Introduction

There is a chain of associations I want to play with and tug at in this consideration of the Anthropocene. At the start of this chain is the signification of science in the imaginary. I have argued elsewhere when considering the discourse of germ-free organisms (aka gnotobiology) that science as a profession and a discourse is about signifying futures (Weinstein & Makki, 2009). We do not call fiction about the future technical fiction, but science fiction. Science relies on this signification for its funding, because the technical details of this ecological survey or that obscure epigenetic pathway for cancer do not inspire, except as a promise of better (eu) worlds (topias). Often the public discourse of science plays upon religious motifs and registers; as Mary Midgely has analyzed, science becomes salvation (1992). Consider this dialogue from the big budget movie Interstellar (Nolan, 2014), which is set against the background of environmental catastrophe:

Cooper::

How far have you got [on solving the formula]?

Brand::

Almost there.

Cooper::

You’re asking me to hang everything on an almost.

Brand::

I’m asking you to trust me. (time code: 35:00)

Such a moment of faith is the keystone to the entire narrative edifice. On the long odds of solving a seemingly insolvable equation is deliverance tied, and as the story unfolds, its solution rests ultimately on the metaphysical. Against this, consider this quote from Kevin Esvelt, an actual scientist who tried to sell the residents of Nantucket, Massachusetts, CRISPR (genetically modified) mice as the solution to Lyme disease (Quimby, 2019, Episode 7):

We are biased. You should never trust an inventor to evaluate whether their technology is safe and effective. Because we’re still human, no matter how hard we might try, we will fail.

Here the attachment to one’s own technology is put in question. It is not just that there are unintended effects but that the scientist is trapped in their humanity: their passions, biases, and attachments in ways that they know they don’t know. Salvation or hubris are the futures offered here.

I am interested in pondering and contesting the ways that science and its framing sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasinoff & Kim, 2015), that is, the fantasies of futures which mobilize projects in the present, traffic in the pseudo- or perhaps crypto-religious discourse, especially in the evocation of crisis. Crisis stands in here for one of a family of terms: catastrophe, disaster, and apocalypse. These terms configure tragedy, nature, human agency, and the divine in complex and contested constellations. At stake in dire sociotechnical imaginaries are fault, possibility, human valuation, and our collective bonds. The Anthropocene is such an evocation. It is barely more than a euphemism for collapse. First, it does so in its reference to nuclear contamination and more recently in its association with climate change. I am old enough to have been subject to both of those fears. I am weary of fear, and want to think beyond that state of living with immanent horror. The word “beyond” in my title does double work: what conviviality is possible temporally past the disaster, and how can we think of this moment in terms other than disaster. Certainly part of my inspiration and guide here is Lilley et al.’s inspiring volume Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (2012). The authors unanimously reject the use of catastrophe as an organizing tool for the left and note that both left and right embrace forms of collapse as hopes for new orders. They note how capitalism feeds on disaster, and thus it is not auspicious as a tool (an imaginary) for producing more equitable worlds. In particular Yuen’s (2012) essay on catastrophism and environmentalism is instructive here:

Catastrophism is rampant among self-identified environmentalists, and not without good reason—after all, the best evidence points to cascading environmental disaster. Warranted as it may be, though the catastrophism espoused by many left-leaning greens remains Malthusian at its core, and is often shockingly deficient in its understanding of history, capitalism, and global inequality. (loc 842)

Much of his essay is focused on the failure of Malthusian predictions and the ways such scenarios provide fuel for reactionary projects—such as the emergence of eco-fascism in the present moment (e.g., loc 862).

Part of the work of moving from crisis to action, from nature to responsibility, as it were, is to note that the Anthropocene, as many have noted, but my way into this critique is through Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the dehumanizing logic of colonialism, is a way of displacing responsibility for the material effects of the moment: nuclear contamination, ocean level rise, ocean acidification, and massive species loss, which is not the responsibility of “man” (anthropos, so gender intentional) but of some: of the global capitalist class and their rapacious need for power and wealth. It is empires centered in the global North who have generated this crisis because it externalized the human and non-human misery that is generated by its desires and wants. To achieve those desires the Global North (the ethnoclass, in Wynter’s framing (2003, p. 260)) has yet to see the humans in the others they dominate and thus has no capacity to imagine the material other of the planet that must serve as a resource to a consuming metropole. In this framing, the apprehension of the Anthropocene is in reality a projection of the self onto the world. Having suddenly glimpsed, that despite its ideology of no limits, the material finitude of the world is manifest.

