Goutam Majhi,
Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Sadhan Chandra Mahavidyalaya
Abstract: Science Fiction, abbreviated as Sci-Fi, falls within the literary genre of Speculative Fiction. Works of Sci-Fi amalgamate scientific thought and prognostic foresight. In the current Anthropocene epoch, which is also termed ‘Capitalocene’, humans are causing the cataclysmic degradation of the environment by bioengineering the planet, satiating an unceasing lust for material gain, and disrupting symbiotic alliances with other organisms. Hence, it is imperative to inculcate ecological cognizance in human beings and this purpose is effectively served by dystopian sci-fi. In fact, utopia is sustained in dystopian fiction. Dystopian discourse envisions a future world characterized by bleakness, desolation, misery and despair caused by environmental catastrophe in an ultra-technological world. The main objective of this literature is to resist the apocalypse by warning readers of the impending eco-disaster when climate denial persists in political framework. This research paper explores dystopian sci-fi through the lens of ecocriticism to understand its effectiveness. For this study, two texts namely The Road by Norman McCarthy and The Ministry for Future by Kim Stanley Robinson are extensively investigated.
Keywords: Science Fiction, Eco-dystopian Fiction, Utopia, Anthropocene, Ecocriticism
“The deer… had become victims of human meddling with the natural scheme of things not enough coyotes around and the mountain lions close to extinction, the deer have multiplied like rabbits and are eating themselves out of house and home”
——–Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
The above lines stated by Edward Abbey, an eminent American radical environmentalist, vent out his frustration about modern human society and their anthropogenic activities which are causing serious threats to ecosystems. The development paradigms engineered by capitalism and green capitalism are getting moulded at the cost of the health of this blue planet and at the same time, unfortunately climate denials in political frameworks are helping the development projects augment leaps and bounds. At this critical juncture, science fiction abbreviated form SF could play a crucial role in inculcating eco-ethics in humans. While arguing about the role of science fiction in human life, Carl Freedman opines that “I do believe that both critical theory and science fiction have the potential to play a role in the liberation of humanity from oppression” (Freedman xx). This is a disheartening fact that fiction bristles with climate change theme is not included to mainstream literature, rather this is often categorised as Cli-Fi or Science Fiction. In this regard, Amitav Ghosh, an acclaimed climate fiction writer, states: “…Fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change was somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel” (Ghosh 9-10).
Sci-Fi, which falls with the genre of Speculative Fiction, often critically explores the utopian future by predicting futuristic world equipped with the mechanisms of the advanced technology. It also significantly contributes to technocratic advancement, rather than simply speculating future through enthralling narrative strategies. In this connection, an interesting story behind the creation of Google Earth could be mentioned –as per some engineers, Google Earth, a geospatial platform used for visualization and scientific analysis of the satellite pictures of the Planet Earth, has been designed after being inspired by Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992) (“Notes on the origin of Google Earth”). Sci-Fi also envisions a dystopian future world, characterized by bleakness, desolation, misery and despair, by recounting the appalling accounts of apocalypse or post-apocalypse caused by the dominant human affairs. In fact, utopia is affirmed in dystopian fiction through the narrativization of the limits and unlikelihood of dystopian scenarios. In this connection, Wallace McNeish opines that “dystopia has replaced utopia as the dominant mode of speculative cultural imagination” in his work From revelation to revolution: Apocalypticism in green politics (McNeish 1040). While demonstrating the general motif of ecocritical discussion, the renowned ecocritic, Cheryll Glotfelty says, “the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences are damaging the planet’s basic life support systems” (Glotfelty & Fromm xx).
The origin of Sci-Fi dates back to second century when this form of writing as the particular genre was not an established phenomenon. It is believed that the first science fiction was authored by a Greek writer, Lucian, who criticised the foibles and follies of the society in which he was an integral part and to do so as, he used a method of an imaginative travel to the moon (Tymon 41). However, the eighteenth century, which was marked by the myriad scientific inventions, witnessed the emergence of Industrial Revolution and due to the immense technological advancement in this era, Sci-Fi had a fertile land to flourish. But the first Sci-Fi in true sense was Frankenstein (1818) which was authored by Mary Shelley. The notable Sci-Fi writers who took the genre to a great height are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Fitz James O’Brien, Edward Bellamy, Ambrose Bierce, H.G. Wells, and others. In contrast to utopian Sci-Fi, dystopian one emerged in the literary arena with the publication of the novel We (1921) by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. The works of dystopian fiction capture human concerns and agony. We significantly impacted the creations of other two major dystopian Sci-Fi works – George Orwell’s 1984 (1939) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1949) and both novels meticulously depicted totalitarian and bleak state of the future world.
