Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene 9780367358891, 9780429342493

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Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term “climate fiction” has paradoxically exhausted the term’s descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse as well as our apparent inability to avert it, we face geophysical changes of drastic proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the consequences. This book argues that this crisis of imagination can be partly relieved by climate fiction, which may help us comprehend the potential impact of the crisis we are facing. Strictly assigning “climate fiction” to fictions that incorporate the climatological paradigm of anthropogenic global warming into their plots, this book sets out to salvage the term’s speculative quality. It argues that climate fiction should be regarded as no less than a vital supplement to climate science, because climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scientifically anticipated. Focusing primarily on English and German language fictions, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis shows how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world in its utilization of a small number of recurring imaginaries, or imagination forms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies more generally. Gregers Andersen is a postdoctoral researcher in environmental humanities at the Department of English, Stockholm University. He has published articles in several international journals on how literature, films, cultural theory, and philosophy can shed light upon human and non-­human conditions in the Anthropocene.

Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media Series editor: Thomas Bristow

The urgency of the next great extinction impels us to evaluate environmental crises as sociogenic. Critiques of culture have a lot to contribute to the endeavour to remedy crises of culture, drawing from scientific knowledge but adding to it arguments about agency, community, language, technology and artistic expression. This series aims to bring to consciousness potentialities that have emerged within a distinct historical situation and to underscore our actions as emergent within a complex dialectic among the living world. It is our understanding that studies in literature, culture and media can add depth and sensitivity to the way we frame crises; clarifying how culture is pervasive and integral to human and non-­human lives as it is the medium of lived experience. We seek exciting studies of more-­than-human entanglements and impersonal ontological infrastructures, slow and public media, and the structuring of interpretation. We seek interdisciplinary frameworks for considering solutions to crises, addressing ambiguous and protracted states such as solastalgia, anthropocene anxiety, and climate grief and denialism. We seek scholars who are thinking through decolonization and epistemic justice for our environmental futures. We seek sensitivity to iterability, exchange and interpretation as wrought, performative acts. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media provides accessible material to broad audiences, including academic monographs and anthologies, fictocriticism and studies of creative practices. We invite you to contribute to innovative scholarship and interdisciplinary inquiries into the interactive production of meaning sensitive to the affective circuits we move through as experiencing beings. Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene Gregers Andersen

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene Gregers Andersen

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Gregers Andersen The right of Gregers Andersen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-35889-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34249-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

To contemporary and future ecocritics

Contents



Acknowledgements



Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction

viii 1

1 Cultural hermeneutics

15

2 The social collapse

23

3 The judgment

42

4 The conspiracy

62

5 The loss of wilderness

81

6 The sphere

104

7 The birth of a new perspective

132



Bibliography Index

143 149

Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of a long study of Western climate fiction, which began in October 2010 with my appointment as PhD Fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. I would therefore like to thank my old colleagues at the Department and, especially, Isak Winkel Holm for his brilliant supervision. Without Isak’s ideas many of the perspectives presented in the book would not have been born. I would also like to thank Antonia Mehnert for being a wonderful host and partner of dialogue during my stay at The Rachel Carson Center, and Rune Graulund and Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen for tirelessly encouraging me to use my Danish PhD dissertation as a springboard for writing a book about cli-­fi in English. Finally, a warm and special thanks to Christian Lampe and Courtenay Crawford. Christian and Courtenay have throughout the writing process been essential collaborators. Translating my PhD dissertation into English, Christian laid the groundwork, which enabled me to transform the original text into a new, improved version, whilst Courtenay’s proofreading has been a cherished help.

Introduction The birth of a new type of fiction

In the last decade the term ‘cli-fi’ has become incredibly popular. Coined by Amer­ican blogger Danny Bloom as late as 2007, the term is used today with convincing familiarity by libraries, bookshops, journalists, and teachers at all levels of education as well as inspiring a quickly growing stream of academic articles, monographs, and anthologies (Glass 2013). This story of success is, however, not as coherent as it initially seems. Libraries, bookshops, journalists, and teachers apply the term to fictions varying wildly in form, genre, style, plot, and theme.1 And research on cli-­fi is so young that confusion still rules when it comes to the simple question of what cli-­fi stands for, i.e. whether it refers to a phenomenon called “climate fiction” (Trexler 2015, 23; Ghosh 2016, 72; Bracke 2018, 5) or “climate change fiction” (Mehnert 2016, 4; Johns-­Putra 2019, 7). As the title of this book reveals, I believe it makes sense to settle on the former. In fact, I hope to erase any possible doubt about what climate fiction or cli-­fi is supposed to mean. But, even more fundamentally, I will seek to demonstrate that climate fiction represents a vital supplement to the reports published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) because, by depicting humans in worlds resembling those forecast by the IPCC, climate fiction provides speculative insights into how it might be to feel and understand in such worlds. And these are basically insights we as contemporary humans cannot obtain anywhere else. Moreover, this speculative nature of climate fiction clearly underpins the fact that anthropogenic global warming cannot be reduced to a chemical process in the atmosphere. The phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming is also present in different cultures, where its meaning is processed cognitively and shaped imaginatively. In this sense “the discovery of anthropogenic climate change requires a new understanding of climate as a cultural force”, as the German professor in Comparative Literature, Eva Horn, puts it (2018, 63). Horn is therefore also right in emphasizing the need of research, which “not only looks back into the history of climate change but also into the various imaginations of climate disasters in the modern age” (ibid.). However, it is in my view necessary to enhance the scope even further; i.e. it is not enough to culturally analyse anthropogenic global warming strictly as a

2   Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction phenomenon giving rise to various disaster imaginaries. Rather, the many dimensions of anthropogenic global warming call for a cultural analysis that takes other kinds of imaginaries into consideration as well. Accordingly, this book sets out to map the most dominant imaginaries in Western climate fiction. Because of their central function in Western understanding, in which anthropogenic global warming is a relatively new, but nonetheless central phenomenon, these imaginaries will be known as imagination forms. I understand an imagination form as a narrative template that underlies the imagination, whereas I define the specific imagination forms I will focus on in this book as a set of dominant narrative templates that underlie the imagination of anthropogenic global warming. Intrinsic to this description is the understanding that these forms did not emerge from a vacuum, but rather consist of bits and pieces from narrative templates that already have predominance in the cultural history of the West. The idea that Western climate fiction allows an insight into how anthropogenic global warming is shaped in the Western imagination is of course by no means unproblematic. The ‘Western imagination’ as a generalized term easily falls prey to criticism, as one may question that it makes sense to subsume countless millions of individuals’ heterogeneous ways of imagining under such a general banner. However, it is my belief that this terminology can be epistemologically justified. Because just as impossible as it is to uncover the production of imaginaries in all Western individuals, it is just as possible to extrapolate certain general patterns (structures) from the fictions that are products of their heterogeneous imaginaries. Culture can after all be defined, in the Canadian cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s words, as “historically created systems of meanings in terms of which we give form, order, point, and direction to our lives” (1973, 52) – that is to say, as certain cognitive schemes that create and shape the common understanding within a ­specific cultural sphere. If Geertz is to be believed, inspired as he was by the German-­Amer­ican art philosopher Susanne K. Langer, these schemes become apparent in cultural phenomena. In line with Geertz’s point, it is therefore natural to characterize climate fiction as a ‘symbolic form’ – that is to say, as one of the “roads by which the spirit proceeds towards its objectivization, i.e., its self-­revelation” (Cassirer 1953, 78). However, instead of following this theoretical trail from Geertz back to Langer and further back to the German cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1923, 1925 and 1929), this book’s inquiry is rooted in a different approach.2 Placing itself on the other side of a conflict which marked twentieth-­century philosophy, this book instead takes its cultural-­analytical foothold in what is perhaps Martin Heidegger’s most crucial contribution to hermeneutical philosophy.3 In Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) Heidegger points out how the “fore-­structure of understanding” (Vor-­Struktur des Verstehens) means that the human being is already part of a cultural context which shapes its understanding (2001, 192). In other words, we find here an

Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction   3 argument for the cultural structures of pre-­understanding that I claim to be inherent in the imagination forms present in Western climate fiction. Blending Heidegger’s argument with Geertz’s, we may even add that the cultural embeddedness of human existence should not only be thought of as an embeddedness into certain cognitive processes; it should also be thought of as something that continuously feeds the imagination. I will elaborate on this claim more thoroughly in the first chapter of the book. But for now I will just add that this will not be the only point from hermeneutical philosophy that will guide my investigation. Taking inspiration from another prime thinker of hermeneutics, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, I will also strive to explicate how human existence is in various ways altered in Western climate fiction. Specifically, I will seek to elucidate constellations between different worlds and modes of existence, because, if we heed Western climate fiction, anthropogenic global warming will not only change the climate in the worlds that engulf human existence. It will also change how humans feel and understand their worlds. That is, it will influence their affective and cognitive relations to the world.

A brief history of global warming These two interpretative prisms (imagination forms and relations to the world) are of course first and foremost made relevant by scientific developments. Since the French physicist Joseph Fourier compared Earth’s atmosphere to a greenhouse in the beginning of the nineteenth century, human modes of existence have been increasingly formed vis-­à-vis expectations of radical climate change. Indeed, the human impact on the climate has grown to such an extent that it is today an essential part of the understanding that we are now living in the Anthropocene.4 Thus, as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has famously pointed out, with the notion of the Anthropocene a threshold is passed beyond which humans are no longer strictly “biological agents” endowed with the power to change their natural surroundings, but also “geological agents” shaping geophysical developments (2009, 206). However, in between Fourier’s comparison and today’s descriptions of the Anthropocene lie a string of events that led to the establishment of anthropogenic global warming as a scientific paradigm and hence its creation as ‘a cultural force’.5 This applies, for example, to the discovery of the Irish physicist John Tyndall, when, in 1859, he claimed that the longest heat waves which were reflected back at the Sun from the Earth were held back by the atmosphere’s layer of carbon dioxide (CO2). Tyndall did not, however, link his discovery of greenhouse gasses with a potential rise in global temperature. This link was not made until 1896, when Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius claimed that double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause a rise in global temperature of 5–6 degrees Celsius (Behringer 2010, 182). Nevertheless, it was not until the mid-­twentieth century that Arrhenius’ discovery led to actual concern about the consequences this may have for life on Earth.

4   Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction Two discoveries made seven years apart were crucial to this growing concern and the initial establishment of anthropogenic global warming as a scientific paradigm. First, in 1957 the Amer­ican scientist Charles Keeling proved that the overall amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was increasing year by year (ibid., 184).6 And shortly after, in 1964, Danish geophysicist Willi Dansgaard published data from ice core drillings that made it possible to compare changes in temperature with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere several hundred thousand years back in time. These two discoveries were pivotal, because they enabled the comparison of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from the beginning of industrialization with earlier amounts in the history of the Earth. Alongside measurements of the average global temperature in the same period they paved the way for the present work conducted by the IPCC and the conclusion that “the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming” (Bernstein et al. 2008, 37). However, neither Keeling’s nor Dansgaard’s discoveries immediately led to a standardized understanding of how the global climate was developing. Dansgaard’s data not only made it possible to compare humanity’s emission of greenhouse gasses since the beginning of industrialization with a geological record stretching far back in time, but it also gave some support to the idea that humanity was facing a new ice age.7 Indeed, according to the German historian Wolfgang Behringer, it was not until 1977 that “a new consensus began to form among scientists that global warming [not a new ice age] was indeed the greater threat” (2010, 190). Crucial to the further strengthening of this consensus has undoubtedly been the IPCC-­reports published periodically since 1990. For instance, in the IPCC’s summarizing report from 2014, it is estimated that a rise in temperature from between 3.7 and 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100 would be the most likely result of anthropogenic global warming (20). Consequently, the IPCC generally operates with two different temporalities that can also be found in Western climate fiction: one in which anthropogenic global warming will, among other woes, gradually cause worsening floods, droughts, forest fires, tidal waves and hurricanes, raise sea levels, increase the number of people that will lack food and clean drinking water, and accelerate the reduction in global biodiversity (Bernstein et al. 2008, 48, 52–53); and one in which the global average temperature changes disruptively with more or less unpredictable consequences, or as this is phrased in the IPCC’s 2007 summarizing report: “Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change” (ibid., 53).

What is climate fiction? The history sketched above is important here, because it enables a clear definition of climate fiction. Hence just as the route of anthropogenic global warming from marginal theory to mainstream science represents a paradigmatic break in human history, so does the rise of fictions that depict and

Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction   5 t­hematize this phenomenon mark a break or event in the history of fiction. As it has been suggested by myself (Andersen 2014a, 37; 2014b; 2016a, 856) and other researchers of cli-­fi (Johns-­Putra 2016, 267; Mehnert 2016, 4) for quite some time now, what defines cli-­fi is, thus, that it uses as a narrative element the scientific consensus that humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases cause global warming. In fact, this narrative element can, as I will demonstrate in detail, be used in a variety of ways, but common to all climate fictions is that they use the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming in their world-­making. Consequently, climate fiction distinguishes itself from other fictions in which both natural and human-­induced climate change have catastrophic consequences. In other words: a fiction is not automatically climate fiction if it presents a future in which human beings must persevere under difficult climatic conditions. As I will substantiate throughout this book, one of the conditions that makes climate fiction such an important tool for reflection in our times is exactly that it takes its point of departure from what is arguably the greatest challenge facing humanity today: anthropogenic global warming. However, to avert any misunderstandings further down the line, I should at this point also mention that anthropogenic global warming does not exclude the possibility of a new ice age. In fact, there are several climate fictions in which human-­induced global warming leads to extremely cold worlds. For instance, in both of the cinematic climate fictions The Colony (2013) and Snowpiercer (2013), humanity’s technological attempts to reduce the rise in temperature have instead led to drastic drops in temperature, while another variant of this theme is used in the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and the trilogy of novels Science in the Capital (2004, 2005 and 2007). In these latter two fictions the human-­induced global rise in temperature stops the Atlantic Ocean’s currents from circulating warm water, which means a disastrous shift to cold worlds. I will shortly follow up on this specification by further introducing the field of fictions that hides behind my preliminary use of the term ‘Western climate fiction’, but first there is a major problem I need to address. Although climate science in general illustrates that many of the areas in most imminent danger of being severely affected by anthropogenic global warming lie in the Global South, it is very difficult to find climate fictions originating from the Global South on the Western market.8 This means that I will, in this book, be unable to offer a cultural-­comparative analysis of potential differences between Western climate fiction and climate fiction from other cultural spheres. Instead the knowledge presented will be distilled from around 60 fictional works produced in North America, Australia and Europe. Within these limits it is possible to trace climate fiction back to the beginning of the 1970s where, for instance, a reference to “the greenhouse effect” is made in the film Soylent Green (1973).9 Yet, in the heated and overpopulated world the film depicts, this reference is not unfolded. Cli-­fi is therefore more properly born a few years later with the Amer­ican author Arthur Herzog’s thriller Heat

6   Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction (1977), where humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases are not only represented as the cause of out-­of-control warming, but are also framed and reflected upon as a problem fundamental to human existence. Interestingly, the publication of Heat did not initially set off a wave of more cli-­fis. Very little with relevance to the study of Western climate fiction seems to have happened in the early 1980s, and one needs to progress to 1987 in order to find an heir to Heat, namely The Sea and Summer, a novel published by the Australian author George Turner. Indeed, it is not before the 1990s – likely galvanized by the occurrence of a number of major political events, such as the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 – that we see the first real burst in the production of Western cli-­fis. For instance, in 1993 the perhaps first German climate fiction – Anton-­Andreas Guha’s Der Planet schlägt zurück – was published, while anthropogenic global warming also featured as a key subject in several Amer­ican publications in the latter part of the 1990s (e.g. in Kevin E. Ready’s Gaia Weeps (1998), Rock Brynner’s The Doomsday Report (1998) and Greenhouse Summer (1999) by Norman Spinrad). This trend continued into the new millennium with the acclaimed Amer­ ican author T.C. Boyle publishing the cli-­fi novel A Friend of the Earth in 2000. In fact, the small burst in the production of Western cli-­fis, which had begun in the early 1990s, was soon followed by another and much more substantial burst. Crucial to this burst was the increasingly severe picture drawn by the IPCC. In particular, the IPCC’s third report (2001) contained new material (Mike Mann’s hockey stick curve, for instance), which can explain why 2004 stands out as an exceptional year in the production of Western cli-­ fis. Thus, in 2004 the German director Roland Emmerich’s disaster film The Day After Tomorrow premiered. The first volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ambitious novel trilogy Science in the Capital was published, and so were two of the best-­selling literary climate fictions to date: the Amer­ican author Michael Crichton’s climate-­sceptic-thriller State of Fear, and the German author Frank Schätzing’s eco-­thriller The Swarm (Der Schwarm). At this point climate fiction was, however, still very much a North Amer­ ican phenomenon, but in the latter part of the 2000s Europe began to catch up. For instance, in 2005 Finnish author Risto Isomäki published the eco-­ thriller and climate fiction Sarasvatin Hiekkaa, which was in 2008 published in German with the title Die Schmelze. The main push came, however, from Great Britain, where the publication of Sarah Hall’s post-­apocalyptic novel The Carhullan Army in 2007 did not only mark a timely, first injection of feminism into climate fiction, but also the beginning of a flood of new climate fictions onto the British book market. Thus, in 2008 Paul McAuley published the science fiction novel The Quiet War, which was followed in 2009 by Liz Jensen’s eco-­thriller The Rapture, Marcel Theroux’s post-­ apocalyptic novel Far North, Matthew Glass’s thriller Ultimatum, and in 2010 by Ian McEwan’s satirical novel Solar and Helen Simpson’s collection of short stories In-­Flight Entertainment. Simultaneously in the USA and in Canada, several literary climate fictions were published, among them Allegra Goodman’s

Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction   7 youth novel The Other Side of the Island (2008), Jean McNeil’s love story The Ice Lovers (2009) and Paul Di Filippo’s science fiction short story “Life in the Anthropocene” (2010), while Steven Amsterdam’s post-­apocalyptic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming was published in Australia in 2009.10 Since 2010 the number of publications has proliferated even further, as the destructive effects on anthropogenic global warming gather pace and the average global temperature continues to rise. In Germany, these developments have for instance prompted the publication of Ilija Trojanow’s novel The Lamentations of Zeno (Eistau, 2011) and Sven Böttcher’s climate-­scepticthriller Prophezeiung (2011). In Great Britain they have incited novels such as Martine McDonagh’s I Have Waited, And You Have Come (2012) and James Bradley’s Clade (2017). In Scandinavia they have formed the backdrop for Maja Lunde’s great success with her novel The History of Bees (Bienes historie, 2015). And they have prompted the Korean, French and Canadian cooperation that is Boon Joon-­ho’s cinematic blockbuster Snowpiercer (2013) as well as the Scandinavian and Amer­ican cooperation that is Tommy ­Wirkola’s Netflix production What Happened to Monday (2017). However, it is indisputable that in the last decade North America has reclaimed its position as the main producer of climate fiction. This is among other fictions, partly due to novels such as Dana Stein’s Fire in the Wind (2010), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), Clara Hume’s Back to the Garden (2013), Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold, Fame, Citrus (2015), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) and New York 2140 (2017). And it is partly due to the release of cinematic climate fictions such as Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Jeff Renfroe’s The Colony (2013), Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones (2014), Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland (2015), Dean Devlin’s Geostorm (2017), and Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2017). Indeed, I find it highly likely that the number of Western cli-­fis will only continue to rapidly grow long after this book has been published.

The context of this book Nevertheless, I hope the review above – which is by no means extensive, but only supplements other listings of Western cli-­fis (e.g. in Johns-­Putra 2016 and in Goodbody and Johns-­Putra 2018) – has explicated how the field of Western climate fiction calls for a type of analysis that is comfortable with moving in and out of different genres. Indeed, one of the things that makes the study of climate fiction so cultural analytically intriguing is that the diversity of genres utilized in Western cli-­fis is indicative of the diversity of imaginaries that anthropogenic global warming produces.11 This is also confirmed if we look to another analytical work. In Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions – the first book-­length study containing analyses of several Western cli-­fis – the Amer­ican literary scholar asserts that the genres used to fictively narrate anthropogenic global warming help “construct [its] meaning”. (2015, 14).12

8   Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction More generally, this should, however, not give the impression that the contemporary research on cli-­fi is dominated by consensus or that it springs from a long coherent tradition of analysis. In fact, as I emphasized in the beginning of this introduction, the reality is rather the opposite. One should for example notice that larger analytical works on the relation between Western fiction and anthropogenic global warming were until very recently still absent from literary and cultural studies. This is not least remarkable considering that ecocriticism has since “the early 1990s” been a growing academic practice (Buell 2011, 88).13 So remarkable in fact that as late as in 2011 the British literary scholar Timothy Clark commented that ecocriticism was not properly geared to respond “in the way and on the scale demanded by a truly global issue” (11). One can of course only guess what would have happened if ecocriticism had not “evolved primarily to address local and easily identifiable outrages and injustices” and had therefore from the start been better equipped to deal with fictive representations of anthropogenic global warming (ibid.) But as it stands, literary and cultural studies did not show any real interest in anthropogenic global warming during the 1990s and early 2000s.14 In fact, one needs to progress to the latter parts of the 2000s and early parts of the 2010s to find a kind of starting point for research on Western cli-­fi. An important milestone in the development of cli-­fi as a research field was thus the publication of the German literary scholar Ursula K. Heise’s monograph Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). When this work is to be counted as a milestone in the development of cli-­fi as a research field, it is however not because it is a monograph dedicated to analysing Western cli-­fis. It is rather because, in the short concluding chapter of the monograph, Heise lists several short stories, novels, and films that have anthropogenic global warming as their primary subject. What is more, Heise only lists these fictions to explain why she has not drawn on them in her discussions of how different fictions represent “connections and disjunctures across ecological scales in their considerations of local, regional, and global forms of inhabitation” (206). Her main argument is that anthropogenic global warming’s recent emergence as a scientific paradigm and cultural force makes it too difficult to imagine how this phenomenon “might affect particular places and individuals” (ibid.). According to Heise, attempting to discuss these influences through the imaginaries of climate fiction would therefore correspond to “a paradigmatic exercise in ‘second-­hand nonexperience’ ” (ibid.). I will return to this argument in order to refute it in a moment. But let me first name a handful of other scholarly contributions that have helped put research on Western cli-­fi on the academic map – because after the publication of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet it only took three years before there emerged a more ambitious “overview of representations of climate change in fiction” (Trexler and Johns-­Putra 2011, 185). In 2011 Adam Trexler and the British literary scholar Adeline Johns-­Putra published an article in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change that listed an impressive number

Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction   9 of fictions depicting various forms of climate change. In retrospect, it is, however, also obvious that Trexler and Johns-­Putra’s article did not fully satisfy the need for analyses that both the worsening of the global climate crisis and the accelerating number of cli-­fis on the Western market were creating. For instance, the article only listed literary works, did not refer to the term ‘cli-fi’, and even more problematically did not make a clear distinction between fictions utilizing the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming in their world-­making and fictions in which the represented ­climatic changes had other causes. In fact, it seems fair to say that some of these problems continued to haunt Trexler’s work. Although the publication of Anthropocene Fictions in 2015 marked the first publication of a book-­length study containing analyses of several Western cli-­fis it did thus not really set a new direction for how climate fiction was approached. In Anthropocene Fictions cli-­fi is still very much treated as if it is solely a literary phenomenon, with Trexler focusing on how “climate change make[s] new demands on the novel itself, forcing formal and narrative innovation” (10). Moreover, Trexler neglects once again to distinguish cli-­fi from fiction depicting other kinds of environmental and climatic changes, as he approaches both kinds of fiction through the much broader category of ‘Anthropocene fiction’.15 In this sense the publication of Anthropocene Fictions – along with the fact that cli-­fi was becoming increasingly popular and hence used with increasing imprecision – only further explicated the need for a clear definition of cli-­fi, which explains why such a definition was at this point beginning to emerge in the works of several researchers. For instance, Trexler’s co-­writer on the 2011 article in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Adeline Johns-­Putra, tried to set the record straight, when in 2016 she published another article in the same journal. Referring to cli-­fi as ‘climate change fiction’ she wrote: “I would prefer to define climate change fiction as fiction concerned with anthropogenic climate change” (267). The same year, the German scholar in Amer­ican Studies, Antonia Mehnert, similarly stated in her monograph Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in Amer­ican Literature (2016) that “climate change fiction [is] literature dealing explicitly with anthropogenic climate change” (4). Mehnert’s definition is, however, a bit imprecise if we judge from her own monograph and John-­Putra’s article, because, in both, cli-­fi is explicitly treated as more than a literary phenomenon, i.e. as a phenomenon appearing also in for example, contemporary drama (Johns-­Putra) and cinema (Mehnert).16 Despite this, it is, however, also indisputable that research on cli-­fi has continued to revolve primarily around literary works. Recent titles in the field such as Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel (2018) by the Dutch literary scholar, Astrid Bracke, and Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (2019) by Adeline Johns-­Putra clearly testify to this. Again, the inclusion of a few analyses of films in Cli-­fi: A Companion (2018) – an anthology

10   Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction edited by Johns-­Putra and the British scholar of German literature, Axel Goodbody – also re-­emphasizes the huge potential the field holds for analytical expansions. And so does the fact that the number of interesting films, TV-­series, computer games, plays, commercials, campaigns, etc. utilizing the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming in their world-­making is rapidly increasing. That said, this book will at large continue the trend of approaching cli-­fi through literary fictions and turn only sporadically to films. But in contrast to much of the previous published research on Western cli-­fi, it will not explore a national (e.g. Amer­ican or British) body of cli-­fis or focus on the problems of aesthetically representing anthropogenic global warming in particular and the Anthropocene in general. Rather, it will offer a broader cultural analytical mapping of the most persistent worlds and modes of existence that the prospect of Anthropocene futures brings to light in Western cli-­fi. Returning to Heise’s claim in the concluding chapter of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet I will therefore also challenge the idea that analysing the imaginaries of climate fiction corresponds to ‘a paradigmatic exercise in second-­ hand nonexperience’. Because is fiction not exactly the sort of space where we, as a species, can make things visible that are not clearly available to our worldly physical experience? In the impressive legacy left by Ricoeur, one sentence in particular stands out as an affirmative answer to this question. In the essay “Imagination in Discourse and Action”, which like many of Ricoeur’s most crucial essays are found in From Text to Action (Du texte à l’action, 1986), Ricoeur states that “the first way human beings attempt to understand and to master the ‘manifold’ of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it” (172). If Ricoeur is correct in this observation, fictions cannot merely be seen as the playground of the imagination, but must necessarily be understood as vital reflective spaces for humans facing new existential conditions. In fact, this makes fictions particular important, in a world which stands before serious, but not precisely known, climatic changes. Accordingly, this book is grounded in an idea of fiction contrary to the idea that runs through Heise’s dismissal of the potential of climate fiction. It is precisely because we do not know how anthropogenic global warming will affect ‘places and individuals’ that climate fiction is such an exciting medium for reflection at this crucial point in human history. Indeed, it is precisely this uncertainty that makes climate fiction a premium source of interpretations – not only of which dominant imaginaries the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming evokes in the Western mind, but also of how anthropogenic global warming may change human beings’ modes of existence. I am thereby, of course, not suggesting that climate fiction contains depictions of the exact existential conditions that anthropogenic global warming will have for human beings in a not-­so-far-­away future. Such a direct correlation between fiction and reality is not at all necessary to justify the philosophical and cultural relevance of climate fiction. Rather, it is sufficient to

Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction   11 remind the reader that all fictions generally contain an element of mimesis. That is, they display something that could be real. In fact, as already indicated this element can be claimed to have an extraordinary significance in climate fiction as the fictive configuration of future modes of existence is here placed within worlds not only deemed probable by science, but which are also expected to come into being. It is in this sense characteristic of climate fiction that it partly establishes its mimetic mode of representation by presenting plots which lie within the boundaries of the future scenarios communicated by the IPCC. In the following chapters this specific quality will guide my exploration in a certain direction. Thus, I am interested in showing how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world through its utilization of a small number of recurring imagination forms.

Presentation of content A key issue in each of the book’s analytical chapters will therefore be the disclosure of the worlds that shapes these relations. Drawing on a phrasing that is Heidegger’s and an understanding of fictions that is Ricoeur’s, I will aim to show how different worlds shape different kinds of Being-­in-the-­world (In-­ der-Welt-­sein). Indeed, in this interpretative approach the book is guided by an anthropological understanding that stretches far beyond Heidegger’s phenomenology. The idea that we as humans “move from envelopes to envelopes, from folds to folds” is found in a range of philosophies that the book will pick up on in its interpretations (Latour 2008, 8). That said, just as the aim is to map the dominant imagination forms at work in the field of Western climate fiction, the aim is also to map how a set of dominant worlds gives shape to a set of dominant relations to the world. In other words each chapter will also aim to lay bare at least one central pattern, or what I will term an existential structure. After the first chapter – in which I will expand my reflections on the value of climate fiction – I will in the second chapter thus seek to map how a range of climate fictions take their premise from the imagination form of ‘The Social Collapse’. According to this imagination form anthropogenic global warming will result in accelerating social disintegration and interhuman violence on a very large scale. The chapter looks into how this form is utilized in a number of Western cli-­fis. In particular it demonstrates how many of the fictions deploying this imagination form display human beings who have been deprived of both a homely sphere as well as the security provided by societal institutions. Torn from worlds in which they felt at home and secure these humans bring to light the conflation of two forms of emotional and physical vulnerability: one relating to exposure to radical weather, the other relating to exposure to interhuman violence. In the third chapter my focal point will change to the imagination form of ‘The Judgment’. According to this imagination form anthropogenic global warming will at some point instigate a reaction from the non-­human world

12   Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction to the violence inflicted upon it. Hence the chapter will specifically deal with formations of non-­humans that render judgment upon humanity. The chapter shows how these formations engender a relation to the world which can also be deemed uncanny. However, in contrast to the existential structure that appeared through the imagination form of The Social Collapse this relation does not manifest as an atmosphere or mood the origin of which has no concrete object. Rather, it comes out of an encounter with an object within-­theworld. Thus, what is encountered by the humans in these fictions are more precisely non-­human entities that have transgressed their Cartesian identity as mere objects of the human will. In the fourth chapter, I will map climate fiction’s utilization of the imagination form of ‘The Conspiracy’. In particular, the chapter will investigate how the various conspiracy narratives at work in Western cli-­fi challenge the understanding of climate science as an objective science, and consequently bring into sight different connections between science and politics. Latour’s philosophy will here provide the interpretative toolkit, as I will strive to show how climate fiction’s utilization of The Conspiracy again and again fosters a world in which the difference between science and politics, and truth and ideology temporarily breaks down. This will then allow me to discern a specific existential structure, as this world becomes the phenomenological horizon of a Being-­in-the-­world dedicated to a hermeneutics of suspicion. In Chapter 5 climate fiction’s portrayal of the human–non-­humanrelationship will be back at the centre of attention. However, this time it will be in order to map the imagination form ‘The Loss of Wilderness’ – an imagination form according to which anthropogenic global warming will result in the destruction of the least cultivated areas on Earth. In particular, the chapter will seek to demonstrate how climate fiction’s utilization of this imagination form makes evident two different existential structures. On the one hand this utilization reveals a mode of existence whose primary comportment towards the non-­human world and the disappearing wilderness is best described as calculative. On the other, the same utilization also reveals a mode of existence whose primary comportment towards the non-­human world and the disappearing wilderness is defined by love. In the sixth chapter I will deal with the imagination form of ‘The Sphere’, or the imaginary that anthropogenic global warming will result in a construction of artificial atmospheres vital to human survival. To be more explicit, my particular concern will here be the imagination of social design that is intrinsically linked to this imagination form. Contrary to the first chapter, I will therefore not explore what consequences anthropogenic global warming is imagined to have for interhuman behaviour, but instead the consequences a technological response to global warming might have for human beings’ ways of organizing themselves. Finally, I will in the book’s seventh and last chapter summarize my findings as well as reflect further on the potential of climate fiction. However, before I embark on the path just presented I would like to end this introduction with a general reflection on the relationship between fiction

Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction   13 and philosophy – a reflection for which I am once again indebted to modern hermeneutics, yet here not so much to Heidegger and Ricoeur, as to the German philosopher Martin Seel. Seel has, in extension of Heidegger’s and Ricoeur’s works, pointed out that whereas philosophy generally works its way towards conceptual understandings, fictions represent “human existence immanent in situations” (1991, 64). In other words, narrative fiction is, following Seel, a place where different forms of existence are not primarily tested conceptually, but rather affectively and cognitively, and thereby existentially on the level of the present that the reader and viewer are drawn into through the fictive plot. For the same reason the discussions in this book will be based on an understanding of philosophical and fictional texts that acknowledge both their similar and dissimilar foundations as instruments for interpretation. They are similar because philosophy cannot be said to have a higher claim to truth than fiction, since it is in itself a medium through which different imaginaries come to light, and dissimilar, because philosophy makes it conceptually possible to expand on the interpretation of the ways of being in the world that fiction sets forth. With this important distinction in mind, let us now move on to the ground of epistemology, before entering the worlds of climate fiction.

Notes   1 For instance, the term has been used about fictions as different as the films Godzilla (2014) (Rothman 2014) and Noah (2014) (Gal 2014).   2 Following Cassirer’s death in 1945, Langer was one of the key propagators of his thinking. In her art-­philosophical works, she repeated his weighty cultural-­ philosophical point: that human understanding reveals itself in symbolic expressions (1953, 236).   3 As the Amer­ican philosopher Michael Friedman has shown in his A Parting of the Ways (2000), a decisive rupture in twentieth-­century philosophy can be traced back to a philosophical disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger. Inspired not only by Kant but also Hegel, one of the most fundamental goals in Cassirer’s work with symbolic forms is, as Friedman writes, “to show how all the different symbolic forms (from mathematical natural science to the history of human culture, from natural language to morality religion and art) possess their own distinctive types of ‘universal validity’ ” (152). Opposed to this is Heidegger’s “existential hermeneutics” according to which understanding is irrevocably tied to human finitude (ibid., 3).   4 According to some of the world’s top geologists the Anthropocene is a new geological epoch that we have already entered or are in “a transition towards” (Waters, Colin N 2014, 15). The term is meant to encapsulate how from the atmosphere to the biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere, the human signature has become of such a magnitude that it makes sense to formally announce the end of the Holocene and name the contemporary geological epoch: the Anthropocene.   5 Here and elsewhere I use the term ‘paradigm’ in a Kuhnian sense, i.e. as referring to a scientific understanding that dominates a historical period (Kuhn 1996, 10).   6 Keeling proved this by annually measuring the amount of CO2 from the volcano Mauna Lao on Hawaii. At this specific place, the increase in CO2 could not be explained by way of local factors, but had to be an expression of the general increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (Behringer 2010, 184).

14   Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction   7 His findings made it possible to deduce a pattern that confirmed that the warm period of the last 10,000 years (the Holocene) was coming to an end, as throughout the last 2–3 million years, warmer periods have never lasted more than 10,000 years (Behringer 2010, 186).   8 Snowpiercer is here partly an exception. Whereas its plot originally featured in a French graphic novel, the film was co-­written for the screen and directed by South Korean Bong Joon-­ho.   9 Another early 1970s fiction – which has been singled out as a potential starting point of cli-­fi – is the Amer­ican author Ursula Le Guin’s novel Lathe of Heaven (1971) (Goodbody and Johns-­Putra 2018, 3–4). 10 Exemplified by the publications of the anthologies I’m with the Bears (2011) and Beacons (2013), climate fiction has since the publication of Di Filippo’s short story been integrated further into the short-­story genre. 11 For instance, science fiction forms an ideal narrative scheme for displaying many of the technological issues that are made increasingly relevant by the acceleration of anthropogenic global warming. Similarly, post-­apocalyptic fiction forms an ideal narrative scheme for displaying issues relating to the resource scarcity that this acceleration will most likely create, just as the thriller forms an ideal narrative scheme for displaying climate-­political intrigue and so on. 12 Trexler also claims that the influence goes in the other direction in the sense that “climate change necessarily transforms generic conventions” (2015, 14). 13 Ecocriticism can broadly be defined as a cultural criticism which connects interpretations of cultural phenomena, but especially literature, to “a ‘green moral’ and political agenda” (Garrard 2004, 3). 14 A good example of this is the anthology Climate and Literature: Reflections of Environment (1995) edited by the Amer­ican literary scholars Janet Pérez and Wendell Aycock. Despite the fact that its introduction begins with a reference to “endangered species, acid rain, global warming, and ills of pollution, deforestation, and desertification”, the anthology does not focus on what I understand here as climate fiction (1). Utterly ignoring the specific meaning of climate that the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming brings to the world, it examines instead broader meanings of climate and environment in a variety of literary classics. 15 In another monograph from 2015 (Ecocriticism on the Edge), Timothy Clark follows in Trexler’s steps when he uses a handful of Western cli-­fis to reflect on the question: “Does the Anthropocene form a threshold at which art and literature touch limits to the human psyche and imagination themselves?” (176). 16 Amitav Ghosh approaches this issue from another perspective. In The Great Derangement (2016) he wonders if “to think about the Anthropocene will be to think in images” and if this can explain “why television, film, and the visual arts have found it much easier to address climate change than has literary fiction” (83). In my view, this is, however, not a correct analysis considering the diversity of ways Western cli-­fis have hitherto represented anthropogenic global warming. In fact, judging from the limited number of cli-­fis Ghosh refers to in his book, I think we can discard his analysis on the ground that it demonstrates too little knowledge of the field.

1 Cultural hermeneutics

This short chapter will elaborate on the book’s analytic foundation and central terms. Specifically, it will facilitate a meeting between two epistemologies that as far as I know have not been combined before. This is a meeting between a hermeneutical philosophy, whose main reference point is text interpretation, and Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-­object.1 Latour’s description makes it possible to approach global warming as a scientific fact, a social connection and a discursive construction. Instead of ontologically reducing global warming to just one of these phenomena, we can with Latour simply say that global warming is “simultaneously real, discursive, and social” (1993, 64). We are, in other words, not taking anything away from the natural sciences. Anthropogenic global warming can, in relation to this characteristic, still be understood as a real object that can be made an item for various measurements and projections. However, as this object is simultaneously “narrated” and “historical”, it also resembles some of the objects that cultural studies are normally concerned with (ibid., 89). The link to hermeneutical philosophy consists here in the tool of interpretation that I find useful for exploring the narratives partly comprising (the quasi-­object) anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, this tool is so flexible that it can basically be applied to explore everything from the future scenarios that climate science projects to the more clearly defined fictions that are interpreted in this book. As previously emphasized I term this tool imagination form, as I understand an imagination form as a narrative template that guides the imagination in its world-­makings. Indeed, one can think of an imagination form as a building structure which gives form to a variety of facades, but which underneath them remains the same. It would therefore not be entirely unjustified to conceive imagination forms as straitjackets that confine the imagination in its freedom. But it is equally important to note – as the variety of plots taken into consideration in the coming chapters will show – that these forms nevertheless enable the imagination to create a multitude of different worlds. The overall aim of this study will therefore be to show how certain imagination forms reappear in Western climate fiction. That is how Western climate fiction relies on a repertoire of understandings that enables it to set

16   Cultural hermeneutics forth a variety of worlds, in which anthropogenic global warming plays a crucial part. This description comes with the understanding that the imagination forms deployed in Western climate fiction are composed of other narrative templates that comprise their cultural heritage. In fact, this understanding – in conjunction with the descriptions given above – situates the concept of the imagination form within a philosophical context that does not take the act of imagination to be a completely free activity. Rather, the concept belongs to a realm of thought that takes this act to be grounded in preunderstanding. In this respect, hermeneutical philosophy adds something important to Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-­object (simultaneously real, discursive, and social). This is that the narratives partly comprising this object must be understood in a cultural-­historical context, since the imagination never starts from a clean slate, but is always based on already established understandings that structure it. To explore the link between the description of global warming as a quasi-­object and hermeneutical philosophy, I will therefore now briefly turn to three of the most important thinkers of modern hermeneutics: Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur.

