All Aboard for Ararat: Islands in Contemporary Flood Fiction

Abstract

All Aboard for AraratIslands in Contemporary Flood Fiction Caroline Edwards (bio) One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focused interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and desertification, the return of "last man" narratives of global viral pandemic, as well as the collapse of oil-based petroconsumption. Analyses of fiction that deal with climate change (what has been called climate change fiction, or "cli-fi," among the online commentariat) have started to recognize a fundamental shift from literary fiction's preoccupation with characters' psychological interiority, to the grander-scale attempt to understand the place of human subjects within a broader ecosphere at a time of rapid change. As bill mckibben writes in his introduction to the short-story collection I'm With the Bears (2011): "Instead of being consumed with the relationships between people, they increasingly take on the relationship between people and everything else. On a stable planet, nature provided a background against [End Page 211] which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet we're creating, the background becomes the highest drama."1 However, scholarship of contemporary literature has thus far overlooked an important set of narratives dedicated to examining the "highest drama" of literary setting as a subject in and of itself: flood fictions. These fictions depict a range of cataclysmic floods and encompass both the small scale of texts whose tsunamis and deluges are local, partial, and/or provisional, as well as the larger-scale and planetary accounts of rising sea levels, global disaster, and pluvial shifts in meteorology. Among this caucus of fictions, we might identify a number of prominent examples, including: literal journeys to Ararat and the retelling of the Genesis flood narrative in David Maine's The Flood (2004; released in the U.S. under the title The Preservationist) and Yann Martel's phantasmagoric bestseller The Life of Pi (2001), Geraldine McCaughrean's Not the End of the World (2004), and Meg Rosoff's YA novel There Is No Dog (2011); apocalyptic deluges caused by impact events, such as the meteorite-induced tsunami in Maggie Gee's The Flood (2004) or the alien invasion in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon (2014); and the disastrous effects of rising sea levels caused by global warming, as in Marie NDiaye's genre-melding memoir Autoportrait en vert [Self-Portrait in Green] (2005), Kim Stanley Robinson's SF thrillers Forty Signs of Rain (2004) and New York: 2140 (2017), Will Self's The Book of Dave (2006), Stephen Baxter's Flood (2008), Paolo Bacigalupi's young adult novels The Drowned Cities (2013), Ship Breaker (2011), and The Windup Girl (2009), the graphic novel IDP: 2043 (2014), David Sachs's The Flood (2015), Don DeLillo's Zero K (2016), Megan Hunter's The End We Start From (2017), Philip Pullman's fantasy prequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy, La Belle Sauvage (2017), and Abi Curtis's Water & Glass (2017). These texts take up the mantle, as McKibben puts it, of addressing the gaps in scientific- and policy-based research relating to climate change and global warming by "help[ing] us to understand what things feel like,"2 something that the novel form is privileged in being able to accomplish. In the blending of speculative with realist literary imaginaries, flood fictions return us to the experimental period of Science Fiction's New Wave in the 1960s: a time that was similarly preoccupied with stories of cataclysmic climate change in texts such as J. G. Ballard's early catastrophe novels The Wind from Nowhere (1960), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964; expanded and [End Page 212] republished as The Drought in 1965), and The Crystal World (1966), and John Christopher's post-apocalyptic survivalist texts The Death of Grass (1956) and The World in Winter (1962); as well as earlier ur-texts of flooding, including Richard Jefferies's After London; or, Wild England (1885), Garrett P. Serviss's The Second Deluge (1912), S. Fowler Wright's Deluge (1928), and John Wyndham's alien invasion The Kraken Wakes (1953). As Rob...