Australian novelist George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and Summer is one of the world’s first climate fiction novels, although James Edmond’s 1911 story, ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’, is a precursor to the genre. The early emergence of Australian climate fiction is not surprising given the country’s vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change. This chapter investigates the 35-year history of Australian climate fiction through an analysis of six novels, contemplating how environment, history and culture shape the use of genre, form and theme. It examines slow violence and flooding in The Sea and Summer; the intertwining of colonisation, environmental destruction and dispossession in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013); the use of the uncanny to explore the impact of ‘settlement’ in Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia (2018); the effect of a changing climate on generations in James Bradley’s Clade (2015); and the psychological ramifications of the 2019–20 bushfires, evident through motifs of missing bodies and an invisible menace in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Inga Simpson’s The Last Woman in the World (2021). These novels, which are shaped by their production in a country with a fragile environment and a history of colonisation, offer varying visions of hope and despair.

This chapter reads three examples of what is now frequently labelled climate fiction and argues that rather than addressing climate change in the manner commonly assumed by criticism, such works frequently wish to evade it. Clade by James Bradley (2015) draws on the domestic novel and therapeutic fiction, and their concern with the personal, pairing these with climate events to become an anaemic version of the nineteenth-century historical novel. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (2017) replaces climate events with myth so as to scale up the personal to the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. These genre combinations convert the punctum of apocalypse into something more durable and suggest a cultural structure of feeling chiefly concerned with a fantasy subjugation of climate change to a continuation of the affluent lifestyle of the Global North. A reading of All Rivers Run Free by Natasha Carthew (2018) confirms the link between climate events and myth as replacements for the planetary forces that are truly frightening to the domestic near future: history, and other people.

The introduction traces the emergence of new forms of the near future to the global financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing events, linked to an urgent awareness of coming and needed change in relation to global environmental crisis. It argues that by merging the Anthropocene with the broader contemporary field, the near future provides a better means of understanding how global warming makes its presence felt in fiction than does a focus on ‘climate fiction’ alone. Two major themes shape contemporary culture’s relationship to the Anthropocene: the prospect of radical change, and of a broad collective. A large number of works, explored through the first half of the book as the ‘domestic near future’, recoil from the prospect of such cooperation and such change. The second half reads a set of fictions which do try to imagine new kinds of collectivity, and radical change, though they frequently struggle to find a generic form adequate to the task. In these cases, the near future acts more like the emergent form that Raymond Williams hypothesised, underlining the link between the emergent near future as narrative genre, and the cultural shift to which such a genre might correspond.

Origin stories of the economics discipline give considerable credit not only to philosophy, but also to poetry. And many canonical economists have reputations for polymathy. But interdisciplinary economic inquiry, like that which has become increasingly common since 2008, is often treated as both novel and ill-fated, in part because contemporary orthodox economists lack the commitment to pluralism necessary for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. This chapter looks to a 2020 Climate Fiction (“CliFi”) novel, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, for models of interdisciplinary collaboration between economists, critical theorists, and climate scientists. In particular, Robinson centers an unlikely pair of Utopian thinkers – British economist John Maynard Keynes and American theorist Fredric Jameson – who at crucial junctures in their careers took seriously what is also the project of Robinson’s titular Ministry: treating future generations as a political constituency deserving of political representation in the present.

Critical questions about the relation between literature and climate are relevant both before and after the rise of environmentalism and today’s climate politics. How does literature write the encounter between biological bodies and climate? What trends in literary form and content do critics track when they study climate change? What concepts have they then created or rethought? To answer these questions, we need to look outside the contemporary moment and compare historical periods. This chapter looks at four topics: the ‘superorganism’, the climate theory of race, the concepts of ‘hyperobject’ and ‘trans-corporeality’, and the idea that literature can ‘model’ anthropogenic climates. The Anthropocene has certainly created new configurations of climate and embodiment coupled to changes in literary form, including what sort of narrative worlds seem real to their readers. But none of this is unprecedented. Present configurations of embodiment, climate, and form are still constrained by those of the past. Critics are only beginning to understand what they are, and how they change in historical time.

