THE ANTHROPOCENE UNCONSCIOUS

THE ANTHROPOCENE
UNCONSCIOUS

Climate Catastrophe Culture

Mark Bould

First published by Verso 2021

© Mark Bould 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-047-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-048-8 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-049-5 (US EBK)

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Andrea,

who asked for the weirdest of birthday presents:
that I write another book.

Having lived through the process, maybe next time you’ll settle
for a LEGO Technic Fast and Furious Dom’s Dodge Charger.

Twined we were, entwined, then riven,
Ever to new embracements driven

Herman Melville, ‘John Marr’

not in what we glimpse
but in that we yearn to glimpse it,
and in our sense that glimpse it we can

China Miéville, ‘Death Cults of East Anglia’

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Anthropocene, the Unconscious

1.  Chum to the Maw

2.  Serious Literary Silences

3.  The Sound of Silence

4.  The Life Aquatic

5.  We Am Groot

Conclusion: The Dialectics of Dominic Toretto

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Anindita Banerjee, Michelle Clarke, Catherine Constable, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Beata Gubasci, Karolina Lebek, Sarah Lohmann, Ania Malinowska, Peter Maurits, Chuckie Palmer-Patel, Sherryl Vint, Brian Willems and Rhys Williams for inviting me to test out parts of this at conferences and seminars. It is so much less bad than it would otherwise have been.

Thanks to Rosie Warren for taking it on and bearing with me through all the delays – and all my daft suggestions for cover art and immensely long subtitles.

Thanks also to Mark Wilson, Mark Martin, Maya Osborne and Amelia Ward for all their hard work and support.

That the day job did not defeat this project is down to Charlotte Crofts, Kathrina Glitre, Humberto Pérez-Blanco, Steve Presence, Sarah Robertson and Estella Tincknell. Especially Kathrina, without whom I would never get anything done.

Thanks to Junot Díaz for asking me to write the thing that spawned the voice I needed.

Big love to China Miéville for immediately getting it, insisting I write it and giving so much feedback that (gee thanks) I now have to do a sequel.

Love of similar proportions to Dan ‘Disneycene’ Hassler-Forest for sharing the struggle. For a while there he was very nearly my new Billy Zane (or at least that’s what he asked me to say).

INTRODUCTION

The Anthropocene, the unconscious

Imagine the world to come.

Imagine we carry on doing too little too late. Imagine we continue to set inadequate emissions targets with no real intention of meeting them, and then keep right on missing them. The parts per million of atmospheric CO₂ relentlessly increase. Temperatures rise, releasing the methane naturally sequestered in permafrost and ocean bed clathrates.

The last of the glaciers melt. We lose the polar icecaps, first in the north and then, inexorably, the south. The oceans rise and, since water expands as it warms, rise still more. Low-lying islands disappear. So do the densely populated river deltas. Coastlines retreat. Hundreds of millions flee the inundation. Hundreds of millions more stay behind and die.

Elsewhere deserts form, and agriculture collapses. Daytime temperatures kill. Those who can, take flight.

More refugees. Endless border violence to keep them out.

Skirmishes, then wars, over food and fresh water.

Large-scale geoengineering projects distribute climate amelioration here and foreseen-but-ignored consequences there. Unforeseen consequences fall where they may.

More corpses. Not just human. The sixth great extinction accelerates. As each species diminishes, its environment collapses a little more.

Death cascades.

The planet persists.

But we are gone.

Imagine a world haunted not just by the dead, but by the spectre of death. Drawn ever closer by the already locked-in consequences of our actions and inaction. Its domain extended by endless escalating catastrophe.

Imagine a future of foreclosed possibilities.

Haunted by all the worlds that were, and all the worlds that could have been.

Then imagine – as Amitav Ghosh suggests in The Great Derangement (2016), the most widely read and highly regarded book on literature and climate change – that somewhere in the middle of all this, in a future in which ‘sea-level rise has swallowed the Sunderbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable’, there are still museums and libraries and bookstores. Picture its inhabitants, urgently examining ‘the art and literature of our time … for traces and portents’ of the upheavals that made their ‘substantially altered’ world.¹

And ‘when they fail to find them’, Ghosh asks, ‘what should they – what can they – do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight?’²

This is, of course, nonsense.

It requires us to imagine tidal surges discriminating enough to sweep away significant portions of the ‘science’, ‘politics’ and ‘science fiction’ shelves, not to mention all that gussied-up ‘climate fiction’ too fancypants to consider itself sf.

And it requires us to believe future humans will have really poor reading skills. Because the truth is: auguries abound. The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness.

But the truth is also that mundane fiction – what Ghosh calls ‘serious literary fiction’ – has mostly failed to engage with climate change. And, as we will see in chapters two and three, this is because the mainstream bourgeois novel mistook exclusion for insight, a glitch for a feature. Muteness is its unique selling proposition.

Ghosh’s account of the built-in shortcomings of mundane fiction is pretty persuasive, but where he sees near-universal failure, The Anthropocene Unconscious often finds negotiations with the limitations of the form. Not silence but expressive aphasia, teeming with tongue-tied questions. Must a text show tides rising in a world that is elsewhere parched, must it mash up Waterworld (1995) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), to be ‘about’ climate change? Must it – like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004–7) and New York 2140 (2017) – map the progress of the storm? Must it depict smart people in white coats telling each other things they all already know, but the reader might not, about greenhouse gases, hockey-stick curves, retreating glaciers, shrinking ice sheets, Gulf Stream deceleration, clathrate outgassings and so on? Must the observation of environmental shifts be explicitly connected to climate destabilisation, as is the radically altered migration of monarch butterflies in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012)? Must fiction be immediately and explicitly about climate change for it to be fiction about climate change? Is there no room for the symbolic? The oblique? The estranged? No room to think about the capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal histories, systems and structures that are historically and foreseeably responsible for climate destabilisation, and through which it has, is and will be experienced? No room to consider texts that do not say ‘climate change’ aloud? To discover what happens if we stop assuming a text is not about climate change?

And what of the kinds of fiction that lie beyond Ghosh’s self-imposed restrictions? What of the ‘serious’ fictions of the arthouse cinema and the graphic novel? And of not-so-serious and not-so-literary? Of blockbusters and genre fictions? Cable movies and comics? The popular, the trashy and the disreputable? The sort of things the ‘serious’ and the ‘literary’ might wish the seas would swallow?³

Somewhere in the African veldt, a hominid ape, uplifted into sentience by an alien monolith, hurls a bone into the air; four million years later, in 2001, a similarly shaped nuclear weapons platform orbits the Earth.

In my semi-colon – in that space between Stanley Kubrick’s frames – lies the starting point and almost all the rest of the Anthropocene.

A series of visual echoes follow: another spacecraft, then the Pan-Am Orion shuttle climbing silently into space, then a pen floating in freefall inside its passenger compartment; the curvature of the Earth, the orbital trajectories around it, the twin-wheels of a massive space station, which gently spin, producing gravity-like centrifugal force for its inhabitants; that rotation, the circular path of the drifting pen, the waltz of the Orion’s docking manoeuvres. This sequence of images reiterates and extends the evolutionary development implied by cinema’s most famous match cut – from apes learning to use tools to the expansion of humanity (well, white men, mostly) into interplanetary space.⁴

This is the consensus future history promulgated by mid-century Anglophone sf, by such rocketry advocates as Wernher von Braun, Walt Disney and NASA, and by sf-author-turned-Kubrick-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke. It echoes and extends America’s frontier mythology upwards and outwards; indeed, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was initially conceived as a roadshow epic along the lines of How the West Was Won (1962). However, for sceptical satirical Kubrick, the masculinist–colonialist Cold War conquest of space is profoundly unheroic – a bathetic affair, conducted by bland bureaucrats and other corporate functionaries.

In the two hours of screen time after that match cut, two years of story time pass. A second monolith, excavated on the Moon, transmits a signal towards Jupiter, where another, much larger monolith awaits. Dave Bowman, sole survivor of the mission sent to investigate, plunges headlong into this Stargate’s unfolding vortex of dazzling lights, strange geometries and otherworldly landscapes. He wakes in a simulacral suite of baroque rooms. Time distorts. He sees older versions of himself, who in turn see older versions of himself. A final monolith appears and transforms him into the luminous Star Child. He floats in space, blankly contemplating the Earth below.

Clarke’s novel, written alongside Kubrick’s film, is much less elliptical, but its ominous conclusion is just as ambiguous. The Star Child wills the Earth’s orbiting atomic arsenal to explode, bringing ‘a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe’, after which he ‘brood[s] over his still untested powers’: ‘he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something’.⁵ Clearly, humanity is soon to be subjected to another nonhuman intervention, to extraterrestrial experimentation, to posthuman becoming.

After which, the time of the Anthropos will, by definition, be over.

But where exactly in that celebrated match cut did the Anthropocene begin?

The stories we tell about the world matter, but it is not always easy to know where to start or what to call them.

The Anthropocene is derived from Anthropos (‘human’) and cene (‘recent’, as in the current geological era, the Cenozoic, dating from 66 million years ago, and its several epochs: Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene). It describes the period in which human activity has disrupted significant geological conditions and processes, and/or in which traces of human activity can be discerned in the geological record. The term is usually attributed to either the biologist Eugene Stermer, who used it in the 1980s, or more commonly to the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who independently re-coined it in the late 1990s.⁶ Après quoi, le déluge terminologique …

the Accumulocene

the Andropocene

the Agnotocene

the Anthrobscene

the Capitalocene

the Carbocene

the Carnocene

the Chthulucene

the Corporatocene

the Econocene

the Eremocene

the Eurocene

the Homogocene

the Homogenocene

the Idiocene

the Manthropocene

the Misanthropocene

the Naufragocene

the Necrocene

the Novacene

the Oliganthropocene

the Phagocene

the Phronocene

the Plantationocene

the Planthropocene

the Polemocene

the Proletarocene

the Pyrocene

the Suburbocene

the Technocene

the Thalassocene

the Thermocene

the Theweleitocene

the Traumacene

the Urbocene

the White (M)anthropocene

the White Supremacy Scene

&c.

&c.

&c.

-cene

is the new

-punk

but this is no mere glossolalia

This proliferation of terms – some serious, others playful – does not arise from confusion or obfuscation or jargon-for-jargon’s-sake. Nor is it the result of bandwagon-jumpers coining career-making catchphrases for the heady fame and giddying royalties academic publishing bestows, or even for a meagre slice of the ever-shrinking research funding pie.

Rather, it is what happens when the implications of a technical stratigraphic issue – primarily of interest to geologists and paleontologists – spill out into wider culture. It is trace evidence of an already-rich history of thinking through what it means for humans to have become a geological force.

Each of these terms tells the story from a different perspective and with different emphases. Half a dozen of them were coined by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz specifically to demonstrate the power a name has to construe a narrative, designate a protagonist, indicate an orientation, shape perception. For example, they only half-jokingly interrupt their Thermocene chapter with the observation that because the UK and US are responsible for at least 50 per cent of global cumulative total CO₂ emissions until 1980 ‘the Anthropocene should rather be called an “Anglocene”’.⁷

Changing the name changes the story.

As, of course, does deciding where to start it.

Nigel Clark argues for the longest of long Anthropocenes, beginning 1.6 million years ago on the African savannah, when Homo erectus first used fire ‘for warmth and light, for keeping predators at bay, and for increasing the available nutrient content of foodstuffs’.⁸ Noting, correctly, that the genus Homo evolved on a planet with a unique ‘combination of oxygen-rich atmosphere, ignition sources and fuels’, Clark rather less plausibly suggests that these ‘pyrophytic tendencies’ of the Earth itself somehow rendered the urge to burn carbon irresistible to certain upright hominids.⁹ And just as 2001’s bone-as-weapon leads inevitably to orbital nuclear missiles, so our catastrophic consumption of fossil fuels flows naturally from that first prehuman barbecue. The planet made us – makes us – do it.

Michael R. Raupach and Joseph G. Canadell more reasonably suggest that the Anthropocene should at least start with something closer to the actual Anthropos, when ‘half a million years ago … the ancestors of human-kind learned to derive energy from the controlled combustion of detrital biotic carbon such as wood and peat’.¹⁰ But once more, there is a Kubrickian cut that mythologises causation and obscures massive differences of scale. We are all, it seems, twisted fire-starters, and we just cannot help ourselves.¹¹

At the other extreme, the shortest of the short Anthropocenes dates either from the 16 July 1945 Trinity nuclear test, with it global spread of radioactive isotopes, or more generally from the end of World War II, when wartime production was retooled to manufacture mass commodities. Inaugurating a new phase of consumer capitalism, this shift expanded and intensified the use of fossil fuels, both as an energy source and in the production of plastics. This ‘Great Acceleration’ seems the option most likely to be selected by stratigraphers as the point from which to date the Anthropocene in the official Geological Time Scale.¹² And you can see why.

In 2004, Will Steffen and ten co-authors compiled twenty-four graphs of changes in human activity and global scale alterations to the Earth system since 1750. The first dozen chart increases in population, urban population, total real GDP, foreign direct investment, damming of rivers, water use, consumption (of fertiliser, paper, motor vehicles, telephones, international tourism and McDonald’s restaurants). The second dozen show the depletion rate of ozone and the increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (CO₂, N₂O, CH₄), average surface temperature, species extinctions, land domestication, coastal zone nitrogen flux, coastal zone structural alterations, and in the number of great floods and fully exploited fisheries.¹³ Each graph reproduces that distinctive hockey stick curve – a level then gradually rising line, measuring units against time, that abruptly swerves upwards – and on all of them that sudden steepening occurs around 1950. Which seems pretty conclusive. Especially if all we are interested in is resolving a technical stratigraphic issue.

However.

Two other short Anthropocenes should give us pause.

They both begin in the 1400s and are so profoundly interrelated that they are probably just different ways of looking at the same conjuncture.

The European ‘discovery’, exploitation, extraction and colonisation of the Americas devastated indigenous populations through disease, conquest, enslavement, resettlement and other forms of colonial violence. And since the Atlantic slave trade developed to replace indigenous forced labour in the looting of the ‘New World’, it also devastated African populations. Indigenous Americans had no immunity to smallpox and other diseases that leapt ahead of the European invaders, sometimes eradicating entire peoples before there was any direct contact. In the 150 years after Columbus landed, colonisers wiped out probably 50 million indigenous people, and the jungle reclaimed agricultural land so quickly that its increased uptake of atmospheric CO₂ is discernible in early 17th century ice cores.

Intertwined with this violent collision of worlds – which also brought about the biotic integration and homogenisation of species that had evolved on separate continents for millions of years – is the early modern development of capitalism as a world system, beginning with the Dutch and British agricultural revolutions. As Jason W. Moore notes, this otherwise well-established early history of capitalism is obscured in – and by – accounts that prefer to start a short Anthropocene with the industrial revolution in 18th century Britain, and thus to shift the blame, consciously or not, onto ‘industrialisation’ rather than capitalism and colonialism.

Crutzen, for example, selects 1784 – which he associates with ‘James Watt’s design of the steam engine’ – as his starting point because that is when ‘analyses of air trapped in polar ice [show] the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane’.¹⁴ But as Moore scathingly enquires, if the ‘motive force behind this epochal shift’ was ‘coal and steam’, then what was the ‘driving force between coal and steam?’

Not class. Not capital. Not imperialism. Not even culture … you guessed it: the Anthropos. Humanity as an undifferentiated whole.

The Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all. The mosaic of human activity in the web of life is reduced to an abstract Humanity: a homogeneous acting unit. Inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, racial formations, and much more, have been largely removed from consideration.¹⁵

The Anthropocene recognises humanity as a geological force, but does so indiscriminately. In ‘the time of guilt’, it finally admits as human those it denied ‘in the time of plenty’.¹⁶ Hence Moore and others prefer to call it the Capitalocene.

Yet some would rather stick with the Anthropocene.

For example, Adam Trexler argues that the term avoids such ‘politically contentious’ phrases as ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ – for which it is now effectively a euphemism – and moves discussions away from prognosticating outcomes to asserting ‘a phenomenon that has already been measured and verified across scientific disciplines and conclusively linked to human emissions of fossil fuels’.¹⁷ It refocuses us on a geological process that far exceeds any solution to be found in individual consumer choices, and emphasises ‘larger, nonhuman aspects of climate’, such as ‘the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere’, that ‘will continue to act’ independently of us.¹⁸

Adopting the aura of scientific authority is not without risk. It appeals to science’s own ideals of objectivism, universalism, scepticism and disinterestedness, at the same time obscuring the extent to which science is not only a human and social practice but one that is increasingly dominated, directed and shaped by corporate and state interests, often in direct contradiction of those ideals. And it is not at all clear how effective this borrowed mantle can be when capital’s ideologues, sponsors and bagmen conceal scientific findings that might undermine profit margins. When they spend decades and dollars muddying the waters. When their manufactured uncertainty is misreported by ‘news’ media as conflict between equally valid, equally scientific viewpoints. And when, in the crazy dance of illiberalism and undemocracy, ascendant populisms deride expertise and throw out the baby of scientific consensus with the bathwater of technocratic governance.

Furthermore, talking about a geological epoch invites awestruck recoil at sublime magnitudes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, since hubris should be clobbered once in a while, but also risks evasion and complacency.

Yes, the climate does possess all the qualities of a hyper-object. It is ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’, and thus functions on ‘profoundly different’ scales and temporalities than those we are used to.¹⁹ It is so vast as to be ‘almost impossible to hold in mind’.²⁰ It showers us with effects and affects, even as it withdraws from our comprehension: we can see rain, but not climate; a banknote, but not the economy. The weather or the dollar bill is but ‘a flimsy, superficial appearance’, a ‘mere local representation’ of a phenomenon so massive, so extended in space-time, that it finally shatters idiot illusions of linear cause-and-effect.²¹ By definition, the hyperobject, always invisible, exceeds our framings of the world, and presses chaos, complexity and non-linearity upon us.

But in the face of such debilitating immensity, we cannot merely shrug and take a selfie. We cannot allow the scale of the crises we are already living through, and of those to come, to trump their urgency.

To do so is to condone the impoverishment, immiseration and deaths of untold billions, human and otherwise.

These many different terms and timescales, these variouscenes, foreground what each of the others conceals, obscures, distorts, suppresses, manipulates, thwarts and denies. Together, they expose the unconscious of ‘the Anthropocene’.

Indeed, this book argues, the Anthropocene is the unconscious of ‘the art and literature of our time’.

In Sigmund Freud’s model of the human mind, the unconscious consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes, traumas and ideas that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge. It is not some pre-existing dumpster into which we chuck these things, but the ceaseless roiling process of repressing them. Peristaltic and paradoxical, it is shifting, unstable, uncertain. It is ‘history pressing on the present and manifesting in disruptions of discourse’, slipping out in distorted forms – dreams, lapses, jokes, parapraxes, tweets, odd fixations, strange associations – from which the unconscious itself can only be retrospectively inferred.²²

Bereft, bothered and bewildered, Ghosh’s future humans seem unaware of the unconscious as a metaphor and method for reading critically. Pierre Macherey, for example, argues that a text’s shape, matter and meaning are produced by selecting these particular words, images, sounds, structures, patterns, ideas, themes, and so on, and thus by rejecting those. At the same time, a text must grant entry to all the things it ‘is compelled to say in order to say what it wants to say’.²³

Thus a text is always disrupted – fractured even – by material its producer might rather exclude, and thus less coherent than it pretends. It is trailed by swarms of ‘other things which must not be said’,²⁴ by an eloquent jive of demurral, equivocation, circumvention, slippage, contradiction. And it is laden with prior interpretations: from the whole apparatus of production, marketing and consumption; from reviewers, critics, scholars, book clubs, friends and other recommendation algorithms; and from ‘the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions’.²⁵

Macherey describes the text as being surrounded by and filled with such silences – like the externalities intrinsic to capitalism that must always be denied, removed from calculation, if that shambling jerry-built corpse-machine is to keep on keeping on. He imagines a circumambient yet somehow also internal realm of the unspoken, and likens it to the unconscious.

But critics are not bathyspheric explorers plumbing textual depths. At no point do we even need to break the surface. The clamour of the unspoken is everywhere. Thus, it is beyond quixotic to imagine that criticism is concerned with uncovering the text’s single true meaning. Because there is no such thing. There is no rabbit waiting to be pulled out of the hat. There is probably not even a hat.

Criticism is about the words and images and sounds that are there for all to see and hear. It cannot reduce a text to something less complex and imagine that it is somehow ‘say[ing] more by saying less’.²⁶ But it can encourage the text to speak: to confront ‘the silences, the denials and the resistance’ of which it is formed, to enunciate ‘its silent significance’.²⁷ Criticism can bring ‘out a difference within the work’ that demonstrates ‘that it is other than it is’.²⁸

No submersibles or prestidigitation required.

Fredric Jameson argues that to draw out the textual unconscious, critics must rewrite the ‘text in terms of a particular master code’.²⁹ Queer film theory, confronted by relentlessly heteronormative movies, does just that. It asked viewers to stop assuming that everyone in the movie is straight, and instead to watch queerly. To encourage the silent currents of desire that flow through films to speak aloud, and to amplify them.

And suddenly, that first bristling barroom encounter between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in My Darling Clementine (1946), filled with the threat of violence, becomes about two men, full of themselves and fascinated by each other, flirting. The female friendship at the heart of Calamity Jane (1953) becomes more intimate and persuasive when Doris Day sings about a ‘secret love’ and ‘a woman’s touch’. At some point you realise that X-Men: First Class (2011) was Brokeback Mutant all along, and the ending of Die Hard (1988) will never look the same.

And ultimately, The Anthropocene Unconscious is about this kind of rewriting. Except, it asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?

Let us begin in unpropitious waters.

1

Chum to the Maw

In mid-summer 2013, Hurricane David swept up the west coast of Mexico, driving unprecedented numbers of sharks north into unfamiliar waters. On 11 July, the storm approached Santa Monica, forcing the disoriented predators into the shallows, where they attacked surfers and swimmers. Just minutes later, the hurricane hit. A prodigious storm surge raced inland, through West Los Angeles and beyond, spewing the voracious fish into the flooded streets. At the same time, the first of three massive water-spouts that would tear through the city formed and hurled sharks at unsuspecting Angelenos.

It was the first recorded sharknado.

Produced by mockbuster powerhouse the Asylum, and debuting on Syfy, the $1 million Sharknado underperformed, attracting just 1.37 million viewers, a hundred thousand fewer than expected for one of the channel’s consciously cheap and laughably ‘original’ movies. However, live-tweeting by minor celebrities and others – reaching up to 5,000 tweets per minute – set it trending, and audiences for the repeat screenings grew, attracted as much by the social media frenzy, itself widely covered online and in more traditional media, as by the film. Thus, an action-comedy-revenge-of-nature-disaster-movie mash-up, whose star only took the role to pay for his family’s health insurance, became a phenomenon. It spawned a sequel every year for five years, becoming sillier and – which is not necessarily the same thing – increasingly science-fictional.¹

The first movie introduces the divorced former surfing champion turned bar-owner Fin Shepard, played by Ian Ziering, who brings an utterly unwarranted Tom Cruise– like intensity to the role. Aided by Nova, a waitress who was orphaned by sharks, he must save – and reunite – his broken family.

In the second, three sharknadoes converge on New York, where Fin must once again quell the storms to save his no-longer-ex-wife April, his family and the city.

In the third, multiple Atlantic sharknadoes threaten the whole of the ‘Feast Coast’. Fin, his estranged ex-astronaut father, Gil, and the heavily pregnant April fly into orbit to activate mothballed SDI weapons that will quash the storms – and to fight sharks hurled into space by the extreme weather. Re-entering the atmosphere inside a shark, April gives birth to a son, also called Gil, but she is then crushed and killed by falling shuttle debris.

The fourth is set five years later. Unknown to Fin, April’s mad-scientist father has transformed her into a Terminator-quoting flying cyborg, which, beyond giving her a more active role, is a brilliant solution to affectless Tara Reid’s inability to play anyone even remotely resembling a human being. When an innovative nationwide sharknado-suppression grid fails, sharknadoes plough through west coast and mid-western cities before the rebooted system can dissipate them. However, after one electrically enhanced sharknado – a lightningnado – hits the Perry Nuclear Plant, Fin and April must build a quantum box around Niagara Falls to shut down this nukenado (I have no idea what this means or how it works, but neither does the script).

The globetrotting fifth film begins in the cave system beneath Stonehenge. Fin and Nova – who quit waitressing to found the black-clad Sharknado Sisterhood, a secret organisation comprised entirely of generically hot chicks in tight costumes – unearth an ancient sharknado-suppression technology, a network connecting sacred sites around the world, but unintentionally disable it. A sharknado containing a dimensional vortex makes off with young Gil. His parents, in hot pursuit, are deposited in Switzerland, Australia, Brazil, Italy, Japan – where a giant radioactive Sharkzilla stomps Tokyo and kills Nova – and finally Egypt. In the pyramids of Giza, Fin and April unleash the devastating power of the ancients, stopping the global sharknadoes but accidentally destroying the world. Fin, the last man alive, wanders the ruins with the April’s severed-but-still-active cyborg head in a bag. One day, a vehicle appears, driven by Gil, who is now a grizzled old man. Thrown into the distant past by the sharknado/vortex, it took him decades to invent time travel …

While travelling forward through time, Gil rescued characters who died in the earlier movies, snatching them up in the split second before their deaths and depositing them safely in sundry historical periods. And so the sixth movie opens 65 million years in the past, just minutes before the K-T asteroid impact. Fin, Nova (who did not die in the fifth movie), human-April (who did not die in the third) and cyborg-April’s head shut down the first ever sharknado. They leap forward in time, pursuing iterations of the young-but-growing-older Gil and fighting sharknadoes in Camelot, the American War of Independence, the Wild West and 1950s Santa Monica (where Fin encourages his parents to hook up). In 1997 San Francisco Nova saves her grandfather, but the sharks that had killed him instead devour her and April. Fin and Skye (his childhood sweetheart, who did not die in the second movie) misdial their flux capacitor, arriving in a post-apocalyptic 20,013 of April clones and flying robot sharks, ruled over by the now evil cyborg-April head.

