What does it mean to be entertained by a fictional apocalypse as we stare down the possibility of a real one? One job of pop culture is always to serve stories that distract even as they appear to engage—to deliver sublimation and diversion. In a time of cascading climate change, Hollywood is also trying to make sense of our changing relationship to nature, which we have long regarded from at least an arm’s length—but which, amid this change, has returned as a chaotic force we nevertheless understand, on some level, as our fault. The adjudication of that guilt is another thing entertainment can do, when law and public policy fail, though our culture, like our politics, specializes in assigning the blame to others—in projecting rather than accepting guilt. A form of emotional prophylaxis is also at work: in fictional stories of climate catastrophe we may also be looking for catharsis, and collectively trying to persuade ourselves we might survive it.
Already, with the world just one degree warmer, wildfires and heat waves and hurricanes have inundated the news, and promise to cascade shortly through our stories and inner lives, making what may seem today a culture suffused with intuitions of doom look like a comparatively naive season. End-of-the-world nightmares will blossom, including in children’s bedrooms, where siblings once whispered worries over the fact of death or the meaning of godlessness or the possibility of protracted nuclear war; among their parents, climate trauma will take its place in the pop-psychological vernacular, if often as a scapegoat for more personal frustrations and anxieties. What will happen at two degrees, or three? Presumably, as climate change colonizes and darkens our lives and our world, it will do the same for our nonfiction, so much so that climate change may come to be regarded, at least by some, as the only truly serious subject.
In fictional narratives, in pop entertainments, and in what was once praised as “high” culture, a different, weirder course suggests itself. At first, perhaps a revival of the antiquated genre known as “Dying Earth”—initiated in English by Lord Byron with his poem “Darkness,” written after a volcano eruption in the East Indies gave the Northern Hemisphere “The Year Without a Summer.” That environmental alarm was echoed in similar fiction of the Victorian era, including H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which depicted a distant future in which most humans were enslaved troglodytes, laboring underground for the benefit of a pampered and very small aboveground elite; in an even further future, almost all life on Earth had died. Our new version might include epic lamentations, a flourishing of what’s been called already “climate existentialism.” One scientist recently described to me the book she was working on as “Between the World and Me meets The Road.”
But the scope of the world’s transformation may just as quickly eliminate the genre—indeed eliminate any effort to narrativize warming, which could grow too large and too obvious even for Hollywood. You can tell stories “about” climate change while it still seems a marginal feature of human life, or an overwhelming feature of lives marginal to your own. But at three degrees of warming, or four, hardly anyone will be able to feel insulated from its impacts—or want to watch it on-screen as they watch it out their windows. And so as climate change expands across the horizon—as it begins to seem inescapable, total—it may cease to be a story and become, instead, an all-encompassing setting. No longer a narrative, it would recede into what literary theorists call metanarrative, succeeding those—like religious truth or faith in progress—that have governed the culture of earlier eras. This would be a world in which there isn’t much appetite anymore for epic dramas about oil and greed, but where even romantic comedies would be staged under the sign of warming, as surely as screwball comedies were extruded by the anxieties of the Great Depression. Science fiction would be seen as even more prophetic, but the books that most eerily predicted the crisis will go unread, much like The Jungle or even Sister Carrie today: Why read about the world you can see plainly out your own window? At the moment, stories illustrating global warming can still offer an escapist pleasure, even if that pleasure often comes in the form of horror. But when we can no longer pretend that climate suffering is distant—in time or in place—we will stop pretending about it and start pretending within it.
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In his book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t yet become preoccupations of contemporary fiction, why we don’t seem able to adequately imagine real-world climate catastrophe, why fiction hasn’t yet made the dangers of warming sufficiently “real” to us, and why we haven’t had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half existence and names “the environmental uncanny.”
Others call it “cli-fi”: genre fiction sounding environmental alarm, didactic adventure stories, often preachy in their politics. Ghosh has something else in mind: the great climate novel. “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ”
His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in conventional novels, which tend to end with uplift and hope and to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the miasma of social fate. This is a narrow definition of the novel, but almost everything about our broader narrative culture suggests that climate change is a major mismatch of a subject for all the tools we have at hand. Ghosh’s question applies even to comic-book movies that might theoretically illustrate global warming: Who would the heroes be? And what would they be doing? The puzzle probably helps explain why so many pop entertainments that do try to tackle climate change, from The Day After Tomorrow on, are so corny and pedantic: collective action is, dramatically, a snore.
The problem is even more acute in gaming, which is poised to join or even supplant novels and movies and television, and which is built, as a narrative genre, even more obsessively around the imperatives of the protagonist—i.e., you. It also promises at least a simulation of agency. That could grow more comforting in the coming years, assuming we continue to proceed, zombie-like ourselves, down a path to ruin. Already, the world’s most popular game, Fortnite, invites players into a competition for scarce resources during an extreme weather event—as though you yourself might conquer and totally resolve the issue.
There is also, beyond the hero problem, a villain problem. Literary fiction may not accommodate epic stories of the kind for which climate change fashions a natural setting, but, in the genre fiction and blockbuster movie space at least, we have a number of models at hand, from superhero sagas to alien-invasion narratives. Stories don’t get more elemental and familiar than those that used to be described as “man against nature.” But in Moby-Dick or The Old Man and the Sea or many lesser examples, nature was typically a metaphor, encasing a theological or metaphysical force. That was because nature remained mysterious, inexplicable. Climate change has changed that, too. We know the meaning of extreme weather and natural disaster, now, though they still arrive with a kind of prophetic majesty: the meaning is that there is more to come, and that it is our doing. You wouldn’t have to do much in rewrites to Independence Day to reboot it as cli-fi. But, in the place of aliens, who would its heroes be fighting against? Ourselves?