ABSTRACT
Climate fiction offers a space for considering how we might understand environmental justice under differing climate futures. How might changing climate conditions impact the ways humans live together, and live together with nonhumans? In climate fiction, characters face a variety of challenge to living together justly: extreme weather, displaced peoples, political unrest, scarcity, loss, and disease. This chapter focuses on a particular subgenre of climate fiction, on novels that depict the impact of pandemic disease. The chapter considers how pandemics impact our understanding of both the content and the meaning of environmental justice through a reading of three novels, paying special attention to the value of affiliation, one of the central human capabilities outlined by Martha Nussbaum. Leigh Richards’ Califia’s Daughters (2004), Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), and James Bradley’s Clade (2017) all include pandemics of different kinds and lethality. The characters’ responses to those pandemics, in turn, produce different understandings of both the content and the extent of justice in and with the world.
