I’m writing a multi-part series of posts on climate fiction, and usually these posts briefly discuss such titles. Here’s a step back to provide a wider context, stealing heavily from academia.
Mathew Schneider-Mayerson is Associate Professor of English at Colby College, and an affiliate in the Department of Environmental Studies, and before joining Colby, he taught at Yale-NUS College. An interesting addition, and worthy of a character in a climate fiction novel, he is as an expert affiliate at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk at the National University of Singapore.
A lot of people write about climate fiction and some provide nice roundups of new climate fiction works (here’s looking at you, Amy Brady, although, since she’s taken the position of Executive Director for Orion Institute, I’ve not seen any more of her many roundups that were featured in Literary Hub). I’m inclined to argue that Schneider-Mayerson has provided the most helpful critical contributions for understanding this category of literature. Please note the lack of genre; this is one of his arguments, that genre doesn’t fit as well as category, since climate fiction offers a wide range of literary types, from literary fiction to the most hyper-genre’d thrillers or science fiction.
Although dated now—at least from the perspective that books cited within this critical essay as examples are getting long in the tooth—his contribution to American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010, of Chapter 20, Climate Change Fiction, is a top primer. The chapter in PDF can be found through Google Scholar here.
His definitions of the three types of climate fiction is especially clear and helpful:
With a focus on the novel, this chapter appraises three major themes that emerged in the embryonic corpus of climate change fiction. The first concerns the denial avoidance, and acceptance of the magnitude of climate change in the present and recent past. The second presents cautionary fables of the Anthropocene (the current epoch in which humans act as a geologic force), extrapolating current trends into devastated, depopulated, and denatured futures. The third advances this implicit rebuke to the present by exploring the ecopolitics of resistance, reform, and revolution. I conclude by Identifying two rising themes in the following decade of climate change fiction: aiding the ongoing transition to life after oil and depicting the amplified global inequalities of climate injustice.
Schneider-Mayerson has updated this essay, in a sense, in his article Does Climate Fiction Make a Difference? in Literary Hub, published on December 16, 2021, where he writes a great description of climate fiction, as follows:
Most of my work… is premised on the assumption that literature and other forms of art, media, and culture have important roles to play in telling a new (and very old) story about the humanity’s appropriate connection to and place within the broader web of life.
In 2010, Schneider-Mayerson posited that the predominant category of climate fiction was dystopian or post-apocalyptic, with stories typically set in distant and troubled futures that presented vastly reduced populations of survivors, existence dismal. “[T]hese works present cautionary fables of the Anthropocene that offer a blunt critique of fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalism and political passivity,” as he puts it. He’s critical of such work, at least in the efficacy of these works getting readers to become climate activists. While such post-apocalyptic stories can provide emotional intensity, he argues that “too many hew too closely to established apocalyptic tropes that audiences easily ignore after decades of exposure,” before he points to conclusions of social scientists that “doom and gloom” doesn’t move readers to do much. “The injunction to do something, which is all that many cautionary fables mustered, is merely a point of embarkation, with no clear route to a better destination,” he concludes.
Schneider-Mayerson has continued this line of thinking, and he expands on this in the 2021 article, reporting on three empirical studies of the influence of climate fiction on real-world readers. The change needed to address the climate crisis is cultural in nature, but little attention has been paid to the mechanisms of narratives to have real and ongoing effects, and in his own modest efforts to test this question he conducted qualitative studies (i.e., structured interviews) with readers of climate fiction. The conclusion confirmed his suspicion that while climate fiction does get readers reacting to and changing their thinking about climate change, that influence is ephemeral. Other research suggests that repeated exposure to such kinds of stories increases the climate change engagement effect with the reader, but common sense is all one needs to reach the same conclusion, if for no other reason than that of a self-selecting audience for this type of fiction.
He has an idea of what’s needed:
Instead of merely raising awareness about the reality and magnitude of the climate crisis—beliefs that are now common in the United States—more authors, filmmakers, and cultural workers ought to model for readers the necessary transition from apathetic awareness to meaningful action, including political engagement.
[Author’s Note: There were two footnotes within the above quote that I’ll summarize. The first is a reference to substantiate the claim that awareness about climate change is now common that links to Climate Change Communication, a Yale program tracking public awareness of climate change. The second, on models of effective climate change storytelling, leads to an article by him on Gizmodo, about the television series Ted Lasso, in a terrific bit of popular scholarship!]
Political engagement is a key requirement for more successful efforts to address the climate crisis, and this I believe. In fact, this more or less sums up what I’m trying to do with The Steep Climes Quartet, where the emphasis is on characters with whom—one hopes—readers identify as these characters are portrayed from the near future (In Kill Well, the first book, the action takes place basically at three years from now) and then revisited three years later (Dear Josephine), then six more years (Over Brooklyn Hills), and then another twelve years (Farm to Me), and ending up somewhere around 2050.
Perhaps my other favorite thing in his Literary Hub article is yet another footnote that links to Empirical Ecocriticism, where Schneider-Mayerson is involved with four other academics, doing research and tracking research on the effectiveness of climate fiction.
Gosh, but it is almost enough to make me wish I had kept going in school and become an academic!