{"id":27477,"date":"2024-12-31T04:04:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/?p=27477"},"modified":"2024-12-31T05:44:05","modified_gmt":"2024-12-30T21:44:05","slug":"2024%e5%b9%b4bmj%e5%9c%a3%e8%af%9e%e4%b8%93%e5%88%8a%ef%bc%9a%e4%bb%8e%e7%98%9f%e7%96%ab%e5%88%b0%e5%85%a8%e7%90%83%e5%8d%b1%e6%9c%ba%ef%bc%9a%e6%b0%94%e5%80%99%e5%b0%8f%e8%af%b4cli-fi%e5%89%8d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/?p=27477","title":{"rendered":"[2024\u5e74BMJ\u5723\u8bde\u4e13\u520a]\uff1a\u4ece\u761f\u75ab\u5230\u5168\u7403\u5371\u673a\uff1a\u6c14\u5019\u5c0f\u8bf4(cli-fi)\u524d\u7684\u6c14\u5019\u5c0f\u8bf4"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Feature<\/strong> Christmas 2024: For Forever<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From plague to planetary crisis: climate fiction before cli-fi<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Lakshmi Krishnan<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

BMJ<\/em>\u00a02024;\u00a0387\u00a0doi:\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1136\/bmj.q2583<\/a>\u00a0(Published 18 December 2024)Cite this as:\u00a0BMJ<\/em>\u00a02024;387:q2583<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Literature has long sounded ecological alarms and imagined our planetary futures, finds Lakshmi Krishnan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our oldest stories begin in the soil or by the sea, myth being the original ecological narrative. The Mand\u00e9 and Sumerians tell of people growing from seeds or moulded from earth; Rigveda, the ancient Hindu sacred text, and the Kojiki,<\/em> the earliest written Japanese chronicle, speak of births from primordial oceans; and Abrahamic traditions place us in Eden\u2019s lushness. With industrialisation came a new imperative: writers began exploring not just our connection to nature but also our power to destroy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Climate fiction is a recent literary genre confronting environmental and societal breakdown. But literature has grappled with the interplay of people and environment long before \u201ccli-fi\u201d exploded in the 2010s. These works offer more than historical perspective. They reveal how story and imagination might help us grasp what climate data alone cannot\u2014the full scope of our crisis\u2014while helping us to envision paths beyond catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last Man<\/em> by Mary Shelley (1826)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Lionel Verney is the sole survivor of a global plague in a 21st century Europe torn asunder by political upheaval, societal collapse, and environmental catastrophe. Shelley is better known for Frankenstein<\/em> (1818); Last Man<\/em> pushes those Gothic scientific horrors further, to humanity\u2019s extinction. Written after Mount Tambora erupted in today\u2019s Indonesia, causing a volcanic winter that lasted over two years, and reflecting Shelley\u2019s personal tragedy, this prophecy about human spirit in the face of disaster influenced a flock of apocalyptic subgenres: the trope of a lonely human roaming the planet after a \u201cdie-off\u201d endures. Read it for the clarity of Shelley\u2019s vision and her evocative prose: memorably, in Verney\u2019s encounter with a sheepdog still guarding its dead shepherd\u2019s flock\u2014crystallising nature\u2019s persistence against our impermanence and suggesting the possibility of different bonds between species in a world beyond human dominance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life<\/em> by Elizabeth Gaskell (1848)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mary Barton<\/em> deals directly with the terrible, polluted conditions of working class districts in Manchester during England\u2019s Industrial Revolution, where daily life wavers through a toxic, pervasive haze. Gaskell\u2019s descriptions of poisoned skies raining black dust, children gasping in smoke choked alleys, and workers\u2019 lungs turning to stone in factories epitomise environmental violence. These burdens disproportionately affect the working classes, doomed to struggle \u201cbetween work and want,\u201d as unchecked industrial proliferation and profit mongering exact their human cost. Part domestic novel, part social critique, Mary<\/em>Barton <\/em>is an early template for understanding how industrial centres become locuses of both progress and premature morbidity and mortality. It is a poignant chronicle of urban interconnectedness\u2014showing how the health of individuals, communities, and the environment are inextricable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Time Machine<\/em> by H G Wells (1895)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you think things are bad, they are about to get worse. H G Wells transports us at warp speed into Earth\u2019s twilight, the terminus of social and environmental decay. A time traveller encounters a world divided between the childlike, surface dwelling Eloi and the subterranean, menacing Morlocks\u2014a grim example of class division resulting in divergent evolution. True horror awaits as he hurtles further forward in time, with \u201cprodigious velocity,\u201d to a dying Earth. Here he finds \u201cabominable desolation,\u201d where monstrous crabs scuttle across a degraded landscape, finally pressing on to an unrecognisable dark planet stripped of all animal life. Wells\u2019s writing frightens. As the traveller\u2019s curiosity transforms into disgust and unease, we vibrate in sympathy. As he returns to tell the tale to his friends, only to disappear again, we too dread what is to come\u2014a potent brew of planetary horror and nervous speculation about humanity\u2019s future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Day of the Triffids<\/em> by John Wyndham (1951)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Imagine our world over-run by ambulatory carnivorous plants. When a meteor shower blinds most of humanity, the bioengineered triffids, cultivated for oil, escape and assert their dominance. Wyndham\u2019s tale explores technological hubris through the eyes of a sighted survivor watching it all unravel. Exposing the consequences of unchecked scientific experimentation on the natural world and resource greed, the book also reveals a dark vision of society\u2019s attempts to reorganise after environmental catastrophe. Written as Britain\u2019s post-war welfare state emerged, it probes the dichotomy between individualism versus community in times of crisis\u2014questions that are resonant in climate emergency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dune<\/em> by Frank Herbert (1965)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.