British Climate Fiction and Will Self’s The Book of Dave

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proceeds from the premise that the early 2000s saw an increasing number of British authors deploy double-mapping techniques to concretise the supranational scope of advanced climate change. Along these lines, this article suggests that Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) epitomises a subgenre of contemporary climate fiction – one that maps an inverted historical referent onto a seemingly speculative future in order to transport the reader to a state of imagined obsolescence. More specifically, Self’s semi-submerged Hampstead Heath distils over two-hundred years of history on the remote island Hiort into a period of fourteen to foreground the implosive tendencies of closed geopolitical systems sustained by transhistorical reiterations of power. At heart, this article asserts that Self cloaks recorded history in defamiliarizing devices to critique present-day petroleum dependency as propelled by ideological rigidity, historical distortion, and cynical opportunism as much as corpocratic encapsulation and environmental precarity.