Somehow, Fin makes it back to that first deadly summer, reworks the opening of the original movie and brings an end to the sharknado threat for good. And all this chrononautical malarkey has irrevocably altered the world. This time around, Fin and April worked on their marriage and did not alienate their children, families and friends; and Nova, no longer an orphan, has no reason to hate sharks.

The Sharknado movies are salvage artefacts, composed of the flotsam and jetsam of American TV. News footage of floods, disasters and accidents – sometimes dressed with shoddy CGI storms, airborne sharks and other meteorological phenomena – collides with hastily shot, green-screen-heavy location and studio scenes, similarly subjected to deliberately unconvincing digital enhancement.

Through this visual patchwork flows a torrent of allusions to TV series – Baywatch, Taxi, The Twilight Zone – and movies – Airplane!, Back to the Future, Evil Dead 2, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jaws, The Lady and the Tramp, Mission: Impossible, Network, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Roman Holiday, Scarface, The Sound of Music, Space Cowboys, Star Wars, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Toy Story, The Wizard of Oz and that bit from Independence Day pastiching Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. Some of these riffs, nods, plagiarisms and petty larcenies become recurring in-jokes. Others – April’s reworking of the Action Comics #1 cover, the reference to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension – are unexpected, possibly even obscure. But none of them are subtle.

At the same time, the screen is packed with half-remembered faces, drawn from the ranks of – often former – child actors, soap stars, talent show contestants, fauxality grafters, news and weather presenters, chat show hosts, authors, rappers, country and western singers, rock guitarists, Vegas crooners, comedians, veejays, bounty hunters, magicians, scientists, drag queens, figure skaters, skiers, divers, skate-boarders, wrestlers, the Chippendales, supermodels, glamour models, spokesmodels, romance novel cover models, right wing pundits, a Republican congresswoman,² a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury, Star Trek alumni, character actors who have done and should know better, writers and directors of crappy movies (including these ones), members of the crew, people whose fifteen minutes of fame were just too long ago, random cleavages, charisma vacuums, the dead-faced victims of ill-advised cosmetic surgery … Many of them play themselves, and some bring family along for the ride. And like the incessant allusions, they are there to be noticed, pointed at, exclaimed over.

The Sharknado movies are not unified or coherent. They eschew bourgeois textual norms and demand the retention of disbelief. They have no interest in absorbing the viewer, no aspiration to illusionism. They are Brecht gone bad. Digressive, dispersible and composed almost entirely of exit points, they interpellate differently. They bombard us with scattershot textual moments intended to draw attention to themselves, to prompt pleasures of recognition, groans of incredulity, cries of mockery and, more importantly, tweets, posts, memes, buzz. They are epiphenomena of commercially networked global media, glimpses of the informational hyperobject.

The franchise churns through cultural detritus, resuscitating and recirculating it, making it into capital once more.

Everything is chum to its maw.

But this rapacious, indiscriminate appetite for distraction means the sprawling, repetitive nine-hour Sharknado dreamwork cannot avoid talking about climate change. The term itself is used just once, in an easy-to-miss background TV news report, but as Sharknado 5: Global Swarming’s subtitle suggests, we do not have to look far to see climate change and other anthropogenic crises folded into the movies’ constantly self-unpicking fabric.

There are depictions of illegal overfishing and extinction events. Stray references to refugees, migrations and borders. Fantasies of hi-tech magic bullets and geoengineering solutions. Disruptions of space and time, shifts of magnitude and intensity, which figure the asynchronous, non-linear, tipping-point causality of climate change. And the narrative is repeatedly interrupted by news updates in which (real-world) presenters perform their (real-world) uncritical, platitudinous, sentimental, hyperbolic-yet-bored fascination with crisis, normalising extreme weather events even as they grow in size and frequency.

And there are the sharknadoes themselves.

Ludicrous, crudely rendered images of climate disruption and destabilisation, they gesture towards the weirdness and excessiveness of our changing weather.³ They are big dumb reminders that we share the world with other species.

The franchise shows recorded human history taking place in a period when – and because – sharknadoes are artificially suppressed. This implies that a climate inhospitable to humans is the terrestrial norm, that human civilisation developed in a period of climatic stability unusual in the planet’s history, and that climate chaos is destined to return. In the real world, we call that stable period the Holocene, and we are now poised on the edge of what will come after it, some of which we have already made unavoidable.

When we watch a movie, we inhabit a contradiction. We surrender to a fiction we know is fictional. Visual effects heighten this interplay of credulity and incredulity: they show us things we know cannot possibly be real. This pleasurable hesitation is often upset when effects fail to convince, and even the most cutting-edge accomplishments soon fade, become obvious, look fake.

But something different happens in the Sharknado movies.

Minimally concerned with the illusion of the real, their special effects are deliberately crafted to be amusingly inept. Their function is not to persuade but to titillate.

However, the movies’ overall tone and aesthetic is potentially disturbed by dependence on stock footage. A traditional economy for the low-budget filmmaker, stock footage is a just-good-enough way of avoiding location shooting and the costly staging of spectacular events. But, like visual effects work, stock footage produces its own set of contradictions. It is usually part of a visual rhetoric intended to maintain the viewer’s suspension of disbelief in the narrative and story world but, simultaneously, the visible differences in image quality draw disruptive attention to the movie’s artifice.

In the Sharknado movies, the contrasts between stock footage, narrative footage and the maladroit CGI with which they intercut and are often adorned are excessively evident. Such disjunctures underscore the actuality of the stock footage. Real catastrophe lurks beneath the surface. It emerges as out-of-place verité fragments, but is quickly swept away by remorseless torrents of distraction.

The repressed, however, always returns. Here, as exorbitant meteorological–ichthyological symptoms, as climate parapraxes, as anthropocenic slips of the tongue.

The franchise’s reluctance to say ‘climate change’ aloud is no bashful qualm.

The Asylum and Syfy promulgate an image of themselves as being fun, not serious, so as to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce and broadcast. And they obey a commercial imperative to maximise their niche audience segment by remaining superficial. At the same time, the franchise enacts – and speaks to – a habituated desensitisation to the ever-present existential threat of anthropogenic climate destabilisation. But whatever its source, this disinclination, this peculiar silence, does not mean that the franchise is not about climate change.

This should come as no surprise.

The fantastic expresses our fears and anxieties, our desires and sometimes even our hopes. Frankenstein’s monster embodies terrors of reproduction, foreshadows proletarian and anti-colonial revolution. King Kong rampaging through Manhattan enacts white fears of black masculinity and colonial comeuppance. Bodysnatching aliens are avatars of consumerist conformism. Robots are our dehumanised selves. Godzilla is the bomb.

So the first thing you should always ask of a monster is: what does it represent? ⁴

In Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… (2002), humans infected with the Rage virus burst out from a lab. The contagion spreads rapidly across Britain. It cannot be cured, controlled or contained. Infrastructure remains intact. Nonhuman life obliviously persists. But nearly every last Briton who is not dead is undead.

In a stately home near Manchester, barricaded against zombie assault, half a dozen soldiers sit around pondering when things will get back to normal. Sergeant Farrell corrects them: ‘If you look at the whole life of the planet … man has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality.’

More typically, monster movies contrast the brevity of human existence with the age of the planet by conjuring creatures from the distant past. By excavating crashed alien things from ancient polar ice and carelessly defrosting them. By unsealing dinosaurs from lost worlds or engineering them from fossilised DNA.

In Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2012), creatures from another dimension open a portal between tectonic plates in the Pacific, and from this Breach kaiju emerge to smash, stomp and generally destroy. But they have been here before. A throwaway exchange reveals that dinosaurs were actually part of an earlier attempt to colonise the Earth, defeated by the inhospitable terrestrial climate. However, anthropogenic climate change has now made the planet habitable for them.

As arithmetic, let alone history, this is nonsense. Dinosaurs were around for about 165 million years and were the dominant vertebrates for 135 million; Homo sapiens only speciated from Homo erectus (or an intermediate species) 350,000 years ago, about 1/400th as long.

This absurdity is not inconsequential. It indicates the terrifying rate at which humans are transforming the atmosphere. If we take Clark’s longest of Anthropocenes (1.6 million years), we have been at it for just one per cent of the time dinosaurs were around. If we take the shortest of Anthropocenes (70 years), just 0.0000042 per cent.

But I was talking about zombies.

Not all zombies require a shot to the head to kill them, and some do not crave a diet of human brains. In fact, the only thing all zombies have in common is that they mean. Jim Jarmusch’s melancholic The Dead Don’t Die (2019) spells this out with a deadpan lack of subtlety: whether it is alienation, consumerism, conformity, rich people, poor people, people of colour, people of pallor, immigrants, nationalists, white supremacists or Trumpians,⁵ zombies are as allegorical as fuck.

But whatever else they might mean, in this current conjuncture, any depiction of a massive, mobile and ‘unwanted’ population cannot not be about climate refugees, of which it is commonly estimated there will be 250–500 million by 2050.⁶

This need for human mobility in the interconnected world of global capitalism – and the drive to prevent it that manifests in borders and other forms of state violence – is reiterated throughout Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). It collects a series of interviews with men and women from around the globe (but primarily the US and Asia) that were deemed too personal to be included in the UN’s official report on the origins and spread of a zombie virus, and the ensuing war against undead hordes.

The novel opens near China’s Three Gorges Dam. One night, a child is bitten while diving in the reservoir, hoping to recover something valuable from the many evacuated and now submerged settlements. The doctor is delayed in treating him because of a confusion over place names. Relocated from Dachang, the villagers who sent for him call their new home New Dachang. However, Dachang itself was rebuilt brick-by-brick above the waterline as a tourist destination, as ‘a national historic museum’,⁷ and is also – and officially – called New Dachang. Although it is unclear whether the boy was patient zero, his case weaves the viral outbreak into ‘China’s next Great Leap Forward’,⁸ and into the marginalisation of people displaced by such development goals.

Such sites of displacement and exclusion play a key role in strategies to combat the zombies. The infamous architect of a plan to preserve white power if black South Africans rose up against the apartheid regime comes out of retirement one last time to produce a similar scheme for these new circumstances: abandon the majority of the population; use some of them as bait to distract the zombies; and transport the selected few to an isolated, heavily barricaded location to wait out the end of the world. Similarly, Israel announces a retreat to the 1967 borders, but only because it is easier to complete and enhance the separation wall around this smaller area. And in perhaps the novel’s most fantastical occurrence, Israel also extends the right of return to Palestinians. As a former Mossad agent explains in Marc Forster’s 2013 film adaptation, this is because ‘every person we save is one less zombie to fight’ – though, and of course, mere Islamophobic moments later, a young hijabi takes the mic to celebrate their salvation, and feedback squeal brings the zombie hordes, who scale the wall and overrun Jerusalem.

The novel recognises the global interconnections through which contagion spreads: tourism, international travel, commercial shipping, the organ trade, human trafficking. As the film puts it, ‘the airlines were the perfect delivery system’.

But the inhumanity of borders is best emphasised by attempts to halt the massive population movements sweeping the world, as people flee not only the zombies but the radically deteriorating environments produced by burning oilfields, nuclear winter and other climate-changing catastrophes. Disaster provides the pretext, and urgency the justification, to extend state violence. But turned back at gunpoint, refugees inevitably swell the zombie ranks, overrun defensive positions, sweep borders away.

In the real world, climate change is not recognised as a cause of migration. For example, the 1998–2012 drought in the Fertile Crescent of the eastern Mediterranean – the worst on record there and unquestionably exacerbated by anthropogenic climate destabilisation – is never officially entertained as the reason for attempted migration to Europe, or as a factor in the Syrian civil war.⁹

Neither are climate refugees likely to be recognised as refugees. Instead they will be dumped into intermediate categories to deny them the special protections they should be afforded. They will be called asylum seekers, and often held in detention centres, sometimes for years, while their petitions are processed, with no guarantee of success. Or labelled illegal immigrants, undocumented workers and economic migrants, many of whom might be entitled to refugee status or asylum but will be understandably reluctant to subject themselves to detention. Especially as the proportion of successful applications for asylum and refugee status has declined significantly since 1990.¹⁰

Most zombie stories reiterate one of two colonialist narratives: a lucky few shelter behind walls as savage hordes gather, or a plucky few undertake a perilous journey through hostile territory. Either way, the protagonist must develop a paranoid consciousness to survive, a turn-on-a-dime willingness to kill strangers, competitors for resources and those who, just a moment earlier, were friends, allies, loved ones. This violent survivalist monad, this attenuated, evacuated personhood, little different from the undead, also describes the neoliberal subject who, like the would-be survivor and the zombie, is reduced to ‘a mere calculus of interests’.¹¹

Annie McClanahan, however, argues that the subjectivity typical of the neoliberal era is rather different to the one described in much of the critical literature.¹² It is not the subjectivity of the bourgeois academic suddenly discovering quite how disposable the neoliberal university considers them. Nor is it that of the professional-managerial class, thrown into precarity by corporate restructuring, offshoring, predatory mergers and acquisitions, financial volatility and toxic debt, who then accepts interpellation as a ‘moment-by-moment calculation of loss and gain, risk and reward’.¹³ Rather, it is to be found among the most marginalised: the under- and unemployed, the working poor, peoples of colour, the indigenous, the immigrant and, beyond them, among the segregated, warehoused ‘surplus population that capital seeks to contain, not to credit; to export, not exploit; to annihilate, not to invest in’.¹⁴

It is to be found among the already dead.

In this context, and whatever else individual examples might also be about, zombie stories are dehumanising and murderously inhospitable responses to and anticipations of the multiple intertwined and overlapping anthropogenic crises.

They are about the middle-management of our own extinction.

But enough, for now, of the monsters lurking in the great midden of genre. Let us turn instead to mundane fiction.

2

Serious Literary Silences

Ghosh asks us to imagine the baffled denizens of future libraries to highlight the mundane novel’s general failure to address climate change. And to emphasise how blinkered contemporary literary culture must be to unthinkingly relegate any text that does so to ‘the genre of science fiction’, which it equally habitually despises.¹

Later, he asks us to imagine ‘a character … walking down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of weather phenomenon’:

To introduce such happenings into a novel is … to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house – those generic outhouses that were once known … as ‘the Gothic,’ ‘the romance,’ or ‘the melodrama,’ and have now come to be called ‘fantasy,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘science fiction’.²

Why, he asks, should this be?

As the mundane novel developed from the 18th century onwards, it broke with earlier narrative forms, such as the epic, and denigrated its rival, the romance, ‘the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents’.³ Instead, it fantasised the regularity of bourgeois life, which it equated with plausibility. It promoted the rational, the orderly, and the statistically normative. Having no time for the extraordinary, it was ‘deliberately prosaic’.⁴

Of course, any narrative proceeds ‘by linking together moments and scenes that are in some way distinctive or different’,⁵ but the novel suppresses their exceptionality through the accumulation of non-narrative quotidian detail. The minutiae of everyday life disciplines and regulates the boisterous confusions of reality, making events seem to flow naturally, smoothly and unexceptionally.

Thus the novel became intensive rather than extensive. It focused on a distinctive finite social and physical setting. On minimising or severing ‘connections to the world beyond’ its particular milieu, such as ‘the imperial networks that make possible the worlds portrayed by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte’.⁶ And on banishing from its purview nonhuman agency and those ‘forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space’.⁷

Like capitalism, the novel depends upon producing – and by definition not counting – externalities.

Countless mundane novelists wrestled with these formal constraints. Think of the raging gothic encyclopedism of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). The evolutionary speculation that complicates the elaborate social mapping of Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72). The ways Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) interweaves narratives of courtship and social jostling with Napoleonic battlefields, and the fate of nations with meditations on the nature of causation and narrativisation, of historiography itself. The tensions in Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) between the relativistic temporalities of contemporary science and the comedy of bourgeois peculiarities, between sublime alps and twitching neuroses, between the heights above and flatlands below – disjunctures which make novelistic illusions of personal significance seem absurd. Think of Zola, of Dos Passos … the list could go on.

But even these exceptions are really just articulations of the norm, that is, of the general tendency of the mundane novel, especially and increasingly in the twentieth century, to focus on the particular and the individual. To be centripetal rather than centrifugal. To tighten its focus, narrow its range – and miss out the world.

This tendency has always been present. For example, the main concern of Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) is the extraction of Fanny Price from poverty and Portsmouth. Her removal from the urban working class and from a major British port to the Bertrams’ eponymous country estate, where most of the novel is set, attenuates connections to the world beyond it. And although the Bertram fortune depends upon Antiguan plantations, and thus upon slavery, they are mentioned just a half dozen times in passing. This circumspection, as Edward Said argues, ‘sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence’.⁸

It also produces one of the novel’s most curious passages – when Fanny asks her uncle about the slave trade and is greeted with silence. Sir Thomas’s refusal to respond is not directly represented, denying the reader any possible insight into his reticence, but is recalled later, with minimal detail, by Fanny when talking with her cousin Edmund – a conversation which is not about slavery, economics or empire, but about her relationship with her uncle and cousins and about her own anxious, self-effacing development into ‘a pretty young woman’.⁹ These are the priorities not merely of this novel but of the novel.

Some argue that, despite Austen’s support of abolitionism, she did not consider slavery of sufficient importance to warrant more overt discussion, and thus is guilty here of tacitly supporting it. But since Fanny could have been talking to Sir Thomas about absolutely anything, Austen’s decision to mention slavery but to do so indirectly – in a conversation about a conversation – on some level recognises quite how excluded from the ‘proper’ matter of the novel such things had already become.

Either way, the passage separates the setting – the realm in which the main characters attempt to maintain or improve their social and economic standing – from the source of the wealth that enables and perpetuates it, even as it flickers briefly into view.¹⁰

This inward tendency is not just a preference for depicting upper class mating rituals, the hustle for position in Regency drawing rooms, or the conjugal destiny of assorted daughters and governesses. It is about a vision of bourgeois individualism, and of what the novel can – and should – do. To clarify this, Ghosh cites John Updike’s patronising New Yorker review of Cities of Salt (1984), the first volume in Abdelrahman Munif’s trilogy about the impact of US oil companies on an unnamed emirate in the 1930s and 1950s. Apparently, the insufficiently westernised Munif is merely a ‘campfire explainer’, wrongheadedly ‘concerned … with men in the aggregate’.¹¹ Thus he (unlike Updike, of course) is incapable of producing that sense of ‘individual moral adventure – of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance, which … has distinguished the novel from the fable and chronicle’ since Cervantes and Defoe invented the form.¹²

Such a mode of fiction is not without merit.

Yet by so precisely pinpointing the aspirations of the mundane novel, Updike also reveals its lack of ambition. Its refusal to engage with significant aspects of the world. Its parochialism. Its ideological blinkers. And its complicity in ‘a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled’, not just from literature but also ‘from politics [and] economics’.¹³

So where is the mundane novel now?

Three recent works that might seem to exemplify its centripetal drive and depleted connections with the world are Paul Auster’s thousand-page semi-autobiographical 4 3 2 1 (2017), Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019), usually misdescribed as a single thousand-page stream-of-consciousness sentence, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume, four-thousand-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle (2009–11).

4 3 2 1 follows four different versions of Archibald Isaac Ferguson. In each iteration, small changes of circumstance generate a parallel but different life. Each chapter has four numbered parts, and each part covers roughly the same period for its particular Ferguson. The four Fergusons were all born on the same day, 3 March 1947, into the same middle-class Jewish-American family in Maplewood, New Jersey; all are athletic, drawn particularly to baseball, and all are bookish, precocious readers who want to become writers. They share the same relatives and many of the same friends, but relationships differ, often strikingly. They grow up, pursue or abandon sport, stay in New Jersey or move to New York. Their families remain comfortably well off, or grow richer, or lose their businesses and have to settle for more constrained middle class lives. There are, or are not, deaths, divorces, second marriages. Most of the four have voracious appetites for classic and contemporary literature, classical Hollywood and European cinema, and/or classical music, jazz and the blues. As teenagers, they discover girls and sex; one of them embraces the bisexuality latent in the others. Some of them visit or live in Paris. Only one of them ever encounters anything resembling anti-Semitism. They all support the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and campus struggles, but to varying degrees and never very actively, and they all avoid serving in Vietnam.

It is elegiac, alluring.

Countless moments resonate across its quadripartite narrative.

Very long sentences, exquisitely weighted, unfurl and entrance.

It depicts historical times and places with realist precision but also insists on its own artifice, refusing dialogue conventions, writing about writing, and telling stories about telling stories.

And embedded in its several strands are constant reminders of the rich liveliness of the possible. The contingency of the actual. How susceptible our understanding of the world, of the moment, is to being organised in very different ways.

Each of the Fergusons has some sense of the world-as-itis being a balancing act. Of unseen determinants. Of alternatives haunting the actual.

After falling out of a tree, six-year-old Ferguson-2 tries to reason backwards to the cause of his broken leg: if the next branch had been closer; if his friend had not come around to play; if his parents had bought a different house in a different town without a tree in the back garden … a possibility that sets him imagining the different boy he might have become.

When seven-year-old Ferguson-3’s father dies, the world begins to seem like ‘a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn’t have been happening’.¹⁴ A decade later, Kennedy’s assassination confronts him with a sense of reality ending, with no hint as to what might come next: ‘Something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing where once there had been a something, as if every tree in the world had vanished, as if the very concept of tree … had been erased’.¹⁵

At summer camp, Ferguson-4 sets his friend Noah a logic problem: do you take the shorter, multi-lane road to an urgent appointment, even though it is rush hour and likely to involve traffic jams, or the longer backroad, which is less likely to be busy but has only a single lane in each direction? There is of course no way to know which is the right decision. Ferguson-4’s own fiction will return obsessively to such dilemmas. For example, one story is composed of isolated junctures in a man’s life, unconnected by any narrative tissue; another contains three stories following what happens when a man chooses alternative directions at a crossroads. Ferguson-4 comes to believe that ‘whatever choice he made was bound to be the wrong one’ because all decisions have unknowable consequences.¹⁶ Why? Because in John Cage’s words, ‘The world is teeming: anything can happen.’ ¹⁷

Four-year-old Ferguson-1 tunes the television sets in his father’s store to different channels, juxtaposing cartoons, westerns, soaps, church services, adverts, news and sports, ‘set[ting] in motion’ a ‘delirious swirl of mayhem’.¹⁸ Ferguson-2 contrasts the permanence and orderliness of books with a newspaper’s ephemerality, its collisions of content, its ‘hodgepodge of simultaneity and contradiction’.¹⁹ At fourteen, Ferguson-4 realises that a life does not possess the linearity of a Bildungsroman but a complexity ‘akin to the structure of a tabloid newspaper’: there is no predetermined order in which to make your way through the events it reports and the trivia it contains.²⁰

Ultimately, 4 3 2 1 is a paean to a world long gone. To comfortably middle class, blithely-unaware-but-as-decent-as-they-can-be white liberal post-war kids, none of them ever quite as insufferable as Holden Caulfied or Danny Rand. It presents a stable world of bourgeois certainties, where tightening your belt means getting rid of the maid or one of your several cars. Where precarity means relying on well-connected relatives, ample savings or a timely inheritance.

This historically, geographically, culturally specific bubble of privilege is richly detailed: the four Fergusons are just a month younger than Auster himself, and the novel has the warm glow of memoir. History is present – from Jackie Robinson breaking the colour bar through to Watergate – but almost entirely as backdrop and pageant.

Thus the novel feels hermetically sealed, like a pocket universe parallel to but distinct from our own. This is accentuated by Auster’s solution to the problem of concluding his novel. One Ferguson reveals that he invented the stories of the other three to weave through his autobiography, which is also called 4 3 2 1. And then, just like that, he pulls the ladder up behind him and is gone.

This metaleptic scramble to a higher diegetic level – which might have seemed innovative in the 1970s, when the ‘real’ Ferguson supposedly wrote it – should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Auster’s long dalliance with metafiction. Or to the reader attentive to the way the novel repeatedly sets out a false binary. It constantly denigrates those who attempt to reinvent the world, in favour of those who decide they cannot change it but can at least make aspects of it more bearable for some – usually themselves.

For all its brilliance, 4 3 2 1 is the tired sound of boomers justifying to themselves their ruination of the world.

Ducks, Newburyport is actually divided into fifty-two distinct sections, alternating between two narrative strands concerned with maternal feeling and endeavour. The minor one, told in conventional prose and never running for more than two pages at a stretch, follows a rare Eastern mountain lion through Pennsylvania and Ohio, first with her cubs and then, after they are ‘rescued’, in search of them. The major strand, told in parts ranging from seven-and-half to 127 pages, is a stream-of-consciousness account of an unnamed Ohio woman’s everyday life. There are no sentences, just words, phrases, clauses – including the frequently recurring ‘the fact that’ – separated by commas. And since each section begins with a lower-case letter and ends with a comma, continuity of consciousness is implied, even though the sections do not immediately follow on from or lead into each other. Hours, days or weeks might pass between them.²¹

This strand is composed of the narrator’s thought associations, mostly as she works in her kitchen, making cakes and pies for local restaurants to supplement her husband’s income. We learn, in snatches, here and there, about the family’s declining middle class lifestyle and status; about her childhood, her mother and sisters; about her academic career and the cancer that ended it; about her first marriage, her second marriage, and her four children; about neighbours, clients, acquaintances and sort-of friends; about her taste in fiction and films and songs, and the contents of her freezer. There are lists of sandwiches, desserts, creeks and islands, and ruminations about celebrities, dinosaurs, terrorism, drone strikes, decluttering, big pharma, male sexual violence, rape, white privilege, medical insurance, college debt, conspiracy theories, police violence, mass shootings, ethnonationalism, immigration, open carry, doomsday preppers, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump …

It is as if cable news, tabloid journalism and talk radio – as well as some more reliable sources – stream through the narrator, weaving the centrifugal into the centripetal, capturing something of the way in which human interiority is infiltrated and shaped by exteriority.