\u201d So goes one of the many sayings dotting Herbert\u2019s grand vision of ecology, power, and religion. Resource scarcity is the organising principle. Only the desert planet Arrakis (Dune) produces a spice, m\u00e9lange, that drives the interstellar economy\u2014a metaphor for our petroleum dependent world. Arrakis is a delicate ecological system with a hostile climate. Indigenous Fremen, who have learnt its ways, refuse to submit to intergalactic overlords. Enter Paul Atreides, a sci-fi Hamlet bent on revenge. Through Atreides\u2019s journey from privileged heir to eugenically engineered messiah, Herbert crafts a masterwork about environmental adaptation, indigenous rights, and resource colonialism. Dune\u2019s<\/em> immersive universe, complete with its own theological-ecological lexicon and sweeping cosmology, is a triumph of worldbuilding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

House Made of Dawn<\/em> by N Scott Momaday (1968)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What is it to be a stranger in your own land? Abel returns to his Pueblo culture after fighting in the second world war, alienated from both his ancestral traditions and the encroachment of modern life. This Pulitzer prize winner, considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance, began as poems\u2014and it shows. Steeped in the natural landscapes of the American Southwest, it explores the impacts of forced dislocation from ancestral lands and disruption of ancient ecological practices on native communities, and the spiritual, existential connections between land and people. Drawing from intergenerational indigenous knowledge systems, Momaday rejects linear time for a cyclical understanding where past and present, human and landscape, physical and spiritual, are in constant conversation, just as they are in nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New Atlantis<\/em> by Ursula K Le Guin (1975)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Manhattan is under 11 feet of water, and America is drowning. As extreme weather makes tracts of the US uninhabitable, now-coastal Portland is under authoritarian control. The government maintains power through a late stage capitalist and bureaucratic apparatus of terrifying banality: marriage is illegal, hospitals are tools of coercion, and people are under surveillance and beholden to the state for electrical power. But threaded through this is a reverie about a submerged continent rising from the ocean depths, as a small group of mathematicians devises a way to harness solar power and free themselves from the state. In this citizen science movement lie seeds of resistance, as old continents sink to make way for the new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em> by Edward Abbey (1975)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This cult classic fuses high octane adventure with heartfelt environmental activism\u2014Mad Max meets eco warrior\u2014and is so influential that \u201cmonkey wrench\u201d has become synonymous with sabotage carried out by environmental activists. Four eco-anarchists engage in \u201cconstructive vandalism\u201d to protect the American Southwest from industrial development: burning billboards, damaging construction equipment, and plotting to destroy the Glen Canyon dam. Irreverent as it may be, it also raises questions about the ethics of direct action in the face of environmental exploitation. Do we have to burn it all down to allow ourselves and nature to rebuild?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Petals of Blood<\/em> by Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o (1977)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Petals of Blood<\/em> screams, as Ng\u0169g\u0129 traces a long historical chain of unchecked development across the global south. Through the stories of four characters involved in a murder investigation in post-independence Kenya, we witness how the village of Ilmorog transforms from a thriving region into a modern town, charting the devastating effects of land dispossession and environmental degradation. Promises of liberation prove false, as people are betrayed by a new African elite who merely replace the colonial regime. The novel meditates on how colonial scientific discourses and extractive capitalism transformed people's relationship with their environment\u2014replacing traditional ecological knowledge with systems that view nature solely as something to be studied, controlled, and exploited, and perpetuating patterns that still shape global climate inequality. Petals of Blood<\/em> is named for the flowers that bloom during drought and the sacrifices of those who suffer under colonial and postcolonial systems. Yet Ng\u0169g\u0129\u2019s indictment is not without hope: even when the system abandons them, the people will keep fighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parable of the Sower<\/em> by Octavia Butler (1993)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo be led by a fool,\u201d wrote Octavia Butler, \u201cis to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.\u201d The unsettlingly prescient Parable of the Sower<\/em> exists between fiction, prophecy, and, increasingly, reportage. Its America is ravaged by climate emergency, resource scarcity, and the dismantling of essential services and environmental protections under the guise of economic recovery. Without safety nets or state accountability, people form communal units for survival. Through Lauren Olamina\u2014a teenager with hyperempathy syndrome\u2014Butler explores how environmental catastrophe reshapes human consciousness. As Lauren develops a new faith, Earthseed, the novel asks us to envision healing our wounded earth through new myths, a fundamental disruption of our belief systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feature Christmas 2024: For Forever From plague to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27478,"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27477\/revisions\/27478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csccm.org.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}