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 climatolog-
ical 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 exist-
ence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scien-
tifically 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 con-
ditions in the Anthropocene.
Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media
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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
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© 2020 Gregers Andersen
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To contemporary and future ecocritics
Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: the birth of a new type of fiction 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 143
Index 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 Depart-
ment 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 Courte-
nay 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, journal-
ists, 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 funda-
mentally, I will seek to demonstrate that climate fiction represents a vital sup-
plement 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 under-
standing, in which anthropogenic global warming is a relatively new, but
nonetheless central phenomenon, these imaginaries will be known as imagina-
tion 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 “histor-
ically 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 cogni-
tive 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 Ver-
stehens) 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. Blend-
ing 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 green-
house 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 “geo-
logical 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 anthropo-
genic global warming as a scientific paradigm and hence its creation as ‘a cul-
tural 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 atmos-
phere’s layer of carbon dioxide (CO2). Tyndall did not, however, link his dis-
covery 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). Never-
theless, 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 atmo-
sphere from the beginning of industrialization with earlier amounts in the
history of the Earth. Alongside measurements of the average global temper-
ature 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 tempo-
ralities that can also be found in Western climate fiction: one in which
anthropogenic global warming will, among other woes, gradually cause wors-
ening 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 defi-
nition of climate fiction. Hence just as the route of anthropogenic global
warming from marginal theory to mainstream science represents a paradig-
matic 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 cli-
matic conditions. As I will substantiate throughout this book, one of the con-
ditions 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 fic-
tional 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 repres-
ented 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 pub-
lished 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 sub-
stantial 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 develop-
ments have for instance prompted the publication of Ilija Trojanow’s novel
The Lamentations of Zeno (Eistau, 2011) and Sven Böttcher’s climate-­sceptic-
thriller 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 con-
sidering that ecocriticism has since “the early 1990s” been a growing aca-
demic 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 hap-
pened 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 mono-
graph 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 imagi-
naries of climate fiction would therefore correspond to “a paradigmatic exer-
cise 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 publica-
tion 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 cre-
ating. 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 ana-
lyses 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 impreci-
sion – 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 Interdiscipli-
nary 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 inclu-
sion 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 analyt-
ical 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 imagi-
naries 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 them-
selves a fictive representation of it” (172). If Ricoeur is correct in this obser-
vation, 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 pre-
cisely this uncertainty that makes climate fiction a premium source of inter-
pretations – 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 depic-
tions of the exact existential conditions that anthropogenic global warming
will have for human beings in a not-­so-far-­away future. Such a direct correl-
ation between fiction and reality is not at all necessary to justify the philo-
sophical 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 dis-
closure 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 phe-
nomenology. The idea that we as humans “move from envelopes to enve-
lopes, 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 viol-
ence 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 con-
crete object. Rather, it comes out of an encounter with an object within-­the-
world. 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 imagi-
nation 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 spe-
cific 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-­human-
relationship 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 imag-
ination 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 cal-
culative. On the other, the same utilization also reveals a mode of existence
whose primary comportment towards the non-­human world and the disap-
pearing 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 construc-
tion of artificial atmospheres vital to human survival. To be more explicit, my
particular concern will here be the imagination of social design that is intrinsic-
ally linked to this imagination form. Contrary to the first chapter, I will there-
fore 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, fol-
lowing Seel, a place where different forms of existence are not primarily
tested conceptually, but rather affectively and cognitively, and thereby exis-
tentially 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 expres-
sions (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 dis-
tinctive types of ‘universal validity’ ” (152). Opposed to this is Heidegger’s “exis-
tential 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 geo-
logical 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 through-
out 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 inter-
pretations 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 sci-
entific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming brings to the world, it exam-
ines 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 ques-
tion: “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 scient-
ific fact, a social connection and a discursive construction. Instead of onto-
logically 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 simul-
taneously “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 interpre-
tation 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 inter-
preted 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 imagina-
tion 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 imagi-
nation 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 imagina-
tion forms deployed in Western climate fiction are composed of other nar-
rative 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 (simul-
taneously real, discursive, and social). This is that the narratives partly com-
prising 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 philo-
sophy, I will therefore now briefly turn to three of the most important think-
ers 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 develop-
ing methods that would ensure correct understanding, i.e. that the interpreta-
tive 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 integ-
rated 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 ‘onto-
logical orientation’ of hermeneutics. According to Gadamer, any under-
standing 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 ‘situ-
ation’ 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 interpret-
er’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 sens-
itive towards the horizon of the text or discourse of the other, true under-
standing occurs.
This leads us to Ricoeur, for whom the relation between the interpreter’s
and the text’s horizon, between preunderstanding and the “things them-
selves” (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 struc-
turalism and hermeneutics into two separate stages of the same interpretation
process.
Specifically, this involves making the deduction of what French anthro-
pologist 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 pre-
understandings, 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 refer-

