What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and ‘climate fiction’ get wrong

Yet, his research does suggest that climate stories that employ a positive frame – particularly those that focus on resilience or innovation – might be able to inspire readers to act. He concedes that examples of non-dystopian climate fiction are few and far between, but he highlights Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior or Clara Hume’s Back to the Garden as promising examples. (To this I would also add stories like Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Grist’s ongoing “Imagine 2200” project, or just about any novel by Kim Stanley Robinson).

Schneider-Mayerson believes that climate fiction shouldn’t be the main focus of criticism. “The real problem is that the vast majority of fiction published today does not acknowledge the reality of climate change. Climate fiction is such a smaller portion of everything that’s being read today. It’s valid and valuable to criticise it and ask what it could be doing differently, but the bulk of criticism should go to non-climate fiction that portrays the natural world as a stable and reliable backdrop to human affairs,” he says. “The reality is that those works are essentially all fantasy now.”

Every scholar I talk to holds out hope – some more, some less – that there are forms of environmental art that might succeed in shaping the public’s imagination for the better. But they are equally clear that “cli-fi” is certainly not the panacea that was promised, and that as long as it continues to operate in a mode of unremitting doom, it will never live up to its potential. Perhaps the first step toward a better climate fiction, then, is to stop clinging to the sort of magical thinking which holds that a novel can save the world; to be clear-eyed about what tangible impact we can expect from a paperback.

Here, I am reminded of Socrates, who suggests in Plato’s Republic that there is no place for poets in a well-running city. Socrates’ quibbles with poetry are manifold, but the core of his objection is that literature confers on its audience the false sense of having taken real action – it provides readers with the feeling of war without the risk of combat, the feeling of love without the hazards of romance. That is, the problem with a certain kind of literature is that it gives us the sense that we have really done something noble, when in fact we have done nothing loftier than sit on the couch and read a book.

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