My medium for exploring these issues is public pedagogy. Public pedagogy is theorized by Henry Giroux (2003) as the way media and popular texts educate their consumers about common-sense arrangements, social imaginaries, and identities. I am interested in contrasting fabulations of ecological futures. In particular I want to cross-read public pedagogies of the Anthropocene (largely reduced to global warming scenarios) as lenses to understand our socio-science-political imaginaries. Here I will focus on the catastrophism of the movie Interstellar and Kim Stanley Robinson’s (2017) New York 2140. However, moving beyond the popular I want to read these futures against a more scholarly text which is as much a science fabulation as the above: Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann’s Climate Leviathan (Wainwright & Mann, 2013, 2018). They look forward to multiple configurations of governmentality and its resistance. What are the likely and possible forms of governance we face as we look forward to the climate crisis, and what are the forces arraigned within and against such forms? They posit two dimensions: capitalist-non-capitalist (in the broadest sense of the term, i.e., a social order that is driven by something other than profit) and planetary-anti-planetary, defining the scope of the power of such governmentality. My reading is not so much a meta-discourse as a useful but problematic slit through which to diffract their narratives.

After considering these contrasting Anthropocene futures, I conclude by comparing them to a fictional account of life under the proposed Green New Deal (GND) (Aronoff, 2018). How is our vision of the GND limited as a sociotechnical imaginary? I end by speaking to the limits of extant imaginaries and the necessity of better ones.

Apocalypse

Apocalypse references particular types of fictions, futures, and sociotechnical imaginaries. For instance, it is worth considering the differences between apocalyptic science fictions and dystopian science fictions. While certainly there is an overlap in the genres, there are important differences. Dystopian fictions are inevitably fictions of life under states, usually totalitarian in some aspect; for example, the patriarchal tyranny in Margaret Atwood’s (1986) The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women’s autonomy is crushed, or the socialist tyranny in Kurt Vonnegut’s (1968) short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which all inequalities are rendered to their lowest form (smart people have to have their thinking interrupted constantly, graceful people have to manage cumbersome weights). They are almost always, therefore, cautionary tales about challenging the extant political order. Apocalyptic tales function differently. There is a giddy sense of freedom that is often part of the tale. The state or family relations or other social bonds are dissolved. A slate is wiped clean, and we can begin again. This is made clear by the writer Sarah Vowell (1999) in her memories of the function of apocalypse in various religious, political, and technological guises throughout her life. She explores the giddy dimension of apocalypse in a visit to a Y2K prepper meeting in California. It is in reflecting on this meeting that she comes to realize that apocalyptic talk is cover for utopian talk:

Just like my old church and my old anti-nuke group, they’re using the end of the world as a means to meet and greet, planning block parties so they can come up with Y2K contingency plans in their neighborhoods. They were also very idealistic. This is the thing you might not realize about end of the worlders. They might seem like they’re all about fetishizing doom and destruction, but stick around long enough for them to finish their spiel—few people do, I know—and before long, they get to a straight-up Utopian vision of the world. After all, after the biblical tribulation comes the new Jerusalem and 1,000 years of peace on Earth.

Vowell is identifying that the rhetorical function of apocalypse is to prepare for a new and better world order. As Sasha Lilley (2012) notes:

The collapse is frequently, but not always regarded as a great cleansing, out of which a new society will be born. Catastrophists tend to believe that an ever-intensified rhetoric of disaster will awaken the masses from their long slumber—if the mechanical failure of the system does not make such struggle superfluous. (loc 207)

Lilley’s greater point is that the rhetoric of the apocalypse will fail the left as a strategy, whether or not it is warranted; ultimately apocalypse is too central to reactionary movements for whom “worsening conditions are welcomed, with the hope they will trigger divine intervention or allow the settling of scores for any modicum of social advance over the last century” (loc 213). I endorse Lilley’s analysis, but my interest is in working with social imaginaries that might better function than apocalyptic event horizons.