ence 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 rede-
scribing 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 cul-
tural 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 interpreta-
tion of the preunderstandings and world depictions that manifest in the imag-
ination 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 ‘extend-
ing the concept of fiction’ should consist in applying some of the interpreta-
tive 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 herme-
neutical 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, unfore-
seen 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 opposi-
tion 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 prompt-
ing 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 interpre-
tations 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 exist-
ence (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 rel-
evant 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 ‘inter-
pretation’ 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 cogni-
tive 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 “defor-
estation” poses a problem for scientific understanding, as these phenomena show
how modern science rests on an illusory Constitution (50). This “modern Consti-
tution” divides nature and society (ibid., 13). It consists on one side of some scient-
ific 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 constitu-
tive 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 com-
plete 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 inter-
prétations, 1969), the structural comprehension can despite all not be completely
liberated from interpretation. It is, as he writes, “never without a degree of herme-
neutic 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 Col-
lapse: 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 con-
nection 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 begin-
ning 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 inter-
human 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 complex-
ity 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 par-
ticular, 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 acknowledge-
ment 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 environ-
ment 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 appar-
ent 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 rup-
tured 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 instate-
ment 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 interpre-
tation 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 per-
spective 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 situ-
ation 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 expecta-
tion 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 scient-
ific books, namely the assumption that anthropogenic global warming will
result in war.4 In Ultimatum, the geopolitical fight over what level of reduc-
tion 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 cata-
strophes 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 club-
bing 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 con-
tinue 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 reiter-
ates 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 divid-
ing 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 acceler-
ating 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 narra-
tor’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 institu-
tions 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 mani-
fests in the indirect climatic violence that springs from, for example, extreme
consumption. Rather, in these worlds this indirect violence has been sus-
pended, 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 col-
lapse. 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 utili-
zation 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 uti-
lization 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 divi-
sion 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 descrip-
tions 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 there-
fore depicted as being more instrumental in nature than excessively barbaric.
If we imagine the different forms of civilizational loss that The Social Col-
lapse 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 out-
right 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 accel-
erating 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 inter-
human 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 Inter-
esting 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 every-
one’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 sur-
prised 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 disap-
pointment with the world brings about a new cognitive relation. That is, it
leads Makepeace to the interpretation that she herself must become the sover-
eign (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 appropri-
ation 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 Entertain-
ment (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 nar-
rator 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 lan-
guage. 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 dis-
trust 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 con-
ditions 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 exist-
ence 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 philo-
sophy. 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 conven-
tional 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 criti-
cizes 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 mani-
festation 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 affec-
tive 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 narra-
tor, 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 dis-
tinctive 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 omni-
present vultures, rode your shoulder, picked at your living flesh. Thou-
sands, 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 emo-
tional 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 famil-
iar, yet strangely unhomely atmosphere brought on by climate-­changed
weather conditions. On the second, there is the uncanny interhuman atmo-
sphere 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 con-
ditions 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 emo-
tions 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 there-
fore 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 experi-
ence does in I Have Waited, And You Have Come not only appear in the por-
trait 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 afraid-
ness 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 atmo-
sphere 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 afraid-
ness 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 inter-
pret 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 funda-
mental 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 attach-
ments, 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 Imagina-
tion […] 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 ‘sur-
vival fiction’. In fictions belonging to this genre, we follow the struggle for sur-
vival 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 radic-
ally 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 under-
stood 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 destruc-
tive 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 insen-
tient 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 nar-
rative templates in Western culture, because this template is intricately linked
to two related, but different, types of imaginations. The first is the imagina-
tion 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 degener-
ation. 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 shake-
­up. 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 McIn-

tosh. 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 mani-
fests 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 con-
temporary humanity that is morally at sea, McIntosh misses a substantial cul-
tural 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 pro-
portions 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 mon-
strous 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 con-
figurations 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 anima-
tion 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 psy-
choanalysts normally pick up on. The repressed that returns in climate fic-
tion’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 pro-
moting 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 destroy-
ing 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 imagi-
nation 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 narra-
tor 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 uncanni-
ness 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 emblem-
atic 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 lit-
erary 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 applica-
tion 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 cul-
tural 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 nar-
rative 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 influ-
ence 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 human-
ity’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 Love-
lock 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 extinc-
tion. 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 exem-
plifies 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 descrip-
tion 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 con-
trolled 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 imagina-
tion of a war between humanity and the non-­human world can easily be integ-
rated 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 armis-
tice, 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 affec-
tive 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 dis-
pensed 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, pun-
ishment and war) are only initiated to lead humanity into a sustainable rela-
tionship 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 philo-
sophy, 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 judg-
ment 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, accord-
ing 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 sup-
posed 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 judg-

ment 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 trans-
formation from something homely (i.e. in agreement with Cartesian onto-
logy) to something uncanny (i.e. not in agreement with Cartesian ontology).
That said, in Latour’s oeuvre this application of the imagination form is integ-
rated into a more complex web of meaning. Hence the question is not so
much whether the imagination form migrates from Serres’ to Latour’s philo-
sophy. 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 con-
tract’) 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 pain-
fully 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 divi-
sion between humanity and the non-­human world. It is instead about creat-
ing 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 chem-
istry, 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 politi-
cally 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 judg-
ment. 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 gen-