Hermeneutics and preunderstanding Our starting point will be Being and Time, since Heidegger here impregnates hermeneutics with (what later Gadamer called) “an ontological orientation” (2004, 296). Before Heidegger, hermeneutics was mainly aimed at developing methods that would ensure correct understanding, i.e. that the interpretative act progressed in a manner that would lead it to the true (objective) meaning of a written text. However, in Being and Time Heidegger rebukes this idea by stressing how the human subject – or Dasein – is always integrated in a specific temporal and spatial context.2 Basically this means that the understanding of Dasein is always premised by its “Being-­in-the-­world” ­(in-­der-Welt-­sein), since all humans have worlds that their understandings are integrated into and stand in relation to (78). This point is central to the concept of the imagination form that I outlined before, because it means that according to Heidegger human understanding never meets a world that is not already uncovered. Humans are, as understanding beings, already thrown (geworfen) into a world of meaning.3 Any interpretation of this world is therefore based on preunderstanding. Indeed, as Jürgen Habermas has highlighted, it is even possible to take this as evidence of the existence of certain socially and culturally transmitted “interpretative schemes” ­(Deutungsskemata) – a concept very similar to my concept of imagination forms (1971, 122). Likewise, arguments for the existence of such schemes can be found in Gadamer’s writings, which philosophically build upon Heidegger’s ‘ontological orientation’ of hermeneutics. According to Gadamer, any understanding must be perceived as a synthesis. Whether it is the meeting between text and interpreter or the meeting between two individuals in a conversation,

Cultural hermeneutics   17 understanding always occurs in a meeting between two horizons. The term ‘horizon’ is here referring to the same aspect Heidegger sought to highlight in his references to Dasein as a Being-­in-the-­world, and which Edmund Husserl before him had highlighted with the term ‘lifeworld’. This is the aspect that any understanding is anchored in a specific temporal and spatial context, or as Gadamer writes: Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of ‘situation’ by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of ‘horizon’. The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. (2004, 301)4 An interpreter of text or conversation therefore also stands with her world’s limited horizon against the horizon of the text and conversation partner. According to Gadamer, it is these two horizons, or worlds, that must melt together in the act of interpretation. However, it is important to note that melting together does not imply the superimposition of one horizon upon the other. It is not the interpreter’s task to completely eradicate her own horizon under the other’s horizon, in the same way as it is not the interpreter’s task to force her horizon upon the fictive text or conversation partner’s discourse to the extent that the horizon embedded in it disappears. By being filtered through the understanding of a limited horizon that is open and sensitive towards the horizon of the text or discourse of the other, true understanding occurs. This leads us to Ricoeur, for whom the relation between the interpreter’s and the text’s horizon, between preunderstanding and the “things themselves” (Sachen selbst) is also an important issue (Heidegger 2001, 49). However, Ricoeur’s position is that Heidegger and Gadamer have taken hermeneutical thinking to a dead end by placing it in opposition to the aim of objective knowledge that dominates in the natural sciences. He insists therefore on combining the foundation that preunderstanding creates for interpretation with a method he takes from structuralism. In fact, his solution to avoid the epistemological opposition between preunderstanding and the things themselves emphasized by Heidegger and Gadamer is to make structuralism and hermeneutics into two separate stages of the same interpretation process. Specifically, this involves making the deduction of what French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss termed “a depth semantics” into the first phase of textual interpretation (Ricoeur 2008, 116).5 According to Ricoeur, this will ensure that the interpretation is adequately distanced from imposing preunderstandings, before the second phase of the interpretation process begins. Indeed, it is this second phase – constituting in combination with the first phase what Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutical arc” (arc herméneutique) – that I

18   Cultural hermeneutics find especially relevant as an approach to climate fiction (ibid., 117). Hence, while the first phase of this arc consists in extracting the depth semantics of a text, the second phase consists in interpreting the kind of world that the text puts forward and what opportunities for Being-­in-the-­world it contains. Ricoeur writes: […] what must be interpreted in a text is a proposed world [proposition du monde] that I could inhabit and wherein I could project one of my ownmost possibilities. […] Through fiction and poetry, new possibilities of Being-­in-the-­world [d’être-au-­monde] are opened up within everyday reality. (Ibid., 83) The full meaning of this cannot however be emphasized without a further reflection on the question: ‘What is a text?’, because in contrast to Gadamer, Ricoeur highlights a difference in interpreting fictive texts and trying to understand a counterpart in a conversation. As Ricoeur points out, the fictive text does not respond, like my counterpart does, when I ask about what it means. Moreover, the fictive text’s world is not my own, no matter how much it resembles it, since there are no ostensible references in the text to the world I am situated in. Instead the fictive text releases what Ricoeur calls “a second-­order reference” by referring to a world that does not exist in reality (ibid., 82). This reference that Ricoeur also calls the “poetic reference” and the “productive reference” gives fiction in general and the fictive literary text in particular, the ability to shape reality (2008, 10; 1991, 135). Reality can, according to Ricoeur, be the result of the fictive text’s productive reference, in so far as the fictive text breeds behaviour models in a context that could be real and therefore makes it possible for the reader to apply these behaviour models in reality. In the fictive text, we have for the same reason, a “prefigured” understanding of action that through the text’s configuration of action can transfigure the reader’s actions (1984, 53). However, Ricoeur’s description of the productive reference also leads us back to Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-­object, as Ricoeur insists that it is not only within the arts that fiction inhabits the function of simultaneously describing and shaping reality. In the essay “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality” (1991) he states: Nothing is more harmful for a sound recognition of the productive reference of the imagination than [the] dichotomy between the sciences and the arts. […] Our task, consequently, would be to extend the concept of fiction beyond language and the plastic arts, and to acknowledge the work of the analogies, models, and paradigms in the conceptual field of scientific knowledge. (134–135)

Cultural hermeneutics   19 And he continues: Models […] in turn provide us with the most accurate account of what we have attempted to describe as productive reference. To the extent that models are not models of … i.e., still pictures of a previously given reality, but models for, … i.e., heuristic fictions for redescribing reality, the work of the model becomes in turn a model for construing in a meaningful way the concept of the productive reference of all fictions, including the so-­called poetic fictions. (Ibid., 135) Literary fiction is, in other words, not the only medium where a description of a world marks the outline for a new world. Climate science also ‘worlds’ (i.e. creates worlds), when it keeps redescribing the future through revised models (based on huge amounts of empirical data). We can with Ricoeur therefore say that climate models are ‘heuristic fictions for redescribing reality’.6 Indeed, this description of climate models as ‘heuristic fictions for redescribing reality’ is consistent with Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-­object that besides being real and social, is also narratively constructed. Thus, it further explains why, in the beginning of this chapter, I described the narratives partly comprising global warming as a research area calling for cultural studies. Or to be more exact: what modern hermeneutics affirms is not only that Latour is right in conceiving global warming as a quasi-­object partly comprised of narratives; modern hermeneutics also affirms that the interpretation of the preunderstandings and world depictions that manifest in the imagination of this object needs not limit itself to a single medium (i.e. literary fiction). A number of cultural phenomena, climate-­scientific models and social-­scientific reports can in principle be the departure point of this type of interpretation. In fact, I have called this chapter ‘Cultural Hermeneutics’ in order to name the territory for interpretation that has here appeared between Gadamer’s ‘universal hermeneutics’ and the ‘textual hermeneutics’ that Ricoeur – despite his remarks above – primarily unfolds. So while I agree with Ricoeur that there is a need for cultural studies to think ‘fiction beyond language and the plastic arts’ I also find his elaboration of hermeneutics to be too narrowly focused on texts. I would therefore like to suggest that a first step in ‘extending the concept of fiction’ should consist in applying some of the interpretative tools Ricoeur discovered more broadly on the various mediums in which the narratives partly comprising global warming appear.

Approaching climate fiction With these remarks a cultural hermeneutical foundation has been given for the interpretation of the different forms of preunderstandings and world

20   Cultural hermeneutics depictions that manifest in Western climate fiction. However, a more detailed account of how I will approach Western climate fiction in the rest of this book is still necessary. First of all, because I do not think Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc represents an ideal method for bringing forward the different forms of preunderstandings, worlds and relations to the world that climate fiction contains.7 The main difference between mine and Ricoeur’s approach consists here in how Ricoeur dedicated the first phase in this arc to depth semantics, whereas my first step will be to look for cultural-­historical and philosophical commonalities in the Western climate fictions that utilize the same imagination form. I am in this regard indebted to Lévi-Strauss, to whom I owe the idea that the imagination forms are narrative templates created on layers of other narrative templates. Thus, this idea derives from Lévi-Strauss’s description of “bricolage” in The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage, 1962) (2004, 16–17). Here Lévi-Strauss sets out to demonstrate how the mythmaker saves the world picture of his culture by rearranging fragments of different myths every time this world picture is challenged or put in danger by new, unforeseen events. That is how “mythical thought […] builds up structures by fitting together […] remains of events, while science […] creates its means and results in the form of events” (ibid., 22). It is this description of bricolage – or of how previously applied narrative fragments are repurposed to maintain a narrative that is fundamentally the same – that I find useful in relation to the imagination forms deployed in Western climate fiction. Hence these imagination forms seem also to have been created out of other narrative templates that comprise the foundation for their fictive utilization. I must therefore also situate myself in a different place than Lévi-Strauss, who uses the concept of bricolage to delineate a stark dichotomy between native cultures and the modern world. Thus, in opposition to Lévi-Strauss, rather than seeing a gap between the mode of bricolage and the mode of science, I believe it to be more fruitful to perceive these two modes as intertwined. That is to think bricolage as a natural cognitive response to the paradigmatic shifts produced by major scientific events. Anthropogenic global warming can be characterized as an event prompting such a shift. Yet, fragments from narratives pre-­dating this event still appear in the imagined future worlds depicted in Western climate fiction. On the other hand, these fragments are not preserved here without being adjusted to the new scientific reality that is anthropogenic global warming. The cultural-­historical work of this book will therefore consist in highlighting some of the central narrative templates that the imagination forms seem to be founded on and in highlighting major steps in their adjustment. My interpretations will in this regard be tied to two contexts in particular. On one side I will have a focus on the layer of Biblical resonance in the imagination forms.8 On the other side I will focus on these templates’ adjustment via various strands of ecological thinking developed after World War II. While the concept of bricolage is suitable for elucidating ‘the narrative heritage’ embedded in the imagination forms, two terms will have a prominent

Cultural hermeneutics   21 role in my interpretations of the main relations to the world (i.e. existential structures) that climate fiction displays. The first of these two terms is ‘mood’. I find the foundation for this interpretative approach in Heidegger, who in Being and Time, along with “understanding” and “discourse”, highlights “state-­of-mind” (Befindlichkeit) as a fundamental condition for human existence (2001, 172). This means that we can understand human beings as beings whose relations to the world are shaped by moods, which also makes it relevant to interpret fictive characters as affectively attuned. While I will focus on moods in my interpretations of the affective side of the main relations to the world that appear in Western climate fiction, I will apply the term ‘interpretation’ in my analyses of the cognitive side. The foundation for this double hermeneutic is found again in Heidegger, because if we take understanding to be a fundamental condition of human existence, it also makes sense to investigate how the characters in climate fictions interpret the world. A final point is here to stress the connection between these two terms. In Heidegger such a connection is described existentially. He writes “a mood makes manifest ‘how one is, and how one is faring’ ” (2001, 173). In other words: according to Heidegger, moods point human beings towards their own existence and install a self-­relation wherein the human being can find encouragement to take care of his/her own existence. In the analyses I will begin in the next chapter, the connections between the affective and cognitive side of the relations to the world must be understood in broader terms. As we shall see, the moods brought forward by global warming do not only engender new interpretations. The interpretations engendered by global warming also create new forms of affective receptivity.

Notes 1 I understand the term ‘quasi-object’ in extension of Latour’s description of it in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). Here Latour uses the term to point out how “global warming” together with phenomena such as the “ozone hole” and “deforestation” poses a problem for scientific understanding, as these phenomena show how modern science rests on an illusory Constitution (50). This “modern Constitution” divides nature and society (ibid., 13). It consists on one side of some scientific practices that divides humans from non-­human beings (nature), i.e. of the imagination that through this division it is possible to find the objective truth about these beings (ibid., 15). On the other side it consists of some practices that seek to emphasize how the very same non-­human beings increasingly are mixed with humans and therefore must be understood as socially constructed. What, according to Latour, the modern Constitution does not do, however, is allow things to be seen as hybrids both real and constructed. 2 More specifically, Heidegger defines Dasein as “an entity which, in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being” (2001, 78). 3 Thrownness (Geworfenheit) is another central term for Heidegger. It expresses the central essence of the human subject, which is that it has been given an existence beyond its own wishes or control (2001, 174). Being and Time is in this regard an existential appeal to the human subject: to accept this thrownness and determinedly relate to the options of its existence (ibid., 297).

22   Cultural hermeneutics 4 Gadamer also connects this preunderstanding to Hegel’s substance-­term. For instance, with clear reference to Hegel, he writes: “Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-­examination, we understand ourselves in a self-­evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live” (2004, 278). 5 Lévi-Strauss had in Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie structurale, 1958) showed how, from a wide range of collected myths, it was possible to elicit some constitutive units or “mythemes” (1963, 211). By reducing the collected myths to these mythemes and the relations that they often appeared in, a depth semantics could be extricated according to Lévi-Strauss. 6 This is reflected in the aspect that IPCC keeps emphasizing in their reports that the predictions and future scenarios depict a future that cannot be known with complete certainty (Bernstein et al. 2008, 27). It is also ingrained in the revision process itself because these reports’ continuous releases mark revisions in the understanding of reality. 7 As Ricoeur himself points out in The Conflict of Interpretations (Le conflit des interprétations, 1969), the structural comprehension can despite all not be completely liberated from interpretation. It is, as he writes, “never without a degree of hermeneutic comprehension” and must therefore be understood as one among several ways in which the interpreter can attempt to let the text express itself, within an already delimited horizon (2000, 56). 8 The point of this is not to argue that the individual imagination forms have their exact origin in the Bible. It is simply to illustrate how climate fiction draws on some narrative templates that date far back in Western cultural history.

2 The social collapse

In a way, beginning with collapse is like putting the cart before the horse. From the Amer­ican anthropologist Joseph A. Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) to the Amer­ican archaeologist Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) comes a historical tradition of connecting collapse with the end. In this tradition, collapse is connected with the downfall of civilizations. In particular, to the end of a range of ‘golden’ periods in the history of humanity. I stress this because a similar connection is established in several climate fictions. Here the difference is simply that the fictions do not concern the end of a distant historical period. Instead, the fictions represent the end of the period that has existed since the beginning of industrialization (1750), and which has fostered increased prosperity as well as the establishment of a range of judicial and political institutions and principles. Accordingly this chapter will mainly be concerned with worlds where socio-­political complexity has been rapidly and significantly reduced.1 That is, worlds where the complexity embedded in social relations has either greatly decreased or has entirely disappeared alongside a number of institutions. However, when I write ‘mainly’ above, I do so because this chapter will not only interpret affective and cognitive relations to the world in worlds where civilization’s veneer has been stripped away. The imagination form of The Social Collapse also opens up the possibility of other worlds and thereby also actualizes the interpretation of other kinds of relations to the world. Thus the framework for these interpretations will not solely rest on the idea that anthropogenic global warming leads to a violent struggle between individuals in a space devoid of institutions, but more precisely the idea that global warming exposes and intensifies interhuman division. To be more concrete, this means that The Social Collapse does not always appear in Western climate fiction through representations of violent conflict. Rather, in climate fiction utilizing The Social Collapse the use of violence marks different degrees of loss in socio-­political complexity: the more interhuman violence is represented as a necessary individual mode of action, the more apparent is the loss of socio-­political complexity. Therefore, in my explorations in this chapter I will follow a gradual socio-­anthropological

24   The social collapse d­ eterioration. This deterioration will take us from a world where socio-­political complexity is only just beginning to unravel to post-­apocalyptic worlds, where the framework for peaceful coexistence has fully broken down.

From the broken social contract to climate war Thus, I begin my explorations within a world where socio-­political complexity has not yet been rapidly reduced. In the British author Ian McEwan’s novel Solar (2010), it is only hinted at that social collapse will be the result of anthropogenic global warming. The novel’s protagonist, the former Nobel Prize laureate Michael Beard, is a disillusioned scientist who through chance and amoral behaviour ends up as head of a research project aiming to develop a new promising energy source from sunlight. Beard approaches the task without enthusiasm. He is described as “aggressively apolitical”, and generally feels loathing for any talk of global warming and its consequences (39). Instead of being preoccupied with the collective issues that global warming raises for humanity, Beard is more occupied with his own personal issues – issues that are frequently caused by his inability to control his urges. This is expressed in a number of episodes where Beard fights against his urges in vain, although he acknowledges a self-­interest in not acting on them. In particular, Beard’s urge to stuff food down his gullet, which throughout the novel makes him increasingly overweight, has an obvious symbolic meaning as the following passage shows: He saw at the edge of vision […] the gleam of the thing he wanted, the thing he did not want to want, a dozen of them in a line, and without deciding to he was taking one. […] It was a plastic foil bag of finely sliced potatoes boiled in oil and dusted in salt. […] He was still stuffed from his lunch, but this particular chemical feast could not be found in Paris, Berlin and Tokyo and he longed for it now, the actinic sting of these thirty grams – a drug dealer’s measure. One last jolt to the system, then he would never touch the junk again. (Ibid., 117–118) These potato chips function as a symbol for a long range of commodities (from oil to beef ), which humanity continues to consume despite the many warnings that this consumption will lead to irreversible climatic changes. In other words, Beard is made the representative of a humanity that despite its acknowledgement of the long-­term, damaging consequences of its current actions puts its own immediate and overproportionate needs before the long term. This is not only reflected in how Beard ‘befouls’ his bodily home, but also the environment around him. For instance his apartment is so filthy that it is described as a “midden” (ibid., 109). More generally, what can be extracted from these descriptions is therefore also a world-­depiction that is profoundly dystopian. Hence, by associating Beard’s actions with an ecological destructiveness general

The social collapse   25 to human behaviour, the novel indirectly predicts a future ecological collapse driven by irreversible climatic changes. Furthermore, the novel contains a number of episodes that make it apparent that such a collapse is imagined not only to be ecological, but also social. For instance, when Beard is in the Arctic with a group of climate artists, there is a mess in the room where the group puts on their boots. Beard interprets the mess as a sign of humans’ tendency to put their individual needs before the collective: a tendency that according to Beard will be a decisive obstacle in humanity’s attempt to create a sustainable future unless a set of common rules are put in place to counteract selfish behaviour. In an article (“Save the boot room, save the Earth”) that McEwan wrote during a stay with a group of scientists in the Arctic in 2005, a corresponding use of this motif appears. Here McEwan writes: Ten minutes later, the owner of those [missing] size 44 boots appears. He’s a good man, a decent man, but he must now take what is not his own. With the eighth Commandment broken, the social contract is ruptured too. No one is behaving particularly badly, and certainly everybody is being, in the immediate circumstances, entirely rational, but by the third day, the boot room is a wasteland of broken dreams. […] Hobbes would say we need a Common Power of which we might stand in awe. As things are, this is Chaos, just as Haydn conceived it, and tomorrow morning it will make us miserable. […] We must not be too hard on ourselves. If we were banished to another galaxy tomorrow, we would soon be fatally homesick for our brothers and sisters and all their flaws: somewhat co-­operative, somewhat selfish, and very funny. But we will not rescue the earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more, even if we accept that we can never really change our natures. All boot rooms need good systems so that flawed creatures can use them well. Good science will serve us well, but only good rules will save the boot room. (2005, n.p.) The point is of course that these conclusions resemble the conclusions McEwan lets Beard arrive at five years later in Solar. His argument is thus that just as Hobbes found peaceful coexistence to be dependent upon the instatement of the social contract, so anthropogenic global warming will require the global implementation of a new set of protective rules.2 According to McEwan these rules must be able to protect human beings against their own self-­centred actions and those of their fellow humans. That is against the human ‘natures’ from which McEwan claims ‘we can never really change’. It is therefore also telling that neither the ‘good science’ nor the protective set of rules called for in “Save the boot room, save the Earth” is present in Solar. While Beard’s interpretation of the boot room only intensifies his cynicism, his research project ends in total failure. And what is more, almost concurrently the

26   The social collapse hope that a new set of protective rules will prevent a future ecological and social collapse driven by climatic changes suffers a symbolic defeat. This defeat is satirically rendered when Beard receives an invitation to the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen (COP-­15). Beard decides to participate in the conference, since by his own admission “he would be at one with its spirit” and therefore represents “the perfect choice” for the organizers (McEwan 2010, 276). In fact Beard’s self-­perception corresponds in this case for once with reality, as the summit ended in a manner affirming his interpretation of the boot room. Hence as McEwan knew when Solar was published about six months after COP-­15, the summit did not reveal a willingness by one or more of the world’s most powerful leaders to put down some binding rules for the emissions of greenhouse gases. That is, from a Hobbesian perspective no sovereign appeared that was capable of protecting humanity against itself. Rather, as British sociologist John Urry has pointed out, COP-­15 has come to stand as “a major failure” and hence a symbol of humanity’s inability to find a common solution to the threat posed by global warming (2011, 112). Moreover, in its depiction of an exceedingly fragile interhuman bond the novel more than indicates that the outcome of this situation will not be peaceful. Although Solar does not directly depict large-­scale violent conflicts, it therefore still draws on The Social Collapse in its world-­ making. Indeed, in its depiction of a humanity lacking the collective qualities needed to prevent a future ecological and social collapse driven by irreversible climatic changes, the novel leaves little hope for a “great Anthropocene” (Asafu-­Adjaye et al. 2015, 6).3 The expectation that humanity lacks the collective qualities needed to secure a peaceful outcome to the global crisis constituted of accelerating anthropogenic global warming also appears in Amer­ican author Matthew Glass’s political thriller Ultimatum (2009). But in Glass’s thriller this expectation takes on a much more spectacular form than it did in Solar, as the thriller gives flesh to an assumption found in a range of contemporary popular scientific books, namely the assumption that anthropogenic global warming will result in war.4 In Ultimatum, the geopolitical fight over what level of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions each nation state ought to commit to drives China and the United States to nuclear war. However, Glass’s thriller is first and foremost worth mentioning because in its unfolding of this plot a rather depressing socio-­anthropology emerges as well. This becomes apparent at the end of the novel when its protagonist, the Amer­ican president Joe Benton, ponders the bloodshed that global warming has led to: A horrible suspicion was beginning to form deep within him, that it had always been the case that something like this would happen. That only a massive catastrophe would shock the world out of the delusion that half measures and half steps would be enough and that the problem would be solved tomorrow, if not today, without any price to be paid. […] And maybe it had always been the case that this catastrophe would have to be

The social collapse   27 something that human beings inflicted on each other, since all the catastrophes that nature so abundantly inflicted seemed not to be enough. And yet it was almost unbearable to think that this was true, that despite all the science, the evidence, the analysis and the projections that the most sophisticated computers could produce, in the end it would take the crudest, most primitive argument – death, millions and millions of needless deaths – to make this happen. It shook his faith in humanity. It made him wonder whether human beings had ever made any progress at all, whether, deep down, they weren’t still just tribes of cave men clubbing each other into the mud. (432) Thus, in this extract the idea emerges that in spite of the sophistication of human culture and technology, humans remain tribal beings that will continue to compete over natural resources with members from other clans (i.e. nations). To a certain extent one could even say that the novel thereby reiterates an argument perhaps most famously put forward by Rousseau – that is, the argument that humanity’s scientific and technological progress does not reflect a similar step forward in civility.5 Indeed, as the above citation shows, through its manifestation in war, global warming changes Benton’s cognitive relation to the world. It makes him substitute his interpretation of the human being as a being that improves itself with an interpretation of the human being as a fundamentally violent and incorrigible being. This also means that some of the cultural-­historical heritage stored in the imagination form appears, as a similar narrative can be found in one of the most well-­known Biblical stories: the story of Babel. In this story, humanity is of course punished, as through architectural and technological prowess it strives to emulate God’s power, while the punishment consists in God dividing humanity into clans with different tongues. In Ultimatum this narrative ­re-­emerges, except the punishing and clan-­dividing God is left out. Instead, humanity is itself imagined to bring forth interhuman division between already existing clans through technological progress resulting first in accelerating climatic changes and then in war. That the story of Babel forms an underlying, intertextual layer for the utilization of The Social Collapse in quite a few Western climate fictions is only made more apparent in the post-­ apocalyptic climate fictions that I will examine in the rest of this chapter. In many of these fictions the utilization of The Social Collapse does not only result in interhuman division, but also encompasses a division in language. Indeed, their post-­apocalyptic worlds should be seen as an extension of the representation of climate war in Glass’s thriller, as the dissolution of the social contract in these worlds marks the next step in the imagination that global warming will lead to interhuman strife.

28   The social collapse

Post-­apocalyptic worlds In Amer­ican author Steven Amsterdam’s award-­winning, post-­apocalyptic debut novel Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009), it is human short-­sightedness that leads to extensive social dissolution. As the title of the novel indicates, it unfolds a plot in which humanity faces a number of dangers – mainly caused by anthropogenic global warming – which it only realizes too late. That short-­ sightedness is presented as a fundamental human trait is already evident in the first chapter in the novel. Here we are told by the first-­person narrator how on the first day of the new millennium, he and his family leave their house in the city and travel to a farm in the Australian outback. In the evening, the narrator’s father ventures out into the outback, and when the narrator finds him there, his father explains his actions in the following way: This whole thing is symbolic, symbolic of a system that’s hopelessly short-­sighted, a system that twenty, thirty years ago couldn’t imagine a time when we might be starting a new century. Do you get it? A whole Species that didn’t think to set its clocks the right way. We are arrogant, stupid, we lack humility in the face of centuries and centuries of time before us. […] What we know now is that we didn’t think enough. We know we aren’t careful enough and that’s about all we know. (2011, 22–23) This interpretation – that the narrator’s father advances on the back of the fear of an electronic meltdown prompted by the new millennium – proves true. The events in the rest of the novel support his description of a humanity unable to guard itself against catastrophic events. After the first chapter, the reader encounters the narrator in a number of post-­apocalyptic worlds that contain only a minimum of socio-­political complexity. In an Australia divided into city areas and land districts, collapse manifests as an absence of institutions keeping law and order. What is characteristic of the new, climate-­ changed worlds depicted in the novel is thus that many of the norms enabling interhuman trust no longer prevail. Instead the narrator is embedded in worlds where violence and insecurity define human interaction. However, this does not mean that a clear distinction can be made between humanity before and after the collapse. Indeed, the mode of human existence that emerges after the collapse contains some of the same elements that are depicted as having led humanity to damage its own living conditions. The difference is just that after the collapse, human self-­interest no longer manifests in the indirect climatic violence that springs from, for example, extreme consumption. Rather, in these worlds this indirect violence has been suspended, as the general struggle for survival makes self-­interest a foundation for direct, interhuman violence. This is particularly evident in an episode from the middle of the novel, in which the narrator is confronted by a man infected with a deadly virus:

The social collapse   29 He [the infected man] is pacing as he talks, touching everything, manic. There’s something normal about him, though, like he was once a good man, but he doesn’t think about me or anyone now. […] He laughs. […] ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler if you move on and I stay here? I’m the weak one, after all. You could climb down and not look back, not even inhale. Naturally, if you start feeling feverish tomorrow and want a little company, I’d let you come back. You’d be keen for a little conversation then.’ He gags on some fluids in his throat that I don’t want to think about. ‘But that’s who I am, a barely surviving humanist in an inhuman world.’ I don’t say anything. (Ibid., 79–81) This encounter clearly illustrates that there is no longer room for the same kind of interpretation of human behaviour as in the world before the collapse. On the one hand, the narrator is unable to help the man without risking his life, and on the other hand the man, who was ‘once good’, is too desperate to think of anyone but himself. Thus when the infected man calls himself a ‘humanist in an inhuman world’, it is a statement no longer in accordance with reality. The infected man was once a humanist, but the inhumane world he exists in has made him inhumane. In this sense the utilization of The Social Collapse in Things We Didn’t See Coming discloses the socio-­anthropological idea that humans’ ability to act humanely depends upon a ‘benevolent’ climate.6 Or to be more exact: that humane behaviour is a privilege of the generations that are now putting their favourable living conditions into serious jeopardy.7 It is, however, also important to note that this idea is disclosed via the utilization of a narrative template that dominates the post-­apocalyptic genre as a whole. As Amer­ican political scientist Claire P. Curtis has pointed out in Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (2010), it is generally characteristic of post-­apocalyptic fictions that they present worlds wherein human existence is – like in the Hobbesian state of nature – “nasty, brutish and short” (8).8 A central question is therefore: What enables anthropogenic global warming to enter the post-­apocalyptic genre? The answer is the scientifically predicted equivalence between a rise in average global temperature and a world lacking fundamental resources like food and clean water. It is in other words this equivalence that enables a socio-­anthropology echoing Hobbes’s idea of human existence in the state of nature to migrate into the worlds of Western climate fiction. That said, in Things We Didn’t See Coming such a social anthropology does not stand alone. Instead, the novel presents a first-­person narrator that is torn between the amoral behaviour that the climate-­changed worlds makes it advantageous to adopt, and the morality of the old world.9 This internal division is thematized at the end of the novel where the narrator is found eligible to work for the administration tasked with rebuilding Australia. He is only found eligible for this work because the administration assess he did not

30   The social collapse succumb to “excessive theft” in his struggle for survival and additionally showed signs of “genuine honesty, kindness and patience” (Amsterdam 2011, 179). Furthermore, the compassion he displays at the end of novel is more in line with the behaviour Rousseau ascribed to human beings in the state of nature than the behaviour described by Hobbes (ibid., 181).10 In this way the novel once again exposes the socio-­anthropological aspect of global warming that I underlined before. That is, it shows how genuine human kindness risks becoming impossible in worlds where major climatic changes have turned all forms of human existence into a relentless struggle for survival. However, it is not just that the novel contains worlds wherein humans are forced to interpret the world as an individual battlefield for survival that should merit our attention. It is also that the novel contains several descriptions of how this cognitive relation to the world has affective consequences. Especially noticeable is in this regard its depiction of a humanity that must use a large amount of pharmaceutical products in order to persevere in the new worlds created by a rapidly changing climate. Hence these products are not only aimed at curing physical ailments, but also at helping a traumatized humanity cope with the mental consequences of living in a world extremely liable to change and full of dangers (ibid., 104, 129). The novel’s first-­person narrator is for instance frequently affected by fits of anxiety (ibid., 103). Taking into account how The Social Collapse is utilized in Western climate fiction in general it is here, however, still necessary to distinguish anxiety from horror. All considered, interhuman violence is in Things We Didn’t See Coming depicted as a relative sporadically occurring phenomenon. It is so to speak the product of fairly nuanced socio-­anthropology and therefore depicted as being more instrumental in nature than excessively barbaric. If we imagine the different forms of civilizational loss that The Social Collapse germinates in Western climate fiction on a socio-­anthropological scale, we do therefore not hit rock-­bottom in Things We Didn’t See Coming. There is still some way down to barbarism found in Jeff Renfroe’s post-­apocalyptic cli-­fi film The Colony (2013). In The Colony social collapse manifests as outright cannibalism. Good and evil are here relegated to their respective socio-­ anthropological poles in the form of a few sympathetic survivors and the horde of cannibals wanting to devour them. However, while this means that these few sympathetic characters’ affective relation to the world constantly switches between states of insecurity and horror, I am more interested in another aspect of the film. To be more exact, The Colony enables me to return to the cultural-­ historical link that I was only able to superficially demonstrate earlier in the chapter. One can even say that the film forms a bridge between the subtle incorporation of the story of Babel in the plot of Ultimatum and the more obvious examples of its incorporation that I will turn to shortly. Thus, early on in The Colony it not only surfaces that humanity once tried to bring accelerating anthropogenic global warming to a halt by constructing a number of “weather modification towers”, but also how these towers “did their damage

The social collapse   31 a long time ago”. That is, how their use caused the desolate world of ice that the film depicts, and therefore also engendered the extreme social anthropology that is an integral part of it. However, although the link between technological hubris and growing interhuman violence resurfaces, the connection between The Social Collapse and the story of Babel is still not as obvious in The Colony as in other Western climate fictions. While it is important to note how global warming is imagined here to result in the rupture of the social contract and a normalization of barbaric forms of interhuman violence, it is equally important to stress that this rupture does not constitute an impossibility in communication. In order to encounter such an impossibility we must instead turn to Marcel Theroux’s post-­apocalyptic novel Far North (2009) and Helen Simpson’s short story “Diary of an Interesting Year” (2010). However, before I elaborate on this issue, I must first make clear how in one way Far North is significantly different from the other climate fictions that I have hitherto examined. Thus, in Far North the negative (i.e. Hobbesian) socio-­anthropology that I have so far found to be rather tightly joined to the utilization of The Social Collapse is combined with a more positive idea of humans’ socio-­political abilities. Here humanity actually reaches an agreement on cooperative action to prevent runaway global warming, before this act paradoxically leads to extreme climatic changes and social collapse.11 This is apparent from the description the novel’s first-­person narrator Makepeace receives from the character Shamsudin, which is the only account the novel offers of how its post-­apocalyptic world came to be: As it turned out, the smoke from all the furnaces had been working like a sunshade, keeping the world a few degrees cooler than it would have been otherwise. He said that in trying to do the right thing, we had sawed off the branch we were sitting on. The droughts and storms that came in the years after put in motion all the things that followed. Life in the cities had ended. […] ‘The whole world is a barer and less interesting place,’ he said. ‘Human misery has few varieties: tent camps, forced labour, hunger, violence, men taking food and sex by force. (Theroux 2009, 139–140) In other words, we are here introduced to a slightly different socio-­ anthropology than the one we were introduced to in, for example, Solar. Human self-­interest is in Far North not imagined to be an insurmountable obstacle for radically reducing the global emission of greenhouse gases. Rather, humanity simply faces – like it did in Things We Didn’t See Coming – a phenomenon (i.e. anthropogenic global warming) which exposes its inability to see beyond the causality of its immediate actions (i.e. its short-­ sightedness). Moreover, as in Things We Didn’t See Coming, we are in Far North presented to a socio-­anthropology which links human behaviour post collapse to human behaviour pre collapse. The parts of the human that spur

32   The social collapse interhuman violence after the collapse are here also imagined to have been present in humans before the collapse, or, as it is phrased in the novel: People had all those possibilities in them, devil and angel, depending on how the times moved them. Like the seed that splits concrete, it was the appetite for life in them that made them so destructive. It was just everyone’s misfortune to be born in times when the wherewithal for living had got so scarce. (Ibid., 86) It is therefore once again the radical changes in living conditions brought forth by accelerating global warming that proves decisive for human behaviour.12 This does, however, not mean that, in the radically altered world the novel depicts, all human behaviour is by definition vicious. Indeed, what drives the plot forward in Far North is precisely Makepeace’s search for a place where law and order is upheld and humane behaviour (i.e. civility) possible. On the other hand, it is also telling of the general social anthropology of the novel that such a place no longer exists, or, as Makepeace explains at the end of the novel: I had always believed that right was like north to my father. […] But our world had gone so far north that the compass could make no sense of it, could only spin hopelessly in its binnacle. North had melted right off the map. North was every which way. North was nowhere. […] I was anchored by the bad thing just as by the hope that in a distant city some semblance of order, of right, was giving meaning to my world. But we were long past that place. (Ibid., 271) What Makepeace finds instead is a place where the attempt to rebuild human civilization is founded upon forced labour.13 We should therefore not be surprised that the novel ends on a rather Hobbesian note. First Makepeace kills the leader of the rebuilding efforts, and then she returns to her hometown, where she begins to patrol its outskirts.14 Indeed, one may say that her disappointment with the world brings about a new cognitive relation. That is, it leads Makepeace to the interpretation that she herself must become the sovereign (hence her name) that secures order, safety and prosperity within a restricted area. This is evident from the end of the novel where several people with different languages coexist in peace within the area Makepeace has created through her patrols (ibid., 285–286). In fact, with the latter description I have already hinted at how the story of Babel is integrated into the plot of the novel. Thus, when Makepeace describes how her ‘world had gone so far north that the compass could make no sense of it’ this is not just a description of civilization’s complete decay. The broken compass also refers to the Babel-­like world which the novel

The social collapse   33 brings to light. To be more precise, the novel is set in a world where global warming has resulted in large streams of refugees. These streams are not only described as having undermined human security by bringing fatal struggles for resources with them (ibid., 100). They are also portrayed as having caused a fundamental breakdown in interhuman communication. This breakdown is for example apparent in the beginning of the novel, where, after having wounded the harmless girl Ping, Makepeace concludes: “It was clear that we didn’t have a common language. There are some tongues where you can get, say, one word in five or ten, and it’s enough to make some sense of one another. We had nothing” (ibid., 7). The point is of course that this total inability to communicate mirrors the shattered social contract and hence a world where technological progress has led to a regression in civility. It is in other words indicative of how the novel draws on a narrative that, with the story of Babel, was created thousands of years ago.15 As already indicated this does not, however, make Far North an exceptional case within Western climate fiction. In fact, a similar appropriation of the Babel-­myth can be found in “Diary of an Interesting Year”, which is part of Helen Simpson’s short story collection In-­Flight Entertainment (2010). In “Diary of an Interesting Year” large streams of climate refugees are also depicted as the engine that sets social collapse in motion. In the beginning of the story a group of Spanish climate refugees are forcibly placed in the female first-­person narrator and her husband’s (G) apartment. The Spaniards then forcibly appropriate the apartment, and the narrator and G decide to head for the milder climate of a warmed Siberia (2011, 120–121, 124). However, their journey through a drenched Britain, where small parties of refugees attack, rob, rape and kill each other, soon hits an impasse. G is killed, while the narrator is turned into a sex-­slave by his killer, who continuously beats her, or as it reads in the laconic diary-­style of the short story: “M speaks another language. Norwegian? Dutch? Croatian? We can’t talk, so he hits me instead” (ibid., 125). In other words a lack of interhuman communication is once again deployed here as a mirror of the shattered social contract. That is, of a world where men take – as it was formulated in Far North – ‘food and sex by force’. In this way the two fictions are equally Hobbesian in their descriptions of a humanity that generally acts bestially and cruelly post-­collapse. However, what is more interesting is that in “Diary of an Interesting Year” this setting clearly brings to light a specific mode of existence. Through its deviation from the post-­apocalyptic convention of having at least one strong pro­ tagonist, “Diary of an Interesting Year” sheds light on an existential structure, which was also apparent in Things We Didn’t See Coming. This is, to be more exact, an uncanny relation to the world, which springs from the general distrust and violence produced by the social collapse as well as from the radically altered weather conditions produced by anthropogenic global warming. For instance, it reads in the short story:

34   The social collapse We’re staying off the beaten track. Heavy rain. […] I am lying inside the tent now, G is out foraging. We got away in the middle of the night. G slung our two rucksacks across the bike. We took turns to wheel it, then on the fourth morning we woke up and looked outside the tent flap and it was gone even though we’d covered it with leaves the night before. ‘Could be worse,’ said G. ‘We could have had our throats cut while we slept.’ (Ibid., 121) What this passage makes apparent is thus a world wherein social collapse has not only brought an end to the sense of security that characterized life in civil society. It also discloses a world wherein the radically altered weather conditions produced by anthropogenic global warming contribute to the uncanny atmosphere of insecurity. In the rest of this chapter, I will more closely delve into this combination, as it is closely tied to the conditions for human existence which the utilization of The Social Collapse produces in Western climate fiction.

The uncanny as a mood However, before I do this a small detour will be necessary. After all, the term ‘uncanny’ is often connected to the conceptual understanding that Freud gave it, while it is not so often noticed that it also plays a part in Heidegger’s philosophy. In their use of the term, both Freud and Heidegger refer to the experience of something familiar becoming strangely alien, yet what they connect this experience to differs significantly. According to Freud, an uncanny feeling arises when one encounters an animated object or being that was previously unanimated, while Heidegger links the uncanny to a mood (Stimmung) of existential alienation, a sense of “not-­being-at-­home” (Nicht-­ zuhause-sein) in one’s being (Heidegger 2001, 233). Indeed, to Heidegger this mood is crucial, as he frames it as an opportunity for the human being (i.e. Dasein) to understand its universal lot as a mortal being that has been thrown into a world – an opportunity that Dasein, according to Heidegger, often misses, as it repeatedly “flees” into a conventional understanding of existence that comfortably overshadows the truth of its thrownness (ibid., 229). In fact, it is in this context that the uncanny plays a crucial part in Heidegger’s attempt to present a ‘fundamental ontology’ for human existence. Thus, he describes how anxiety pulls Dasein out of the familiarity that saturates its existence as a “they” that does and understands like others do (ibid., 155). That is, anxiety recalls Dasein from the “they” to its own separate situation. “Nothing else”, Heidegger stresses, “is meant about our talk about ‘uncanniness’ ” (ibid., 233). Consequently, it is possible to say that in Heidegger the uncanny mood (that is, anxiety) exposes Dasein to a Being-­in-the-­world devoid of security. Indeed, it is this understanding of the uncanny that I find useful in defining the affective relation to the world which the post-­apocalyptic climate fictions

The social collapse   35 have brought to light. However, such a theoretical ‘translation’ of meaning requires an inclusion of two other Germans thinkers, namely the philosopher Hermann Schmitz and the historian Reinhart Koselleck. Both are relevant here, because they are not only inspired by Heidegger, but also very critical of his fundamental ontology. For instance, it is Heidegger’s description of the human being as an attuned being that forms the background for Schmitz’s idea of the human being as a being situated in an emotional space (Gefühlsraum).16 Yet, Schmitz also criticizes the dichotomy between anxiety and fear, which Heidegger establishes in Being and Time, and which frames anxiety as an uncanny mood and fear as deriving from objects encountered “within-­the-world” (2001, 179). Schmitz argues that in this dichotomy, Heidegger misses a crucial emotion: the feeling of being afraid or, as he calls it, ‘afraidness’ (Bangnis). According to Schmitz, this feeling manifests when the entire atmosphere surrounding the human being appears uncanny without the origin of this ‘uncanniness’ being locat­ able (ibid., 283). This description makes it possible to understand the uncanny in an expanded sense. Thus instead of understanding this mood as a manifestation of an inner anxiety, we can understand it as being connected to an atmosphere that appears threatening and makes human beings afraid. Yet the affective relation to the world which the utilization of The Social Collapse in Western climate fiction has brought to light invites us to expand even further on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology by turning to Koselleck. The reason for doing this is that Koselleck explicates how in Heidegger’s description Dasein is not sufficiently framed as a being “free to enter into conflict with its contemporaries” (2000, 100–101). Koselleck writes: If histories are to be possible, then Heidegger’s central identification of being-­there [Dasein] as a ‘Being-­towards-death’ [Sein zum Tode] must be expanded with the category of ‘Being-­towards-killing’ [Sein zum Totschlagen]. It is defining of the human being that it has not only made survival the aim of its ordeals within the horizon of its inevitable death; from the hunting hordes onto the atomic equipped superpowers the battle of survival is intertwined with the threat […] of dying from the violence of others. (Ibid., 101–102) This expansion of the idea of Dasein as a being-­towards-death is essential for our understanding of Western climate fiction – simply because in Western climate fiction we also find human beings that interpret their existence in relation to their risk of being killed by other humans. In fact, without this cognitive structure, the uncanny affective structure we have encountered in  several of the hitherto analysed climate fictions is simply not explainable. Furthermore, it is crucial to stress how this uncanny affective structure arises from an interhuman atmosphere where it is not immediately apparent who is friend or foe. This judgment is only possible

36   The social collapse when a threatening object in the form of a fellow human being emerges from the surrounding uncanny atmosphere. That is, when the ‘afraidness’ connected to the uncanny atmosphere that has no particular object as its origin is turned into fear through the appearance of fellow beings revealing themselves as beings-­towards-killing.17

The uncanny relation to the world To further illustrate this, I will now turn to a climate fiction where this aspect is particularly apparent. In the British author Martine McDonagh’s prize-­ winning debut novel I Have Waited, And You Have Come (2012) we find a social and physical climate that constitutes a remarkably gloomy world for human life. McDonagh’s novel revolves around the female first-­person narrator, Rachel, who lives in a corner of England plagued by floods, violent storms and ceaseless rain. That these weather phenomena are due to global warming is suggested in several places. For instance, petrol-­driven cars have been banned, and various sustainable forms of energy have played a central role in the society that once existed in the landscape Rachel inhabits (29, 52). Yet only scattered ruins are left of that society. As in Things We Didn’t See Coming, Far North and “Diary of an Interesting Year”, the novel’s plot unfolds in a future where global warming has led to a rapid reduction in socio-­ political complexity. Hence it is not surprising that the novel brings to light a characteristic of the human being reminiscent of the critical socio-­ anthropological representations discussed earlier in this chapter. One of Rachel’s descriptions of the time before the climatic and social collapse is, in this regard, quite illustrative: In other times the present was seen as an uncomfortable dead spot, an inconvenient moment to be endured in order to access the safety of hindsight. It was this fear of the present and the desire to fast-­forward into a utopian future that forced the world to shift into reverse and move backwards faster than it ever had advanced. (Ibid., 157) It is this desire for progress, or, as it is phrased elsewhere, “the obsessive belief in the value and power of speed” that has led to the civil decline distinctive of the novel’s post-­apocalyptic world (ibid., 54). In other words, the story of Babel can here be glimpsed once again as a part of the cultural-­ historical layer that shapes the utilization of the imagination form. Even though the shattered social contract does not manifest in a breakdown in interhuman communication as in Far North or “Diary of an Interesting Year”, global warming is still represented here as a phenomenon that has not only reversed technological development and reduced socio-­political complexity, but has also reduced human empathy. This is apparent in one of Rachel’s other retrospective musings:

The social collapse   37 People were dying because they no longer knew how to survive. People were killing each other over the possession of a shrivelled potato or a sip of polluted water. People were killing each other out of mercy while they still had the energy to do it, because heat and disease, those omnipresent vultures, rode your shoulder, picked at your living flesh. Thousands, maybe millions, there was no way of knowing, had already died, of malaria, typhoid, starvation, heatstroke, hypothermia, of fear, violence, confusion. The infrastructure, the illusory safety net upon which life had become so dependent, had collapsed. (Ibid., 91) However, it is also important to stress that violence plays a smaller role in I Have Waited, And You Have Come than in Things We Didn’t See Coming, Far North and “Diary of an Interesting Year”. The interhuman violence described above does not figure in the novel’s present. Instead, Rachel lives in almost total isolation from the society of small collectives that surround her. Her only contact is her friend Stephanie located on the other end of a fragile Skype reception in the USA, and the shopkeeper Noah in whom she has a romantic interest. That is, until the mysterious Jez White enters her world. Under the guise of being Noah, White sets up a meeting with Rachel, which she quickly escapes from. Yet afterwards, in her almost total isolation, Rachel becomes fixated with White. When her efforts to find his hiding place bear fruit, she proceeds to live in his house, where she discovers that White has been watching her. But whereas White’s behaviour is motivated by twisted desire, Rachel’s corresponding monomaniac interest in White is driven by paranoia. Hence it is crucial that White never appears threatening towards Rachel, not even when he knows that she lives in his house. The antagonism between them is driven fully by Rachel, who, at the end of the novel, kills White by sticking a rusty umbrella through his eye while he sleeps. After the murder of White, a couple of pages are presented as Noah’s report to the local community about the incident. Here Noah assesses that Rachel has been ill for a long time and that loneliness has driven her to murder (ibid., 172–173). Yet, I will present an expanded interpretation of this event. As I see it, the cause of Rachel’s actions is found in the atmospheric emotional space that comes to light in her descriptions of her own surroundings. This atmospheric emotional space can be seen as acting on two levels that make Rachel’s relation to the world both unhomely and uncanny. On the first level, there is the familiar, yet strangely unhomely atmosphere brought on by climate-­changed weather conditions. On the second, there is the uncanny interhuman atmosphere created by social collapse. When the climate-­changed weather conditions in the novel play a part in creating an atmospheric emotional space that appears unhomely, it is because these conditions form a gloomy world around Rachel. The darkness and the  rain cling almost ceaselessly to the physical horizon that composes the

38   The social collapse sensuous frame of her world. This is already apparent at the start of the novel, where it reads: “I sniff the air; there is rain on the way. There’s always rain on the way” (ibid., 22). This ‘always’ marks a mood that has been affected by the climate-­changed world’s weather conditions. It exposes a hopelessness in a world where further climate change will only worsen the weather conditions enframing human existence. In this way, the collapse of the once-­ known climate creates an atmospheric emotional space around Rachel that not only reflects her emotional life, but also forms it. This is particularly evident in the following passage: “A final burst of yellow light stains the western sky where a sunset might once have promised a fine day to follow” (ibid., 68). In the third volume of his magnum opus, System der Philosophie (1964–1980), which bears the title Der Gefühlsraum (1969), Schmitz argues that the weather’s effect on the human mood is an excellent example of the atmospheric quality of emotions. That is, how they dissolve the Cartesian difference between subject and object and form one affective atmosphere (2005, 361). In this way, Schmitz agrees with Heidegger that moods come neither from within nor without, but arise out of our Being-­in-the-­world yet only insofar that we understand human beings as beings that disclose the world in atmospheric emotional spaces. Similarly, the two examples from Martine McDonagh’s novel discussed above demonstrate that Rachel’s emotions cannot be separated from the space surrounding her. Hopelessness cannot be described as a feeling that solely emerges from herself, but must rather be seen as the fundamental mood of the entire emotional space, which envelops her Being-­in-the-­world. In its hopelessness, this emotional space contains a concrete feeling of what (inspired by Heidegger’s neology ‘uncanniness’) we may call ‘unhomeliness’, as ingrained in this hopelessness is a memory of another climate and therefore another atmospheric emotional space affected by hope. That said, the changed climate constitutes only one of two crucial dimensions of the atmospheric emotional space that the novel brings to light. The dark, rainy weather attached to Rachel’s atmospheric emotional space only becomes uncanny by being part of a world where interhuman trust has broken down. Without this other atmospheric dimension, the gloomy, rainy weather only outlines a mood of unhomely hopelessness rather than an uncanny relation to the world. In other words, the collapse of interhuman trust results in a change of mood in the atmospheric emotional space, since hopelessness moves over into afraidness with this collapse. This is apparent in the novel, when Rachel experiences the darkness in a new way after the social collapse: As a young girl I liked to venture into the quietest darkest places at night, in search of fear. But the dark never scared me; it would wrap itself round me like the arm of an old friend. The more I sought to scare myself, the more protected I felt. Things are changing. (McDonagh 2012, 80)

The social collapse   39 This insecurity does not emerge from the darkness per se, but from the threatening atmosphere of mistrust which the social collapse has brought into the darkness. Thus it is not a threat in the form of an object encountered within-­the-world (which is how Heidegger defined the cause of fear), but a threat attached to the atmosphere constantly clinging to Rachel. Let us therefore recall how Schmitz associated afraidness with an uncanny experience of the entire emotional space which has no apparent origin (i.e. derives from one or more particular threatening objects). In fact, such an uncanny experience does in I Have Waited, And You Have Come not only appear in the portrait of Rachel. When Rachel begins to sleep in White’s house, she discovers that he sleeps with the light on, which brings her to the conclusion: “[he is] a man afraid of the dark […] a man afraid of death” (ibid., 165–166). In other words we get here a form of confirmation that, through its utilization of The Social Collapse, the novel does indeed bring forth a world, in which afraidness is a dominant existential structure. Moreover, this existential structure can be seen as an impetus of further interhuman division and violence, since Rachel’s afraidness leads to a social antipathy that culminates in her murder of White. I will even go as far as saying that Rachel’s murder of White is a culmination of an unbearable stress that comes from her being constantly afraid. Or to put this important point differently: that it is a direct result of her being in a world the entire atmosphere of which is constantly uncanny, but which ‘lacks’ threatening objects encountered within-­the-world. Indeed, it is only by in her paranoia creating such an object (White) that it becomes possible for Rachel to turn her afraidness into fear and thereby eliminate it.18 However, if we look beyond the interesting way I Have Waited, And You  Have Come links irreversible global warming to mental disease, what re-­emerges here is basically a tension, which appeared in all the post-­ apocalyptic climate fictions discussed in this chapter. This is the tension between an interpretation of human existence as a being towards death and an interpretation of human existence as a being towards killing. It is thus not only Rachel who confines herself to a world in which she must interpret her own existence as either a being towards death or a being towards killing. These two modes of existence make up two fundamental ways of being through which all the characters discussed in this chapter had to interpret their worlds. There is therefore a general point to be made about the protagonists of these fictions. They are all thrown into worlds which are – due to the acceleration of anthropogenic global warming – dominated by the existential modus of being-­towards-killing. In fact, it is the prevalence of this modus in their surrounding environment that makes it obvious to the protagonists that their existence is a being-­towards-death. That is, it is this prevalence that anchors them in an interhuman atmosphere of fundamental insecurity that, together with the physical climatic changes, makes their world unhomely uncanny.

