ABSTRACT
Briohny Doyle's dystopian climate fiction novel The Island Will Sink dramatises the failure to respond ethically to climate change, as protagonists create a sensationalist media spectacle out of environmental disaster. The ubiquitous narrative of awaiting ‘the’ final apocalypse takes centre stage, as the Pacific island Pitcairn is in the process of sinking as sea levels rise. Although awaiting the apocalypse has become a magnetic trope of climate fiction, the novel highlights an important but often sidelined dimension of climate change: the fact that it is always mediated. Because we have come to rely on aesthetic mediation for communicating the urgency of climate change, the novel suggests that the contemplation of dominant aesthetics, affects and narratives is crucially important. As I argue, The Island Will Sink presents a ‘negative cosmology’ with no way out: it inhabits the paradox of critiquing the over-exposure to apocalypticism, while also contributing to this proliferation. In this obsession with disaster, however, also lie glimpses of cosmological alternatives.