Thus despite Ducks, Newburyport’s inwardness, unfolding anthropogenic crises run through it: extractionism, fossil fuels, dirty power, fracking and global warming; agribusiness, factory farming, consumerism and carbon footprints; melting icecaps, extreme weather, floods, and lowlying islands threatened by rising tides; endangered species, coral die off, colony collapse, and the sixth great extinction; the displacements, migrations and behavioural changes of various species; viral pandemics, cancer clusters, respiratory diseases; declining air quality, diminished watersheds, dams, dead lakes and habitat destruction; chemical, industrial and domestic pollution; isotopes, lead, mercury, microbeads, microplastics, nanoparticles, PCBs, radiation, tailings and toxins; population growth, slave labour, climate migration, refugees, camps and cardboard cities …

In fact, it has no intention of avoiding such things, but the stream-of-consciousness form Ellmann deploys makes constructing a coherent critical account of them impossible.²² Rather, it establishes their typically unacknowledged presence in and impact upon ordinary, if still relatively privileged, lives. By repetition and accretion, the Anthropocene unconscious emerges into visibility.

My Struggle’s loudly trumpeted autobiographicality doubles down on its intensive inwardness. It recounts Knausgaard’s life in remorseless, unaccented quotidian detail. It tells of his troubled relationship with a domineering, sometimes violent and eventually alcoholic father. Of his sexual desires and inadequacies, and of his own struggles with drink. Of becoming a writer, a husband and father. Of trying to be less of a dick, and less obsessed with his dick.

It should be utterly tiresome, and sometimes it is, yet it also somehow renders the accumulation of ordinary moments compelling, at times even mesmerising.

But despite its best centripetal efforts, its solipsism and solecism, it cannot avoid at times connecting outwards. For example, in the opening incident of volume one, eight-year-old Knausgaard, watching news coverage of the search for a missing trawler in 1976, is startled by pareidolia: in the ‘grey-green swell’ of the sea of the northern coast of Norway, ‘suddenly the outline of a face emerges’.²³ In 2004, glimpsing in a floorboard the half-averted face of a thorn-crowned Christ, he abruptly recalls this long-forgotten childhood moment, this uncanny suggestion of something beyond the immediately perceptible surface of the world. Soon after, he argues that ‘until the Age of Enlightenment’, ‘the great beyond’ was located in the divine, and then in the Romantic period in ‘sublime’ nature: ‘the mountains are vast and intense, the sea is vast and intense, even the trees are vast and intense while humans … are small’.²⁴ But then, starting with Edvard Munch, it ‘is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs’.²⁵

Consequently, Knausgaard recognises that what his fiction ‘ought to do’ is ‘affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, … revel in the world outside’, and express those ‘sudden states of clear-sightedness …, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself’.²⁶

But he cannot.

He attributes this failure to his own psychological shortcomings. Yet clearly it is at least as a much a product of the way he has internalised the conventions and concerns – that is, the limitations – of the mundane literature he so admires.

In volume three, reflecting on his 1970s childhood, Knausgaard asks ‘Did I know that it couldn’t last?’ and ‘Did I really think it would last?’.²⁷ He answers ‘No’ to the first question, and ‘Yes’ to the second (but promptly admits he was wrong). Shortly afterwards, he describes ‘an enormous oil platform in the sound … which was due to be towed out the following week’,²⁸ his first overt acknowledgement of the fossil fuel economy underpinning Norway’s growing affluence.

In volume six, environmental changes begin to register. The European fire-bellied toads unique to a particular coastal stretch of southern Sweden are eerily absent, as are the nightingales that always used to be heard there. This prompts Knausgaard to imagine a novel about an elderly Gotlander who suddenly finds out about colony collapse, the disappearances of wild salmon and a butterfly species, and the mysterious mass deaths of bats, fish and birds.²⁹ He later contemplates writing a novel – it might even be the same one – about ‘the final days, told by a man alone in a house, in the midst of a dry, warm landscape in late summer’.³⁰ Another idea he entertains for a novel concerns a nineteenth century disaster in which the entire population of a Norwegian village collapses and dies in the middle of the hay harvest: all the air is ‘sucked up from the earth by some thunderous implosion’ and returns ten minutes later ‘in an ear-splitting tumult’.³¹ Later, he reads a sign near a tree stump, explaining that it ‘had died from a disease that had hit almost every tree of its kind in Skåne’, and the first section of the novel ends on a beach overrun by swarming ladybirds: ‘There was something ominous about it, as if something had gone wrong, as if something that ought to have been closed had been opened … I thought to myself this is how the world ends’.³²

The landscape in which Knausgaard’s depiction of (mostly) lower middle class life since the 1970s takes place is ineluctably, if incidentally, that of an accelerating global petroculture: not just the oil rigs and oil tankers glimpsed offshore, but the plastic bags and bottles and gas stations, the journeys by car, bus, train and, increasingly, plane, the groceries and other commodities gathered in from across Europe and the world, the shifting Scandinavian demographics …³³ But these occasional hints of the uncanny and scant apprehensions of desolation seem – given the rapid pace of My Struggle’s composition – to be there purely by accident. As if they have slinked up unnoticed from some abyssal basement.

Ghosh does acknowledge that some of the genre outhouses are equipped to engage with nonhuman agency and forces of unthinkable magnitude, and thus with climate. But among them, even sf is inadequate, because – even though his own Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning sf novel, The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), takes place mostly in the 1890s and 1990s – sf is apparently always set in the future, and the future is ‘but one aspect of the Anthropocene’, which ‘also includes the recent past, and, most significantly, the present’.³⁴

His solution to this seeming impasse is two-fold. The mundane novel should either stop repressing climate change and finally actually pursue its self-proclaimed project ‘of reproducing the world as it exists’, or it should embrace a different goal:

What fiction … makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode, to conceive of it as if it were other than it is; in short, the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warning has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.³⁵

In short, though this is not what Ghosh means to say, the mundane novel should become more like sf – a genre that operates entirely in the subjunctive, describing events that have not happened, including those that might happen, will not happen, have not yet happened and could have but did not happen.³⁶

But before we make our way to such generic outhouses, there is more to be said about mundane fiction, a mansion that – to appropriate Shirley Jackson – has stood for many years and might stand for many more, its walls continuing upright, its bricks meeting neatly, its floors firm, its doors sensibly shut, where silence lies steadily and whatever bourgeois monad walks there, walks – of course! – alone.

3

The Sound of Silence

Ghosh identifies three mundane novelists who are deeply concerned with climate change but have never addressed it in their fiction. The journalist and environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth documented turn-of-the-millennium global resistance movements and later founded the Dark Mountain Project – a group of writers and artists who reject ‘the stories that our societies like to tell themselves … that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway’.¹ However, he ‘has yet to publish a novel in which climate change plays a major part’.² The Booker Prize–winning human rights and environmental activist Arundhati Roy ‘is passionate and deeply informed about climate change’, but ‘all her writings on these subjects are in various forms of nonfiction’.³ And climate change ‘figures only obliquely’ in the nine novels written by Ghosh himself.⁴

Since Kingsnorth and Roy had each published only a single novel at the time, this is hardly a damning indictment or indicative of anything much. But Ghosh’s claims about their work, and his own, betrays a quite stunning literal-mindedness about what it means for a text to be ‘about’ climate change.

Kingsnorth’s The Wake (2015) is a ‘post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years ago’.⁵ It tells of the 1066 Norman invasion, of the brutal expropriation of land and property, the murderous destruction of indigenous ways of life, and of Anglo-Saxon guerrilla resistance – of the bands of ‘grene men’ led by a freeman called Buccmaster and others.

Written in a partly invented variant of the Old English spoken a millennium ago, it poses the kind of linguistic challenge familiar from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) or Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980). However, it estranges the reader not by anticipating future evolutions of the English language but by returning us to (some of) its roots.

Kingsnorth composed the novel in pseudo-Old English because ‘the way we speak is specific to our time and place. Our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes – all are implicit in our words, and what we do with them’.⁶ But despite the rigour of his endeavour, it remains impossible to leave such things behind. And even if he were somehow to circumvent them in his writing, the reader would still encounter the novel in and through the present moment. For example, when we read of a far-from-perfect, already-transforming society falling victim to an invading army and violently imposed foreign modes of governance, and of insurgent resistance, it is difficult not to see it all through the lens of the invasion, occupation and plundering of Iraq. The defeated Anglo-Saxons even have to cover the cost of being invaded and reconstructed:

and he saes geeyome cyng will be raisan the geld for all men to two scillings for eacc carucate so as to mac good the worc what harald thief of coronas had not done to cepe this land safe from ingengas

now i was not the only one roaran out for loc what this cunt has saed. he tells us that we moste gif mor geld to an ingenga cyng to cepe ourselfs safe from ingengas … and this is all the cyng needed to sae for war had cum to angland with him and it did no end at sanlac or in lundun and it wolde not end now.⁷

In a similar way, the novel constantly evokes climate change.

It is told retrospectively, from Buccmaster’s perspective long after his wife and sons have been killed and his land taken, long after England’s ruination by invaders. After the fire has come. After ‘it has beorned high and strong and for many years and it has eten all angland in it and now angland is but a tale from a time what is gan’.⁸

It begins with foreboding: ‘be waery of the storm be most waery when there is no storm in sight’.⁹ Buccmaster spots a strange black bird flying slowly in the still air above the Lincolnshire fens. It has a long neck, fiery eyes and, at the end of its wings, human fingers. It is the devil’s bird, he thinks, a harbinger for all to see. It is the time of the first ploughing, around Easter, ‘in the year when all was broc’.¹⁰

One ill omen follows another. In the ‘next fuccan month’, Halley’s comet appears – a hairy star that ‘has been seen in efry part and all has been afeart of it’.¹¹ Buccmaster senses that ‘there is sum great thing cuman from the sea’.¹²

The opening pages focus on changing land use as, even before the Norman invasion, the wild fens were being tamed, turned agricultural. Buccmaster pins the blame for this squarely on an earlier invader, Christianity, whose priests disrupted the relationship between the people, the old gods and the land:

this hwit crist … he is not a god of the ground of treow and leaf or mere and snow of sumor and all the grene lif in the land. he is a god of men only and he tells thu to loc up to the heofon not around at thy place in this land. he is an ingenga god from a land where there is no treows and no luf for anything what is not man and for this great yfel the folcs of angland has been gifen the ire of the frenc. if thu wolde lif thu moste feoht and the eald gods will feoht with thu and if thu does not feoht thu will die for this is the way of things and the only way.¹³

Such anxieties about migrants, invaders and strangers from other places, about constant upheavals and uncertainty, about the fear and threat of violence, course through the novel.

Elsewhere, Buccmaster recalls his grandfather’s contempt for those who refuse to

lysten to the wise for what the wise has to sae is not what they wants to hiere for what they wants to hiere is that their lifs is right as they is and that they is good folc and does not need to do naht … they does not see beyond their hus into the night … they is blithe in their hus fuccan and drinccan while all in the wilde world falls away.¹⁴

And in the face of this unfolding catastrophe – and in a perhaps unintentional nod to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s classic petrofiction Oil! (1927) – Buccmaster warns that ‘there will be fuccan blood’.¹⁵

It is difficult to imagine how The Wake – with its images of storm, fire and flood, of resource wars and refugees, of both desperation and apathy in the face of cataclysm, with its headlong tilt from unheeded omens to a time, just two years later, when ‘all is broc’ and ‘fucced we was fucced and beorned’¹⁶ – is anything other than a novel about climate change.

Buccmaster notes that travelling storytellers might think they merely entertain poor peasants, but ‘in sum of their tales they tells great triewths though they is too dumb to cnaw it’.¹⁷ Which is to say, if you write an apocalypse now you cannot not write about the apocalypse now.¹⁸

Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) is set in Ayemenem, a village in the south-western Indian state of Kerala, between 1969 and 1993. Ammu leaves her abusive husband, whom she met on a visit to Calcutta and hastily married in a desperate attempt to escape this rural backwater and her domineering parents. She returns to raise her twins, Rahel and Estha, in the household of her divorced brother, Chacko, her bitter, widowed mother, Mammachi, and her even more embittered, sexually repressed, caste-obsessed aunt, Baby Kochamma.

The novel starts with the funeral of Chacko’s daughter, Sophie Mol, who was visiting from the UK. It then swirls backwards and forwards in time, filling in the lives of these and other characters, tracing the events that led up to the funeral and charting its aftermath. Gradually, the personal and political contexts surrounding the tragic death are unpacked.

As a child, Rahel, her eyes closed against the hot bright sun, sees the world as if from underwater: ‘the coconut trees were sea anemones, waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud’.¹⁹ She sees the world as it is and the world transformed. And if, like her, we squint, we can see another novel interwoven with the narrative described above.

It opens with Ayemenem’s long-established weather patterns, with its landscape and its inhabitants. In May’s ‘hot brooding … long and humid’ days, the

river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air [then] stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun … nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.²⁰

But in June, ‘the south-west monsoon breaks’ and

there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars … small fish appear in the puddles that fill the … potholes on the highway.²¹

Contrasting the arid with the inundated in this way emphasises the familiarity of the annual cycle, while de-emphasising the human: confounded flies and lethargic people, boatmen in the markets and fish in the roads echo each other, obscuring distinctions – just as cassava stems, returned to life, stop being a mere fence and, growing, shift the border they are meant to fix in place.

Such predictable seasonal changes inform the novel’s imagery. When Rahel returns as an adult to Ayemenem, ‘Something lay buried in the ground … Under twenty-three years of June rains’.²² When Estha stops talking, it is ‘a sort of aestivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season’.²³

But sometimes these anchors in everyday experience are disrupted, unleashing confusion, violence and exile: ‘Though it was December, it rained as though it were June’ and, to ‘a drunk superstitious man’, the ‘relentlessness of that unseasonal downpour’ might have ‘seemed like an omen from an angry god’ or ‘the beginning of the end of the world’.²⁴

This is the night on which just such a man, the Dalit Vellya Paapen, reveals Ammu’s affair with his son, Velutha, to Mammachi and Baby Kochamma. On which Velutha is then beaten to death by local police to ‘inoculat[e] a community against’ caste-defying passion.²⁵ On which Sophie Mol drowns in the swollen river.

It is the night that leads to Ammu’s banishment and premature death, and to the twins’ decades-long separation.

The landscape is also subject to change.

It used to be possible ‘to see the river from the house’, until ‘the influential paddy-farmer lobby’ traded political support for the construction of a barrage downstream to regulate ‘the inflow of saltwater from … the Arabian Sea’, enabling them to reap a second harvest each year.²⁶ Upstream, near Ayemenem, the river is ‘no more than a swollen drain now’, turgid, clogged with weeds, ‘a slow, sludging green ribbon … ferr[ying] fetid garbage to the sea’.²⁷ The steps down to the water, now ‘entirely exposed’, go ‘from nowhere to nowhere’. Scales of dead fish glitter in the stream of untreated sewage and ‘factory effluent’.²⁸ It all reeks of ‘shit, and pesticides bought with World Bank loans’.²⁹

A new five-star hotel ‘further inland’ faces away from the stinking river – ‘smelliness, like other people’s poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigour and Air-conditioning’.³⁰ There, Kathakali dancers, ‘turning to tourism to stave off starvation’, perform massively ‘truncated’ versions of traditional epics.³¹ Guests enjoy a consumable exotic frisson, warding off any fuller encounter with the place or its people.

Regardless of the global systems and processes underpinning it, this example of capitalist development is local and particular. Compare it with an sf text which imagines a future world constructed around climate change – like Elysium (2013), which contrasts a dry and dusty planet of slums, represented by satellite images of desertified Africa and Asia and by a favela-ised Los Angeles, with the eponymous O’Neill-inspired space station, a vast gated community of vaguely Mediterranean villas and rich (mostly) white people in orbit around the Earth.

Roy often refers to the national and international contexts that frame events.³² But by denying itself the affordances of sf – its global visions that localise and its temporal shifts that historicise contemporary conditions, as well as its tolerance for and techniques of worldbuilding exposition – any novel juxtaposing filthy immiseration and spotless wealth would struggle to establish their global and historical causes. Nonetheless, these extremes derive from the key drivers of climate change, and Roy shows, albeit obliquely, how its consequences already fall, and will continue to fall, on different parts of the population.

Embedded in this particular landscape, the contrast between impoverishment and excess folds into and complicates the seasonal contrast with which the novel begins. In the cycle, there is now a trajectory. Seasons change in regular succession: it is dry and then wet and then dry again. But here, the river has been reduced to a trickle and, without conscious intervention, it will never flow freely again.

Water is central to the novel, and its absence haunts the land and its people.

The deserted old mansion, known as the History House, which once possessed pristine white walls and a red roof, is now weathered, crumbling, covered in moss: ‘Like sunken treasure dredged up from the ocean bed. Whale-kissed and barnacled. Swaddled in silence. Breathing bubbles through its broken windows.’³³ There, Estha and Rahel witness Velutha’s beating: ‘Screams died in them and floated belly up, like dead fish.’³⁴

Sent off to school in Calcutta, Estha experiences ‘a green-wavy, thick-watery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty, bottomless-bottomful feeling’.³⁵ Amid the bustle of the marketplace, this misfit youth is a ‘quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise’; an inner, amniotic quiet ‘enfold[s] him in its swampy heart’ and sends ‘stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory’.³⁶ Host to an ‘uneasy octopus’ that ‘squirt[s] its inky tranquillizer on his past’,³⁷ he withdraws from the world, stops speaking. He has ‘sea-secrets in him’.³⁸ But then Rahel returns, and ‘the world, locked out for years, suddenly flood[s] in’, overwhelming him: ‘A dam had burst and savage waters swept everything up in … a scrambled swirling’.³⁹

Liquid imagery inundates the novel. It blurs boundaries between memories, emotions, inner lives and outer realities. It turns humans into polluted rivers belching dead fish, into silent coral probed by cephalopods, into downstream landscapes deluged by catastrophic floods. It reaches backwards into childhood and projects forwards into a destabilised future of landscape upheaval and climate uncertainty.

Surely when Ghosh argues that, to address climate change, fiction must deal with the past and present, not just the future, this is precisely the kind of thing he has in mind?

Maybe his own fiction will clarify matters.

~

William Gibson – unexpectedly channelling Trotsky – once said, ‘The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed’.

This claim seems to reiterate the myth of progress – that worn-out shill for capitalism and imperialism – by aligning the future with technologies and thus commodities. But Gibson’s words also imply that, on a finite planet, futurity is scarce. That perhaps we have already gone as far as we can. That under the regime of actually existing futurity, the future will be – already is – accumulated, concentrated and offshored by the few, denied to the many.

After the time of progress, Ghosh argues, chronology lies in disarray: ‘the Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us’.⁴⁰ If so, then perhaps the ideal author of climate fiction might be an Asian writer of historical fiction, of contemporary-set fiction embedded in history, and of sf in which the future frames the past?

Surely such an author would recognise that the culture responsible for climate change is ‘intimately linked with the wider histories of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world’, even if the ‘imperatives’ of these ‘dual aspects of a singular reality … have often pushed in different directions’?⁴¹ And surely he would use such a dynamic to drive his fiction?

Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy roams across the Indian Ocean and South and East Asia during the First Opium War. In Sea of Poppies (2008), Indian subsistence farmers are content to produce small amounts of ‘opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings’, alongside ‘useful crops, like wheat, dal, vegetables’.⁴² But they are forced into debt peonage by ‘English sahibs’, ‘their agents’ and the ‘white magistrate’, and made to grow nothing but poppies for semi-industrial processing and export.⁴³

River of Smoke (2011) plays out the brutal comedy of Free Trade as capital and empire both oppose and reinforce each other. The British merchants in the Canton are fanatical Free Traders, but when High Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü bans opium imports and destroys already unloaded stocks, they declare themselves ‘subjects of the world’s most powerful nation’.⁴⁴ Construing Lin’s actions as theft, they take comfort in the fact that ‘by seizing our property under threat’ he has given a reluctant ‘Lord Palmerston exactly what he needs in order to declare war’.⁴⁵

They espouse what Flood of Fire (2015) describes, deadpan, as ‘the God-given laws of the market’ and ‘the law of cupidity, that great engine of progress that matched needs to gains, supply with demand, and thereby distributed the right rewards to those who most deserved them’.⁴⁶ And they use their vast wealth to suborn parliament and the press so as to manipulate the British government into military intervention. Victory restores the merchants’ position and opens up ‘markets that had previously been beyond their reach’,⁴⁷ enabling them to create – and expand through addiction – demand for opium.

The trilogy repeatedly depicts the Free Traders as ‘full of braggadocio and false conceit, but in fact … the rankest of cowards’, whose ‘commercial advantage ha[s] nothing to do with markets or trade or more advanced business practices [but lies] in the brute firepower of the British Empire’s guns and gunboats’.⁴⁸ Lancelot Dent, the least hypocritical of the Free Traders, objects that this turn to state power makes ‘a mockery of’ their principles,⁴⁹ but does not refuse the benefits that accrue from the nation-state’s military intervention.

The Free Traders’ dogmatic rhetoric, flexible principles and boatloads of self-deception – Dent proclaims that ‘whenever governments attempt to sway the Invisible Hand, whenever they attempt to bend the flow of trade to their will, then must free men fear for their liberties’⁵⁰ – firmly tie this history of capitalist-imperialism to contemporary economic globalisation and anthropogenic crises.⁵¹

And liquid imagery again plays an important role.

Peter Fraser, the skipper of an opium transport, insists the British are not to blame for the massive numbers of Chinese addicts. Exemplifying cynical reason and attempting to naturalise an economic system through nature imagery and (misunderstood) physics, he says:

The demand came from Chinese buyers and if the British did not meet it then others would. It was futile to try to hinder the flow of a substance for which there was so great a hunger. Individuals and nations could no more control this commodity than they could hold back the ocean’s tides; it was like a natural phenomenon – a flood. Its flow was governed by abstract laws like those that Mr Newton had applied to the movements of the planets. These laws ensure that supply should meet demand as surely as water always seeks its own level.⁵²

Note my italics. Even if these are innocent word choices, just the connotative baggage of deeply embedded metaphors, they cannot avoid activating an additional layer of meaning when used by an author who writes elsewhere about the threat of inundation faced by the densely populated Ganges, Irrawaddy, Indus and Mekong deltas – where the land is ‘subsiding much faster than the oceans are rising’ because of a combination of ‘geological processes and … human activities, such as dam building and the extraction of groundwater and oil’.⁵³ The region is also threatened by a lack of freshwater. Flooding in Pakistan results in the loss of a hundred thousand acres of arable land every year, with a fifth of the remaining fields badly waterlogged. Desertification ravages India and China. By 2050, the Himalayan glaciers whose run-off sustains almost half of the global population will have shrunk by a third, parching land in the dry season and flooding it in the summer.⁵⁴ These ongoing catastrophes will create tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of climate refugees – and migration, diaspora and exile are central to Ghosh’s fiction.

The Circle of Reason (1986) opens in Lalpukur, a West Bengal village mostly inhabited by migrants from ‘close to Burma’ who emigrated there ‘after East Bengal became East Pakistan’.⁵⁵ In 1971, as West Pakistan forces meet East Pakistan’s struggle for independence with genocide, ‘the stream’ of refugees ‘pouring over the border’ from what will become Bangladesh turns into ‘a deluge’, prompting Balaram Bose to douse Lalpukur with buckets of carbolic to keep it ‘germ-free’.⁵⁶ Years later, his nephew Alu transforms this hygienic panic about national and bodily borders. He declares the real vector of ‘contagion and filth, sucking people out and destroying them … preparing them for their defeat, turning one against the other, helping them destroy themselves’ is money, which Abu Fahl describes as ‘a dirty system [that] spreads germs like a squid spreads ink’.⁵⁷

In The Shadow Lines (1988), the narrator’s grandmother – finding the land on the riverbank opposite a widowed relative’s house occupied not by the ‘garden houses’ of ‘rich Calcutta people’ but by a ‘filthy’ shantytown – denounces ‘refugees, flooding in like that’.⁵⁸ (All the while insisting that her own family are ‘not refugees’ because they settled there ‘long before Partition’.)⁵⁹

Her arbitrary distinction is built into the landscape. The shanties cling to patches of higher ground. Among them, women squat by ‘stagnant pools’, polluted by a smoke-belching factory, ‘splashing with both hands to drive back layers of sludge, scooping up the cleaner water underneath to scrub their babies’.⁶⁰ Other, almost invisible, figures pick through garbage mounds, ‘their clothes, their sacks, their skins … the uniform matt black of the sludge in the pools’.⁶¹ Summoned inside, the narrator – ‘already well schooled in looking away, the jungle craft of gentility’ – goes ‘willingly’.⁶²

In contrast, the widow’s elderly father-in-law refuses to move from Dhaka, now in Bangladesh, to Calcutta. He long ago recognised the arbitrariness and contingency of borders: during Partition he asked his departing sons to ‘suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere’.⁶³ After Partition, he allowed Indian Muslim refugees to take over his otherwise empty family home; they continue to look after him, and he is content to die in the house where he was born. All of which mystifies his daughter-in-law: ‘Imagine what it must be like to die in another country.’⁶⁴ But as the narrator eventually recognises, there has ‘never been a moment in the 4000-year-old history of that map when … Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines’ of Partition.⁶⁵ All borders, he concludes, are ‘a mirage’.⁶⁶

The Hungry Tide (2004) is set in the Sunderbans, the massive delta at the confluence of the Ganges, Hooghly, Padma, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers. An archipelago of islands, mangrove forests, mudflats and sandbars, it bridges and obscures the border between India and Bangladesh,⁶⁷ between freshwater and saltwater, between river and sea: ‘The tides reach as far as three hundred kilometres inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater, only to re-emerge hours later’, and ‘a minuscule change in the level of the sea would be enough’ to ‘submerge the tide country’ completely.⁶⁸

And yet people have settled this regularly flooded, constantly transforming land that is battered by storms, cyclones and tidal waves. They often live below tide-level, protected by a wall, a bãdh, that is relentlessly undermined by crabs and at constant risk of breach, which would flood agricultural land with saltwater, making it useless for farming. They share the mangrove forests and waterways with tigers, leopards, sharks, tree perch and Gangetic and Irrawaddy dolphins.

