A Review of “Climate Change and the Future of the City: Arabic Science Fiction as Climate Fiction in Egypt and Iraq.”

Homo Sapiens Sapiens Progressive Defaunation During The Great Acceleration: The Cli-Fi Apocalypse Hypothesis

Climate change has been attracting increasing attention as one of the most significant consequences of the anthropogenic global warming and fictional narratives have increasingly been involved in engaging human imagination on the topic of climate change. Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is the umbrella term that designates fiction with climate change as its main theme. Climate fiction has been primarily published in English so far and narratives specifically problematising anthropogenic climate change are still quite rare in the Arabic literary landscape. In this regard, the novel 2022 by the Lebanese author Ghassān Shibārū constitutes an interesting case, given that it is authored in Arabic but displays several of the characteristics typical of the cli-fi genre. This paper aims at providing an analysis of Shibārū’s novel 2022 as representative of Arabic climate fiction. The main features of the climate fiction genre and its relationship to the scholarship of ecocriticism are first outlined. An overview of the environment as a theme in Arabic literature and Arabic literary studies then follows. The paper subsequently presents the concept of ecological literacy, which constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis of the characters in the novel. After a synopsis of the plot, the characters are analysed and discussed and the novel itself is examined as instance of climate fiction as intended by the Anglophone definition of the genre. The authors argue that the purpose of the novel is didactic, since, rather than narrating a fictional story, the novels exploits a fictional story in order to spread awareness of global warming and climate change.
 Keywords: Contemporary Arabic literature • Climate change • Climate fiction • Ecocriticism • Ecological literacy

In the current climate crisis, we count more than ever on art and literature.1 Theorists and critics repeatedly emphasize the role of literature and imagination in overcoming an impasse in climate change communication through science and data.2 In genres like speculative fiction and science fiction, or, for convenience, the umbrella genre/category of climate fiction, writers already narrativize climate change and speculate on its futures.3 Yet, there is much critique and contestation on how climate fiction may properly respond to the climate crisis, what affects it may create, and whether it could move the public to act. Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra have done extensive research on climate change representation in contemporary culture. One major frame for representing climate change in their surveys is, expectedly, a future dystopia or apocalypse; Johns–Putra writes: “Overwhelmingly, climate change appears in novels as part of a futuristic dystopian and/or postapocalyptic setting” (269).4 Climate change here refers to social upheavals, civilization collapse, abandoned cities, violence, authoritarian rule, along with environmental degradation, extinctions, and loss of land. For many commentators, however, this representation seems to be more of a problem than a solution. These novels are said to “evade most of the present-day moral [and] political dilemmas by simply jumping ahead to some far more straightforward depiction of future disaster,” and they “inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space” (Clark 78-79; Morton 103–04). They are alarmist, or they rather commodify apocalypse as entertainment (Hoggert 261; Swyngedouw 219). They invest in the “charisma of crisis,” and they “contribute to negative public perceptions of environmentalism” (LeMenager 225; Seymour 54).

In recent years, climate fiction has exploded on the literary scene. Meanwhile, climate change is occurring in the Mekong river basin. In this paper, I put these phenomena into contact in an ontologically multi-sited ethnography of climate change and climate fiction. Rather than assuming a radical separation between real and fictive worlds, this entails a comparison that moves back and forth between the realms. On the one hand, as objects of ethnography, works of cli-fi can be examined in terms of the climate-changed worlds they construct and the responses generated within those worlds. On the other hand, as objects for ethnography, these worlds and responses can be laterally compared with different situations, like those found around the Mekong basin. Inhabiting a zone of indiscernibility between Mekong climate change and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-up Girl, I suggest that lateral comparisons of climate change and climate fiction make it possible to broaden the imaginative spectrum of climate futures and to recover the “strange and adventurous task of believing in this world.”

This article discusses the capacity of climate fiction to construct master and counter-narratives as part of the logic of its storyworlds, and to use such narrative structures to both (1) represent climate change as a grand-scale problem requiring collective action and (2) function as environmentally oriented counter-narratives to currently dominant discourses. Drawing from both sociolinguistic and philosophical approaches to master or “grand” narratives, this two-pronged analytical approach is prompted by two thorny questions in environmental humanities and ecocritical literary studies. Firstly, can climate change, as a grand-scale complex system, be usefully represented in narrative form? Secondly, how can climate fiction contribute to public discourse around climate change, and to what effect? While these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered within the scope of one article, the inquiry they inform here yields new insight into how master and counter-narratives can be usefully employed, as narratological concepts, for investigating the expressive and persuasive potential of climate fiction. Regarded as literary devices, they can be fruitfully analyzed as tools for world-building that facilitate representing disruptive environmental and societal change as a matter of narrative contestation of the storyworld. Understood in terms of rhetoric, on the other hand, reading climate fiction as counter-narration provides a new framework for assessing the potential of such grand-scale storytelling as meaningful political action.

