Master of Arts / Department of English / Katherine Karlin / By the year 2037, climate change has destabilized the world’s ecology, politics, and culture. Hawaii has seceded from the United States, instituting the Cultural Reaffirmation, which champions a sustainable, traditional way of life. Eenie is an astronomer on the Big Island of Hawaii. In order to keep the observatory on Mauna Kea operational, she must appease the newly independent island nation by reenacting a mythical sled race between Poliahu, the Hawaiian snow goddess of Maunakea, and Pele, the fierce goddess of lava, personified by a rival geoscientist from Maunaloa’s volcanic laboratory. Once an Olympic contender in the women’s luge, Eenie has won this race twice before. This year, though, the greenhouse effect has caught up with her; there is no snow on Maunakea. Without it, she cannot prevail, and if she doesn’t, the priests of Hawaii’s Cultural Reaffirmation will pull the telescopes down from their most sacred mountain. Eenie struggles against nature’s increasing wrath, gods, monsters, pigs, and political rivals, though her biggest struggle is within herself. Fire and water must live together takes place in an ecodystopic future, though its story pulls from Hawaiian myth. The story’s projection into the future is based on current events, including the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, climate change science, and technology. An accompanying essay frames the novella through three critical lenses: ecocriticism, eco-politics, and post-colonial hybridity. The essay includes a focused look at the setting of Hawaii as it stands today in terms of environment, politics, and people.

What happens to man’s place when non-human nature – man’s environment – is under threat? Norwegian author Maja Lunde explores this in the four novels that make up the “climate quartet,” Bienes historie (2015), Blå (2017), Przewalskis hest (2019) and Drømmen om et tre (2022), in which she discusses various climate issues. This master’s thesis investigates how Lunde establishes the significance of place and the meaning of nature as a place in her climate quartet, with an emphasis on the dystopian portrayal of place and the relationship between the human and the non-human. The analysis employs a thematic close reading approach, using ecocriticism as a general theoretical framework. In particular, the works of scholars Ursula K. Heise, Doreen Massey, and Antonia Mehnert on the meaning of place contribute to this study’s analytical framework, which includes concepts such as sense of place, de- and reterritorialization, riskscape, non-places, the global and the local. The study also draws on Sigmund Freud’s and Martin Heidegger’s concepts of the Uncanny. The thesis shows that in Lunde’s climate fiction, place is a prominent actor because it threatens the characters' existence and can be perceived as a catalyst for the stories’ events. The characters’ identity as nomads who traverse the world as a global riskscape is a key theme. The fictional world is characterized by emptiness, which can be perceived as a result of deterritorialization. The emptiness in some places leads to the concept of the Uncanny in both the dystopian future perspective, where the climate-changed world is depicted as an uncanny place, and in the past and present perspectives, where nature is often depicted as an uncanny quasi-object. The characters’ awareness of nature as an ambivalence is particularly significant. The analysis of Lunde’s use of place and the meaning of nature as a place provides a nuanced exploration of the complex relationship between humans and their environment.

Funny Bone is a novel engaging with Climate Change and Capitalism. The book is specifically interested in how children all over the world are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, and yet they have no say in Environmental Policies. How did we get here as a civilization and where do we go from here?

An Earth of Foxes: A Novel opens in 2073 and explores the realities of daily life if environmental change unfolds in particular, ever-more-likely ways—as well as the kind of collaborative action that will be required to survive. In North Dakota, a woman struggles with being an outsider and the only fertile woman in a former fracking town; in Idaho a girl weighs whether or not to run away from the militia that’s raised her; in Arkansas a young woman contemplates futility as her town erodes. Climate change is not a catastrophe or an apocalypse. It doesn’t end, there can be no clearly defined after. Heat and storms and earthquakes become an invisible routine. People defend what they have or set out from one corner of the country to another, hoping for better. A work of speculative climate fiction, An Earth of Foxes attempts to marry the extrapolation of science fiction with literary fiction’s empathy to the relationships and choices of individuals. The book considers complicity, futility, and sacrifice as climate change unravels with slow and intimate violence, a problem that cannot be solved by some single character’s hero journey but demands collective action.

abstract: This project uses the tools of speculative climate fiction to explore and imagine the future of the United Nations climate negotiations in each of the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios. Climate fiction (cli-fi) proves a powerful but imperfect tool for envisioning future challenging and turning scientific models into meaningful narratives. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Sustainability 2020

Since its establishment, the study of environmental literature has included a great deal of research which has based its arguments on assumptions that state that climate fiction contains persuasive elements that are impactful on readers. The problem with these assumptions is that they do not offer any empirical proof to demonstrate their arguments. This thesis offers an empirical study of the reception of Lydia Millet’s short story “Zoogoing” and examines whether or not the story is able to generate an animal welfare consciousness in the context of climate change within an audience that includes 10 participants from Bahrain. This project was conducted via two surveys on SurveySparrow, one before and the other after the participants had read the story. From the findings, it was revealed that the extinction narrative was able to help the readers conceptualize future ecological possibilities. Although the narrative was able to heighten the participants’ consciousness about environmental destruction, their concern for animal conservation remained the same. What was speculated from the analysis in this thesis was that the story had lacked a representation of animals that would focus the participants’ gaze on animal extinction.

This study explores the potential of transdisciplinary climate fiction prototyping to create a transformative space within state-owned enterprise governance. The approach includes a thematic analysis of governance documents within the portfolio, scenario development, narrative design, participatory sessions with the department of state-owned enterprise, related ministries, and company representatives. The narrative design climate fiction, henceforth Cli-Fi, is used to highlight complexity and create an affectual relationship with the future. The main finding is uncovering a systemic closure constituted by risk aversion that locks in transformative potential of state-owned enterprise governance. The four Cli-Fi prototypes are thus built on narratives driven by different risk behavior that hinder or enable change for sustainability, and are called The Dutiful Widower, The Future Proofers, Winning Vincent, and The Untrusted Trustee. The study concludes that transdisciplinary Cli-Fi prototyping can, and perhaps should, be leveraged to create transformative spaces within organizations and to identify closures and openings for sustainable development.

This paper examines the relationship between the sublime and the Anthropocene, the period in earth’s geological history characterized by human impact upon the planet. As the genre of Anthropocene fiction, or climate fiction, has emerged in recent years, difficulties in defining the new genre as well as identifying useful tropes and forms within cli-fi novels has given rise to several proposed methods of understanding the Anthropocene. This essay examines the problems posed within Anthropocene fiction as well as the history of the concept of the sublime before examining Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation to find evidence of the relevance of the sublime within the Anthropocene.

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

The stories humans tell and are told about climate change matters in our understanding of the phenomena, and have an impact on how we act in relation to it. However, climate fiction video games are few in numbers. This project presents the development of “The Testing Bureau”; an interactive fiction game with a story inspired by climate research. The research used is that of the shared socioeconomic pathways: five scenarios that present different socio-economic and political movements and their impact on mitigating and adapting to climate change (O’Neill et. al 2015). The game has been created as a response to the lack of climate fiction within video games, as well as being a way to make climate change research visible outside of scientific circles. Playtests indicated that the game held the potential of spurring personal reflection and engagement on the topics of the policies and possible endings.