Anthropogenic Worlds of Transformation and Destruction: Doris Lessing’s Climate Fiction Duology

Abstract

Depicting a world stricken with an ice age in the North and drought in the South, Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) recounts the survival story of two siblings, Mara and Dann, amidst un/natural and societal havoc. The sequel, The Story of General Dann, Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog (2005) pictures the dramatic transformations both in the nonhuman nature and the protagonists’ lives after the devastating disasters in the first novel. Migrating among thousands of people from the south towards northern Ifrik and passing through desolate lands scorched with drought, 4re, 3ood, and diseases in Mara and Dann, the protagonists mature as they learn to live in a perilous and erratic world populated with survivalists solely focused on personal gain. Through the horrendous picture of an Ifrik parched with drought in the South and frosted with a solid layer of ice at the top north, the novel pictures the helplessness of humankind through Mara and Dann’s quest for life in the face of unstoppable and inevitable environmental calamities. With the melting of the ice in the Northern Yerrup and the flooding in the Northern Ifrik, General Dann delivers Dann’s struggle to cope with his personal loss as the world changes once again, and the climate gets cooler. Obsessed with knowledge and set on to save a library, he races against time, human beings, and the hostile nonhuman environment. In this light, this study aims to analyse Doris Lessing’s climate fiction (cli-fi) duology, Mara and Dann: An Adventure and General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog as climate fiction novels reflecting the destructive impact of climate change on humans and nonhuman nature in the anthropogenic conditions of the fictional world, which is not a far cry from our world in the twenty-first century.