In this research paper, two texts The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy and The Ministry for Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson are investigated extensively to seek the ecocritical effectiveness of dystopian sci-fi. But there is a debate regarding the genre of this novel whether it is a sci-fi novel or simply a dystopian fiction. In this regard, the novel could be assessed in the light of a well-accepted definition of science fiction. As per Darko Suvin, a noted science fiction critic, science fiction is, “… a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 8). Hence, as per the definition, to conform to the genre of science fiction, a text must not include the writer’s empirical reality but have a certain desirable connection to realism. The world portrayed in the novel is entirely a fictional one which is evident from the meticulous depictions of landscape and atmosphere throughout the text. In the opening chapter, the novelist describes the fictional world in its post-apocalypse state: “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (McCarthy 1). The valley that the father, one of the protagonists of the novel, viewed using his binoculars in the fictional world is described as thus: “Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop…The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke” (2 & 3). From these descriptions, it could be said that The Road bears the necessary elements to be regarded a sci-fi text as suggested by Suvin in his definition of the said genre.
The novel The Road unfolds a dystopic visualization of the post-apocalyptic world. In this emotionally shattering fiction, the storyline centres on the struggle of survival of a father, a forty-year-old man to protect his son, a ten-year-old boy, in the utterly annihilated sate of industrial civilization. The cause of the catastrophe is unknown in the novel. While asked about the cause of the apocalypse in an interview, McCarthy skips the answer by just saying that “it is not really important” (Jurgensen, 2009). The unnamed protagonists strive to survive in ‘barren, silent, godless’ world but their critical physical health might not let them reach the next winter. The novel opens in a landscape, where darkness looms over land and water bodies, death bodies litter, which is devastated by an unknown catastrophe and death permeates everywhere. The gory illustration of the bleak landscape is found in the line: “At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.”
The journey of survival essentially needed food supplies for which the father and the boy had to struggle. To evade the impending death, they had to scavenge the desolate towns, deserted houses and destroyed market to satiate their hunger and carry on their existential struggle. On the road journey, the ‘good guys’, father and the boy, encountered ‘bad guys’ – the cannibals who were normal human beings but the dearth of food materials led them to turn into the current form and the other people who tried kill the father and son just like the duo to secure themselves in insecure cataclysmic world.
It’s a brilliant dynamic tale which unfolds the imagination of posthumous juncture of environment and developed civilization. In post-catastrophic world, nature of human beings has changed, and they turn into murderers and cannibals. In fear of getting raped and murdered inevitably, and eaten, the man’s wife resolves to commit suicide with a piece of obsidian and to evade the definite doom, this pathetic decision of committing suicide is also manufactured by telling upon ecological equilibrium. The perils of the post-catastrophic world are evidently vivid in her following words –“They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I can’t…We used to talk about death.” At the end of the novel, the man succumbs to death by coughing up blood profusely. Before death, the man requests his son to carry the fire which is the source of life for regeneration. The very last paragraph of the novel portrays the vivacious life force of the pre-apocalypse world and ecological disaster puts an end to the human civilization. In fact, the concluding paragraph, which summarises the entire text, leaves us on a road and the journey along the road makes us aware of the gory future of our world if we do not adopt sustainable policies at an early date. The final paragraph states:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep lens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (McCarthy 306)
In this regard, Kenneth K. Brandt says that the “concluding passage spotlights a web of environmental interrelationships and presents a contrapuntal arrangement of images that implicitly conveys the totality of humanity’s dependence on ecological stability” (Brandt 65).
The speculative fiction in Global South also theorizes climate change through creating dystopian plot. The notable authors of this genre in Global South are Satyajit Ray, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Gautam Bhatia, S.B. Divya, etc. Even I tried to compose an eco-dystopian short story which featured in an annual children’s magazine entitled Alor Fulki in 2019 and later it became a part of the compendium Sera Alor Fulki (2021) (The Best Collections of Alor Fulki). The story revolves around a boy named Palash who travels to the future world in a time machine invented by his uncle who is by profession a Physics professor. Landing in the future soil, Palash gets petrified to encounter entirely an alien world which bristles with misery, desolation and gloomy atmosphere. The sights of cannibals on the roads of future world make him terrified. The cannibals are those existing humans striving for survival. Coming back to reality from time travel, his uncle makes the boy understand the cause of degraded civilization which he just experienced in the future world. Uncle informs him the impact of global warming is the main cause of the catastrophe and the domination of human activities is accelerating the climate crisis. Hence, Palash develops eco-conscious within himself and resultantly vows to plant sapling and protect them and above all, indulge himself in developing consciousness in his pals and neighbours (Majhi 454-457).