Kanai, returned from Delhi to his aunt’s house on the remote Lusibari island for the first time since childhood, notices how moonlight turns the landscape ‘into a silvery negative of its daytime image. Now it was the darkened islands that looked like lakes of liquid, while the water lay spread across the earth like a vast slick of solid metal.’⁶⁹ The visiting cetologist, Piya, born and raised in Washington state to immigrant Indian parents, witnesses a similar inversion. She is out observing dolphins when a cyclone hits: ‘twigs, leaves and branches … whirling coconut palms and spinning tree trunks’ fly past; when the winds reach full force, she sees ‘something that looked like a whole island hanging suspended above their heads: it was a clump of mangroves, held together by the trees’ intertwined roots … and she caught a glimpse of a shack spinning above them’.⁷⁰

This already disorientating landscape, where unclear borders between land and water constantly shift, has turned upside down. She is not in Kansas – well, Seattle – any more.

And neither are we.

On 17 March 1978, Ghosh’s decision to head from campus to his room by a different route to usual put him directly in the path of the first recorded tornado to hit Delhi. This experience is central to his understanding of climate change as an uncanny encounter with nonhuman agency.

In The Hungry Tide, the uncanny takes several forms: the ‘untold multitudes of crabs’ burrowing into the bãdh; the rarely glimpsed but unusually ferocious tigers; the dolphins which seem to interact with Piya across the species boundary; and the mangrove forest itself:

It seemed to trick the human gaze, in the manner of a cleverly drawn optical illusion. There was such a profusion of shapes, forms, hues and textures, that even things that were in plain view seemed to disappear, vanishing into the tangle of lines like the hidden objects in children’s books.⁷¹

We will return to the uncanny in chapter five.

The Hungry Tide’s sequel, Gun Island (2019), is effectively a novelisation of The Great Derangement. Exploring the mundane novel’s capacity to deal with the improbable – which is ‘not the opposite’ but ‘an inflection’ of the probable⁷² – it produces a sense of the uncanny by repeatedly activating then rejecting other genre frameworks that might explain the odd, climate-related events it depicts. It invokes the kinds of rationales provided by sf, fantasy and horror, as well as by the Umberto Eco/Dan Brown/Indiana Jones school of mystically inflected globetrotting conspiracy thriller involving archaeology and exegesis, but refuses to collapse into any of these narrative forms.

An ancient legend turns out to be a record of historical events – of an actual journey unwittingly retraced by the protagonist, Deen. Unlikely communications and apparent action-at-a-distance might be explained by the spatio-temporal dislocations of global digital networks.

At Venice Beach, Deen sees a dog bitten by a yellow-bellied sea snake, and in Venice comes face-to-face with a brown recluse spider. Neither venomous creature should be so far north. Is it supernatural intervention? The machinations of some secret organisation? Or – merely! – climate-change-driven species migration? And why do these encounters happen in similarly named locations? And how do they relate to the narrative strand about human migration from the global south?

After freak weather hits Italy, Deen and Priya join an armada heading towards Sicily to support and defend a boatload of refugees heading northwards. They converge with Italian navy vessels despatched to keep the refugees out, with a racist flotilla intent on violence, with the mass migration of seven of the eight species of cetacean found in the Mediterranean, and with tornados.

In fact, pretty much all the elements of a whalenado.

But sadly it is not to be. Ghosh prefers to keep all his generic options – and their respective degrees of subjunctivity – in play. It would take an act of wilful misreading to agree with Piya that every improbable twist and turn of the narrative has a rational scientific explanation – that is, that she is a realistic character in a mundane novel.

Consequently, it becomes increasingly peculiar that an author so open to ambiguity and ambivalence, to the potentials of contradiction, would insist that his own earlier novels and the debuts of Kingsnorth and Roy do not address climate change. As we have seen, they invoke apocalypse, particularly images of water and fire, inundation and conflagration. They recount shifts in land-use, including the catastrophic destruction of subsistence agriculture in favour of export crops and monocultures. They capture changes in weather patterns and seasonal cycles. They chart complex ecologies and interspecies relations. They unfold complex temporalities that disrupt simple models of linear cause-and-effect. They track the violence of imperialism, colonialism and the world market. They depict the imposition and policing of borders and identities. They demonstrate how language can naturalise the economic and social relations of capital. They pick away at the economic models and biopolitical processes that usurp the world, that reduce it to things to be counted in the columns of a spreadsheet. And thus, these fictions are undeniably about climate change, negotiating in complex, nuanced ways – and awkward, clumsy ones – between the catastrophe-in-progress and the mundane novel’s foundational exclusion of the world.

But now it is time for the outhouses.

We will sojourn among them for a while, so to ease the transition we will begin with literature, serious and otherwise, and with arthouse cinema. And for the time being, we will stay with water: with seas, tides and inundations, with ships, dams and development.

4

The Life Aquatic

Growing up in 1970s Norway, Knausgaard sometimes imagined the sea rising to drown the Sørland forests:

The hilltops became islets you could sail between and from which you could bathe … the thought that everything was covered by water had me spellbound, the thought that you could swim where now you were walking, swim over bus shelters and roofs, perhaps dive down and glide through a door, up a staircase, into a living room. Or just through a forest, with its slopes, cliffs, cairns and ancient trees.

…

I often happily indulged the notion that the countryside resembled the sea. And that fields were the surface of the sea with mountains and islands rising from them. Oh, to sail in a boat through the forest! To swim among trees! That would be something.¹

He also remembers the ‘hypnotic’, ‘exciting’ game of ‘building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream’,² and recalls ‘the cellar … in an unfinished house filled with shiny black water we sailed on in two polystyrene boxes’.³

An exhilarating fantasy of a world submerged. The thrills of hydraulic construction, of diversion and release. And the risks of subterranean voyaging in impromptu boats made of salvaged chunks of an aromatic long chain hydrocarbon polymer, of benzene derived from crude oil. Knausgaard means nothing by them, or rather, he does not mean this. But there they are: things the text ‘is compelled to say in order to say what it wants to say’.

A brief passage in Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) rather more consciously connects aquatic imagery with historical struggles over development projects. Private security guard Gulabiya protects the billboard on the side of a fancy public toilet from vandals and graffitists. One night, he falls sleeps at his post, and dreams that most improbable dream of the displaced: being paid enough to remit money back to his family.

Better still, he dreams that his village was not flooded to create a reservoir. That his family does not have to live in the tin huts of resettlement camps or perform demeaning labour on land they no longer own.

He dreams of a still-living river, where children play and buffalo shelter from the sun. Of a still-living forest on the hills above, where villagers gather to celebrate festivals.

And he dreams that ‘Fish didn’t swim through his windows. Crocodiles didn’t knife through the high branches of the Silk Cotton trees. Tourists didn’t go boating over his fields, leaving rainbow clouds of diesel in the sky’.⁴

He dreams simultaneously of a world lost and a world restored, of upheaval and of fullness. Of the present over-laid by the past it negated, which in turn negates an unbearable present. Of his village from the bottom of the lake, where the air has become water and swimming, flight.

He dreams an absurdity: the actually existing one.

He dreams slow violence. The unspectacular time of dispossession and dispersal. Of irrevocable environmental change engineered by dams and development, by the global economic system of which they are both parts and epiphenomena. And of circumfluent fossil fuels: diesel above, diesel below; not a divine promise but an iridescent threat.

In these images of elements transposed, of displacement and disaster, natation and navigation, flood and flight, Knausgaard and Roy mash up modernity with its consequences. Superimposing submergence and salvage onto everyday life, they not only make externalities visible but show them to be internal, intrinsic. Haunted by myths and memories of deluge, by anxiety and anticipation, they glimpse worlds – possible, impossible, actual, alternative – that ghost each other. That flicker in and out of view, intertwine and blur.

They show the paucity of what is, crack open its contradictions, reveal the rich weird fullness within.

But enough of mundane fiction. Let us consider instead a pair of mid-twentieth-century sf novels, from the heart of the Great Acceleration, when capitalism turned to ‘development’ for an alibi and a henchman – and then some contemporary arthouse cinema to see how well that is all working out.

~

Developmentalism presumes that economic growth is undeniably a good thing. It insists that increased productivity creates prosperity for all, and ‘proves’ it by accepting only GDP as the measure of wealth and wellbeing. Inheriting the myth of progress, it insists that the ‘development’ of the industrialised west is a universal path that all must follow, rather than a localised, contingent, hazardous, unstable history. And it conjugates the world accordingly: we are developed, you are developing, they are underdeveloped. It is blind to capital accumulation and deems superfluous any effort at redistribution in the other direction. The problem is never maldistribution but underdevelopment, and the solution is always more development.

In Gilbert Rist’s ‘scandalous’ definition, development

consists of a set of practices, sometimes appearing to conflict with one another, which require – for the reproduction of society – the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations. Its aim is to increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, by way of exchange, to effective demand.⁵

In other words, stripped of all its rhetoric, hypocrisy and even the occasional good intention, development is the ‘worldwide expansion of the market system’.⁶ Neo-colonial class war imposed by the IMF, World Bank, WTO and others, it produces impoverishment and immiseration worldwide. And it is responsible for the post-war global expansion of the carbon economy, and thus for biospheric depletion and climate crisis.

~

Hegel, unashamed apologist for capitalism-colonialism, claims that ‘all great progressive peoples press onward to’ the sea, which he celebrates as ‘the natural element for industry’.⁷ To take to the seas is to flourish; to eschew seafaring is to stagnate and descend into ‘the most frightful and scandalous superstition’.⁸ For the sea is a vast animating force. It mirrors and drives the ‘passion for gain’.⁹ A risky ‘element of flux, danger, and destruction’, it is also ‘the greatest means of communication’ and cultural transmission – by which he means the imposition of European trade and ‘contractual rights’ as well as ‘the colonising activity … to which mature civil society is driven’.¹⁰

In a similar vein, the 1956 United Nations’ Conference on the Law of the Sea led to four international treaties in 1958 that reaffirmed the openness of the high seas and established the extent of national sovereignty over territorial waters, contiguous zones, continental shelves and resources on and below the seabed.

And in 1957, Arthur C. Clarke published The Deep Range. A rare maritime utopia,¹¹ it is giddily developmentalist.¹²

The treaties defined the continental shelf not as a geological feature, but as ‘superjacent waters’ up to 200 metres depth or where ‘the exploitation of natural resources’ is possible – that is, as a zone of potential expansion determined by asymmetrical access to capital and technology.¹³ This should come as no surprise. The foundational text of international maritime law, Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum or The Free Sea (1609), argues that the sea, being fluid and unfixed, is not like the land. An abyssal hyperobject, it cannot be physically occupied or divided and thus, like the air, cannot be owned. It should instead be common property, international territory across which all have the right of unhindered passage.

However, Grotius was championing neither the commons nor humanity but the Dutch East India Company, embroiled in conflict over Portugal’s monopoly on the East India trade. The Dutch used Grotius – and their naval power – to break up such monopolies (often to establish their own).¹⁴ In England, John Selden’s rebuttal, Mare clausum or Closed Sea (1635), declared that the sea is as subject to dominion as the land, providing intellectual and legal justification for Britain’s claim of sovereignty over the waters surrounding itself and its north American colonies – as well as the entire ocean between them.

And Clarke’s novel is not as utopian as it thinks, either.

A century in the future, a benevolent world government unites the Earth. Mars and Venus have been colonised. Capitalism persists but is oddly invisible. Externalities do not exist. Progress works the way its shills shill and its true believers truly believe. Development smoothly develops. Mega-projects are utterly benign. The green revolution has turned blue, and aquaculture has abolished hunger.¹⁵

Vast plankton farms, protected by sonic fences and harvested by ocean-going vessels with ‘mile-long skimmers’, feed ‘a quarter of the human race’.¹⁶ Atomic generators on the seabed heat cooler waters, rich in ‘salts and minerals’, so that they rise to fertilise the plants near the surface on which plankton feed, increasing the yield.¹⁷ Whales, their populations enlarged, are no longer hunted. Instead, their migratory cycles are channelled by sonic technologies, and by submarine, seaborne and airborne whale-herders, until finally they are guided, unsuspecting, into immense automated slaughterhouses. They feed an eighth of the world’s population.

But this pristine future is haunted by past and alternative worlds.

Just as whales evolved from quadrupeds who abandoned dry land, so rationalised aquaculture is cast as humankind’s ‘return to the sea, his ancient home, after aeons of exile’.¹⁸ The whale-herder is a pastoral ‘David, among ancient Palestinian hills’ protecting ‘his father’s sheep’ from predators,¹⁹ and whale-herding recalls cowboys and ranchers caught up in an Old West conflict with sod-busting homesteaders.

Clarke’s imagery conflates evolution with (sanitised) progress. The only hint of genocidal settler colonialism, for example, is provided by killer whales. Avatars of indigeneity, the orcas pose a constant threat to the herds, so are regularly slaughtered in their thousands.

An abnormally large giant squid provides an uncanny reminder of the world beyond technocratic subjection. Its massive, clearly intelligent eyes contrast with the whales’ smaller eyes and bovine gaze. But it is captured and put on display.

An enormous sea-serpent lurks in the deepest of the deeps, its existence inferred from scant evidence. At the novel’s end, it is still at large. But it is presented as an isolated being, rather than part of an ecosystem. Scepticism about its existence might preserve it from direct human interference, at least until capital and technology extend the ‘continental shelf’ that far. But such disbelief also condemns it to suffer the consequences of human action elsewhere.

Towards the end of the novel, its protagonist, Walter Franklin, now a senior figure in the Whale Bureau, abruptly changes his mind about the cetological slaughter he oversees. He is not swayed by morality or reason. He remains unconvinced that meat-eating is a residual trace of our primitive past, with no place in a more advanced (and thus obviously vegetarian) civilisation. In fact, he is just fine with the reification of everything, in treating nonhuman life as just more standing reserve. He finds nothing amiss in herding and killing whales, no matter how magnificent they are, as long as it is done proficiently and without cruelty. And he is not even concerned about the inefficiency of it all (it takes ten pounds of plankton to produce a pound of whale meat). He changes his mind because he begins to wonder how such slaughter might be judged by the space-faring – and thus superior – aliens that humanity must inevitably encounter.

This is not an ethical or political awakening, or a re-enchantment of the world. It is just a trade-off, the most minimal of acknowledgements that his position is perhaps not the best one. It is an exercise in subservience to the hierarchy of progress: the fear of waking up to find yourself ‘underdeveloped’.²⁰

The closing pages reiterate and contradict human exceptionalism, oscillating between the scorched earth of monadic being and our inescapable entanglement in the world. Clarke invokes for the first time the idea of nature as a scene of ‘incessant cruelty and slaughter’, and positions humanity as somehow outside looking in: tending, not butchering.²¹ In the same passage, though, he describes whales as our ‘kindred’,²² undoing the supposed separation of humans from nature. But then, the decision to cease the slaughter places humanity outside and above nature once more, and from this elevated position humanity can – at least as far as cetaceans are concerned – impose ‘his truce upon th[is] battlefield’.²³

Just five year later, as U Thant launched the UN’s ‘Development Decade’, J.G. Ballard reconfigured Clarke’s muddle of separation and entanglement by collapsing temporality and conflating times. The Drowned World (1962) imagines a future after temperatures and tides have risen. After the levees have collapsed and the cities flooded.

Seventy years before the novel opens, massive and prolonged solar storms destroyed most of the Earth’s protection from solar radiation. The tropics soon became uninhabitable, with temperatures rising to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Glaciers disappeared. Ice caps melted. Populations fled north and south to the temperate zones, but the temperate zones rapidly became tropical. The last diminished remnant of humanity, fewer than five million people, settle in the Arctic and Antarctic. But even there, temperatures are up in the eighties, and still rising.

And it is not just the heat. Increased solar radiation mutates flora and fauna. Gigantism and evolutionary recapitulation abound. London’s hodgepodge of architectural periods and styles is invaded and overlaid by prehistoric remnants and revenants: gymnosperms, acacias, tamarisks, algae, club mosses, calamites, horsetail ferns, red kelp; nautiloids, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, sponges; alligators, albino reptiles, amphibians, cephalopods, pelycosaurs; two-hundred foot tall non-lignified plants and other giants – ficus, anemones, starfish, mosquitoes, water-spiders, wolf spiders.

Ballard’s reworked colonial adventure fiction, as much Edgar Wallace as Joseph Conrad, is littered with the adjectives ‘Mesozoic’, ‘Paleozoic’ and ‘Triassic’, and with allusions to mythical, classical and historical times: to Eden, Herodotus’s account of Nile floods, the Parthenon, an Egyptian necropolis, Nefertiti’s tomb, Hernán Cortés, the Haitian revolution and, more recently, the Mau Mau and Malay uprisings.

Ballard eschews Clarke’s developmentalism and engineering literalism, drawing instead on the dream-like, surreal imagery of Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux. And where Clarke confuses evolution with progress and technology with transcendence,²⁴ Ballard rejects vertical hierarchies in favour of a lateral dissolution of boundaries. Humanity is experiencing a transformation of consciousness and being, paralleled by the world outside. Archaic memories are summoned into existence. Clock time gives way to ‘the myriad-handed mandala of cosmic time’.²⁵ And the novel ends with no discernible future for humanity. Its protagonist, Kerans, heads southward into the ‘jungle’, ‘following the lagoons … through increasing rain and heat’, ‘completely lost’.²⁶

Clarke has always been modern; Ballard, not so much.

Half a century later, narratives about the sea and the shore, development and dams, lakes and lochs continue to frame and reframe the Anthropocene – as a handful of recent arthouse movies, quotidian and uncanny, grungy and pristine, will demonstrate.

Writing about Moby-Dick in the 1950s, C.L.R. James imagines shipboard life as a kind of unalienated utopia: ‘a world-federation of modern industrial workers … ow[ing] no allegiance to anybody or anything except the work they have to do and the relations with one another on which that works depends’.²⁷ Amid the barbarism, a little socialism: a daring, delightful subaltern misprision, devoutly to be wished.

But Mauro Herce’s Dead Slow Ahead (2015), filmed onboard the dry-cargo freighter Fair Lady, suggests utopia is harder than ever to attain.²⁸

Nowadays, less than a quarter of dry cargo by volume is containerised, but that fraction is worth ‘70 per cent of all world cargo by value’.²⁹ Fair Lady is not a container vessel. Its less profitable bulk cargo – grain, minerals – is carried loose in its hold. A workhorse of global capitalism, it is marginal, unglamorous, truthful.³⁰

Dead Slow Ahead is a slow cinema documentary, with an average shot length (ASL) of 40 seconds.³¹ Nothing much happens, and none of it quickly. Like the crew, we are confronted with duration.

The camera is usually static. The frame moves when the ship moves.

Occasionally, there is a track, pan, tilt or zoom. A slow one.

The high-resolution digital images are stunningly beautiful. But when the camera is handheld and more mobile, the lighting and colour palette give way to a neo-noir-gone-even-more-sour look.

There are no characters, and only the most tenuous of narratives: the Fair Lady weaves uncertainly from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, back through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic (although characteristically the film does not actually tell us this).

Dialogue, when there is any, goes nowhere, peters out.

A soundtrack of distorted noises and disembodied voices renders this utterly material world – in all its sublime weirdness, its stonefaced absurdity – irreal.

We are cast adrift. Left to our own resources in the unstable realms of semiosis and affect.

The film begins at night, offshore. Electronics beep, like R2-D2 low on battery and out of whistle. Amid hard-to-make-out bursts of polyglot radio chatter, an automated female voice enunciates English. There is a machinic throb, an ominous time-golem always just about to arrive.

Below, a pitch-black sea undulates; above, the sky, which should be full of stars, is deep reddish brown, filthy with light pollution. In between, a fairytale Manhattan, a skyline of yellow light, garish and unsavoury, burns against the night. It looks just like Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, Ridley Scott’s science-fictionalised recollection of the Port Talbot steelworks.

Equipment clangs and bangs and whirrs. Humans in orange overalls, hard helmets and protective goggles stand by. A dance of indifferent machines and diffident humans, all perilous mass and inertia. An angular monstrosity, its shape uncertain, rotates; its abreal gaze sweeps. Steam swirls. Lights flare so bright they obscure more than they reveal.

It is a crane, enormously scooping coal from barges and cascading it down into the hold.

Glimpsed through a window, but not heard, crewmen desperately karaoke.

Later in the film they will do so again, and on their side of the window, it will be dark, too, apart from intense flickering pools of LED torchlight, a makeshift discotheque as frantic as their camaraderie. Offscreen voices wail along tunelessly to Neil Sedaka. A crewman, smoking, slumps alone by empty beer cans. His eyes, Deckard-like, glisten inhuman. Seen through a window smeared green and yellow with light, the crane dumps coal into the hold.

Is this a memory? A grim groundhog day?

The LED flickering becomes insistent. Eyes silver. The karaoke singer belts out an unheard song, overdubbed by the sound of squealing. Like amplified insects, or swine-things from the pit. It goes on much too long.

Let us return to the beginning of the film.

In daylight, from the deck, a riverbank or shoreline slides by. Like a Lowry seascape, sky, land and water are washed out, off-white, hard to tell apart. Distances are indeterminate. No identifiable objects lend scale. Are those ancient wooden keels rotting in the shallows?

Then, later, at sea, the ship rolls from side to side, tilting the horizon one way then the other. Ahead, a storm cloud balances on a column of rain, like a mushroom. Bands of dark and light, a sunset, perhaps, or a sunrise. Then, from behind a dark cloud standing against an unfathomable sky, the sun descends. There is water above and below. The machinery begins to sound like whale song. Aquatic, amniotic, as if we are being borne, and born, out of this world and into another.

Screens map the ship’s motion through the void. Navigational instruments bleep a desperate sonar into emptiness, like devices monitoring a comatose god.

In the depths of the ship, the remorselessly throbbing turbine governs all. Tainted red, it beats. A brutal machine heart. Its clanking thumps like the distant native drums of some colonial yarn. Crewmen’s faces, briefly illuminated, peer down pipes and shafts. One man scrubs away at a surface, as if to cover up an occult ritual or bloody xenomorph feasting. In the distance, machines groan. In the impenetrable darkness, hidden cuts derange the space; continuous yet impossible, a non-Euclidean geometry.

Soon, though, amid all this dread, there will be comedy: for just three shots but five minutes.

From starboard, the camera looks across the empty bridge and through a portside window: a light blue sky and white clouds. But then, as the ship rolls, the sea rises into and out of view. No one is at the helm.

Bleeps. A creak. A chirring phone. A crewman enters, but the caller hangs up before he gets to the receiver.

The phone rings again. He picks it up. Registering neither panic nor concern, he reports:

Attention, please, there’s water in the ship. Not only at the bridge’s wheels but also at the bottom. It’s pouring in. [Pause.] Yes, more water is entering from the bottom. [Pause.] Yes, that’s right. [Pause.] The water is flowing in!

He hangs up, ambles away. The ship rolls, creaking.

An electronic squawk. Over the intercom, another unurgent voice: ‘Hello? Sir, here at the Sub-1 there’s water, too!’ No response. Squawks. A metallic voice: ‘Is anybody listening? An entire river is running through the keel. There’s a lot.’

Another unhurried voice: ‘The water is reaching the storage tanks.’

Seen from the empty captain’s chair, spray from the steel-grey sea washes over the deck and hatches. A pale sky. Clouds fill the horizon, which tilts slowly from side to side. A voice: ‘Roger! Roger! Attention! The wheat is getting wet.’

A phone rings. Someone says: ‘The wheat.’

Cut to black. A phone chirrs. Bleeps persist. A final unhurried voice: ‘Sir, this is a disaster!’

The roaring of the engines merges with the soundtrack.

This is not what we expect from maritime catastrophe. The pace is all wrong, the exclamation marks a subtitler’s imposture. There are no fiery explosions for Mark Wahlberg to outrun, or Somalian pirates for Tom Hanks to outfox. No hemisphere-jarring consummation. Just slow catastrophe. A temporal mismatch between humans and physics. The heedless deadpan unfurling of events.

This is as funny as it gets.

Half an hour into the film, this is the first dialogue scene: voices isolated in different parts of the ship call out blindly to each other, and miss. It will be another half hour before dialogue is attempted again.

In the hold, wavelets of red-brown water. Dunes of wheat. Long-handled shovels and squat buckets, as if misshapen children are on a seaside spree. Not enough men, inadequately equipped, fill the buckets with spoiled cargo to be winched away. The men sit and wait. Far above, the open hatch looks like an ebony monolith into which they might fall. But there is no transcendence here. Just grain lapping against the ribs of an unscalable wall.

Topside, it is piled on the deck to be blown, swept, shovelled overboard.

This is not a salvage effort.³²

When the floodwater is all that is left, a crewman sits alone in the hold, as if forgotten.

The ship ploughs on, heading downriver once more. The immobile camera gazes to port. Land and sky indistinct again, alien. An industrial plant in the distance, beneath a looming tower. A gargantuan moisture vaporator on a sodden Tatooine. Maybe this is where Thomas Newton came from before the drought, before he fell to Earth.

We pass by and out to sea in a single, five-and-a-half minute shot.