This article explores the challenges faced by climate fiction writers who address human responses to climate change, emphasising the need to expose the underlying political and economic mechanisms of the climate crisis. It builds on the critique offered by theorists Adam Trexler, Timothy Clark, Mark Fisher and Amitav Ghosh, highlighting the risk of climate fiction novels becoming “complicit concealments” if they fail to focus on the principle drivers of the carbon economy – overconsumption, economic growth and market-based thinking. We analyse a growing trend in Australian climate fiction, where connections between neoliberal capitalism and climate change are becoming major themes. Novels like Sally Abbott’s Closing Down (2010) and Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia (2021) represent characters’ relations to society and the economy and try to capture the complex realities of climate change. Based on this analysis, we propose the concept of “ecological consciousness” as a potential narrative strategy for writers, building on the Marxist concept of class consciousness, which extends awareness beyond traditional class dynamics to encompass the interconnectedness of humans with the environment. The article concludes by emphasising the strength and versatility of this approach, showcasing its potential for providing a holistic perspective on societal and environmental dynamics in climate fiction.

Weirding Climate Realism in Sunshine and Ex Machina Selmin Kara (bio) and Cydney Langill (bio) Avoid the term "global warming." I prefer the term"global weirding," because that is what actually happens asglobal temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weathergets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter,the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.Thomas Friedman, "Global Weirding Is Here" When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman made a call for replacing the phrases global warming and climate change with "global weirding" in 2016, he was effectively critiquing the climate-science community's inability to represent the reality of climate change in ways that do justice to its catastrophic effects, unevenly distributed intensities, and disruptions.1 More recently, scholars Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman returned to the phrase as a productive space for literary-cultural analysis, invoking its potential to enter literary, artistic, philosophical, and scientific communities into a dialogue concerning how to conceptualize our ecologically unstable times. For their special theme issue published in the journal Paradoxa, Hageman himself facilitated a cross-disciplinary conversation between ecophilosopher Timothy Morton and author Jeff VanderMeer, a key figure in the literary movement of the new weird (a genre that came into existence following the alter-globalization movement in Seattle and later made anthropogenic climate change one of its main concerns).2 Their musings, as well as other conversations in the issue, crystallized a definition of the weird as a particular iteration of the real, perceived in the era of climate change as something porous, difficult to grasp, and resistant to [End Page 60] cognitive capture. They also imagined the twenty-first-century weird as encapsulating a prevalent affect or gripping sensation related to the expansion of awareness and anxiety of "a necropastoral world" brought into existence by human agency.3 In this article, we continue the work of thinking the weird and climate together, specifically in the context of climate-realist imaginations in cinema. We are interested in how the aesthetic economy of climate change both necessitates a concept like weirding (already containing its effects) and finds resonance in recent climate fiction films. Climate realism is an emerging approach in climate science, one that is trying to move past an alarmist tone (which gives the public apocalyptic warnings about an inevitable dark future and cultivates a zeitgeist of political helplessness) toward helping society face the everyday realities of living with climate change. In critiquing catastrophism and collapse narratives as well as constructivist and denialist approaches to climate change, scholars like Andreas Malm, Robert J. Antonio, and Brett Clark have acknowledged the need for climate realism from within the realm of the humanities and social theory.4 Finding climate realism to be "entirely compatible with a passionate interest in representations of climate change," especially in the realm of climate fiction, Malm has further embraced diverse (at times scientifically not-so-reliable) articulations of climate change within literature as inspiring expressions of the approach.5 It can be argued that in the context of cinema, climate fiction and its attempts at depicting massively distributed objects such as sea level rise, terminal landscapes, mass species extinctions, and geological timescales have also led to a revival of realism, this time as an aesthetic framework that has roots in twentieth-century analog cinema (often associated with humanist realism via Bazin), yet diverges from its anthropocentric moorings significantly in order to speak to twenty-first century ecological imperatives. As Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Clair La Berge argue, "Realisms of today do not operate in the same world of conditions and demands" as those of the nineteenth (or even twentieth) century.6 Twenty-first-century realisms have to take into account the fact that the world as we know it is in the course of being irrevocably altered and ecologically destabilized. Beasts of the Southern Wild's (2012) magical realism, which maps a little girl's anxieties about the rising waters in Louisiana onto the image of extinct animals magically coming back to life from melting ice caps; Déjà Vu's (2006) capitalist [End Page 61] realism, which sets a terrorist threat in post-Katrina New Orleans, a...