At stake in the Anthropocene apocalypse is nature, its forces, responsibilities, victimhood, status, and so on, all of which act as struggles for the boundary of the conditions of politics (Haraway, 1994, p. 59). The germinating idea of the Anthropocene is that we humans have (unnaturally) been writing nature, leaving our marks on her strata. We are, in essence, embarrassingly visible in nature—of which we imagine ourselves apart. In climate crisis talk nature is both the actor and the object of human action, as many have argued, though hardly the same humans. Is the weather written upon—analogous to the geological strata now containing higher levels of radioactive elements—by our industrial misbehaviors? Are the losses, displacement, and dispossession due to changes in climate our capitalist burden? Can we coordinate, salvage, rebalance, and move toward conviviality? Or as Lilley suggests (see last paragraph), that ecological crisis, like all crises, better serves the forces of reaction, in this case an emergent eco-fascism. Eco-fascism embraces the crisis but responds to it by dehumanizing and abandoning those who try for sanctuary in the better sheltered landscapes of the world/west (Darby, 2019). The formulation of nature as a reified set of relations, forces, and powers beyond or maybe including the human is at stake in the sociotechnical imaginaries that drive policies from walls to new green deals, and those imaginaries are crafted in narratives: narratives of the second coming, narratives of technological fixes, narratives of radical democracy, and narratives of bordered nations, hoping to survive the climate crisis akin to images of families in fallout shelters in the 1950s and 1960s (Rafferty, Loader, Rafferty, Archives Project., & Thorn EMI Video (Firm), 1983).

Again, to explore these sociotechnical imaginaries I look to popular and academic media and texts; public and private pedagogies of the future, looking backward to look forward, and the ways these are likely to play out in any policy or collective response. I start with Interstellar, a big-budget film with high-salary stars about the response to an un-named but always implied climate crisis. In a radically different view of the future, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines New York surviving after several major flooding catastrophes as the new Venice, and against and within both of these, I examine the four futures foretold by Climate Leviathan and consider the narratives needed to produce a more democratic, less fascist future.

Interstellar: Magic and Science

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is considered here as a representation of a kind of common-sense consideration of climate change and the Anthropocene. (Note: I will spoil the plot entirely.) Despite its spectacular futuristic narrative, it is the path forward in the face of the global climate crisis for many of Silicon Valley’s plutocratic elites. The main character, Joseph Cooper, is an ex-astronaut, who in a post-industrial age, is farming in Wyoming. His daughter, Murphy, is being haunted by “ghosts,” ambiguous visions that push books from her shelf. The world is in deep crisis; crops are failing, dust bowl weather is sweeping the land, and the government has taken an anti-technological stance, promoting the idea that the moon landing was a hoax. And yet Cooper soon finds out that NASA is still active and is planning an expedition which will either 1) get humans to a habitable world on the other side of a wormhole (through a complex data collection operation) or 2) seed that world with humans in the form of embryos carried on his spacecraft (so-called plans A and B). Fights happen, people are betrayed, but ultimately Cooper is able to get the data for plan A and communicate back to Murphy what to do (Cooper is himself the ghost enabled by evolved humans who are trying to save the planet through their ability to exist in five dimensions). In short, the story takes a metaphysical turn at the end in positing some higher dimension that will save us.

This is a narrative of the technical fix. Of salvation through technology, but a technology that also evokes the metaphysical. It is not through the collective science labor that the solution is reached but by the magic of five-dimensional post-humans who, to save themselves, allow Cooper to communicate with Murphy at multiple time points. In this sense we are saved by some future and more perfect version of our selves. The logic here is that we will go elsewhere (scientificomagically) to save ourselves from the mess we are in, not by fixing the mess but by abandoning it. We don’t have to do anything.