The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson is one the best sci-fi texts brought out in recent years. It’s a novel which is very impactful through its portrayal of future world which is struck by climate disaster. Robinson’s narration which is realistic in manner bears optimism even in dystopic vision. The novel takes the readers to near future where we find that Uttar Pradesh, a state in India, is struck by unprecedented heat wave. From the pictorial depiction of the narrator the readers can easily perceive the lethal heat wave: “And then the sun cracked the eastern horizon. It blazed like an atomic bomb, which of course it was. The fields and buildings underneath that brilliant chip of light went dark, then darker still as the chip flowed to the sides in a burning line that then bulged to a crescent…” (Stanley 1). Extreme heat and humidity claimed the lives of twenty million people in India. Frank May, an American aid worker, one of the protagonists of this novel, strove his best to help the people survive in ‘hottest wet-bulb temperatures ever recorded’ but unfortunately his attempts went in vain. When questioned about the perturbing opening chapter of this novel, in reply Robinson says: “Fiction can put people through powerful imaginative experiences; it generates real feelings. So I knew the opening scene would be hard to read, and it was hard to write…I felt that this kind of catastrophe is all too likely to happen in the near future. That prospect frightens me, and I wanted people to understand the danger” (Onion).
In COP29, held at Bogotá, Colombia, in 2025, the parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change unanimously decided to form a subsidiary body after the miserable failures in implementation of the resolutions adopted at Paris Agreement on climate change. The proposed subsidiary body is The Ministry for the Future and their aim is to “advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are as valid as our own ” (Stanley 15). This body is led by Mary Murphy, a former foreign minister of Ireland.
The current world witnesses the extreme technological advancement to comply with the established ‘development’ paradigm designed by capitalism and thereby causing ecological crisis. Robinson’s imagination of decarbonization of economy through implementation of various economic policies such as global carbon tax enhancement , Georgist land taxes and most interesting introduction of ‘carbon coins’, a cryptocurrency, are the most welcoming hopeful steps to eradicate carbons from atmosphere. In the novel, Mary Murphy appeals the central bankers to adopt carbon coin to expedite the process of decarbonization of ecosystem. In Mars trilogy, Robinson critiques capitalism and surfaces the dreadful impact of this economic system. The idea of carbon coin that Robinson drew from a research paper titled “Hypothesis for a Risk Cost of Carbon: Revising the Externalities and Ethics of Climate Change” co-authored by Delton Chen.
Unlike The Road, The Ministry for the Future is harrowing as well as utopian novel about climate crisis. It delineates with climate change, environmental degradation, and climate refugees. Deceitful politicians and the affluent capitalists who are always guided by profit-mania – are the targets of Murphy because these people are plundering the earth to satiate their mere lust for material possessions. While discussing about the plot of this novel, Stanley says that “The Paris Agreement is a major event in world history and inspires great hope in me that it will serve as a framework for the world’s many nation-states to cooperate in decarbonizing rapidly enough to save civilization from all kinds of climate change damage and death” (Brady). Taking into account of the irresistible supremacy of capitalism in world economy, the current epoch, as per Donna Haraway, could be termed as Capitalocene. Since capitalism is indicted on the augmentation of carbon emission in biosphere, Jason W. Moore in his book Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Civilization, argues for checking carbon particles to restrict climate apocalypse.
Incredible scientific innovations have moulded human civilization in a new form and the process of pursuance of extreme material advancement causes ecological degradation. Aldo Leopold states that “ man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen” (Leopold 218). But interestingly, in this novel Robinson relies on technology to decarbonize ecosystem from its degraded position for making it sustainable for future generations. In this text, we find Indian Government uses geoengineering to combat the historic heat wave as Badim Bahadur informs Mary that “You must have heard that the Indian government is beginning a solar radiation management action,” (Robinson 39). In this project, Airforce is deployed to sprinkle Sulphur dioxide to diminish the dimming effect.