This introduction sets out the volume’s main contention that any analysis of climate and literature must not only deal with the many ways in which climate has been conceptualised but also frame those conceptualisations as a pre-history to climate emergency. It chronicles first the vexed genealogy of climate and literature, showing how this history proceeds unevenly through expectations around, variously, climate’s agency as a felt presence, its status as data or index, and its betokening of an impossibly complex global system. It thenconsiders the literary and literary-critical fields, arguing for the need to contextualise these both in the here and now of climate crisis and in the longer pre-history of climate concepts. It then introduces the chapters in this volume, which simultaneously look back on this terrain and forward into a fraught world. Ultimately, if the history of climate and literature is one of climate’s various conceptualisations as agency, index, and system, this introduction, like the volume as a whole, argues for the potential of literature to depict systems conversion – not merely the future potential for disastrous global environmental failure but rather the means to reinvent it.

Chapter 7 directs critical attention to contemporary narratives that are coalescing in popular technology discourses that imagine climate crisis as an occasion to expand on structures of capitalism. This narrative template – whose leitmotif is making rather than saving nature – turns away from what Ramachandra Guha termed “varieties of environmentalism” in celebrating technological acts of inventing, designing, and rebuilding biophysical worlds. It begins by addressing the parallel emergence of a high-tech planet and a planet in peril as divergent stories of global capitalism. It then examines two visions of remaking the planet: geoengineering and terraforming. These overlapping engineering arenas draw an expressly environmental portrait of innovation that imbues the tech industry with quasi-magical capacities that can be leveraged either to improve on or to transcend the Anthropocene. Offering a counterpoint to this techno-utopia, the chapter concludes with an analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), which satirizes the colonial logic of world-building fantasies while making the planet a charismatic character with a story of its own.

Climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a still-emerging but broad and diverse category of fiction that addresses the challenges of climate change and its impacts on human and nonhuman life, in the present and in the future, on Earth and in more fantastical settings. This chapter offers an inclusive definition of this increasingly urgent genre, aiming to capture what's currently being published and to suggest other possibilities available to future cli-fi writers. Additionally, it sets out to expand the history of the genre, drawing on the work of Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra before offering a taxonomy of cli-fi's various contemporary forms, with examples from literary fiction, hard and soft sci-fi, eco-fabulism, afrofuturism, solarpunk, indigenous futurism, uncivilized writing, and other related subgenres

As rising seas, spreading wildfires, and unbearable heat shrink the expanse of the habitable earth, the prospect of a contracting world resonates in particular and forceful ways within the American imaginary. Recent American climate fiction responds to the specter of a shrinking world by reprising narratives of the American frontier, simultaneously unsettling and reanimating elements of these stories. This chapter pays attention to stories of neo-agrarian settlements, depictions of internal displacements and migrations, and portrayals of corporate collapse in the wake of dwindling carbon economies. It argues that American climate fiction can run retrograde, reiterating the very seizures of land and political suppressions that underwrote the American frontier. However, the radical environmental changes envisioned in this genre also intensify ongoing struggles for racial and economic justice in the United States, opening the possibility of more equitable forms of relation. Although the climatic future is often depicted as a brave new world, an unknown terrain, climate narratives must acknowledge rather than subsume history: A changed world must not be mistaken for a wholly new one.

This chapter investigates the effect of climate change (along with the host of other anthropogenic effects on the planet that now fall under the rubric of the Anthropocene) on the concept of extinction, particularly, human extinction. Whereas previous concepts of human extinction - from religious apocalyptic to Darwinian evolutionary discourses - were capable of imagining extinction as an event of grandeur and promise of something greater, extinction in the Anthropocene is figured as a moment of profound and abject loss, namely, the loss not just of humans but of particular configuration of capitalist comfort and consumerism. This chapter examines the history of this now dominant perception of extinction, via Enlightenment, Romantic and modernist thought.

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.

This chapter discusses the relationship between nuclear literature and criticism on the one hand and climate fiction and criticism on the other. It demonstrates, first, a long-standing preoccupation in nuclear texts with weather and climate, suggesting that nuclear literature might usefully be considered a special subcategory of climate fiction. It then deals with a thriving - and relatively new - tradition of nuclear criticism and theory. It shows how, by opening up three key problematics (nuclear geographies, nuclear temporalities, and nuclear subjectivities), nuclear criticism brings into focus the interdependence of global and local, the significance of deep time, and how humans are produced by their interactions with technology and nature. This critical tradition can feed usefully into an understanding of climate fiction.

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.