In the 2014 novel Annihilation, nature revolts against us. The first novel of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, considered a ‘climate fiction’, describes a mysterious territory known as Area X where nature, and the humans who enter it, change beyond recognition. The story describes the U.S. security institutions’ failed attempts to understand and contain the territory, the total collapse of modern civilisation and the survivors left to adapt to the radically altered natural world. Despite centring the story on the eerie ecological breakdown, Annihilation, like many other climate fictions, is oddly quiet about what initially brought the world to the brink of collapse. However, the absence of historical and political context in climate fictions such as this one is anything but negligible. The absence of fictional engagement with the origins of climate change is the result of a political discursive reality that refuses to acknowledge humanity’s role in causing our own climate disaster.
This essay engages the term ‘climate fiction’ as a broad category encompassing imaginary narratives expressed not only in literature but also films and television series. Climate fictions are not politics, but they are intricately connected with the political world. In the words of the constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt, ‘the structures of human association are determined primarily by shared ideas rather than material forces.’ In this sense, cultural fictions matter because ideas shape politics. But politics also shape ideas. Political reality creates narratives about the world we live in. It defines what is normal, what is dangerous and what is forgotten. In this sense, the particular issues addressed or omitted in climate fictions are also reflective of the political narratives of our era. There do exist important fictions that explicitly engage with the socio-economic origins of climate catastrophe, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. However, I am primarily intrigued by the exceptionally large body of climate fiction that refuses to offer an explanation for the apocalypse of focus.
In climate fiction, narration of the climate’s future matters as much as the meta-critical position of these narratives in political reality. The capacity for fictions to shape our understanding of the world, ourselves and our future gives climate fiction a deeply political calibre. Narratives matter because they inform us of our responsibilities and actions. But the specific focuses and omissions of fictions also inform us of the ubiquitous narratives we have already consumed. In this sense, climate fictions are not only warnings of impending ecological disaster; the prevailing absence of meaningful engagement with the source of the climate crisis in fiction mirrors the ingrained inadequacies in political recognition and action regarding the global climate crisis. As I observe this phenomenon, climate fictions struggle to talk about what is killing the planet because the answer is erased in the ongoing political discourse on how to address the climate crisis.
At first glance, fictions such as the Southern Reach trilogy penetrate the political imagination by constructing potential portraits of the climate future given human inaction. In the words of Gregers Anderson, this is the primary function of climate fiction: portraying ‘worlds resembling those forecast by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].’ In this sense, climate fictions have the capacity to confront readers with the uncomfortable imagery of a world in ruins and persuade them to do something about it. By creating an uncanny future where nature mutates like cancer cells, Annihilation joins the decidedly young genre of post-climate apocalypse media, including J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and films such as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) in fleshing out the consequences of humanity failing our climate responsibilities.
But can climate fictions truly call for action when they so often obscure the deeply human cause of climate change? Politics embeds itself into the meta-narrative of the fictional worlds. For many climate fictions, the story’s commitment to describing the macabre post-apocalyptic world is paired with narrational obscurity of what caused this ecological breakdown in the first place. In the Southern Reach trilogy, the cause of the ecological transformation of Area X is not fossil fuels, political muddling or any other such familiar anthropogenic cause. Instead, the origins of the biospheric crisis are relegated to an undefined extra-terrestrial event. George R. Stewart’s 1949 fiction Earth Abides and John Christopher’s 1956 novel The Death of Grass ascribe the end of the world to a conveniently mysterious virus that smothers both ecology and humanity. In Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, the end of the world comes in the form of a mysterious sound. In The Drowned World, the origin of the apocalypse is even more ironic; Ballad attributes the devastating global warming not to human action but to increased solar radiation.
But climate change is, undoubtedly, our fault. It has been our fault for quite some time. The particular narratives of climate fictions did not fall off an epistemological coconut tree; they exist in the context of all the political history now and all that came before them. Political discourse normalises realities, classifies issues and informs dialogues. How we talk about climate change inspires contemporary fiction as much as the fictional world inspires political discourse. It is difficult to disentangle the chicken from the egg, but the result remains. By evading the question of what got humanity into this socio-ecological crisis, climate fictions reflect the ongoing political narrative that struggles to confront the cause: our extractive political-economic order and its historical development.