40   The social collapse

Notes   1 According to Tainter “a society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of socio-­political complexity” (1988, 4).   2 As many will recall, in Hobbes the constitution of the social contract puts an end to “the state of nature”, in which all humans are virtually at war with each other (1991, 91).   3 The wording ‘great Anthropocene’ is used by the authors of “The Ecomodernist Manifesto” (2015) in their call for an optimistic view on the technological and economic options available for dealing with the Anthropocene.   4 This idea is for example present in Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars (2008), in German social psychologist Harald Welzer’s Climate Wars: Why People Will Be Killed in the 21st Century (Klimakriege. Wofür im 21. Jahrhundert getötet wird, 2010), and in Amer­ican sociologist Christian Parenti’s Tropic of Chaos (2011).   5 In “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts” (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750), his famous essay addressed to the academy in Dijon, Rousseau denied that improvements in art and science would also lead to an improvement in human morality. Such progress, he argued, only aided in corrupting the human being (1987, 5).   6 That the egotistical but necessary behaviour that comes forward in the meeting between the narrator and the infected man is general for the interhuman behaviour in the novel can be discerned from the narrator’s other descriptions. For instance: From what I’ve seen, people usually come to reality and save themselves. Despite all the feelings we think we’ve got for our loved ones and our attachments, when push comes to shove most people figure out how to travel light. (2011, 65)   7 Eva Horn is via her analyses led to a similar point. She writes: “Climate Imagination […] does not just revolve around a change in environment. With the climate, humankind also changes be it by devolving into a prehistoric state […] or by losing any trace of humaneness” (2018, 88).   8 In particular, this applies to the sub-­genre of post-­apocalyptic fictions called ‘survival fiction’. In fictions belonging to this genre, we follow the struggle for survival of one or more protagonists in a post-­apocalyptic world generally devoid of humane behaviour. This is for example the case in Cormac McCarthy’s prize-­ winning novel The Road (2006) and in the film Book of Eli (2010) directed by the brothers Albert and Allen Hughes.   9 For instance, the encounter with the virus-­infected man makes the narrator stop stealing, because “it all suddenly seems barbaric” (Amsterdam 2011, 82). 10 According to Rousseau, in his description of the natural state Hobbes neglected to take into consideration that humans do not like to see fellow humans suffer (1987, 53). Indeed this circumstance prompts Rousseau, in “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (Discours sur l’Origine de l’Inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755), to conclude that humans are in the natural state not cruel or aggressive, but rather empathetic and mild (1987, 64). 11 Theroux draws on this apropos the theory of global dimming, which implies that human emissions of greenhouse gases have already warmed up the atmosphere to the degree that it will have severe consequences to stop such emissions, since air pollution contains some of the heat anthropogenic global warming would create in isolation (Lovelock 2006, 56). 12 This idea has also a strong presence in the social scientific literature on global warming. With reference to future climate change, Welzer claims for example

The social collapse   41 that “violence occurs when there is pressure to take action that will produce results. If these are not forthcoming, new forms of violence are devised – and, if found to be effective, are repeatedly applied” (2012, 4). 13 As this forced labour takes place in Gulag-­like camps, the novel symbolically plays upon the paradox of the locality which Siberia may have in a world of extreme global warming. As Dyer points out in Climate Wars, Siberia may be one of the few places where it is still possible for the human beings to exist in a world radically changed by global warming (2010, 27). 14 In Leviathan, Hobbes underlines that in the state of nature no human can feel secure, since even the weakest can kill the strongest (1991, 87). 15 In Far North this connection is further indicated with the description of the city of Polyn. A modern equivalent to Babel, Polyn is described as a city “that might as well have been built by gods as men”, while in its present post-­apocalyptic state it only makes “a mockery” of Makepeace’s “patched cloth and scavenged food” (Theroux 2009, 191). 16 In extension of Heidegger’s concept of mood, Schmitz argues that emotions exclusively stem neither from the inner life of humans nor from external stimuli. They manifest instead as a colouration of both the inner and the outer, which is why Schmitz characterizes emotions as atmospheric (2005, 52, 100). 17 This understanding of the contradiction between friend and foe can be considered as a precondition for the fits of anxiety, which the first-­person narrator’s afraidness culminated in, in Things We Didn’t See Coming. Indeed, these fits can be seen as a consequence of a constant stressful readiness to defend oneself against a hostile human counterpart, which in the field’s post-­apocalyptic fictions is expected to show itself within the horizon of the climate-­changed worlds’ uncanniness. 18 This is backed by the fact that Rachel’s mental health improves significantly after she has murdered White (McDonagh 2012, 175).

3 The judgment

While the previous chapter focused on how global warming is imagined to influence the relationship between humans, this chapter focuses on how global warming is imagined to influence humanity’s relationship with the non-­human world. That the term ‘non-­human world’ should here be understood in the widest possible sense appears already from the title of the perhaps oldest German climate fiction: Anton-­Andreas Guha’s The Planet Strikes Back (Der Planet schlägt züruck, 1993). Guha’s title encapsulates how the imaginary of ‘a revengeful earth’ – or to use British chemist James Lovelock’s famous term ‘Gaia’ – is frequently present in climate fiction. That said, this presence is not enough to constitute an imagination form by itself. Instead, I will attach this label to the more general imaginary that the destruction caused by anthropogenic global warming marks a decisive ‘crossing’ of a heretofore invisible boundary. That is, a boundary for ‘acceptable coexistence’ that humanity finally crosses through global warming with the result that the non-­ human world judges humanity and returns its violence. This imagination form is of course connected to a narrative template that has a reach beyond climate fiction. Indeed, the imaginary that the destructive manifestations of the non-­human world reveal a judgment of humans is one of the oldest narrative templates in Western culture. However, in climate fiction this imaginary is slightly adjusted. Whereas in many of the earliest stories in Western culture the destructive manifestations of the non-­ human world were imagined as messages from a vindictive God or gods, in climate fiction the judge is the non-­human world itself. Here the non-­ human world both judges and punishes humanity for its abuse in what can essentially be perceived as acts of self-­defence. This is specifically expressed via a transformation in the non-­human world that grants its entities an uncanny animatedness making it impossible to perceived them as mere objects. In fact, we may even say that this transformation liberates them from an identity bestowed upon them since Descartes. Or to frame it a bit differently: what has for a long time been repressed and neglected as insentient objects, in climate fiction returns as animated and revengeful entities. I will describe how this influences the affective and cognitive worlds of the characters in the climate fictions that use The Judgment as their imagination

The judgment   43 form later on, but first I will delve deeper into the cultural history of the form.

The judgment in cultural history It is thus insufficient to characterize The Judgment as one of the oldest narrative templates in Western culture, because this template is intricately linked to two related, but different, types of imaginations. The first is the imagination of catastrophic weather as a judgment. This type of imagination plays a central role in several of the myths which continue to influence Western culture. This is not just the case for the Genesis flood and Plato’s Atlantis myth. It also applies to the oldest story that humanity still has access to, The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 3300 bc), in which humanity is punished for its arrogance with uninterrupted rain for six days and six nights. In general, these myths explicate: […] the idea that human ways have a built-­in tendency towards degeneration. Things naturally drift from bad to worse until, one day, they get so bad that the gods send in the horses of the apocalypse for a right shake­up. To us they’re natural disasters. To the collective psyche – the realm of the ‘gods’ – they’re moral purges – a ‘judgement’! (McIntosh 2008, 129) The words belong to Scottish professor in human ecology, Alastair McIntosh. McIntosh is here worth a reference, because his own take on global warming is a good example of how the narrative template of these myths is still usable as a cognitive schema that can give meaning to global warming. In Hell and High Water. Climate Change, Hope and The Human Condition (2008), McIntosh pursues the argument that the decreasing presence of Christian values in Western culture has led to a lack of humility that manifests as rampant materialism. According to McIntosh, we can dismiss the animism in the above-­mentioned myths as superstition, but should not overlook that their “moral diagnosis – their link between patriarchal pride, violence and the destruction of ecosystems – today speaks to us with a ­prophetic force” (ibid., 138). That said, in his analysis of how these myths may be a warning to a contemporary humanity that is morally at sea, McIntosh misses a substantial cultural historical link. In his focus on flooding-­narratives, he overlooks that in the oldest stories of the West, judgment is also executed by monstrous organisms. The Bible is, for instance, not just a catalogue of catastrophic weather events, but also a horror show of beings that assume monstrous proportions in their judgment and punishment of humanity – the most famous probably being the ten plagues which Yahweh inflicts on the Egyptian people to make the Pharaoh release Moses and the Jews. Besides a hailstorm “such as hath not been in Egypt since the foundation thereof even until

44   The judgment now”, here we also find plagues of gigantic swarms of locusts, frogs, lice and mosquitoes (2012, 160). I’m mentioning this because these two plot elements – judgment executed through catastrophic weather and judgment executed through monstrous organisms – are the two primary ways in which the imagination form of The Judgment manifests itself in climate fiction. This relies considerably on the emergence of a relatively new genre; in eco-­thrillers one often finds monstrous organisms and ecosystems running amok. It therefore offers an ideal format for the fictional application of the imagination form, as it not only enables narrative configurations wherein global warming can manifest as ‘unnatural’ and ‘morally correcting’ weather phenomena. It also enables configurations wherein organisms qua climatic changes are transformed to assume monstrous proportions, so that they can punish and judge humanity for its ecological devastation. Consequently, it is also quite easy to point to more recent examples of these configurations than found in the Bible. For instance, at the inception of the industrial age monstrous and judgment-­executing organisms reappear in gothic and fantastical literature.1 It may therefore not come as a surprise that it is in an analysis of the means deployed by this kind of literature that I find a term fitting to describe the affect the imagination form produces in climate fiction. Thus, in his famous article “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”, 1919) Freud stresses how fantastical literature contains a number of beings and objects whose animation renders the familiar uncanny (2003, 148). However, it is also worth noting that Freud points to two particular reasons as to why fantastical literature invokes an uncanny affect. According to Freud fantastical literature produces this affect not only because its animation of objects and beings confronts modern humans with an “old animistic view” they thought they had long repudiated (ibid., 147). Freud sees, as many readers will know, in this animation also the manifestation of “something that has been repressed and now returns” (ibid.). Although it may not be obvious at first how this latter idea relates to the monstrous organisms and weather phenomena appearing in climate fiction, it is actually a quite useful element for their interpretation, but this has nothing to do with the repression of latent wishes and childhood episodes that psychoanalysts normally pick up on. The repressed that returns in climate fiction’s representations of monstrous organisms and catastrophic weather phenomena is rather what can be termed ‘the inherent life of the non-­human world’. In other words, it is simply the explicit animatedness of something that was conceived as having no agency, no cognition – yes, even – no life. Ingrained in climate fiction, we thus find a barely concealed critique of modernity’s anti-­animistic understanding of the non-­human world as objects which humans have the right to exploit for their own purposes. In fact, it would not be too drastic to say that many climate fictions are explicitly promoting an end to a way of thinking that can be traced back to Descartes’ ­definition of the human being as a thinking being (res cogitas) separated from nature’s extended objects (res extensa).2

The judgment   45 In those climate fictions that employ the imagination form the known is thus often transformed into something uncanny because the non-­human world – that humanity has so far treated as a dead object – suddenly appears to have an agenda of its own. This basically happens because the entities of the non-­human world act either to defend themselves individually or the non-­human world as a whole. In this sense climate fiction is also related to some of the literary and filmic genres that have been influenced by gothic and fantastical literature. For example, the Amer­ican historian Andrew Kirk reminds us how “a generation of Amer­icans born after World War II grew up watching giant nuclear ants or other such mutants of technology destroying humanity” (2001, 378).3 Films like Them and Godzilla (both 1954) are early examples of fictions in which uncanny non-­human beings arise in order to punish a morally lost humanity.4 In these films there is thus a similar mix of animism and critique of human Prometheanism as in the climate fictions I will explore in the rest of this chapter.

The judgment in climate fiction In spite of the close connection between the imagination form and the eco-­ thriller it would, however, be a mistake to ignore the presence of the imagination form in other genres. Just as the form of The Social Collapse was not confined to the post-­apocalyptic genre, The Judgment is not confined to the eco-­thriller. The reason for this is that (as imagination form) The Judgment is capable of more than just encapsulating a non-­human world that expresses its dissatisfaction with humanity via a violent form of judgment. In the climate fictions that deploy the form this dissatisfaction also figures by way of a weak non-­human world, whose judgment can only be delivered to humanity as a non-­violent appeal. The latter is, for example, the case in Nathaniel Rich’s short story “Hermie” (2011). In the short story the first-­person narrator – a climate scientist – is sought out by the crab Hermie, which the narrator played with as a child. Hermie confronts the narrator with the fact that, due to global warming, all animals from the narrator’s childhood are dead, whilst Hermie himself is without a place to be. Hermie therefore asks the narrator if he can stay with him, which leads to the following situation when the narrator refuses: He stared at me, his eyes fixed like little black stones. But I realized he couldn’t possibly be crying. There are no tears ducts on a hermit crab’s eyestalk. ‘I’m sorry, Hermie.’ He didn’t speak for some time. […] I glanced again at my phone. Two minutes left. ‘I have to go.’ (Rich 2011, 98) The symbolism of this scene is obvious, as Hermie’s glance contains both a moral judgment and an appeal that goes beyond the narrator. By referring to the many animals that have died due to global warming, Hermie appears here

46   The judgment as a representative of the whole non-­human world that humanity is failing in its warming of the Earth. And on the other hand, the narrator appears as a representative of a humanity too stressed and selfish to truly care about the consequences of its actions. However, while the short story calls on a rather clichéd interpretation of the affective and cognitive relations to the world that seem to morally derail humans in modernity, the scene does not encapsulate the full sense of how the imagination form is deployed in the short story. Hence, in the otherwise sentimental meeting between the narrator and his old playmate an uncanniness suddenly sneaks in. Because his natural habitat has been destroyed by global warming, Hermie’s shells have grown together in an unnatural way. They form “a monstrosity for which there exists no scientific term” (ibid., 92). Hermie is in other words incarnating a connection between climatic and organic change, which links Rich’s short story to a number of other climate fictions that deploy the imagination form. His monstrosity is simply emblematic of how in climate fiction the non-­human world comes to incarnate the return of the repressed in a manner that uncannily objectifies human guilt. In comparison to the climate fictions that apply the eco-­thriller as their genre the only difference lies in the proportion of the monstrosity. Hence, in these climate fictions (that apply the eco-­thriller as their genre) the proportion of the monstrosity is of such a scale that it tips the power balance in favour of the non-­human world. For example, this is the case in a climate fiction that despite its poor literary quality is of considerable cultural analytical value. In Amer­ican author Kevin E. Ready’s early eco-­thriller Gaia Weeps: The Crisis of Global Warming (1998) the reader is presented with a non-­human world that as a living unit pushes humanity to its knees. This happens most dramatically at the end of the novel, when a tsunami created from gigantic glacier calvings hits many of the most populated areas on Earth. As the tsunami hits, the novel’s main character (Andy Knowles) is forced to passively watch (together with the president of the USA) while the animistic non-­human world takes its revenge on humanity: Here he was, standing next to the man who was the most powerful man on earth. And this man who commanded power and respect worldwide stood, like Andy, as a helpless spectator as the waters rolled in towards his capital city. They were watching like the billions of other human souls as Mother Nature, […] Gaia, wreaked her revenge for the industrial Revolution and the myriad of other insults mankind had exposed her planet to. (Ready 1998, 384) The extract shows how in the eco-­thriller, the monstrous transformation of the non-­human world means a shift in the power balance between the human and non-­human world. However, the reason why Gaia Weeps is analytically

The judgment   47 interesting is more precisely because it also exemplifies the consequences that this shift in power balance often come to have in the eco-­thriller. That is how this shift generally makes it impossible for humanity to reject the non-­ human world’s judgment and resist change. In Gaia Weeps this appears from the fact that the judgment of the non-­human world forces a change in humanity’s affective and cognitive relation to the world. A few pages after the tsunami hits, one can thus read how humanity had now finally learned its “lesson” and how Gaia has restored “the planet’s equilibrium and cleaned up after the excesses of her children” (ibid., 386). In other words what we find here is a Promethean humanity that has been called to order via the application of the imagination form. As the deluge recedes and humanity has been washed clean of its sins, an affective and cognitive relation to the world emerges that is built on humility instead of dominion over the non-­human world. In this sense Ready’s eco-­thriller is rather open about its ties to the cultural historical heritage embedded in the imagination form. However, this does of course not imply that French philosopher Pascal Bruckner is right, when he outlines in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse (Le Fanatisme de l’Apocalypse, 2011), a rather climate sceptic view and portrays global warming as “a new secular religion” (2013, 14).5 It is one thing to show via cultural analysis how the quasi-­object global warming partly consists of narrative fragments that have been imaginatively piled together. It is another is to reduce the factuality of this object to mere myth altogether. Indeed, instead of seeing the linkages between cultural historical narratives and the imagination of global warming as a chance to dismiss the importance of global warming as a real phenomenon, we should rather take this linkage as an imperative to do the opposite. That is, we should see it as an invitation to culturally analytically map all the connections embedded in this linkage in order to learn more about how we as global inhabitants understand and imagine global warming. But back to the analysis, because Gaia Weeps is far from the only climate fiction in which an animistic non-­human world humbles humanity and thereby reinstates balance in their relationship. In several other climate fictions the violence of an animistic and monstrously proportioned non-­human world means that humanity is forced into a reinterpretation of its role in the world: a reinterpretation that leads to a more humble approach to the non-­human world. One explanation for this comes, without doubt, from the strong influence that James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis has had on environmentalism for the last 40 years. Lovelock has thus made himself a spokesperson for the idea that Earth’s biosphere is a living, intelligent system that will not allow humanity’s abuse in the long run. This thesis is, though, only implicitly presented in Lovelock’s first book: Gaia. A New Look at Life On Earth (1979). Here Lovelock describes Earth’s biosphere as an intelligent system which guarantees the biosphere’s overall survival through regulating the planet’s climate (Lovelock 2000, 137). Lovelock has, however, sharpened his argument, as global

48   The judgment warming has accelerated. Humanity’s behaviour is, in later books, presented as a violation that will engender ‘Earth’s self-­defence’. For instance, in The Revenge of Gaia. Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006), he writes: I make no apologies for repeating that Gaia is an evolutionary system in which species, including humans, that persists [sic] with changes to the environment that lessen the survival of its progeny is doomed to extinction. By massively taking land to feed people and by fouling the air and water we are hampering Gaia’s ability to regulate the Earth’s climate and chemistry, and if we continue to do it we are in danger of extinction. We have in a sense stumbled into a war with Gaia, a war that we have no hope of winning. All we can do is to make peace while we are still strong and not a broken rabble. (109) The imagination form is not only present here in the way Lovelock deploys the word ‘doomed’ to describe a humanity whose treatment of the non-­ human world will result in a violent form of judgment. The quote also exemplifies how, in both fiction and philosophy, this imagination is closely tied to an idiom of war – that is, to the imagination that humanity’s maltreatment of the non-­human world will result in a war that will either end in humanity’s capitulation or extinction. To better explain this relation, I turn now to one of the best-­selling climate fictions: the eco-­thriller The Swarm (Der Schwarm, 2004) by German author Frank Schätzing. In The Swarm anthropogenic global warming is, along with various other negative human influences on marine life, what causes a previously unknown underwater creature (the Yrr) to instigate a warfare against humanity (Schätzing 2006, 194). In this warfare the Yrr does not only use the biodiversity of the seas as a weapon. Rather paradoxically, it also brings humanity to heel with the threat of provoking an extreme period of warming that will make Earth uninhabitable for humans in less than a few centuries (ibid., 510). The motive is simple: the Yrr has once and for all had enough of humanity’s abuse of Earth’s ecosystems and its warming of its air and water. The Yrr’s judgment begins when the organisms of the sea suddenly become unrecognizable.6 Whales attack and eat people as their brains are infected with something “that doesn’t belong there” (ibid., 246). Meat-­eating crabs roll over Earth in swarms so big that they resemble the Bible’s description of locusts “that cover the face of the earth [so] that one cannot […] see the Earth” (The Holy Bible, KJV, 162). And this is just to give a few examples, as it is all marine life in general that runs amok. Intelligently controlled by the Yrr, it suddenly appears to be acting with an eeriness that is only intensified when the Yrr finally manifests itself as a liquid substance assuming any shape it wants. Or as Dr Johanson, who is part of the group leading the defence of Earth, explains:

The judgment   49 They don’t need machines or equipment, just genes. Their weaponry consists of organic life-­forms – strategic mutations. I’d say they’re tied to nature in a way that humans aren’t. You can see how they might be far less estranged from their natural environment than we are. […] We’re always talking about the destruction of the rainforests. […] But what if, metaphorically speaking, the yrr are the rainforests? (Schätzing 2006, 586) The point is of course that in contrast to humanity the Yrr exists in an immediate symbiosis with Earth’s ecosystems. The Yrr does not appear as just one side of Descartes’ subject-­object divide, but rather bridges this divide in a manner that reflects Lovelock’s description of how Gaia will react to the declaration of war that humanity has issued through its instrumental treatment of the non-­human world. In this sense, Schätzing’s eco-­thriller is a showcase of how the imagination of a war between humanity and the non-­human world can easily be integrated into the imagination form. This integration follows a turn of events which in The Swarm first contains a declaration of war (humanity’s violence against the non-­human world), then a judgment (the non-­human world’s decision that humanity shall be punished), then a punishment (the execution of the judgment through the uncanny violence of monstrous organisms), and finally war again (as the conflict is recognized by both parties). To this turn of events one may even add a fifth element, which is an armistice. Hence the war between humanity and the non-­human world is also in The Swarm – as it was by Lovelock – framed in a manner that offers humanity no chance of winning. The reason is that humanity is dependent on the non-­human world, so when it is waging war against the non-­human world it is actually waging war against itself. It is therefore a given that the war has to end in the creation of an armistice, a new balance, where humanity accepts the non-­human world’s judgment and improves its behaviour. This happens in The Swarm, when the war rapidly becomes hopeless for humanity. In an attempt to arrange an armistice, before an enormous methane release will initiate extreme global warming, humans pull away from the seas. Indeed, this action paves the way for a new relationship between humanity and the non-­human world, as it installs in humanity an affective and cognitive relation to the world that is once again built on humility. Or as this is framed by one of the characters (Dr Crowe) in the eco-­thriller: We’re not going to get any closer to understand the yrr until we’ve dispensed with the idea that our system of values is the be-­all and end-­all of the universe. We have to cut ourselves down to size – to what we really are: just one among an infinite number of possible species, with no special claim to being anything more. (Ibid., 581) In this way the war between humanity and the non-­human world comes to function as the passage through which humanity re-­learns to sense and

50   The judgment interpret itself as just one earthly being among many. Thus what we find here is a clear rejection of the anthropocentrism that can be traced back to Descartes and the advent of modernity. In fact, this anthropocentrism is in the conclusion of The Swarm presented as a path that can no longer be taken, but must be replaced by an ecocentrism in which humanity once again comes to interpret itself as part of a bigger whole.7 This is central for how the imagination form is applied in The Swarm: events (judgment, punishment and war) are only initiated to lead humanity into a sustainable relationship with the biosphere via a return to an animistic worldview. The Yrr’s aggressions thus lead humanity to a similar affective and cognitive relation to the world that the Yrr enjoys in its symbiosis with the biosphere. Or to put it differently: the Cartesian objectification of the non-­human world is at the end of the eco-­thriller replaced by a view of the non-­human world that acknowledges its Gaia-­like agency.

Serres, Latour and the imagination form The Swarm’s ending leads us – perhaps rather unexpectedly – towards philosophy, because its plot forms a pattern that is very similar to the argument presented in one of the first philosophical works to deal with anthropogenic global warming: Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract (Le contrat naturel, 1990). In The Natural Contract Serres deploys the imagination form in order to propose a new symbiotic interpretation of the relationship between humanity and the non-­human world. An early proponent of the idea that humanity’s rational treatment of the non-­human world must be understood as violence, Serres warns his readers that this violence may return and “condemn us all together […] to automatic extinction” in the shape of global warming (1995, 14). In his unfolding of this argument Serres turns – like Schätzing did in The Swarm – to an idiom of war. He claims that via its Cartesian relation to the world humanity has declared war against the non-­ human world, or as it reads in The Natural Contract: “Cartesian mastery brings science’s objective violence into line, making it a well-­controlled strategy. Our fundamental relationship with objects comes down to war and property” (ibid., 32). However, in contrast to events in The Swarm this realization should not lead humanity back to a more deferential understanding of its role in the world, according to Serres. It should, instead, encourage humanity to set up some ground rules that take into consideration how humans have become global beings. Serres is in this regard particularly critical of the ecological dimension in Heidegger’s thinking, which will be discussed further in Chapter 5. In particular, Heidegger’s description in Being and Time of Dasein as a presence that takes care of its immediate surroundings, can for Serres no longer be an ideal of how humans should treat the non-­human world. The reason for this is that Heidegger’s description is no longer fitting in a world where humans are no longer local beings, a ‘being-­there’ (i.e. Dasein), but

The judgment   51 rather a “being-­everywhere” (L’être-partout) that can shake Earth in its entirety (ibid., 20). In this respect global warming shows, according to Serres, how an entrenched power relation that used to be has been turned on its head. Humanity was previously subject to the climate and natural forces, but humanity now has such a profound influence that it has become a driver of geophysical transformations. It has seemingly ‘won’ against the climate and the natural forces, but Serres points out that this victory is only superficial, because “people are dying of hunger in the desert just as they are suffocating in the slimy quicksand or drowning in the rising rivers. Conquered, the world is finally conquering us” (ibid., 11–12). Thus, it is Serres’ analysis that humanity’s victory over the non-­human world is now returning as a judgment on humanity itself. Indeed, it is in the light of this analysis that Serres proposes a new ‘natural contract’ between humanity and the non-­human world. He describes this contract as: An armistice contract in the objective war, a contract of symbiosis, for a symbiont recognizes the host’s rights, whereas a parasite – which is what we are now – condemns to death the one he pillages and inhabits, not realizing that in the long run he’s condemning himself to death too. (Ibid., 38) In this way The Natural Contract contains a conclusion similar to the outcome in The Swarm, as it frames the natural contract as an inevitable end to the unwinnable war that humanity has declared against the non-­human world. Serres’ idea that a natural contract must supplement ‘the social contract’ should in this regard be perceived as a response to the circumstance that the non-­human world is (metaphorically speaking) beginning to voice itself.8 Via catastrophic phenomena such as the tornados, droughts, forest fires, etc. that global warming engenders, the non-­human world is speaking back to us. And with a discontent that we should take deadly serious. In fact it should, according to Serres, incite us to make peace with the non-­human world and replace our Cartesian ontology of dominion with an ontology of symbiosis. Moreover, approaching Serres’ arguments in this way enables us to track his contribution to the imagination form and the philosophical interpretation of global warming. Thus, this idea of a non-­human world speaking back to humanity in the form of ecological disasters is even more present in the works of Serres’ most famous successor, Bruno Latour. In many of Latour’s texts global warming is presented as a phenomenon that illuminates the existence of a new communication relation. Hence whereas Descartes and his modern successors objectified the non-­human world into silence, we are according to Latour now witnessing a non-­human world ‘communicating’ with humanity through threats of throwing humanity’s living conditions into decay. This interpretation is already indirectly found in the introduction of We Have Never Been Modern (Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, 1991). Here Latour

52   The judgment explains the reasons for the growing concern for the general health of the planet – including global warming – in the late 1980s, in the following manner: By seeking to reorient man’s exploitation of man toward an exploitation of nature by man, capitalism magnified both beyond measure. The repressed returns, and with a vengeance: the multitudes that were supposed to be saved from death fall back into poverty by the hundreds of millions; nature, over which we were supposed to gain absolute mastery, dominates us in an equally global fashion, and threatens us all. It is a strange dialectic that turns the slave into man’s owner and master, and that suddenly informs us that we have invented ecocides as well as large-­ scale famine. (1993, 8) This passage clearly echoes Serres’ description of global warming as a judgment that dialectically returns humanity’s violence towards the non-­human world to its original sender. And this in a manner that links this dialectic to Freud, i.e. to the return of the repressed and the non-­human world’s transformation from something homely (i.e. in agreement with Cartesian ontology) to something uncanny (i.e. not in agreement with Cartesian ontology). That said, in Latour’s oeuvre this application of the imagination form is integrated into a more complex web of meaning. Hence the question is not so much whether the imagination form migrates from Serres’ to Latour’s philosophy. But rather: how the imagination form deepens our interpretation of global warming in this process. An initial answer to this question may be that in Serres’ philosophy, the apocalyptic threat of The Judgment prompts (in the shape of ‘the natural contract’) an attempt to re-­establish a harmonious relationship between the two sides of the Cartesian divide, while, in Latour’s philosophy, it prompts the conclusion that this divide should be abolished altogether, indeed, does not exist. Thus, according to Latour, what the uncanny return of the non-­human world reveals to us – e.g. in the shape of the catastrophic events that global warming engenders – is that the division between nature and society that Cartesian philosophy produces never really existed in the first place and that we have therefore ‘never been modern’. Hence what this return makes painfully evident is that humanity’s actions in one of these domains (society) have consequences in the other (nature). It is thus this interpretation which, in We Have Never Been Modern and later in Politics of Nature (Politiques de la nature, 1999), prompts Latour to go much further than Serres in his appeal that we begin to ‘listen’ to the non-­human world. At a time (the Anthropocene) where the non-­human world has, in the form of disasters and ecological crises, again begun ‘talking to us’ – i.e. violently demanding our attention – it is according to Latour thus pivotal that  we grant it a stronger political influence. This regards in particular

The judgment   53 q­ uasi-­objects that do not conclusively belong to the non-­human world, since they are partly anthropogenic. For Latour the next step is therefore not to implement Serres’ natural contract, as (ontologically) it still hinges on a division between humanity and the non-­human world. It is instead about creating a forum where the countless mediating “actants” that connect society and nature, politics and science in quasi-­objects are represented (2004, 75).9 In We Have Never Been Modern Latour names this forum ‘the Parliament of Things’ and describes its function in the following manner: In its confines, the continuity of the collective is reconfigured. There are no more naked truths, but there are no more naked citizens, either. The mediators have the whole space to themselves. The Enlightenment has a dwelling-­place at last. Natures are present, but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name. Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their ballast from time immemorial. Let one of the representatives talk, for instance, about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical industry, a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another the voters of New Hampshire, a fifth the meteorology of the polar regions; let still another speak in the name of the State; what does it matter, so long as they are all talking about the same thing, about a quasi-­object they have all created, the object-­ discourse-nature-­society whose new properties astound us all and whose network extends from my refrigerator to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy, and satellites. (1993, 144) We should thus imagine a political assembly, where everything from polar bears, rare insects and the biggest industrial companies voice their opinion through representatives. All such actants must, according to Latour, be politically heard in order to minimize the risk that quasi-­objects (i.e. assemblages of the human and the non-­human) appear as messengers of an apocalyptic judgment. While under the modern Constitution the instrumental violence against the non-­human world could be suppressed until the repressed returned in an uncanny manner, the Parliament of Things can be seen as a bulwark against such unpleasant surprises. Yet, this does not mean that Latour’s thinking is in line with deep ecology and its inherent desire to save all species. It becomes clearer in Politics of Nature than it was in We Have Never Been Modern that Latour imagines the discussion ongoing in the Parliament of Things as an open process. This means that it is not given in advance which actants should continue to be part of the collective of human and non-­human beings that are represented in the Parliament of Things.10 This is illustrated in Politics of Nature by the fact that Latour divides the Parliament into two chambers. The upper chamber is to ensure that all actants are heard, while the lower chamber is subsequently to “judge” which actants can have a place in the collective (2004, 145). Latour

54   The judgment imagines this ‘judging process’ of the lower chamber as a process in which the Parliament of Things will have to be assembled again and again to decide which new actants should be invited into the collective and which actants it should no longer include (ibid., 80).11 This does of course beg the critical question whether it is – via such a process – actually practically possible to arrive at “the common world”, Latour imagines (ibid., 47). Not least because Latour – despite the notion that the Parliament should be able to deny certain actants access to the collective and thereby principally judge them to extinction – maintains that non-­human beings should not be perceived as means, but as ends. Following in the steps of Hans Jonas, Latour insists that Kant’s moral law must at least provisionally be extended in such a manner that the Parliament’s judging process does not just result in a return to the modern Constitution, or as he writes: Ecological crises, as we have interpreted them, present themselves as generalized revolts of the means: no entity – whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood – agrees any longer to be treated ‘simply as a means’ but insists on being treated ‘always also as an end.’ (Ibid., 155–156) It is thus clear that Latour in his attempt to imagine a new constitution (executed by the Parliament of Things) is still battling with the imagination form. In this sense the problem he seeks to resolve is basically the same in Politics of Nature as it was in We Have Never Been Modern. This problem can be framed as follows: Actants can be brought to silence, but will as quasi-­objects then ultimately return so loudly that they are no longer possible to ignore.12 For the same reason the Parliament of Things can in its judgment of actants not compromise with its founding principles just to increase its efficiency as this would not only mark a return to the anthropocentric domination of the modern Constitution, but also mark a return to the risky negligence of quasi-­ objects. Instead Politics of Nature rests on the idea that it is not possible to determine once and for all which actants will develop into monstrous quasi-­objects and thereby threaten the collective. Framing the assemblage of the collective as a continuous process is, however, not the only step Latour envisions as a necessary bulwark against this uncertainty. To optimize the protection of the collective will also require a new epistemological understanding, which is why Latour insists that the Parliament’s judging process must depart from “matters­of-concern” instead of “matters-­of-fact” (2005, 19). This basically means that Latour rejects the idea of an armistice capable of creating an end to the war between humanity and non-­human world, i.e. totally neutralizing the threat coming from various quasi-­objects. According to Latour, war will still be the default state for the relationship between the collective and the quasi-­objects despite the new constitution with its two-­tier Parliament. The collective therefore also is conscious that new quasi-­objects, new dangerous enemies,

The judgment   55 may constantly arise which will challenge the existence of the collective, or as Latour writes: “Since gradually becoming a cosmos has no end, there is thus, for political ecology, no Apocalypse to fear: it comes back home, to the oikos, to ordinary dwellings, to banal existence” (2004, 192). In this way, one could say that Latour indirectly solves the problem inherent in the imagination form, and which still reigned in Serres’ philosophical take on global warming. By replacing the stasis of Cartesian ontology with an ontology based on immanent composition (i.e. assemblages consisting of both human and non-­human actants), Latour places global warming within a new context that indirectly antiquates the imagination form of The Judgment. Hence the monstrous violence of quasi-­objects is within this context no longer imagined as the unexpected emergence of uncanny quasi-­objects, whose violent judgment risks containing an apocalyptic message. This violence is instead imagined as something homely, as something that ‘comes back […] to the oikos, […] to […] banal existence’, because it will already be expected by a Parliament of Things in a state of constant vigilance.

Another uncanny relation to the world Latour’s thinking is, however, not only important for this study because it shows how the imagination form materializes in contemporary philosophy. It also provides a useful toolbox for interpreting the most significant worlds and relations to the world that appears in Western climate fiction. This is for instance the case with Roland Emmerich’s disaster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004). The viewer, in the opening of the film, is confronted with an ontology that unmistakably resembles the Cartesian ontology that underlines the modern Constitution. Thus, when the protagonist, climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), warns an assembly of leading politicians and scientists of the danger of transgressing climatic tipping points at a UN-­summit in New Delhi, he is interrupted by the Amer­ican vice-­president (Kenneth Welsh). The central part of their dialogue proceeds as follows: Hall:  If

we do not act soon, our children and grandchildren will have to pay the price. Vice-­president:  And who’s going to pay the price of the Kyoto Accord? It would cost the world’s economy hundreds of billions of dollars. Hall:  With all due respect, Mr Vice-­president, the cost of doing nothing could be even higher. Our climate is fragile. Vice-­president:  Professor Hall, our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment. The modern Constitution is here clearly present in the vice-­president’s understanding of the natural sciences and the economy as two separate domains. Indeed, it is this understanding that instigates the imagination form’s

56   The judgment appearance in the film. Incarnating humanity’s violation of the laws of the non-­human world, the vice-­president’s rejection of Hall’s warning thus functions as the symbolic hubris that triggers the execution of The Judgment. Before I discuss how The Judgment more precisely emerges in the film, I will, however, make a short return to the notion of the uncanny. The reason for this is that the film affirms the relevance of both Heidegger’s and Freud’s understanding of the term. In the film the uncanny thus appears as an affective atmosphere saturating the whole horizon as well as a feeling caused by specific (quasi-)objects. For instance, in the beginning of the film the uncanny appears first and foremost as an affective atmosphere. During the UN Summit the temperature drops to way below freezing point in New Delhi. In other words: the world of the film’s central characters here presents itself – despite its recognizability – as weirdly transformed i.e. unhomely. The transformation is at this point not connected to particular threatening objects, but rather to the setting. One may say that it works as an uncanny warning that something is fundamentally wrong, as the physical change within the characters’ horizons also entails an affective change in their relation to the world. Hence the uncanniness stemming from the unhomely transformation of their whole horizon soon recedes to be replaced with an uncanniness that relates directly to threatening quasi-­ objects (i.e. objects they encounter within-­the-world). Almost immediately after the summit in New Delhi myriads of uncanny quasi-­objects take the stage, as all kinds of phenomena – stretching from hailstorms capable of killing humans to vicious swarms of incredibly destructive tornados – cause disarray around the world. The introduction of these uncanny quasi-­objects then gradually accelerates into a crescendo where New York is not only flooded, but also ravaged by one of three gigantic storms, whose “eyes” (i.e. centres) contain “supercool air” that instantly freezes people to death. I mention this because via the depiction of the storm it becomes clear that the non-­human world is endowed with agency. One scene that illustrates this particularly well plays out when Jack Hall’s son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhall), and two of his friends, try to return to New York’s central public library (their temporary safe haven) after they have found some lifesaving medicine for the girl Sam is romantically interested in. Having barely escaped a pack of hungry wolves on the deserted supertanker where they find the medicine, Sam and his friends are literally chased by one of the storms on their way back to the library. As its eye moves closer and closer to Sam and his friends and everything around them begins to freeze, the soundtrack of the film is dominated by the snarling of something that sounds like a very large and very angry animal. The point is of course that Emmerich takes full advantage of the animistic metaphor: ‘the eye of the storm’ in order to create the (uncanny) feeling that the non-­human world has come alive with the intention to judge humanity. At this point in the film it is certainly no longer possible for any of its characters to relegate the non-­human world to ‘the dead objects’ of ­Cartesian ontology. This is especially clear towards the end, where the

The judgment   57 v­ ice-­president, who has now become president, acknowledges that the modern (Cartesian) world view that he represented in the beginning of the film has proved to be untenable. In a speech broadcast to the whole world he states: These past few days have left us all with a profound sense of humility in the face of nature’s destructive power. For years, we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet’s natural resources, without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong. This apology reveals both a cognitive and affective change in humanity’s general relation to the world. Cognitively it embeds a transformation in which the two domains (nature and society) that were interpreted as separate in the beginning of the film, now are understood as inseparable. Affectively it entails a new-­found human humility. Thus we are, in The Day After Tomorrow (as in so many other climate fictions that deploy the imagination form), once again left with a Promethean humanity which has been disciplined by the non-­human world. The animated, monstrous, and therefore uncanny non-­human world we find in the film in this way serves the same purpose as in Gaia Weeps and The Swarm. It re-­establishes the old power structure, where the non-­human world was more powerful than humanity. Indeed, this change not only forces humanity into an interpretation of the non-­human world that leads to the same symbiotic equilibrium as in Serres’ natural contract. At the end of the day, this change also saves humanity, as it enables it to realize that it has gone too far in its exploitation of the non-­human world and impose a moral judgment on itself.

