Mark Bould

Imagine the world to come.
Imagine we carry on doing too little too late. Imagine we continue to set inadequate emissions targets with no real intention of meeting them, and then keep right on missing them. The parts per million of atmospheric CO2 relentlessly increase. Temperatures rise, releasing the methane naturally sequestered in permafrost and ocean bed clathrates.
The last of the glaciers melt. We lose the polar icecaps, first in the north and then, inexorably, the south. The oceans rise and, since water expands as it warms, rise still more. Low-lying islands disappear. So do the densely populated river deltas. Coastlines retreat. Hundreds of millions flee the inundation. Hundreds of millions more stay behind and die.
Elsewhere deserts form, and agriculture collapses. Daytime temperatures kill. Those who can, take flight.
More refugees. Endless border violence to keep them out.
Skirmishes, then wars, over food and fresh water.
Large-scale geoengineering projects distribute climate amelioration here and foreseen-but-ignored consequences there. Unforeseen consequences fall where they may.
More corpses. Not just human. The sixth great extinction accelerates. As each species diminishes, its environment collapses a little more.
Death cascades.
The planet persists.
But we are gone.
Imagine a world haunted not just by the dead, but by the spectre of death. Drawn ever closer by the already locked-in consequences of our actions and inaction. Its domain extended by endless escalating catastrophe.
Imagine a future of foreclosed possibilities.
Haunted by all the worlds that were, and all the worlds that could have been.
Then imagine – as Amitav Ghosh suggests in The Great Derangement (2016), the most widely read and highly regarded book on literature and climate change – that somewhere in the middle of all this, in a future in which ‘sea-level rise has swallowed the Sunderbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable’, there are still museums and libraries and bookstores. Picture its inhabitants, urgently examining ‘the art and literature of our time … for traces and portents’ of the upheavals that made their ‘substantially altered’ world.
And ‘when they fail to find them’, Ghosh asks, ‘what should they – what can they – do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight?’
This is, of course, nonsense.
It requires us to imagine tidal surges discriminating enough to sweep away significant portions of the ‘science’, ‘politics’ and ‘science fiction’ shelves, not to mention all that gussied-up ‘climate fiction’ too fancypants to consider itself sf.
And it requires us to believe future humans will have really poor reading skills. Because the truth is: auguries abound. The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness.
But the truth is also that mundane fiction – what Ghosh calls ‘serious literary fiction’ – has mostly failed to engage with climate change. And, as we will see in chapters two and three, this is because the mainstream bourgeois novel mistook exclusion for insight, a glitch for a feature. Muteness is its unique selling proposition.

Ghosh’s account of the built-in shortcomings of mundane fiction is pretty persuasive, but where he sees near-universal failure, The Anthropocene Unconscious often finds negotiations with the limitations of the form. Not silence but expressive aphasia, teeming with tongue-tied questions. Must a text show tides rising in a world that is elsewhere parched, must it mash up Waterworld (1995) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), to be ‘about’ climate change? Must it – like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004–7) and New York 2140 (2017) – map the progress of the storm? Must it depict smart people in white coats telling each other things they all already know, but the reader might not, about greenhouse gases, hockey-stick curves, retreating glaciers, shrinking ice sheets, Gulf Stream deceleration, clathrate outgassings and so on? Must the observation of environmental shifts be explicitly connected to climate destabilisation, as is the radically altered migration of monarch butterflies in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012)? Must fiction be immediately and explicitly about climate change for it to be fiction about climate change? Is there no room for the symbolic? The oblique? The estranged? No room to think about the capitalist, imperialist patriarchal histories, systems and structures that are historically and foreseeably responsible for climate destabilisation, and through which it has, is and will be experienced? No room to consider texts that do not say ‘climate change’ aloud? To discover what happens if we stop assuming a text is not about climate change?
And what of the kinds of fiction that lie beyond Ghosh’s self-imposed restrictions? What of the ‘serious’ fictions of the arthouse cinema and the graphic novel? And of not-so-serious and not-so-literary? Of blockbusters and genre fictions? Cable movies and comics? The popular, the trashy and the disreputable? The sort of things the ‘serious’ and the ‘literary’ might wish the seas would swallow?

La guerre des salamandres combine le capitalisme devenu fou de La fabrique d’absolu avec la révolte apocalyptique des travailleurs de R.U.R. Elle utilise aussi la forme journalistique de La fabrique d’absolu, avec la même brillante extravagance, mais associée désormais à la cohérence supplémentaire fournie par l’articulation précise, hilarante et dévastatrice, par Čapek, de ce qu’on pourrait appeler la logique fantaisiste du capitalisme – le fantasme d’une économie croissant sans fin pour apporter toujours davantage de marchandise à toujours plus de consommateurs – et de la logique fantaisiste également du colonialisme – le rêve d’autochtones invisibles fournissant terres vierges et travail gratuit pour les besoins en expansion de leurs maîtres. Ces deux logiques fantaisistes sont abondamment mises en œuvre dans La guerre des salamandres, mais leur réalisation s’y inverse savamment pour aboutir à de cauchemardesques catastrophes. Tout au long de la découverte des salamandres, de leur inondation du monde et de la destruction de l’humanité, Čapek disperse tout un tas de matériau spécifique, incluant une parodie antifasciste d’Oswald Spengler, ou des allusions directes aux exigences d’Hitler en matière de Lebensraum. Toutefois, la cible fondamentale de la satire, la logique systématique du capitalisme lui-même, est la même dans la fable de 1936 que dans celle de 1921, et demeure tout aussi pertinente aujourd’hui. (Traduction improvisée par votre serviteur)