eralized 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 neces-
sary bulwark against this uncertainty. To optimize the protection of the col-
lective will also require a new epistemological understanding, which is why
Latour insists that the Parliament’s judging process must depart from “matters-
­of-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 inher-
ent 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 viol-
ence 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 Tomor-
row (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:  Ifwe 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 func-
tions 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 affec-
tive 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 stem-
ming 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 every-
thing 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 ani-
mistic 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 Tomor-
row (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 con-
tract. 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 reli-
gious 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 electro-
convulsive 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 inter-
national 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 inter-
human 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 Judg-
ment 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 (symbol-
ized 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 cher-
ishes. 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 imper-
sonal 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 develop-

ment 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 industrializa-
tion’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 animis-
tic 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 reli-
gious 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 descrip-
tion 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 con-
tempt 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 con-
nected 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 col-
lective understands itself as a liquid “composition”, because the actants continu-
ously 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 communi-
cations (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 inten-
tion 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 the-
ories. 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 influ-
ential 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 some-
what 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 con-
sequences or malicious intent.
However, my emphasis of these connections does not mean that I uncriti-
cally accept Popper’s framing of conspiracy theories as superstition. As the
philosopher Lee Basham has noted, it seems legitimate to take a more prag-
matic 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 conspir-
acy 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 per-
spective, the configurations of conspiracies in climate fiction are not just
analytically interesting because they tell us something about how anthropo-
genic 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 com-
promising 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 commis-
sion, 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 illu-
minates 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 imagi-
nation 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 conspir-
acy 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 accu-
racy 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, tem-
porarily 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 considera-
tions (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 Novem-
ber. 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 sci-
entific 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 pol-
itics 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 repres-
ented 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 capa-
cities, 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 fic-
tions 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 inter-
ests 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 affec-
tive 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 manu-
script 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 weak-
ness. Terri and Franco’s affective readiness to accept the arrival of the apoca-
lypse 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 par-
allels 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 gener-
ally 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 rela-

tion 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 Constitu-
tion 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 Consti-
tution 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 Constitu-
tion expire after its collapse they rebuild it by either reducing scientific pro-
duction 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 ima-
gined 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 syn-
thesize 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 glo-
bally 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 composi-
tion’ – 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 prob-
lematized in the German author Sven Böttcher’s cli-­fi thriller Prophezeiung
(2011). In Prophezeiung we encounter the advanced computer-­driven progno-
sis 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 dis-
covers 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 “simula-
tion” 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 progno-
sis 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 under-
stand this too late, while the same goes for the group of eco-­activists (Com-
mando 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 prog-
nosis,’ 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 Pro-
metheus’ 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 Gerrit-
sen 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 any-
thing, 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 dec-
larations” or describe Mike Mann’s ‘hockey stick curve’ as resting on “calcu-
lations errors” (ibid., 184, 368). It is thus not just against the Prometheus
prognosis that Beck’s falsificationist approach to science is depicted as an anti-
dote. 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 cata-
strophic 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 tempo-
rary 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 best-
sellers 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 anthropo-
genic 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, chal-
lenged by the typical masculine hero of the thriller in the form of the pro-
fessor 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 eradi-
cate 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 Proph-
ezeiung. 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, sim-
ilarly 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 estab-
lished 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 con-
spiracy 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 estab-
lishing 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 environ-
mental 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 institu-
tions, it brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s famous description of conspiracy
theory as “a degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the con-
temporary world system” (1993, 38). Yet, in light of the analyses I have pre-
sented 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 con-
spiracy 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 charac-
ters. 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 con-
tinued 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 scient-
ific ‘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 inter-
ests. 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 battle-
ground, 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 Edmun-
ston 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 begin-
ning 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:

Einarsson:  The reality is that since 1970 these glaciers have been stead-
ily 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)

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 Crich-
ton’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 Crich-
ton’s thriller.19

The suspicious relation to the world

On a more general note, this perception of science serves first and fore-
most 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 attune-
ment 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 founda-
tion 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 charac-
ters’ suspicion (post this collapse) can therefore also be described as an affec-
tive 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 falsifi-
cationist 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 suspi-
cious attitude forms the affective foundation for all their future interpreta-
tions. 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 conspira-
tors come to realize that they cannot enforce their political power by totally
ignoring scientific considerations, which means that a new self-­critical suspi-
ciousness 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 Par-
liament 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 eco-
nomic 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; every-
thing 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 auto-
nomous, 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 the-
ories 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 follow-
ing way. Because the conspiracy is so powerful, it controls virtually all the chan-
nels 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 prom-
inent 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 irrele-
vant – 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 inter-
pretative 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 par-
ticularly influential voice, criticizing the imagination of wilderness as being
both an obsolete left-­over from the romantic period and a commercially con-
structed 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 wil-
derness 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 ima-
gined 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 demarca-
tion 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 Chris-
tianity) led to a metaphysical demarcation, as animism was replaced by a God
who was no longer present in nature and in certain aspects resembled human-
ity (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 hunter-
­gatherers to farmers) with the current ecological crisis. Hence Oelschlaeger
also emphasizes how religious historians have often seen the Neolithic revolu-
tion 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 mythi-
cal 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 McKib-
ben’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 (wilder-
ness) 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 aggra-
vated 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 wil-
dernesses 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 wildern-
esses 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 there-
fore “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 accord-
ing to Heidegger what is basically revealed in humanity’s use of modern tech-
nology, 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 conti-
nent. 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 Antarc-
tica as a resource that can be used to enhance human experience, but other-
wise 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 con-
quered, 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 gla-
cier’s full emotional force before we captivated its data. It was my doc-
toral 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 con-