The judgment as a denial of responsibility As we shall now see this plot-­structure is, however, not the only possibility the imagination form offers. While The Judgment is deployed in climate fiction primarily to question and adjust humanity’s relationship with the non-­ human world, it also enables the pursuit of a more self-­conscious form of exploration. This is, for instance, the case in Liz Jensen’s acclaimed eco-­ thriller The Rapture (2009). In The Rapture Jensen uses the mythical and religious resonances embedded in The Judgment as a means to criticize its deployment and thereby sheds light on an important psychological aspect of anthropogenic global warming. Jensen’s novel does this by confronting its readers with a lead character who is a medium for a living Earth suffering from the stresses of human exploitation – among these, anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, the suspense of the thriller is created around a plot in which it is quite unclear whether or not the main character, the teenage girl Bethany Krall, is actually in telepathic communication with the Earth. When we first meet her – through the novel’s first-­person narrator, psychiatrist Gabrielle Fox – Bethany is thus in a psychiatric ward for killing her mother.

58   The judgment From inside the ward she shares with Fox how, after treatments with electroconvulsive therapy, she is haunted by visions of catastrophic destruction. Fox initially rejects these visions as psychotic hallucinations, but gradually becomes convinced of their validity, as the visions one after another materialize into real events. Scared of the final apocalyptic event Bethany has foreseen, Fox frees Bethany in order to prevent a gigantic methane release. However, it is too late, as they arrive at the site of the event just in time to witness an international gas company setting off the release. The release is apocalyptic in more than one sense, as it instantly creates a tsunami of fire that traverses Earth and simultaneously locks humanity in a world where global warming can no longer be stopped. In this way, humanity brings upon itself a world that does not only feel as unhomely as it feels uncanny, but in which these affective relations to the world have become a permanent and inescapable part of existence. The world created by the methane release is at the end of the novel thus portrayed as a world where humans have lost the architectonic shells (i.e. homely spheres) that previously made them feel protected. In fact, it is portrayed as a world in which humans will long into the future not only be unable to find sufficient shelter against an ungenerous climate, but also be ruthlessly exposed to interhuman violence. This is depicted when the pregnant Fox describes the post-­ apocalyptic world (Bethanyland) that the methane release has left her, her unborn child and a few other survivors in: There will be no green fields in Bethanyland, no safe place for a child to play. Nothing but hard burnt rock and blasted earth, a struggle for water, for food, for hope. A place where every day will be marked by the rude, clobbering battle for survival and the permanent endurance of regret, among the ruin of all we created and invented, the busted remains of the marvels and commonplaces we have dreamed and built, strived for and held dear: food, shelter, myth, beauty, art, knowledge, material comfort, stories, gods, music, ideas, ideals, shelter. […] A world I want no part of. A world not ours. (Jensen 2009, 341) Consequently, one could admittedly be inclined to think that it would make more sense to place The Rapture with the climate fictions I dealt with in the previous chapter. Yet, it is my opinion that this would not be viable. The reason is that the imagination form of The Social Collapse is only deployed on the final pages of the novel. Up until to this point the novel devotes, as I have already claimed, much more energy to the disclosure of how The Judgment psychologically offers a way for humans to avoid responsibility. For instance, this theme is explored by the novel via Bethany’s connection to her father: a priest from a revivalist church that preaches a form of Armageddon called ‘The Rapture’. ‘The Rapture’ is described by Bethany as the day where the righteous believers are carried up to God, while the sinful are left in hell

The judgment   59 on Earth. Here the sinful must go through seven years of plagues, before human life will finally cease to exist (ibid., 137). However, at the end of the novel, the plagues awaiting humanity are revealed as having a strictly secular cause, namely humanity’s endless exploitation of the Earth System (symbolized by the gas company setting off the methane release). Moreover, when Fox and Bethany witness the monstrous tsunami of fire, they are at first rescued by a helicopter (ibid., 339). In other words, what in the religious language of Bethany’s father was phrased as God’s saving of the righteous, turns out to be a purely secular event. What this lays bare in a very satirical manner is basically the seductive danger inherent in the imagination form. In fact, it affirms a conclusion that Fox arrives at some 30 pages before the methane release. Driving towards the site where the methane release will later take place, Fox reaches a form of secular epiphany: A tiny brown spider is making its way along the dashboard. Sometimes, as a young girl, I’d squash small creatures, from a mixture of boredom and curiosity. Following its stumbling progress towards the air filter, and contemplating what I could or could not do, at this moment, to radically alter the course of its tiny, unaware life, I realize the extent of my mistake in accepting the grandiose notion that Earth’s plight is man’s punishment. That all we have wished for in modern times, and engendered in the getting, is affront to some invisible principle of ethics. Nature is neither good nor motherly nor punitive nor vengeful. It neither blesses nor cherishes. It is indifferent. Which makes us as expendable as the dodo or the polar bear. (Ibid., 308) This interpretation marks a change in Fox’s cognitive relation to the world and embeds a ‘secularization of the imagination form’, which matches a similar interpretation reached by Bethany. Just prior to Fox’s epiphany, Bethany reveals the conditions that made her kill her mother. She explains how she was both physically and mentally abused by her religious parents, because her visions made it impossible for her to believe in “God, the Bible, Genesis, the whole bag of shit” (ibid., 273). Or as she says to Fox: “They expect you go on believing it even when you know, you know” (ibid.). Indeed, this sentence is particularly interesting, because it contains an echo of Leibniz’s famous theodicy question. But only to a certain extent. Hence the question it indirectly poses is not: How can one believe in God in a world that contains so much evil? It is rather: How it is possible to believe in God, when humanity has gained the power to destroy what is claimed to be God’s creation? The conclusion Bethany draws (from her visions) is thus that God is superfluous in a world where humanity is ‘flashing’ an apocalyptic power that used to be strictly associated with the divine. In fact, The Rapture thereby embraces a take on the imagination form that we also encounter in

60   The judgment Serres. In Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Eclairecissements, 1992) Serres, who wrote his PhD dissertation on Leibniz, claims that with anthropogenic global warming the theodicy is placed in a new context. When Latour (i.e. the co-­author of the book) asks Serres why he believes that the theodicy has been almost emptied out, he replies: Here’s what’s new: this cycle is ending for the obvious reason that it has exhausted the list of possible accused parties – the small change remaining from the former single accused party, the God whom the Theodicy put in the place of Satan, the former author of all evil. Each one of us, and finally everyone, will have his turn as accused. […] By this global result: evil, hate, or violence has every object, but no subject. Rain, hail, and thunder fall on everyone, without there being a hand that dispenses them or controls the electrical current. Active evil is conjugated like an impersonal verb: it is raining, it is freezing, it is thundering. (Serres and Latour 1995, 191) What Serres is here aiming at is a consequence of the ontological development that has turned human existence from a local presence to a being-­ everywhere, because this development means that evil must now not only be understood as something that springs from “everyone and no one” (ibid.) but also be understood as something that materializes as quasi-­objects. That is, as something ‘conjugated like an impersonal verb’, but which still stems from the being-­everywhere that human existence has become. The Rapture advances a similar message, although the emphasis is here more strongly placed on the human responsibility that this new situation entails. Indeed, it can be claimed that in its depiction of apocalypse as a purely secular event the novel poses what we may call an ‘anthropodicy’ question. This question reads: Is humanity actually entitled to exist in a world that it is not only about to destroy for itself, but also for most non-­human beings? The fact that Bethany throughout the novel tries to commit suicide and at its end finally succeeds, can in this regard be considered a rejection of such an entitlement – and thereby as an affirmation of the most radical judgment that humanity can impose on itself.

Notes   1 Valdine Clemens has described this literature as “a pocket”, in which industrialization’s objectification of the natural world meets resistance in the form of an animism that connects humanity with its “archaic past” (1999, 5).   2 This link to Descartes is often used in ecocriticism and eco-­philosophy (Garrard 2004, 61). For example, Australian philosopher Val Plumwood has illustrated how Cartesian philosophy has contributed to a perception of the natural world as “pure matter” that can be shaped according to human will (2010, 38).   3 Valdine Clemens also emphasizes that there has been a tendency in science fiction to contrast an increasingly technology dominated world with a monstrous animistic natural world (1999, 213).

The judgment   61   4 Global warming in itself opens for a literary production of mutated nature. One example is the Amer­ican author Perla Sarabia Johnson’s debut eco-­thriller Global Warning (2008). Here a number of animals mutate to gigantic proportions because of global warming and they then begin killing humans.   5 Bruckner’s main point is that the concern regarding global warming has developed into a suppressing ideology, which he terms “Ecologism” (l’écologie) (2013, 18). According to Bruckner this ideology has several common denominators with religious fanaticism.   6 The cause of this uncanny transformation is not initially explained in The Swarm, as its uncovering becomes the driving force of the eco-­thriller’s plot.   7 This becomes apparent in the following dialogue between Dr Johanson and another character (Li), where Johanson clearly refers to Descartes in his description of the difference between humans and the Yrr: ‘We’re determined not to be animals. On the other hand our body is our temple, but on the other we despise it for being mere machinery. We’ve become accustomed to valuing mind over body. We feel nothing but contempt for the factors relating to our physical survival.’ ‘But for the yrr this division doesn’t exist,’ Li mused. […] ‘Body is mind, and mind is body.’ (2006, 756–757)   8 Serres is here referring to Rousseau’s Le contrat social (1762), where Rousseau poses the idea of a social order that can prevent civil war. It is thus this contract between people that according to Serres must be expanded, so that it also comes to include the non-­human world. In The Natural Contract Serres argues for this at one point with an analogy to mountain climbing. The climbers are not only connected to each other through a rope (a metaphor of the social contract); they are also connected to the Earth and mountainside that they attach themselves to with their climbing picks (a metaphor of the natural contract) (1995, 104–105).   9 Latour use the term ‘actants’ instead of actors, because this term, as he writes in Politics of Nature, is clearer than the anthropocentric term actors to emphasize that it also includes non-­human beings. 10 The collective is “to be distinguished first of all from society”, as it is the concept Latour deploys to describe the unified collection of humans and non-­human beings (2004, 238). 11 To be more precise, Latour argues that it will be of vital importance that the collective understands itself as a liquid “composition”, because the actants continuously engage in new connections with each other, which as quasi-­objects can threaten the collective (2010, 474). 12 Latour draws in this description on the notion ‘noise’ (bruit), which plays an important role in Serres’ philosophy. For Serres, who develops this notion as early as in The Parasite (Le parasite, 1980), noise is “the third” element in all communications (1982, 53). It is therefore clear for Serres, as it becomes for Latour, that in the relationship between humanity and the non-­human world there is an element of noise, i.e. threats coming from quasi-­objects.

4 The conspiracy

It would be a serious mistake if – in its presentation of the most prevalent imagination forms in Western climate fiction – this book was to ignore the impact of climate denial. After all, there are quite a few people on this Earth who, in the words of Amer­ican senator James Inhofe, believe that: “With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science it could be that man-­ made global warming is the greatest hoax ever” (Pearce 2010, 83). The intention of this chapter is therefore to show how anthropogenic global warming is in climate fiction imagined as a phenomenon connected to conspiracy. However, what makes this imagination a prevalent imagination form in Western climate fiction is not just its incarnation in dismissive conspiracy theories. In fact, the imagination form of The Conspiracy appears quite often in a shape that covers the real threat anthropogenic global warming poses to humanity. Moreover, the conspiracies appearing in Western climate fiction are not solely the work of “an organisation made up of individuals or groups [that] is acting covertly to achieve some malevolent end” (Barkun 2003, 3). As this definition is too narrowly focused on conspiracy as an instrument of evil, I will on the following pages instead understand conspiracy as “a secret plan on the part of a group to influence events partly by covert action” (Pigden 2006, 20). In Western climate fiction we find conspiracies intended to benefit both the common good and covert political and economic self-­ interest. But what is even more interesting about the imagination form is that its application brings forth worlds where (what Latour calls) the modern Constitution temporarily breaks down. My attention will therefore be focused on how these worlds transform the affective and cognitive relations of their inhabitants.

The conspiracy in cultural history Before I focus on these worlds, let me however first take a brief detour to the domain of cultural history, as in contemporary cultural studies conspiracy theory is often framed as a relatively recent phenomenon.1 This interpretation appears, however, to be without warrant if we consult one of the most influential thinkers of conspiracy theory in the twentieth century. Thus, in his

The conspiracy   63 essay “Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences” (1948), Karl Popper gives the following definition of conspiracy theory: It is the view that whatever happens in society – including things which people as a rule dislike, such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages – are the result of direct design by some powerful individuals or groups. This view is very widespread, although it is, I have no doubt, a somewhat primitive kind of superstition. It is older than historicism (which may even be said to be a derivative of the conspiracy theory); and in its modern form, it is the typical result of the secularization of religious superstitions. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies were responsible for the vicissitudes of the Trojan War is gone. But the place of the gods on Homer’s Olympus is now taken by the Learned Elders of Zion, or by the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists. (2000, 341–342)2 According to Popper, conspiracy theories rest, in other words, on an antique imagination that takes secular events to be metaphysically orchestrated, i.e. construed as negatively experienced events emanating from divine schemes hidden from human understanding. On the basis of Popper’s description we may therefore add that the Bible – despite its monotheism – contains similar schemes. For instance, when Eve is tempted by the snake or when Jesus is tempted by the devil in the desert, there is a narrative template applied much like the one Popper argues is used in Homer. Hence these stories also contain the imagination of a hidden plan orchestrating events with negative consequences or malicious intent. However, my emphasis of these connections does not mean that I uncritically accept Popper’s framing of conspiracy theories as superstition. As the philosopher Lee Basham has noted, it seems legitimate to take a more pragmatic approach to whether conspiracies are in fact real (2006a, 64).3 Basham is, however, only tentatively describing a problem that appears on a deeper level for the cultural researcher. This problem is that when Popper makes the conspiracy theory analogous with superstition, he prevents it from containing any valuable insights outside of this comparison. In fact, it indirectly renders cultural studies on conspiracy theories unproductive, since within Popper’s theory conspiracy theories are framed as pure myths. On the one hand we should therefore acknowledge Popper’s acuity in pointing out how conspiracy theories are historically tied to some of the oldest narratives in Western culture. On the other we should take his definition lightly and use it as the starting point of a more constructive reflection about how conspiracy theories can actually enhance our understanding. One can, of course, answer this question like Basham does and say it would be ignorant to conceive all conspiracy theories as being superstition, because conspiracies do sometimes actually occur. But as my emphasis is not on conspiracies as such, but on representations of conspiracies in fiction, I feel

64   The conspiracy obliged to approach this question from a different perspective. From this perspective, the configurations of conspiracies in climate fiction are not just analytically interesting because they tell us something about how anthropogenic global warming is shaped in the Western imagination. They are also interesting because they offer a symbolic explication of real scientific issues. In particular, they draw an interesting comparative context to the alleged scandal which in the final months of 2009 was named ‘Climategate’. This scandal took off when more than 1,000 emails stolen from The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit appeared on several North Amer­ican blogs. From the mails it seemed that leading IPCC scientists had been discussing in secret how certain scientific articles that downplayed the consequences of human influence on the climate could be left out of IPCC’s reports and prestigious journals. For instance, one of the allegedly most compromising mails – sent by Phil Jones, the leader of The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit to the climatologist Mike Mann with the subject line ‘HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL’ – contained the following sentences: I can’t see either of these papers [two papers that questioned some of IPCC’s former conclusions] being in the next IPCC report. […] I will keep them out somehow – even if [I] have to redefine what peer review literature is! (Pearce 2010, 138) Although Phil Jones and the other implicated scientists were exonerated from scientific misconduct by both an internal and a public review commission, Climategate did, at least in the short term, bruise the IPCC’s credibility (ibid., 221–222). But as Latour has later pointed out, it also disclosed – even if most people did not seem to recognize it – how climate science contains an element of “composition” (2010, 478). For instance, in the sentences from Jones’ mail highlighted above, anthropogenic global warming does not just appear as an object for objective (apolitical) science to investigate, but also as a narrative construction and political instrument. In this sense the email illuminates a much less divided reality than the one assumed to uphold the modern Constitution. This is interesting, because this is an epistemological issue that again and again emerges in the climate fictions that apply the imagination form. In these fictions conspiracy is exactly what brings the entangled and complicated relationship between science and politics, truth and ideology to light. However, it is one thing to conclude that in climate fiction conspiracy shakes the modern Constitution and thereby displays its vulnerability. Another is how this function is activated within the various plots that the application of the imagination form encourages.

The conspiracy   65

Doomsday atmospheres So let me begin my analyses by turning to a plot in which the conspiracy takes on a rather classic form. In Arthur Herzog’s thriller Heat (1977) a small group of high-­ranking staff in the Amer­ican state administration fail in their attempt to hide a prognosis that shows anthropogenic global warming will spin out of control. On the surface the conspiracy fails because the thriller’s protagonist – the scientist Lawrence Pick – fights to have the state administration approve the validity of the prognosis. But underneath the main plot the reason for the failure is more subtle, as in the end, what really causes the conspiracy to fail are actual climate events as the earth’s average temperature reaches a level where it becomes impossible to hide the accuracy of the prognosis. When global warming manifests itself in this way towards the conclusion of the novel, it becomes an image of how science is imagined to contain a power that stands above political power. Why? Because science has ‘matters of facts’ on its side and is therefore able to delineate its boundaries and stand above the power struggles that go on in the political sphere. Before the plot arrives at this conclusion and the modern Constitution is re-­established, the divide between science and politics does, however, temporarily collapse. This happens when the political sphere seeks to assert its powers in the scientific realm via the conspiracy. The conspirators thus operate from the assumption (which is later proved false) that politics has no limits. Or to use some other concepts from Latour, they conceive politics as “Force”, a form of “Might” allowed to sidestep all other forms of considerations (scientific, democratic, etc.), in order to maintain their own power (1999, 11, 264). This is particularly obvious from a dialogue where one of the conspirators – Pick’s chief Edmunston – tries to talk Pick out of publishing the prognosis: Edmunston:  The

White House doesn’t accept the likelihood of climate change. The White House wants to table the matter, until after the convention at least, or even the election. pick:  Table? That’s insane. We’ll be losing invaluable time. Corrective measures ought to start at once! How did politics get into it? Edmunston:  Politics is everything, Larry. Don’t be naïve. pick:  Are you trying to be funny? The general elections are in November. Nine months could be critical. Edmunston:  Don’t provoke me. I’m fully aware of your concern, but there are others, especially in view of the tentative nature of your findings  (Herzog 1989, 184) It is, of course, in particular Edmunston’s statement ‘politics is everything’ that is here of interest, since it perfectly encapsulates the conception of politics as

66   The conspiracy ‘Force’. That is, as a domain in which the quest for power not only stands above democratic considerations, but even above factual truth. However, in order to understand what is at stake on a deeper level in Edmunston’s (and the other conspirators’) attack on the modern Constitution, we must unfold this analysis further, as his attack works via not one, but two strategies. The first is, as we have just seen, to undermine science’s power by erasing the limits of where the political domain ends and where the scientific domain begins, by claiming ‘politics is everything’. The second is by questioning the core of scientific conduct: the ability to disclose reality and present results as matters of fact. This strategy is embedded in Edmunston’s reference to ‘the tentative nature’ of Pick’s findings, as this remark reduces Pick’s prognosis to just one construction from a dataset that allows many.4 However, when the conspiracy in Heat causes a breakdown in the modern Constitution that is only temporary, it is because its divide of science and politics is only momentarily annulled by the conspirators’ attack. As is revealed by the citation above, Pick continues to believe in the modern Constitution. He embodies a quest for truth throughout the novel that is not derailed by personal interest and thereby opposes the political domain (represented by Edmunston and the other conspirators), which is fraught with such interests. The conflation of science and politics that the conspiracy emphasizes does not, in other words, change how the modern Constitution’s two domains (nature and society) are imagined as separable. As already mentioned, the realization of the prognosis in the end confirms the notion of an apolitical objective science that delivers matters of fact and whose power is ultimately above political power. This is expressed when the president fires Edmunston and instead hires Pick as his primary security adviser, while runaway warming threatens to eradicate humanity (ibid., 260). In this way, the conspiracy in Heat functions as a disturbance in the modern Constitution that through the thriller’s plot is brought to order, when science finally returns as what Latour calls Science with a capital S. This is as a science that appears free of political interest and can therefore assume a particularly authoritative political position (Latour, 1999, 258). This moment is a key event in Heat that presents it in the following manner: The President sighed. ‘Yes, yes, I’ve read your [Pick’s] report, not that I thoroughly understand it. We have to do what we have to do. Now tell me in plain English what is required?’ (Herzog 1989, 260) This excerpt shows how the vacuum that the conspiracy has created in the modern Constitution is closed by science being elevated to a form of untouchable policy. After the conspiracy’s failure, Science remains as the only true anchor point in a world that has been exposed as dominated by lies and manipulation. It is however still worth noting how Pick “well before the rest […] accepted the fact that the climate change could and probably would

The conspiracy   67 materialize” (ibid., 130). This is interesting, because it discloses how Pick not only embodies scientific truth, but also an instinctive readiness to accept the apocalypse. This readiness can also be found in the other fictions that I will consider in this chapter. But contrary to the developments in these fictions, this readiness never makes Pick a victim of conspiracy theory. Instead it only strengthens his scientific integrity and his devotion to matters of fact, while this integrity simultaneously clearly separates Pick from the doomsday cults and fanatics that also appear in the novel (ibid., 193). In fact, we may even say that Science is here framed as a bolster in two senses. On the one hand, it offers protection against an external enemy: the manipulative power represented by the conspirators. On the other it also works as a defence against an internal enemy: a tendency in humans to be misled by their imaginative capacities, including the temptation to foster and believe in conspiracy theories. In the three fictions that I will now look at, the plots take a different route. Where Science was granted a considerable political power towards the end of Heat – symbolized by the president’s question to Pick: ‘What is required?’ – it is here instead perverted by vested interests. And what is more: where Pick could see through the mirage of the conspiracy, precisely because of his instinctive readiness to accept the apocalypse, such a readiness is in these fictions exploited by the conspirators. Indeed, it plays such a vital role that I will, with Heidegger, frame it as a specific affective relation to the world. That is as an affective ‘attunement’ towards the apocalypse. It is thus precisely because they are attuned (gestimmt) to the apocalypse and therefore do not immediately recognize Science as an avatar for political and economic interests that the main characters in these fictions become victims of manipulation. In Amer­ican author Rock Brynner’s novel The Doomsday Report (1998) the main characters, publisher Franco Sherman and his assistant editor Terri Bancroft, publish a report that falsely concludes that humanity is imminently doomed due to anthropogenic global warming. As this conclusion first appears to be scientifically credible, Franco and Terri embody the same affective attunement towards the apocalypse as Pick did in Heat. For instance, in the beginning of the novel Terri risks her job to convince the company’s publishers, including Franco, to print the report – a commitment which is later in the novel portrayed as an attunement towards the apocalypse, when Franco remarks: “From the beginning you were ready to do anything – and I mean any fucking thing – to announce that the earth is doomed” (Brynner 1998, 200). Yet, this should not blind us to the fact that Franco himself embodies a similar kind of attunement. For instance, it is described how, from his first meeting with the report’s author Roger Belacqua, Franco is eager to believe “that the world was doomed” (ibid., 202). Indeed, long into the novel its readers are lured into a similar trap, as the story deploys some of the generic conventions of the thriller to cause suspense about the validity of the report. Terri and Franco receive Belacqua’s manuscript from a man (General Shreiver), who claims that there are central people within the Amer­ican president’s administration who do not want the report’s

68   The conspiracy conclusion to be known (ibid., 44–45).5 From the very beginning of the novel Terri and Franco are in other words placed in a position we recognize from other thrillers. That is as the protagonists who have been granted the responsibility of exposing something that others with more power are trying to conceal. However, this turns out just to be a build-­up to a late twist in the plot, in which Shreiver is revealed as a B-­film actor and some of the data in the report is disclosed as having been deliberately manipulated by Belacqua. Instead of being impending and irreversible, the end of humanity predicted by the report is actually between 40 to 100 years away and can therefore still be hindered (ibid., 188). In other words: the attunement towards the apocalypse that made Pick a prophetic truth-­teller is in The Doomsday Report presented as a human weakness. Terri and Franco’s affective readiness to accept the arrival of the apocalypse not only makes them easily corruptible to their own conspiracy theories; it also makes them easy victims of the conspiracies of others. In terms of the modern Constitution it is, however, even more important to notice how Terri and Franco’s attunement towards the apocalypse takes flesh in an uncritical acceptance of Science. Or to be more precise: in an acceptance of the imperative that was already latently present in the question ‘What is required?’ that we saw the president pose to Pick at the end of Heat – namely the imperative: ‘Keep your mouth shut!’. In fact, as Latour points out, this imperative follows from science’s elevation to Science, since Science “is not a description of what scientists do […] but has always been a political weapon to do away with the constraints of politics” (1999, 258). It is thus exactly this imagination of science as Science, which causes Terri and Franco to deposit their critical sense and accept Belacqua’s report. But what drives Belacqua to appropriate Science as an avatar for conspiracy? The answer is particularly interesting in the light of the Climategate emails. Reading Fred Pearce’s book The Climate Files (2010), one gets the impression that the true motive behind these emails was to ensure that the public was warned of a threat that the involved scientists took extremely seriously.6 It is therefore rather astonishing to discover that the manipulations in Belacqua’s report have a similar root. After the timeframe in the report has proven to be false, Belacqua describes his manipulations as an attempt to make humanity realize that there are limits to their exploitation of the planet (Brynner 1998, 246). His conclusion is that humanity is racing towards the doomsday that he predicted in the report and therefore needs to be shocked into action. The parallels to ­Climategate become even clearer when it appears that Belacqua was not alone in this manipulation. It turns out that he has been indirectly supported by his scientific colleagues. These colleagues avoided revealing him because they knew that the threats he “has dramatized are actual and urgently need action” (ibid., 245). In this way the novel presents a scientific environment that generally values worry – or with Latour: ‘matters of concern’ – above matters of fact.7 Indeed, this valourization of matters of concern above matters of fact plays  well with the novel’s affinity – in both form and content – with

The conspiracy   69 p­ ostmodernism.8 Hence this affinity means that Science is less valued in The Doomsday Report than it was in Heat. Despite its manipulative misuse of certain scientific data Belacqua’s report is still portrayed as a document that contains a deeper truth about the human condition. In other words what is at issue here is a split between truth and fact, as Belacqua’s misuse of science appears not to compromise the overall truth of his conclusion. Indeed, the end of the novel indirectly legitimizes Belacqua’s actions in several ways. For example, it reads: By the end of 1999 The Belacqua Report had become an enduring feature of global civilization, and while many took the affair as a clarion call for action, others remembered only that there had been a threat that was lifted. But in some respects it was impossible to return to pre-­Belacqua innocence. False instruction is as difficult to unlearn as the truth, and now at least the possibility of mass extinction from overpopulation and global warming was part of the popular culture. That, Franco believed, was exactly the impact the Belacquas had intended. (Ibid., 260–261) What is encapsulated in this excerpt is thus a completely different power relation to the one we saw in Heat. As ‘false instruction is as difficult to unlearn as the truth’ the power of Science diminishes to the extent that there is more need for rhetoric that can communicate matters of concern than a Science that can describe matters of fact. The consequence of this is that the collapse that the imagination form creates in the modern Constitution does not become permanent. Rather, via Franco and Terri, we are as readers of The Doomsday Report, simply transported from one side of the modern Constitution to the other – that is, from an imagination of Science to the imagination of science as a purely linguistic construction in which the production of truth does not necessarily correspond to a representation of facts. While for Franco and Terri this jump from one side of the modern Constitution to the other represents a decisive event in their cognitive relation to the world, it is perhaps here worth emphasizing how it conflicts with the Latourian epistemology I have been drawing heavily on thus far. The shift to a postmodern conception of science as just another form of linguistic play is as remote from Latour’s thinking as the framing of science as Science found in Heat. For Latour it is neither about reducing science to a pure construction or about acquitting it from embedding any form of construction. Rather, it is Latour’s appeal to us that we (in particular, in the light of global warming) understand science as both constructed and true, or as he writes in “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’ ” (2010): We compositionists want immanence and truth together. Or, to use my language: we want matters of concern not only matters of fact. For a compositionist, nothing is beyond dispute. And yet closure has to be

70   The conspiracy achieved. But it is achieved only by the slow process of composition and compromise, not by the revelation of the world beyond. (478) According to Latour, it is in other words not about choosing one of the two sides of the modern Constitution – that is choosing between a science that is imagined to speak of facts unmediated (free from construction) and a science that is imagined to be so mediated that it cannot represent factual truth.9 However, as we have seen in the two previous fictions this is exactly what their main characters end up doing. Instead of letting the modern Constitution expire after its collapse they rebuild it by either reducing scientific production to pure truth (Heat) or to pure construction (The Doomsday Report).

The arrival of the supercomputer That said, I have so far primarily focused on the imagination of scientific mediation in The Doomsday Report. As we saw here Belacqua’s report comes to epitomize a mediation of science in which the ability to formulate matters of concern was more useful than the ability to represent matters of fact. I will now return to Heat, because scientific mediation is here unsurprisingly imagined in a totally different manner. That is as something through which the scientist gains access to absolute truth, to matters of fact, or what Latour calls, in the excerpt above, ‘the revelation of the world beyond’. Pick is thus only able to acquire truth because his prognosis is produced on a supercomputer (XMP) that is imagined to be powerful enough to assemble all geophysical data, or as this work is described by one of the engineers who helps Pick: The climate system taken as a whole is too complex even for computers – ordinarily, we’d need several computers, but the XMP’s big enough to work with – so we have to break it down into pieces such as atmosphere, ocean surface layer, deep oceans, wind, albedo. […] We’re trying to synthesize all relevant phenomena into a single interacting whole, to learn how the real climate system will operate. So far we’ve been able to make only one model, which we call ‘Earth One’. (Herzog 1989, 119–120) In fact, this description is so interesting that it is worth comparing to a description Latour has given of the utilization of computer-­driven models in climate science. In the paper “Waiting for Gaia. Composing The Common World through Arts and Politics” (2011), Latour writes: The reason it is so important to stress this slow, tapestry-­weaving process of calibration, modelling and reinterpretation is because it shows that even for the climate scientist there is no way to measure up directly with the Earth. Thanks to the slow calibrating process of many standard

The conspiracy   71 i­nstitutions, what they do is to carefully watch a local model from the tiny locus of a laboratory. So there is one disconnect we don’t have to share: we don’t have on the one side the scientists benefitting from a globally complete view of the globe and, on the other, the poor ordinary citizens with a “limited local” view. There are only local views. (2011a, 6) It is exactly this ‘complete view of the globe’ (which Latour dismisses as inaccessible to the climate scientist) that XMP makes possible in Heat. XMP represents the imagination of a scientific mediation devoid of uncertainty, as the prognosis ‘Earth One’ gives Pick and his group of researchers access to a complete view of all the physical processes that constitute the Earth System. The assemblage – or to use another of Latour’s favourite terms: ‘the composition’ – of these processes into one model neatly compiles complexity into the object that is imagined to face the scientist doing Science i.e. the object that can be discerned without being contaminated by scientific mediation. The element of uncertainty in climate science that necessitates the leap from facts to concern according to Latour, is here simply edited out and replaced with an absolute truth that manifests as ‘the revelation of the world beyond’.10 I am highlighting this because such an imagination of climate science as Science (i.e. purified from the contamination of human construction) is problematized in the German author Sven Böttcher’s cli-­fi thriller Prophezeiung (2011). In Prophezeiung we encounter the advanced computer-­driven prognosis programme Prometheus, but in contrast to Earth One in Heat, Prometheus is fictively deployed to undermine the computer models used in climate science. Or to be more specific: to undermine the assumption that these models may be conceived as matters of fact. In Prophezeiung this assumption is embodied by the climatologist Mavie Heller. Shortly after Mavie has been hired as a climate scientist by the prestigious climate institute ILCO, she discovers a prognosis on Prometheus that shows how changes in the sun’s heat will lead to the overheating of Earth. However, when Mavie approaches her superiors with her findings she is told that the prognosis is only a “simulation” and should therefore not be published (Böttcher 2011, 58). Mavie refuses, though, to accept this explanation, and when, shortly after having approach her superiors, she leaks the prognosis to a journalist the plot gathers pace. The journalist is found dead, while Mavie is fired and then chased, as she seeks to get the doomsday message encapsulated in the prognosis out to the public. Central to these events is her conviction that the prognosis is absolutely true, or as she states: I know the data and the models, the most complex calculations in the world, and the best simulations, but none of them comes close to being as large, detailed, or precise as Prometheus. Hence it does not make any sense to talk about the prognosis as if it was made up of fantasy-­data. I have seen the simulations generated by Prometheus – and they can all be

72   The conspiracy tested. In fact, every time I have tried to validate one of these simulations by comparing it to historical data, the tested simulation has turned out be 100 per cent precise on all parameters. (Ibid., 117)11 However, by the end of the novel it becomes apparent that the creator of Prometheus (Gerritsen) has tampered with the prognosis in order to acquire more funds for ILCO (ibid., 412). He has even been pressured to do so by his boss (Eisele), whose motive is also economic. Eisele wants to use the prognosis to support a wind-­power project that he has co-­financed, as he is counting on the prognosis to push a competing Chinese project out of the market. His expectation is simply that China (as one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases) will be blamed for the millions of deaths that the prognosis predicts (ibid., 355–356). In this way Prometheus comes to represent climate science in a manner that frames it as vulnerable to conspiracies i.e. as a form of science whose primary medium (computer models) is constructed and therefore vulnerable to abuse. Mavie’s ‘mistake’ is that she comes to understand this too late, while the same goes for the group of eco-­activists (Commando Diego Garcia) who help her publish the prognosis. Like Mavie, these activists’ instinctual readiness to accept that “the end of the world is near” makes them elevate Prometheus’ prognosis to an absolute truth (ibid., 218). This is displayed in a crucial scene where the scientific hero of Böttcher’s thriller, the ILCO scientist Thilo Beck, tries to convince one of the activists (Paulina) not to publish the prognosis: ‘What truth?’ Thilo’s voice sounded helpless on the other side of the locked door. ‘It is a prognosis, god dammit.’ ‘An extremely precise prognosis,’ she said. ‘Yes, the most precise prognosis that exists,’ he responded, ‘but that does not change the fact that it is indeed a prognosis.’ (Ibid., 220–221) Beck can thus be seen as the thriller’s scientific hero because he insists on making a distinction between simulation and truth. He understands that Prometheus’ prognosis – being a construction – must not be taken as a matter of fact. However, this understanding does not lead him out of the grip of the modern Constitution. Beck’s understanding of climate science’s dependency on construction does not make him give up on the imagination of Science. Unlike Latour, he never turns this understanding into something positive, to a vision of a science that is true in its construction despite its inability to produce more than matters of concern. Beck instead assumes the position of the “falsificationist”, when he embodies the imagination that the main task of science consists in falsifying (Popper 2000, 237).12 In this way he differentiates himself not only from the manipulated characters of the thriller (i.e. Mavie and the activists) – who in their attempt to find positive arguments for the truth of the prognosis can be called “verificationists” – but also from the

The conspiracy   73 p­ erverted science that Gerritsen and Eisele represent (ibid., 248).13 The latter is, for instance, obvious at the end of the novel, when Beck criticizes Gerritsen for having adapted the prognosis to Eisele’s scheme: Beck angrily cut him [Gerritsen] off. ‘Have you also told him [Eisele] that you are a scientist, and that research and experiments should only serve one aim: to falsify hypotheses. That it is not about believing anything, as long as it fits with your expectation, and ignoring it, when it does not. That you do not stop your work, when the first result confirms your hypothesis, but this is where the real scientist work starts. Where have you been educated? The IPCC?’ (Böttcher 2011, 365) What is most interesting about this quote, is, though, Beck’s reference to the IPCC, because it implicitly alludes to the ‘ghost’ of Climategate. In fact, this ghost appears several times in Böttcher’s thriller. For instance, when some of its positively represented characters refer to IPCC’s reports as “consensus declarations” or describe Mike Mann’s ‘hockey stick curve’ as resting on “calculations errors” (ibid., 184, 368). It is thus not just against the Prometheus prognosis that Beck’s falsificationist approach to science is depicted as an antidote. It is also against the IPCC’s descriptions of global warming as human induced. For the same reason it is perhaps not so surprising that the catastrophic events that do take place in Prophezeiung are not a result of the heating of Earth. They are instead the results of what is portrayed as a general human fallacy to accept predictions of doom – or what I have in this chapter called an affective attunement towards the apocalypse. In the same way as in The Doomsday Report (where the release of Belacqua’s report causes a temporary social collapse) social unrest arises in several places across the world in Prophezeiung, when Mavie with the help of the activists finally manages to publish the prognosis (ibid., 329). The message that the reader is left with when finishing Prophezeiung is therefore not to fear anthropogenic global warming but rather to fear ‘fear itself ’.