And then there is no one. The ship is deserted. The corridors are empty. In the crew lounge, a muted TV plays. A table set for half-a-dozen. A close-up still life: apple, plate, napkin, upturned glass. Then, photos of the officers and crew. A whiteboard reminder of upcoming alcohol tests. A solitary voice says, ‘Hello?’ and repeats it moments later. Finally, an automated response: ‘Sorry, we cannot connect you. Thank you for calling’.

The final act has begun.

Brightly lit recesses, pristine pipes and flues; slow zooms, tilts and pans. A crewman jogs through the shot, twice, in too-rapid succession, as if his route is badly designed or time passes differently for him. On the soundtrack, crewmen call their families: heartbreakingly quotidian conversations thwarted by distance, inadequate technology, insufficient credit.

It is New Year, but the ship is far from land. There is no cell signal. A wife’s texts loiter disentimed in cyberspace, abstracted from context. On the satellite phone, he asks, like an interstellar voyager weighed down by time-dilation, ‘Are you still beautiful?’

‘Ugly,’ she replies. ‘Worn out’.

Banal exchanges of love betray their resignation to this separation. Talking is too difficult. He will text.

‘We are on course now,’ he explains to his son. ‘We’re in the middle of the ocean. We still don’t know where we are headed. We are just going and going.’

He cannot hear his son clearly.

Another crewman phones his pregnant wife. She has no idea what he is talking about. Has she forgotten their earlier conversation about baby names? Or did he imagine it?

She wonders who will take her to hospital when she goes into labour. If she can hold on, he should be home by the last week of October …

‘Your credit has been used up.’

They are cut off.

A third crewman worries about his sons, but the line is dodgy. He cannot be sure.

The timelag, the intermittent signal, the pauses between sentences make speakers overlap, uncertain that they have been heard. Faltering conversations become incoherent, tail off. Time clots, and connections between people are lost.

But the industrial and the material persist, sustaining the flows of immaterial capital to which they are subject, flooding the world with CO₂.

There is a turbine at the heart of it all. Relentless, imperturbable. Down there in the dark spaces, it churns and does not care.

This is what development looks like.

~

Ships are mostly in-between. Engineered shards of land on water, they transplant stability and set it adrift. Coagulations of stasis and mobility, of control and contingency, they connect as they disconnect. They displace water, and they displace people.

Back on dry land, dams seem more certain. They dominate, rather than submit (or so they think). They block and divert, channel and withhold, store and release. They create still waters, and sometimes generate power.

But they too displace and disconnect. Their construction destroys; their stability destabilises.

Fengjie is a city on the Yangtze, 800 miles west of Shanghai, with a 2,000-year history. Upstream of the then-under-construction Three Gorges Dam, it is in the process of being demolished in Jia Zhang-Ke’s Still Life (2006) – along with twelve other cities, 140 towns and 1,352 villages, forcibly relocating 1.2 million people. It will be gone in less than two years, dismantled by tens of thousands of workers, mostly migrant, often using nothing more elaborate than sledgehammers, to ensure unobstructed navigation of the coming 10-trillion-gallon, 244-square-mile reservoir. It is a gargantuan project, and a monstrous one: when the basin is filled, it will shift ‘ever so slightly the Earth’s rotation and the axial coordinates of the North and South Poles’, lengthening ‘the day by sixty billionths of a second’.³³

Jia’s handheld digital realism makes it difficult to distinguish between professional and non-professional actors, extras and passers-by, between controlled and uncontrolled locations, natural light and naturalistic lighting, planning and contingency. While our attention is on the foreground, unexpected things happen in the background: jury-rigged cables spark electricity, a wall topples, a distant tower block is felled by explosives, a flying saucer whizzes unnoticed across the sky. Absurd images puncture social realist norms, as when Chow Yun-fat wannabe Brother Mark is found tightly zipped into a laundry bag by gang rivals. Never commented upon, these whimsical interjections upset expectations.

Which is appropriate, given that everything in the film is precarious: walls teeter, buildings collapse, rubble surges up mountainsides, and everyone is heading somewhere else – or soon will be. Even the thirteen-storey Brutalist jenga of the uncompleted Monument to Progress and Posterity, aka the Monument to Displaced Citizens, takes to the sky – a spaceship abandoning this garbage world. (In reality, funding will run out and it too will be demolished.)

The nurse Shen Hong and the coalminer Sanming travel from Shanxi province to Fengjie in search of their spouses. The two never meet. Trajectory and location are all that connect them.

Two years earlier, Shen Hong’s husband, Gui Bin, left for the city to manage a demolition crew (and a gang of young thug ‘bailiffs’). Her only clue is a phone number missing a digit.

Sixteen years earlier, Sanming’s wife – a bought bride, young and unhappy, shipped far from home – left him, taking their daughter with her. His only clue is an address in Old Fengjie, which he soon discovers is already underwater.

Shen Hong turns to Wang Dongming for help. He was in the army with Gui Bin, and is now an archaeologist, excavating Western Hang Dynasty artefacts, just a few steps ahead of the demolition (or of the new apartment blocks being thrown up above the anticipated water level). He brings the estranged couple together.

They walk along a concrete path beside the river, through a recently constructed but temporary landscape with no discernible human future. On their left, a steep concrete slope rises. On their right, huge blocks of rubble form a revetment. Behind, a concrete tower climbs from this jumble; a narrow bridge connects it to the top of the slope. Up there, far above the couple, half a dozen ballroom dancers, tiny in the distance, dance. The bridge is a jetty, waiting in the sky for the waters to come.

Earlier, two men paint ‘THIRD PHASE LEVEL: 156.5m’ halfway up the side of a building. Soon, everything below that line, below the dancers, will be submerged. In the sweltering city, labourers naked to the waist, sometimes in just their underwear, seem dressed for a flood. They know what is coming. Dislocated, uncertain, they are the already-drowned.

Gui Bin proffers Shen Hong his hand. Reluctantly, she takes it. They dance, awkwardly, then stop, part. In the background now is a titanic barrage, somehow dwarfed by the gulf between them. She wants a divorce so she can remarry. Impassive, he agrees. They head off in different directions.

Sanming finds his wife working on a ferry to pay off her brother’s debt to its owner. He volunteers to return to the mines for a year to earn the 30,000 yuan needed to free her, that is, to buy her a second time.

Why did he wait 16 years to look for her? Did he love her once? Does he still? Did she ever feel anything for him? Does she now? Will she in future? Does she return to him because her life since leaving has been so much worse than their brief time together all those years ago?

In The God of Small Things, the twins ponder whether Jesus, who ‘walked on water’, could ‘have swum on land’.³⁴ In Still Life’s final shot, Sanming sets off on the five-day journey back to Shanxi. In the air behind him, a tightrope stretches between two partially demolished buildings. Does the daring aerialist anticipate a perilous crossing? Does the funambulist already see the torrents beneath him?

It is a liquid world, and he – like everyone else – is in transit, balancing as best he can between instabilities.

In Ryan Gosling’s Lost River (2014), a young man in a white T-shirt and blue jeans walks through tall grass. His name is Bones. In his hands, an oar and an empty fish tank; on his back, a rubber raft. In the indeterminate space where land, water and air meet, parallel lines of streetlamps rise like skinny branchless trees on either side of him. Traces of a lost past, no longer enlivened with electricity, they exist at the pace of the materials from which they are made. Fossilised in the air, they become geological.

Beneath a late afternoon sun, Bones clumsily paddles out onto a woodland-fringed lake. The neck of a streetlamp curves up and out of the water, a stick-figure Nessie, organic, impassive.

Something here is wrong, out of place. The soundtrack drones ominously.

The camera stalks the lakebed, rises through the murky gloom towards the surface, to the bottom of the fish tank through which Bones, flat on his belly, peers. The sun begins to set. His torch reveals nothing in the cheerless, caliginous depths: just swirling, green-brown-blackness; drifting silhouettes of vegetal detritus; darting black tiddlers. And then, in the darkness, a white patch appears, edges into focus, takes on shape, looms into fleeting clarity. A chord clangs. It is the head of an aquatic beast. An orphaned kaiju, an unexpected dinosaur.

Earlier images of demolition – shot from a hydraulic excavator’s boom as its metal-toothed bucket repeatedly crashes through walls, feasting on the carcases of abandoned homes – have foreshadowed its powers of rampage.

Bones, understandably, panics.

Later, his maybe-girlfriend, Rat, explains that the no-longer-visible road leads to the flooded valley town where her grandparents used to live. Grandad died working construction on the dam, and Grandma, black clad and veiled, has not spoken in all the years since; she just watches her endlessly looping wedding movie.

When the reservoir ‘drowned’ the valley ‘an evil spell was cast on Lost River’, Rat says. ‘That’s why it feels like this whole place is underwater.’

A chirpy old promotional film – full of slippery contradictions, non-sequiturs and half-truths – describes forced relocation as ‘work[ing] together to help our town grow’. It claims the flooded dwellings were just ‘old bricks and boards and nails’, but the new houses will be special because it is ‘a family [that] makes a home’. And it promises that, even though the valley’s Prehistoric World theme park must be lost, the reservoir will offer everyone motorboating and other luxurious leisure activities.

But that better life, to whatever extent it ever manifested, has gone too, swept away by deindustrialisation and predatory finance.

Shot around Detroit, Lost River is about Rust Belt devastation, first by the flight of heavy industry overseas, where labour is cheap, regulation lax and taxation avoidable, and then by the 2007–8 financial crisis. Empty houses in disrepair line the streets of the eponymous suburb. Residents depart just days or hours ahead of the wrecking crews. Some nights, bored arsonists drift through, leaving flames to devour the empty shells.

All Bones wants is to fix his junker so he can drive away.

Stripping copper from the nearby derelict projects, he risks the wrath of their self-proclaimed owner, Bully, a skinhead in a sparkly jacket. A Midwestern Humungus, a dimestore disco Immortan Joe, he rants and raves from an armchair strapped to the top of a prowling convertible. His amplified threats – dully repetitive, contorted with rage – reverberate off brick facades and through the turgid air. He likes to cut the lips off people who defy him.

In this post-apocalyptic debtscape of foreclosed homes and abandoned social housing, no-longer-held-back nature – always there, tenacious, just waiting for that long moment of human inattention – erupts, albeit slowly.

All Billy – Bones’s mother – wants is to stay. To keep her childhood home. But she was mis-sold a consolidating loan, the fixed interest rate period is long over and she is months behind on repayments.

The creepily solicitous Dave is in town to shut down the loan office and foreclose on whatever is left. It is his sixth such town in three years, but he says that it is just a job, that it does not define him. But it certainly suits him. He also runs the Big Bad Wolf Club, where jaded decadents, convinced they are not desperate but transgressive, bay at a giallo-inspired floorshow: on stage, women are (apparently) brutally murdered or (seem to) peel the skin off their own faces. In special rooms beneath the club a very particular service is provided. Women stand immobile, locked in rigid, impenetrable plastic shells, safe from physical harm, which men pay to assault.

Dave offers Billy a job.

She is claustrophobic, haunted by debt and imminent loss. She clings to a house that is falling apart around her; she agrees to work in a shell. They are both just manifestations of the formal consent finance demands even when there is no real alternative. Dave can foreclose on one, unlock the other.

Bullytown and the Club are displaced expressions of the mortgaged home’s ‘strange ontology’.³⁵ The mort gage – or dead pledge – subjects the human to the asymmetrical, disproportionate power of finance. It is a sadistic, disciplinary instrument, demanding more than it gives. It pressgangs the borrower to project a fantasy of stability into an oceanic future. It commands the present. It forecloses the future. And it threatens every future you can possibly imagine with repossession, which is also dispossession.

The mortgaged home is not ‘a place of comfort and security’ but ‘a space of unease and alienation’.³⁶ Like Hill House and the Overlook Hotel, like the Winchester Mansion and Borley Rectory, it is possessed. Not ‘simply [by] the alienated, hostile strangeness of property’ but by ‘the anticipatory temporality of a total, systemic crisis in the making’.³⁷

This crisis – economic, ecological – is everywhere in Lost River. Shot on grainy 35mm, the film looks like it is torchlit through the surface of a tenebrous lake. Daytime barely exists, and when it does the light is failing. Or it is nighttime, and interiors are lit by candles and TV flicker, or by intense spotlights and lurid seeping neons. Greens and blues, filthy and impenetrable, dominate the palette, thickening the air, staining it sickly yellow. Infernal reds pool. Long lenses confuse distance. Shallow depth of field blurs spaces, objects and people. Condensation beads car windows, obscuring already hazy city lights. Characters move slowly, like deep-sea divers, through underlit spaces. Faces float out of the darkness like corpses bobbing to the surface.

We are among the already-drowned again. Swept under by the mysterious currents of finance, they anticipate the world to come. A world which is already no kind of home, and in which the waters continue to rise.

Another man walking. This time across Aberdeenshire moorland. He is tiny at first but grows larger and more audible as he approaches. He carries a wooden frame on his head, and around his waist, four empty plastic jerry cans; a home-made paddle and coiled rope are strapped to his backpack. In the silence of the moors, the only sounds are his footsteps, the jostle and gentle clatter of his kit. Later we will hear water running, water lapping, the faint chuckle of a distant grouse.

The man is called Jake. Or at least the person in front of the camera is. It is never clear whether he is a documentary subject, a fictional character or something in between. He is in his forties, maybe, or his sixties. He has long white hair, a white beard and moustache. His face is lined and creased. His heavily lidded eyes often seem closed.

Ben Rivers shot Two Years at Sea (2011) on a 16mm Bolex with an anamorphic lens, using up the world’s last ever reels of Kodak Plus-X, a discontinued high-contrast black-and-white film stock. He developed the footage by hand in his sink, before blowing it up to 35mm for exhibition.

Despite the film’s title, it all takes place on land.³⁸ There has been no shipwreck, but Jake has nonetheless washed up here. This contemporary Crusoe lives off the grid, alone in the woods, in an old farmhouse. Like the battered caravans and vehicles around the farmyard, it is packed with the detritus of the twentieth century. From fragments glimpsed and remnants lingered upon, one might piece together his past, if only there were some way to tell which ones were significant to him. Apart from some stray electronics, his technology is all mechanical, analogue. He lives as if before the digital. In some alternative present or post-peak-everything future. Or maybe just in a state of uneven development.

The film is about the measured disclosure of quotidian detail. About making visible the unseen. The passage of time. The idiocy of rural life, the press of isolation – or, perhaps, the peacefulness of solitude and sufficiency.

It is about the materiality of the film stock that captures all this: the fizz and swirl of its grain; the dance of scratches, white runes like wriggling corpse worms; the ectoplasmic throb of chemical blotches and stains; strange haloes.

It is about light itself.

And the air. The currents within it: the swaying of grass, the stirring of branches, the angles of precipitation, the coiling of vapour, the curl of exhalations.

And, yes, it is about the water that fills the air: steam from kettles, coffeepots and cooking pots, from bodies warmer than the surrounding chill; moisture condensing on windows, obscuring the world beyond, or forming drops, poised between surface tension and gravity, biding their time; mist rising from forested hillsides, thickening into fog, becoming rain or snow; smoke churning thickly upward from bonfires, or streaming wraithlike from chimneys and the cooking pit.³⁹ At one point, a caravan in which Jake sleeps bobs up into the air, as if on his dreams or a rising tide. It settles on a treetop, like wreckage after a flood. But perhaps it is just on higher ground behind the trees; not quite so precarious then, but nonetheless it rocks with his movements and he with its, as if at sea.

The shot of Jake walking on the moors lasts for 72 seconds. The camera, although handheld, is static until Jake eventually brushes past; it pans to follow him.

It is the start of an eleven-shot sequence that runs for over twelve and a half minutes, more than 750 seconds, with an ASL of sixty-five seconds (the film’s overall ASL is over twenty-nine seconds). In the second shot, Jake – again small in the distance – walks across the screen from right to left. A dark blotch briefly dances above him, like a UFO. An amoebic stain pulsates ahead of him, like a portal to a parallel dimension. He passes through it untouched and exits the frame. On the path behind him a strange figure flickers and gyrates, but it is just a stalk of grass in the foreground.

The next two shots form a pair, following close behind Jake, then retreating, looking back at him from in front.

In the fifth shot, the camera is static once more, looking back. The path, curving over and down into the left of the frame, is wider here, wide enough for vehicles: Jake approaches, passes, and the path is empty.

The sixth shot is the shortest: a close-up of Jake. He blows into a valve, bungs it. The screen flares white.

A high angle shot looks down across water to a tiny spit of land. Jake is still inflating the airbed, but far enough away that we can no longer hear him; however, the sound of water seeps backwards in time from the eighth shot, in which a mobile camera will follow his hands as he ties the airbed to the frame. In the eighth shot, water continues to lap, but the soundtrack is dominated by him blowing up the airbed, a task completed in the seventh shot.

The ninth shot is the longest. The camera, locked off, stands back from the shore, motionless for over seven-and-a-half minutes. The pond is actually the edge of a loch. A jerry can is now tied to each corner of the raft. Jake puts on gloves and launches it out onto the water. He kneels, paddles. Ripples spread out in all directions, reaching the nearby shore, disappearing into the distance. He stops paddling, sits upright. And floats. Unmoving. Fresh ripples ruffle the surface occasionally. Jake’s head eventually nods. Perhaps he is drowsing. The raft drifts slowly to the right. When it gets close to shore, Jake rouses himself to paddle back out onto the loch. He settles once more.

Cut to a long shot. Two fir-covered ridges sweep across the screen from bottom left to top right, a similar sweep of sky above them. Mist hangs over the valley between them. The camera pans right: more trees, mist and sky.

The final shot looks down on Jake from a high angle. Lying down on the raft, perhaps sleeping, a simple rod and line pitched over the water, he floats. No shore is visible. The grouse chuckles. Jake turns his head. It chuckles again. Nothing. Jake floats. Cut to black.

He is living in an aftermath.

Is this what survival looks like?

Is this learning to bide? To pass on?

Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Évolution (2015) is all about the weirdness of puberty, of intimacy with and separation from the maternal body. It is also about learning to die, not so much as an individual – ‘letting go of our predispositions and fears’ – but as a civilisation – ‘letting go of this particular way of life’.⁴⁰

It begins beneath the waves. From below, the sun shines down through the rippling, swelling surface, like an eye. The faint roar of distant waves breaking on rocks grows closer, louder. And then, the seabed: water so clear you cannot actually see it, just flickering beams of refracted sunlight, schools of fish suspended, the white churn of breakers above, ochre, russet and pink-orangered plants undulating in invisible currents, drifting particles, lifeforms small and translucent. And then from below again, a boy swims into frame, floats in silhouette across the white disc of the sun, the surface of the sea like oil.

Even when the film is above water it all seems strangely aquatic. Intertidal and hermaphroditic, like some kinds of echinoderm. Amphibian, like a selkie.

There is an oddly piscine woman, her eyebrows bleached to invisibility, her hair pulled back tight, her eyes abhuman. She is raising the boy, Nicolas, about ten years old, in a white-walled village whose steep narrow streets are covered in black volcanic cinders.⁴¹

Indoors, the rooms are barren. Nicolas lives on a diet of khaki, worm-filled mush, and every day his mother administers four drops of a medicine that looks suspiciously like squid ink.

A dozen other oddly piscine women live in the village. They look similar, dress alike, and each of them is raising a ten-year-old boy.

No one says very much.

The camera is generally static. Sometimes the action congeals into an ominous tableau. Occasionally one shot succeeds another without any sense of progression, merely of replacement and erasure.

Nicolas claims to have seen a dead boy on the sea floor with a red starfish on his belly. His mother dives to retrieve the starfish, thus ‘proving’ there was no dead boy. But Nicolas knows something is not right. Where do the women go by lantern-light once the boys are asleep? What is going on at the medical facility along the cliffs? Why do all the boys eventually end up there? What happens to them?

Sometimes, a shot lingers on the natural world as if willing meaning to burst forth. But instead there are half-glimpses, elliptical cutaways, silences, incompletions, occult resonances of shape and colour, sympathetic magics. The red starfish Nicolas’s mother holds out to him is both a navel and a bleeding wound, its mouth a dentata; when Nicolas breaks off one of its arms with a rock, he suffers a spontaneous nosebleed; the light above the operating table, reflected in each of Nicolas’s eyes, has five arms; a starfish extends sensors from the tip of one of its arms to touch his belly button.

Nicolas draws pictures of things he cannot have seen on the island. A giraffe. A Ferris wheel. A woman with a mass of ginger curls: his real mother.

The island is a kind of Faerie realm, the boys abductees, their transforming bodies necessary for these nonhuman women to reproduce. And the boys, it seems, do not survive.

One of the women, a nurse, befriends Nicolas. He calls her Stella. One night, she lets down her hair, reddishly buoyant. She takes him swimming in the lava tube beneath the hospital. She is amphibian, with gills like sucker marks running down her back. But he cannot breathe underwater. He almost dies.

So together, they learn how to die. He must not be afraid. As they swim once more through the cave to the open sea, he must trust her to breathe air from the water into his lungs. And although her entire way of life, her species even, depends upon the use of bodies like his, she must let him go.

Back outside of Faerie, or wherever the island was, Nicolas floats in a rowing boat on the night-time sea. Facing him, filling the horizon, yellow against the dark, is another of those irreal Manhattans, a port and refinery complex. In the middle of the screen, a tower; at its pinnacle, a ball of burning gas. Back in carbon culture, has he learned from her example that it too must cease to reproduce itself? Have we?

These arthouse tales of our liquid world are lessons in duration and endurance. With slowness they re-embody us, confront us with the passage of time.

The worlds they depict remind us how very small we are, and how disproportionately large our consequences. That we are so precarious, individually and as a species, but together we can upset the world.

In them, we see that our culture builds nothing to last, and yet some of what we build endures: as rubble and pollution, and in the persistence of the petrocapitalist infrastructure that constrains our future as surely as does the power congealed within it.

They pit the mobility of capital, carbon and cargo against the stuckness of people: not progressing or developing as promised, but stuck in place, left behind; or coming unstuck as the indignities of labour subordinates social relations to capital’s whims, or severs them through disjunctures of time and space.

But enough about water. Let us come ashore and widen our scope.

For all around us, our uncanny neighbours, the trees, are ‘making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain’.⁴² Let us attend to them.

5

We Am Groot

The mundane novel developed so as to exclude from itself the fact that we are inseparable from the world: that we are entangled, all the way down, with nonhuman forces and entities – as any extreme meteorological, geological or epidemiological event makes clear. Our encounters with such nonhuman agency are not about discovering something new but recovering something forgotten: not anagnorisis but anamnesis. In these uncanny moments ‘something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive’.¹

In 1906, Ernst Jentsch said that uncanny sensations arose from uncertainty about ‘whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate’.² His examples include wax figures, automata, people suffering from mental and nervous illnesses or grand mal seizures – and that ‘rafter covered with nails’ which, in the dark, you mistake for ‘the jaw of a fabulous animal’.³ He also mentions that moment common in ‘old accounts’ of expeditions when the explorer sits ‘down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk’ which, to his ‘horror’, turns out ‘to be a giant snake’.⁴ Sadly, he gives no actual examples.

Freud considered Jentsch’s work ‘fertile’ but obviously ‘incomplete’,⁵ and in 1919 set out to address its shortcomings with his own sprawling, contradictory essay, full of half-formed thoughts. At one point, as if to outdo Jentsch, Freud dredges up an otherwise superfluous example – Lucy Gertrude Moberly’s ‘Inexplicable’ (1917) – containing both domestic timber terror and lively colonial lumber that echoes his precursor’s most absurd instances of the uncanny (the rafter–jaw, the log–snake). Like Jentsch, he presents colonial human-animal encounters in which dead wood comes to life but retains a sense of strangeness: wrongly animated, reptilian, spectral.

In a tale full of phallic pulsations of size and texture, May and Hugh rent a house in ‘the very unromantic suburb of Prilsbury’, unfurnished but for an abandoned octagonal table:

In each curve of the octagon there was fashioned a small alligator, his head pointing outwards, his tail meeting the tails of the other crocodiles in the centre; and as the light fell full on the scaly bodies, they had an extraordinary look of life, and the little sinister heads with the small evil eyes almost seemed to move.⁶

Immediately, a blurring of distinctions: between species, and between the animate and the inanimate, the fleshly and the ligneous.

At night, an unseen creature roams the house. A pervasive smell, like ‘decaying vegetation’,⁷ fades in and out, at its strongest when the carved alligators seem most lively. For a visiting friend, it triggers traumatic recollection of the alligator-infested New Guinea swamp where such ‘unspeakable devils’ dragged a companion ‘off the path’ and into the night.⁸

When the couple finally see the inanimate creatures animated, they are struck dumb, ‘paralysed’ with ‘horror’.⁹ As ‘a huge shape glid[es] at lightning speed’ down the stairs, and another comes ‘more slowly out of the drawing-room door’, and as ‘sounds of sliding and pattering’ fill the shadowed hallway, May and Hugh are rendered inanimate.¹⁰

Then, recovering from this exchange of qualities, they flee. The next morning, Hugh smashes and burns the table: ‘it is not a part of the house any more … not a part of anything, excepting insofar as matter never dies, and the smoke is doing some useful turn elsewhere’.¹¹

The uncanny incursions are over, but for May the memory lingers. Like the CO₂ Hugh’s bonfire releases, doing its very little bit to heat the planet, to universalise the archaic swamp, to drown the world.

There are two kinds of environmental uncanny. The first, related to confusions between the animate and the inanimate, is the moment we recognise the ‘presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors’.¹² The second, related to those ferocious colonial avatars prowling suburban London, is when ‘the mysterious works of our own hands’ return ‘to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms’, often on a scale that renders us powerless.¹³ Let us consider them in turn.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s award-laden, bleak but beautiful-looking films criticise Russian life under Putin, but diffusely enough to be indistinguishable from a more general railing against modernity. Petty, selfish characters are caught in circumstances unlikely to bring out the best in them. Casting and performance counter caricature; deliberate pace quells sentimentality; misanthropy (almost) alibis misogyny.

