where the irreal negotiates radical environmental upheaval in a manner that realism’s recognisable individual experience cannot.