ditions distinct from the conditions under which the tourists experience Ant-
arctica. 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 misan-
thropy – 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 ques-
tion: 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 coinci-
dences 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 epi-
demic 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 sud-
denly 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 com-
mences 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 sur-
render 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 imagina-
tion 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 con-
sequence 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 Lamen-
tations 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 disappear-
ance 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 wilder-
ness (initiated by anthropogenic global warming) come to mean for the
Being-­in-the-­worlds of humans? This does not mean, though, that the disap-
pearance 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 perman-
ently present (ibid.). This force embeds within her a new kind of Being-­in-
the-­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 sur-
roundings. 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 acceler-
ate 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 them-
selves to dwell in the wilderness. Or to put it slightly differently: that wilder-
ness 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 suf-
fering 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-­in-
the-­world i.e. to a mode of existence that – due to love – recognizes the suf-
fering 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 Lam-
entations of Zeno. Finally, the same can be said about the glaciologist Alexan-
der (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 pro-
grammes, numbers” – their sensibility remains closed to its “mystery” (ibid.,
26, 80).
What emerges in these three male characters’ ways of engaging with Ant-
arctica 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 high-
lighted 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 ecocrit-
ical 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 wilder-
ness. 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 spe-
cifically embodied by a strong tendency in Heidegger to separate the existen-
tial 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 calcula-
tive thinking (rechnende Denken) i.e. how the standard human relation to
the world has become dictated by economic concerns and consequently con-
sists in turning (by way of modern technology) all that exists into an eco-
nomic 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 techno-
logy 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 calcula-
tive 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 exis-
tential 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 ques-
tion 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 crit-
ical 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 Techno-
logy” (“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 challeng-
ing (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 pre-
cedes 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 busi-
ness” (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 philo-
sophical 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 medi-
tative 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 mas-
tering. 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 medita-
tive 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 appre-
hension 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 “shelter-
ing” (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 dis-
covered in my analyses of the two novels earlier in this chapter. Namely the
imagination that humans dwelling far from the epicentres of modern civiliza-
tion 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 encap-
sulates 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 signifi-
cance 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 essen-
tially 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 Human-
ism” 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 justi-
fied 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 redu-
cing 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 presenc-
ings. 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 con-
ditions – 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 seclu-
sion 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 rela-
tion 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 philo-
sophical 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 ecolo-
gical 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 techno-
logical 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 con-
temporary 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 confi-
dence in the ecocritical potential of Heidegger’s philosophy. We also encoun-
ter 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 accelerat-
ing 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 sensibil-
ity 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 criti-
cized 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 Anthro-
pocene no longer exists.16 That is, this assumption is in their view simply out-
dated, 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’ per-
ception that separates nature from society and valourizes wilderness as some-
thing 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 Wilder-
ness I will therefore now move on to the imagination that anthropogenic
global warming will proliferate the engineering of atmospheres and technolo-
gical 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 pos-
sible 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 sci-
entific knowledge means technological power over nature” (1967, 1203).
  3 It is here important to emphasize that the imagination form (i.e. The Loss of Wil-
derness) 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 anthropo-
genic 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 con-
sciousness’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 Meta-
physics 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 atmo-
spheres encapsulate their inner worlds as a protective shield or cover. These
engineered atmospheres constitute, so to speak, the worlds of their inhabit-
ants’ 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 integra-
tion 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 atmo-
spheres. 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 influ-
ence on how their inhabitants relate to the world. With their distinct spher-
ical 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 atmo-
spheres 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 Slot-
erdijk 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 humani-
ty’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 imagina-
tion 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 con-
sequences 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 enti-
tled 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 repres-
ents, 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 inter-
pretation 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 real-
izing 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 incarcera-
tion 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 cog-
nitively 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 some-
thing 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 irrevoc-
ably 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 Lamenta-
tions 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 cri-
tique 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 com-
plete 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 biopo-
litically 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 ruth-
lessness – 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 ruth-
lessness of Wilford’s regime stems from an obsession with ecological equilib-
rium: 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 geo-
engineering) 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 encoun-
ter 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 sec-
tions (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 privi-
leges 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 passen-
gers’ 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 territ-