Each one begins with an overture, a series of images featuring trees or water or both, that lulls the viewer into the world of the film even as it evokes the first kind of environmental uncanny. The ASL is longer than one might expect of establishing shots, sometime significantly. Elena (2011) starts with a static 80-second shot of tree branches outside an out-of-focus apartment, then a four-minute eight-shot sequence of the interior as its two inhabitants wake, and then a brilliantly choreographed two-and-a-half minute shot of them moving around each other, pursuing morning rituals with habitual lack of communication. It is seven-and-a-half minutes before there is an (almost meaningful) exchange of dialogue.

The Banishment (2007) begins with a 70-second shot over a ploughed field and a road to a tree standing alone on the left of the screen at the foot of a hill. Nothing happens. And then a car appears in the top right hand corner of the screen and the camera begins to track around to the left; the car follows the road as it curls down and around the hill, and the moving camera keeps the tree on the left, only slowly allowing it to drift to the centre of the frame. The car, much larger now, whizzes past, but instead of cutting to follow it, the film stays focused on the tree for another six seconds, as if it is the real protagonist.¹⁴

Both of these trees are unhurriedly there, free from passing human melodrama. In close up, Elena’s tree has texture, its branches a temporary resting place for birds. It is in the world. It is immanent, merely realistic: on the one hand, specific; on the other, just another tree. In long shot, The Banishment’s tree, isolated and whole, is present before humans enter the frame and present after they have gone.¹⁵ Editing and composition make it the subject of the shot. It is transcendent, like an icon: like it has meaning.

The uncanny trees that open Loveless (2017) lie somewhere between. Ten shots in 85 seconds display the parkland between suburban Moscow tower blocks. The colour palette is very nearly black and white. To begin, the camera tracks right, peering vertically into the barren, snow-coated branches of a dark, almost featureless tree against a luminous grey-white sky. Smaller and smaller branches fractal upwards and outwards, filling the screen, spilling beyond it. The music reaches a crescendo and stops, but the camera keeps tracking around the coolly indifferent tree.

Then, a tree in profile, its trunk zigging left, zagging right, as if it has suddenly paused because someone is looking. Perhaps it is shrinking back, appalled by the fallen tree lying before it. Boughs reach down like arms. Behind, a wall of leafless, snow-covered branches cannot quite conceal the sky.

In other shots, trees bend, as if under some unimaginable weight, over a black lake. Gently falling snow seems to fall forever into their reflections. Were it not for the rippling water, one might think they were frozen trees, trapped beneath ice.

The trees do not look quite like trees. Corals, perhaps, or arachnids. Or agonisingly slow explosions of white-edged blackness.

There is something soothing about them, and something ominous.

Birds call. A susurrus of distant traffic. In the background, apartment blocks, black and white and grey.

The sequence cuts to a shot peering between concrete pillars and across a school yard. The image is still predominantly black and white, but now there is no snow. A flag billows. And then, after forty seconds, movement and colour: school doors fly open and kids burst out, some walking, some running. The camera picks up one boy – Aloysha – and tracks left alongside him, but then halts. He leaves the frame; but the shot continues.

The camera finds him walking through the wooded parkland. The trees are bare, but there is no snow. Just dull autumnal browns. A pale blue sky.

And then the film cuts to the base of a tree. Massive roots reach out above the ground for several feet before plunging into the soil. One root is shattered, revealing a cavity. Red and white police tape weaves around the roots, under the fallen leaves and broken-off wood. The camera ignores it, slowly tracking in towards the broken root, the dark hole.

Aloysha walks through the shot, picks up one end of the ribbon, trails it behind him.

The camera ignores him, continues to track in on the shattered hollow at the base of the tree.

It is not immanent enough. It is just a tree. It should be indifferent. But the darkness stares back, alien, malign.

It is not transcendent enough. The track-in gives texture and detail, makes it a particular tree. And it is just a tree. It can only be indifferent. It cannot possibly stare back.

It means something, and it means nothing.¹⁶

Aloysha throws the ribbon up into the branches of a tree stretching out over the lake. The next day, he disappears. There is no suggestion of anything supernatural. He has just run away from his bitterly separated parents.

But nearly two hours later, the final shot of the film is of the same tree. A couple of months have passed. The landscape is now that of the winter overture. The ribbon continues to billow. Aloysha is still missing.

This kind of environmental uncanny foregrounds questions of agency and identity, while troubling distinctions between human and nonhuman, between the subject and the world in which it is enmeshed.

DC’s Swamp Thing, created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, first appeared in an eight-page gothic tale of sexual jealousy, mad science and revenge in The House of Secrets #92 (1971). Inflamed with desire for his best friend’s wife, Damian Ridge murders Alex Olsen, blows up his lab and dumps his body in the swamp. Taking advantage of proximity and a grief he pretends to share, Damian seduces and marries Linda. Six months later, convinced she will uncover his crimes, he reluctantly plans her murder. However, Alex did not die. Somehow melded with the swamp, he has transformed into a giant vegetal humanoid. He returns to the mansion just in time to kill his killer and rescue his widow. But Linda recoils in horror. The human world has no place for her grotesque melancholy saviour. He leaves.

In 1972, Wein and Wrightson rebooted Swamp Thing in a contemporary setting. Scientist Alec Holland and his wife Linda are hiding in the swamp from a criminal organisation that tracks them down anyway. Alec refuses to hand over his revolutionary ‘bio-restorative formula’. They order his death to ensure no one else gets it. An explosion rips through his lab. Alec – on fire, doused in his chemical innovation – throws himself into the quagmire, where he transforms into the Swamp Thing.

Wein makes the creature mute, unable to communicate with people, but abundant thought bubbles ensure that a sense of interiority sympathetically inflects his monstrosity. Curiously, though, it is clear from the start that he can actually speak, albeit only a single word every half dozen issues,¹⁷ finally blurting out a sentence in Swamp Thing #13: ‘I … AM … ALEC … HOLLAND …!’

Alan Moore’s revision of this origin story evacuates meaning from this declaration of identity. In Saga of the Swamp Thing #21 (1984), Holland dies in the explosion. Swamp plants altered by the bio-regenerative formula consume his decomposing body. Infected by his memories, the plants mistake themselves for a man who thinks he has been transformed into a plant.

Acknowledging this misrecognition allows another identity to emerge: neither Holland nor swamp plant, but something unfixed, fluid, endlessly becoming. This Swamp Thing can also discard his body and construct a new one wherever vegetable matter is available, transferring his consciousness from temporary body to temporary body through the Green, a kind of mystical cyberspace that links all plant life: in #53, he marches on Gotham City in the form of a giant ambulatory redwood; in #63, he lethally erupts through a villain’s intestinal flora.¹⁸

The ease with which he uploads and downloads his consciousness, abandoning and adopting physical forms, both reinforces and undermines a sense of identity. As does Moore’s retconning of the 1971 origin story: Swamp Thing is a plant elemental, with numerous iterations, all of which are both continuous with and distinct from each other.

Marvel’s Man-Thing, created by Wein’s roommate Gerry Conway and introduced in Savage Tales #1 (1971), has more or less the same origin story, only with an experimental super-soldier formula and some scantily clad female treachery. As much slime-based as vegetal, Man-Thing is mouthless and thus wordless. Other characters have speech bubbles and very occasionally thought-bubbles: Man-Thing has neither. And unlike Swamp Thing, it has only the vaguest fleeting memories of its human life and no coherent sense of self.

While Swamp Thing expresses his own subjectivity, Man-Thing’s interiority remains elusive, cut off by the principal writer Steve Gerber’s captioning technique.¹⁹ Narrative captions describe unfolding situations for the reader. Sometimes they slip vaguely into attributing intentionality to Man-Thing’s actions and reactions. And sometimes – this is extremely rare in comics – they directly address the creature in the second person, insisting that there is a ‘you’ there, even if the otherwise omniscient narrator has no access to it. The slime-subject hypothesised and hailed by Gerber’s captions exists only in its precarious relationality to other subjects. Hyperempathic, it displays little rationality, but is pushed and pulled by the emotions of nearby humans. And in some instances, it clearly just mirrors the emotions and imagined subjecthood projected onto it: whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch.

Unlike Man-Thing, Marvel’s Groot – a Flora colossus from Planet X who resembles a seven-metre-tall humanoid tree – can talk. And like Swamp Thing, he can declare his name. But that is the extent of his language. All he can say is ‘I am Groot’.²⁰

The phrase announces and performs an identity, but it is also an entire language. Subtle nuances of pronunciation, inflection and timbre convey the same complexity of meaning as the English spoken by his interlocutors. But their replies imply a specific meaning to each ‘I am Groot’, thus interpellating him as a subject of their speech and intentionality, as a distinct object in the world.²¹

Zvyagintsev’s uncanny trees insist upon a different order of nonhuman aliveness. Adjacent to us, webbed into our environment, persisting, their mode of being undisclosed. As with Groot, we interpret them. As with Man-Thing, our drives and desires, ignorance and indifference, buffet them. And as with Swamp Thing, we cannot imagine their difference, their fullness.

Groot’s very first appearance – in a standalone story in Tales to Astonish #13 (1960) – was a different matter entirely. Gigantic and comparatively loquacious, this self-declared overlord of all the galaxy’s timber can control trees, even make them uproot and walk. He is intent on abducting a small American town back to his planet for scientific experiments.

It is the kind of reverse-colonisation tale inaugurated by H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897), in which the centre of empire suddenly finds itself primitive, underdeveloped, peripheral – that is, invaded and subjugated by a more technologically advanced power. Wells’s tentacled vampiric Martians are effectively from the future. They come from a planet further from the sun and thus, according to the nebular hypothesis of solar system formation, from an older world. And they are modelled on the future humans whose evolution Wells imagined in his essay ‘Man of the Year Million – A Scientific Forecast’ (1893).

Wells’s Martian are killed by lowly bacteria, the original Groot – in a burst of missing-the-point Cold War hubris – by laboratory-bred termites.

Two more recent tales of xyloid invaders – neither term is quite accurate – bring us to a second kind of environmental uncanny, in which the consequences of our collective actions rebound upon us with overwhelming force.

Warren Ellis and Jason Howard’s Trees (2014–20) starts ‘ten years after they landed’: black columns as tall as mountains, descended from the sky in groups of three, ‘All over the world as if there was no-one here’.²² Above the clouds, they thicken out into rectangular blocks, joining the three trunks together, like an enormous electrical plug on distended prongs:

And they did nothing and did not speak as if there were no-one here and nothing underfoot. Ten years since we learned that there is intelligent life in the universe but that they did not recognise us as intelligent or alive. They stand on the surface of the Earth like trees exerting silent pressure on the world as if there were no-one here.²³

This opening exposition overlays a six-page action prologue in which Brazil’s Pacification Police violently assault a favela beneath the Rio de Janeiro tree, bloodily murdering a group of young residents.

But on the obsidian trunks, green symbols appear. Shaped like elaborate crop circles, they (and their visual echoes) will recur. This time, they spew rivers of toxic sap, killing everything in their path. It is the sixth time it has happened somewhere.

The comics then follow unrelated characters living close to the trees in flooded Manhattan, a Chinese Special Cultural Zone, a small Italian coastal town, a Russian village, the Somalia/Puntland border, an archaeological dig on the Orkney Islands and the Blindhail research station on a warming Spitzbergen – where a scientist, Marsh, discovers an unknown variety of black poppy growing near the tree’s base.

The flowers sprout from metal, as if they do not need soil. They thrive in the shade, as if they do not need sunlight. They produce radio frequency interference. And soon they are growing from Marsh’s own flesh.

Microscopic examination reveals wiring in the petals, ‘a mineral structure’ formed ‘on a biological substrate’.²⁴ Marsh hypothesises that each petal ‘is an individual cell in a broadcasting dish’,²⁵ and that soon – finally – the trees will speak. A broadcast so massive it will melt Arctic ice. Produce thermal currents that will carry poppy seeds around the world.

When the electromagnetic pulse comes, it is a solid block of white, half the width of the splash page, offset against a black night. Absolutely featureless.

Whatever the trees have to say, it is not for human ears.²⁶

~

In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), the sudden appearance of a dozen massive alien spaceships in terrestrial skies similarly condenses climate change into a single ruptural, if ambiguous, event.

The alien heptapods look and sound primarily like aquatic creatures. Their seven limbs flex like tentacles, but are sometimes rigid, jointed like crustacean legs. At least one limb terminates in seven digits which, opened outwards, create a palm resembling a starfish; from it sprays the inky substance with which they write in the air or on the transparent wall of their aquarium-like meeting chamber. Their language sounds like whale song.

But they look like banyan trees, too, rising up through the swirling atmosphere they inhabit, and their language also sounds like didgeridoos and the knocking root stumps of a BBC Triffid.

These associations with the aquatic and the arboreal, the intertidal, the mangrove swamp, suggest they are from a world submerged. Departing, their ships dissolve into the darkly clouded sky.

Envoys of the Weird, down here in the Chthulucene, they have come from the future to infect us with their language so that we begin to perceive time differently: simultaneously rather than sequentially. And by becoming no-longer-quite-human, by losing the prop of linear causation, by being everted into the web of life, the monadic subject in a reified world ceases to be a tenable proposition.

The Pentagon recruits a linguist, Louise Banks, to interpret the heptapods’ language. She quickly realises their written language – composed of complex circular logograms with shifting structures, dense with fractal detail – is semasiographic rather than glossographic. That is, the logograms do not approximate the sound of their spoken language, but express meaning directly. They are also temporally non-linear, as if a human were to write a sentence with both hands, working from both ends towards the middle.

Banks appears lonely, focused on her work, with few social ties. She has flashbacks to her daughter’s childhood, adolescence and slow death from a rare disease. To the estrangement from her husband which made it all so much harder to bear.

Except they are not flashbacks. They are glimpses of the future. Learning to think in heptapod has rewired her brain to perceive time as the aliens do.

She will marry Ian Donnelly, a scientist working alongside her, and give birth to the palindromic Hannah. And she will tell him of her foreknowledge, even though she knows it will drive him away.

The main plot implies that choice exist, that it is possible to change the course of events: the heptapods travel back in time to ensure human survival so that we will be able to come to their aid 3,000 years in the future. This is reiterated when Banks flashforwards eighteen months to a celebration of global unification, at which the Chinese General Shang thanks her for risking her life to phone him at a vital moment with the message that persuaded him not to attack the heptapods, thus saving the world. And then he gives her the information she needed eighteen months earlier to do just that.

However, the film also implies that the heptapods must already know what happened before they intervened: that is, they had no choice but to act in this particular way. And neither perhaps did Banks and Shang (or maybe they did, but the heptapods already knew what their choices would be).

The same uncertainty surrounds Banks’s decisions about her daughter and husband. It is impossible to tell whether she has choice and agency. Whether foreknowledge is indistinguishable from predestination. Whether – if you experience past, present and future simultaneously – there is even a present moment in which to experience foreknowledge.

Whether she is in a garden of forking paths, or foreclosed ones.

The heptapod intervention in human history and Villeneuve’s flashback/flashforward trick exemplify contemporary cinema’s turn to misdirection, manipulation and mind-games, to narrative complexity, to uncertainty and instability.

This trend is often seen as a response to the growth of long-arc television drama since the 1990s. Or to the structures and everyday experience of digital media, in which narrative – linear, determined, causal, authoritarian even – gives way to the logic of databases and networks, of sampling, iteration and gameplay. Or to the neoliberal end of history in which there is no longer any real hope of change or improvement, just more of the same, grinding away forever. Or to generating the ‘productive pathologies’ required by precarious digital labour in a network society: paranoia (lateral thinking, making connections), schizophrenia (living with multiple modes of consciousness) and amnesia (running through protocols and procedures without personal or interpersonal engagement).²⁷

But it is also often about reaching the point of impasse.

In Edge of Tomorrow (2014), also known by its tagline Live Die Repeat, William Cage hits the Normandy beaches in futuristic combat armour, part of a massive assault on the weird alien Mimics who have destroyed all human life on the continent.

He dies horribly.

Wakes up alive again on the eve of the invasion.

And dies on the beach once more.

Over and over again.

The Mimics are actually a single organism with a distributed nervous system. For every 6.8 million warrior Mimics – rapidly flailing balls of tentacles – there is an Alpha Mimic, a major node in the networked intelligence. And hidden somewhere is the Omega, the organism’s brain, which can reverse time. This means that the Mimics are always eventually invincible because the Omega can replay every encounter until it wins.

Cage picked up this time-looping ability by dying (the first time) covered in the blood of an Alpha. The same thing previously happened to Rita Vrataski: she relived a battle at least 300 times, until she got down the necessary moves to defeat the Mimics. But then she was badly injured, given a massive blood transfusion, and lost the ability.

Every day, Cage must find her and explain everything so she can train him, make him a better soldier; and each day, he must teach her the evolving series of moves necessary to fight her way off the beach with him so they can head inland to find the Omega.

Cage dies countless times before he and Rita eventually reach an impasse: whatever they try, however many times they try it, Rita dies.

They switch to Plan B, but repeatedly reach another impasse.

And then Cage also loses his power.

The day cannot be reset. They have just one chance left to kill the Omega.

It is an uncanny war of revenants: Cage, a dead-alive repetition daily reiterated, surrounded by the always-already dead who will die again when he reboots the day.²⁸

Every route off the beach ends in disaster.

There is no way out.

Nor is there one for us.

The necessary series of moves is impossibly complex, and we have already blown it.

When the US, the UK, the USSR and Japan derailed concrete international emissions targets at the Noordwijk conference in November 1989, we died on the beach. When the US refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol and sabotaged the Paris plans for living within, rather than averting, disaster, we died on the beach. When the successively more alarming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports produced since 1990 were and are ignored, when fossil fuel companies concealed evidence and deliberately created bogus ‘uncertainty’, when supine media perpetuate a fake controversy rather than report scientific consensus, when some dumbass politician points to the snow outside to dismiss global warming, we die on the beach. When a common response to the too-little-too-late proposal that we act to keep atmospheric CO₂ below 450 parts per million is to argue that 550ppm is more politically plausible, we die on the beach.

Even if that pesky additional 100ppm could subsequently be sequestrated as promised, we still die on the beach. The ice caps and glaciers will not magically reappear. The water level will not drop. Ocean acidification will not reverse. Corals will not reform. The dead will not come back to life.

This is our littoral zone: the contradiction we inhabit, the impasse we face. No one is seriously a denialist any more, yet we all live in denial; we act as if there are endless opportunities for the path to fork but live within systems of constant foreclosure. When oil companies announce their abandonment of exploratory drilling in the Arctic, it is not because the leopard has changed its spots: it is because the warmer world they are creating will make it cheaper and thus more profitable to extract the oil a decade or two later. When governments and corporations concoct sustainable development agendas and slogans, they are all about sustaining development rather than developing (or not) in a manner that is sustainable.

But what, asks the Petrocultures Research Group, if we see impasse differently? Not as a paralysis-inducing, status-quo-reinforcing ‘foreclosure of possibility’ but as ‘a situation of radical indeterminacy’ and ‘a condition of possibility for action within a situation that is suddenly open because it is uncertain’.²⁹

What if impasse is actually transition?

~

Arrival is obsessed with screens: TVs, phones, computer monitors. With screen-like images: large windows, the square of light into which the humans ascend to enter the heptapod craft, the ‘aquarium’ wall separating humans from heptapods on and across which contact and communication occurs. And with screening: with both concealing and showing. That is, with metaphor.

Sf in its empirical, realist mode directly depicts climate change unfolding. However, sf also possesses mundane literature’s metaphoric capacity to produce equally concrete but indirect representations of climate change. (And in either variety, the genre’s world-building imperative and affective repertoire encourages mapping the distribution of climate change’s effects across scales, from the personal and visceral to the social and the planetary, from the instant of catastrophe to the long durations of before and after.)

Metaphor is powered by contradictory impulses and energies. It deflects pressing material into the text’s unconscious, but the more deliberate this manoeuvre, the more likely latent content will emerge, become manifest. Any pressure towards the one-to-one correspondences of strict allegory is met by a contrary drive to ensure manifest content is meaningful on its own terms: that while the cigar is never just a cigar, it conscientiously performs the role of one.

What then happens to the mundane novel that, sidling up to the subjunctive, conceives of the world as if it were other than the mundane novel had previously imagined it to be? That tries to represent ‘a universe animated by nonhuman voices’, to map ‘the elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings’, to explore the ‘intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman’?³⁰

Let us conclude with two efforts in this direction.

Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) integrates natural history into a cross-class rural romance, and frames both within an evolutionary perspective. It contains no landscapes, no seigneurial prospects, but characters enmeshed within and never entirely separate from the natural and social worlds that surround, shape and sustain them. It is saturated in a bosky uncanny, through which run veins of the eerie, a sensation ‘constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence’.³¹

Wessex woods and plantations churn in biological and botanical process. They are fecund, rich with competing, cooperating nonhuman life. Ancient, yet constantly renewed, constantly changing. Comforting and disturbing.

Small mammals discreetly feast on plants and, bloodily, each other. Elms and ashes pool water in their forks, host symbiotic and parasitic fungi, lichens and ivies. Rabbits strip the thin bark from young beech trunks. Garden plots lie empty for years, waterlogged by dripping branches.

In spring, sap rushes almost audibly through the trees, and flowers bloom overnight, signalling ‘great undertakings on the part of vegetable nature … apt to fill reflective human beings who are not undertaking much themselves with a sudden uneasiness at the contrast’.³² At night can be heard ‘the scrape of snails creeping up the window glass’.³³

In the autumn, near ‘a half-dead oak, hollow and disfigured with white tumours, its roots spreading out like claws grasping the ground’, a lime tree disperses its winged seeds into the ‘chilly wind’.³⁴ The frost comes. Trees lose their golden colour. Underfoot, shed leaves clump and degrade into humus.

Winter sets in. Trees become ‘haggard, grey phantoms’.³⁵ Against the empty sky, they look like ‘sentinels, gigantic candelabra, pikes, halberds, lances’.³⁶

In summer, despite the longer, lighter days, thicker foliage darkens the woods. Through spectral air, pareidolian traces of strange figures are glimpsed.

Old trees, once landmarks, are felled or blown down. Bushes, once smaller than children, now overhang adults. On the ground, ‘dead boughs are scattered about like ichthyosauri in a museum’.³⁷ Lichens, mosses and fungi abound, various and colourful. Trees jostle noisily, wounding each other as they reach for the light. Rotten stumps rot.

And all around, the forest seems to talk, ‘an endless monologue, like that we sometimes hear in deep secret places where water flows, or where ivy leaves slap against stones’.³⁸

John South is terrified of the elm next to his rented house. He has known it all his life, once even contemplated cutting it down to make a clothes-line prop. But now he is elderly and bed-ridden. Fascinated, he watches it sway in the wind, dreads that it will fall and crush him: ‘it seems to haunt him like an evil spirit. He says that it … has got human sense, and sprouted up when he was born on purpose to rule him, and keep him as its slave’.³⁹

An eerie ligneous agency. A presence where there should be an absence.

The situation is bound up in asymmetries of power, property and class. The landlord, Giles Winterbourne, cannot fell the tree because it belongs to the Charmond estate. And, in a further complication of the sort that only happens in Victorian novels and real life, the house reverts to the estate upon the death of its tenant. Any effort Giles makes to alleviate John’s suffering might therefore be interpreted as acting in his own interests at the estate’s expense.

Giles cuts off the elm’s lower branches to reduce its movement, a shrouding that makes the tree seem even taller, more threatening. Fitzpiers, the local doctor, then insists it must be cut down overnight so the ailing woodsman does not witness the operation. The next day, the revelation that the elm has gone sends John into shock and, as the sun sets, he dies. Killed not by the uncanny, but the eerie: an absence where there should be a presence.

There were six trillion trees before humans evolved.

Now there are just half that number.

And half of them will disappear in the next century.⁴⁰

Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) is constantly amazed by trees.

It is also a serious literary novel sceptical of the serious literary novel. For Olivia and Doug, lodged atop a giant redwood they are protecting from loggers, the novels with which they pass the time, whether mid-Victorian or contemporary, all have the same problem: it is as if the characters are ‘imprisoned in a shoe box, and they have no idea … Everything alive is just outside their field of view’.⁴¹ Adam, a doctoral researcher studying the psychology of green activists – or, in Olivia’s words, ‘what makes some people take the living world seriously’ rather than thinking ‘that only people matter’⁴² – finds himself no longer able ‘to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations … His appetite for human self-regard is dead’.⁴³

Passing references to two sf stories offer solutions to mundane fiction’s shortcomings. On an undergraduate course on Transcendence, Chinese–American Mimi Ma reads Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884). When its two-dimensional protagonist–narrator is lifted from the eponymous realm to the three-dimensional Spaceland, she realises that she should become an engineer because the ‘only thing worth believing in is measurement’.⁴⁴

As epiphanies go, it seems counterintuitive. One might expect a sudden change of perspective, but not into the empirical, with its utilitarian processes of abstraction and equivalence that conceal aspects of the world they are rendering malleable.

But this is a vital bait-and-switch. Powers embeds the numinous within the material world of trees and forests. Measurement moves beyond mere impression. It makes trees visible. It insists upon the physical and temporal scale of their existence.⁴⁵ For example, the strand of the novel about Nicholas Hoel begins with his immigrant ancestors, the Norwegian Jørgen Hoel and the Irish Vi Powys, who settle in Iowa in the 1850s, and it recounts the lives of the following generations in relation to an American chestnut tree.

Jørgen plants six chestnuts, five of which sprout. One dies in the winter of 1862, and another when their oldest boy John strips its leaves for use as play money. One falls to drought, another to lightning. In 1904, the Cryphonectria parasitica fungus is accidentally introduced into the US with imported ornamental chestnuts. It kills a quarter of the trees in the 200-million-acre mixed eastern forest, wiping out ‘the most harvested tree in the country’,⁴⁶ and spreads as far west as Chicago by the 1940s. But Jørgen’s sixth chestnut, far out of its native range, survives until the 1980s before becoming infected. Fresh trunks will continue to sprout indefinitely from its diseased base, doomed to the briefest of lives before they too succumb to the blight.