Weirding Climate Realism in Sunshine and Ex Machina Selmin Kara (bio) and Cydney Langill (bio) Avoid the term "global warming." I prefer the term"global weirding," because that is what actually happens asglobal temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weathergets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter,the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.Thomas Friedman, "Global Weirding Is Here" When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman made a call for replacing the phrases global warming and climate change with "global weirding" in 2016, he was effectively critiquing the climate-science community's inability to represent the reality of climate change in ways that do justice to its catastrophic effects, unevenly distributed intensities, and disruptions.1 More recently, scholars Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman returned to the phrase as a productive space for literary-cultural analysis, invoking its potential to enter literary, artistic, philosophical, and scientific communities into a dialogue concerning how to conceptualize our ecologically unstable times. For their special theme issue published in the journal Paradoxa, Hageman himself facilitated a cross-disciplinary conversation between ecophilosopher Timothy Morton and author Jeff VanderMeer, a key figure in the literary movement of the new weird (a genre that came into existence following the alter-globalization movement in Seattle and later made anthropogenic climate change one of its main concerns).2 Their musings, as well as other conversations in the issue, crystallized a definition of the weird as a particular iteration of the real, perceived in the era of climate change as something porous, difficult to grasp, and resistant to [End Page 60] cognitive capture. They also imagined the twenty-first-century weird as encapsulating a prevalent affect or gripping sensation related to the expansion of awareness and anxiety of "a necropastoral world" brought into existence by human agency.3 In this article, we continue the work of thinking the weird and climate together, specifically in the context of climate-realist imaginations in cinema. We are interested in how the aesthetic economy of climate change both necessitates a concept like weirding (already containing its effects) and finds resonance in recent climate fiction films. Climate realism is an emerging approach in climate science, one that is trying to move past an alarmist tone (which gives the public apocalyptic warnings about an inevitable dark future and cultivates a zeitgeist of political helplessness) toward helping society face the everyday realities of living with climate change. In critiquing catastrophism and collapse narratives as well as constructivist and denialist approaches to climate change, scholars like Andreas Malm, Robert J. Antonio, and Brett Clark have acknowledged the need for climate realism from within the realm of the humanities and social theory.4 Finding climate realism to be "entirely compatible with a passionate interest in representations of climate change," especially in the realm of climate fiction, Malm has further embraced diverse (at times scientifically not-so-reliable) articulations of climate change within literature as inspiring expressions of the approach.5 It can be argued that in the context of cinema, climate fiction and its attempts at depicting massively distributed objects such as sea level rise, terminal landscapes, mass species extinctions, and geological timescales have also led to a revival of realism, this time as an aesthetic framework that has roots in twentieth-century analog cinema (often associated with humanist realism via Bazin), yet diverges from its anthropocentric moorings significantly in order to speak to twenty-first century ecological imperatives. As Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Clair La Berge argue, "Realisms of today do not operate in the same world of conditions and demands" as those of the nineteenth (or even twentieth) century.6 Twenty-first-century realisms have to take into account the fact that the world as we know it is in the course of being irrevocably altered and ecologically destabilized. Beasts of the Southern Wild's (2012) magical realism, which maps a little girl's anxieties about the rising waters in Louisiana onto the image of extinct animals magically coming back to life from melting ice caps; Déjà Vu's (2006) capitalist [End Page 61] realism, which sets a terrorist threat in post-Katrina New Orleans, a...

Climate crises have become an unavoidable dominating element in the present, the climate is changing and the exact degree to which it will change is unpredictable. Climate change is responsible for the extreme weather conditions like flooding, desertification and sea level rise. To emphasise on the severity of climate change and the consequences of it a new genre of literature termed Climate Fiction addresses the concerns of climate change on a global scale. In a growing dystopian world where climate change is the norm,climate fiction through works of art and literature addresses pressing environmental concerns to reach wider audience. Cli-fi novels and films are set in future and narrate the story of disaster and its effect on humans. To raise awareness documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Before The Flood, movies like Day After Tomorrow, Kedarnath, Water world play major role in humanising climate change and makes it relatable to broad audience. Some of the notable works of climate fiction include Solar by Ian McEwan, State of Fear by Michael Crichton, The Drowned World by J.G.Ballard and The Science in the Capital Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

This chapter looks at the intersection of environmentalism and theology within climate fiction. Climate fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction in which climate, and especially climate change, is foregrounded within the story or storyworld. In discussing her own climate fiction trilogy, Margaret Atwood points to the suggestion that environmentalism must become a religion if it is going to accomplish its goals. This chapter will explore the influence of eco-religions or eco-spirituality in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy and Octavia Butler's Parables series, teasing out whether hope for avoiding (or recovering from) a collapse of the biosphere in the face of climate change can be found in the religious.