This logic builds on a kind of frontier imaginary. At times the logic is made painfully explicit, as when Cooper explains to his father-in-law Donald, “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are, Donald. Explorers, pioneers, not caretakers” (time code 15:46). Here a sharp distinction is drawn between a narrative of the frontier joined with masculinity and one of domesticity and care. According to Greg Grandin (2019), it is an ideology that stabilized political dissent and materially managed inequality and difference (p. 2). Frontier myths are, as he titles his first chapter, “Fleeing forward.” Interstellar is building on that history of frontier thinking (as much of science fiction and NASA have). But it strangely makes clear what is at stake: not care for the existing world; instead, burning through it to another world. Our world, in the name of this masculine ideal, is disposable. “We” (the subject of Cooper’s sentence) do not care (meaning we have no feeling of care and we do not provide care). The frontier is about escape not solutions; it is flight rather than fight, even if it is simultaneously a site of spectacular violence as one locus of primitive accumulation, that is, the site of fencing the commons.

Interstellar articulates the mythic structure of feeling of the frontier, involving heroicism, novelty, escape, and masculine violence (whatever the gender of the actors provided) with our contemporary ecological state. It offers the frontier of space as the solution to our Earthly problems. The mad money behind such endeavors as Space X and Blue Origin (Musk and Bezos respectively) envision such escape. Musk has repeatedly fantasized of travel to Mars; Bezos of colonies in space. In his words, “We have to go to space to save Earth” (Foer, 2019). This uncaring vision of the Anthropocene is the world made narrative in Interstellar. The funding of NASA while the Midwest goes up in dust is the solution that is implied in their emphasis on space as the way out of Earth, the telos of the kind of dual world described by Naomi Klein (2007) of green zones and red zones proliferating around the world (green zones of order and peace for the rich; red zones of chaos and violence for the rest), but taken one step further, a green zone for a time when all the world is ravaged.

But the irony is that any thought about the plot offered here reveals it as no more than magical thinking. In the end, leaving Earth does not solve the problems except if we can run into fifth dimensional, time skirting, evolved versions of ourselves who can collect data in black holes. While emotionally we suspend disbelief—and the film’s exquisite special effects enable that—the absurdity of the dream of the billionaire class to escape rather than care for Earth reveals itself in the deus ex machine solution the film offers. This is what Noah Gittell (2014) means in his The Atlantic review when he opines on Hollywood’s lousy environmental politics: they can’t get the environment or solutions to environmental problems right, largely because the solutions are not spectacular, and cinema is about spectacle.

But what such a review misses is the way that this is irrelevant. It gets Bezos’s politics of the environment largely right: escape nature, do not care for it. It wraps such a stance in compelling narratives of heroism, masculinity, exploration/frontierism, and so on—and I grant that these terms are imbricated. It works in the way that reactionary movements succeed in giving a narrative of masculinity in opposition to femininity and thus feminism. Critically, in considering this as a public pedagogy of science, that this articulation of masculinity valorizes science along the way, but not real institutional science, that is, it heroicizes science as salvation and magic rather human, fallible, social labor.

The Bezos solution with its concomitant frontier narratives represents one larger context for popular narratives of what has come to be called CliFi (i.e., Climate Fiction—see, for instance, Svodboda, 2014). But it should be clear that such apocalypse and salvation (by science’s second coming in this case) are only one narrative, a narrative that treats the climate crisis as a frontier to be escaped and the Anthropocene as uninhabitable. But that is not the only narrative climate change affords, and New York 2140 is a very different kind of CliFi. In most respects it inverts the frontier narrative that Interstellar embraces.

New York 2140: Quotidian Anthropocenes

If Interstellar is a curriculum of heroic masculinity and miraculous salvation, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is about life on the other side of the Anthropocene’s event horizon. It’s not that there isn’t crisis but that life has a weird ordinariness in the afterlife of the flooding of the planet despite crisis. The plot (and, again, I will spoil) involves a housing cooperative in the intertidal zone of Manhattan; certainly one of the framing presumptions of the book is that the ambiguous state of property law in intertidal zones creates an opening for social democratic possibility. Different chapters focus on different members of the elite and downtrodden in that dwelling. Manhattan has become a kind of high-rise Venice, in which one boats up 5th Avenue. Despite multiple cataclysmic moments, in the 100 plus years’ time from our present, life is weirdly ordinary. Capitalism is doing very well, and capitalism continues in its financialized form. One of the main denizens of the Coop and subjects of the book is Franklin Garr, the developer of Intertidal Property Pricing Index (IPPI); which is explained as “a kind of Case-Shiller Index for intertidal assets” (loc 1893)—Case-Shiller being a contemporary measure of the housing market.