Crichton and the conspiracy That Prophezeiung contains the above-­mentioned message is only made more interesting by the fact that a similar message drives the plot in the perhaps most-­read climate fiction to date: Michael Crichton’s thriller State of Fear (2004). Crichton is probably best-­known as the author of a long line of bestsellers such as The Andromeda Strain (1969) and Jurassic Park (1990). However, after his publication of State of Fear and until his death in 2008, Crichton became a renowned spokesperson for the Amer­ican Right in its scepticism of established climate science.14 In State of Fear, an environmental activist group tries to stage a series of catastrophes to have the world believe that anthropogenic global warming poses a serious threat to life on Earth. The activist

74   The conspiracy group are, in their attempts to succeed with this conspiracy, however, challenged by the typical masculine hero of the thriller in the form of the professor and secret agent Jack Kenner. Kenner embodies a scientific position much like the position Beck embodies in Prophezeiung. In Crichton’s thriller we are therefore once again presented with a falsificationist hero who fights the politicization of science, as Kenner’s main function in the plot is to eradicate all ‘false’ prejudices pertaining to anthropogenic global warming. In particular, Kenner serves this function in his mentoring of the thriller’s main character, the young lawyer Peter Evans, who helps Kenner derail the activists’ plan. During most of the thriller Evans embodies the same idea of science as Terri and Franco did in The Doomsday Report and Mavie in Prophezeiung. That is, he imagines science as Science, an apolitical, authoritative form of truth-­telling that delivers matters of fact. Kenner’s ‘Socratic work’ with Evans consists in relieving him of this ‘illusion’, while replacing it with the same falsificationist approach to science he embodies himself. In fact, similarly to Prophezeiung, considerable amounts of energy in State of Fear are spent on framing the IPCC as “a political organization, not a scientific one” (Crichton 2005, 292). Or, to put it slightly differently, it is on a deeper level this imagined politicization of climate science which shakes the modern Constitution and, what is more, necessitates its resurrection in shape of the falsificationist approach to science, which Kenner pushes not only to Evans, but also to the readers of the thriller. In fact, Kenner is far from being the only character in the thriller that explicitly speaks against the existence of anthropogenic global warming and critically attempts to undermine established climate science. The professor Norman Hoffman is a particularly important character for pushing this agenda. Hoffman’s presumption, which is reflected in the thriller’s title, is that modern economies are maintained by a perpetual production of new forms of fear. These forms of fear thrive according to Hoffman, because common people are unable to test the facts behind the stories that the media presents to them (ibid., 543). Employing an argumentation typical for hardcore conspiracy theorists, Hoffman even claims that this ‘fear industry’ controls all other major channels of information.15 The reason why the actual truth about global warming is not widely known, is, thus, according to Hoffman, that the most powerful producers of knowledge have an economic interest in establishing a false consensus. This applies not only to the state and the media, but also to scientists working at universities, or as Hoffman states: The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a particular neo-­Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting behind closed doors without due process. In our society, only universities have created that – so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core, I’m telling you. (Ibid., 546)

The conspiracy   75 Although the thriller ends with Kenner and Evans derailing the environmental activists’ plans, we are, as readers of State of Fear, therefore also faced with the idea of a much more far-­reaching conspiracy. Indeed, as we are here dealing with a conspiracy imagined to seep through all major global institutions, it brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s famous description of conspiracy theory as “a degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (1993, 38). Yet, in light of the analyses I have presented in this chapter, it seems meaningful to spend a bit longer on Hoffman’s portrait of modern day universities as a major source of politicized climate science. Hence, as it already tentatively appears from the quotation above, universities are in their distribution of this form of science imagined to be extremely powerful. So powerful, in fact, that they are capable of spreading the imperative ‘keep your mouth shut!’ with such force that it not only blocks democratic conversation, but also produces false preunderstanding.16 We should in Hoffman’s optics thus read the deafening power of the conspiracy of politicized climate science along at least two lines. On the one hand we should conceive it as excluding all viewpoints not corresponding with the viewpoints of the IPCC i.e. mainstream climate science. On the other hand we should conceive it as having the scientific effect that it produces the foundation for new scientific research. That like a virus it transmits false prejudices from one climate scientific investigation onto the next with the contamination of all science as its consequence.17 Indeed, it is very difficult not to read State of Fear as a climate sceptical manifesto (i.e. separating the implied author from the author), since it contains a four page long postscript titled ‘Author’s Message’, where Crichton presents a range of arguments identical to the arguments presented by the thriller’s climate sceptical characters. For instance, in the postscript one reads: We desperately need a nonpartisan, blinded funding mechanism to conduct research to determine appropriate policy. […] Research funding is almost never open-­ended or open-­minded. Scientists know that continued funding depends on delivering the results the funders desire. As a result, environmental organization “studies” are every bit as biased and suspect as industry “studies”. Government “studies” are similarly biased according to who is running the department or administration at the time. No faction should be given free pass. (2005, 680) What is needed, according to Crichton, is thus a return to an apolitical science that can produce new matters of fact – i.e. rediscover truth – since truth has been distorted by the politicization of climate science. His logic is, in other words, that this politicization has created a disastrous collapse in the credibility of the modern Constitution, which is in urgent need of being addressed by a return to an economically and politically independent science. In fact, what we have here is an argument that logically seems to contradict

76   The conspiracy itself, as Crichton starts out with the hermeneutical claim that all climate science is biased only to end with the conclusion that climate science should be disinterested and apolitical. In this way he jumps from an imagination of prejudices as an ontological condition to an imagination of a falsificationist science uncontaminated by preunderstanding. Indeed, in State of Fear this imagination is presented as a bulwark not only against mainstream climate science (and its alleged politicization), but more directly also against the environmental activists that Kenner and Evans fight. These activists understand themselves as being part of the same scientific ‘climate war’ as are the climate-­sceptic characters of the novel.18 However, this does not encourage them to call for a science free of interests. Rather than taking the falsificationist road, they accept their situation in a world where science is a battleground for biased viewpoints. Their interpretation is simply that since climate science is already a biased battleground, there is no need for more matters of fact, but rather for a stronger rhetoric in support of preventative measures (ibid., 57). In particular this position is taken up by the leader of the environmental activists, Nicholas Drake. Drake occupies the same interpretative position as we saw Edmunston give words to in Heat, namely the position that ‘politics is everything’. For this reason he believes science should forego its self-­acclaimed distance and recognize that it is a political tool. In Drake’s position we can therefore also recognize an echo of the same postmodern relativism as Belacqua embodied in The Doomsday Report. This appears for instance in the beginning of State of Fear when Drake attempts to pressure the Icelandic glacier scientist Per Einarsson to divert from what Einarsson perceives as matters of fact: reality is that since 1970 these glaciers have been steadily advancing. They have regained half the ground that was lost earlier. […] That is the reality, Nicholas. And I will not lie about it. Drake:  ‘No one has suggested you do,’ Drake said, lowering his voice and glancing at his newly arrived audience. ‘I am merely discussing how you word your paper, Per’. Einarsson raised a sheet of paper. ‘Yes, and you have suggested some wording –.’ Drake:  Merely a suggestion. Einarsson:  That twists truth. (Ibid., 50) Einarsson:  The

Like Belacqua, Drake perceives truth as ideological rather than factual. It is this perception that allows him to reduce science to a linguistic construction, a question of rhetoric, or as he puts it above: to a matter of ‘wording’. Indeed, at first glance this position does not seem far apart from the position Crichton arrives at, when he finishes his postscript with the subtle statement: “Everybody has an agenda. Except me” (ibid., 680). As this statement appears initially as a

The conspiracy   77 self-­ironic realization that any understanding is always already biased, it can be said to justify the conclusion that ‘politics is everything’. However, this is not how I suggest we read it, as the statement comes across as bizarrely paradoxical in the light of the fact that Crichton also calls for more scientific control and a return to matters of fact. Because which matters of fact would that be? Judging from both the postscript and the plot of the thriller the answer is: facts that go against the conclusions of mainstream climate science, or, in other words, certain types of climate-­sceptical ‘fact’. In the classic sense of the term Crichton’s position is here even comparable to a critique of ideology, since behind the ‘ideological veil’ of mainstream climate science, he imagines the existence of a pure reality. That is a reality free from the manipulative contamination of human construction, and which can therefore be disclosed via the falsificationist approach to science. In fact, when Einarsson in the excerpt above speaks of ‘the reality’ it mirrors how this perception of science dominates throughout Crichton’s thriller.19

The suspicious relation to the world On a more general note, this perception of science serves first and foremost a purpose in the plot of State of Fear that was also pivotal to the plots in the three other climate fictions I have discussed in this chapter. What is this purpose? It is to pave the way for a new critical consciousness – not only in the main characters of the fictions, but also in their readers. In all the four fictions I have looked at in this chapter the characters are placed in worlds where a critical relation to the production and dissemination of knowledge becomes an absolute necessity. It does so simply because, in all four fictions, politics, economic interests and science turn out to be linked to each other in unexpected ways. This worldly condition also has, of course, an affective and cognitive influence on the characters. The worlds that the utilization of The Conspiracy calls forth are (within the context of cli-­fi) thus remarkable for their production of a certain affective attunement as well as for their production of a certain cognitive relation to the world. Hence by creating worlds wherein politics, economic interests and science are intertwined, the imagination form is used to explicate how the maintenance of the modern Constitution demands a relation to the world defined by suspicion. Basically, the temporary collapse of the modern Constitution forces an adjustment in affective attunement on the main characters in all four fictions. From anticipating doomsday and therefore being receptive to manipulation they bitterly discover that the world must be met with suspicion – and that this also applies to the institutions that have the power to produce and widely disseminate knowledge. To be more precise this means that suspicion becomes (post the collapse in the modern Constitution) the affective foundation of their Being-­in-the-­world and therefore also of their interpretations. What we discover in this existential structure is thus the contours of what

78   The conspiracy Ricoeur calls “a hermeneutics of suspicion” (herméneutique du soupçon) (2008, 97) i.e. an interpretative praxis based on the affective attunement of suspicion.20 As already explicated, this affective attunement or mood has, however, also a cognitive background in the critical consciousness that the temporary collapse of the modern Constitution triggered. The main characters’ suspicion (post this collapse) can therefore also be described as an affective setting towards the world that originates in previous experiences of how any communication may be distorted and contain an intent to manipulate and suppress truth. When both Mavie in Prophezeiung and Evans in State of Fear come to represent the restoration of the modern Constitution via their turn to a falsificationist understanding of science, they are in a sense both returning and not returning to their original starting points. They are returning because their appropriation of the falsificationists’ understanding of science signifies a renewed confidence in the solidity of the modern Constitution. And they are not returning because they have become aware that such a confidence is only solid as long as it is coupled with continual suspicion. Their conclusion is, in other words, that the modern Constitution can only be restored if a suspicious attitude forms the affective foundation for all their future interpretations. Likewise, a hermeneutics of suspicion comes to save the modern Constitution from collapsing altogether in The Doomsday Report. The only difference here is that a hermeneutics of suspicion is not assumed in order to save Science (and thereby the divide between a purified road to truth and human translation/construction/composition of such a truth). When Franco and Terri assume such a hermeneutics it is rather because they have come to believe that all communication is already politicized and therefore requires suspicion. Finally, a new atmosphere of suspicion also arises at the end of Heat – although in a more complex fashion. On the one hand, the political conspirators come to realize that they cannot enforce their political power by totally ignoring scientific considerations, which means that a new self-­critical suspiciousness is integrated in the political sphere. On the other hand, Pick comes to realize that he cannot complete his scientific mission without a politically ordained “organisation […] with enormous power”, which means a new self-­ critical suspiciousness is also integrated in the scientific sphere (Herzog 1989, 260). What is discovered in both the political and scientific sphere in this new atmosphere of suspicion is that enhancing the power of both the political world and the scientific world is only possible via mutual integration. In fact, at the end of Heat this discovery leads to the construction of a new power-­ formation. When the president remarks to Pick ‘Now tell me in plain English what is required’, the result is not only the transfer of power from politics on to Science. No, what Pick thinks is required, and receives from the president, is an organizational setup that (legitimized through the state of exception) gives Science the conditions to operate without being delayed by normal democratic procedure. Consequently, the atmosphere of suspicion that arises

The conspiracy   79 at the end of Heat does not lead to a new democratic constitution, a new Parliament of Things. Rather, it just leads to a new version of the modern Constitution more powerful and totalitarian than ever.

Notes   1 For instance, this is the case both in Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003) and in Conspiracy Culture. From the Kennedy Assassinations to The X-­Files (2000) by British scholar in Amer­ican studies Peter Knight. In both studies the period after the Kennedy assassination and until the present is seen as a period wherein conspiracy theories have gained traction in Amer­ican consciousness and cultural production (Knight 2000, 2; Barkun 2003, 2)   2 In this essay Popper attempts purging the social science for a (mainly Marxist) tendency towards what he calls ‘historicism’. That is, “the view that the story of mankind has a plot, and that if we can succeed in unravelling this plot, we shall hold the key to the future” (2000, 338).   3 From the Watergate scandal to small private and public manipulations there are, as Basham points out, numerous examples of conspiracies being constantly developed and realized on both a narrow and a wide scale (2006b, 98).   4 I would even claim that Edmunston in this regard indirectly operates with Latour’s (famous) dichotomy between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘matters of concern’. Hence it is his leap from matters of fact to matters of concern that makes it possible for him to deny Pick’s prognosis by referring to how other and more important (political) concerns exist. Or as he tells Pick: ‘I’m fully aware of your concern, but there are others.’   5 Shreiver even tells them that the report has fierce enemies in the coal and oil industries who will try to undermine its conclusions (Brynner 1998, 45).   6 Pearce’s book thus delivers a clear picture of the implicated scientists as defenders of important truths that are under attack from climate sceptics with obvious economic or political interests (2010, 132).   7 There is of course a considerable difference between the Climategate emails and the plot in The Doomsday Report. While the Climategate emails disclose an attempt to construct a certain narrative (which was and still is considered true) through the exclusion of certain results, the narrative in The Doomsday Report is constructed through deliberate use of false data.   8 Here I understand postmodernism by way of Latour, for whom postmodernism is still based on the modern Constitution’s ontological division of “the material and technological world on the one hand and the linguistic play of speaking subjects on the other” (1993, 61). The only difference is that the postmoderns have lost belief in the access to truth guaranteed by the modern Constitution, and they are therefore emphasizing its relativity (ibid., 46).   9 To avoid having to choose one of the sides in the modern Constitution, Latour creates, in Pandora’s Hope, the term ‘factish’. This term, which is a combination of fact and fetish, has to be understood as a scientific object that is simultaneously true and constructed, or as Latour writes: The solution of the factish is not to ignore the choice, as many postmoderns do, by saying, ‘Yes, of course, construction and reality are the same thing; everything is just so much illusion, storytelling, and make believe. Who would be so naive, nowadays, as to dispute such trivia?’ The factish suggest an entirely different move: it is because it is constructed that it is so very real, so autonomous, so independent of our hands. (1999, 275)

80   The conspiracy 10 In his article “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-­Network Theorist” (2011), Latour also calls this imagination (in which the world speaks unmediated to the climate scientist) for the “positivistic narrative” (2011b, 809). 11 All excerpts from Prophezeiung have been translated from German into English by me. 12 Popper describes in Conjectures and Refutations (1963) the falsificationists’ position in the following way: For us, therefore, science has nothing to do with the quest for certainty or probability or reliability. We are not interested in establishing scientific theories as secure, or certain, or probable. Conscious of our fallibility we are only interested in criticizing them and testing them, in the hope of finding out where we are mistaken; of learning from our mistakes; and, if we are lucky, of proceeding to better theories. (2000, 228–229) 13 According to Popper, the verificationists (in contrast to the falsificationalists) “hold that whatever cannot be supported by positive reasons is unworthy of being believed” (ibid., 228). 14 In 2005 Crichton for instance spoke on a invitation from James Inhofe in a hearing on climate change in the Amer­ican Senate (Slovic 2008, 107). 15 Barkun puts it in the following way: “Conspiracists’ reasoning runs in the following way. Because the conspiracy is so powerful, it controls virtually all the channels through which information is disseminated – universities, media, and so forth” (2003, 7). 16 As an alternative to the alleged dominance of this imperative, in his ‘Author’s Message’ Crichton suggests a more direct form of democracy, where everyone from “snowmobilers” to “fly fishermen” are heard before climate policies are decided (2005, 680). 17 There is quite a strong link to hermeneutics here. For instance, Gadamer points out that prejudices can have a negative nature when they represent an uncritical acceptance of authority (2004, 278–279). He therefore differentiates between legitimate and illegitimate prejudices (ibid., 299). 18 The term ‘the climate wars’ has been used to designate the dispute that has taken place in the last few decades between mainstream climate scientists (led by prominent IPCC researchers) and climate sceptics who have criticized, or attempted to completely disavow, the significance of these scientists’ work (Pearce 2010, 89). 19 This perception is, for example, also found in Kenner’s motto: “Caring is irrelevant – all that matters is fact”, while a third character, the plutocrat, George Morton, in the novel’s conclusion suggests that the sticker “Warning: Speculation – MAY BE FACT-­FREE” is placed on all scientific articles the conclusions of which are based on computer-­driven climate models (Crichton 2005, 575, 674). 20 Ricoeur uses this term to expand the intention of hermeneutics, so that it does not only include an effort to understand what is communicated by the other (e.g. through a literary text), but also a critical sensibility in cases of manipulation (e.g. when the communicative act is deployed to transmit ideology).

5 The loss of wilderness

The interpretations have hitherto had two primary sources: Heidegger and Latour. However, whereas the two previous chapters have mainly taken a Latourian path, I will now – and for the rest of the book – return to an interpretative prism which is either directly or indirectly inspired by Heidegger. This also means a return to a way of thinking that is in a Latourian sense ‘modern’, as many of Heidegger’s writings are rooted in a separation of nature and society. Let me therefore make it clear that this return to Heidegger is not arbitrary. The separation of nature and society is also implicitly present in the imagination form that I will now investigate, as this chapter will deal with the imagination that anthropogenic global warming will lead to the loss of the last wild places on Earth. When I call this imagination form The Loss of Wilderness, I understand wilderness as a deserted area that has not been cultivated. This is because the imagination form implies that there still exist areas on Earth so untouched by humanity that they can be called wild. I explicate this, because this is of course not an issue devoid of controversy. In addition to Latour, who states in Politics of Nature that “the great Pan is dead”, a number of cultural theorists and philosophers have rejected the existence of such areas and thereby the idea of wilderness (2004, 25).1 Timothy Morton has in this regard been a particularly influential voice, criticizing the imagination of wilderness as being both an obsolete left-­over from the romantic period and a commercially constructed fantasy (2010, 3, 7). However, the purpose of this chapter is not to enter this discussion. It is, rather, to investigate how the imagination of wilderness assumes a prominent role in Western climate fiction. That said, the existence in climate fiction of this imagination does in a way also give credit to the other side of the argument, as wilderness is here imagined as disappearing. This means that the issue of the Anthropocene will not be ignored in this chapter, but, rather, resurface in the shape of wildernesses in decline i.e. through fictive representations that implicitly embed the spatial drama of nature’s integration into society. In this sense, Western climate fiction does (in its use of the imagination form) not just depict two worlds (wilderness and human civilization) that foster certain modes of being; (i.e. some typical ways of relating to the world). No, these worlds also bring forth

82   The loss of wilderness two particular existential structures that are imagined to possess the ability to reconfigure each other.

The loss of wilderness in cultural history But before I unfold this argument, let me briefly trace some of the deep-­ seated roots that The Loss of Wilderness has in the cultural history of the West. It is almost needless to say that my mapping of these traces will be superficial, as we are here dealing with an imagination form which has sprung from a vast number of sources. My attempt to carve out a historical trajectory for the imagination form is therefore bound to be wanting. Nevertheless, I think some important clues to what this trajectory may look like can be found in Amer­ican history professor Max Oelschlaeger’s seminal work The Idea of Wilderness (1991). Here, Oelschlaeger frames humanity’s transformation from hunter-­gatherers into farmers and the concurrent rise of monotheism as two decisive events – not only for the rise of the idea of wilderness and eventually the idea that it is in decline, but also for the ecological crisis that we are today stuck within (41–42). According to Oelschlaeger, these two transformative events are particularly important because they demarcated human existence from nature in two different ways, each of which paved the way for the human destruction of wilderness (ibid., 44). What did these demarcations consist of? First, humanity’s transformation from hunter-­gatherers into farmers created a spatial demarcation between cultivated areas and non-­cultivated areas that physically severed humanity from its previous embeddedness in the wilderness (ibid., 28). Second, the rise of monotheism (in the form of, first, Judaism and then Christianity) led to a metaphysical demarcation, as animism was replaced by a God who was no longer present in nature and in certain aspects resembled humanity (ibid., 47). In fact, Oelschlaeger’s argument is here very similar to the argument put forward by Amer­ican history professor Lynn White Jr. in his famous article: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967). Here, White Jr criticizes Christianity for being “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (1205).2 More importantly for my investigation is, however, Oelschlaeger’s attempt to align the Neolithic revolution (i.e. humanity’s transformation from hunter­gatherers to farmers) with the current ecological crisis. Hence Oelschlaeger also emphasizes how religious historians have often seen the Neolithic revolution as the historical foundation for the myth of the eviction from Paradise (1991, 31). What appears from this emphasis is thus a connection between the eviction myth and the imagination form – a connection which is also brought to our attention by several other authors with a cultural-­historical interest in the narratives that anthropogenic global warming and the present ecological crisis foster. For instance, in his essay “Four Meanings of Climate Change” (2010), the British professor of climate and culture, Mike Hulme connects four discourses of anthropogenic global warming to four Biblical

The loss of wilderness   83 myths. One of these myths is the eviction myth, as Hulme links this myth to a discourse he terms ‘the lament for Eden’. That is a discourse that: […] views climate as a symbol of what is natural, something that is pure and pristine and (should be) beyond the reach of humans. In this mythical position, climate therefore becomes something that is “fragile” and needs to be protected or “saved”, just as much as do ‘wild’ landscapes or animal species. (Hulme 2010, 40) As an example of this discourse Hulme refers to the environmental activist Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature (1989), in which McKibben laments the loss of pristine weather. However, if Hulme had read McKibben’s book more carefully, he may have been able to give a more precise account of its cultural-­historical roots. Hence it is not only the fact that “a child will now never know a natural summer” that is lamented in The End of Nature (ibid., 41). As the title of McKibben’s book suggests, the loss of pristine weather also entails the loss of something more fundamental, or as McKibben writes: We [humanity] have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather we make every spot on earth man-­made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning, without it there is nothing but us. (2003, 60–61) In this description we thus find an invitation to draw the lines a bit sharper than Hulme does, because in perceiving the loss of pristine weather and the loss of wilderness as two related yet separate causes of lament, Hulme overlooks the arguably most important aspect disclosed by McKibben’s argument. This is the fact that these two causes in combination create a more culturally dominant narrative template than the elegiac bemoaning over the loss of pristine weather does in itself. This means that Hulme also misses the core of the cultural-­ historical connection he is otherwise right to emphasize. Hence what the assemblage of these two causes into one narrative template reveals, is a much closer resemblance between the eviction myth and the imagination form. To be more precise, this resemblance appears in climate fiction in two ways. First, the imagination form manifests through an elegiac lamentation over the loss of a specific geographical area: a paradisiacal garden. Second – and equally important – the loss of this area comes to mirror a more principal loss of harmony in the human-­non-human relationship. In fact, the point is not only that in Western climate fiction the loss of wilderness comes to signify a deep imbalance between humanity and nature; it is rather that because the loss of wilderness signifies this imbalance it also presages the

84   The loss of wilderness s­elf-­destruction of humanity. The reason being that this self-­destruction is imagined to be equivalent to the annihilation of nature that follows from humanity’s increasing colonization of Earth. Indeed, in the climate fictions that employ the imagination form this logic (i.e. that humanity’s increasing colonisation of Earth will lead to an annihilation of nature that will lead to humanity’s self-­destruction) results in what we may term an ‘ontological divide’. A divide in which humanity contains such a destructive force that it appears ontologically distinct from the rest of nature. Not that nature is imagined to be without destruction, of course; but rather because humanity’s destructiveness is imagined to be without the balance that nature possesses in its destructiveness. In the climate fictions that employ the imagination form this divide is the centre of a rather curious paradox: the more the geographical distance between humanity (civilization) and nature (wilderness) diminishes, the more present the ontological divide becomes. Or to put it differently: the more humans occupy the wilderness and reduce it, the clearer the ontological difference between the human and the non-­human becomes. That said, this ontological divide is, in the climate fictions that use the imagination form, not imagined as an unbridgeable chasm. For some of the characters in the two climate fictions that I will now turn to, the divide between civilization and wilderness is also a divide between two ways of relating to the world. The wilderness represents for these characters simply a meeting with a new form of Being-­in-the-­world. The reason for this is that – instead of presenting itself as an object that can be turned into an instrument of the human will – the wilderness appears for these characters as a force by which they themselves are turned into impressionable objects: the vessels of an unfamiliar will.

The destructiveness of humanity In the Bulgarian-­born but in-­Germany-residing author Ilija Trojanow’s novel The Lamentations of Zeno (Eistau, 2011), this force is for instance experienced by the narrator Zeno. However, as the title of the novel indicates, it is here part of a rather complex affective relation to the world in which its positivity is exceedingly overshadowed by a feeling of loss. Hence the imagination form manifests in the novel via Zeno’s experience of how some of the most remote areas on Earth are suffering from accelerating ice-­loss. At first, a glacier in the Alps – that Zeno has spent his whole working life studying as a glaciologist – melts away. Then, as a guide on a cruise ship sailing tourists to Antarctica, he witnesses how the destructive behaviour of humanity is causing the continent to melt as well as destroying its ecosystems. In fact, Zeno becomes so aggravated and depressed by his experiences that when a performance-­artist invites the passengers from the cruise ship to form a giant SOS on Antarctica’s ice, Zeno sails away with the ship, before finally jumping overboard. Whereas Zeno’s suicide marks the culmination of his growing aggravation towards his own species, his opposition towards other people drives the plot

The loss of wilderness   85 from the very beginning of the novel. It is quite early on established that Zeno is perceived as a misfit, whose love of ice and Antarctica’s biodiversity is puzzling for others, as illustrated by this excerpt: ‘Professor Z., why do you love ice as much as you do?’ Jeremy has stopped, his glasses are slightly clouded over. Zeno:  Because of its variety. Jeremy:  Could you explain further? Zeno:  The most beautiful thing on earth: variety. Jeremy: Yes of course, we all love variety, but in ice? Zeno:  There’s nothing more varied. A solid body containing gas and liquid. (Trojanow 2016, 144) Simultaneously, we are here offered one conceivable answer to the question: What consequences will the loss of wilderness have for the Being-­in-the world of humans? Hence ice is, in the excerpt, a synecdoche for the vast areas of ice that have in the novel either already disappeared (the glacier in the Alps) or are on course to either partly (Antarctica) or completely (the Arctic) disappear due to anthropogenic global warming (ibid., 26–27).3 When Zeno talks about the aesthetic quality of ice, he is in other words also speaking about the aesthetic quality of these disappearing wildernesses. The reduction of wilderness here simply comes to stand for a reduction in the diversity of life, which again comes to stand for a reduction in the aesthetic quality of life. In fact, it is in this experience of a reduction in the aesthetic quality of life that we find one of the main reasons for Zeno’s deteriorating mood.4 Nevertheless, while the novel display a relation to the world that is in this way affectively marked by the disappearing aesthetic quality of wildernesses, Zeno’s deteriorating mood has an arguably even more significant cause. Intrinsically related to his grief over the disappearing aesthetic quality of wildernesses is Zeno’s anger with his own species for having engendered this disappearance through its destructive colonization of every spot on Earth. Indeed, the latter is for Zeno as unbearable as the former. Thus, it is to Zeno one thing that humanity has instigated warming that is causing large amounts of ice to evaporate and leading towards the disappearance of the last wildernesses on Earth. Another is humanity’s direct violence against ecosystems and the plethora of non-­human life forms that the novel (in ‘modern’ fashion) calls nature. What according to Zeno is most characteristic about humans is that they “destroy everything aligned with nature”, and that they will therefore “go on destroying the very foundation of life” (ibid., 7, 80). Consequently, this prediction also contains a deeper explanation for Zeno’s pull towards Antarctica as well as to why his mental health collapses there. Since ‘his’ glacier in the Alps has already disappeared and the Arctic is described as disappearing, for Zeno Antarctica comes to stand as the final place on Earth still capable of resisting the all-­encompassing destruction of

86   The loss of wilderness humanity. In fact, what Zeno wishes for more than anything else is that this last piece of wilderness can be left alone – or as he reveals to his girlfriend Paulina, after she accuses him of wanting to decide the fate of the continent: ‘If you mean I don’t want any people or fuel oil in the Antarctic, then you’re right. I do want to determine what happens here. But I don’t want to possess the place, that’s the difference, I don’t want to have any part of it named after me, I just want it to be left in peace.’ (Ibid., 61) However, via his job on the cruise ship Zeno soon discovers that this is an impossible wish. For instance, he witnesses first-­hand how a number of nations have established bases on Antarctica, in which “people are just biding their time waiting for the day they’re allowed to drill for oil and not just ice” (ibid., 105). In fact, Zeno clashes directly with one of these ‘people’. When a Chilean soldier enters a colony of brooding and especially shy penguins, Zeno tries verbally and physically to stop him, until the infuriated soldier threatens him with his rifle (ibid., 107). We should therefore also note how these accounts disclose another way of being on Antarctica than Zeno’s i.e. how they point towards another way of affectively and cognitively relating to its world. A way that is not saturated by an all-­encompassing sense of loss, but rather permeated by cynicism. These descriptions even explicate a cognitive reason for this cynicism. Hence when Antarctica is described as a place where people are ‘waiting for the day they’re allowed to drill for oil’, what appears is a human interpretation of Antarctica as a resource that can be used when economically needed. There is therefore also a link to Heidegger here, as in his late writings we find a quite detailed critique of an identical cognitive relation to the world. Heidegger does in his late writings thus not only frame the interpretation of the non-­human world as resources awaiting utilization as the standard human comportment towards the non-­human world. As this interpretation is according to Heidegger what is basically revealed in humanity’s use of modern technology, he even suggests a specific term for the entity of this kind of interpretation. He calls it “the standing reverse” (Bestand) (1977, 17). While I will come back to Heidegger’s critique later in the chapter, let me for now return to the interpretation of Antarctica as a resource in Trojanow’s novel. Hence in Zeno’s depiction of the tourists on the cruise ship it surfaces just as it did in his depiction of the people ‘biding their time’ on the continent. Zeno describes how these tourists engage in what is commercially labelled “The Worst Journey in the World” in order to master a continent that was formerly only accessible to daredevils (Trojanow 2016, 26). And how – when they have ended their journey and overcome its feeling of danger – they quickly forget the world of the continent again.5 In their way of relating to the world we therefore also rediscover two features already accentuated. First, the destructive urge to colonize and conquer that Zeno

The loss of wilderness   87 described as a general human trait.6 And second, the interpretation of Antarctica as a resource that can be used to enhance human experience, but otherwise stands in reserve. Moreover, these features are also connected with some of the affective attributes that Kant associated with the experience of the sublime.7 Faced with Antarctica’s massive scale, treacherous terrain and rough climate the tourists are at first overwhelmed by the grandeur of the continent. But it is a fleeing sensation. As soon as they discover that this grandeur can be conquered, both their awe and their interest disappear. In this way their affective relation to Antarctica’s wilderness is represented as the complete opposite of Zeno’s, whose relation rests on a strong affective experience of dependence. While the tourists experience the meeting with Antarctica as a quickly fading sensation of being confronted with something sublime, Zeno cannot “live without [his] sojourns in the ice” (ibid., 94). This dependence, deriving from his many years as a glaciologist, is revealed in this passage: Every May and September I would go a few days ahead of my students, so I could abandon myself to my senses, undisturbed, and feel the glacier’s full emotional force before we captivated its data. It was my doctoral advisor who placed this particular glacier in my care, an arranged marriage that in time became a union of love, as if every measurement were an acknowledgment of its singularity. On that first morning, I rose before the sun, laced up my hiking boots which initially felt strange, and then I trekked around the glacier, ascending on the left side and then after crossing the ice descending below the escarpment on the other side. Each time I visited I would first scan the glacier with my eyes, then test it with my feet. Whenever I stopped to catch my breath I would touch it, laying my hands on its flanks and then stroking my face, taking in its icy breath, its invigorating cold. I was familiar with every one of its sounds, the creaking and the clanking, every glacier has its own voice, when I visited others I would compare theirs with the one I knew. A dying glacier sounds different than a healthy one, it gives off a powerful rattle when it bursts along a crevasse, and if you listen closely you can hear the melt flowing into the underground lakes speeding the erosion of the wrinkled body. We were like an elderly couple: one of us was severely ill, and the other couldn’t do anything about it. (Ibid., 44) This passage explicates how Zeno’s dependence on ice originates in conditions distinct from the conditions under which the tourists experience Antarctica. Where the tourists’ experiences are shaped as a fleeting encounter Zeno’s dependence stems from dwelling; that is, it springs from a mode of being not unlike boredom, since the huge amounts of time Zeno has spent with ‘his’ glacier initially began as an obligation/a part of his job. Against the tourists’ transient desire for mastering Antarctica, we therefore find an

88   The loss of wilderness important clue to explaining Zeno’s love of ice in his description of how his relation with the glacier started as an ‘arranged marriage that in time became a union of love’. Indeed, in this description we also find a key to understand Zeno’s suicide, as this love of ice makes his life unbearable in a world with accelerating global warming. What we encounter in Zeno is thus an affective relation to the world that on the basis of love is opened for grief and depression. However, this explanation should not stand alone, as Zeno’s suicide can, in fact, be perceived as both a hateful and a loving gesture. On the one hand we can read the novel’s conclusion as a hateful act of violence that Zeno directs first at the cruise ship’s passengers (by leaving them on the ice) and then himself (by committing suicide), and therefore as an act that from an anthropocentric perspective can be seen as a representation of the most radical form of misanthropy – even as another negative reply to what I called in my interpretation of Bethany’s suicide in The Rapture the ‘anthropodicy’ question. That is, the question: Is humanity actually entitled to exist in a world that it is not only about to destroy for itself, but also for most non-­human beings? On the other hand Zeno’s suicide can, from an ecocentric perspective, also be read as an act of love. Since he reached the conclusion that a biodiverse life on Earth cannot thrive until humanity is gone, suicide in a sense appears as the ultimate gesture of love that a human can show the non-­human world.

Another suicidal ice-­lover I can understand if this reading appears somewhat bizarre. After all, do the negative replies to the anthropodicy question that concludes both The Rapture and The Lamentations of Zeno not constitute just one of those strange coincidences one may easily over-­interpret (i.e. take to be more significant than it actually is)? Well, this may of course be the case, but in the novel that I will now turn to – The Ice Lovers (2009) by Canadian author Jean McNeil – we encounter a protagonist whose death encourages a further explication of this interpretative pattern. In fact, this novel may be introduced as yet another story about an ice-­lover who ends up committing suicide. In The Ice Lovers the journalist Helen travels to Antarctica in 2016 to write a book about the biologist Nara, who three years before disappeared on the continent. Indeed, the novel consists mainly of the book that Helen writes about Nara’s experiences on Antarctica from 2011 until her disappearance in 2013. Along with archive material and interviews with Nara’s friends, Helen bases her book on her discovery of Nara’s diary. Herein Nara describes how she is forced to stay the winter on Antarctica in 2012, when a deadly epidemic hits the rest of the world and how during this winter she feels that the Earth is speaking to her (McNeil 2009, 179). Aware of this, Helen narrates how Nara travels to Antarctica in the summer 2011 in order to research how accelerating global warming is affecting the continent’s biodiversity. However, even before she sets foot on the continent Nara encounters its

The loss of wilderness   89 wildness. During her flight from the Falklands to Antarctica the weather suddenly changes and Nara must (while a snow storm rages) spend several days with the pilot Luke in a tent on the continent’s ice. For Nara this first meeting with Antarctica’s wild weather and geography spells the beginning of a romance that develops into a love of ice in particular and a love of Antarctica in general. Moreover, the experience creates a common bond between her and Luke. Luke is, however, much older than Nara and instead of beginning a romantic relationship with him, she commences a relationship with the glaciologist Alexander. At this point Nara starts hearing voices and soon after is haunted by visions of ghostlike beings that frighten her. During this period she decides that she again wants to experience a remote area of Antarctica with Luke. She initially wants to surrender herself sexually to him, but changes her mind at the last minute. On the homeward journey the plane crashes and when Luke awakes Nara has disappeared. It is afterwards described how Nara has walked onto a floating ice piece and thereby committed suicide. Parallel to this story the novel also contains Helen’s narration of how, on Antarctica, she begins a relationship with the British civil servant David. In fact, in many ways her experiences on the continent mirror Nara’s, as Helen too is forced to spend a winter on Antarctica while another deadly epidemic roams the world. Along with the accelerating ice-­loss and loss of biodiversity on Antarctica (which we hear about through Nara’s experiences), through Helen’s description of the epidemic we also get a quite detailed account of the chaos that anthropogenic global warming is causing in the rest of the world. For instance, via Helen we learn how a number of collapses in both human and non-­human systems have begun undermining human civilization. What we encounter in these descriptions is in other words a proportionality between Antarctica’s gradual melting and the beginning of the collapse of human civilization. The Antarctic wilderness is in the novel simply imagined as maintaining a fragile climatic balance that human civilization depends upon (ibid., 26, 134). In fact, for this reason the apocalyptic link between the loss of wilderness and the extinction of humanity (which belongs to the imagination form as one of its possibilities) is more explicitly present in The Ice Lovers than in The Lamentations of Zeno. That said, this link only appears in the background of a more general depiction of Antarctica as a world that has the power to reconfigure the Being-­in-the-­world of its human visitors. That Antarctica is in this regard imagined as a wilderness appears explicitly from the novel’s descriptions. The continent is for instance described as “nobody’s country”, “the largest and most empty wilderness on the planet”, and as being “not really part of the world” (ibid., 98, 145, 280). Indeed, the spatial segregation of Antarctica from the rest of the world creates the foundation for the novel’s elegiac depiction of the continent’s biodiversity. For instance, a number of lesser-­ known species are via Nara’s experiments portrayed as going extinct as a consequence of anthropogenic warming on Antarctica and in the oceans around

90   The loss of wilderness the continent (ibid., 81–82). The novel even contains a description that quite closely echoes the aesthetic framing of ice that was also present in The Lamentations of Zeno. Helen thus states that: There are so many kinds of ice that exist in the world: ice clouds, ice vapour. Icebergs, ice mountains, ice plateaus. Then the sea ice: ice floes, pack ice, pancake ice, grease ice, undersea ice, rotten ice, ice ridges, ice hummocks. An ice planet, in the process of melting. What will it be like, to live in a world without ice? The white warp gone, the mirror gone. The earth and its hot oceans, dense with methane. (Ibid., 301) As it was the case in The Lamentations of Zeno all these types of ice come to stand for the aesthetic quality of a biodiverse planet, and how its disappearance reduces the quality of human existence. What we reencounter here is in other words a familiar answer to the question: What will the loss of wilderness (initiated by anthropogenic global warming) come to mean for the Being-­in-the-­worlds of humans? This does not mean, though, that the disappearance of the Antarctic world initially touches Nara in the same way that it touched Zeno. The grief and anger that the disappearance of the Antarctic world evoked in Zeno is in the beginning of The Ice Lovers overshadowed by Nara’s feeling of being liberated from her former self (ibid., 64). In fact, the primary mood that Antarctica evokes in Nara is (in the early parts of the novel) relief, as on the continent she feels separated from her past.8 In her narration Helen explicitly connects this experience with how “the Antarctic forces you to live for the moment” (ibid., 98). She describes how Nara experiences the “last place in the world without money or cars” as a force that due to its geographic isolation gives her a sense of being permanently present (ibid.). This force embeds within her a new kind of Being-­inthe-­world experienced as an enduring state of heightened attention. Nara is installed within this new mode of existence almost from the outset of the novel. When she and Luke are caught on the ice (waiting for the snowstorm to pass) Nara goes outside the tent to get some water, but cannot find her way back. Eventually Luke saves her, but this incident leads her straight to the conclusion that “this is a new way of living, we are living each moment as a part of itself ” (ibid., 43). In other words: what we encounter through these descriptions is a portrait of Antarctica as an unique kind of world, because it is still capable of transforming humans into an object of its surroundings. It is thus that the continent poses resistance to (what Serres called) the ‘being-­everywhere’ of humans, which gives its world the ability to anchor Nara in a state of permanent presence. While Nara initially experiences this state as a relief, it increasingly has a negative bearing on her in the second half of the novel.9 Here, Antarctica’s demand for permanent presence turns into a destructive force that opens Nara to an uncanny shadow world, in which the Earth talks to her and she sees

The loss of wilderness   91 strange beings. These beings are initially experienced by Nara as “the will of a presence – a disembodied thing, not a person, but not an object either – looking at her”, but during the winter she is stuck on the continent they take more concrete shape as animals, old Vikings and former polar explorers (ibid., 217–218, 225–226). Nara even describes in her diary how some of the animals have come from a future without humans to tell her that Earth has begun contributing to the warming induced by humanity in order to accelerate the regeneration of the biosphere (ibid., 152).10 Although this representation of Earth echoes very closely Lovelock’s idea of Gaia (i.e. Earth as a punitive ‘war machine’), we do not get an explicit depiction of a non-­human world executing its judgment of humanity in the novel.11 What we get is instead an implicit enactment of such a judgment, as the message Nara receives from the uncanny beings haunting her, is “that she is in the wrong place” (ibid., 225). In fact, indirectly this message already contains the outline of the judgment that Nara inflicts on herself with her suicide, which is made even clearer by this remark that Nara makes to Luke: ‘Sometimes I think we’re not supposed to be anywhere at all on the planet. And it’s only in coming to the Antarctic that you realize it.’ She paused. ‘I feel closer to the planet here. To how it works. Sometimes I even think it’s speaking to me.’ (Ibid., 138) This remark can thus be read as an echo of the conclusion that Zeno – and for that matter also Bethany – reached, namely that humans are not entitled to exist in a world that they are about to destroy for themselves and for most non-­human life forms. Although it can be objected that what Nara hears and sees are the hallucinations of psychosis, such a reading ignores that animism is clearly part of the imaginations that accelerating global warming are triggering in the Western mind. Furthermore, such a reading also ignores how, in climate fiction, the particular utilization of the imagination form (i.e. The Loss of Wilderness) brings about a world that seems to produce a specific relation to the world or existential structure. In both The Lamentations of Zeno and The Ice Lovers we thus encounter the idea that the non-­human world can present itself to humans in a radically different way if humans allows themselves to dwell in the wilderness. Or to put it slightly differently: that wilderness can open humans to a relation to the world that differs radically from the relation to the world that they are opened to when situated in the high-­ tempo worlds of the modern city. In The Ice Lovers this imagined ability particularly features in the novel’s description of how Nara experiences the silence of the Antarctic world. Just as Zeno was only able to truly hear ‘the voice’ of his glacier when dwelling alone in the silence surrounding it, so too the silence of the Antarctic world becomes for Nara a medium for the communication of the non-­human world. That Nara experiences the silence of the Antarctic world as an importunate force

92   The loss of wilderness thus already features in the novel’s description of her first days on the continent. When she and Luke are forced to wait on the ice, Nara experiences how “silence itself had no sound: it was not a whine, a ringing absence, but it was pristine, unarguable” (ibid., 48). Indeed, it is this ‘unarguable’ silence that later materializes into an actual voice, as the novel reads “in the soundless Antarctic, she is certain she can hear it: the planet’s racing heart, beating with new frantic purpose” (ibid., 152). Another way to describe the similarities in Nara’s and Zeno’s experiences is therefore that they are both affectively and cognitively opened to the suffering of the non-­human world via their dwelling in the wilderness. Being forced to dwell in the wilderness opens them to a loving way of Being-­inthe-­world i.e. to a mode of existence that – due to love – recognizes the suffering that humanity is imposing on the non-­human world. Thus, just as Zeno’s love of biodiversity made him a misfit, Nara’s relation to the world radically differs from the standard behaviour in The Ice Lovers. This is shown, for example, in this passage where Luke thinks back on Nara after her death: Nara had been one of them, the lovers of ice. To be enchanted by ice takes a particular kind of soul, he considered; most people saw death in the frozen continent, they saw lack. It took a strange nature, a person somehow divorced from themselves, from their interests, their destiny to appreciate its pale fire. (Ibid., 207) In fact, it is difficult to speak of the different modes of existence that the novel portrays without applying a perspective on gender. When Luke (in the excerpt above) describes an ice lover as a person ‘somehow divorced from themselves, from their interests’. the description stands in stark contrast to the novel’s male characters. Luke appears in the beginning of the novel to be an ice lover, but as the novel proceeds it becomes clearer and clearer that his affection for Antarctica is inseparably intertwined with his desire to possess Nara sexually (ibid., 291). When this desire remains unfulfilled his love of ice and affection for Antarctica completely evaporates (ibid., 270–271). Indeed, after Nara’s death his only desire is for the continent to be “lit by melt […] burned up, consumed, ashes”, so that he can return home to his family (ibid., 81). Luke shares this desire with the civil servant David (Helen’s lover), who is stationed on Antarctica in order to secure Great Britain’s territorial interests as the continent melts. David’s relation to the Antarctic world is defined by the violence that is indirectly embedded in the functions he performs for his country. That is, he represents the same interpretation of Antarctica as a resource that stands in reserve that we saw critically highlighted in The Lamentations of Zeno. Finally, the same can be said about the glaciologist Alexander (Nara’s lover). As he is on the continent strictly to boost his academic career, his relation to the continent can be summarized by the novel’s

The loss of wilderness   93 descriptions of the many scientists that Luke flies from the Falkland Islands to Antarctica. As these scientists’ relation to the continent consists in turning it into a scientific object – they only engage with via “maths, computer programmes, numbers” – their sensibility remains closed to its “mystery” (ibid., 26, 80). What emerges in these three male characters’ ways of engaging with Antarctica is thus a relation that turns wilderness into an object for human (i.e. sexual, geopolitical, economic) interests. We may even say that in both The Ice Lovers and in The Lamentations of Zeno this relation appears as the main reason for the global loss of wilderness i.e. as the engine of both accelerating global warming as well as of other human-­induced forms of destruction in the Earth’s biosphere. Just as Zero’s relation to the world contrasted the general human way of relating to the world portrayed in Trojanow’s novel, so too in The Ice Lovers we are generally confronted with a humanity that is highly destructive. Not only because it relates to wildernesses (and the rest of the non-­human world) as a means, but also because this way of relating to the world is in McNeil’s novel basically imagined to make humans immune to the deep-­felt love and sorrow that Nara is experiencing. Rather banally, we may in regard to both novels therefore say that they depict how the meeting with the melting worlds of the planet’s last wildernesses can evoke two very different relations to the world. In fact this idea (that wilderness may evoke a relation to the world that differs from a general human destructiveness) is in itself nothing new. In modernity this idea has a philosophical history that goes back to before the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming began to attract public attention in the late 1980s. For instance, this idea plays a very central role in many of the most influential texts that Heidegger wrote in the latter part of his life. Before I briefly return to the two novels at the end of this chapter let me therefore now devote some pages to the Heideggerian heritage that appears in the utilization of the imagination form.

