ABSTRACT
The year 1962 witnessed two cornerstone anxiety-inducing events which had an enormous impact on the imagination of disasters. The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the peak of Cold War fears, while the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring opened the environmental debate by arguing that the biosphere is quickly degrading, which could ultimately lead to the end of life on earth. In the following period of about twenty-five years—ending in the next caesura with the fall of communism and the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988—disaster fictions devoted to calamitous climate change were written, often underlining the psychodynamics of an environmental catastrophe. John Christopher’s The World in Winter describes the coming of a new ice age and the radical shift in the global balance of power in terms of the characters’ suppressed guilt and remorse. J. G. Ballard’s The Drought is a study of the traumatised mind of the protagonist who, during catastrophic anthropogenic dryness, realises that human time on this planet has ended and gladly embraces death. George Turner’s The Sea and Summer scrutinises the impact of the approaching climate change on social life and individual well-being on two temporal planes: from the perspective of future historians who have to face a new ice age and who professionally research the twenty-first-century global warming catastrophe; and from the perspective of those people living in the twenty-first century. Interestingly, these novels were written in the last decades of the Cold War but do not describe nuclear disasters, instead focusing on planetwide catastrophes caused by climate change. And yet, environmental disasters resonate with the protagonists’ unconscious, and the conventions of Doomsday Clock Narratives serve to epitomise historical guilt rather than an ecological warning.
