Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Heise, Ursula K

Titel

Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene

Ist Teil von

• ELH, 2019, Vol.86 (2), p.275-304

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• While new forms of art and literature are no doubt called for to meet this challenge, I will argue, some of the narrative resources for addressing long time intervals actually lie in narrative forms that preceded the rise of the novel and have accompanied it throughout its history. ii. the anthropocene and the untellable Hundreds of nonfiction books, novels, short stories, documentaries, and feature films have engaged with climate change and other manifestations of the Anthropocene over the last three decades: the publication of the Australian novelist George Turner's The Sea and Summer in 1987 (retitled The Drowning Towers in its 1988 American edition), one of the earliest science fiction novels to engage with the "Greenhouse Culture" of the late twentieth century, and Bill McKibben's The End of Nature in 1989, one the first nonfiction books to ring the alarm regarding climate change, may serve as convenient markers for the beginnings of stories about anthropogenic global warming.11 So many stories about climate change are being told that the term cli-fi—climate fiction—coined by the journalist and novelist Dan Bloom in 2007, is now often used to describe texts and films concerned with the issue. [...]the popularity of the shorthand indicates increased attention to the question of how literature and film might be able to engage with climate change—to the point where some environmentalists wish for "'the great climate change novel'" that might exert the galvanizing influence on climate change activism that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a 1962 book of scientific nonfiction that ingeniously opened with a dystopian short story, had on the awareness of environmental toxins and on the rise of the North American environmental movement.12 The anxiety that existing narratives, especially in their fictional variants, might so far have fallen short of truly persuasive forms and strategies in their engagement with the magnitude of climate change (and also other dimensions of the Anthropocene such as biodiversity loss and population growth), has remained a recurring concern among literary and film critics. Many devoted themselves to this work, each individual specializing very minutely in some particular episode of human or animal history, and transmitting his work into the culture of the race. [...]increasingly, the individual felt himself to be a single flicker between the teeming gulf of the never-more and the boundless void of the not-yet. [...]considering these works in the tradition of epic and in the context of other novelistic experiments with epic elements foregrounds the way in which they take up premodern forms of narrative: cosmologies, myths, origin stories, and narratives about the emergence and eventual disappearance of species, places, or civilizations. Since telling such stories has always formed part of the repertoire of science fiction, it is not surprising that such fiction has now emerged as one of the major genres for narratives about the Anthropocene.