On 21 March 1903, John takes a photo of the tree. He does so from exactly the same spot at exactly the same time every month until his death a decade later. His youngest son, Frank, takes over the task, but dies in World War I. Frank Jr, entrusted with the task while his father is in the army, continues this ‘monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life’.⁴⁷ His son Eric takes the final photo of the series on the day Frank Jr dies. And his son, Nick, grows up fascinated with the occasionally riffled flipbook made up of the 913 photos taken over 76 years, a little more than half the chestnut’s lifespan. He eventually transforms them into a 38-second film, Words of Air and Light.

The photos focus on one thing to the exclusion of others: but the camera’s back is always turned to the farm, to the conventional concerns of the novel. Powers alludes to all the things ‘a human being might call the story’ – to personal, family, local, national and international history – but within the photographic frame and ‘through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiralling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood’.⁴⁸

A contrast of durations: arboreal growth, human incidents. No single photo can show the chestnut’s gradualness, but in succession and speeded up – on a zoopraxiscope, in a flipbook, as a film – they make growth, and its slow pace, visible.

This steadiness contrasts with accelerating logging. In the two months Patricia must wait before going to the Amazon for seed bank samples, ‘one thousand more square miles of forest … vanish’.⁴⁹

But trees do also outlive humans and our transformations of the land. Doug finds stands of trees, miles from any habitation, growing in a peculiar ‘grid that looks like a child’s logic puzzle’.⁵⁰ He understands, eventually: it is the only remaining trace of the town that used to be there

The second sf story Powers refers to plays across such differential rates of being. Neelay Mehta, a disabled Indian– American computer genius, twice recalls an unnamed story – it sounds like a misremembered version of Katherine MacLean’s ‘Pictures Don’t Lie’ (1951) – in which tiny aliens arrive on Earth. Their metabolisms burn so quickly, they live so rapidly, that terrestrial ‘seconds seem to them like years’ and humans ‘are nothing but sculptures of immobile meat’.⁵¹ They ‘try to communicate, but there’s no reply’, ‘no signs of intelligent life’.⁵²

It is an analogy for the human relationship to trees: we are the fast-lived aliens, they are the humans. And for the human relationship to processing power: software agents are the fast-lived aliens, we are the humans.

Even as a seven-year-old, Neelay intuits such parallels. The microprocessor contains ‘thousands and thousands of transistors’, and in Neelay’s (first) epiphany, his ‘brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees’.⁵³ Branching is not only a thing all trees have in common. It is also, Neelay realises, the key to programming.

The Overstory is full of branchings, of fractal patterns replicating across scales, of networks, communities, communications, roots.

Patricia discovers that maples chemically alert nearby trees about insect infestations so they can start producing protective insecticidal chemicals. That they effectively share an immune system. She is laughed out of academia.

Her observations of Douglas-firs show that they host over a thousand other species. That when their roots meet underground they graft together, not merely sustaining each other but becoming a single entity. And that symbiotic fungal threads extend this network over acres of trees, making an entire forest into a single organism. Visiting ‘one of the oldest, largest living things on earth’,⁵⁴ she effortlessly undoes Deleuze and Guattari’s influential but wrong-headed opposition of the arboreal to the rhizomatic.⁵⁵ Above ground, 50,000 aspens cover over a hundred acres of south-central Utah; she counts the rings of the oldest downed tree she can find, which is about 80 years old, and smiles. Because beneath the ground is the rhizomatic mass from which all these trees spring. They are all natural clones of the same tree. A single entity. A hundred thousand, perhaps a million, years old.

What are we to make of such sociable entities? Of beings so interwoven that it defies sense to even think of them as separate individuals? Of this cellulose socialism?

In the autumn of 1976, thirteen-year-old Adam becomes fascinated by the stream of ants transporting a ‘spilled Popsicle’ across the sidewalk to their nest in the lawn.⁵⁶

He sees coordinated behaviour without any command hierarchy. A decentred, optimising organisation of formic endeavours.

He marks ants with nail polish so as to better observe them. He moves the Popsicle, scatters other foodstuffs, raises obstacles – that is, he performs experiments, takes notes and photos, and hypothesises, all for ‘the pleasure of looking until you see something’.⁵⁷

The ant ‘colony possesses something … Purpose. Will. A kind of awareness … so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing’.⁵⁸

After various family traumas, Adam realises that humankind cannot last much longer. That ‘soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones’.⁵⁹

Trees – forests, rather – possess a healthy intelligence, however opaque it may be to humans.

In Vietnam, Doug parachutes from his burning plane and lands in a banyan. Three centuries old, it has ‘three hundred main trunks and two thousand minor ones’ and yet is ‘all still a single fig’.⁶⁰ Losing consciousness in its embrace, he imagines descending past its roots, ‘downward toward the beginning of time, into the lair of a fantastic creature whose existence he never imagined’.⁶¹

Returning to the horizontality of the US undoes this fantasy of depth. Driving through a dense forest of spruce and fir, he stops for a piss. And discovers that he has been travelling between ‘beauty strips’ or ‘vista corridors’ only several trees deep,⁶² left in place to conceal clear-cutting of the National Forest beyond.

A few pages later, Neelay gets his first glimpse of a microprocessor. To explain its miraculous compression, his father shows him a photo of a many-trunked banyan growing from piles of shattered stone. Over centuries, a seed no bigger than the tip of his little finger has occupied, demolished and consumed the ancient temple into which it fell. Neelay suddenly grasps that ‘Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil’.⁶³

A couple of dozen pages – and years – later the now paraplegic Neelay discovers the astonishing array of alien-seeming trees in Stanford’s courtyard arboretum. (More pages and years later, Patricia will also stumble upon them, and despite her botanical training think of them as ‘mighty, improbable, outlandish trees that have come from some Golden Age pulp novel about the teeming jungle beneath the acid clouds of Venus’).⁶⁴ As Neelay contemplates these bizarre, almost hallucinogenic trees, he has a vision of the kind of gameworlds he might build. It will ultimately lead him to develop software agents that might save the planet from humankind and humankind from itself.

The chapter ends with a description of the land rising away from the campus.

A land of manzanita, bay laurel, madrone and bay live oak. Of hills and outcrops, meadows, canyons and crags. Beyond which, ‘in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize – the plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his’.⁶⁵

It is unclear how seriously we should take such a passage.

The novel repeatedly alludes to trees as experiments. To their immense variety of shapes, behaviours and forms of sociality as the product of unceasing evolutionary problem-solving. And in the real world, we know that trees respond to human presence and interact chemically with us. We know that they demonstrate forms of memory and foresight. That they can learn from experience.⁶⁶ But what kind of subjectivity and agency do they possess? And how are we to take account of it?

In one strand of the novel, Ray Brinkman reads a proposal to extend rights to trees, as recompense for the harm humans have done them and for the use of their Intellectual Property. It is not clear, though, that reifying trees as individual subjects rather than as isolated objects would actually make much difference. Such subjectification would, in the guise of saving trees, perpetuate human violence against entities that (like us) depend on inter- and intra-species sociality to survive, let alone thrive. At best, it would constitute something like – and nothing more than – the replacement of chattel slavery with wage slavery, or The Deep Range’s climactic shift from raising whales for slaughter to herding dairy-whales with orca-sheepdogs. That is, while not insignificant, it remains trapped within the event horizon of the monadic individual, that pathological old wet dream of liberalism and capitalism. And like all attempts to green capitalism, it would fall far short of an actual solution.

Perhaps instead we need to start with the trees, the forests, and what they can teach us. After all, as Patricia concludes, ‘This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.’⁶⁷

And with their aid, this chapter has roamed that strange penumbral realm where the shadows cast by the mimetic and the fantastic meet and overlap – a domain of the uncanny, the weird and the eerie where nonhuman agencies can emerge, where their antic forms loom and haunt, prank and caper, come within our grasp and yet elude us.

We have seen lumber live, refusing reification, becoming subjects but exceeding subjectification.

We have seen climate change condensed into potent images of rupture to map cascading effects, even as groundhog days and other narrative complexities disrupt simplistic notions of linear causation.

And we have seen that even the mundane novel has the potential to account for nonhuman voices. We have seen it expand its conception of the social beyond its preoccupation with particular classes and skin colours. We have seen it include other species and orders without reducing them to allegories of the human multiplicity it usually excludes. We have seen that it is not a hopeless case.

Our exploration of the Anthropocene unconscious began in unpropitious waters. Let us conclude in the belly of the petrocultural beast.

CONCLUSION

The Dialectics of Dominic Toretto

Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a
mechanical monster whose body fills whole
factories, and whose demon power, at first
veiled under the slow and measured
motions of his giant limbs, at
length breaks out into
the fast and furious
whirl of his
countless
working
organs.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

From sharknadoes to slow cinema, from slabs of bourgeois solipsism to the crepuscular domain of ligneous lives, we have seen the Anthropocene lurking within texts that have little or no idea that that is what they are talking about.

Sometimes these claims about the unconscious of the art and literature of our time might have seemed tenuous or elliptical. And that is okay – it is the dice you roll when you hazard criticism: you make judgements for which you can only offer support, never proof.¹ Which is why we began with monsters.

Like texts (and the unconscious), monsters are stitched-together congeries of contradiction: restless, surging, riven, troubled. Paradoxical shape-shifting Things, rich in mismatched potentials for meaning, they never look quite the same from a different angle or twice in a row. And, as with monsters, we must always ask of texts what they really represent. But the latent always outweighs the manifest content, and so we should also never try to reduce texts (or monsters) to singular fixed meanings. Disinterested, they live and grow and change, exceeding any frame of reference we might bring to bear. They give us the runaround, not caring to be tamed. And the more we try to pin them down, the more they will defy us and slip away – or perhaps turn on us and exact revenge for such slights.

This elusiveness should be celebrated. It is perhaps the greatest asset in making meaning meaningful, in making criticism activism. It can turn an often-recondite practice, usually confined to academia and middlebrow media, into transformative praxis.

If we start from the position that all cultural texts are about climate change – even if only in the most fleeting, evanescent way, and never denying whatever else they might also be about – then they are wide open. Not just as opportunities for dialogue, discussion and debate, but as adventure playgrounds, workshops, studios, festivals, carnivals, invitations to creative play, to thinking through, to action – as close to unalienated labour as we might get. And this is important.

Although climate change is an existential threat, for the most part we continue to live as if it were not. And drawing out the Anthropocene unconscious of a text can, in itself and on its own, achieve almost nothing. But the more widespread and collective such critical creativity becomes, the greater our chances of bridging the gulf between, on the one hand, the too-little/too-late/if-at-all responses to climate catastrophe our political and economic systems are capable of producing and prepared to sanction, and on the other, a flourishing biosphere in which we too flourish.

Shifting attitudes and ways of life away from and into opposition to petrocapitalism is not a magic bullet. It will not solve everything, and it will probably not solve anything quickly enough. It will not undo the catastrophe in which we already live, or prevent those that are already locked in. But it is essential to any long game seriously committed to life and diversity, equality and justice.

When writers and critics insist that the proper matter of the novel is the moral adventure of the evolving individual, they are like a threadbare Peter Pan begging us to clap, demanding that we abase ourselves to keep Tinker Bell alive.

It is a terrible extortion, like when the Saw movies’ tediously moralising Jigsaw demands his victims not only choose between self-mutilation and death but also accept his framing of their lives.

It is a ploy to make invisible the constant frantic concoction of the monadic subject – isolated, pristine, transcendent – and a wager that this most preposterous of fictions will thus seem real.

It is an injunction to circle the wagons, to shore up the illusion. To act as if you believe, especially if you do not.

It is a discursive black hole from which neither The Woodlanders nor The Overstory can escape. Trapped within its event horizon, they nonetheless demonstrate some of the ways in which mundane fiction can move beyond merely propagandising our separation from the world. By imaginatively reinstating human interdependence with the nonhuman, they re-enchant the world and re-embroil the subject within it. They gently propose a politics of interconnection, duration, scale and complexity.

Meanwhile, the Fast and Furious films spew from the Anthropocene unconscious.

‘They emerge,’ as James Baldwin wrote about something else entirely, ‘for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream.’²

Extruded from carbon culture’s death drive, all they see is the Earth, scorched, and they cannot look away, cannot think about anything else. They are all distraction and dissimulation, swagger and bluff. But they cannot conceal their terror. They know it is game over.

But even in this most unpromising of material we will find hopes and desires that might reframe the impasse we face as the early days of a better world.

Behind the hyperbole and euphoria, desperation haunts the franchise’s frantic film-by-film growth of budget, scale, pace, globality. Ever-larger box-office totals conceal shrinking returns on investment. The Fast and the Furious (2001) grossed over $207 million on a production budget of $38 million, returning $5.46 for every dollar spent. The only film in the franchise to outperform it is the $190 million Fast and Furious 7 (2015), which grossed over $1.5 billion for a 1:7.98 return-on-investment ratio (although that shrinks quite a bit when marketing costs are taken into account). And the two subsequent movies, The Fate of the Furious (2017) and Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw (2019), join The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) in each grossing less than its immediate predecessor.³

When the ninth, tenth and eleventh films were announced, they were explicitly described as bringing the saga to an end. As if the franchise owners already know it is too late – that the rate of profit does have a tendency to fall – but just cannot help themselves.

Hobbs and Shaw was intended to be a nitrous hit for the IP, allowing the main saga to drive off into the sunset while launching another multi-film series within the franchise universe. This sidequel dutifully set up sequels that now – along with the proposed Letty spin-off movie – might never be made since the box-office was merely whelming. Subsequent video game releases have continued to be moderately successful, but the Netflix animated series Fast and Furious Spy Racers (2019) limped through just eight episodes. The Fast and Furious: Supercharged Universal Studios theme park attractions in Hollywood and Orlando met with such public indifference that the Beijing park decided not to bother, and the enjoyably naff Fast and Furious Live tour bankrupted its production company.

There is something hideously appropriate about this scramble to extract as much value as possible from such a deeply (and soon-to-be-over) petrocultural property. It is merely replicating – while contributing to – fossil fuel capitalism’s burning desire to maximise profits before everything crashes.

But let us pop the franchise’s hood and take a closer look at this mechanical monster’s whirl of countless organs. Let us see the odd ways in which it acknowledges that we simply cannot go on like this.

The films follow, with some asides, the story of the street-racing LA criminal Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Conner, the undercover cop sent to infiltrate his gang. Brian falls for Dom’s sister, Mia, very nearly as hard as he falls for Dom, the adrenaline, the life. He quits, is coerced into working for, re-joins and re-quits law enforcement, while Dom’s adventures escalate from hijacking truckloads of portable TVs to taking down cartels and fighting Bond villains bent on global domination. Fast and Furious 9 (2021) even launches Roman and Tej into space.

Documents of petrocultural barbarism, the films nonetheless glimpse post–white supremacist civilisation. Structured by this contradiction, they are neither one nor the other, but both – at every turn and all the way down.

They indulge in Great Acceleration fantasies of limitless petroleum but also show the reckless cities and slow violence those fantasies produce. They possess a post-national imaginary but are always constrained by the world market and a touristic gaze. The characters constantly stick it to the Man, but also end up working for Him. They are rebellious, but pretty much accept the world as it is: street-racing defies the law but never really colours outside the lines.

The films offer visions of libidinal plenitude, but articulate them through fast cars, improbable physiques, booty shots and benevolent physics – but also through the affective and sentimental ties of a post-racial family of (mostly) chosen (mostly) working class kin.

Yet the franchise can never quite overcome a skin-tone hierarchy in which the darker you are the more likely you are to be a comedy sidekick. And although it includes smart, skilled, strong women, it struggles to consistently recall their existence and can never quite bring itself to question patriarchal reproductive heteronormativity.

It depicts the skilled labour of mechanics as creative co-operation – the way C.L.R. James imagined life on Melville’s Pequod – but the ‘family’ it constantly evokes is also a mechanism for exclusion.⁴

Yet these affective and elective ties are repeatedly expanded to include others. In The Fate of the Furious, the pseudo-profundity-spouting supervillain Cipher offers Dom a choice: either take her gun, kill her and all her henchmen, and rescue his former lover and infant son from their cell; or continue to betray the rest of his family and help her acquire a nuclear submarine with which to impose her will upon nations. Unlike Jigsaw, Cipher has no faith in her convictions or her asymmetrical power. Opening the cell requires two simultaneous key-card swipes in different locations, and since Dom is on his own, he cannot do that. He does not actually have a choice. His only move is to transform impasse into transition. So he extends his family once more, opening it out to include previous nemeses Deckard and Owen Shaw (and their mum). It is not easy, either emotionally (#JusticeForHan) or logistically (the later flashback exposition has more holes than not-holes), but for all its anguish and ricketiness it works.

~

The franchise’s vision of existence never extends beyond the human or considers the cost of carbon culture. Despite all the hours of screen time spent among cars, in auto shops, on city streets and open roads, we only actually see fossil fuels three times: in the first film, a character is forced to ingest lube oil; in the fourth, gasoline briefly sprays from a fuel tanker being hijacked by Dom’s crew; in the fifth, Dom douses drug money in gasoline to set it alight.

And for all that the films celebrate mobility, they can only stage it implausibly.

From the outset, live-action action sequences have been digitally enhanced, including green screen, compositing and computer-generated imagery. The very first street race introduces a signature visual trope: when Dom hits the ignition, the film switches to a CGI sequence from the impossible viewpoint of gasoline racing through the fuel line and into the cylinder to ignite and expand. Moments later, the unrepresentable is again digitally represented when Brian, trailing as usual, injects nitrous oxide into the fuel, forcing his already straining motor to burst through the limits of engineering and credibility.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) adds variety to this trope: a CGI plunge into the screen of Brian’s dashboard TomTom through the wiring to the GPS chip planted in his car and out from there to a screen on which others are elsewhere following his progress; and from Roman pushing a button, down a cable to compressed air cylinders that blow off the passenger door and fire an improvised ejector seat. In Fast and Furious (2009), the trope – absent from Tokyo Drift – mutates into something more complex, intercutting between a (digitally enhanced) live-action street race and a graphical representation of it in a 3D virtual space that looks like the ‘inside’ of a TomTom. The film ends with a virtual camera passing through a speeding car’s radiator grille and into a highly stylised CGI representation of its racing engine. And with that, this signature visual disappears from the franchise for good, banished by an escalating dependence on ‘photo-realistic’ CGI to depict pseudo-live-action sequences.

The franchise’s other and longer-lived signature visual, which never fails to provoke a laugh, is a cautionary text:

The motor vehicle action sequences depicted in this film are dangerous. All stunts were performed in controlled environments with professionally trained stunt crews on closed roads. No attempts should be made to duplicate any action, driving or car play scenes herein depicted.

In The Fast and the Furious, it appears – with slightly different wording – at the end of the final credits, and in 2 Fast 2 Furious it climbs to a position just after key cast and crew credits but before the full end credits. It reaches the very top of Tokyo Drift’s credits, despite the climactic action sequence being the most CGI heavy in the franchise up to that point. In Fast and Furious, it drops back down below the key credits, a position it retains in Fast Five (2011) but after a mid-credits stinger scene; in Furious 6 (2013), it climbs above the stinger, appearing after just a single credit for the director. But Fast and Furious 7 relegates it once more to the very end of the credits (even though Paul Walker, who plays Brian, died during production in an unrelated car crash). It remains there in The Fate of the Furious and completely disappears from the admittedly less auto-centric Hobbs and Shaw spin-off.

The declining fortunes of these signature visuals concede the gulf between the material and the virtual, between the reality of automobiles and the fantasies with which they have been inflated.

At the same time, the visibility of the virtual – audiences cannot help but see the implausible irreality of the evermore elaborate action sequences – implies a move away from the excesses of carbon culture. This is reiterated by a green seal of approval that appears in the end credits from the fourth film onwards, along with the statement: ‘This motion picture used sustainability strategies to reduce its carbon emissions and environmental impact.’ The words are impressively vague, the commendation actually NBCUniversal’s ‘Green is Universal’ stamp, which it likes to award itself.

These shifts of emphasis arise from the changing production context: as budgets have grown, so has the demand for spectacle, and thus so has reliance on digital technologies – which of course have their own carbon footprint, and do not replace exorbitant live-action sequences so much as expand the potential for staging and exaggerating them. Heavily invested in automotive fantasies – from the muscle of Dom’s pre-OPEC crisis 1970 Dodge Charger to Fast and Furious 7’s $3.4 million Lykan HyperSport – the franchise continues to employ genuine cars. But the car-based stunts are never now unassisted, never purely analogue, and this glaringly obvious digital dependence constitutes a significant admission: actual cars cannot do these things; gravity does not work like this.

The fantasies are just fantasies. The dream is over. The Great Acceleration fried its pistons long ago.

On the one hand, a fast, furious, thanatropic race to destruction, and on the other, a yearning for fullness. In between, lies a space in which to imagine the world to come.

For decades, that world will be the one sketched in the opening pages of this book: rising seas, creeping deserts, extreme weather; hunger, thirst, migration; wars and violence; depletions and extinctions. We cannot avert or even ameliorate some of the biophysical aspects of this future, but we can change the social, political and economic systems that organise the distribution of catastrophe and of respite.

So recall the worlds we could have had and imagine the ones we could still have.

Imagine waking from this anthropogenic nightmare.

Imagine possibility.

Imagine a world of trees, of all the other lives with which they make kin, of rich and healthy biodiversity.

Imagine a world where energy is not just clean, but free. Where no one lacks water, food, shelter, community, health.

Imagine plenitude without profligacy, produced here without creating poverty there. Imagine this Red Plenty, and turn it Green.

Imagine replacing separation, isolation, hostility and suspicion with a Red Belonging that says without hesitation or cavil ‘it doesn’t matter where you come from or who you are, we will care for you anyway’.⁵

And imagine extending that unconditional care – that respect and love – to the biosphere …

In almost every Fast and Furious film, characters talk about walking away from the life, but they never manage to get out or settle down. They are trapped in a juggernaut over which they have no direct control.

Just like us. Just like the world we have made.

The market and other forces arrayed against the humans and nonhumans who share this planet are overwhelming.

But down here in the Fast-and-Furiocene, our choice is clear.

Ecosocialism or barbarism.

Ride or die.

Notes

Introduction: The Anthropocene, the Unconscious

  1. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Despite the courtliness with which Ghosh excludes genre fiction from consideration, doing so replicates the problem he diagnoses. That said, The Anthropocene Unconscious also sets aside sf and other fictions that overtly address climate change. So sadly, no Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi or N.K. Jemisin (but, on the bright side, no Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen, either). This is not to say that such fiction does not also possess an Anthropocene unconscious, not least in the way currents of strategic realism, techno-utopianism and environmental apocalypticism run through them. Critical introductions to climate sf and ‘cli-fi’ include: Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, eds, Cli-Fi: A Companion (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019); and Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann, Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).

  4. Or, as the Angel of History would perceive it, from hominids learning to violently appropriate scarce but previously shared resources – and to slaughter previously commensal species for meat – to humans encircling the planet with weapons of mass destruction.

  5. Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (London: Orbit, 1998), 252.

  6. US scientists are said to have used the term ‘Anthropocene’ informally in the 1970s, and Soviet scientists its Russian equivalent in the 1960s. Earlier attempts to conceptualise and nominate the Anthropocene can be found in the work of the Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist Vladimir Venardsky in the 1920s and 1930s, and of the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani, who in 1873 wrote of the ‘anthropozoic era’.

  7. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016), 116.

  8. Nigel Clark, ‘Rock, Life, Fire: Speculative Geophysics and the Anthropocene’, Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), 259–76. 269.

  9. Ibid.

10. Michal R. Raupach and Joseph G. Canadell, ‘Carbon and the Anthropocene’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2.3 (2010), 210–18. 211

11. Other, much shorter, long Anthropocenes start roughly 14,000 years ago, with the extinction of the last megafauna after 50,000 years of human hunting and agricultural use of fire to reshape landscapes, and 4,000–8,000 years ago, as accelerating agricultural transformations – forest clearance, rice production – increased CO₂ and CH4 emissions.

12. The International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy’s Anthropocene Working Group were due to make their recommendation in 2020.

13. Will Steffen, Angelina Sanderson, Peter Tyson, Jill Jäger, Pamela Matson, Berrien Moore III, Frank Oldfield, Katherine Richardson, H. John Schellnhuber, B.L. Turner II and Robert J. Wasson, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure (Berlin: Springer, 2004), 132–3.

14. Paul Crutzen, ‘The Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415 (3 January 2002): 23.

15. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), 170.

16. Salvage Editorial Collective, ‘The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene’, Salvage 7 (Autumn/Winter 2019), 7–60. 41.

17. Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, 4.

18. Ibid. 4–5.

19. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.

20. Ibid. 58.

21. Ibid. 104.

22. Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London: Verso, 2015), 24.

23. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Verso, 2006), 106.

24. Ibid. 94.

25. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1989), 9.

26. Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, 85.

27. Ibid. 168.

28. Ibid. 8.

29. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 10.

1. Chum to the Maw

  1. There was also a making-of documentary, a mockumentary – excellently subtitled Heart of Sharkness – about the fatal first attempt to make Sharknado using real sharks, a book (How to Survive a Sharknado, which shares its title with the book written by the character April Shepard between the first two movies), a video game based on the second movie, and the one-shot comic Archie vs. Sharknado (2015), published as a tie-in to the third movie. And two Lavalantula movies, arbitrarily and tenuously set in the same storyworld, featuring volcanic eruptions which unleash giant lava-spewing tarantulas on LA, Fort Lauderdale and surviving cast members of the Police Academy and Cocoon franchises.

