Thammasat University students who are interested in science fiction, climate change, sociology, literature, political science, public health, ecology, environmental law, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61715
The TU Library collection includes many other books about different aspects of science fiction.
Science Fiction and Climate Change discusses a number of authors who are also represented in the TU Library collection.
The publisher’s description follows:
Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst Anglophone conservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near-consensus amongst climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. The resultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-cultural phenomenon and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fiction occupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed ‘cli-fi’. It does not, however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmann adopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analysing print and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especially Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. Inspired by Williams’s cultural materialism, Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and Moretti’s version of world systems theory, the book builds on Milner’s own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive study in the sociology of literature.
The book begins:
Despite intermittent upsurges of climate change scepticism among conservative politicians and journalists in the Anglosphere, there is now a near consensus among climate scientists – and indeed among most other scientists – that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Recent projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) point to global surface temperature increases of between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees between 1986–2005 and 2081–2100 and global rises in sea level of between 26 and 82 centimetres. Subsequent research by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), factoring in the effects of marine ice-sheet instability in Greenland and the Antarctic, points to global rises in sea level of between 30 and 250 centimetres by 2100. There is also evidence that recent increases in heat waves and flooding are related to climate change; and that these indicate ‘significant vulnerability’ to climate variability on the part of both ecosystems and human systems. Despite the 25 United Nations climate change conferences held between 1995 and 2019, carbon emissions continue to rise on what the IPCC describes as a ‘business as usual’ basis. The results are already apparent. As Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge, observes, whereas during the 1970s sea ice covered some 8 million square kilometres of the surface of the Arctic Ocean, by 2012 this had fallen to only 3.4 million square kilometres; and, by the end of 2015, 238 ships had successfully sailed through the once impassable Northwest Passage. The science is no longer seriously in question, but nonetheless it is routinely ignored. As Wadhams himself concludes: ‘Everyone knows that exponential growth … will lead only to disaster, yet every finance minister seeks to encourage economic growth’. How is it, then, that this scientific consensus can be so widely acknowledged and yet simultaneously ignored? For the distinguished Indian novelist and literary critic, Amitav Ghosh, the answer lies in the fact that climate change is a fundamentally collective process, while the dominant culture is one ‘in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike’. The third term here – literature – might seem surprising, but it is central to Ghosh’s argument that ‘ours was a time when most forms of … literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight’. This was so, he concludes, because ‘serious prose fiction’ had become overwhelmingly committed to versions of literary realism that depend for their efficacy on notions of everyday probability. Climate change, by contrast, necessarily involves everyday improbabilities: radically extreme weather events on the one hand, a non-human nature that is both sentient and proactive on the other. The irony of the realist novel, he observes, is that ‘the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real’. Radical improbabilities are therefore normally banished from what is conventionally regarded as ‘literary fiction’ into the ‘generic outhouses’ of fantasy, horror and science fiction (henceforth SF). Some obvious objections come to hand: that much modernist fiction is not so much realist as magical-realist; and that SF has of late become increasingly incorporated into the literary mainstream. More seriously, Ghosh’s argument remains complicit with the binary opposition between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction it promises to undermine. So, when he tries to come up with the names of ‘writers whose imaginative work has communicated a … sense of the accelerating changes in our environment’, Ghosh concludes that ‘of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind: J.G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Barbara Kingsolver, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan and T. Coraghessan Boyle. The problem is obvious: Ballard, Vonnegut and Lessing were, by any reasonable standard, ‘genre’ SF writers; and the particular texts by the other writers that Ghosh has in mind – Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, McCarthy’s The Road, McEwan’s Solar, Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth – are again, by any reasonable standards, very clearly science-fictional in character. But his main conclusion stands: if literature (and the other arts) are indeed crucial mechanisms by which human societies come to understand themselves, then our arts have singularly failed to understand the threat posed by ‘anthropogenic’ climate change, that is climate change caused by human activity; and that the significant exceptions to this observation lie overwhelmingly in genre fiction, most especially SF. Our purposes here are not so much to mount an indictment of literary fiction, however, as to explore how SF itself has come to terms with climate change. And we do so, moreover, in the hope of further enhancing the genre’s colonisation of the literary and cultural mainstream; or, if that metaphor seems too (post-) colonial for comfort, of encouraging its capture of the commanding heights of the literary and cultural economy.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)