Heidegger and the imagination form It ought to be relatively uncontroversial to claim that philosophical texts may contribute to a better conceptual understanding of the modes of existence that fiction in general and Western climate fiction in particular make visible. However, when the philosophical texts in question are written by Martin Heidegger it is not that simple. Heidegger’s long love-­affair with Nazism means that the existential templates embedded in his texts cannot be highlighted without due consideration. In fact, after the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (2014) this is more evident than ever. However, I do not agree with British ecocritic Greg Garrard when he suggests that Heidegger’s inexcusable devotion to Nazism makes his entire oeuvre unusable for ecocritical purposes (2010, 252). The reason for this is not that I disagree with Garrard (and many others) on the point that some of Heidegger’s texts are

94   The loss of wilderness stained by Nazism. They certainly are.12 Rather, I find Garrard’s suggestion too harsh because I don’t think these stains warrant a rejection of the whole oeuvre since most of Heidegger’s texts focus on questions that do not directly relate to Nazism. Indeed, this is the case with the reflections that I will now turn to. Thus, one can, in several of Heidegger’s late texts, find passages that conceptually expand on the modes of existence that contrasted Zeno’s and Nara’s ways of Being-­in-the-­world to standard human behaviour. It is, however, important to emphasize that the world dominating Heidegger’s late texts is not a wilderness. It is rather an agrarian or rural world. The separation of nature and society that in a Latourian sense makes these texts ‘modern’ is thus more specifically embodied by a strong tendency in Heidegger to separate the existential possibilities related to city-­life from the possibilities related to the rural worlds of the forest or country path. This separation has for instance a strong presence in the small monograph Discourse on Thinking (Gelassenheit, 1959), which contains the two texts: “Memorial Address (“Gelassenheit”) and “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking (“Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit”). In the monograph Heidegger critiques what he calls calculative thinking (rechnende Denken) i.e. how the standard human relation to the world has become dictated by economic concerns and consequently consists in turning (by way of modern technology) all that exists into an economic means. For instance, he writes: The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. […] The power concealed in modern technology determines the relation of man to that which exists. It rules the whole earth. (Heidegger 1966, 50) Heidegger’s primary concern is, however, not how the dominance of calculative thought leads to ecological degradation. Although attentive to the destruction that it is causing in the non-­human world, this destruction is not the main driver of his critique. This is instead the anthropocentric perception that calculative thinking prevents modern humans from manifesting an existential modus that epitomizes “a more primal truth” about what it means to be human (1977, 28). However, whereas in Being and Time Heidegger framed human existence as a being that disclosed the truth about its own being and the world around it in the light of its finitude, the existential modus in question is framed slightly different here (2001, 292). In his late texts Heidegger increasingly connects the meaning-­giving of humans with occurrences that do not stem from an inner conception of finitude, but are rather triggered by the non-­human world. Or to be more precise: to events (Ereignissen) in  which human thinking is appropriated as a clearing (Lichtung) by “the

The loss of wilderness   95 presencing of something that presences” (Das Anwesen eines Anwesenden) (1977, 9). This turn (Wendung) in thinking is clearly motivated by Heidegger’s critical perception of the accelerating development and use of technology.13 After the turn Heidegger repeatedly frames what occurs in the event as being fundamentally different from the meaning-­giving embedded in the utilization of modern technology. In his lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”, 1953) this appears for example in the way he differentiates between two forms of meaning-­giving. And in Discourse on Thinking it re-­emerges in his description of calculative thinking and its counterpart: meditative thinking (besinnliche Denken). In “The Question Concerning Technology” this agenda is more clearly present in Heidegger’s accentuation of how technology (technē) originates in poiēsis i.e. how it was originally a revealing, a bringing-­forth ­(Her-­vor-bringen) that happened in accordance with physis, the concealment and unconcealment of “the growing things of nature” (Heidegger 1977, 11, 14). As an example of this Heidegger urges us (rather unsurprisingly) to think about how farming was traditionally a revealing that happened in accordance with the changing seasons (ibid., 16). In other words: how farming used to consist in a presencing that allowed itself to be appropriated by the concealment and unconcealment embedded in the natural rhythms of the non-­human world. In fact, it is exactly this natural presencing of the growing things of the non-­ human world that according to Heidegger is lost in the utilization of modern technology, since “the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging (Herausforderung)” (ibid., 14). The point is of course that in the utilization of modern technology the presencing of the non-­human world is not allowed to occur naturally, but it is, rather, forced forth. Indeed, it is in this distinction that we find traces of the contrasting ways of Being-­in-the-­world that appeared in The Lamentations of Zeno and The Ice Lovers. For example, in his description of the revealing that rules in modern technology Heidegger emphasizes how nothing is safe from the challenging of calculative thinking. Or as he states in the essay “What Are Poets For?” (“Wozu Dichter?”, 1946), even “the Earth and its atmosphere become raw material” (1975, 109) i.e. they become resources of a human will to master that is in the end “self-­assertive”, a self-­ destructive “will to will” (Wille zum Willen) that with ever more speed and force conquers and impoverishes Earth (ibid., 112). Moreover, it is in the light of this self-­destructive will to will that Heidegger turns to poiēsis as an alternative. When, in the later part of his oeuvre, Heidegger lets himself be influenced by poets such as Rilke and Hölderlin it is due to a fascination of how these two poets allowed themselves to be appropriated by the event. That is how, in their writings, Rilke and Hölderlin became clearings for the presencings of the non-­human world. In particular, Heidegger is fascinated with the waiting for inspiration that precedes the poetic event. He interprets this waiting as an encounter with a form of resistance that may be forced aside – as it indeed is by modern technology

96   The loss of wilderness – but otherwise conceals that which presences itself in the event (ibid., 92). What Heidegger takes from the poetic event and integrates into his critique of modern technology is in other words the idea that human beings may experience the non-­human world in a more genuine and caring way, if they await its presencings. Thus, we can now return to Discourse on Thinking, as waiting here is a vital part of what Heidegger conceptualizes as meditative thinking. In the first of the two texts in the monograph Heidegger explains how meditative thinking is a form of thinking that (in contrast to calculative thinking) does not have a particular purpose and therefore “is worthless for dealing with current business” (1966, 46). Meditative thinking appears instead, when thought lets go of specific aims and opens itself to the potential occurring of the event. This does not mean, though, that meditative thinking demands any special philosophical abilities. Rather, Heidegger emphasizes how meditative thinking only requires that we as humans “dwell” in our thinking (ibid., 47). Heidegger even goes on to describe the transition from calculative to meditative thinking as a “releasement toward things” (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen) (ibid., 54). He links the letting go of calculative thinking to an affective state in which “our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed” (ibid., 54). What we find here is in other words not only the idea that capitalism structures the human comportment towards all that exists as a mastering. Or that this mastering will accelerate the impoverishment of Earth, as long as modern technology continues to be appropriated by the economic pursuit of ever-­higher profits. No, we also find the idea that this pursuit is not only causing destructive stress in the Earth System, but also stressing humans. Indeed, this is why Heidegger frames the transition from calculative to meditative thinking as an alternative to both these types of stress. Where this is the main point in “Memorial Address”, the argumentation moves along a similar route in “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking”, which consists of a fictive dialogue between a scholar, a teacher and a scientist that walk at night “far from human habitation” (ibid., 60). What connects the latter text to the former is thus the reiteration that via its release from calculation, thinking can be steered into the open (das Offene). That is, into the meditative state where Being may – through the potential occurring of the event – presence itself as “mystery” (Geheimnis) (ibid., 55). However, in “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking” this is emphasized via a terminology that differs significantly from the one deployed in the “Memorial Address”, as the following excerpt shows: Scientist: You

say that the horizon is the openness which surrounds us. But what is this openness as such, if we disregard that it can also appear as the horizon of our representing? Teacher:  It strikes me as something like a region, an enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests. (Ibid., 64–65)

The loss of wilderness   97 Embedded in these rather abstract formulations is the point that for the human being who dwells, a region (Gegend) opens in which ‘everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests’. In fact, due to this opening, Heidegger’s scholar, teacher and scientist quickly move on to talk about this experience as an encounter with “that-­which-regions” (Gegnet), a term that is significant for several reasons (ibid., 66). First of all, it discloses the apprehension that a protective circle or sphere may open around the human being who dwells in meditative thinking. Second, it also discloses the apprehension that this circle or sphere may function as “an abiding expanse”, in which the event gives new meaning to Being (ibid., 66). And finally – and in this context perhaps of most importance – Heidegger implicitly associates this mental space with remote physical places. That is, he imagines the forest and country path as places that enable meditative thinking to become a “sheltering” (Unterkunft) from calculative thinking and therefore also as the places in which meditative thinking may expand into the event (ibid., 65). This is apparent in “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking” both by the way the dialogue between the three characters takes place on a country path far from human habitation and from the fact that their conversation ends as soon as they “again near human habitation” (ibid., 87). Indeed, the three characters even stress how their distance to human habitation “leaves [them] time for meditating by slowing down [their] pace” (ibid., 60). That said, the main point here is not that the modern divide between nature and society to a certain extent limits Heidegger’s thinking. It is rather that we in Heidegger find an imagination that is comparable to what I discovered in my analyses of the two novels earlier in this chapter. Namely the imagination that humans dwelling far from the epicentres of modern civilization may find access to a mode of existence characterized by a new way of giving meaning to the non-­human world. Or to be more precise: to a way of giving meaning to the non-­human world different from those dominating in the epicentres of modern civilization. In fact, Heidegger even goes one step further. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (“Bauen Wohnen Denken”, 1954) he not only portrays meditative dwelling as an alternative way of Being-­in-the-­world. He also describes it as a way “to save” Earth (1975, 148). This may strike us as a rather ludicrous statement, but it encapsulates two ideas already highlighted. One: that the human being who dwells in meditative thinking is protected against the stress of calculative thinking and its eternal ambition of creating ever more economic value. And two: that in its release from this stressful relation to the world the human being who dwells is in essence saving Earth, since he (to deliberately echo Heidegger’s male-­chauvinistic discourse) lets things be and thereby enters that ‘enchanted region where everything returns to that in which it rests’. In regard to the alternative ways of Being-­in-the-­world manifested by Zeno and Nara these two ideas gain, however, only full comparative significance when we include one more Heidegger text. Hence in his “Letter on Humanism” (“Brief über den Humanismus”, 1946) – which was written at

98   The loss of wilderness almost the same time as “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking” – Heidegger points out how it requires a certain emotional engagement to let things be. And what is more, he no longer describes this engagement in terms of “care” (Sorge) (which was the term used in Being and Time about the general human way of relating to existence) (2001, 225). Instead he frames the emotional engagement required to let things be in the following manner: To embrace a ‘thing’ or a ‘person’ in its essence means to love it, to favour it. Thought in a more original way such favouring means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favouring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. (1993, 220) What Heidegger claims here is thus that love (Liebe) is the true foundation of letting things be – that it takes love to let something that presences be so that it can presence itself in ways that are not forced. Linking this claim to the claims summarized above, we may therefore also conclude that in “Letter on Humanism” love does not only appear as a condition for ‘the releasement toward things’ that Heidegger later on, in Discourse on Thinking, finds in meditative thinking. No, it also appears as a condition for the dwelling that Heidegger in “Building Dwelling Thinking” portrays as a way to save the Earth. Indeed, it is in this line of thought that we find a parallel to the main existential templates displayed in The Lamentations of Zeno and The Ice Lovers. Hence we do within it reencounter the imagination that remote places enable a sustainable way of Being-­in-the-­world. Or to be more precise: that human beings dwelling in the non-­human world are more capable of seeing and hearing its presencings than human beings occupied by the business of the city.

The loving relation to the world So, let us now return to the two novels by asking: can we – sticking a bit longer to Heidegger’s terminology – say that, in their love for ice and the biodiversity of Earth’s last wildernesses, Zeno and Nara save the Earth? On the surface this is of course a totally ridiculous question. After all, the two novels leave very little room for anything other than pessimism in their general depiction of anthropogenic global warming and other human-­induced forms of ecological devastation. At first glance we do here therefore not find any positive assessments of humanity’s ability to avert human and non-­human annihilation on a large scale. And yet, if we allow ourselves to put our justified scepticism of Heidegger’s terminology aside, it is actually possible to answer yes: Zeno and Nara do to a certain extent embody actions that (in a Heideggerian sense) promote the saving of Earth. One way of pursuing this argument could for example consist in claiming that, in the most radical of ways, Zeno and Nara let things be by committing

The loss of wilderness   99 suicide. But this claim has an undeniable weakness. Hence we should keep in mind that there is an abyss separating Heidegger’s (eco)philosophical ventures from ‘deep ecology’ and its tendency to end in arguments for drastically reducing the number of humans on Earth.14 Since humans are for Heidegger the clearing that enables the non-­human world to presence itself, his philosophy is in essence deeply anthropocentric – and this to the ontological extent that there is for Heidegger no non-­human world presencing itself in a meaningful way without the meaning-­giving entity that is the human being (1995, 311). Or to put this differently: Heidegger totally ignores the knowledge that is for example embedded in biosemiotics, namely that non-­human beings submit meaningful communication to each other in all kinds of ways. When one may claim that Zeno and Nara do (in a Heideggerian sense) embody actions that promote the saving of Earth it is therefore not so much due to their suicides. It is rather, because, in their love of the non-­human world, Zeno and Nara allow themselves to become clearings for its presencings. That is, they do not – in contrast to what is in The Lamentations of Zeno and The Ice Lovers described and depicted as standard human behaviour – reduce the non-­human world to a means for their self-­interests, but instead become mediums for its suffering. In Zeno’s case, this opening towards the suffering of the non-­human world first manifests in his attentiveness to ‘the voice’ of ‘his’ glacier. It is this attentiveness that grounds him in a mode of existence where the primary concern is to protect the non-­human world by letting its ecosystems be. In Nara’s case it is initially a bit more difficult to connect her actions to the comportment that Heidegger claimed could save the Earth. Hence it would not be unjust to describe her experiments as a challenging, since they consist in exposing different specimens of Antarctica’s biodiversity to unnatural conditions – for example placing them in water heated to the temperature expected to be the result of future global warming (McNeil 2009, 82). However, in “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking” Heidegger’s scientist makes a comment that we may take as a clue in our interpretation of how these experiments influence Nara. This comment reads: “that scientific research is a kind of attack on nature, but one which nevertheless allows nature to be heard” (1966, 88). The point we may take from this is thus that Nara’s experiments may be interpreted as one of the factors that open her to the sufferings of the non-­human world i.e. as an important driver in her transformation to a clearing for Gaia. Another important driver is of course the fact that she is forced to spend the winter dwelling in Antarctica’s ‘unarguable’ silence. In the same way that the remoteness of the glacier (and the silence surrounding it) was pivotal for Zeno’s ability to sense its suffering, so too Antarctica’s seclusion from the rest of the world is key to Nara’s transformation. We may even say of this seclusion that it comes to function as a ‘sheltering’ from her normal life and that this sheltering makes her receptive to the suffering of the non-­human world in ways she was not before. Or simply: that this sheltering conditions the

100   The loss of wilderness events in which the non-­human world presences itself to her – not only in new ways, but also in a manner that changes her affective and cognitive relation to the world. In the end, what matters is that for both Zeno and Nara the wilderness becomes an affective and cognitive entry to the suffering of the non-­human world. And that (in their experience of this suffering) they oppose (what is depicted as) a general human tendency to not take this suffering in. In fact, we may say of this tendency that it epitomizes an existential structure which is not open to the non-­human suffering that it is inflicting. And further: that this structure is equivalent to a calculative relation to the world, which – due to its affective and cognitive capability to repress the consequences of its destructiveness – is ultimately (imagined as) self-­destructive. Indeed, we may in a semantic twist that turns one of Heidegger’s most famous terms on its head, even say of this (calculative) existential structure that it contains a fatal ‘oblivion of the being’.15 It is moreover noteworthy that the novels display this dichotomy between a loving and a calculative relation to the world, because we are here dealing with two existential structures that do not just belong to the fictions. Zooming out from the novels and in on their cultural context, we may also locate this dichotomy in a couple of the most significant ecocritical and philosophical works on anthropogenic global warming that have been published since the millennium. For instance, in one of the most influential early ecocritical monographs, The Song of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Bate frames the awaiting tragedies caused by global warming and other forms of ecological devastations (induced by humans) as a reason for turning to what he calls “ecopoiesis” (Bate 2001, 262). Following Heidegger his dubious point is that poetry can promote the saving of the Earth, since the reading of poetry is connected to dwelling and a highly attuned sensibility towards the non-­ human world. Bate even makes sure to mention that such an attunement will require that humanity liberates itself from calculative thinking and its technological domination of the non-­human (ibid., 258). Within contemporary philosophy a comparable critique (of the use of modern technology) and call (for a more attuned sensibility towards the non-­ human) can be the found in Ruth Irwin’s Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change (2008). Here sensorial immersion in the non-­human world is again presented as a path to an alternative (i.e. more loving) relation to the world that may lead humanity out of its ecological perils. Or as Irwin writes: The element of perceptive attunement (Gelassenheit) is precisely what is missing from philosophical discourse about the relation between contemporary human beings and the environment. The lack of awareness – and discussion – has rendered the environment alien and inaccessible to the norms of cultural empathy or any recognition about the way the landscape shapes culture and subjectivity. (2008, 187)

The loss of wilderness   101 In fact, what we encounter in Bate and Irwin is not just a very strong confidence in the ecocritical potential of Heidegger’s philosophy. We also encounter a strong phenomenological perspective that separates the human from the non-­human, but at the same time imagines the human body and mind as highly sensitive to stimuli from the non-­human world. We should therefore not be fooled by the fact that Husserl’s thinking is much less evident in Heidegger’s texts after Being and Time. Hence the perception that the human is surrounded or encircled by a (local) world is basically still present in Heidegger’s description of how meditative dwelling grounds the human being within a protective sphere or ‘region’. What – in the light of accelerating anthropogenic global warming and the general human destruction of the biosphere – makes Heidegger’s thinking attractive for scholars such as Bate and Irwin is thus exactly that it combines this anthropology (deriving from phenomenology) with the idea that the human who truly attunes her sensibility to the non-­human world participates in saving it. Or in other words: that it frames the non-­human world as the place where the sensitive human being can become acquainted with the true condition of the world and therefore also be opened to a sustainable mode of existence. As mentioned in the beginning of the chapter this is by no means uncontroversial, but rather an idea that has for good reason been heavily criticized by a number of influential cultural studies scholars and philosophers. The assumption that the remote non-­human world constitutes a ground from which saving Earth (i.e. a transition to sustainability) can be instigated is for these critics equivalent to a nostalgic longing for a world that in the Anthropocene no longer exists.16 That is, this assumption is in their view simply outdated, since: […] the end of the world has already happened. We sprayed the DDT. We exploded the nuclear bomb. We changed the climate. This is what it looks like after the end of the world. (Morton 2010, 98) What we encounter here is therefore basically a battle about how the non-­ human can and should be perceived in a world that, due to human action, is rapidly moving towards overheating. On the one side of this battle, we have what (following Latour) I have in this chapter described as a ‘modern’ perception that separates nature from society and valourizes wilderness as something pure, pristine, and beautiful. On the other side of this battle we have what we might – for lack of a better term – call a postmodern perception. The essence of this perception is not only that what ‘the moderns’ perceive as pure, pristine, and beautiful wilderness no longer exists; it is also that this loss is a step towards the creation of artificial worlds. From The Loss of Wilderness I will therefore now move on to the imagination that anthropogenic global warming will proliferate the engineering of atmospheres and technological world-­making.

102   The loss of wilderness

Notes   1 Already in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson points out, with a direct reference to Heidegger, that “today […] it may be possible to think all this in a different way, at the moment of a radical eclipse of Nature itself: Heidegger’s ‘field path’ is, after all, irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital” (Jameson 1993, 34–35).   2 White Jr. argues that the framing in Christianity of human beings as beings made in the image of God has had a long deteriorating effect on the non-­human world. Especially because it led to a modernity guided by “the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature” (1967, 1203).   3 It is here important to emphasize that the imagination form (i.e. The Loss of Wilderness) does not just appear in the shape of remote areas of ice in decline. For instance, in the last novel in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Science in the Capital the imagination form appears in the following way: This was a south-­facing slope, and it almost looked like late autumn. Not quite, for autumn in the Sierra was marked by fall colours in the ground cover, including a neon scarlet that came out on slopes backlit by the sun. Now that same ground cover was simply brown. It was dead. […] one of the loveliest landscapes on the planet dead before their eyes. […] It had never occurred to Charlie that any of this could ever go away. And yet here it was, dead. (2007, 300–301)   4 Another example of how the imagination form is equated with a reduction in the aesthetic quality of life – which causes an affective turn towards melancholia and even depression – can be found in T.C. Boyle’s novel A Friend of the Earth (2000). Here the main character Tyrone Tierwater, a former eco-­terrorist, returns to the Amer­ican wilderness that he left 35 years earlier, only to discover how anthropogenic global warming has basically ruined it: What I’m [Tierwater] noticing, at the lower elevations, is how colorless the forest is. Here, where the deciduous trees should be in full leaf, I see nothing but wilt and decay, the skeletal brown stalks of the dead trees outnumbering the green at a hundred to one. […] I’m whispering to myself, jabbering away about nothing, a kind of litany I began devising in prison as a way of bearing witness to what we’ve lost on this continent alone – bonytail chub, Okaloosa darter, desert pupfish, spot-­tailed earless lizard, crested caracara, piping plover, the Key deer, the kit fox, the Appalachian monkeyface pearly mussel – but I can’t keep it up. I’m depressing myself. (Boyle 2001, 265–266)   5 This has Zeno remarking that “the tourists should be sent elsewhere, to a theme park, to a traveling Capsule of Eternal Ice that can be set up anywhere, you enter through the front and leave by the back” (Trojanow 2016, 93–94).   6 That the tourists are inflicting damage on the continent’s biodiversity appears most emblematic in Zeno’s description of the tourist Mrs Morgenthau and her attempt to ‘save’ a penguin egg from a predatory bird that has taken the egg from a penguin colony. When she returns this egg to the penguin colony she not only gets a bad bite in her hand; the penguins also leave their nests, which makes them more vulnerable to the predatory bird (Trojanow 2016, 133–137).   7 In Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790) Kant thus associates the sublime with the experience of nature “in its chaos, or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation” (2007, 77). That is, with wild nature so immense in scale and force that it in humans invokes a mixture of fear and fascination.

The loss of wilderness   103   8 The same feeling is experienced by Helen. While she in the beginning of the novel is weighed by the mourning over husband’s death, she describes how, during her stay on Antarctica, she feels released from her sorrow (McNeil 2009, 97–98).   9 It is, however, already early in the novel described how Nara overhears her consciousness’s warnings that “we are not meant to live in a continuous present tense” (McNeil 2009, 71). 10 The Earth thereby manifests an intention that is comparable to the intention the Yrr incarnated in The Swarm. 11 Instead this destruction is described as “payback for something long, long before humanity even existed” (McNeil 2009, 138). 12 In particular, this includes many of Heidegger’s text from the 1930s. Take for example his Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik, 1953) written in 1935. Here one finds a clear echo of the national socialistic belief that the German people stood before a decisive event in history. In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger thus talks about the event not only as the point in which the human Dasein comes to terms with the fact that it is a being-­towards-death. He also talks about “history as happening”, and about how the event is meant to “restore the historical Dasein of human beings” (2000, 44, 47). A similar echo can be found in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1950), which stems from a lecture that Heidegger gave in the middle of the 1930s. In this essay Heidegger claims that one of the ways in which truth occurs “is the act that founds a political state” (1993, 186). 13 Amer­ican Heidegger-­researcher Thomas Sheehan has pointed out how this turn in Heidegger’s thinking is often mistakenly described as ‘die Kehre’. Hence according to Sheehan the term ‘Kehre’ is only one of several expressions that Heidegger uses to describe the shift in thinking that occurs in the event (2001, 3). 14 In deep ecology anthropocentric thinking is replaced by an ecocentrism, in which the non-­human world is perceived as having the same value as human beings. For the representatives of deep ecology this idea often results in the perception that humanity must shrink considerably in numbers before life on earth can really prosper (Garrard 2004, 21). 15 Heidegger is famous for claiming that the question of Being (Das Sein) – or “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” – has been neglected/forgotten in Western philosophy (2000, 1). In this regard he is eager to emphasize how “the oblivion of being is oblivion to the difference between being and the being” (2002, 275). Although there is thus a vital difference between what Heidegger terms oblivion/forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) and what I above call oblivion of the being, it is however also obvious that Heidegger’s critique of the utilization of technology to a certain extent encourages us to speak of a repression of the being. 16 For more on this, see my article “The Destruction of Dwelling. Ecopoetics in the Anthropocene” (2016).

6 The sphere

In a world where humans are increasingly able to create artificial atmospheres through engineering and life through biotechnology it would be strange if these developments did not influence climate fiction. Hence we should not be surprised by the fact that technological evolution engenders fictive responses very different from the critiques we encountered in the previous chapter. Basically, the imagination that modern technology embeds a will to master that is leading humanity towards self-­annihilation is here just one side of the coin. On the other side we find fictions that take their hope for the future precisely from the advances of modern technology. I will in this chapter therefore zoom in on fictions that host the imagination that anthropogenic global warming will result in the proliferation of the engineering of atmospheres and technological world-­making. I call this imagination form The Sphere, because its utilization tends to be synonymous with two different ball-­shaped geometries: the bubble and the globe. While these two geometrical shapes differ (as we shall see) in several ways they do have something in common in the way their engineered atmospheres encapsulate their inner worlds as a protective shield or cover. These engineered atmospheres constitute, so to speak, the worlds of their inhabitants’ Being-­in-the-­world. And this very often to the extent that it is their protection that enables human life per se. It is thus typical for the fictions that deploy the imagination form that they depict worlds wherein technological world-­making has become vital for human survival – simply because anthropogenic global warming has damaged the conditions of human life to such an extent that it can only be upheld in the artificial environment and climate created by an engineered atmosphere. In naming this imagination form The Sphere I take inspiration from German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who is probably the philosopher that has thought most thoroughly about humans as beings that “create their own climate” (2011, 46–48). Indeed, Sloterdijk’s oeuvre enables us to conceive anthropogenic global warming as a phenomenon that is linked to not one, but two atmospheric events: on the one hand the general atmospheric event that we have come to know as anthropogenic global warming, climate change or the greenhouse effect; and on the other, the various forms of atmospheric

The sphere   105 creation that humans engage in as a means to protect themselves against this event. Sloterdijk does, however, not use the word protection, but instead characterizes the various ways humans seek to shelter themselves as struggles for ‘immunity’.1 Moreover, in his philosophical investigation of bubbles, globes, and foams, Sloterdijk presents a terminology that benefits the interpretation of the climate fictions that utilize the imagination form. However, where Sloterdijk applies these three ‘spherologies’ to describe a cultural development from human integration in intimate religious spheres (bubbles) to religious integration in a whole (globes) to a (post)modern integration in technological air-­ condition (foams), I will deploy these terms somewhat differently. When, on the following pages, I speak of the bubble and the globe as two different geometries appearing in the climate fictions that utilize the imagination form, I do not mean the same as when, in Spheres I-­III (Sphären I-­III, 1998, 1999, and 2004), Sloterdijk speaks of bubbles (Blasen) and globes (Globen).2 Rather, I am strictly referring to two different world-­formats with engineered atmospheres. That is, on the one hand, to worlds with a limited social design (bubbles) and on the other, to worlds designed to contain all life on Earth (globes). In fact, the difference in size of these two world-­formats also has an influence on how their inhabitants relate to the world. With their distinct spherical constructions the bubble and the globe often derive from different world pictures and therefore also demand different ways of Being-­in-the-­world. Regardless of this there is, though, still one condition that is generally common for the inhabitants both of bubbles and of globes. In almost every climate fiction that deploys the imagination form, the spherical world demands of its inhabitants that they undergo some sort of transformation. As the extent of this transformation very often depends upon the size of the sphere, my analysis will follow a pattern that will take us from bubbles with a limited requirement of transformation to globes that demand radical human transformation.

The sphere in cultural history First however, I want to draw (as in the previous chapters) a connection between the imagination form and one of the oldest narratives in the cultural history of the West, namely that of Noah’s ark. Hence, we may with Sloter­ dijk note that one of the remarkable things about this narrative is that it “gave rise to a new kind of project: the notion of a group’s self-­harbouring and self-­ surrounding in the face of an outside world that has become impossible” (2014, 237). Indeed, we may add to this description that, in many respects, it is the same project we reencounter in the climate fictions that deploy the imagination form.3 We are in these fictions also presented to humans, who are, in the light of impossible surroundings, forced to create their own spaces of immunity.

106   The sphere Although this similarity should encourage us to perceive Noah’s project as a cultural-­historical foundation for the various ways that the imagination form comes to life in climate fiction, there is however also one obvious difference. Noah’s ark is after all not a space of immunity that in terms of technological sophistication allows a direct comparison with the world-­making depicted in the climate fictions utilizing the imagination form. Or to phrase this slightly differently: the engineered atmospheres of climate fiction are far more advanced in design than Noah’s wooden boat – a difference that first and foremost materializes in their ability to isolate their inner worlds from the outside. So, where Noah’s ark encapsulated its inhabitants (who aboard the ark were still exposed to the same air conditions as were those existing outside its walls) only to a certain extent, is it characteristic of the engineered atmospheres of climate fiction that they belong to an age in which air conditions can be artificially created (i.e. technologically managed). We are, in the climate fictions deploying the imagination form, thus no longer situated within a historical world where the exposure to natural air conditions is a given. Rather, we are situated in worlds where technological air-­conditioning has become possible, and with it the capability to totally seal off the space of immunity from the air conditions on its outside. Beyond climate fiction Sloterdijk traces the origin of this paradigmatic shift to the beginning of the twentieth century and World War I. Hence, as Sloterdijk points out: “After the massive gas attacks of the Germans and the devastating counterstrikes of the Allies in 1915, the breathable air had lost its innocence” (2016, 181). However, as indebted as we are to Sloterdijk for having alerted our attention to the history of atmospheres, it is here still necessary to emphasize a weakness in his attempts to culturally-­historically map the significance that this event has had. In fact, in order for us to further understand the origins of the engineered atmospheres appearing in climate fiction, it makes sense to dwell a little on a couple of cultural-­historical details, which Sloterdijk omits in his analyses. Taking many of his interpretative clues from the history of art and of architecture, we could blame Sloterdijk for forgetting how literary history and the history of film are equally rich in depictions of engineered atmospheres. For instance, the motif of the engineered atmosphere has a notable history within science fiction that goes much further back than its presence in climate fiction. At least since the early 1940s – when Amer­ican science fiction author Jack Williamson introduced the term ‘terraforming’ – science fiction has been busy exploring how humans can use technology to make the atmospheres of planets habitable (Stableford, 2005, 131). And for at least as long, science fiction has depicted various forms of spaceships and planetary habitats shielded by engineered atmospheres through its interest in space travel. However, according to British science fiction expert Brian Stableford a shift has occurred in the genre vis-­à-vis the growing concern about humanity’s impact on the Earth System. Stableford notes that from the mid 1970s and onwards there has been a rising tendency within science fiction to

The sphere   107 a­ ssociate the engineered atmosphere with future life on Earth (ibid., 136),4 while the genre has likewise become increasingly prone to depict spherical worlds in the space around Earth. Since this is the case, it has been quite easy for climate fiction to incorporate narratives of engineered atmospheres. We may even say that many of the narrative elements that constitute the imagination form had already been put up for grabs by science fiction – with the important caveat that these elements had to be adjusted to the new scientific reality of anthropogenic global warming. For instance, while the imagination form has only recently entered fiction, the motif of the engineered atmosphere was, in the science fiction film Silent Running (1972), already deployed to tell a story about the possible consequences of humanity’s ecological devastation.5 While another and more recent example is Neil Bloomkamp’s sci-­fi film Elysium (2013), in which the wealthiest live in an engineered atmosphere (Elysium) orbiting a diseased, polluted and vastly overpopulated Earth. I mention Elysium here, because the film is a good example of how the motif of the engineered atmosphere is often used to pose the question: In a situation of extreme crisis, who is entitled to enjoy political, economic and legal privileges, and who is not?6 The boundaries of the engineered atmosphere do, in this sense, mark more than a limit to the human art of technological world-­making. They mark also a dividing line between an inside and an outside that subjects humans to opposite immunitary conditions as well as to different social statuses. It is exactly this drama (of distributing different immunitary conditions and social statuses) that is embedded in the difference between the bubble and the globe. In the climate fictions that deploy the imagination form, these two different spherical constructions are almost always depicted as an absolute necessity for a human species that has put itself in severe danger by overheating the Earth System. These constructions manifest, so to speak, imaginations of what kind of social design such a situation may foster in the future.

Bubbles On this note, let me now initiate my interpretations of the climate fictions that deploy the imagination form by turning to a novel in which danger is rather ambiguously portrayed. In Amer­ican author Allegra Goodman’s youth novel The Other Side of the Island (2008) the engineered atmospheres do on the one hand take form as bubbles with carefully selected populations.7 On the other hand, the novel’s plot is not – as in Elysium – centred around a few characters’ struggle to access a sphere that will secure their immunity. For the novel’s main character – the schoolgirl Honor – the spherical bubble represents, rather, a place very similar to the cave in Plato’s famous allegory. That is, a place that gives her a false perception of reality, and which she must therefore leave in order to grasp the truth. Goodman’s novel is thus set in a world where anthropogenic global warming has melted both poles and flooded most of Earth (2008, 92). All that

108   The sphere remains are a few islands that have seemingly been subjected to what is in the novel termed ‘Enclosure’ i.e. the reconstruction of these islands into bubble-­ like domes, in which both the weather and the temperature are technologically regulated. Furthermore, we learn that it is not only the climatic conditions on the islands that are subjected to detailed regulations. All life forms on the islands are also strictly managed with the aim of preserving their immunity from the disastrous conditions that rampage beyond the domes (ibid., 29). In fact, Goodman uses the imagination form to portray a post-­apocalyptic society in which the eagerness not to repeat past mistakes has resulted in (what we may term) ‘eco-­totalitarianism’. The world’s new political leader (Earth’s mother) is subjecting the islands’ inhabitants to various forms of suppression. Suppression that is, among other things, meant to dissuade them from visiting the parts of the islands that have not yet been exposed to Enclosure, and which therefore remain unsealed. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the novel’s plot is driven by Honor’s gradual discovery of the aesthetic value of the world that lies beyond the orderly design of the seemingly sealed areas. Because of the indoctrination that Honor is exposed to in school, she does not realize this value in the beginning of the novel. She is afraid of any form of nature that has not been put under the pacifying control of human design. This is, for example, obvious from the following excerpt, where Honor’s father, Will, in secrecy has taken Honor to the coast in order to tell her the truth about Enclosure: ‘She’s [Earth Mother] got everyone living under her control, but she hasn’t got the wild places. She hasn’t even got the other side of this island. She hasn’t got the whole world ceiled yet.’ […] Will bent down and trailed his hand in the foam. ‘Touch the water,’ he said. ‘It’s Unsafe.’ ‘No,’ Will said. ‘It’s beautiful.’ […] She began to cry. Her father’s ideas were dangerous. To call the wild ocean beautiful was crazy. (Ibid., 63–64) In fact, what we are presented with here is a didactic invitation to reflect on the value of different aesthetic experiences. In Honor’s and Will’s opposite affective reactions to the meeting with ‘wild nature’ we thus come across two very different aesthetic interpretations. Honor’s aesthetic sense is at this point in the novel still shaped by the strictly organized appearance of ‘nature’ that rules within the sealed areas of the islands, while Will associates aesthetic pleasure with the (Kantian) sublime (das Erhabene) i.e. with a natural world whose forces are so powerful that they exceed human mastery. Honor’s interpretation can on the other hand be linked to what Kant characterized as beauty (Schönheit), since every phenomenon within the sealed areas of the islands is designed in a manner that invokes a feeling of order (ibid., 265–266).8 Indeed, it is this interpretation of beauty that Honor must relieve herself of in order to discover the truth about Enclosure. It is thus only when she

The sphere   109 v­ entures onto the other side of the island (she inhabits) that she discovers her perception of reality has been false. No part of the islands is actually sealed. Their spherical frames are instead made of colours in the sky, which a machine on a weather station emits at certain intervals (ibid., 277). After realizing this, Honor helps other rebels turn off the machine, as a shared longing for ‘wild nature’ drives them to revolt against Earth Mother. In this way The Other Side of the Island deploys the motif of the engineered atmosphere in a manner that is relatively traditional in science fiction. Hence it is quite normal in science fiction that engineered atmospheres represent places of incarceration from which one or several protagonists long(s) to escape. In fact, it is this craving to penetrate the frames of spherical worlds and escape to their outside that often makes it relevant to compare engineered atmospheres in science fiction with Plato’s cave i.e. with a place humans must leave in order to cognitively escape a false perception of reality and to feel free.9 In The Other Side of the Island this affective aspect is embedded in Honor’s and the others rebels’ longing for the ‘wild nature’ outside the seemingly sealed areas. In this longing, ‘wild nature’ clearly comes to represent something wonderful and authentic that humans must be in to feel authentic themselves and therefore free. In this sense the primary relation to the world that the novel brings into view closely resembles the primary relation to the world accentuated in the climate fictions deploying The Loss of Wilderness. However, where the utilization of The Loss of Wilderness typically brought forth worlds in which the loss of ‘wild nature’ was dramatically present (or even at a zenith) – and hence could be directly witnessed – the utilization of The Sphere typically brings forth worlds where the loss of ‘wild nature’ has peaked: meaning that the accelerating loss of biodiversity that formed the backdrop of the plots in The Lamentations of Zeno and The Ice Lovers here assumes a phase in which the natural Earth System has already been irrevocably damaged. A crucial consequence of this is that, in the climate fictions deploying The Sphere, we encounter an affective relation to the world that is slightly different from the intense sorrow that took the protagonists in The Lamentations of Zeno and The Ice Lovers. Instead of presenting humans who are deeply saddened by an accelerating loss of biodiversity they are witnessing firsthand, these fictions contain humans who have survived the irrevocable damage done to the natural Earth System and are therefore dominated by the affect that very often succeeds sorrow, namely by a longing for what has gone and is not coming back. That said, it is important to notice how The Other Side of the Island is a bit more sophisticated in plot than its evident valourization of ‘wild nature’ may initially suggest. The depiction of a successful rebellion that in the novel’s conclusion succeeds in re-­establishing the natural appearance of the weather, flora, and fauna on the islands is thus countered in the first sentence of the novel, which reads: “All this happened many years ago, before the streets were air-­conditioned” (ibid., 2). Honor’s and her fellow rebels’ freedom fight

110   The sphere is in other words situated in a remote past, while the novel is told from a present in which Enclosure has been completed and the islands have actually been turned into real bubble-­like domes. Despite the novel’s inherent critique of engineered atmospheres in general and their aesthetics in particular, we do in the novel still encounter an imaginary of the future that is in complete compliance with the narrative template of the imagination form. That is with the expectation that anthropogenic global warming will result in the proliferation of engineered atmospheres and technological world-­making. However, there is a difference that makes The Other Side of the Island stand out from other climate fictions that depict engineered atmospheres with a limited social design. In these climate fictions the engineering of one or more socially limited atmospheres is typically a question of surviving or not i.e. the limited spaciousness of the engineered atmosphere(s) appears here as an inevitable necessity that in itself poses a serious social problem. To be more precise, the point is that the limited engineered atmosphere in climate fiction often plays a Janus-­faced role. On the one hand it is typically portrayed as a fundamental necessity for survival and hence as something positive. On the other hand it is, due to its limited spaciousness, just as often portrayed as the root of violent conflicts and hence as something negative. A good example of this is Boon Joon-­ho’s action film Snowpiercer (2013). In Snowpiercer the limited engineered atmosphere takes shape as a long high-­ tech train circling a frozen Earth, which is initially without any other signs of life. In other words the train manifests at first glance a technological world that has enabled the continuation of human and non-­human life, after an attempt to chemically mitigate the effects of anthropogenic global warming has gone terribly wrong. However, just as in The Other Side of the Island, we quickly learn that all is far from well within the limited space of the train, and that the main reason for this is an eco-­totalitarian regime, which both biopolitically and anatomo-­politically manages some of the train’s passengers with extreme ruthlessness.10 Indeed, it is this biopolitical and anatomo-­political ruthlessness that drives the plot, as the film displays a narrative in which those subjected to this ruthlessness – symbolically represented by the passengers living in the tail section of the train – revolt against the eco-­totalitarian regime and its leader, Wilford (Ed Harris). As the revolting trail section passengers move through the train it is thus gradually disclosed how the biopolitical and anatomo-­political ruthlessness of Wilford’s regime stems from an obsession with ecological equilibrium: an obsession that has not only degenerated into totalitarianism, but which at the end of the film also reveals a fascistic core. Here it becomes clear how some lives are deemed disposable by the regime in its quest to save others and hence how fascism is a ‘price’ that Wilford is willing to pay in order to realize his conception of ecological equilibrium. In fact, we may stretch this point a bit further by saying that the main purpose of the limited engineered atmosphere (i.e. the train) in Snowpiercer is to display the difficulty of sustaining human and non-­human livelihood in an

The sphere   111 artificial ecosystem. Or to put it differently: if James Lovelock indirectly raised a fundamental question, when back in 1979 he warned that the immense human impact on the Earth System could lead to a situation in which “man would wake up one day to find that he had the permanent lifelong job of planetary maintenance engineer”, then the answer in Snowpiercer is that ‘man’ would not be up for the job (2000, 123). This is not only evident from the fact that it is a human attempt to mitigate global warming (via chemical geoengineering) that has made the limited engineered atmosphere of the train necessary in the first place. It is also evident from Wilford’s numerous failed attempts to biopolitically and anatomo-­politically administer the population of the train in a sustainable and ethically justifiable manner.11 Moreover, with fascism saturating Wilford’s regime we do also return to a configuration of the socially limited engineered atmosphere that harbours the question: In a situation of extreme crisis, who is entitled to enjoy political, economic and legal privileges, and who is not? However, we do not encounter it in the shape of an inside and an outside that subjects humans to opposite immunitary conditions as well as to different social statuses. This distribution is instead symbolically mirrored by an inside that is sharply segregated in sections (namely, those of the train). Hence it is obviously not enough to note here that the train makes all its passengers immune to the seemingly deadly conditions outside its walls. It should also be added that immunity means something completely different to those in the trail section of the train than to those in its front section. Or to be more precise: that the general immunity enjoyed by all passengers aboard the train hinges on a distribution of privileges that reduces the passengers of the trail section to an object of biopolitical and anatomo-­political violence. That is, it hinges on a distribution that in practice enables the suspension (if not complete annulment) of these passengers’ immunity. But let us move on, because the imagination form does not only give life to climate fictions in which limited engineered atmospheres embed the anthropocentric drama pertaining to the interhuman distribution of political, economic and legal privileges. In the Amer­ican science fiction author Paul Di Filippo’s short story “Life in the Anthropocene” (2010) we do, for instance, encounter an engineered atmosphere, which marks a segregation of the human from the non-­human. In Di Filippo’s narrative, Earth’s entire human population (in the short story consisting of nine billion people) have thus been crammed into an engineered atmosphere covering only a third of Earth’s surface. This event has enabled human survival on a very large scale. But it has also left humans in a world with very little non-­human life. Or as it reads in the story: The immemorial ecosystems of the remaining climatically tolerable territories had been devastated by Greenhouse change, then, ultimately and purposefully, wiped clean. Die-­offs, migratory invaders, a fast-­forward churn culminating in an engineered ecosphere. The new conditions sup-

