Imagination, Identification, Intensification: Rhetorical Strategies for Climate Fiction on Television

Abstract

ABSTRACT Television climate fiction is an emerging, promising genre for environmental communication. Because audience uptake of this genre’s early texts will likely influence future texts’ production, it is important to attend to early texts’ persuasive successes and shortcomings. Thus, I rhetorically analyze Extrapolations (2023), a climate-fiction television series intended to provoke climate action from its audience. This analysis reveals three rhetorical strategies as critical to the genre’s persuasiveness: imagination, which helps audiences envision and evaluate information being presented to them; identification, which fosters feelings of connection and responsibility from audiences; and intensification, which moves audiences to act by imbuing emotion into the delivery of information. I show how these strategies can serve as a conceptual framework for developing and assessing climate fiction in popular media, and I suggest ways in which these strategies can more effectively motivate climate action.