This article aims to analytically and comparatively examine the representation of children's and adolescents' voices and experiences in a world entirely altered by climate change. The article focuses on two cli-fi novels: Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible (2020) and Tochi Onyebuchi's War Girls (2019). The article looks at how children's and adolescents' voices and experiences are depicted in a climate changed-world. Climate Fiction (cli-fi) writers can serve as a wake-up call for the world to recognize the needs of children during a climatic catastrophe by incorporating children's and adolescents' voices and experiences in their literary works so that readers of all ages will be able to see how children will harvest their fathers' sins, and what actions needed to preserve the Earth from a climatic crisis. Indeed, children and teenage protagonists in climate change literature have something to say about their current situation and the corruption of their social and political structures, which have caused climate change and destroyed their sole home; the Earth.

This chapter addresses the relationship between ecofeminism and climate fiction (cli-fi) through an ecocritical reading of three contemporary cli-fi narratives: Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006), Michelle Law’s short story Bu Liao Qing (2020), and Zoya Patel’s short story Displaced (2020). Beginning with a brief definition of the genre of cli-fi and following that with a critique of the genre from ecofeminist standpoints, Iris Ralph comments on the three texts according to how they measure up against that ecofeminist critique and so according to how the texts more or less successfully break with mainstream cli-fi production, for the ecofeminist charge is that mainstream cli-fi is masculinist, or literary production that indulges in and fantasizes about the planetary future—about the planet as it promises to be and already is being terrifically impacted by climate change—more so than it shows any alarm about or any commitment to slowing and even reversing climate change, and, in addition, mainstream cli-fi subtly disparages environmental activism. In the instances of mainstream cli-fi narratives that do reflect a genuine concern for tackling climate change, these also are disappointing insofar as hope for the future is represented in the figure of the human unborn progeny, a wish that betrays anthropocentric desires for futurity.

Via thematic content analysis, this article combines approaches from educational and literary research to explore representations of nature, climate change and sustainability by children in their own reflections and for children in fiction. The primary materials consist of ethnographic studies conducted in Swedish schools in 2011 and 2013, and of close readings of Julie Bertagna’s trilogy Exodus (2002), Zenith (2003), and Aurora (2011). Representations by young learners, as well as themes in climate fiction, reflect concerns regarding climate change, a critical awareness of anthropogenic influences, and a conviction that cooperation is essential to promote change. Speculative climate fiction can assist when re-thinking current structures and patterns by letting readers encounter possible scenarios in a safe space, in this way broadening discussions regarding future sustainability. We identify a number of contact points between our materials and suggest how findings point to bright spots when re-thinking the role of literature in education for sustainable development (ESD) and, conversely, the importance of young learners’ voices within ESD for literature studies.

Climate change is a phenomenon of immense and disorienting complexity which challenges the imagination and complicates its representation in literature. Many critics have pointed out the dominance of universalist and anthropocentric crisis narratives in climate fiction, which focus on imagined future events in North America or Europe and understand climate change as a unique and unprecedented event. In contrast, recent publications by postcolonial, indigenous, and diasporic writers illustrate how global power relations inform past, present and future environmental crises and work to reveal the manifold interrelations between humans, nonhumans and the material world. Such works reveal how climate change interacts with other social and environmental justice matters and contribute to a cross‐pollination of climate fiction beyond a Western‐centric imagination. This article discusses Pitchaya Sudbathad's 2019 novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain as an example of contemporary global Anglophone climate fiction which highlights the coexistence of heterogeneous experiences of climate change. While the novel exhibits some features that are commonly found in Anglophone climate fiction, its complex form and narrative structure create a sense of the socially stratified nature and the omnipresence of environmental and urban transformation, which is often absent in Western crisis narratives. The novel illustrates the entangled nature of social, political and ecological concerns and rejects the totalising pretence of undifferentiated human victimhood in the face of climate change by drawing attention to a plurality of human and more‐than‐human realities.

Climate Fiction as Environmental Education