Climate Fiction as Future-Making: Narrative and Cultural Modelling Beyond Representation

Abstract

Climate fiction (cli-fi) increasingly attracts the attention of wider publics and expert science communities. And yet, critiques of its limits and the limits of its efficiency as a tool of persuading broader readerships are also becoming more frequent. This article draws on such critiques and discussions of the limits of representing climate change and related crises. We argue that, first, a focus on the representational capacity of fiction occludes other, equally important, functions of fiction. Second, we aver that such a focus insufficiently reflects on its own didactic bias that leads critics to endorse or even instrumentalize literary narrative for the seemingly obvious good cause of educating or mobilizing readers. The article suggests shifting the focus from mere issues of representation to questions of the effect and impact of reading in the wider conceptual context of climate imaginaries, defined as a shared set of beliefs, practices and norms, that define the scope of individual and collective future-thinking. It aims to develop a better understanding of the potential links between future-making and fiction and employs insights from model theory and theories and practices of (climate) modelling—the dominant, authoritative form of future-making in many disciplines, especially the natural sciences—to propose that cli-fi can be seen as an important alternative future-making tool when it is recognized as a form of cultural modelling. This allows us to acknowledge that cli-fi is a future-making technology directly impacting climate imaginaries, as the article will show through exemplary readings of two case studies, Jessie Greengrass's novel The High House (2021) and Rory Mullarkey's play Flood (premiered 2018).