112   The sphere ported no animals larger than mice and only a monoculture of GM plants. A portion of humanity’s reduced domain hosted forests specially designed for maximum carbon uptake and sequestration. […] The bulk of the rest of the land was devoted to the crops necessary and sufficient to feed nine billion people. […] Not a world conducive to sightseeing Grand Tours. (Di Filippo 2010, 408) What we encounter in Di Filippo’s short story is in other words a critique of the imagination form that closely resembles the critique embedded in The Other Side of the Island. That is, the limited engineered atmosphere is here once again associated with an aesthetic lack. The only difference is that where this aesthetic lack was, in The Other Side of the Island, represented by an exclusion of ‘wild nature’ from the engineered atmosphere, it is in “Life in the Anthropocene” more generally represented by a massive reduction in biodiversity. The multitude of life forms that have been made extinct in the terraforming process (leading to the construction of the engineered atmosphere) is in other words here still very much missed. Their absence marks an affective prize (in terms of longing) that the nine billion people living inside the engineered atmosphere must everyday ‘pay’ for, having been able to survive extreme anthropogenic global warming. This longing after a lost world rich in biodiversity – and hence also in aesthetic quality – is, however, not the only affective relation to the world the short story highlights. Its portrait of the engineered atmosphere as ‘a world not conducive to sightseeing Grand Tours’ explicates how boredom is another, while an even more dominant affect in the short story is guilt. Di Filippo depicts the engineered atmosphere as a world in which humans are wracked with the guilt of having caused the extinction of almost every other earthly life form. For example, a considerable part of humanity (termed ‘Furries’) carry artefacts made from dead animals under their skin in order to remember them (ibid., 409). Indeed, this feature enables us to perceive the world of the engineered sphere as yet another unhomely world that anthropogenic global warming calls forth in the Western imagination. This is a world in which humans are once again forced to live in a state of continuous alienation, since they have irrevocably destroyed the world in which they used to be at home. Implicitly present in the longing, boredom and guilt – that the short story speculatively depicts as future human consequences of anthropogenic global warming – we therefore also find an assemblage of affects that we may more generally characterize as homesickness. As has become increasingly evident from the progress made in the previous chapters, we may perceive homesickness as an affective mode that transcends the specificity of the imagination forms. That is, we may perceive it as a general human trait in many of the worlds which climate fiction has hitherto brought forth. However, although this is an important finding, it should not tempt us to conclude that climate fiction is all about nostalgia. Hence the

The sphere   113 world-­format of the spherical bubble is also used to depict utopian futures. For instance, in British sci-­fi author Paul McAuley’s novel The Quiet War (2008), we encounter engineered atmospheres with some of the features seen in the engineered atmosphere in Di Filippo’s short story. Limited in their social design the engineered atmospheres in McAuley’s novel are also portrayed as technological shelters enabling human life in conditions that would otherwise be too hostile for it to continue. But apart from that there is a considerable difference in the way that the two authors utilize the imagination form. Whereas the engineered atmosphere in Di Filippo’s short story derived from a terraforming, the sole principle of which was the creation of conditions that would enable human survival on a grand scale, engineering implies something completely different in McAuley’s novel. In the twenty-­ third century future the novel depicts the engineering of atmospheres is not just a tool that enables human immunity, but: […] more of an art than a science, an intricate game or puzzle in which everything affected everything else, its complexity increasing exponentially with the addition of each new species. Plants competed for the nutrients and light; animals grazed on plants or preyed on other animals; microorganisms broke down dead organic material and recycled nitrogen and phosphorus and sulphur into forms that other organisms could use. (2008, 37) What emerges in McAuley’s novel is thus a world in which human mastery of biotechnology (and, in particular, of gene manipulation) has progressed so much that life in engineered atmospheres appears at least as attractive as life in more natural conditions. In fact, diverging views on the usage of biotechnology are key to the conflict that drives the plot in The Quiet War. In the novel, humanity has split into two factions after extreme anthropogenic global warming (followed by some highly destructive resource wars) has irrevocably damaged the natural Earth System (ibid., 10). One faction has remained on Earth and lives in conservative and militaristic political systems that suffer from a slow rebuilding of Earth’s ecosystems since this faction has vowed to abstain from extensive use of biotechnology. The other faction lives in liberal societies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, where, through a liberal usage of biotechnology, it has created attractive conditions for itself in bubble-­like domes (ibid., 425). In fact, via this plot-­structure The Quiet War uncovers and answers a question that is fundamental in light of the imagination form. This question is: How will the proliferation of technological world-­making – that anthropogenic global warming is imagined to require for continued human life – influence the understanding of what it means to be human? Thus the novel offers an answer to this question by portraying the faction of humans that live on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn as “barely human any more” (ibid., 33). They are in other words utterly ‘posthuman’ in the sense that their extensive

114   The sphere use of geoengineering and gene manipulation have caused them to change to such an extent that it alters what can be indexed as human.12 In fact, we may say of this faction of humans that they have in impossible conditions created worlds so unhomely that they have indeed made themselves unhomely to the other faction of humanity. That is, they are uncanny to them, because they destabilize their anthropology and thereby their self-­perception. On the other hand, exactly because the faction of humanity living on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have created their worlds from the bottom, these worlds have come to feel particularly homely to them. In this sense these worlds affirm rather than challenge Sloterdijk’s claim that “humans flourish only in the greenhouse of their autogenous atmosphere” (2011, 46). In The Quiet War this specifically shows from the fact that the faction of humanity living on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn does not long for a more natural environment. In contrast to both Goodman’s youth novel and Di Filippo’s short story, we do in McAuley’s sci-­fi novel, rather, encounter a plot where the relation between the homely and the unhomely has been turned on its head. It is generally those living in engineered atmospheres on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that feel at home, and the humans who do not live in such atmospheres that feel alienated (due to the devastating transformations that anthropogenic global warming have evoked in the Earth System) (2008, 33–34). This situation is, however, in itself turned on its head at the end of the novel, when the conflict between the two factions escalates into war. Hence in this war the humans on Earth destroy the engineered atmospheres of those living on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. That is, they expose the fragile immunity of these atmospheres and thereby also expose a radical ‘unhomeliness’ inherent in the worlds they populate. After the humans living on Earth have initiated their military aggression, it thus reads in the novel that “there was an increased awareness that the […] ancillary domes were no more than fragile bubbles of light and heat and air in an immensity of freezing vacuum” (ibid., 321). What we return to here is therefore also a theme that appeared in my reference to Elysium as a typical example of how the motif of the spherical bubble is integrated into science fiction. Hence, in their function as spaces of immunity shielding an interior from impossible external conditions, the spherical bubbles turn into ‘social truth tellers’ at the end of The Quiet War. That is, they reveal who is truly inside and outside in the interhuman battle for privileges and power. It can even be said that, in our investigation, we have made a perhaps unsurprising, but still important sociological discovery – namely that the spherical bubbles of climate fiction (like the spherical bubbles of science fiction more broadly) incarnate different imaginations of human and non-­human selection and in this alert us to the danger of anthropogenic global warming inspiring fascism.13

The sphere   115

The globe As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, it would however be a mistake to conclude that the engineered atmospheres of Western climate fiction only point to a future in which fascism thrives. The engineered atmospheres of climate fiction do not just tell us a story about selection, of how the accelerating devastation of the Earth System will further accelerate present anthropogenic divisions and injustices. This is only half of the story. The other half is about how the engineered atmospheres of climate fiction also assume a world-­format completely different from that of the bubble – and how this world-­format allows the imagination of future technological advances to attach itself to spaces of inclusion rather than of exclusion. There is, in particular, one climate fiction that stands out in this regard. Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy of novels, Science in the Capital, is a great example of how the imagination form gives life to the world-­format of the globe. Consisting of the novels Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007), Robinson’s trilogy begins in a USA dominated by climate scepticism. In fact, the political climate, in which the story in Robinson’s trilogy takes off, in many ways resembles the political climate during the reign of George W. Bush (i.e. 2001–2009) as well as the even more bitter climate-­change denial emanating today from the Trump administration. The trilogy approaches this theme through its two main protagonists, Frank and Charlie, who work in Washington as, respectively, a board member of the National Science Foundation (NSF ) and as a political adviser. At the beginning of the trilogy they are both, however, positioned at the fringes of political power. Charlie works for the Democratic senator Phil Chase, who he is trying to convince that anthropogenic global warming requires a radical transformation of US policies. And when he is summoned to advise the (unnamed) Republican President about the same issue, he finds the task to be even harder. Indeed, after their discussions Charlie concludes (in an echo of Fredric Jameson) that it is “easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit” (2005a, 140).14 At the NSF Frank is experiencing similar problems. Loyal to the idea that science entails an dispassionate approach to the world, he has not just lost motivation in his job, but also lost passion in his personal life. All this changes, however, when he meets a group of Buddhist monks from the island state Khembalung, which is on the verge of being flooded due to global warming. The monks’ message to Frank is that science has developed into madness, because it inhibits itself from being infused by something “like altruism, or compassion, or love” (2005a, 244–245). This inspires Frank to let feelings such as empathy, care and love guide his work for the NSF as well as his own life. He moves to an adjacent national park, where he sleeps surrounded by animals escaped from a local zoo, and reads classical writings on nature.

116   The sphere Frank begins his journey of self-­transformation roughly at the time that anthropogenic global warming begins to radically destabilize climate conditions all over the world. In Washington, this destabilization (in the first novel of the trilogy) first leads to the city being heavily flooded by rain, then (in the second novel) causes a major dip in temperature, before (in the third novel) creating an extreme heat wave. These three disastrous events not only allow the trilogy to depict the Amer­ican capital in a state of emergency; they also foster a new triangle between personal change, political change, and change in how technology and science is applied. The flooding of Washington enables Charlie to convince Phil Chase that the kernel of his political campaign should consist in developing policies to end anthropogenic global warming. Chase then runs for president and (in the final novel of the trilogy) wins the election, which simultaneously spells the beginning of a new era for Frank and the NSF, as Chase’s plan for a sustainable USA and world involves an accelerating use of science and technology. Indeed, the trilogy can be seen as an answer to a question posed in its final novel. Here Frank asks “What could be done if humanity were not trapped in its own institutions?” (2007, 229). By visiting many of Washington’s most powerful institutions the trilogy provides an insight into a political system where common human interest (in not letting global warming accelerate) is impeded by personal interests. It is first when the rain, the cold and the heat cause havoc in the lives of most Amer­icans that this situation fundamentally changes. In fact, we may say of the trilogy that it integrates an argument often raised in discussions about anthropogenic global warming: that the acceleration of anthropogenic global warming has a paralysing effect on most people, and that their apathetic relation to the problem will first dissolve when its disastrous consequences have become an imminent threat to their own security.15 What remains most important in regard to the trilogy is, however, that this awakening of civil society results in a reconfiguration of the political system and returns power from private interests to the general public. That said, this reconfiguration of the political system is not presented as a process without problems. The transition from the Republican President and a political system dominated by private interests to the Democrat Chase and a political system that serves common interests is portrayed as being rife with challenges. Even after extreme rain and cold has hit Washington, the Republican President and his administration remain in the pocket of private interests. In fact, he and his administration regard the catastrophes spurred by the overheating of the planet primarily as an opportunity to create more private wealth (2005b, 268). One way of perceiving the policies standing in the way of the public interest here is therefore also to describe them as tantamount to the type of opportunistic catastrophe administration that Naomi Klein has dubbed “disaster capitalism” (2007, 6). This is a type of administration which uses disasters to privatize public services and thereby funnels capital from public to private pockets. In the trilogy this process – inherent to disaster

The sphere   117 capitalism and pursued by the Republican President and his administration – is first imagined to reach an endpoint in the spherical bubble, or as Phil Chase describes his Republican opponent’s plan: ‘The President isn’t going to do anything. He and his oil-­and-guns crowd will just try to find an island somewhere to skip to when they’re done raiding the world. They’ll leave us in the wreckage and build themselves bubble fortresses, that’s been their sick plan all along. Building a good world for our kids is our plan, and it’s scientific as can be, but only if you understand science as a way of being together, an ethical system and not just a method for seeing the world.’ (Robinson 2005b, 472) We can even extend this point. Hence what we encounter in this excerpt is not just the imagination that anthropogenic global warming may lead to a world in which spherical bubbles will incorporate the function of arks (i.e. work as spaces of immunity that due to their limited social design will subject humans to different immunitary conditions and social statuses). No, it is not just the fear (or fantasy) that anthropogenic global warming will provide the perfect setting for fascist selection-­schemes which re-­emerges here. It is quite obviously also the imagination of another possible world. A world in which science serves common, global goals and facilitates new ways ‘of being together’. Indeed, this imagination is given more and more flesh as the plot of the trilogy advances. From moving towards insular spheres under the reign of the Republican President, the election of Chase marks a turn from disaster capitalism to the creation of what – we in an echo of the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck – may call a “world risk society” (2009, 4). This is, broadly speaking, a world united in a “cosmopolitan political realism” created by the transnational threats arising with accelerating anthropogenic global warming (ibid., 7).16 The rise of this new world risk society specifically emerges in the form of a major global geo-­engineering plan carried out transnationally. In the trilogy, the successful realization of this plan thus clearly comes to serve as evidence for the idea that the problem of anthropogenic global warming can only be solved multilaterally (i.e. by terraforming all of Earth and not just parts of it). Or to be more exact: the trilogy shows a strong affinity towards this idea by continually championing what it calls “the technological sublime” (Robinson 2005b, 225–226; 2007, 135) – a term it equates with an application of technology of such a gigantic scale that it challenges and overwhelms human cognition. For instance, we find this notion crystallized in the excerpt below where we are confronted with the human difficulty in conceiving the scale of the terraforming needed to halt anthropogenic global warming. As Frank witnesses an international fleet of tankers throwing unfathomable amounts of salt into the ocean in order to restart the North Atlantic Current and thereby stabilize the global climate, the trilogy reads:

118   The sphere Again the astonishing sight of a thousand tankers on the huge, burnished plate spreading below them, instantly grasped as unprecedented: the first major act of planetary engineering ever attempted, and by God it looked like it. (2005b, 484) Whereas the sublime was connected to what lay beyond the engineered atmosphere in The Other Side of the Island (i.e. ‘wild nature’), what we encounter here is therefore also the complete opposite: it is the engineering of the atmosphere (and biosphere) that obtains the qualities of the sublime. Indeed, Robinson’s trilogy depicts a world in which anthropogenic global warming has caused so much destruction that it would not make any sense to abstain from modifying the Earth System further and thereby (in Heideggerian terms) let the non-­human world be. In the world of the trilogy, the human impact on the Earth System has been so comprehensive that it would be impossible to distinguish nature from society. Its humans are in other words no longer in a situation where they can choose to honour (what Latour called) the modern Constitution. Rather, for them, being in the Anthropocene means being in a world where the option of using technology and science to continue the radical modification of the Earth System is really a forced choice. However, in opposition to many other climate fictions where the human capacity to use science to prompt technological advances is generally portrayed as a vice, this is not the case in the trilogy. Here the obvious complicity of this capacity in accelerating anthropogenic global warming and depleting Earth’s ecosystems does not prevent its celebration. The human capacity to use science to prompt technological advances is, rather, hailed as something for which humanity should be grateful in the light of its present situation (Robinson 2007, 18). In the trilogy, this is particularly evident from the role science is granted as soon as Chase takes over the oval office. After his inauguration Chase does everything in his power to create a political environment that enables science to become a productive midwife of the technological sublime. It is for instance described how research in biotechnology and climate mitigation technologies is increasingly granted more funds after Chase’s appointment (Robinson 2005b, 107). This is, however, not to suggest that the trilogy presents a partnership between radical techno-­optimism and a cosmopolitan vision of a new world risk society that works by itself. We must add a third component to this partnership, as its success is also depicted as being dependent on a transformation of human behaviour (Robinson 2007, 479–480). Indeed, what is at issue here is the question of how the construction of the spherical globe is imagined to change the ways its inhabitants relate to the world. Hence what the trilogy explicates is basically that in order to realize the cosmopolitan vision – i.e. to be able to interpret their world in accordance with the matrix of the globe – these inhabitants must first and foremost learn to interpret

The sphere   119 their own Being-­in-the-­world in new ways. This is, for example, made obvious in the trilogy by the fact that Frank finds the end goal of his existential search in an affective and cognitive relation to the world that merges scientific knowledge and ingenuity with care for other beings. That is, to be more precise, in a relation to the world in which he interprets his own humanity as being equivalent to possessing some unique cognitive skills, while simultaneously recognizing that these skills come with a unique responsibility (ibid., 405). In this way of relating to the world Frank even takes inspiration from the idea that homo sapiens’ origin on the Savannah still has an influence on what he will experience as wellbeing (Robinson 2005b, 140). Trying to incorporate modes of being into his life that resemble those of prehistoric hunter-­ gatherers, he begins, for instance, to add throwing-­practices to his running-­exercises in the adjacent national park. First throwing a freebee and then a real prehistoric stone axe (!), Frank’s life in the national park can be seen as an attempt to reconnect with modes of existence that have been abandoned in modern life i.e. particularly with modes of existence that reconnect his humanity with the experience of living among other life forms. Indeed, what the trilogy seems to suggest is that modern humans have been alienated from such an experience. Or to frame this point even more explicitly: that by encasing themselves in urban milieus of steel, concrete, and glass, etc., most humans have removed themselves from the affective and cognitive qualities needed to avert ecological collapse. Moreover, by encapsulating this conviction, Frank’s life in the national park also guides us towards another important point. It demonstrates how the imagination of the transformative potential – that in The Lamentations of Zeno and The Ice Lovers was explicitly connected to Being-­in-the-­world of wildernesses – does not necessarily disappear with the disappearance of the imagination of wilderness.17 Although, as already mentioned, the trilogy depicts a world where it is no longer possible to distinguish nature from society, it still portrays the national park as a ground capable of generating human transition i.e. as a ground capable of cultivating a more caring relation to the world. In this regard we may perceive Frank’s relocation to the national park as a deliberate strategy to avoid (what I playfully alluded to in the previous chapter as) an ‘oblivion of the being’. This means that, in the trilogy, the human – who in Heidegger’s critique of the utilization of modern technology was a being that had forgotten its poetic vocation – finds a means to caringly bear in mind the beings that it had become used to ignoring. And that it does so by physically sharing its living-­ space, its home environment, with the non-­human beings it otherwise risked forgetting in a world where excessive use of technology is presented as an absolute necessity. Indeed, by fusing radical compassion for non-­human beings with a positive vision of technological terraforming, Frank manifests a mode of Being-­in-the-­world which differs substantially from the existential structure I highlighted in the previous chapter. That is, from a loving relation

120   The sphere to the world that (in an echo of Heidegger) equated love with the ability to let the non-­human world be. Hence, although Frank is deeply committed to guarding non-­human beings, he does not interpret this commitment as an obligation to let the non-­human world be, but rather as an obligation to accelerate technological terraforming. For the same reason, it is here important to reiterate how Frank’s existential transformation – in which he merges a radical compassion for non-­human beings with a radical embrace of technology – is driven by an urgency to react to the worldly changes sparked by anthropogenic global warming. When we can associate Science in the Capital with the utilization of the imagination form – and more particularly with the world-­format of the globe – it is thus because of how this urgency is met. Or to be more precise: it is because it is met in the form of an (eco)-cosmopolitical project that sets out to encapsulate all life forms on Earth within the same engineered atmosphere.18 Indeed, this project does not only prompt a new technological design of the world, so that it can attain the format of the globe; it also prompts the new social design that emerges with the cosmopolitanism that drives Chase’s rebuilding of both US and global democracy as well as prompting the new existential design incarnated by Frank’s transformation. In sum, we may therefore say that, in contrast to the climate fictions we associated with bubbles, the trilogy hosts the imagination that there will be room for all earthly beings on board ‘the ark’ – but of course with the important addition that the ark here stands for an engineered atmosphere, rather than a wooden ship, and that it provides immunity from the cataclysms generated by accelerating anthropogenic global warming rather than from a flood initiated by a punitive God. However, we must in the same breath also add that, in the trilogy, the engineered atmosphere is only imagined to be capable of serving as a general space of immunity (i.e. as an all-­encompassing ark) as long as the behaviour of every life form within it is organized to preserve its immunity. In this sense it is still the concern of being exposed to impossible external conditions that drives Frank, Charlie, and every other human in the trilogy favouring Chase’s project, to reject the exclusive format of bubbles and opt for the inclusive format of the globe.

Sloterdijk and the imagination form With these remarks in mind let us now zoom more in on Sloterdijk’s oeuvre, as this will enhance the arsenal of tools with which we can interpret the worlds and modes of being made visible by climate fiction’s utilization of the imagination form. In addition, this will also allow us to more critically probe Heidegger’s thinking, as much of Sloterdijk’s oeuvre can be read as a critical dialogue with Heidegger. In fact, we may to a certain extent interpret Sloterdijk’s project in Spheres I-­III as an attempt to correct a mistake that saturates Heidegger’s late writings and thereby guides philosophy away from an infertile ground. In order to get a clearer idea about what this implies, it is useful

The sphere   121 for us to begin with an interview that Sloterdijk gave to the German architectural magazine Archplus more than a decade ago. Hence, in this interview Sloterdijk does not only characterize Spheres I-­III – and its last volume in particular – as an attempt to think with “Heidegger against Heidegger” (Sloterdijk et al. 2004, 23).19 He also makes the following remark: Heidegger, who we must regard as the last great thinker of rural life, thought of existential time as waiting time and because of that as boredom. The event that this waiting led to was something strangely simple: that the things of the field matured. The philosopher equated the field with world history without recognizing that the worlds of the cities no longer were ‘field-­like’. In the city things do not mature. They are produced. (Ibid., 20) This is a fundamental critique, as the remark discloses an anachronism in Heidegger’s thinking that severely hampers its ecocritical potential. The problem Sloterdijk unravels to us here thus clearly raises a vital question about the usability in the Anthropocene of many of the ideas that Heidegger pursued in his late writings. And this is simply because the majority of humans no longer find themselves in the agrarian worlds that inspired Heidegger to think of human protection in terms of meditative dwelling. This does not, however, mean that Sloterdijk encourages us to leave all of Heidegger’s oeuvre on ‘the midden of history’. When he characterizes Spheres I-­III as an attempt to think with ‘Heidegger against Heidegger’ we must instead take the meaning of these words seriously. In particular, we must understand that Sloterdijk is indebted to Heidegger, when in the beginning of Spheres I-­III he declares that human beings are beings that ‘create their own climate’. Hence in this sentence lies not only the anthropology that Sloterdijk’s whole analysis in Spheres I-­III rests upon. Encapsulated in this sentence is also an echo of Heidegger’s phenomenology and its fundamental ontological starting point: that humans are beings that must be understood as beings within-­the-world. This is, however, not to say that Sloterdijk just repeats after Heidegger that we must basically perceive the human being as a Being-­in-the-­world. Rather, he revises this perception by suggesting that instead we understand human existence as a “being-­in-spheres” (In-­Sphären-Sein) (2011, 46) – an idea that, particularly in the third volume of Spheres I-­III, merges with the point from the interview with Archplus inserted above. That is, with the point that the contemporary human being must first of all be thought of as a being that primarily exists in urban spaces with technologically created and modifiable climates (e.g. the typical modern apartment). Still, the point is not just that the movement from Heidegger to Sloterdijk marks a movement from the forest road and country path to the engineered atmospheres of urban life. It is, rather, more precisely that this movement is inherent with a new idea about where humans basically feel at home, and

122   The sphere therefore also with a new idea about what kind of worlds embed their most basic ecological activities.20 In fact, this difference can be formulated even more clearly. Hence we may say that the protecting region that Heidegger associated with meditative dwelling far from human habitation is to Sloterdijk an architectonic sphere. Where immunity (from calculative thinking) was to Heidegger something that could be achieved by way of a certain kind of thinking in a certain kind of place, immunity is to Sloterdijk thus first and foremost simply something that contemporary humans achieve by way of architectural design. This is indeed the reason why design is to Sloterdijk a concept that demands serious analytical reflection. It is according to Sloterdijk thus, exactly because architectural design has become the most basic provider of human immunity that we must today also interpret design as a basic tool for the creation of human well-­being. Design is in this sense both the process through which humans create immunity and through which they create the affective foundation for their prosperity, their good moods, or what Sloterdijk – in another echo of Heidegger – calls their “ecstasy” (2011, 80).21 This also means (as implied by the comment in Archplus) that ecstasy is to Sloterdijk not something that humans access individually through bored waiting, such as it was fathomed by Heidegger in his description of the event. It is rather something that humans arrive at through the creative process of both architecturally and emotionally designing spaces of immunity and community (Sloterdijk 2014, 138). Key to this argument is Sloterdijk’s utilization of the word ‘climate’. Thus, in Spheres I-­III this word is not just used by Sloterdijk to designate different weather conditions in and outside architecturally designed spheres. It is also applied to describe the general mood within these spheres – or what we may also call their social climate or atmosphere. Sloterdijk even asserts that “what we call climate refers initially to a communitarian element, and only later a meteorological fact” (ibid., 138). But first and foremost it is the mutual dependence of these two types of climate that interests him; meaning that while good meteorological conditions tend to have a positive influence on the collective mood of a population or community, so too “is politics the art of the atmospherically possible” (ibid., 967). We may in isolation of course take this sociological interpretation to be quite noteworthy. But in Sloterdijk it is intertwined with the anthropological idea that the creation of atmospheres contains a vitality that is essentially human. A vitality that according to Sloterdijk partly shows itself from the fact that architecturally created atmospheres sometimes collapse due to bad social climates – and partly from the fact that, when they do collapse, they are very  often regenerated in new architectural forms encouraging better social climates (2011, 48). Should we heed Sloterdijk, such reconstructions thus mark opportunities for humans to both architecturally and emotionally design atmospheres with more “solidarity” (ibid., 45) – just as they contain a renewed possibility for humans to be released from various stressing ­emotions,

The sphere   123 quite simply because the immunitary spaces of their self-­created atmospheres are also the places where humans are most capable of appearing “as those who they are” (ibid., 28). Or, as Sloterdijk also formulates this in the introduction to Spheres I-­III: Humans are fundamentally and exclusively the creations of their interior and the products of their work on the form of immanence that belongs inseparably to them. They flourish only in the greenhouse of their autogenous atmosphere. (Ibid., 46) What anthropogenic global warming adds to this analysis is basically that there is a limit beyond which the individual design of protective atmospheres stops having this effect. One can – in extension of what has appeared as a major theme in this book – even say that anthropogenic global warming is capable of bringing a sense of insecurity into the individually designed atmospheres that punctuates their ability to function as protective shelters. Or to be even more exact: that anthropogenic global warming is capable of introducing an uncanniness to individually designed atmospheres that make their homely milieus feel unhomely. What is particularly unsettling about anthropogenic global warming in this sense is that it has the ability to expose the fact that human beings are still vulnerable in spite of being beings-­in-spheres: that they still risk being on the outside of protection, just as Noah would have been without his ark. In Sloterdijk’s oeuvre this risk is more generally present in the way that his celebration of spherical destruction and creation as expressions of human vitality slowly recedes further and further into the background after Spheres I-­III – and from fact that what replaces this celebration is a growing concern about the consequences that this form of vitality may have for the long-­term well-­being of humans. Where in Spheres I-­III Sloterdijk thus more or less restricts himself to remark that human beings are “reckless enough to jeopardize their pampering by taking the risk of anthropogenic overwarming”, this risk is attended to with considerable more gravity in You Must Change Your Life. On Anthropotechnics (Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Über Anthropoteknik, 2009) (2016, 164). For instance, Sloterdijk here emphasizes that “whoever continues along the line of previous separations between the own and the foreign produces immune losses not only for others, but also for themselves” (Sloterdijk 2013, 451). Although this remark can be interpreted in several ways, it is noteworthy that it embeds a focus that is not so much directed on how architecturally designed atmospheres can provide individual immunity; rather, the focus is here on how individual immunity depends on collective immunity, since all humans ultimately share the same atmosphere. In fact, this is the reason why, in You Must Change Your Life. On Anthropotechnics, Sloterdijk does not just return to the term ‘immunity’, but, rather, does so in order to expand its

124   The sphere meaning. Sloterdijk’s main concern is here thus more precisely that of “co-­ immunism” (Ko-­immunismus) or what he also calls “a macrostructure of global immunizations”, adding that: Civilization is one such structure. Its monastic rules must be drawn up now or never; they will encode the forms of anthropotechnics that befit existence in the context of all contexts. Wanting to live by them would mean making a decision: to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises. (Ibid., 452) What surfaces in these formulations is in other words another attempt by Sloterdijk to adjust the ontology of the human who lives as if the frame of his individual sphere was without a context of its own. That is, who lives as if his architectural atmosphere did not reside within another atmosphere embodying the unpleasant capability of causing global disturbances, disturbances that may again be capable of transcending the armour of any architectural atmosphere on the planet and therefore, in principle, represent a threat against all human well-­ being. And this is not all, since we may from Sloterdijk’s description of co-­ immunism not only distil an ambition to adjust human ontology. We may also distil an ambition to promote a new behavioural imperative, an imperative that stresses that contemporary humans must commit themselves to continually improve the sustainability of their individual spheres, if they want to contribute to the production of a safe social climate. Or to be even more precise: how the realization of a macrostructure of global immunizations is in a world threatened by anthropogenic global warming deeply contingent upon the sustainable housekeeping (ecology) of every individual sphere. This may strike us as both banal and politically naive, but it does not mean that the end product of Sloterdijk’s thoughts on anthropogenic global warming is merely a spherical version of Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitanism. To begin with, Sloterdijk insists that it is extremely hard for humans to suppress their emotional ties to ‘the form of immanence that belongs inseparably to them’ i.e. their individual spheres. And what is more, this leads him to the anthropological idea that humans are basically communitarian beings, who feel a deep sense of belonging to the local structures of immunity that they are ingrained in. Spherical solidarity must therefore be thought of in ways that acknowledge this communitarian essence; or, as Sloterdijk stresses in a set of interviews given to the German anthropologist Hans-­Jürgen Heinrichs and assembled in the book Neither Sun Nor Death (Die Sonne und der Tod, 2001), the challenge is “to conceive finitude and opening simultaneously” (2011, 190). More specifically this means that if the behavioural imperative driving co-­ immunism is to proliferate it must, according to Sloterdijk, not disavow communitarianism. It will – returning to the terminology of Spheres I-­III – require that the opening belonging to the topology of the globe merges with the

The sphere   125 ­ nitude belonging to the topology of the bubble. Otherwise, Sloterdijk warns, fi the result will be aggression challenging the social contract that has hitherto enabled the modern societies of ‘foams’ to be places where individuals can seek their own happiness with the knowledge that they can do so in milieus (i.e. social climates) of relative safety.22 On the other hand, this is not to say that Sloterdijk imagines a future world where co-­immunism solely depends on a social contract that reads: ‘if you do your best to make your sphere sustainable, I will do my best to make my sphere sustainable’. As politics is to Sloterdijk ‘the art of the atmospherically possible’, we should not be surprised that he also frames the developments of various air-­conditioning technologies as fundamental for achieving atmospherical solidarity. In fact, one can in Sloterdijk’s thinking find obvious traces of the imagination form that I have in this chapter also located in several climate fictions. For instance, such a trace is clearly present, when, in Neither Sun Nor Death, Sloterdijk asserts that: For present-­day cultures the question of survival has become a question of the way in which they are produced as atmospheric communities. Even physical atmospheres have passed to the stage of their technical producibility. The future era will be climate-­technical, and as such technologically oriented. It will be increasingly seen that societies are artificial from the ground up. The air that, together and separately, we breathe can no longer be presupposed. Everything must be produced technically, and the metaphorical atmosphere as much as the physical atmosphere. Politics will become a department of climate techniques. (Ibid., 245) What Sloterdijk imagines here is thus basically a future in which anthropogenic global warming will lead to a proliferation of engineered atmospheres. That is, he employs the imagination form in order to push the argument that co-­immunism will in the future become increasingly dependent upon air-­ conditioning technologies. In fact, we may even push the tenet of this argument a bit further. Hence, if the opening of the globe is to be ingrained into the finitude of the bubbles without collapsing the modern societies of foams, then it is, according to Sloterdijk, key that increasingly sophisticated air-­ conditioning technologies are used to enhance atmospherical solidarity. If the societies of foams are to avoid rising numbers of spherical implosions caused by a lack of social cohesion, there is, Sloterdijk insists, no way around this; nor is there if these societies want to avoid increasing incidents of spherical explosions caused by external enemies. Only by using technology to rapidly expand atmospherical solidarity will it in a warming world be possible for these societies to sustain their (relatively) safe milieus. Still, this does not mean that Sloterdijk is advocating the type of techno-­ optimism that happily leaves the problem of stopping anthropogenic global warming solely to the market and ‘future’ technologies. Or that he is just abstractly stretching the logic that a globe with relatively little hostility will

126   The sphere require a technological solution to anthropogenic global warming. Rather, Sloterdijk emphasizes that the creation of such a globe will also require human work or, more precisely, practise. Along with new air-­conditioning technologies and a more inclusive social design of the societies of foams he is thus also calling for the rise of a specific way of relating to the world – namely, for a relation to the world that takes anthropotechnics to be its basis and therefore devotes itself to the continued development of: […] the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death. (2013, 10) The point is here twofold. It transcends the mere meaning that contemporary humans must commit themselves to practices that design their existence in ways that continuously decrease their emission of greenhouse gases and reduce their ecological footprint. When Sloterdijk launches anthropotechnics as an important tool in the fight against anthropogenic global warming, it is more precisely because he finds the foundation for such practices present in the many ways that contemporary humans already use various sorts of practices to avert risks.23 What Sloterdijk asks us to imagine is: what if the immense investment of discipline, patience, pain, moderation, etc. that already goes into such practices instead went into efforts of creating co-­ immunity? That said, what is in the context of the imagination form first and foremost important to us here is how Sloterdijk’s philosophical response to anthropogenic global warming thereby contains an echo of an imaginary that we also found embedded in climate fiction – namely, the imaginary that the severe threat posed by anthropogenic global warming will demand from humans a new relation to the world, a relation in which the expected advance in technological know-­how will have to be matched by a proportionate advance in anthropotechnics that quickly advances human care-­taking.

The anthropotechnical relation to the world We may even take this argument a step further, because since we left the worlds of bubbles and entered the worlds of globes, anthropotechnics has assumed an increasingly important role. It has simply appeared as more and more fundamental to the sustainability of the worlds springing from the imagination form. Hence, in Science in the Capital we basically found a fictionalization of the same imaginary that drives Sloterdijk’s conceptualization of co-­immunism. Here, the spherical creation of a globe capable of containing all life was also imagined to be dependent upon a human transformation enabled by various sorts of practice. In Frank’s successful attempts to modify his existence to a world in which technological creativity and care for non-­

The sphere   127 human beings had to flourish in conjunction, we thus witnessed the unfolding of an anthropotechnical relation to the world. That is, we witnessed the unfolding of a relation to the world in which continual practice was conceived as a means to secure immunity for all beings within an engineered atmosphere encircling the whole globe. While this relation to the world became increasingly important and therefore evident as the plot in Science in the Capital advanced, it was however not equally evident in all the climate fictions analysed in this chapter. For instance, in neither Di Filippo’s short story nor in McAuley’s sci-­fi novel did anthropotechnics feature as a condition for sustaining the immunity of engineered atmospheres. In the worlds of these two fictions the application of technology was in itself enough to provide humans with shelter. This differed again from the situation in Goodman’s novel, where anthropotechnics was key to the suppression deriving from Earth Mother and her totalitarian regime. The imperative ‘You Must Change Your Life!’ was here implicitly present in the way that the regime forced practices upon its subjects that adjusted their behaviour to the conditions (apparently) sustaining their spherical surroundings. Indeed, this was also the situation in Joon-­ho’s film, as anthropotechnics here likewise functioned as a biopolitical tool: a means to secure that life within the train unfolded in a manner compatible with both the continuous existence of the machinery of the train and the human and non-­human ecosystem embedding it. What remains the point is, however, this: where anthropotechnics was sometimes and sometimes not imagined to play a significant role in sustaining spherical bubbles, this role appeared much more clearly defined in the imagination of the spherical globe. Hence, where anthropotechnics was not imagined as a consistent condition for maintaining immunity within the limited topology of the bubble, it was – in both Science in the Capital and in Sloterdijk – imagined as an absolute requirement for sustaining co-­immunity. In this sense a logic was unearthed in which the more extensive the social design of the engineered atmosphere was imagined to be, the clearer the demand for anthropotechnics became. In fact, this logic has an even sharper presence in Science in the Capital than it did in Sloterdijk, where co-­immunity was mainly imagined as an immunity of and between humans. As co-­immunity was imagined as an immunity for human and non-­beings alike in Science in the Capital it also unfolded another dimension of this logic, showing how the provision of immunity to other life forms further complicates and expands the need for anthropotechnical commitment. Going back to a couple of the contexts we have previously visited in the book, we could even expand on this finding by framing it a bit differently. Hence although the form of the ark has evidently changed from a wooden boat to an engineered atmosphere encircling the whole globe, Science in the Capital basically explicates the imagination that the more life forms humanity intends to include in the ark, the more human behaviour will have to change. Or to link this argument to yet another context: if the human being should,

128   The sphere as Heidegger imagined, be a ‘shepherd’ of other beings, then Science in the Capital introduces human beings to a new obligation.24 This is to design its existence in such a manner that it befits the technological, social and ecological conditions of an all-­encompassing engineered atmosphere. Indeed, being a shepherd for other beings meant something completely different in Science in the Capital than it did in Heidegger, who – as we remember – associated love with a capability to let other beings be. Frank did, in his way of caring for other beings, clearly not ‘live up to’ this requirement. Rather, what Science in the Capital brought into view through Frank’s anthropotechnical relation to the world was a care ethics that much more closely resembles the behaviour imagined by Donna Haraway, when more than three decades ago she called for a “a cyborg world […] in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines” (1991, 154). Although today this call seems slightly dated – when taking into consideration the huge technological progress that has ensued since the mid-­1980s and the development posthumanism has undergone in the last decade – it is in this context thus still indicative of an important difference. To be more precise: it elucidates how the anthropotechnical relation to the world (represented by Frank) rests on an ontological foundation that completely separates it from the loving relation to the world I described in the previous chapter. Hence what the notion of a cyborg world calls into question is of course first and foremost the idea that it is actually possible to distinguish natural beings from unnatural beings. This is an idea that may indeed be described as the very backbone of Heidegger’s conceptualization of love: his attempt to designate a mode of existence that instead of participating in the exploitative destruction of the non-­human world can let it be, so that it can presence itself in accordance with its own being. Moreover, Haraway did not just describe a world in which humans, other life forms and machines were fusing to such an extent that these categories had become ontologically blurred. Neither did she just foresee how this development would gather in intensity as the scientific and technological evolution progressed. No, what she conveyed with her notion of the cyborg world was also the emergence of an ethical problem. Of what did this problem consist? Basically, it consisted in the following question: After the ontological collapse of the human vs. non-­human, natural vs. unnatural distinctions, how can exploitative behaviour be prevented from continuing or even proliferating? How can it, for example, be possible to prevent cyborgs previously categorized as humans from still preying on cyborgs less distinctively human? Or to put all of this a bit more crudely: What kind of ethics should rule the cyborg world in order for this world to avoid becoming an echo of the destructive past? I mention this because Science in the Capital embedded a similar question. It did not only present a world in which humans had no other choice than to use their technological creativity to save themselves; by doing so it also displayed a world in which humans faced a biodiverse world they had, at least in

The sphere   129 part, artificially created. What came into view here was thus two major cyborg transformations creating a new condition for community. In fact, we may say of this new condition for community that it implicated a fundamental change in terms of what could be viewed as uncanny. Hence as humanity was imagined to intertwine more and more with technology in order to survive, the uncanny was to a certain extent also internalized into the human being. What resulted from this intertwinement was in other words a form of alienation – an alienation that made both human existence and the non-­human world unhomely and therefore also disclosed the need for a new ethics, for some new behavioural rules to permeate the (cyborg) community. In this sense the utilization of The Sphere did more than unearth a new imagination of what it means to be human. It also explicated how extensive use of technology to mitigate anthropogenic global warming is likely to further change the way human beings perceive themselves and their surroundings.

Notes   1 This is, for instance, evident from his definition of spheres as “immune-­ systemically effective space creations for ecstatic beings that are operated upon by the outside” (Sloterdijk 2011, 28).   2 The spherical bubbles and globes that I will look at in the chapter are spatial constructions that Sloterdijk would call foams (Schäume). This is because technological air-­conditioning is an important part of these spatial constructions, while they are simultaneously placed in a historical period, where it, according to Sloterdijk, is technology and no longer God that gives humans a feeling of immunity (2016, 25). With foams Sloterdijk specifically means a plural network of air-­ conditioned spaces (e.g. apartments), where the inhabitants’ only shared interest is in securing an overall immunity that makes it possible for them to unfold their individuality to the widest possible extent (ibid., 52–54).   3 This project does of course also have a strong presence beyond climate fiction. For example, it also resurfaces in Roland Emmerich’s disaster film 2012 (2009). Here, the melting of Earth’s core (generated by a huge solar flare) does not only lead to multiple cataclysmic events (among them the total flooding of many countries); it also leads to the construction of five gigantic boats known as arks. Other fairly recent examples are British Author Stephen Baxter’s two disaster novels Flood (2008) and Ark (2009). Here, humanity only survives a gradual flooding of all landmasses on Earth first by living on boats, and then by sending a spaceship – with a limited number of chosen humans and therefore called ‘ark’ – into space.   4 Since the 1960s science fictions authors have in this regard been able to draw inspiration from various experiments with engineered atmospheres on Earth – with the Amer­ican “Biosphere 2” project as the most famous example (Stableford 2005, 135).   5 In this film humanity is the reason that all plant life on Earth has ceased to exist. The only plants that still exist are found in gigantic greenhouses within six spaceships that have been sent into space to ensure the continued life of these plants.   6 For more on Elysium see the article by myself and Esben Bjerggaard Nielsen “Biopolitics in the Anthropocene: On the Invention of Future Biopolitics in Snowpiercer, Elysium, and Interstellar” (2018).   7 The island where the main character of the novel lives, is, for example, almost entirely inhabited by engineers, who take part in the construction of its engineered atmosphere (Goodman 2008, 39).