De Fragments de rose en hologramme à Code Source, certains motifs irriguent le travail de Gibson. Beaucoup de ses nouvelles et la plupart de ses romans sont des « coups » ou des quêtes, structurés autour de tropes de détection et d’interprétation. Bien que son écriture ne soit plus aussi dense ou aussi maniaque, la riche texture de sa fiction vibre toujours de nuance et d’ironie. Thématiquement, le travail de Gibson invoque obsessionnellement un nombre limité de préoccupations. L’une est la réorganisation culturelle et économique déclenchée par la vitesse et l’ampleur des technologies informationnelles qui transforment la culture globale. Une autre est l’accès inégalitaire à cette réorganisation et le secret danger des données archivées – qui conduisirent Gibson à faire l’une de ses si fameuses remarques, souvent reprise en entretien ou citée : « Le futur est là. Simplement, il n’est pas encore distribué également ». Une troisième, et peut-être la plus importante, est que sa fiction revient toujours aux seuils – ces moments de bifurcation des chemins, d’écroulement de situation et de possibilité de transformation, culturelle ou personnelle. (Traduction improvisée par votre serviteur).

These arthouse tales of our liquid world are lessons in duration and endurance. With slowness they re-embody us, confront us with the passage of time.
The worlds they depict remind us how very small we are, and how disproportionately large our consequences. That we are so precarious, individually and as a species, but together we can upset the world.
In them, we see that our culture builds nothing to last, and yet some of what we build endures: as rubble and pollution, and in the persistence of the petrocapitalist infrastructure that constrains our future as surely as does the power congealed within it.
They pit the mobility of capital, carbon and cargo against the stuckness of people: not progressing or developing as promised, but stuck in place, left behind; or coming unstuck as the indignities of labour subordinates social relations to capital’s whims, or severs them through disjunctures of time and space.
But enough about water. Let us come ashore and widen our scope.
For all around us, our uncanny neighbours, the trees, are ‘making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain’. Let us attend to them.

Regardless of the global systems and processes underpinning it, this example of capitalist development is local and particular. Compare it with an sf text which imagines a future world constructed around climate change – like Elysium (2013), which contrasts a dry and dusty planet of slums, represented by satellite images of desertified Africa and Asia and by a favela-ised Los Angeles, with the eponymous O’Neill-inspired space station, a vast gated community of vaguely Mediterranean villas and rich (mostly) white people in orbit around the Earth.
Roy often refers to the national and international contexts that frame events. But by denying itself the affordances of sf – its global visions that localise and its temporal shifts that historicise contemporary conditions, as well as its tolerance for and techniques of worldbuilding exposition – any novel juxtaposing filthy immiseration and spotless wealth would struggle to establish their global and historical causes. Nonetheless, these extremes derive from the key drivers of climate change, and Roy shows, albeit obliquely, how its consequences already fall, and will continue to fall, on different parts of the population.

The Sharknado movies are salvage artefacts, composed of the flotsam and jetsam of American TV. News footage of floods, disasters and accidents – sometimes dressed with shoddy CGI storms, airborne sharks and other meteorological phenomena – collides with hastily shot, green-screen-heavy location and studio scenes, similarly subjected to deliberately unconvincing digital enhancement.
Through this visual patchwork flows a torrent of allusions to TV series – Baywatch, Taxi, The Twilight Zone – and movies – Airplane!, Back to the Future, Evil Dead 2, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jaws, The Lady and the Tramp, Mission: Impossible, Network, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Roman Holiday, Scarface, The Sound of Music, Space Cowboys, Star Wars, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Toy Story, The Wizard of Oz and that bit from Independence Day pastiching Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. Some of these riffs, nods, plagiarisms and petty larcenies become recurring in-jokes. Others – April’s reworking of the Action Comics #1 cover, the reference to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension – are unexpected, possibly even obscure. But none of them are subtle.

Accelerando est une fiction cynique, et néanmoins perversement enthousiasmante, pour une époque où l’imagination utopique semble sérieusement amoindrie. Le problème n’est pas que nous ne puissions plus imaginer d’altérité, mais que sitôt imaginées, ces altérités sont immédiatement mobilisées en tant que « business models », servant une fois de plus à promouvoir l’accumulation du capital. Le capitalisme d’aujourd’hui est lui-même, directement et immédiatement, utopiste, et c’est peut-être le fait le plus terrifiant à son propos. La singularité technologique de Vinge ou de Kurzweil est symptomatique de ce point de vue, car, comme le montre Accelerando, elle est en réalité un rêve fou de capital financier, aux deux sens du génitif. C’est ce qui se rapproche le plus d’un récit principal pour cet âge néo-libéral et post-fordiste d’accumulation flexible et de flux monétaires massifs et virtuels.

And there are the sharknadoes themselves.
Ludicrous, crudely rendered images of climate disruption and destabilisation, they gesture towards the weirdness and excessiveness of our changing weather.3 They are big dumb reminders that we share the world with other species.
The franchise shows recorded human history taking place in a period when – and because – sharknadoes are artificially suppressed. This implies that a climate inhospitable to humans is the terrestrial norm, that human civilisation developed in a period of climatic stability unusual in the planet’s history, and that climate chaos is destined to return. In the real world, we call that stable period the Holocene, and we are now poised on the edge of what will come after it, some of which we have already made unavoidable.

In mid-summer 2013, Hurricane David swept up the west coast of Mexico, driving unprecedented numbers of sharks north into unfamiliar waters. On 11 July, the storm approached Santa Monica, forcing the disoriented predators into the shallows, where they attacked surfers and swimmers. Just minutes later, the hurricane hit. A prodigious storm surge raced inland, through West Los Angeles and beyond, spewing the voracious fish into the flooded streets. At the same time, the first of three massive water-spouts that would tear through the city formed and hurled sharks at unsuspecting Angelenos.
It was the first recorded sharknado.