ories 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 exclu-
sion of ‘wild nature’ from the engineered atmosphere, it is in “Life in the
Anthropocene” more generally represented by a massive reduction in biodi-
versity. The multitude of life forms that have been made extinct in the terra-
forming 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 engi-
neered 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 por-
trayed 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 imagina-
tion 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 exponen-
tially 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 biotechnol-
ogy 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 ques-
tion that is fundamental in light of the imagination form. This question is:
How will the proliferation of technological world-­making – that anthropo-
genic global warming is imagined to require for continued human life – influ-
ence 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 trans-
formations 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 ref-
erence 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 acceler-
ate 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 prot-
agonists, 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 dispas-
sionate 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 con-
ditions 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 Washing-
ton 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 Washing-
ton’s most powerful institutions the trilogy provides an insight into a polit-
ical 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 situ-
ation fundamentally changes. In fact, we may say of the trilogy that it integ-
rates an argument often raised in discussions about anthropogenic global
warming: that the acceleration of anthropogenic global warming has a para-
lysing 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 Repub-
lican President and his administration remain in the pocket of private inter-
ests. 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 them-
selves 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 sociol-
ogist 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 tech-
nology of such a gigantic scale that it challenges and overwhelms human cog-
nition. 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 wit-
nesses an international fleet of tankers throwing unfathomable amounts of salt
into the ocean in order to restart the North Atlantic Current and thereby sta-
bilize 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 Heidegge-
rian 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 Anthro-
pocene 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 por-
trayed as a vice, this is not the case in the trilogy. Here the obvious com-
plicity 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 biotech-
nology 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 trans-
formation 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 existen-
tial search in an affective and cognitive relation to the world that merges sci-
entific 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 incorp-
orate 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 aban-
doned 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 wilder-
nesses – does not necessarily disappear with the disappearance of the imagina-
tion 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 delib-
erate 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 existen-
tial 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 imagi-
nation 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 atmo-
sphere.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 prompt-
ing 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 pre-
serve 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 Sloter-
dijk’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 infer-
tile 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 archi-
tectural magazine Archplus more than a decade ago. Hence, in this interview
Sloterdijk does not only characterize Spheres I-­III – and its last volume in par-
ticular – as an attempt to think with “Heidegger against Heidegger” (Sloterd-
ijk 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 Slot-
erdijk 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 cre-
ation 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 archi-
tecturally 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 autog-
enous 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 jeop-
ardize 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 Slot-

erdijk to adjust the ontology of the human who lives as if the frame of his indi-
vidual 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 com-
munitarianism. 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 funda-
mental 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 pro-
ducibility. The future era will be climate-­technical, and as such techno-
logically 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 anthropo-

genic 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 argu-
ment 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 prac-
tices 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 imag-
ination form. Hence, in Science in the Capital we basically found a fictionaliza-
tion 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 unfold-
ing of an anthropotechnical relation to the world. That is, we witnessed the
unfolding of a relation to the world in which continual practice was con-
ceived 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 there-
fore 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 engi-
neered 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 spher-
ical 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 imagi-
nation of the spherical globe. Hence, where anthropotechnics was not ima-
gined 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 ima-
gined 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 ecolo-
gical 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 considera-
tion 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 (repres-
ented 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 desig-
nate 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 dis-
tinctions, 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 distinc-
tively 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 dis-
played 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 ima-
gined 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 utiliza-
tion 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 con-
structions that Sloterdijk would call foams (Schäume). This is because technolo-
gical air-­conditioning is an important part of these spatial constructions, while
they are simultaneously placed in a historical period, where it, according to Slot-
erdijk, 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 coun-
tries); 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 space-
ships 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 “Bio-
politics in the Anthropocene: On the Invention of Future Biopolitics in Snow-
piercer, 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 engi-
neered 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 any-
thing 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 tech-
nology 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 differ-
ence between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-­developing and exter-
nally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms
and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves fright-
eningly 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 (Sto-
icism), 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 con-
structed) 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 care-
taker 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 con-
tinued existence of endangered species or in living in a stable climate favour-
able 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 ima-
gined 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 funda-
mentally 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 dominat-
ing 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 fic-
tions 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 inter-
pret themselves as either beings-­towards-death or beings-­towards-killing. In
this way the climate fictions utilizing The Social Collapse emphasized a con-
nection 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 trans-
gression 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 fos-
tered 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 instru-
mental 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 atmo-
sphere, 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 humil-
ity 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, anthropo-
genic 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 col-
lapse 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 charac-
ters were thus initially receptive to apocalyptic messages. However, after
having been manipulated by either individuals, groups or institutions repre-
senting 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 communica-
tion 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 uti-
lizing The Conspiracy, unhomeliness was not so much experienced as ‘afraid-
ness’ – 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 pre-
sumed 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 Wilder-
ness 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 dis-
appearing 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 funda-
mental human change.
 The birth of a new perspective   135
Indeed, in the climate fictions utilizing The Loss of Wilderness funda-
mental 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 construc-
tion 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 atmo-
spheres. 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 con-
ditions 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 life-
time 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 geo-
graphically 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 per-
spectives of its readers the novel does something that is, at least to my know-
ledge, 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 ter-
rifying 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 situ-
ation 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 ecolo-
gical 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 devas-
tation 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 specifi-
cally 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 anthro-
pogenic 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 col-
lective “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 eco-
nomic 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 dedic-
ated 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 pos-
sible 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 some-
thing 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 imagina-
tion 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 imagi-
nation 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 pess-

imistic predictions, so we are told, should be seen in a more balanced
context. True, climate change will bring increased resource competi-
tion, 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 anthropo-
genic 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 fic-
tions 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 observa-
tion 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 ‘con-
dition’ 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 con-
sequences 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 tem-
plates for future ways of existing – not just for individuals but also for soci-
eties – 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 rela-
tions 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 preun-
derstanding 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 anthropo-
genic 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 ‘labora-
tory’ for the creation and testing of new sustainable forms of society and indi-
vidual 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 Beck, Thilo 72