130   The sphere   8 In Critique of Judgement Kant characterizes beauty as “the form of purposiveness in an object, so far as this is perceived in it apart from the representation of an end” (2007, 66). Whereas he writes of the sublime that: In what we are wont to call sublime in nature there is such an absence of anything leading to particular objective principles and corresponding forms of nature, that it is rather in its chaos, or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation, provided it gives signs of magnitude and power, that nature chiefly excites the ideas of the sublime. (Ibid., 77)   9 For instance, we encounter this function in the science fiction films Logan’s Run (1976) and The Island (2005), which both portray characters whose longing for another world makes them escape the engineered atmosphere they live within. After the escape they realize that the understanding they had of reality within the engineered atmosphere was false. 10 I adopt the terms ‘biopolitically’ and ‘anatomo-­politically’ from Michel Foucault, who, in “Society Must Be Defended” (1976), distinguishes between two forms of biopower. Namely, between, on the one hand, ‘anatomo-­politics’, which Foucault names as the technology of power concerned with the disciplining of individuals and, on one the other hand, ‘biopolitics’, which he names as the technology of power concerned with regulating populations (Foucault 2003, 249). 11 The revolt is not the first time Wilford’s attempts to administer the population of the train has gone wrong. Through the leader of the revolt, Curtis (Chris Evans) we learn how, in the early days of the train, too-­small rations made the passengers of the trail-­section feed on each other. 12 Here and in the rest of this chapter I deploy the term ‘posthuman’ as a rather broad description of the many forms of human transformations that involve fusing with technology. That is, if we may – in the words of Rosi Braidotti – very generally define the posthuman as “a complex assemblage of human and non-­ human”, I will more specifically associate the non-­humans parts of this assemblage with technology (2013, 159). In this sense my use of the term stands in debt to Donna Haraway, who wrote more than three decades ago: Late twentieth-­century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-­developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (1991, 152) 13 Indeed, this discovery also applies to other climate fictions than the ones analysed above. For instance, Greenhouse Summer (1999), a novel by Amer­ican sci-­fi author Norman Spinrad, portrays an overheated Earth, where the rich moves around in engineered atmospheres, while millions of poor have been relegated to refugee camps, because their homes were in areas that are no longer habitable. Or as this is explained in the novel: “The interior deserts of North America, Asia, and Africa might as well have been another planet, upon whose surface un-­air-conditioned humans could not hope to survive” (Spinrad 1999, 7). 14 In his essay “Future City” (2003) Jameson writes: Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world. (Jameson 2003, 76) 15 For instance, Amer­ican psychology professor Elke Weber has claimed:

The sphere   131 It is only the potentially catastrophic nature of (rapid) climate change (of the kind graphically depicted in the film ‘The Day after Tomorrow’) and the global dimension of adverse effects […] that have the potential for raising a visceral reaction to the risk. (2006, 113–114) 16 Hence as Beck writes in the article “Climate for Change, or How to Create a Green Modernity?” (2010): “Climate change – like ancient cosmopolitanism (Stoicism), the ius cosmopolitica of the Enlightenment (Kant) or crimes against humanity (Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers) – releases a ‘cosmopolitan momentum’. Global risks entail being confronted with the global other” (259). 17 It is in this sense emblematic that the national park is, in several places in the trilogy, described as a “wilderness”, although it has been both formed (partly constructed) and radically transformed (via the disastrous consequences of global warming) by humans (2005b, 6, 306). 18 The term ‘eco-­cosmopolitanism’ derives from Heise, who frames it as “an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds” (2008, 61). 19 All excerpts from Sloterdijk’s interview with Archplus have been translated from German into English by me. 20 For more on this, see my article “Greening the Sphere: Towards an Eco-­ethics for the Local and Artificial” (2013). 21 However, while in Being and Time Heidegger uses the term “ecstases” about the three different temporal experiences (i.e. past, present and future) that merge in Dasein’s understanding of its own thrownness, Sloterdijk is much more interested in humans as affective beings that can be emotionally intoxicated (Heidegger 2001, 377). 22 Sloterdijk deploys the term ‘foams’ of the structures of mass-­immunization that most humans today live in. One way of perceiving foams is, in other words, to think of how an urban apartment is typically architecturally connected to many other apartments in complexes resembling mountings of foam-­bubbles. Indeed, it is this resemblance that prompts Sloterdijk to define modern society as: An aggregate of microspheres (couples, households, businesses, associations) of different formats that, like the individual bubbles in a mountain of foam, border on one another and are layered over and under one another, yet without truly being accessible or effectively separable from one another. (2016, 56) 23 One needs, as Sloterdijk points out, only to think of the practices taking place in the numerous “fitness centres” around the globe (2013, 436). Hence in these practices it is (among other things) possible to locate a strong human will to avoid certain health risks, i.e. a motivation to be and stay healthy. 24 In his “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger writes that “Man is the shepherd of Being [der Hirt des Seins]”, which also means that the human being is the caretaker of the beings that it sets forth in presencing (1993, 234).

7 The birth of a new perspective

With the last remarks from the previous chapter still fresh in mind, let me begin this final chapter with an etymological reflection. Hence our journey through the most persistent worlds of Western climate fiction has in a way led us back to the original meaning of ecology. That is, it has led us back to ecology’s roots in the Greek word ‘oikos’ and its reference to the home as a household one attends to with care. What has been explicated throughout our journey is thus what might happen if humans do not take proper care of the worlds they feel a belonging to. Or rather, how this feeling may quickly recede into an uncanny feeling of unhomeliness when these worlds change due to mismanagement. In fact, if Western climate fiction leads us towards one answer to the question ‘What is anthropogenic global warming imagined to mean for human existence?’, it is this. On the other hand this conclusion is so broad in scope that it hardly seems to tell us anything new. After all, isn’t the fear of what such unhomeliness might entail what drives ecological concern in the first place? Can’t we detect the same kind of uneasiness about a future in which Earth will stop feeling like home, in both the most committed environmental activists and the busy family that try to pick up something ‘eco’ at the supermarket when they can? That is, whether or not one takes Earth’s homeliness to reside in the continued existence of endangered species or in living in a stable climate favourable to human well-­being. The point is of course that the conclusion above cannot account for all the specific details this book has unearthed. But it does give us a common entry point to the widely varying worlds Western climate fiction displays in its utilization of the five imagination forms. Thus we have seen how anthropogenic global warming appears in Western climate fiction as an event that can dissolve the social contract; how it is imagined to possess the unfortunate ability of enhancing human selfishness to the point of extreme brutality, indeed, to downright barbarity; and how it is, due to this ability, therefore quite naturally also imagined to be capable of fundamentally shaking the trust humans can have in each other. We have seen how this lack of trust is imagined to be capable of permeating the whole horizon of human experience. That is, how it is imagined to be capable of dominating every way humans affectively and cognitively experience their surround-

The birth of a new perspective   133 ings. And to be even more precise: how this experience could therefore be associated with an uncanny experience of unhomeliness, of suddenly not feeling and understanding oneself at home in a world one used to feel and understand as home. In fact, what we disclosed in many of the climate fictions utilizing The Social Collapse, was humans who did not only affectively experience the changes in their physical and social surroundings as something deeply uncanny. No, these humans were very often also compelled to interpret themselves as either beings-­towards-death or beings-­towards-killing. In this way the climate fictions utilizing The Social Collapse emphasized a connection between accelerating global warming and accelerating interhuman violence that had not been so visible before anthropogenic global warming accelerated. Furthermore, we have seen how anthropogenic global warming in Western climate fiction appears as an event that marks the definitive transgression of non-­human tolerance; how it comes to signify the breaking of the last straw in the human–non-­human relationship, propelling the non-­human world to judge and punish humanity. That is, how it prompts the non-­human word to return the violence embedded in the human conduct that has fostered the Anthropocene. What was, moreover, interesting about this return of violence was therefore also how it implied a transformation of the non-­ human being; how it engendered an ontological metamorphosis, which meant that the non-­human being could no longer be reduced to an instrumental object, but rather appeared to the human perception as a quasi-­object – a being endowed with an agency demanding undivided human attention and recognition. In fact, in the climate fictions utilizing The Judgment this metamorphosis very often unleashed non-­human beings monstrous in scale and force, meaning that they appeared to the human perception not only unhomely strange, but also uncanny. The uncanny unhomeliness this metamorphosis brought to the worlds of humans was therefore also different from the uncanny unhomeliness that appeared with the utilization of The Social Collapse. Where the worlds springing from this utilization were primarily uncanny unhomely in atmosphere, uncanny unhomeliness arrived – in the climate fictions utilizing The Judgment – with the presence of specific quasi-­objects. This uncanny unhomeliness was basically evoked to cause a change in human conduct. A change that on the affective side generally consisted in a new sense of humility brought forth by the sudden manifestation of non-­human strength. And on the cognitive side in a new comprehension of humans as beings with neither more nor less entitlement for existence than other living beings. In this sense the utilization of The Judgment disclosed a symbiotic connection between the human and non-­human world that had not been as visible before anthropogenic global warming accelerated. What is more, we have seen how, in Western climate fiction, anthropogenic global warming appears as a conspiratorial event. Indeed, what stood out as the most dominant feature of anthropogenic global warming in the

134   The birth of a new perspective climate fictions utilizing The Conspiracy was its ability to temporarily collapse the modern Constitution and thereby pave the way for an affective and cognitive change in those that were at first bamboozled by its conspiratorial power. In many of the climate fictions utilizing The Conspiracy the characters were thus initially receptive to apocalyptic messages. However, after having been manipulated by either individuals, groups or institutions representing the sciences or the political system, their affective openness to such messages generally receded in order to be replaced by a completely opposite affective approach. In the aftermath of conspiracy what came to light through these characters was a mode of existence in which the cognitive function of giving meaning to the world was grounded in a sense of suspicion. Or put differently: what emerged out of the conspiratorially created confusion was in a sense a hermeneutics of suspicion presuming any authoritative communication to contain an intention of manipulation. Unhomeliness took, therefore, also another meaning here than it had done in the climate fictions utilizing The Social Collapse or The Judgment. In the same way as in the climate fictions utilizing The Social Collapse it emerged out of worlds that were initially permeated by a certain confidence in the good intentions of others. But unlike these worlds this confidence was not primarily broken by acts of violence. Rather, it was broken by scientific deceits and political manipulations, meaning that, in the climate fictions utilizing The Conspiracy, unhomeliness was not so much experienced as ‘afraidness’ – as the uncanny awareness of an always-­present threat of interhuman violence. No, if the worlds springing from the utilization of The Conspiracy were in a sense eerie, it was not because they were highly inclined to spur interhuman violence. It was rather because they were places where human knowledge was constantly brought into jeopardy and being deconstructed. In this context the utilization of The Conspiracy disclosed a connection between climate science, politics, and personal interests that had not been as obvious before the conspiratorial appropriation of anthropogenic global warming. Moreover, we have seen how, in Western climate fiction, anthropogenic global warming appears as an event of abysmal sorrow; how it is imagined as the catalyst of an excruciatingly slow end to the last places on Earth not fully dominated by human existence. In the climate fictions utilizing The Loss of Wilderness, what had centre stage was thus the immense value of places presumed to be of little use to humans. Crudely put, this value took the form of three qualities. The first – and in a way the most essential – of these qualities was geophysical. Hence in the climate fictions utilizing The Loss of Wilderness it was again and again stressed how the disappearing wilderness was a geophysical stabilizer, and how its disappearance would therefore eventually lead to the demise of humanity. The second quality was aesthetic, as the disappearing wilderness was also portrayed as a place of extensive biodiversity and therefore beauty. Lastly, the disappearing wilderness also incarnated an existential quality, as it was depicted as a place capable of generating fundamental human change.

The birth of a new perspective   135 Indeed, in the climate fictions utilizing The Loss of Wilderness fundamental human change was a requirement for experiencing unhomeliness. First, because fundamental human change here culminated in a love for the non-­human world. Second, because this love took the form of an ability to let the non-­human world appear in accordance with its own being. Third, because this ability was depicted as a condition for sensing the suffering of the non-­human world. And fourth, because sensing this suffering meant staring the uncanny ‘truth’ straight in the eyes that the human destruction of the Earth System was irreversible for humans. What made the slow decline in biodiversity such a profoundly unhomely experience in the climate fictions utilizing The Loss of Wilderness was thus its foreboding of Earth’s irreversible transformation from a habitat of manifold life forms into a habitat of a self-­ destructive human monoculture. In this sense the climate fictions utilizing The Loss of Wilderness revealed a connection between absolute human dominion and total powerlessness that had not been so visible before anthropogenic global warming accelerated. Finally, we have seen how, in Western climate fiction, anthropogenic global warming appears as an event for engineering; how it is imagined to necessitate the construction of artificial atmospheres, and how this construction first and foremost actualizes a question about social design. Namely, the question of how many human and non-­human beings can be allowed to take up the space of the engineered atmosphere without risking its ecological equilibrium. In the climate fictions utilizing The Sphere the anthropogenic inhospitality of the natural atmosphere thus led to the engineering both of smaller atmospheres with a limited capacity to contain human and non-­ human life (i.e. bubbles) and of pervasive atmospheres capable of containing all life on Earth (i.e. globes). However, whereas these contrasting world-­ formats represented diverging answers to the question about social design, their appearance also raised at least one additional question – a question which was crudely put not about social design, but about existential design, or, about how to configure one’s life, in such a way that it did not represent a threat to the sustainability of the engineered atmosphere. What generated unhomeliness in the climate fictions utilizing The Sphere was therefore more than the fact that their characters had to live within artificially upheld atmospheres. It was also that the technology used to create these atmospheres penetrated these characters’ being, profoundly changed them, and made them unhomely to themselves. In this sense the utilization of The Sphere laid bare a connection between climate engineering and a technological alteration of the human that had not been so visible before anthropogenic global warming accelerated.

Beyond the grid of the imagination forms While these findings disclose some of the dominant patterns running through Western climate fiction, it would be erroneous to presume that they represent

136   The birth of a new perspective the totality of what Western climate fiction has to offer. Indeed, much of this totality has undoubtedly escaped the grid (i.e. the imagination forms) through which I have in the previous five chapters approached Western climate fiction. And the odds are that the blind spots of this grid will only become increasingly obvious, as the number of Western climate fictions continues to grow. Before concluding I will therefore devote my attention to some of the Western climate fictions I have hitherto ignored. I don’t assume that this will obliterate the blind spots, but rather hope that I may thereby shed further light on how Western climate fiction explores human and non-­human conditions in the Anthropocene. So, let us start with James Bradley’s cli-­fi novel Clade (2017). What makes Clade stand out in comparison to many of the other cli-­fi novels I have dealt with in this book, is its attempt to solve one of the formal problems which has often been associated with narrating anthropogenic global warming. Namely, the problem that anthropogenic global warming sets into motion events that transcend the “space and time” of every human being alive today (Clark 2015, 13).1 In Clade we are thus not only confronted with a plot with many protagonists; we are also confronted with a plot transcending the lifetime of several of these protagonists. It is for instance telling of the poetics of the novel that it begins with the character Adam – a climate scientist worrying about soon becoming a father in a world he knows is about to be severely shaken by runaway global warming – and on its final pages informs its readers of his death by way of a conversation his great-­grandchild is having with her mother on the phone (Bradley 2017, 294). Indeed, the information of his death leads his great-­grandchild to the following reflection: He [Adam] is only one of the many, of course, just as she is, just as they all are, part of a movement in time, a river flowing ever on, bearing them away from the past. They have lost so much: Shanghai and Venice, Bangladesh, all those millions of lives. (Ibid., 297) As this reflection scales up its perspective from one human being to the overall movement of the human species through time and space, it represents the culmination of a narrative ambition which the novel to a certain extent already embeds in its plot. Its reference to ‘Shanghai and Venice, Bangladesh’ is for example emblematic of a more general tendency of the novel to geographically cover events in many countries and on different continents. Whereas its portrait of human beings as ‘part of […] a river flowing ever on’ is mirrored by the novel’s depiction of events spreading over the course of almost a century. In fact, in its attempt to widen in time and space the perspectives of its readers the novel does something that is, at least to my knowledge, quite unique in Western cli-­fi. Hence what happens at the end of the novel is basically that the novel transcends its own ambition of depicting the overall movement of the human species through time and space. How? Well,

The birth of a new perspective   137 by doing something, which lays bare the fact that this ambition is in itself infinitely small in scale compared to the vastness of time and space. At the end of the novel the human species discovers a signal emanating “from a star five hundred light years away known only as SKA-­2165” (ibid., 263–264). The human species succeeds, in other words, in confirming that it is not the only ‘intelligent’ life form in the universe and thereby gets a glimpse of what French philosopher Quentin Meillasoux has quipped “the great outdoors” (2008, 7).2 This is of course important, because it essentially erodes the foundation of the anthropocentric exceptionalism which has been so heavily criticized by Lynn White Jr and others. That is, it erodes the idea that human beings are so unique that they must have been formed in the image of God and therefore have a higher worth than any other universal life form. But let us now move on to two climate fictions which take up an entirely different problem, namely the problem of how vital resources such as crops and water are to be distributed and managed in the Anthropocene. In other words, we return here to the realm of biopolitics and the administration of populations in worlds where vital resources are decreasing due to anthropogenic heating. In Jake Paltrow’s cli-­fi film Young Ones (2014) and in Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli-­fi novel The Water Knife (2015) we are thus introduced to some rather terrifying resource regimes. In fact, these two cli-­fis contain very similar worlds, as they both depict a future United States hard-­hit by severe water shortages due to increasingly intense droughts. Moreover, in both fictions these water shortages are the driver of a survival-­of-the-­fittest type of strife between various characters caught in the middle of even larger conflicts over water involving the federal government, states, big corporations, criminal gangs and local militias. In Young Ones, for instance, we follow the alcoholic farmer Ernest Holm’s struggle to keep his land fertile in a fiercely hot climate, where most of the land has already died due to droughts and unsustainable farming. Holm believes his land will deliver new crops, but in order for it to do so, he must strike a deal with the militia defending the local water pipes on behalf of the state against militias from other states and desperate farmers acting on their own. However, instead of succeeding in this Holm is murdered, while his murder prompts a long string of other murderous acts fuelled by greed and thirst for revenge. In The Water Knife one gets an even clearer depiction of states fighting each other over water rights. In fact, the situation in the novel is not just one of sometimes-­secret, sometimes-­open warfare between states; it is also a situation in which “every single state has its own border patrol” in order to keep climate refugees from jeopardizing their ‘water budget’ (Bacigalupi 2015, 57). We are in the novel thus once again confronted with the idea of an ecological equilibrium so delicate that it justifies inhumane actions on a large scale, actions we may therefore again take as a sign of a fear of anthropogenic global warming arousing fascism or even a return to “Hitlerian descriptions of life” (Snyder 2016, 327). On a more general level, this also means that we can put

138   The birth of a new perspective The Water Knife and Young Ones into the same ‘basket’ as the other Western climate fictions I associate with the imagination form of The Social Collapse. I will therefore not go further into the complicated webs of violence that comprise the plots of these two fictions. Instead I will return to the oeuvre of Kim Stanley Robinson and two climate fictions which in a sense resume the critique of ‘disaster capitalism’ that was already present in his Science in the Capital trilogy. In fact, in the first of these two fictions, Robinson’s novel 2312 (2012), this critique is once again presented through a world-­making that takes its starting point in the utilization of The Sphere. Thus, we are here told how a large part of humanity has left Earth due to the devastating effects of anthropogenic global warming and settled in technologically produced atmospheres on the planets and moons closest to Earth. These spherical communities have to a large extent abandoned the political, social and economic structures that dominate on Earth. However, as the novel progresses it becomes apparent to these communities that their detachment from Earth does not guarantee their well-­being – first of all, because the combination of their physical location and engineered surroundings makes them extremely vulnerable to military aggression. Just as it was the case in McAuley’s The Quiet War, we are here introduced to the problem of what Sloterdijk called ‘immunity’ i.e. to a problem humans might face despite the possibility that they become capable of creating comfortable worlds away from Earth and thereby avoid the devastation of anthropogenic global warming. Second, the novel links aggression to disaster capitalism and the inequality it prompts. Earth is thus conceived as a threat to the spherical communities exactly because it has not yet rid itself of the economic system and logics that fostered anthropogenic global warming and its destructive consequences, or as it reads in the novel: Earth meant people like gods and people like rats: and in paroxysm of rage they were going to reach out and wreck everything, even the space worlds that kept them from starvation. Earth spun like a red horse with a bomb in it. And they could not get off the merry-­go-round. (Robinson 2012, 376) The point is of course that this enables Robinson ‘to explore’ how disaster capitalism can be dealt its death stroke. Or rather, it allows him to imagine an end to disaster capitalism other than that envisioned by him in Science in the Capital. It is thus noteworthy how, in 2312, this end comes about through a process that starts with a rewilding of the Earth. Species long extinct on Earth, but still existent due to gene modification in the spherical communities are in large numbers literally dropped over Earth in a parachute invasion that eventually leads to more basic political, social and economic changes. Whereas one may laugh at the political reverie orchestrating these events, what cannot be taken away from Robinson is his will to generate new utopias for a future that has – to follow the thoughts of Italian philosopher Franco

The birth of a new perspective   139 ‘Bifo’ Berardi – in a way, ceased to exist. At a time when the promises given by industrial modernity of “an ever progressing development” have to a large extent reversed into dystopia, Robinson’s cli-­fis at least explore possibilities of other futures (Berardi 2011, 18). Thus, we find a similar aspiration in Robinson’s latest cli-­fi novel: New York 2140 (2017). The driver of the plot is here again the battle between community and the capitalistic greed threatening to destroy it. More specifically we follow a diverse group of people from the MetLife Building in New York in their fight against ‘big capital’ and its attempts to buy them out of the building. The background of this fight is a world severely marked by anthropogenic global warming. When the novel begins, many parts of New York have already disappeared due to several major floodings. But when, at the end of the novel, a hurricane causes yet another major flooding event in the city, it generates fundamental changes. Whereas the previous floodings have only opened new opportunities for financial investments, this flooding becomes a major backlash against capitalism. Spurring civil unrest the flooding is thus used by the group from the MetLife Building to introduce the idea of a collective “payment default”, that is, a collective refusal to pay back on any form of bank loan (Robinson 2017, 505).3 This payment default then bursts the ‘bubble’ of the New York housing market, causing a worldwide financial crisis – a situation which again leads to a nationalization of all major financial institutions moving enormous sums from private to public ‘pockets’. The plot in New York 2140 thereby partly resembles the plot in Nathaniel Rich’s cli-­fi novel Odds Against Tomorrow (2013). Hence not only does Rich’s novel also contain some vivid descriptions of New York under water, but it also takes a very similar swipe at disaster capitalism and the financialization of the destruction inherent to accelerating global warming. Just as in New York 2140 we find in Rich’s novel a morally scrutinizing depiction of the economic speculation in human-­induced disasters. In particular, this activity is in Odds Against Tomorrow represented by the main character of the novel, the mathematician Micthel Zukor, who is employed by a company which specializes in selling worst-­case scenarios. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that Zukor is incredibly talented at generating horrific, yet still plausible scenarios. But the further the novel proceeds the more it becomes apparent to him that this form of work basically consists in “seeking profit at the expense of human dignity” (Rich 2013, 239). Nevertheless, despite Odds Against Tomorrow ending with Zukor denoun­ cing his capitalist occupation for a life in a self-­sufficient community dedicated to sustainability, the novel does disclose a lacuna opened by the analyses in this book. Hence the plot in Odds Against Tomorrow implicitly shows (along with the plots in other cli-­fis including New York 2140) that it is indeed possible to imagine anthropogenic global warming as something positive, that is, in ways that go fundamentally against the negative ways of imagining it I have laid bare in my analyses of the climate fictions utilizing the five imagination forms. To a certain extent this may of course be explained by the fact that, to

140   The birth of a new perspective start with, the IPCC’s projections of the future are pretty grim. But this does not change the fact that one can, in various contemporary discourses, find the imagination that anthropogenic global warming will produce something positive. Most of the time this positive turns out to be some sort of economic opportunity. For instance, in their recent book Climate Leviathan (2018), Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann show how this kind of imagination lies at heart of what they critically call “Green Keynesianism” and the assumption that by way of some minor regulative interventions national populations will “be able to consume or produce [their] way out of current ecological predicaments” (120). On the other hand, we also find this imagination in perspectives less comfortable with the idea of an intervening state, that is, in the neoliberal: […] voices enjoining us to be positive about global warming. The pessimistic predictions, so we are told, should be seen in a more balanced context. True, climate change will bring increased resource competition, coastal flooding, infrastructure damage from melting permafrost, stresses on animal species and indigenous cultures, all this accompanied by ethnic violence, civil disorder, and local gang rule. But we should also bear in mind that the hitherto hidden treasures of a new continent will be disclosed [with ice melting in the Arctic region], its resources will become more accessible, its land more suitable for human habitation. (Žižek 2010, 328) In fact, although both in Wainwright and Mann and in the excerpt from Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times (2010) above the idea that anthropogenic global warming will represent a positive economic opportunity is repeated from a critical point of view, this idea does indeed have a fairly strong position internationally within political and economic discourse. The fact that it is almost totally absent in Western climate fiction therefore begs further reflections about the social function of cli-­fi. That is, this absence prompts us to delve further into the question of what roles Western cli-­fi may have – and indeed seeks to obtain – in the present world.

Two functions of climate fiction To begin with it is, for instance, noteworthy that in almost all the climate fictions I have dealt with, the general depiction of the understandings and actions of contemporary humans claimed a critical function. This is to say that these understandings and actions were quite unsurprisingly configured as destructive of the long-­term living conditions of the human species as well as of the living conditions of many other earthly life forms. Taking this observation a step further, we can therefore also say that in their configurations of these understandings and actions the climate fictions carried within them a

The birth of a new perspective   141 stark critique of a ‘status quo’ in thinking and behaviour. This critique places these fictions in opposition to the political variations of the imagination that anthropogenic global warming represents a new opportunity for economic growth. Hence whether we look to Green Keynesianism or to neoliberalism what we find is basically an attempt to salvage the thinking and behaviour of the present. Inherent to Green Keynesianism and neoliberalism is therefore also a ‘condition’ that we may, with French philosopher Jérôme Bindé, diagnose as “temporal myopia” i.e. an ominous propensity to focus on the immediate well-­being of the economy, while simultaneously blocking the long-­term threat of ‘runaway’ global warming out (2001, 91). Indeed, I do not believe it would be unfair to frame many of the climate fictions I have analysed in this book as reactions to this kind of myopia. In fact, by placing their readers and viewers in future worlds – where a status quo in thinking and behaviour was no longer possible – many of the included climate fictions placed ‘a pair of glasses’ on their readers and viewers that allowed them to look ahead. What made many of these fictions rather effective cures of myopia was thus their presentations of undesirable futures, that is, their presentations of future worlds which basically made their readers and viewers grateful that they were not yet too similar to their own. In this sense many of the climate fictions discussed contained a powerful potential for intervention. Hence by depicting the understandings and actions of a humanity that had brought extreme global warming upon itself, they did not only lay bare the undesirable consequences of these understandings and actions, but they also made it possible for their readers and viewers to first mirror themselves in these understandings and actions and then transfigure their modes of Being-­in-the world. In other words: the critical function of many of the included climate fictions did not just consist in their ability to alarm their readers and viewers of the more and more catastrophic consequences of human conduct; it also consisted in their ability to convert this sensation of alarm into first self-­criticism and then a transformation of the self. Moreover, in some of the appraised climate fictions this critical function appeared alongside another type of function. Hence by drafting new templates for future ways of existing – not just for individuals but also for societies – several of these fictions also claimed an utopian function. From Kim Stanley Robinson’s depiction in Science in the Capital of a humanity that reshaped the world by reforming political, technological and existential relations to the depiction of a new harmony between humanity and the non-­ human world in The Swarm, we were in quite a few of the climate fictions examined thus introduced to templates for new worlds. What these fictions did was thus essentially to put their imaginative power to the service of the future by imagining worlds in which the accelerating warming of the planet inspired new and presumably better forms of civilizations. Or to draw on a previously quoted remark by Ricoeur: the function of these fictions did not only consist in an ability to help their readers and viewers ‘understand and

142   The birth of a new perspective master the manifold of the practical field’, i.e. in preparing them for likely futures; it also consisted in their ability to ‘re-­describe’ the practical field itself. It would therefore also be wrong to take the meaning of cultural preunderstanding in the creation of imaginations in a way that deprived the concept of imagination forms of a potential for renewal. That is to say: it is not a concept that in a conservative (or even reactionary way) only allows for a reproduction of what has already been imagined. As I have tried to show throughout this book, this concept does not prevent the production of new templates for ways of existing for both individuals and societies. Indeed, it is the exact opposite: the cultural preunderstanding is just the foundation that the fictions’ opening of new worlds and new ways of Being-­in-the-­world rests on. In fact, by disclosing alternative worlds and relations to the world the fictions presented their readers and viewers to various utopian templates that they could integrate in the process of self- and social transformation. On a more general note, I will therefore argue that climate fiction can help counteract the crisis in imagination which the acceleration of anthropogenic global warming represents for contemporary humans and societies. Or to put it even more bluntly: that climate fiction can help those cultures across the globe that must now re-­imagine themselves as sustainable. This is of course not to say that these cultures have not yet transformed themselves simply because they have been lacking visions of what their transformations could look like. On the contrary, it is obvious that the global response to global warming has so far been totally inadequate because of already-­existing power formations. Indeed, in what Swedish human geographer, Andreas Malm, was the first to call ‘The Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016, xi) I side with French philosopher André Gorz in his claim that “it is impossible to avoid climate catastrophe without a radical break with the economic logic and methods that have been taking us in that direction for 150 years” (2010, 26). Nevertheless, it is worth stressing how climate fiction may work as a ‘laboratory’ for the creation and testing of new sustainable forms of society and individual practices. We should thus not forget how one of the primary functions of fiction is to be a place where the imagination can try out different actions to test their value.

Notes 1 This problem becomes of course even more complex if we allow ourselves to think of anthropogenic global warming as just one crucial phenomenon in the row of humanly influenced geophysical processes comprising the Anthropocene. 2 In Meillassoux this term is broadly used about the vastness of space and time which exists “whether or not it is thought” by humans (2008, 63). 3 In his integration of this idea into the plot of the novel, Robinson clearly takes inspiration from Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato (Robinson 2017, 76). Thus, in his Governing by Debt (2015) Lazzarato remarks how an end to the paying of all debts would basically mean “the death of capitalism” (88).

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Index

acceptable coexistence, humanity 42 aesthetic quality of life 85 Amsterdam, Steven 28 anatomo-political violence 111 Antarctica 85–6; affection for 92; anthropogenic warming on 89–90; biodiversity 99; demand for permanent presence 90–1; depiction of 89; human interpretation of 86–7; interpretation of 92; spatial segregation of 89 Antarctic wilderness 89 Anthropocene 3, 101, 118, 121, 133; descriptions of 3; distributed and managed in 137; fiction 9 anthropogenic global warming 3, 7, 11–12, 15, 20, 30–1, 33, 64, 67, 73–4, 81, 85, 89, 100–1, 104, 107–8, 110, 112–14, 116–17, 120, 123, 125–6, 129, 132, 135, 137–9; acceleration of 39, 142; conspiratorial appropriation of 134; dimensions of 1–2; discourses of 81–2; dominant feature of 133–4; effects of 110; establishment of 3–4; existential conditions 10; fictive representations of 7; general depiction of 98; human consequences of 112–13; imagination of 2; problem of 117; psychological aspect of 57; scientific paradigm of 5, 9–10, 92; scientific reality of 107; in Western climate fiction 133 Arrhenius, Svante 3 artificial atmospheres 135 atmospherical solidarity 125 Bancroft, Terri 67 Basham, Lee 63–4 Beard, Michael 24–5

Beck, Thilo 72 Beck, Ulrich 124 Behringer, Wolfgang 4 being-in-spheres 121 Belacqua, Belacqua 67–70, 73 Benton, Joe 26; cognitive relation to world 27 Bindé, Jérôme 141 biodiversity 85, 88–9, 92, 135; loss of 109 biological agents 3 biotechnology: extensive use of 113; human mastery of 113; research in 118 Bloomkamp, Neil 107 Böttcher, Sven 70, 73 Bracke, Astrid 9 Bradley, James 136 bricolage 20 Bruckner, Pascal 47 Brynner, Rock 67 bubbles 105, 107–15, 120; of light 114; topology of 125 Bush, George W. 115 calculative thinking 94–7, 100 carbon dioxide (CO2) 3–4 Cartesian identity 12 Cartesian ontology 56–7 Cartesian philosophy 52 Cassirer, Ernst 2 catastrophic weather 44 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3 change capitalism 115 Chase, Phil 115, 117 cinematic climate fictions 5–7 civilization 23, 30, 32, 69, 84, 89, 97, 124, 141 Clark, Timothy 7 cli-fi see climate fiction

150   Index climate change 66–7; fiction 9; history of 1 climate disasters, imaginations of 1–2 climate fiction 1, 42, 77, 104, 139; approaching 19–21; characteristic of 11; characters in 42–3; conspiracy 64; contemporary research on 7; definition of 4–5; development of 7; engineered atmospheres of 106; extraordinary significance in 11; functions of 140–2; imaginaries of 10; interpretations of 107; potential of 10, 12; relevance of 10–11; research on 1, 9; social function of 140; speculative nature of 1; spherical bubbles of 114–15; as symbolic form 2; Western 2 The Climate Files (Pearce) 68 climate mitigation technologies 118 climate scepticism 115 climate science: computer-driven models in 70; dependency on construction 72; imagination of 70; politicization of 74; scepticism of 73 climate summit in Copenhagen (COP15) 26 climate system 70 co-immunism 124–7 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Diamond) 23 communitarianism 125 conspiracy 62; arrival of supercomputer 70–3; configurations of 63–4; Crichton and 73–7; in cultural history 62–4; definition of 63; description of 75; doomsday atmospheres 65–70; foster and believe in 67; influential thinkers of 63; suspicious relation to world 77–9 The Conspiracy 12, 133–4; utilization of 134 contemporary humanity 43 continual suspicion 78 cosmopolitan political realism 117 Crichton, Michael 73–7 critical function 140 cultural embeddedness of human existence 3 cultural hermeneutics 15–16; approaching climate fiction 19–21; and preunderstanding 16–19 cultural history: conspiracy in 62–4; domain of 62–3 culture: defined 2; Western see Western culture Curtis, Claire P. 29

cynicism 25–6, 86 Dansgaard, Willi 4 The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich) 55 deep ecology 99 depiction 109–10 Diamond, Jared 23 disaster capitalism 117 Discourse on Thinking 96 doomsday atmospheres 65–70 The Doomsday Report (Brynner) 67–9 Drake, Nicholas 76 Earth 3, 59, 106–9, 118, 135; biosphere 47–8; devastation of 115; ecosystems 48–9; impoverishment of 96; radical modification of 118; representation of 91; rewilding of 138 ecocriticism 7 ecological crises 54 ecological equilibrium, conception of 110–11 ecology, original meaning of 132 economic means 94 ecosystems, destruction of 43 eco-thrillers 44, 46–7, 49 eco-totalitarianism 108 Emmerich, Roland 55 engineered atmospheres: critique of 110; depictions of 106; immunity of 127; incorporate narratives of 107; proliferation of 125 etymological reflection 132 Evans, Peter 74–6 existence, human modes of 3 extinction of humanity 89 fascism 111, 137–8 fictional texts 13 fictions 142; conspiracies in 63–4; see also climate fiction Filippo, Paul Di 111 financial investments, opportunities for 139 Fourier, Joseph 3 Fox, Gabrielle 58–9 Freud, Sigmund 34, 56 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 16–17 Gaia Weeps: The Crisis of Global Warming (Ready) 46–7 Geertz, Clifford 2–3 genres 7 geographic isolation 90

Index   151 geometries 104 glacier calvings 46 Glass, Matthew 26–7 global biodiversity 4 global climate 4, 118 global geo-engineering plan 117 global immunization, macrostructure of 124 global temperature see global warming global warming 1, 4, 26, 31–2, 42, 45–6, 51, 65, 88–9, 111, 115–16, 133, 136; description of 16; history of 3–4; imagination of 47; IPCC descriptions of 73; philosophical interpretation of 51; quasi-object 47; Serres on 52, 55; see also greenhouse gases globes 105; transformation to 105 Goodbody, Axel 9–10 Goodman, Allegra 107–8 Gorz, André 142 greenhouse effect 5, 104–5 greenhouse gases: emissions of 5; global emission of 31; humanity’s emissions of 5–6 Green Keynesianism 140–1 grief, and anger 90 Guha, Anton-Andreas 42 Haraway, Donna 128 Heat (Herzog) 65–6 Heidegger, Martin 2–3, 11, 13, 17, 34, 38, 50, 56, 67, 81, 93–9, 120–2, 128; description of human being 35; meditative dwelling 101; ontological orientation of hermeneutics 16–17; philosophy of 101; thinking 97 Heinrichs, Hans-Jürgen 124 Heise, Ursula K. 7, 10 hermeneutical philosophy 2–3 hermeneutics 3; cultural see cultural hermeneutics; ontological orientation of 16–17 “Hermie” (2011) 44–5 Herzog, Arthur 5–6, 65 Hobbes, Thomas 29–30 Hoffman, Norman 74 Holm, Ernest 137 Horn, Eva 1 Hulme, Mike 81–3 human behaviour 128; interpretation of 29; transformation of 118–19 human culture, sophistication of 26 human design, control of 108 human ecology 43

human existence: interpretation of 39; quality of 90 human imagination 112 human immunity 113 human interaction 28 humanity 24, 47, 49, 66, 134, 141; acceptable coexistence 42; depiction of 30; description of 28; destructive behaviour of 84; destructiveness of 84–8; ecological devastation 107; faction of 114; faith in 26; general relation to world 57; history of 23; hopeless for 49; and nature 83–4; and non-human world 49–51; Promethean 57; relationship 42; revenge on 46; violation of laws 55–6 human monoculture 135 human Prometheanism 44 human security 33 human species 107, 136; living conditions of 140 human survival, vital for 104 human well-being 122, 132 The Ice Lovers (McNeil) 88, 91–2, 95, 99 ideology, critique of 77 illusion 74 imagination form 2–3, 11, 15, 20–1, 42, 44, 47–8, 54, 81, 83, 104–6, 108, 111, 114; of anthropogenic global warming 2, 11–12; creation of 142; fictional application of 44; of global warming 47; grid of 135–40; political variations of 140; of scientific mediation 69–70; of The Social Collapse 23, 58; of specificity 113; types of 43; utilization of 91, 120–1; of wilderness 81 immanence, form of 123 immemorial ecosystems 112 immunity 105, 111, 138; designing spaces of 122; space of 106; spaces of 105 individual immunity 123–4 industrialization 4 instrumental violence 53 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1, 4, 11, 64, 73, 139–40; descriptions of global warming 73 interhuman atmosphere 35–6 interhuman communication 33 interhuman violence 11, 23, 28, 30–2, 37, 58, 133–4 interpretation process 17–18

152   Index IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Irwin, Ruth 100

monstrosity 46 monstrous organisms 43–4, 49 Morton, Timothy 81

Jameson, Fredric 75 Jensen, Liz 57 Johns-Putra, Adeline 7–10 Jonas, Hans 54 Jones, Phil 64 judgment 42–3; in climate fiction 45–50; in cultural history 43–5; as denial of responsibility 57–60; imagination form 50–5; through catastrophic weather 44; through monstrous organisms 44; uncanny relation to world 55–7

natural contract 51–3 nature: humanity and 83–4; separation of 81 Nazism 93–4 neoliberalism 141 non-human world: Cartesian objectification of 50; destructive manifestations of 42; humanity and 48–50; instrumental treatment of 49; judgment of 47; suffering 100; transformation of 46–7; treatment of 48; understanding of 44

Keeling, Charles 4 Kenner, Jack 74–6 Kirk, Andrew 44 Klein, Naomi 117 Koselleck, Reinhart 35

objectivization 2 Oelschlaeger, Max 81

The Lamentations of Zeno (Trojanow) 91, 93, 95, 99 Langer, Susanne K. 2 Latour, Bruno 50–5, 70, 81; description of global warming 15–16, 18; on global warming 55; judging process 53–4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 17, 20 literary fiction 19 Lovelock, James 42, 47, 111 Mann, Mike 64 materialism 43 McAuley, Paul 113–14, 138 McDonagh, Martine 36 McEwan, Ian 24–6 McIntosh, Alastair 43 McKibben, Bill 82 McNeil, Jean 88 meditative dwelling 101, 121–2 meditative thinking 95–8 Mehnert, Antonia 9 Meillasoux, Quentin 137 MetLife 139 misanthropy 88 mode of being 87 modern civilization 97 modern Constitution 76–8 modern technology 94; advances of 104; utilization of 95, 119–20 modes of existence 3, 10–11, 39, 92–4, 119

Paltrow, Jake 137 Pearce, Fred 68 perspectives 132–5; functions of climate fiction 140–2; grid of imagination forms 135–40 pessimism 98 philosophical texts 13 Plato 109 poetic fictions 19 political sphere 65 political system, reconfiguration of 116 politics, conception of 65–6 Popper, Karl 63; framing of conspiracy theories 63 Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (Curtis) 29 post-apocalyptic genre 29 posthumanism 128 pre-understanding, cultural structures of 2–3 privileges: distribution of 111; and power 114–15 Promethean humanity 47, 57 Prometheus 71–3 quasi-objects 54–5; global warming 47 rainforests 49 The Rapture (Jensen) 57, 59 Ready, Kevin E. 46 Renfroe, Jeff 30 Rich, Nathaniel 44–5, 139 Ricoeur, Paul 3, 10–11, 13, 17–18, 20; description of productive reference 18

Index   153 Robinson, Kim Stanley 115, 138–9; trilogy 118 romantic relationship 89 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 30 Schätzing, Frank 48 Schmitz, Hermann 38 science fiction 109 Seel, Martin 13 self-annihilation, humanity towards 104 self-defence 42 self-destruction of humanity 83–4 self-transformation 116, 142 Serres, Michel 50–5, 59–60; description of global warming 52; on global warming 55; natural contract 53 sheltering 99–100 Sherman, Franco 67 Simpson, Helen 31 Sloterdijk, Peter 104–6, 114, 120–6, 138; analytical reflection 122; on anthropogenic global warming 124; co-immunism 124, 126–7; philosophical response 126 social collapse 23–4, 30, 133; imagination form of 23, 58, 138; post-apocalyptic worlds 28–34; social contract to climate war 24–7; uncanny as mood 34–6; uncanny relation to world 36–9; utilization of 27, 29, 35, 39, 133 social transformation 142 social truth tellers 114 society: separation of 81; sustainable forms of 142 socio-anthropology 31 socio-political complexity 23–4, 28 Solar (McEwan) 24, 26 solidarity 123 Spanish climate refugees 33 sphere 104–5, 135; anthropotechnical relation to world 126–9; bubbles 107–15; in cultural history 105–7; globe 115–20; Sloterdijk and imagination form 120–6; utilization of 109 spherical bubbles 107, 114, 117, 127 spherical frames 109 spherical globe 127 spherical solidarity 124 spherologies 105 Stableford, Brian 106–7 ‘status quo’ in thinking and behaviour 140–1 storm 56

structuralism 17 sublimes, qualities of 118 supercomputer, arrival of 70–3 suspicion: hermeneutics of 134; sense of 134 The Swarm (Schätzing) 49–50 Tainter, Joseph A. 23 technology: creativity 129; development and use of 95; future 126; radical embrace of 120; sophistication 106; terraforming 120; use of 119–20 techno-optimism 126 temporal myopia 141 terraforming 106 The Lamentations of Zeno 7, 84, 88–95, 99, 109, 119 Things We Didn’t See Coming (Amsterdam) 28–30, 33 totalitarianism 110 Trexler, Adam 7–8 trilogy 115, 118–20; Robinson 118 Trojanow, Ilija 84 Trojan War 63 tsunami 46, 59 Tyndall, John 3 Ultimatum (Glass) 26 unhomeliness 132–3 UN Summit (New Delhi) 56 Urry, John 26 utopian function 141 valourization of matters 68–9 verificationists 72–3 violence 37, 88, 134, 138; anatomopolitical 111 violent conflicts 110 vulnerability, emotional and physical 11, 64 Wainwright, Joel 140 water budget 137 Western climate fiction 2, 4–7, 11, 15–16, 20, 55, 83, 132, 134, 137–8; dominant patterns 135–6; engineered atmospheres of 115; imagination forms in 62; research on 7 Western culture 42; narrative templates in 43 Western imagination 2 White, Jez 37 wilderness 81–2, 101; in cultural history 82–4; destructiveness of humanity

154   Index wilderness continued 84–8; global loss of 93; Heidegger and imagination form 93–8; human destruction of 81; imagination of 81; loving relation to world 98–101; suicidal ice-lover 88–93

wild nature 109; exclusion of 112; valourization of 109–10 Williamson, Jack 106 Zižek, Slavoj 140 Zukor, Micthel 139