Peak Oil Imagining in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl

Abstract

Peak oil discourse has become increasingly prevalent as a trope within contemporary speculative fiction. Cultural and political anxieties regarding the possibility of oil's waning availability as an ur-commodity have been channelled into dystopian visions of the future which present a world without oil as synonymous with catastrophe and apocalypse. Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl (2012. San Francisco: Night Shade) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2010. London: Picador) convey this burgeoning anxiety while moving beyond it through utopian possibilities.This article will situate both texts as new forms of speculative fiction, which interpolate utopian and dystopian imagining, producing an irresolvable paradox between hope and despair for the future, that registers the fundamental uncertainty of the peak oil predicament. An analysis will be offered of both texts as encapsulating the difficulty of imagining life beyond oil, as bespeaking a more fundamental predicament: the impossibility of imagining beyond capitalism. Oil's importance as a commodity which lubricates and upholds the world-system of capital informs McCarthy's vision of an America bereft of oil as a barren wasteland scarred by the spatial violence which petro-capitalism has performed. In Bacigalupi, capitalism endures in ever more sinister configurations, negating the naïve idealism of eco-apocalyptic discourse which assumes that the end of oil will necessitate social and political change.