In many ways the pedagogy of the text is that life in the Anthropocene will have a kind of shocking familiarity filled with small pleasures and adventures as buildings collapse now and then. In its own way, this level of lack of drama is as unbelievable as Interstellar’s miracles. Granted, this level of ordinary living reflects life in the global metropolis rather than its vulnerable peripheries, that is, in a city that is still needed for capitalism—Washington, DC, by contrast is gone; the capital of power has moved to Denver, Colorado, for dryness’s sake. Certainly things would be different in Samoa or another locale. As the author notes, “[T]he people in Denver didn’t really care. Nor the people in Beijing, who could look around at Hong Kong and London and Washington, D.C., and Sao Paolo and Tokyo and so on, all around the globe, and say, Oh, dear! What a bummer for you, good luck to you!” (loc 2295). Cool alienation is the structure of feeling here. The overall feel of the story, far from action-packed SF of Interstellar, is one of daily life, of continuity, of people doing familiar things in solidarity with each other and the planet, often thwarted. But it is a future that other than all the water and a heavy use of zeppelins feels utterly contemporary.

In fact, in so many ways New York 2140 is as much about the global financial crisis of 2008 as about 2140. Through various events and coincidences in the lives of those living at “The Met” (the housing cooperative) the characters get to reset the neoliberal solutions put in place in 2008/2009. The book is a grand fantasy of undoing—or at least starting to—the financialization put in place as a solution to that crisis. It is, in U.S. terms, a Democratic Socialists of America fantasy of repeating, redoing that moment of possibility when one capitalist order seemed ready to collapse only to be saved by the champion of Hope and Change, President Obama. Thus, the text includes as much talk of Federal Reserve Chairs (the heads of the governmental bodies that control money supply) as species loss. And the crisis that animates the book is less that of the Anthropocene’s climate rewriting than a financial one brought by the protagonists of the tale.

And here is the shared organizing moment of both these public pedagogies of the Anthropocene: that crisis as a literary trope (financial, environmental, agricultural, etc.) serves as the opening for a new order. Crisis resolves in better worlds. Both Interstellar and New York 2140 are about transcending crisis. It is about restarting and shifting global orders, as Lilley et al. so critically observe. To make sense of the shifts in these two fictions, it is helpful to consider the matrix of possible worlds they are drawing from.

Climate Leviathan: A Matrix of Anthropocene Futures

Against these two texts I want to examine Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann’s (2018) Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planet Future (hereafter CL). Like the previous fictions, CL imagines life in/beyond/under conditions of climate change. This is near-future fictioning (in the sense of imaginative construction) of governmental forms under climate change. CL first appeared as an article in Antipodes in 2013 and then was expanded into a book in 2018. Driving the analysis in CL is a two by two matrix (p. 30, all citations will reference the book, rather than the article). The top cells represent capitalist futures and the bottom non-capitalist futures; the first column represents “planetary sovereignty,” the second “anti-planetary sovereignty.” Four social formations form the cells in the matrix. Climate Leviathan is the extant hegemonic global social formation of neoliberal governmentality—the upper left corner of the matrix. Here, the goal is to preserve the wealth of the ruling class through managing risk and harm at a global level through financial, political, and social organizations such as the WTO, the United Nations, and the International Courts. Rejecting this within the capitalist economy is Climate Behemoth (the name comes from Locke), which rejects the international order, and privileges racial/ethnic states as the site of sovereignty; it is the upper right corner of the matrix. This is the capitalism of Donald Trump in the U.S., Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, and Andrzej Duda in Poland. Ethnocentric embattled states based on racialized—in Foucault’s sense in which “racism [is] understood as a “basic mechanism of power” by which the state becomes able to exercise the sovereign right to kill against some so that others may live (Erlenbusch, 2017, p. 139)—hierarchies of belongingness.