aesthetic quality of life 85 Beck, Ulrich 124
Amsterdam, Steven 28 Behringer, Wolfgang 4
anatomo-political violence 111 being-in-spheres 121
Antarctica 85–6; affection for 92; Belacqua, Belacqua 67–70, 73
anthropogenic warming on 89–90; Benton, Joe 26; cognitive relation to
biodiversity 99; demand for permanent world 27
presence 90–1; depiction of 89; Bindé, Jérôme 141
human interpretation of 86–7; biodiversity 85, 88–9, 92, 135; loss of
interpretation of 92; spatial segregation 109
of 89 biological agents 3
Antarctic wilderness 89 biotechnology: extensive use of 113;
Anthropocene 3, 101, 118, 121, 133; human mastery of 113; research in 118
descriptions of 3; distributed and Bloomkamp, Neil 107
managed in 137; fiction 9 Böttcher, Sven 70, 73
anthropogenic global warming 3, 7, Bracke, Astrid 9
11–12, 15, 20, 30–1, 33, 64, 67, 73–4, Bradley, James 136
81, 85, 89, 100–1, 104, 107–8, 110, bricolage 20
112–14, 116–17, 120, 123, 125–6, Bruckner, Pascal 47
129, 132, 135, 137–9; acceleration of Brynner, Rock 67
39, 142; conspiratorial appropriation bubbles 105, 107–15, 120; of light 114;
of 134; dimensions of 1–2; discourses topology of 125
of 81–2; dominant feature of 133–4; Bush, George W. 115
effects of 110; establishment of 3–4;
existential conditions 10; fictive calculative thinking 94–7, 100
representations of 7; general depiction carbon dioxide (CO2) 3–4
of 98; human consequences of Cartesian identity 12
112–13; imagination of 2; problem of Cartesian ontology 56–7
117; psychological aspect of 57; Cartesian philosophy 52
scientific paradigm of 5, 9–10, 92; Cassirer, Ernst 2
scientific reality of 107; in Western catastrophic weather 44
climate fiction 133 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3
Arrhenius, Svante 3 change capitalism 115
artificial atmospheres 135 Chase, Phil 115, 117
atmospherical solidarity 125 cinematic climate fictions 5–7
civilization 23, 30, 32, 69, 84, 89, 97,
Bancroft, Terri 67 124, 141
Basham, Lee 63–4 Clark, Timothy 7
Beard, Michael 24–5 cli-fi see climate fiction
150   Index
climate change 66–7; fiction 9; history of 1 cynicism 25–6, 86
climate disasters, imaginations of 1–2
climate fiction 1, 42, 77, 104, 139; Dansgaard, Willi 4
approaching 19–21; characteristic of The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich) 55
11; characters in 42–3; conspiracy 64; deep ecology 99
contemporary research on 7; definition depiction 109–10
of 4–5; development of 7; engineered Diamond, Jared 23
atmospheres of 106; extraordinary disaster capitalism 117
significance in 11; functions of 140–2; Discourse on Thinking 96
imaginaries of 10; interpretations of doomsday atmospheres 65–70
107; potential of 10, 12; relevance of The Doomsday Report (Brynner) 67–9
10–11; research on 1, 9; social Drake, Nicholas 76
function of 140; speculative nature of
1; spherical bubbles of 114–15; as Earth 3, 59, 106–9, 118, 135; biosphere
symbolic form 2; Western 2 47–8; devastation of 115; ecosystems
The Climate Files (Pearce) 68 48–9; impoverishment of 96; radical
climate mitigation technologies 118 modification of 118; representation of
climate scepticism 115 91; rewilding of 138
climate science: computer-driven models ecocriticism 7
in 70; dependency on construction 72; ecological crises 54
imagination of 70; politicization of 74; ecological equilibrium, conception of
scepticism of 73 110–11
climate summit in Copenhagen (COP- ecology, original meaning of 132
15) 26 economic means 94
climate system 70 ecosystems, destruction of 43
co-immunism 124–7 eco-thrillers 44, 46–7, 49
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or eco-totalitarianism 108
Succeed (Diamond) 23 Emmerich, Roland 55
communitarianism 125 engineered atmospheres: critique of 110;
conspiracy 62; arrival of supercomputer depictions of 106; immunity of 127;
70–3; configurations of 63–4; incorporate narratives of 107;
Crichton and 73–7; in cultural history proliferation of 125
62–4; definition of 63; description of etymological reflection 132
75; doomsday atmospheres 65–70; Evans, Peter 74–6
foster and believe in 67; influential existence, human modes of 3
