Challenging ecoprecarity in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The starting point of this article is the escalating climate crisis, the precarity it has already caused in the Global South, and the fact that nations in the Global North have also begun to suffer from climate change, a development that is likely to accelerate in the future. The focus of the article is the disagreement within eco-socialist and postcolonial scholarship on the future of capitalism and on how global relations will change in a world transformed by the climate crisis. These questions are approached via Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy (2010–17) which depicts how global social and economic relations have been transformed in a world altered by the climate crisis. The article argues that while these novels describe the future world as still capitalist and sharply class divided, and (illegal) migration as the only escape from precarity, they also imagine a profound shift in how wealth is distributed.