Zuzana Obertová presents the term climate fiction and points out its relationship to science fiction. She draws attention to the problem of reducing the idea of climate fiction to a type of genre literature. She gives examples of climate fiction by Polish and Slovak authors and presents ecocriticism as a research method for climate fiction as well as climate change literature in a broad sense. She sums up the state of ecocriticism in Poland and Slovakia.
PL
Autorka przedstawia termin climate fiction (fikcja klimatyczna), wskazuje na jego związek z fantastyką naukową i zwraca uwagę na problem ograniczania climate fiction do literatury gatunkowej. Podaje przykłady utworów polskich i słowackich autorów. Wskazując na ekokrytykę jako narzędzie do badania fikcji klimatycznej, ale także literatury związanej ze zmianami klimatu w szerszym rozumieniu, podsumowuje stan badań ekokrytycznych w Polsce i na Słowacji.
Depicting a world stricken with an ice age in the North and drought in the South, Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) recounts the survival story of two siblings, Mara and Dann, amidst un/natural and societal havoc. The sequel, The Story of General Dann, Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog (2005) pictures the dramatic transformations both in the nonhuman nature and the protagonists’ lives after the devastating disasters in the first novel. Migrating among thousands of people from the south towards northern Ifrik and passing through desolate lands scorched with drought, 4re, 3ood, and diseases in Mara and Dann, the protagonists mature as they learn to live in a perilous and erratic world populated with survivalists solely focused on personal gain. Through the horrendous picture of an Ifrik parched with drought in the South and frosted with a solid layer of ice at the top north, the novel pictures the helplessness of humankind through Mara and Dann’s quest for life in the face of unstoppable and inevitable environmental calamities. With the melting of the ice in the Northern Yerrup and the flooding in the Northern Ifrik, General Dann delivers Dann’s struggle to cope with his personal loss as the world changes once again, and the climate gets cooler. Obsessed with knowledge and set on to save a library, he races against time, human beings, and the hostile nonhuman environment. In this light, this study aims to analyse Doris Lessing’s climate fiction (cli-fi) duology, Mara and Dann: An Adventure and General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog as climate fiction novels reflecting the destructive impact of climate change on humans and nonhuman nature in the anthropogenic conditions of the fictional world, which is not a far cry from our world in the twenty-first century.
According to a comprehensive scientific consensus, the environmental impact of modern societies is a significant cause for the current experienced effects of global warming. In addition to science’s function as a diagnostic instance of the Anthropocene, it occupies at least two additional roles in the story of humaninduced climate change. Modern science tries to act as a therapist as it proposes numerous actions that need to be taken when tackling the risks, causes, and consequences of climate change. Moreover, the institution of science is a (co-) producer of anthropogenic risks due to the intentional and unintentional utilization of scientific knowledge and science-based technologies for societal purposes. Therefore, this contribution asks from a sociological point of view how representations of science in exemplary climate change novels, a body of contemporary literature that deals with human-induced global warming and its societal implications, depict this multi-layered embedding of science as a producer, diagnostician, and therapist of societal risks in the story of humancaused climate change.
Since 1959, when C.P. Snow delivered his seminal lecture The Two Cultures on the lack of understanding between scholars working in the humanities and their colleagues from science departments, the gap between the two groups has been one of the most notorious clichés of contemporary Western culture. The aim of this article is to show that this seemingly insurmountable abyss between sciences and the humanities that was brought to the forefront during the mid-20th century is slowly receding into history. Literature studies today is heavily indebted to modern science. Biology (especially evolutionary biology), physics (especially quantum physics), and ecology (especially the Anthropocene studies) are among the most important subjects scholars of literature have to take into account. In order to prove this point I shortly describe literary genres which introduce modern science to the readers: science fiction, cyberpunk, solarpunk, lablit, quantum fiction, and cli-fi. I also refer to the newly-emerged schools of criticism-science fiction studies, ecocriticism and evocriticism-to show how scholars discuss these texts within the framework of the humanities. Additionally, I give a sample discussion of one of the cli-fi’s classics, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and also shortly discuss two science fiction novels concerned with the civilisational conflict between science and humanities: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.