thinkers of 63; suspicious relation to extinction of humanity 89
world 77–9
The Conspiracy 12, 133–4; utilization of fascism 111, 137–8
134 fictional texts 13
contemporary humanity 43 fictions 142; conspiracies in 63–4; see also
continual suspicion 78 climate fiction
cosmopolitan political realism 117 Filippo, Paul Di 111
Crichton, Michael 73–7 financial investments, opportunities for
critical function 140 139
cultural embeddedness of human Fourier, Joseph 3
existence 3 Fox, Gabrielle 58–9
cultural hermeneutics 15–16; Freud, Sigmund 34, 56
approaching climate fiction 19–21;
and preunderstanding 16–19 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 16–17
cultural history: conspiracy in 62–4; Gaia Weeps: The Crisis of Global Warming
domain of 62–3 (Ready) 46–7
culture: defined 2; Western see Western Geertz, Clifford 2–3
culture genres 7
Curtis, Claire P. 29 geographic isolation 90
 Index   151
geometries 104 human existence: interpretation of 39;
glacier calvings 46 quality of 90
Glass, Matthew 26–7 human imagination 112
global biodiversity 4 human immunity 113
global climate 4, 118 human interaction 28
global geo-engineering plan 117 humanity 24, 47, 49, 66, 134, 141;
global immunization, macrostructure of acceptable coexistence 42; depiction of
124 30; description of 28; destructive
global temperature see global warming behaviour of 84; destructiveness of
global warming 1, 4, 26, 31–2, 42, 45–6, 84–8; ecological devastation 107;
51, 65, 88–9, 111, 115–16, 133, 136; faction of 114; faith in 26; general
description of 16; history of 3–4; relation to world 57; history of 23;
imagination of 47; IPCC descriptions hopeless for 49; and nature 83–4; and
of 73; philosophical interpretation of non-human world 49–51; Promethean
51; quasi-object 47; Serres on 52, 55; 57; relationship 42; revenge on 46;
see also greenhouse gases violation of laws 55–6
globes 105; transformation to 105 human monoculture 135
Goodbody, Axel 9–10 human Prometheanism 44
Goodman, Allegra 107–8 human security 33
Gorz, André 142 human species 107, 136; living
greenhouse effect 5, 104–5 conditions of 140
greenhouse gases: emissions of 5; global human survival, vital for 104
emission of 31; humanity’s emissions human well-being 122, 132
of 5–6
Green Keynesianism 140–1 The Ice Lovers (McNeil) 88, 91–2, 95, 99
grief, and anger 90 ideology, critique of 77
Guha, Anton-Andreas 42 illusion 74
imagination form 2–3, 11, 15, 20–1, 42,
Haraway, Donna 128 44, 47–8, 54, 81, 83, 104–6, 108, 111,
Heat (Herzog) 65–6 114; of anthropogenic global warming
Heidegger, Martin 2–3, 11, 13, 17, 34, 2, 11–12; creation of 142; fictional
38, 50, 56, 67, 81, 93–9, 120–2, 128; application of 44; of global warming
description of human being 35; 47; grid of 135–40; political variations
meditative dwelling 101; ontological of 140; of scientific mediation 69–70;
orientation of hermeneutics 16–17; of The Social Collapse 23, 58; of
philosophy of 101; thinking 97 specificity 113; types of 43; utilization
Heinrichs, Hans-Jürgen 124 of 91, 120–1; of wilderness 81
Heise, Ursula K. 7, 10 immanence, form of 123
hermeneutical philosophy 2–3 immemorial ecosystems 112
hermeneutics 3; cultural see cultural immunity 105, 111, 138; designing
hermeneutics; ontological orientation spaces of 122; space of 106; spaces of
of 16–17 105
“Hermie” (2011) 44–5 individual immunity 123–4
Herzog, Arthur 5–6, 65 industrialization 4
Hobbes, Thomas 29–30 instrumental violence 53
Hoffman, Norman 74 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Holm, Ernest 137 Change (IPCC) 1, 4, 11, 64, 73,
Horn, Eva 1 139–40; descriptions of global
Hulme, Mike 81–3 warming 73
human behaviour 128; interpretation of interhuman atmosphere 35–6
29; transformation of 118–19 interhuman communication 33
human culture, sophistication of 26 interhuman violence 11, 23, 28, 30–2,
human design, control of 108 37, 58, 133–4
human ecology 43 interpretation process 17–18
152   Index
IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on monstrosity 46
Climate Change (IPCC) monstrous organisms 43–4, 49
Irwin, Ruth 100 Morton, Timothy 81