But Climate Behemoth is only one challenge to the current global hegemon. As CL points out, the region most impacted by global warming is Asia, and within that region there remains a strong Maoist ideology. Climate Mao is what Wainwright and Mann call that social formation that is global in ambition but anti-capitalist in orientation. “Climate Mao expresses the necessity of a just terror in the interests of the future of the collective, which is to say that it represents the necessity of a planetary sovereign but wields the power against capital” (p. 38). While the current Chinese administration remains committed to Climate Leviathan as a project, there are seeds in place in China (and elsewhere) that are pushing for a more totalitarian solution that rejects (necessarily if one thinks about it) capitalism which has been a large engine of anthropogenic climate change.

Opposed to all of these, in CL’s lower right quadrant, are the small-scale, anti-capitalist, anti-global hegemon movements. These movements are not coherent in any sense and include a wide variety of first nations, peripheral (to the centers of Climate Leviathan’s governance), indigenous, and bioregional responses. In the mainstream it might take the form of the proposed New Green Deal, but it also takes the forms of resistance movements everywhere: climate strikes, boycotts of banks, and so on. Because of the amorphous form of the activities in this quadrant, these social formations are called Climate X. While the authors are openly ambiguous about the nature of Climate X they do propose three “principles” that ought to be fundamental to such a social formation to distinguish it from the three others: equality of all humans, inclusion, and dignity of all, and “solidarity in composing a world of many worlds” (pp. 175–176). They realize that X is almost an impossible formation to establish and maintain; it will be eviscerated by forces of Leviathan, Mao, and Behemoth the minute it obtains a toehold, yet it keeps emerging: in Chiapas under the Zapatistas, and then again in Syria in Rojava (which was based partially on eco-anarchist Murry Bookchin’s political theories). It is also signaled by the front-line role of indigenous and colonized peoples: “While these groups have, of course been subject to capital and state power, to generalize, their present strategies do not emphasize forging internationalist solidarity for a revolutionary communist or socialist future. Their point, rather, is to ensure that the full multiplicity of those lifeways has a vital and dignified future—and in some cases, to communicate to those willing to listen what they might learn from it” (p. 189).

The Wainwright and Mann 4-square gives us a tool to rethink the fictional texts above, though I would argue that one needs to be cautious because those fictions can also be used to problematize CL. CL can’t simply be read as a meta-discourse on these fictions. From the point of view of public pedagogy, CL helps analyze the ways these fictions construct an other who is to be resisted, that is, these fictions educate us to respond to certain social formations as the enemy, as the problem, as to the order that must be transcended. In Interstellar the dominant social formation appears to be some variant of Climate Behemoth, squashing previous history, condemning science (yet still funding NASA? It makes less sense the more you think on it), and the hope is to reinstate the Leviathan, now covering the solar system. Interstellar is a kind of nostalgia for the present—one shared by the liberal elites in response to Trump—though the movie was released in 2014, years before Trump’s election. In New York 2140, the extant order is Climate Leviathan, which seems to have survived ecological disaster after disaster, fulfilling Frederic Jameson’s quip “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (cited in Wainwright & Mann, 2018, p. 47). The dream is sort of Climate X, but the book is not utopian but merely optimistic at the end that small gestures could be accomplished, and the fight has just begun in the closing chapters. We do not, as in more utopian novels, get a structure of feeling for life in a different order, for example, in Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), LeGuin’s Dispossessed (1974), or Gumbs’s “Evidence” (2015), just that such an order might be possible, that Leviathan is not the end of history, to quote Francis Fukuyama’s thesis (1992). This is a pedagogy of small optimisms. But the smallness of the vision is in line with the ambiguity and deep democratic, intercommunal nature of Planet X.

It should be clear that the Climate Leviathan 4-square template is not all inclusive, and other futures, not anticipated by the authors, are possible and can be read in the interstices (between the lines) of these fictional futures. Alyssa Battistoni’s (2018) review ends with exactly this sort of reading of other possibilities in and outside of the 4-square.

Must movements really be opposed to all forms of sovereignty, on all scales, in order to oppose a capitalism-reproducing world state or achieve any measure of justice? Is there truly no left-populist Climate X that could act as a counter to Behemoth at the level of the nation, no way to channel planetary solidarity through international—not necessarily global—institutions? The difference between, say, Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to nationalize and decarbonize the British energy industry and Justin Trudeau’s sign-off on private pipeline projects in Canada may not be enough to save the planet, but it would seem to deserve at least the status of an opening. Instead, the ways that actually existing states have acted in relation to their subjects as well as in relation to capital are collapsed by the authors into an argument about sovereignty—for or against.