While the Ministry for the Future fights carbon polluters, there emerges a secret radial environmental group Children’s of kali. Kali is a Hindu deity representing destruction and death and she symbolises the Mother Nature for having her formless nature. This radical group through their horrifying activities tries to frighten people to curb the usage of fossil fuel. Even in Carl Hiassen’s novel Tourist Season (1986), we find a small group of ecoterrorists called Las Noches de Diciembre led by Skip Wiley, a newspaper columnist. To protect Florida’s natural organisms, the members of this group took some radical steps like kidnapping, killing, bombing, etc. to deter the tourists to visit the state. In the U.S., during 1970-80s, a number of environmental radical groups such as Earth First!, Earth Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Army operated actively and their prime mission was to secure wilderness from the unrestrained encroachment of capitalism. They secretly carried out their operations as a reaction Their environmentally radically anarchist operations stemmed from the disillusionments induced by the activities of mainstream environmental agencies. The book which vastly impacted the ecoteurs in the U.S. was The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) by Edward Abbey.
The essence of green literature lies in the diffusion of imperative underpinnings of environmentalism that have strong potencies to illuminate people with eco-consciousness. By vividly portraying the catastrophic vision of post-apocalyptic world, these dystopian sci-fi novels or more precisely eco-dystopian novels, on one hand, strive to make the readers contemplate the dreadful future of Anthropocene, and on the other, indoctrinate eco-dystopic sensitivities in all and sundry to construct a mechanism of eco-resistance to impending cataclysmic ecological devastation. In this context, a significant question arises – how far is it impactful on the readers to catastrophize the future of the blue planet in the fictional framework? To draw a direct answer to this essential question is onerous. But the discourse of dystopian sci-fi certainly acknowledges and establishes the scientific climate change statistics and consequently creates public opinion which puts pressure on state machinery which may have developed an inclination to erase climate change-related data or to be in denial mood to pave a hassle-free way to the agents of capitalism to carry on their development ventures at the cost of environmental degradation. Hence, the portrayal of apocalypticism or post- apocalypticism in the dystopian turn appears quintessential in achieving the mission of sustainable green world through ecological sexuality. Fortunately, the history of this world is still being written but human affairs would determine how long this process continues.
Works Cited
Brady, Amy. Chicago Review of Books, 27 Oct. 2020, https:// chireviewofbooks.com /2020/10/27/a-crucial-collapse-in-the-ministry-for-the-future/
Brandt, Kenneth K. “A World Thoroughly Unmade: McCarthy’s Conclusion to The Road.” Explicator, Vol. 70, No. 1, 2012), pp. 63-66.
Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000, p. xx.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the unthinkable.
Jurgensen, J. . Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy-Interview with Cormac McCarthy. Wall Street Journal. 2 March 2019. Accessed 10 Feb 2023. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand Country Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford UP, 1949, p. 218.
Majhi, Goutam. “The Time Machine.” Sera Alor Fulki, edited by Ansar Ul Haque & Swapan Pal, All India Children’s Literary Foundation, 2021, pp. 454-457
McNeish, Wallace. “From revelation to revolution: Apocalypticism in green politics.” Environmental Politics, Vol. 26, no. 6, 2017, p. 1040, https://www.tandfonline.com /doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2017.1343766. Accessed 1 Feb, 2023.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Picadore, 2006.
“Notes on the origin of Google Earth.” Reality Prime, 24 July, 2006, http://www.realityprime.com/ blog/2006/07/notes-on-the-origin-of-google-earth/
Onion, Rebecca. Slate: The Gold Rush, 16 Aug. 2021, https:// slate.com/technology /2021/08/ministry-for-the-future-first-chapter-kim-stanley-robinson-interview.html. Accessed 8 February 2023.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future: Orbit, 2020.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press, 1979, p.8.
Tymn, Marshall B. “Science Fiction: A Brief History and Review of Criticism.” American Studies International , Vol. 23, No. 1,1985, p. 41.
Goutam Majhi, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, has been teaching at Sadhan Chandra Mahavidyalaya since 2015. He is a Doctoral Scholar at the Department of English, Bankura University. His writings featured in many international journals. His translation work includes Manthara by Abhijit Chowdhury. His forthcoming co-edited volumes include Beyond the Heteronorm: Interrogating Critical Alterities endorsed by Lexington Books I Rowman & Littlefield, Postcolonial Ecospheres: Environmental Principles, Policies and Politics in South Asia endorsed by Brill Publication and Gaia’s Progenies: Ecocritical Exploration in Select Indian Children’s Fiction endorsed by Rowman & Littlefield. His forthcoming translation compendium entitled 200 Years of Bengali Children’s Literature: A Journey (1800-2020) endorsed by Anthem Publication.
[Volume 5, Number 1, 2023]
