ABSTRACT
Climate fiction – often referred to as cli-fi and broadly understood as fiction that engages with climate change, the ensuing struggles for resources, and the impact of these struggles on human communities locally and globally – has proliferated in recent decades; climate fiction writers from the Americas and Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania are actively changing literature worldwide. Often traced to the British writer J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), climate fiction is likely to become one of the dominant forms of twenty-first century literature, while poetry and other forms of writing on climate change are likewise flourishing globally. Moreover, much climate literature itself travels beyond national and linguistic borders, circulating within and among regions both in its original language and in translations, and in so doing it has become an increasingly important part of world literature.1 Yet not only has world literature scholarship and pedagogy remained relatively silent on climate change, as it has on other urgent matters of global concern, but also discussions of climate change, taking a scientific or social scientific approach, generally do not incorporate the many cultural products, including literature, that have addressed this global crisis.2 These missed opportunities are regrettable, given the power of the arts to shape human consciousness and behavior. Literature rarely offers comprehensive remedies, much less proposes official poli-
cies to prevent future or remediate current damage. But drafting policies, not to mention implementing them, requires changes in perceptions, understandings, and expectations, something literature and the study of literature – particularly in global perspective – are well placed to enhance. As Jonathan Mingle has argued, “Poets help us all process and give meaning to the changes measured by science. And they help us decide where to train our attention among a compounding profusion of data, and motivate us to act.” And, as James Engell has noted, “Poetry, and literature more generally... have provided a construction of a certain consciousness about nature, without which research and knowledge cannot be knitted together into a larger kind of vision” (Mingle 14). Not necessarily a form of escapism (cf. Schulz 59), dystopian literature and other arts can better enable readers to think about, prepare for, confront, and respond to catastrophe (Pérez-Peña, cf. Trexler 220). Incorporating discussion of world literature into courses on climate change and discussion of climate change into courses on world literature not only alerts students of all fields to the deep connections between cultural products and global
crises, but also provides them with a greater variety of perspectives on climate change and its likely impacts on human societies. Teaching students about the literature of climate change likewise gives them space to envision multiple future scenarios and to think imaginatively about what changes might be made to facilitate adaptation, increase resilience, lessen fear, and modulate risk. The pages that follow introduce three prominent works of climate fiction that
have circulated globally: the Japanese avant-garde writer Abé Kōbō’s Inter Ice Age 4 (Dai yon kanpyōki, 1959), the American science fiction and fantasy writer Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), and the Finnish crime fiction writer Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer (Parantaja, 2010).3 These novels – appropriate for courses on both world literature and climate change – probe the future of humanity in deluged cities and worlds. They enhance classroom discussion of the likely impacts of climate change on human societies and the steps that need to be taken to forestall even greater suffering as well as give students unparalleled insights into how individuals and communities are grappling with impending climate change. Abé Kōbō is known worldwide for the bestseller Woman in the Dunes (Suna no
onna, 1962), which has been translated into dozens of languages and was adapted into an award-winning film. But his earlier detective novel Inter Ice Age 4 (1959), in addition to launching Japanese science fiction, has also received critical attention outside Japan.4 Set in Tokyo in the late 1950s, the text is best described as “a murder mystery with a time-traveling detective [Dr. Katsumi, the first-person narrator] who discovers that he has been split into his own present and future selves to become the murderer, the detective, and the victim all at once” (Bolton, Columbia Companion 195). More important for our purposes, Inter Ice Age 4 also anticipates a future where undersea volcanic eruptions have destroyed the polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise dramatically and ultimately forcing human society underwater. As the talking computer that Katsumi and his team create in response to Soviet prediction computers itself predicts: “With the passing of time the speed of the rise in sea level increased. People continued their ceaseless migration toward higher land and in the process lost the habit of living in fixed places... People lived aimlessly on alms given by aquans” (Abé Kōbō, Inter Ice Age 4 216).5