Once we accept the deeply political nature of climate discourse — or its absence — we can turn our scrutiny toward our very political history. Climate change did not arise out of a sudden contemporary accumulation of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Instead, it is implicit as the latest chapter of our age-old obsession with transforming nature, land and people into commodifiable resources and employing violence to do so. This process is what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the capitalist world-system. Wallerstein suggests that the history of colonisation and, to a lesser extent, the neoliberal economic order, comprise an intentional human rearrangement of global socio-ecological functions by the world’s most powerful nations for economic gain and international competition. This process began with the onset of the colonial era, when the industrialised, expanding European empires redrew the world’s territories into peripheries, where resources and labour could be sourced cheaply, and the core, where these resources were commodified and their value accumulated. While Wallerstein focuses strictly on ‘capitalist’ and ‘colonial’ histories, a state need not ascribe to a certain ideological, racial or civilisational identity to partake in the extractive global economy. Since industrialisation, these architects started as the European colonial powers and have expanded over time to include the United States, Russia and non-Western powers such as Japan and China.
From an ecological perspective, the most significant component of the extractive global economy is the often-violent seizure of land, resources and labour. While the enclosure movement began in late mediaeval Britain, it was the great ‘discovery’ of America that truly spurred the forceful seizure of land, resources and the establishment of commodity peripheries. Monocrop plantations, ranches and mining fields quickly took root alongside settlements in the vast and fertile ‘New World.’ At the same time as the Indigenous population was decimated by illness or enslavement, the colonising powers replenished cheap labour in the New World’s fertile plantations with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This establishment of the extractive capitalist world system’s interminable pursuit of cheap natural resources at the expense of animal, plant and human lives marked the onset of both industrialisation and climate crisis. In this sense, climate history is ingrained in our obsessive need to dominate, transform and commodify nature and willingness to use violence to do so. Political philosopher Jarius Victor Grove argues that this geopolitical violence is indeed ‘an ecological principle of world-making that renders some forms of life principle and other forms of life useful or inconsequential.’
While the neoliberal order we live in today has largely abandoned colonial violence, it has not abandoned its extractive practices. The unabated extraction of fossil fuels that sustain the modern economy, the rampant destruction of the Amazon for cattle farming, and the unsustainable fishing practices that deplete the seas are only the modern renditions of our extractive political-economic history. But now, the impact of ecological destruction in the name of this extractive economy occurs at a scale unimaginable just a few centuries ago. The world’s largest banks, even after vocally committing to the Paris Agreement, continue to channel trillions to oil and gas giants. The United States remains the largest global producer of crude oil despite recognising the climate emergency since 2007. The astonishing number of fossil fuel lobbyists crowding the COP28 climate talks calls into question the capacity of international organisations to respond to the climate crisis. In this sense, the real culprit of contemporary ecological breakdown is not merely the epochal accumulation of greenhouse gases but the cycle of expansion, extraction and denial that constitutes the very political-economic basis of our civilisation.
But resources are running out, and so is humanity’s time on the planet if we do not change the way we order our civilisation. But our focus seems to be misplaced. Climate fictions all too often avert their gaze from the burning lands and disappearing animals: the principal victims of climate change. Instead, they are uniquely attentive to the threat of inter-human relations in the event of a climate crisis, focusing on resource wars, barbaric violence and survivalist betrayals rather than our brutalised environment. Using the words of Barry Buzan, Ole Weaver and Jaap de Wilde, this fictional focus on the inter-human relations in the face of climate catastrophe indicates a profound societal apprehension at ‘losing achieved levels of civilisation — a return to forms of societal barbarism — while apparently being able to prevent doing so.’ Despite the narratives’ supposed focus on ecological disaster, climate fictions seem unable to meaningfully understand our responsibility in causing the climate crisis.