Jameson, Fredric 75 natural contract 51–3

Jensen, Liz 57 nature: humanity and 83–4; separation of
Johns-Putra, Adeline 7–10 81
Jonas, Hans 54 Nazism 93–4
Jones, Phil 64 neoliberalism 141
judgment 42–3; in climate fiction non-human world: Cartesian
45–50; in cultural history 43–5; as objectification of 50; destructive
denial of responsibility 57–60; manifestations of 42; humanity and
imagination form 50–5; through 48–50; instrumental treatment of 49;
catastrophic weather 44; through judgment of 47; suffering 100;
monstrous organisms 44; uncanny transformation of 46–7; treatment of
relation to world 55–7 48; understanding of 44

Keeling, Charles 4 objectivization 2

Kenner, Jack 74–6 Oelschlaeger, Max 81
Kirk, Andrew 44
Klein, Naomi 117 Paltrow, Jake 137
Koselleck, Reinhart 35 Pearce, Fred 68
perspectives 132–5; functions of climate
The Lamentations of Zeno (Trojanow) 91, fiction 140–2; grid of imagination
93, 95, 99 forms 135–40
Langer, Susanne K. 2 pessimism 98
Latour, Bruno 50–5, 70, 81; description philosophical texts 13
of global warming 15–16, 18; on global Plato 109
warming 55; judging process 53–4 poetic fictions 19
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 17, 20 political sphere 65
literary fiction 19 political system, reconfiguration of 116
Lovelock, James 42, 47, 111 politics, conception of 65–6
Popper, Karl 63; framing of conspiracy
Mann, Mike 64 theories 63
materialism 43 Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social
McAuley, Paul 113–14, 138 Contract (Curtis) 29
McDonagh, Martine 36 post-apocalyptic genre 29
McEwan, Ian 24–6 posthumanism 128
McIntosh, Alastair 43 pre-understanding, cultural structures of
McKibben, Bill 82 2–3
McNeil, Jean 88 privileges: distribution of 111; and power
meditative dwelling 101, 121–2 114–15
meditative thinking 95–8 Promethean humanity 47, 57
Mehnert, Antonia 9 Prometheus 71–3
Meillasoux, Quentin 137
MetLife 139 quasi-objects 54–5; global warming 47
misanthropy 88
mode of being 87 rainforests 49
modern civilization 97 The Rapture (Jensen) 57, 59
modern Constitution 76–8 Ready, Kevin E. 46
modern technology 94; advances of 104; Renfroe, Jeff 30
utilization of 95, 119–20 Rich, Nathaniel 44–5, 139
modes of existence 3, 10–11, 39, 92–4, Ricoeur, Paul 3, 10–11, 13, 17–18, 20;
119 description of productive reference 18
 Index   153
Robinson, Kim Stanley 115, 138–9; structuralism 17
trilogy 118 sublimes, qualities of 118
romantic relationship 89 supercomputer, arrival of 70–3
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 30 suspicion: hermeneutics of 134; sense of
134
Schätzing, Frank 48 The Swarm (Schätzing) 49–50
Schmitz, Hermann 38
science fiction 109 Tainter, Joseph A. 23
Seel, Martin 13 technology: creativity 129; development
self-annihilation, humanity towards 104 and use of 95; future 126; radical
self-defence 42 embrace of 120; sophistication 106;
self-destruction of humanity 83–4 terraforming 120; use of 119–20
self-transformation 116, 142 techno-optimism 126
Serres, Michel 50–5, 59–60; description temporal myopia 141
of global warming 52; on global terraforming 106
warming 55; natural contract 53 The Lamentations of Zeno 7, 84, 88–95,
sheltering 99–100 99, 109, 119
Sherman, Franco 67 Things We Didn’t See Coming
Simpson, Helen 31 (Amsterdam) 28–30, 33
Sloterdijk, Peter 104–6, 114, 120–6, 138; totalitarianism 110
analytical reflection 122; on Trexler, Adam 7–8
anthropogenic global warming 124; trilogy 115, 118–20; Robinson 118
co-immunism 124, 126–7; Trojanow, Ilija 84
philosophical response 126 Trojan War 63
social collapse 23–4, 30, 133; imagination tsunami 46, 59
form of 23, 58, 138; post-apocalyptic Tyndall, John 3
worlds 28–34; social contract to climate
war 24–7; uncanny as mood 34–6; Ultimatum (Glass) 26
uncanny relation to world 36–9; unhomeliness 132–3
utilization of 27, 29, 35, 39, 133 UN Summit (New Delhi) 56
social transformation 142 Urry, John 26
social truth tellers 114 utopian function 141
society: separation of 81; sustainable
forms of 142 valourization of matters 68–9
socio-anthropology 31 verificationists 72–3
socio-political complexity 23–4, 28 violence 37, 88, 134, 138; anatomo-
Solar (McEwan) 24, 26 political 111
solidarity 123 violent conflicts 110
Spanish climate refugees 33 vulnerability, emotional and physical 11,
sphere 104–5, 135; anthropotechnical 64
relation to world 126–9; bubbles
107–15; in cultural history 105–7; Wainwright, Joel 140
globe 115–20; Sloterdijk and water budget 137
imagination form 120–6; utilization of Western climate fiction 2, 4–7, 11,
109 15–16, 20, 55, 83, 132, 134, 137–8;
spherical bubbles 107, 114, 117, 127 dominant patterns 135–6; engineered
spherical frames 109 atmospheres of 115; imagination forms
spherical globe 127 in 62; research on 7
spherical solidarity 124 Western culture 42; narrative templates
spherologies 105 in 43
Stableford, Brian 106–7 Western imagination 2
‘status quo’ in thinking and behaviour White, Jez 37
140–1 wilderness 81–2, 101; in cultural history
storm 56 82–4; destructiveness of humanity
154   Index
wilderness continued wild nature 109; exclusion of 112;
84–8; global loss of 93; Heidegger and valourization of 109–10
imagination form 93–8; human Williamson, Jack 106
destruction of 81; imagination of 81;
loving relation to world 98–101; Zižek, Slavoj 140
suicidal ice-lover 88–93 Zukor, Micthel 139