Pre-apocalypse Now: Gold Fame Citrus as Weird Western Cli-Fi

Abstract

Pre-apocalypse NowGold Fame Citrus as Weird Western Cli-Fi Jennifer K. Ladino (bio) California holds a special place in the American imaginary. Its geographic location at the western edge of the continent mirrors its symbolic one: California signals the frontier’s coastal end game and, at the same time, a birthplace for human innovation, cutting-edge technologies, and progressive politics. Like that of the West itself, California’s mythology manages to be simultaneously nostalgic and forward looking—an end point for colonial settlement and, as a 2013 Boom interview’s subtitle claims, “The Planet of the Future.” In that interview Kim Stanley Robinson describes California as “a science fictional place,” in which “the desert has been terraformed. The whole water system is unnatural and artificial” (4). Its associations with opportunity—gold strikes, Edenic landscapes, fruitful orchards, Hollywood-caliber celebrity—as well as with limits, especially access to water, are world famous and an entrenched part of US colonial history. More recently, California has made the news for its increasingly catastrophic wildfires and the climate refugees sparked by them, bringing the state to the national consciousness once again as a trendsetter and a harbinger of things to come. No wonder, then, that California is a go-to setting for writers of climate change fiction, or cli-fi. Authors as diverse as Robinson Jeffers, Octavia Butler, T. C. Boyle, Richard Powers, and C Pam Zhang have set their cli-fi in California for good reasons. California is a novelist’s utopia, an optimal site for staging complex subjects like environmental activism, techno-optimistic solutions to ecological problems, apocalyptic natural disasters, and class, race, and border conflicts. My essay reads Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2015 novel Gold Fame Citrus as a dystopian narrative of California as a “failed experiment” [End Page 199] (70) and a text that repurposes familiar tropes of the Western genre in ways that connect some of the most frightening impacts of climate change to capitalism and to settler colonialism. Watkins’s novel falls under the umbrella of cli-fi, a capacious genre, mode, or simply category, depending on who you ask. A big tent approach to defining cli-fi helps avoid the dismissive pigeonholing that other subgenres, notably sci-fi, contend with. In “Climate Change Fiction,” Matthew Schneider-Mayerson considers cli-fi “more a category than a genre” because of the wide range of forms it can take (Schneider-Mayerson 312). “Genre” may be too confining a term to encompass the wide range of texts that might count as cli-fi, from YA bildungsromans, to thrillers, to memoirs and nonfiction, to “weird” fiction, to speculative journalism and other forms of nonfiction, or even new “Anthropocene genres” like the weather section obituary (LeMenager 221). In “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre,” Stephanie LeMenager explains how “genre” too often refers to a rigid structure that calcifies and shuts down innovation; she champions “mode” as “fuzzier,” more generative, and better able to capture “a way of living in the world” that is felt, embodied, and “atmospheric” (222). These conversations about the blurry, contentious, shifting boundaries of genres are familiar to scholars of western American literature. The exciting new volume Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre makes several crucial points about the flexibility of the Western, suggesting that among its “distinctive features” is “its ability to form unexpected combinations with other genres, and the odd resonance those combinations create between the different genres” (Fine et al. 2). The collection focuses on how “science fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural ‘weird’ the western” (3). My essay expands this list to add cli-fi and to hold up Gold Fame Citrus as one example of how cli-fi and the Western “weird” each other by forming “unexpected combinations.” I’ll follow the lead of the Weird Westerns editors and retain the word genre here, though I’d like to embrace its inherent fuzziness and flexibility as Schneider-Mayerson and LeMenager recommend. The emergence of cli-fi is “a symptom of a social need, the need for new patterns of expectation” in an increasingly precarious [End Page 200] world (LeMenager 222). And it is trending. Some scholars suggest all contemporary fiction is, or will soon...