Climate Crises, Ruined Islands, and British Metamodernism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contends that popular acceptance of Anthropogenic climate change in early 2000s Britain coincided with cultural efforts to redefine the historical present via transhistorical phenomena through the concretization of deep time. This article therefore situates itself in the historical juncture between the IPCC’s first report (1990) and its fourth (2007) to argue that the climatological, financial and geopolitical crises that coalesced in the 1990s prompted a shift that changed the tenor of British climate fictions published in the 2000s. To address the supranational reach of the climate crisis, British authors used metamodernist means to map the historical ruination of remote islands onto speculative futures extrapolated from the climate reports of the IPCC – thereby conjuring the climatological transformation of Earth into an Earth-like planet and the propulsion of humans toward future obsolescence. Ultimately, this article attends to the ecocritical significance of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) and Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) to suggest that these metamodernist climate fictions transpose the failures of submerged pasts onto near-futures drawn from present precarity to undermine the present as unique, the future as determined and the past as inaccessible and of little use to the present or future.