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Eutopia, Dystopia and Climate Change

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Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction

Part of the book series: Studies in Global Science Fiction ((SGSF))

Abstract

This chapter develops a Weberian ideal typology of climate fictions built around five measures of formal utopianism and six measures of substantive response to climate change. The five formal variants of utopian fiction are the classical eutopia; the critical eutopia; the classical dystopia; the critical dystopia; and the fiction set in a reality neither significantly better nor significantly worse than our own, the non-utopia we can term the base reality text. The six variants of climate response are denial; mitigation (including climate engineering); positive adaptation; negative adaptation; deep ecological anti-humanism; and pessimistic fatalism. This typology will be applied to the analysis of a range of “literary” and “genre” climate fictions drawn from Australia, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, the United States and South Africa.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rudd, “National Climate Summit.”

  2. 2.

    The World Resources Institute calculates total greenhouse gas emissions for Australia in 2014 as 22.36 metric tons per capita per annum, as compared to 19.84 for the USA, 14.12 for Russia, 13.38 for New Zealand, 10.08 for Germany, 10.39 for Japan, 7.64 for the UK, 5.04 for France and 4.84 for Sweden (CAIT Climate Data Explorer). Australia is also the world’s largest exporter of coal and thus a major source of exported carbon emissions.

  3. 3.

    Milner and Burgmann, “Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction.”

  4. 4.

    Milner, Locating Science Fiction, 194.

  5. 5.

    More, Utopia, 18–19.

  6. 6.

    Sargent, “In Defense of Utopia,” 15; Budakov, “Dystopia,” 86–88; Köster, “Dystopia”; Mill, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates.

  7. 7.

    Sargent, “Themes in Utopian Fiction,” 275.

  8. 8.

    Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 7–10.

  9. 9.

    Moylan, Demand (1986), 10.

  10. 10.

    Moylan, Demand (1986), 10–11.

  11. 11.

    Moylan, Demand (1986), 43.

  12. 12.

    Moylan, Scraps, 198–199.

  13. 13.

    Moylan, Scraps, 188.

  14. 14.

    Moylan, Scraps, 195.

  15. 15.

    Moylan, Demand (2014), xxivn.

  16. 16.

    Atwood, “Dire Cartographies,” 85.

  17. 17.

    Sargent, “Miscellaneous Reflections,” 243.

  18. 18.

    Merchant, “Behold.”

  19. 19.

    Weber, Methodology, 90.

  20. 20.

    Lovelock, Gaia.

  21. 21.

    Weber, Methodology, 90.

  22. 22.

    Suvin, Metamorphoses, 7–8.

  23. 23.

    Suvin, Metamorphoses, 7–9, 20.

  24. 24.

    Suvin, Metamorphoses, 69.

  25. 25.

    Jameson, Archaeologies, 57, 60.

  26. 26.

    Jameson, Archaeologies, 71.

  27. 27.

    Dickerson and Evans, Ents; Dickerson and O’Hara, Narnia.

  28. 28.

    Martin, “Dance.”

  29. 29.

    Miéville, Introduction, 43.

  30. 30.

    Miéville, Introduction, 45.

  31. 31.

    Miéville, Introduction, 48.

  32. 32.

    Baccolini and Moylan, Dark Horizons, 7.

  33. 33.

    Ghosh, Great Derangement, 72.

  34. 34.

    Ghosh, Great Derangement, 124–125.

  35. 35.

    Moretti, Distant Reading; Milner, “World Systems.”

  36. 36.

    Robinson, “Remarks,” 9.

  37. 37.

    Robinson, Sixty Days, 478–479.

  38. 38.

    Robinson, Green Earth, xii.

  39. 39.

    Robinson, New York 2140, 574, 601, 602, 604.

  40. 40.

    Moylan, “‘Utopia,’” 4.

  41. 41.

    Robinson, “Remarks,” 3.

  42. 42.

    Robinson, “Remarks,” 4.

  43. 43.

    This utopianism is genuinely Robinson’s own, not merely that of the novel. As he has recently explained: “We could use the Democratic Party … to elect a majority in Congress to enact a New Deal flurry of changes. Corporations could squeal but they couldn’t make the army go onto the streets against the people. In this country the corporations can’t do that.” Robinson and Feder, “Realism,” 97. This vision of both the United States and the Democratic Party seems to me as improbable in reality as in fiction.

  44. 44.

    Fleck, MAEVA!, 209.

  45. 45.

    Fleck, MAEVA!, 209.

  46. 46.

    Fleck, MAEVA!, 170. Translation of Fleck here and below by me and David Blencowe.

  47. 47.

    Fleck, MAEVA!, 65.

  48. 48.

    Fleck, Feuer, 305.

  49. 49.

    Fleck, Feuer, 208.

  50. 50.

    Fleck, Feuer, 315.

  51. 51.

    Fleck, MAEVA!, 246.

  52. 52.

    Dürbeck, “Anthropocene,” 326.

  53. 53.

    Atwood, MaddAddam, 168–69.

  54. 54.

    Atwood, MaddAddam, xiii.

  55. 55.

    Atwood, MaddAddam, 92.

  56. 56.

    Atwood, MaddAddam, 388.

  57. 57.

    Atwood, MaddAddam, 385.

  58. 58.

    Atwood, MaddAddam, 291.

  59. 59.

    Morris, News from Nowhere, 286–320.

  60. 60.

    Atwood, MaddAddam, 390.

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  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Andrew Milner

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  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Zachary Kendal , Aisling Smith  & Andrew Milner ,  & 

  2. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Giulia Champion

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Milner, A. (2020). Eutopia, Dystopia and Climate Change. In: Kendal, Z., Smith, A., Champion, G., Milner, A. (eds) Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27893-9_4

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