Instead, climate catastrophes become a convenient backdrop for authors to narrate how Euro-American security states, and the people inhabiting them, survive the biospheric erosion. This fear of barbarism, war and terrorism assumed the focus. In David Ely’s 1992 novel A Journal of the Flood Year and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake from 2003, climate change is a mere background to explore the threat of techno-bureaucracy and authoritarian regimes as nation-states securitise in response to the hostile environment. The Last of Us, the 2023 drama series, makes irreversible climate warming the very culprit that induced the world-killing fungus, before forgetting about the climate catastrophe all together. The plot, however thrilling, becomes a hero’s journey against total anarchy, scheming antagonists and resource wars while he rebuilds the last semblance of his humanity in the form of an adopted daughter. This obscurity persists in the worlds of Mad Max and The Road. The vague allusion to a climate ‘extinction event’ that wiped out modern civilisation only serves to set the stage for resource wars, wasteland warriors and unbridled barbarism. The real story is a classically human one: a hero or a heroine’s journey to protect their loved ones from mad tyrants, warlords and cannibals. Reflections of our own guilt in causing the ecological collapse has no space in blockbuster climate fictions. What needs to be protected is not animals, land or the planet’s precarious ecological balance but an arbitrary sense of civilisation embodied by a small group of survivalists.
If this focus on human nature is all that climate fiction is, then it does not deserve its name. But works that engage with the origins of climate catastrophe do exist, though they sometimes make their presence felt by their absence. Barkskins, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, is a sprawling ecological drama centred on the fate of forests rather than people. The story recounts a bloody chronicle of deforestation, colonisation and international commerce by following two bloodlines of French logging colonists. Starting in the 17th century in the part of New France that became modern Canada, the book follows generations of colonists as they exploit and become exploited by the raging enterprises razing the land snatched from the Indigenous population. The cast of characters dizzyingly evolves as characters emerge and die; many are little more than names, and some are shown only for the way they die. The merciless disposability of every human in the story introduces us to the real protagonist: the forest, treasured by the book’s Indigenous people and ravaged by almost all its colonists. ‘[The forest] is the character’, Proulx recounts. ‘It’s the underpinning of life […] This is but one facet of larger things, like climate change and the melting of ice.’ Proulx’s unapologetic departure from our anthropocentric narratives offers us a rare look at the beginning of our self-induced climate apocalypse and a raw perspective on our role in climate change: ephemeral casts that destroy carelessly while justifying their destruction.
Other climate fictions engage with our culpability more subtly. Rumaan Alam, the author of Leave the World Behind, describes a conscious choice to omit fictional explanations for the world-ending sound to explicitly parallel the real-world silence in finding responsibilities for climate change. The goal, he explains, was to highlight the discomfort that comes from the absence of a political and ecological explanation of climate collapse. ‘We just want to be told what to do and when we aren’t, it is scary’, Alam says. ‘We’ve always needed to know.’ This fictional absence of an answer to the ecological apocalypse parallels the erasure of the real-world answer implicating our civilisational responsibility in political discourse.
In a 2018 interview with The Atlantic, VanderMeer recounts designing Area X not as a territory of hostility and terror but as a bubble of ‘protection’ against human contamination by freeing the landscape from the last vestiges of human creation. According to VanderMeer, the real-life inspiration behind the horrors of Annihilation was a human-created catastrophe: the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that wrecked the local ecology. Area X was meant to return nature to its pristine state free from human exploitation and extraction. The melancholic story of Annihilation leaves readers with the feeling of sorrow as the protagonist passively observes the end of our destructive path. Our inability to comprehend our implicit guilt in the ecological crisis dooms us to a world forever changed. The fictional inability to prevent, impede or even explain our own extinction event mocks our political unwillingness to confront our own responsibilities in this ecological doom.
Doomsday prophecies aside, one thing is certain: the way we narrate climate change dictates the way we can respond to it. Narratives define our understanding of the world and our place in it. We cannot truthfully tell the story of climate change without confronting the extractive practices of our history and present that created it. We do not talk about what is killing the planet, and neither does most of climate fiction, because the answer is much too big, too burdensome and too ancient for any one of us to carry. But perhaps this question can be answered in another way. Perhaps it could be answered by redesigning the meaning of our civilisation for ourselves and for the planet.
For that to happen, we must first start creating narratives that engage with humanity’s role in this precarious ecological balance. Fictions give life to ideas, and ideas give life to action. To have any chance of stopping the ecological doomsday, we must first confront our own responsibility in climate change in political discourse and climate fictions. The planet’s perilous future compels us to abandon the ecological prejudice we’ve held for so long that says only some lives are important and others are not. We need to tell real stories that engage with the real victims of climate change: the planet and the countless species that deserve to live on it; this is the ultimate function of climate fictions. The clock is ticking, and we need to set our heads straight.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.