Abstract
Anthropogenic climate change, global warming, the sixth mass extinction event—whatever we want to call it—is now fixed in the science fiction imaginary: witness the recent success of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2010) and consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future depiction of abrupt climate change in the “Science and the Capital” trilogy (2004, 2005, 2007). Perhaps just as noteworthy is the recent spate of novels about future climate-changed worlds by authors who are not usually identified with science fiction. This includes writers of so-called “literary” fiction on both sides of the Atlantic: Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Cormac McCarthy, Will Self, and Jeanette Winterson. Doris Lessing’s return to futuristic world-building in her “Ifrik” novels is worth considering in this vein. So too is British novelist Maggie Gee, and the environmental catastrophe she depicts in her novel, The Ice People (1998).