Another possibility, albeit a darker one, is signaled by the Bezos-Interstellar articulation: as likely as any future is a feudal but non-ethnic, plutocratic, fragmented, anti-Leviathan social formation. A neo-feudalist vision or corporate future that mixes Leviathan’s acceptance of climate change and preference for technocratic solutions with Behemoth’s eco-fascism—that is, rejecting the global nature of climate change or even its existence in the name of resource hording for hegemonic groups however imagined or defined. This could look like Neal Stephenson’s world of Snow Crash (2003), in which the U.S. is divvied up between competing food chains. This is a cyberpunk reimagining of the organization of politics in which corporations are the state in a way very distinct from neoliberal capitalism or fascism. One can sense this in the quasi libertarian utterances of Silicon Valley (writ large) players like Bezos, Musk, and others but also in their political ambitions. My point here is that while Climate Leviathan helps us imagine much more than the CliFi offerings of popular (and less popular) fictions, in more analytic and strategic ways, it is not a final word, not even on the fictions I have cross-read against it here.

Conclusion: Formalizing the Curricula of Eco-futures

To think of texts as educative, it is necessary to state that they operate at the level of imagination and habitus. They shape what we can consider and what how we feel within the matrix world of the story extending outward to our affect in the worlds in which we live. The stories I consider here, fictive and academic, help consider and condition the horizon line of potential action. To consider Climate Mao or Climate X as a possibility is to see beyond the Leviathan embraced by Interstellar and assumed to be the extant governmentality of 2140. These texts thus interact with, that is, are intertextual with, current discourse on strategies moving forward, especially after the failure of the U.N. Climate Conference COP25, in which actors really associated with the Climate Behemoth, for example, Donald Trump, scuttled the agreement. The eco-fascist state lightly portrayed in Interstellar is suddenly palpable. The question becomes, can we envision a way forward toward 1) actual effective responses to the looming climate crisis and 2) something participatory and democratic within those responses?

Take Kate Aronoff’s short fictional opening to “With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation” (2018). Aronoff tries to capture daily life under Green New Deal (GND) in 2043. The story confounds in a number of ways. First, while presenting a vision of social democracy: rent controlled housing, free wifi and broadband, and free water; it does so under the most U.S. terms, hybrids of public and private, that ultimately seem more like neoliberalism with a safety net than a revolution. This is most clear in her portrayals of American Job Centers, in which people are connected to work and training through these centers, but basically the market and entrepreneurship are the defining qualities—in essence this is ObamaCare for labor.

But the history of ObamaCare should make anyone wary about such a future. ObamaCare has been shredded and defunded by courts and Congress, that is, by people opposed to any moral economy that does not let the poor starve and die in the manner that their God of the Wealthy does not support. In short, Aronoff’s story is told without the presence of an active and hostile (and even fascist) opposition, without actors whose identities are tied in deep ways to extractive industries, without climate deniers and their industrial backers, that is, in some other world than this one. It is not the story of struggle and opportunity, of strategy and tactics needed to make the vision a credible tale. This is where Climate Leviathan succeeds more than the other fictions considered here: it spins futures that one can taste, battles one can imagine winning and seeds of hope that are embraceable because the opposition, in both the forms of Leviathan and Behemoth, is factored in.

The world needs fictions: great novels that move between our fragile present and better futures. We need both to be educated to exist within a more modest material world, for those of us in the power centers, and a world shared across all types of social and geographic borders, and stories that get us there in compelling ways (plural intentional). What can we say about such stories: they must heroicize care against the narrative of the frontier of Interstellar, they must be driven by something different than the Darwinian/Classical Economic logics of survival of the individual against the other (as Wynter has so elegantly argued for (e.g. McKittrick, 2015, pp. 16–18) wherein morality is equated with that survival). Finally, it must be a story that is filled with pleasures small and large, that is, that provides a reason for living in such a world. The texts here hint at such elements as the collective action and small heroicisms of New York 2142, the love and connection that drives Cooper in Interstellar, and the dream of democracy and life not yoked by a sovereign in Climate Leviathan, but the stories I am asking for are still being drafted.