Abstract

This article discusses two instances of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ (Trexler, 2015: 4) that engage with the environmental crisis that industrial modernity has generated: Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), and Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep (2019), which both depict a future in which technological civilisation has collapsed, and the non-human world is resurgent. Like climate change fiction, or cli-fi, these novels are concerned with the elusive and unpredictable environmental risks that modern societies inadvertently create, and with finding ways to negotiate the representational challenge of those risks; unlike many instances of climate change fiction, however, these novels do not set out to warn their readers of what is to come, or lament the disaster they depict. They are instead concerned with the legacy of technological civilisation – a legacy of risk and uncertainty – and the question of whether that legacy can ever be escaped. Neither novel offers an answer; but nor do they foreclose its possibility.

Highlights

  • My aim in this article is to explore two narratives that depict the apocalyptic aftermath of society’s breakdown, and discuss their relationship to and bearing on contemporary climate change fiction, or ‘cli fi’ (Johns-Putra, 2016: 267)

  • Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep, published in 2019, depicts a mediaevalesque future; it too takes as its point of departure some form of catastrophe or upheaval that has transformed society but whose nature is surrounded in mystery

  • Difficult as it may be to classify these novels, it is clear that they operate very differently to the modern, realist novel, whose limitations Ghosh identifies as part of the ‘Great Derangement’ (2016: 11); their departure from conventional realist norms is not incidental but central to their importance as part of the literary response to modernity, to its risks, to its uncertainty, and central to their bearing on cli-fi, as agenre that is itself seeking to find the representational means by which to engage with the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene

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Summary

Introduction

My aim in this article is to explore two narratives that depict the apocalyptic aftermath of society’s breakdown, and discuss their relationship to and bearing on contemporary climate change fiction, or ‘cli fi’ (Johns-Putra, 2016: 267). As we understand it’ (JohnsPutra, 2016: 267), they avoid some of the pitfalls inherent in the kinds of climate change fiction that Trexler surveyed: neither implores or laments (Trexler, 2015: 9); neither defers the risks that modernity generates, or reduces them to a ‘single tsunami’ (25); and whilst both imply that modernity’s downfall is a dialectic inevitability, neither extrapolates from this the kind of extreme, end-of-the world scenario that climate fictions often offer (see Garrard, et al, 2019: 39, 120) Rather, these narratives are concerned with the kind of society that might reconstruct itself in modernity’s shadow, ‘after London ended’ (Jefferies, 2017: 3), and whether that shadow can ever be escaped. Do After London and The Second Sleep respond to the ‘self-endangering, “civilized” world’ that modernity has generated (Beck, 1995: 13)?

Themes of Risk and Uncertainty
Representing Risk and Uncertainty
Conclusion
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