  2. In the third movie, Michele Bachmann, who a decade earlier declared ‘global warming … voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax’ (mprnews.org), races through a sharknado to vote against ‘premature’ anti-sharknado measures – a move straight from the denialism industry playbook.

  3. By 2005, scientists had identified a global ‘trend toward more frequent and intense hurricanes’ over the preceding 30 years (P.J. Webster, G.J. Holland, J.A. Curry and H.-R. Chang, ‘Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment’, Science 309.57, 16 September 2005, 1844–46. 1846) and a doubling in their destructive power (Kerry Emmanuel, ‘Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years’, Nature 436, 4 August 2005 686–8).

  4. Though only fools and knaves would then attempt to reduce the monster to a single, fixed meaning. Monsters are polysemic and disorderly: multiple contradictory connotations swirl about them, constantly recontextualising. They always escape our control; if they do not, then – as every episode of Scooby-Doo shows us – they are not really monsters at all.

  5. ‘Keep America White Again’ reads the baseball cap worn by Steve Buscemi’s pointedly named Frank Miller.

  6. A related phenomenon is the recent visibility of narratives about migration, refugees, war zones, post-war zones and disaster zones that contain fantastic elements, including Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Truck to Berlin’ (2009), Saad Z. Hossain’s Escape from Baghdad! (2012), Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014), Mohammad Rabie’s Otared (2014), Gary Barker and Michael Kaufman’s The Afghan Vampires Book Club (2015), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and such films as Eden is West (2009), Monsters (2010), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Monsters: Dark Continent (2014) and Jupiter’s Moon (2017).

  7. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Broadway, 2007), 5.

  8. Ibid. 10.

  9. See Colin P. Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager and Yochanan Kushnir, ‘Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent: Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought’, PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112.11 (2015): 3241–6. Dissenting views (such as Jan Selby, Omar S. Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich and Mike Hulme, ‘Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War Revisited’, Political Geography 60 (2017): 232–244) can really only advise greater caution in making such claims.

10. See Jana Evans Braziel, Diaspora: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 30.

11. Michel Feher, ‘Self Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital’, trans. Ivan Ascher, Public Culture 21.1 (2009), 21–41. 23.

12. See, for example, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone, 2015), Henry Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), Mauricio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012) and Jason Read, ‘A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity’, Foucault Studies 6 (2009), 25–36.

13. Annie McClanahan. ‘Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject’, Boundary 2 46.1 (2019), 103–132. 112.

14. Ibid. 122.

2. Serious Literary Silences

  1. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 7.

  2. Ibid., 24.

  3. Sir Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Romance’, The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., volume VI: Chivalry, Romance, The Drama (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1834), 147–216. 147.

  4. Ghosh, ibid., 26. Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) traces the rise of such statistical normativity.

  5. Ibid., 17.

  6. Ibid., 59.

  7. Ibid., 63. And, ironically, it did so just as the anthropogenic accretion of atmospheric carbon set about ‘rewriting the destiny of the earth’ (26). Ghosh draws an intriguing parallel between the rise of the realist novel and the rise of the gradualist scientific worldview, exemplified by Lyell’s geology and Darwin’s evolutionary biology, which displaced an older catastrophist paradigm capable of believing fossils were evidence of the Biblical flood. Spencer Weart argues that gradualism became so dominant that scientists struggled even to recognise, let alone accept, evidence of anthropogenic climate change (see The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)).

  8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 70.

  9. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 1994), 199.

10. Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation weaves Austen’s setting back into its world through a more explicit treatment of slavery, prompting many enraged ‘PC gone mad’ responses, primarily articulated around a spurious notion of fidelity. Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) introduces revenants and martial arts to Regency Britain, but its failure to then do anything interesting with them attests to the difficulty of reconstituting the attenuated and severed connections between Netherfield Park and the Empire.

11. John Updike, ‘Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns’, The New Yorker (17 October 1988), 117–19, 117.

12. Ibid. Updike is deliciously trolled by a cartoon that also appears on the first page of the review: a suburban mother and son look out of the window as their commuting husband and father returns home, and she says, ‘Oh, good. Here comes Daddy, to bring us to our senses.’

13. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 80.

14. Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), 96.

15. Ibid., 179.

16. Ibid., 887.

17. Ibid., 735.

18. Ibid., 45.

19. Ibid., 186.

20. Ibid., 427.

21. Although the length of each hiatus is unclear, it does not coincide with the duration of the interpolated minor strand sections.

22. However, as the novel reaches crisis point, it does, unfortunately, crystallise all the many anxieties flowing through the narrator, and through contemporary American life, into a home-invading, white working class bogeyman.

23. Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, trans. Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2014), 9.

24. Ibid., 248.

25. Ibid., 248.

26. Ibid., 245, 246.

27. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Boyhood Island, trans. Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2014), 218, 220.

28. Ibid., 227–8. Later, he briefly works as an unskilled labourer in oilrig construction.

29. Karl Ove Knausgaard, The End, trans. Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett (London: Harvill Secker, 2018), 9, 12–13.

30. Ibid., 32.

31. Ibid., 292, 293.

32. Ibid., 304, 394.

33. Knausgaard seems incapable of describing people of colour as anything other than ‘immigrants’.

34. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 72.

35. Ghosh, ibid., 128–9.

36. Samuel R. Delany argues that all genres operate according to different degrees of subjunctivity: for example, reportage describes events that did happen, naturalistic fiction events that could have happened, and fantasy events that could not happen. See ‘About 5,750 Words’, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Elizabethtown: Dragon Press, 1977), 33–49.

3. The Sound of Silence

  1. dark-mountain.net

  2. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 8.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid., 9.

  5. Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (London: Unbound, 2015), back cover. The Wake trilogy, completed by Beast (London: Faber and Faber, 2016) and Alexandria (London: Faber and Faber, 2020), is part of a revival in British weird fiction built on work from the 1960s and 1970s (for example, The Wicker Man [1973], Nigel Kneale teleplays, TV adaptations of M.R. James and Alan Garner, short fiction by Robert Aickman and M. John Harrison, various Doctor Who serials, creepy public information films, sundry tracks by The Fall). In its focus on landscape, rural lifeways, and horrors ancient and modern, supernatural and secular, this revival formulates complex, anxious responses to the destabilisations of globalised modernity, including climate upheaval; it constantly risks, without necessarily falling into, a dangerous nativist essentialism. See, for example, Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2014), Benjamin Myers’s Beastings (2014), Jenn Ashworth’s Fell (2016), Daisy Johnson’s Fen (2016), Fiona Mozley’s Elmet (2017), Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018), Zoe Gilbert’s Folk (2018), Tim Etchells’s Endland (2019) and Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst (2019), films such as Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), Catch Me Daddy (2014), A Dark Song (2016), Arcadia (2017), Possum (2018) and Bait (2019), and the TV series Fortitude (2015–18). This new British weird is related to the ‘English eerie’ and the ‘pictureskew’. A more folklorish European variant includes Thale (2012), The Lure (2015), The Ritual (2017), Spoor (2017), Border (2018) and the TV series Jordskott (2015–17). On the English eerie, see Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’, Guardian (10 April 2015) at theguardian.com; on the pictureskew, see China Miéville, ‘Skewing the Picture’, at chinamieville.net.

  6. The Wake, 355.

  7. Ibid., 92. Roughly, ‘and he says King William will raise the tax for all men to two shillings for each carucate [160 acres] so as to make good the work that Harold, thief of crowns, had not done to keep this land safe from foreigners. Now I was not the only one shouting, for look what this cunt had said. He tells us that we must pay more tax to a foreign king to keep ourselves safe from foreigners … and this is all the king needed to say, for war had come to England with him and it did not end at Senlac or in London and it would not end now’.

  8. Ibid., 49. Roughly, ‘it has burned high and strong and for many years, and it has consumed all of England, and now England is but a tale from a time that has gone’.

  9. Ibid., 2.

10. Ibid., 9

11. Ibid., 15, 32.

12. Ibid., 61.

13. Ibid., 248–9. Roughly, ‘Christ is not a god of the ground, of tree and leaf or pond and snow, of summer and all the green life in the land. He is a god of men only and he tells you to look up to the heaven, not around at your place in this land. He is a foreign god from a land where there are no trees and no love for anything that is not man, and for this great evil English folk suffer the ire of the French. If you would live, you must fight, and the old gods will fight with you, and if you do not fight, you will die, for this is the way of things and the only way.’

14. Ibid., 71. Roughly, ‘listen to the wise, for what the wise have to say is not what they want to hear, for what they wants to hear is that their lives are right as they are, and that they are good people and do not need to do anything … They do not see beyond their houses into the night. They are carefree in their houses, fucking and drinking while everything in the world outside falls away.’

15. Ibid., 98.

16. Ibid., 330, 274.

17. Ibid., 129.

18. Written in more or less conventional prose and set in what appears to be the present day, Beast follows Edward Buckmaster as he wakes, injured, disoriented and alone on an English moor. Something, however, is amiss: it is ‘still and hot like summer’ (24), but it is not summer; there are no birds or animals or other people (except when, perhaps, there are); a giant black cat prowls nearby. Buckmaster – like Clark, Raupach and Canadell – imagines the world consumed by the human fascination with fire (8). But more importantly, he perceives the world as something mysterious and alive beneath and around us (19), trees as majestic fecund Others (61), and ‘the beetles the bacteria the earthworms the centipedes the viruses the mycelium the seeds lying dormant in the soil waiting for us to burn ourselves out’ as ‘the meek who shall inherit the earth’ (64). He postulates a radical equivalence among all species and their lifeworlds (82–83) and tries to express what it feels like to be completely within the fullness of the world (149). The mildly experimental Alexandria, the last and least of the trilogy, is set a thousand years into the post-climate-catastrophe future. A small and declining religious community might contain the very last humans – unless those uploaded into a disembodied realm count.

19. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997), 77.

20. Ibid., 1.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 120.

23. Ibid., 10.

24. Ibid., 239.

25. Ibid., 292.

26. Ibid., 28, 117.

27. Ibid., 117.

28. Ibid., 118.

29. Ibid., 12.

30. Ibid., 118.

31. Ibid., 215.

32. Wars with China and Pakistan, the Vietnam war, splits in the Communist Party of India (Marxist), China’s ensuing preference for the Naxalite CPI (Marxist–Leninist), and so on.

33. Ibid., 289.

34. Ibid., 290.

35. Ibid., 304.

36. Ibid., 11.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 12.

39. Ibid., 14.

40. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 62–3.

41. Ibid., 10, 87.

42. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (London: John Murray, 2009), 30, 31.

43. Ibid., 31.

44. Ghosh, River of Smoke (London: John Murray, 2012), 540.

45. Ibid.

46. Ghosh, Flood of Fire (London: John Murray, 2015), 414, 492.

47. Flood, 350.

48. Ghosh, River, 524, and Flood, 484.

49. River, 255.

50. Flood, 375.

51. The Glass Palace (2000) shares this project, depicting the destruction of Burma’s wealthy and relatively egalitarian society, from the British toppling of the Konbaung dynasty in the 1880s and through the following century’s subsequent rise of logging, oil, rubber and palm oil industries.

52. Flood, 375, my italics. A fundamentalist who cannot perceive contradictory evidence, he self-righteously insists that ‘only when men’, with their God-endowed reason, selfishly ‘calculate their own advancement’ that ‘the public good …, material advancement, or social harmony … come about’ and in a form ‘more just and beneficial than anything that any government could accomplish’. Ibid., 375–6.

53. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 88.

54. Ibid., 89–90. In the distinctive if underdeveloped near-future world-building of The Calcutta Chromosome (London: Picador, 1997), Lhasa is home to ‘the International Water Council’s continental command centre for Asia’, responsible for ‘several major Hydraulic Regions: the Ganges–Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the trans-Yangtze, the Hwang-Ho’ (12).

55. Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason (London: Granta, 1994), 26–7.

56. Ibid., 83; my italics.

57. Ibid., 281, 311.

58. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New York: Mariner, 2005), 129; my italics.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 131.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 211.

64. Ibid., 132.

65. Ibid., 228.

66. Ibid., 241.

67. Less concerned with population movements, the novel nonetheless incorporates the 1978–79 Morichjhanpi massacre, in which the West Bengal government violently removed Bangladeshi refugees – who at the government’s invitation had moved from camps further south into West Bengal – from the island on which many of them had settled.

68. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 7, 215.

69. Ibid., 54.

70. Ibid., 382.

71. Ghosh, Hungry Tide, 150.

72. Ghosh, Great Derangement, 16.

4. The Life Aquatic

  1. Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 303–4, and Boyhood Island, 36.

  2. A Death in the Family, 304.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (London: Penguin, 2018), 113.

  5. Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, fifth edition, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Zed, 2019), 13.

  6. Ibid. 19.

  7. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, at marxists.org, 223, 224.

  8. Ibid., 224.

  9. Ibid., 223.

10. Ibid., 223, 224.

11. Aquatic sf prefers catastrophe and dystopia, albeit often with a utopian edge: something unbearable is washed away, something of value survives, something lost is recovered, something new emerges. And, vice versa, more utopian efforts are ideologically constrained. The Nautilus, the technotopian microcosm of Jules Verne’s sort-of anticolonial Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1869–70), lays the imaginative groundwork for the military–corporate liberal technotopias of Stingray (1964–65), Marine Boy (1966–67) and SeaQuest DSV (1993–96). The ambient aquatopia of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)’ (1968) and the pop-up Atlantis of Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair (1978) are funkier but distinctly phallocentric. Busted’s ‘Year 3000’ (2003) is the banal stuff Fukuyama’s end-of-history dreams are made of: not much has changed but they live underwater. On the continuous hilarious failure of capitalist–libertarian sea-steading utopias to actually emerge, see China Miéville, ‘Floating Utopias: Freedom and Unfreedom of the Seas’ in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds, Evil Paradises: Dreamworld of Neoliberalism (New York: The New Press, 2007), 251–261.

12. As were the times: in 1956, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation was established; in 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency; in 1958, the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development, which would become part of the United Nations Development Programme. Without ever really breaking with the paradigm of economic growth, the ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developing’ world contested the ‘developed’ world’s versions of development, as demonstrated by the Bandung Conference (1955), the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference (Cairo 1957–58), the Non-Aligned Conference (Belgrade 1961), the Tri-Continental Conference (Havana 1965), the Casablanca and Monrovia groups (founded 1961, merged into the Organisation of African Unity 1963), and the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia and Africa (founded 1957, adding Latin America in 1966 to became OSPAAL).

13. ‘Convention on the Continental Shelf’, legal.un.org, Article 1.

14. On Grotius, see China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005), 153–224.

15. On the green revolution, see Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (London: Zed, 1991).

16. Arthur C. Clarke, The Deep Range (London: Pan, 1970), 94.

17. Ibid., 93.

18. Ibid., 16, 84.

19. Ibid., 12.

20. And anyway, by the time whale meat is abandoned, the Bureau has developed whale-milking technologies and trained orcas to work like sheepdogs.

21. Ibid., 203.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. See also Childhood’s End (1953), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and its sequels.

25. J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: Fourth Estate, 2014), 61.

26. Ibid., 175.

27. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, second, revised edition (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), 20.

28. An earlier version of this section appeared in my ‘Dulltopia’ in Boston Review’s issue on Global Dystopias (2017), 191–206; also available at bostonreview.net

29. Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso, 2020), 1.

30. At Sea (Peter Hutton, 2007) gives similar treatment to the life cycle of container vessels.

31. The ASL of a contemporary Hollywood movie is four to six seconds, occasionally dropping below two seconds in films such as Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2007) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

32. In reality, it took the entire crew a month of 17-hour days to dump the cargo into the sea.

33. Jennnifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (New York: Oxford UP, 2018), 133-4, 220.

34. Roy, The God of Small Things, 199.

35. Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 129.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. It is inspired by Knut Hamsun’s novel Pan (1894), which is set in Nordland, just across the sea from Sørland, where Knausgaard played as a child.

39. Similar effects are found in Hard to Be a God (2013), Aleksey German’s remarkable chronicle of the barbarism to come. Set in the future, but on a planet like ours was 800 years ago and in which all traces of rational enlightenment are brutally suppressed, its grotesque violent comedy of proximity and abjection is obsessed not just with rain- and smoke-filled air, but with boundary-blurring viscosities: with blood, shit, piss, vomit, mucus, phlegm, saliva, pus, milk, stew, albumen, grease, viscera, sores, wounds, rotting vegetables, decaying corpses, bodies smashed and torn.

40. Ibid., 24.

41. It was filmed in Tenesar, the ‘lost village’ of Lanzarote.

42. Richard Powers, The Overstory (London: Vintage, 2019), 209–10.

5. We Am Groot

  1. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 3.

  2. Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, trans. Roy Sellars. Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 216–28. 221.

  3. Ibid., 224.

  4. Ibid., 221.

  5. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Art and Literature (London: Penguin, 1990), 335–76. 340, 341.

  6. L.G. Moberly, ‘Inexplicable’, Strange Tales from the Strand, ed. Jack Adrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 183–95. 183, 184.

  7. Ibid., 187.

  8. Ibid., 191.

  9. Ibid., 194.

10. Ibid., 194

11. Ibid., 195.

12. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 30.

13. Ibid., 32.

14. But it appears just twice more: 110 minutes later, when the driver’s brother reprises his journey into the city, and again, after another half hour, in the closing shot, as he returns to the country

15. In the foreground of the final shot, farm labourers cut straw by hand. This links the tree to a deeper time, to pre-industrial history, and provides a deflationary perspective on the bourgeois malarkey that has preoccupied the principal characters. But at the same time, it naturalises class differences and uneven development.

16. Zvyagintsev does something similar at the start of Leviathan (2014). After a dozen shots of waves crashing on rocks, of still sea waters and an impassive shore, of a crumbling jetty and crumbling boats, the overture segues into the narrative by settling on an isolated house and one of its occupants as he drives into the nearby town to meet the train. The 18th shot looks across the road as he drives past, but rather than cutting, the camera lingers on the rock opposite, its folds and scars suggesting a monstrous face trapped within.

17. In #1, he twice thinks ‘STOP!’ as heavies try to run him down, then thinks ‘I SAID …’ before shouting ‘STOP!!’ as he smashes their car into the ground. In #6, about to kiss an android copy of Linda, he suddenly cries ‘NO!!’ and turns away, partly in horror, partly because he cannot betray his dead wife, and partly because, he reasons, even a robot programmed with emotions could not respond romantically and sexually to whatever ‘in god’s name’ he has become.

18. Unfortunately, intestinal flora are not plants but bacteria, archaea and fungi.

19. See Fear #10–19 (1972–73), The Man-Thing #1–22 (1974–75) and Giant Size Man-Thing #1–5 (1974–75).

20. Groot cropped up intermittently for almost fifty years before he finally secured his place in the Marvel universe around 2006, although his linguistic capacities have continued to vary. He has died and been regrown from a twig several times. So, as with Moore’s Swamp Thing, the extent to which these iterations are continuous or distinct from each other remains unclear.

21. Just as the comics and reference sources insist on gendering Swamp Thing, Man-Thing and Groot as male.

22. Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, Trees, volume 1: In Shadow (Berkeley: Image Comics, 2015), n.p.

23. Ibid., n.p.

24. Ibid., n.p.

25. Ibid., n.p.

26. Volume three, Three Fates (Berkeley: Image Comics, 2020), implies that the trees are engaged in something like Nikolai Fyodorov’s Cosmist scheme to resurrect all of the universe’s dead. But this hint is supplied by a ghost who might just be a figment of a character’s imagination.

27. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 13–41.

28. Appropriately, Live Die Repeat and Repeat, the sequel that is actually a prequel, has been stalled for years in development hell. Freud links repetition and impasse to the uncanny. In ‘The Uncanny’, he writes about wandering the labyrinthine streets of a provincial Italian town, only to find himself among houses of ill repute, where ‘painted women’ disport themselves (359). He hastens away, but his unguided perambulations soon deposit him back on the same street. His return begins to ‘excite attention’, so again he hurries off, ‘only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time’ (359). Overcome by feelings ‘of helplessness and of something uncanny’, he hurries back to the piazza from which he departed. (He does not explain what he was doing in the red-light district, or why he feels the urge to simultaneously announce and disavow his repetition-compulsion to restage the Oedipal revelation of female ‘lack’.)

29. Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2016), 16.

30. Ibid., 73, 63, 33.

31. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 61. This account of uncanny-adjacent phenomena contrasts the eerie to weird, which is ‘the presence of that which does not belong’ (61).

32. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (London: Penguin, 1986), 184.

33. Ibid., 252.

34. Ibid., 267.

35. Ibid., 282.

36. Ibid., 317.

37. Ibid., 378.

38. Ibid., 379.

39. Ibid., 149.

40. Powers, The Overstory, 540.

41. Ibid., 367.

42. Ibid., 399.

43. Ibid., 414. Twenty years later, in an undergraduate lecture, he will demonstrate how recently we invented the categories ‘of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human’ (540). This constrained view extends into the world: as the botanist Patricia argues, although people see fruit, nuts, wood, shade, ornaments, foliage, obstacles, dark places, dangerously overhanging branches, cash crops, ‘No one sees trees … trees are invisible’ (495, 529).

44. Ibid., 47.

45. Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016) approaches the questions of differential duration through a multigenerational family-and-business saga, and of scale through number, through the sheer quantity of trees felled over three centuries. In 1693, two young men arrive in the seemingly endless and eternal forests of New France as consitaires or habitants contracted for three years labour in service, after which their seigneur will award them land to clear and settle for themselves, under his feudal control. René Sel settles, marries a Mi’kmaq woman, raises a family, but Charles Duquet flees at the first opportunity, becomes a fur trapper, a fur trader and finally a timber merchant. The novel follows them and their descendants through to 2013, taking in North America, Europe, the Far East, the Antipodes and the Amazon basin, mapping the development of a global capitalism incapable of seeing the trees for the lumber. Everywhere, as trade in timber expands voraciously, trees are felled. Land is transformed, laid barren or made over into monoculture plantations, amputating trees from their complex interdependencies. The novel leaves one with a sense of the world depleted, exhausted, haunted by what was but is no more, and by what could have been but can no longer be.

46. The Overstory, 14.

47. Ibid., 17.

48. Ibid., 19.

49. Ibid., 409.

50. Ibid., 455.

51. Ibid., 122.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., 116.

54. Ibid., 165.

55. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988).

56. Ibid., 66.

57. Ibid., 69.

58. Ibid., 67.

59. Ibid., 70.

60. Ibid., 102.

61. Ibid., 104.

62. Ibid., 109.

63. Ibid., 117.

64. Ibid., 558.

65. Ibid., 140.

66. For a brief introduction to such matters, see Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World, trans. Jane Billinghurst (London: William Collins, 2016).

67. Ibid., 530.

Conclusion: The Dialectics of Dominic Toretto

  1. See V.F. Perkins, ‘Must We Say What They Mean?: Film Criticism and Interpretation’, V.F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism, ed. Douglas Pye (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020), 240–56.

  2. James Baldwin, ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, Notes of a Native Son. Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 11–18. 16.

  3. With none of preceding movies’ stars – other than a last-minute Vin Diesel cameo – Tokyo Drift also grossed less than the first movie, and has the worst return on investment ratio (1:1.86); after marketing costs, it probably barely broke even. Justin Lin’s $250,000 Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), unofficially retconned into the franchise as Han’s origin story, grossed over $3.8 million for the best return on investment of all (1:15.25).

  4. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.

  5. Mark Fisher, ‘Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)’, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater, 2018), 573–84. 578.

Index

2 Fast 2 Furious (film), 138, 139

4 3 2 1 (Auster), 37–41

28 Days Later… (film), 27

2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 4–6, 9

2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 6

Abbott, Edwin, 123

Action Comics #1 (comic), 23

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension (film), 23

Airplane! (film), 23

Anderson, Paul Thomas, 53

Annie McClanahan, 32

Arrival (film), 113–15, 119

Austen, Jane, 34–6

Auster, Paul, 37, 41

Back to the Future (film), 23

Baldwin, James, 134

Ballard, J. G., 77, 78

The Banishment (film), 104, 105

Baywatch (TV series), 22

Blade Runner (film), 80

Bonneuil, Christophe, 9

Boyle, Danny, 27

Brecht, Bertolt, 24

Bronte, Charlotte, 34

Brown, Dan, 66

Cage, John, 40

Calamity Jane (film), 17

The Calcutta Chromosome (Ghosh), 46

Canadell, Joseph G., 10

Capital, Volume I (Marx), 131

Cervantes, Miguel de, 37

The Circle of Reason (Ghosh) 62–3

Cities of Salt (Munif), 37

Clark, Nigel, 9, 28

Clarke, Arthur C., 5, 6, 46, 73–7, 78

Clinton, Hillary, 42

A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 50

Conrad, Joseph, 78

Conway, Gerry, 109

Cortés, Hernán, 78

Cruise, Tom, 20

Crutzen, Paul, 7, 12

Day, Doris, 17

The Dead Don’t Die (film), 28–9

Dead Slow Ahead (film), 79–85

The Deep Range (Clarke), 73, 74–7, 129

Defoe, Daniel, 37

del Toro, Guillermo, 28

Deleuze, Gilles, 126

Delvaux, Paul, 78

Die Hard (film), 17

Disney, Walt, 5

The Drowned World (Ballard), 77–8

Ducks, Newburyport (Ellmann), 37, 41–3

Eco, Umberto, 66

Edge of Tomorrow (film), 116–17

Elena (film), 104, 105

Ellis, Warren, 111

Ellmann, Lucy, 37, 43

Elysium (film), 57

Ernst, Max, 78

Evil Dead 2 (film), 23

Évolution (film), 97–100

Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw (film), 135, 140

Fast and Furious (film), 138, 139

Fast and Furious 7 (film), 135, 139, 140

Fast and Furious 9 (film), 136

Fast and Furious Spy Racers (TV series), 135

The Fast and the Furious (film), 134, 139

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (film), 135, 138, 139

Fast Five (film), 139

The Fate of the Furious (film), 135, 137, 139

Flatland (Abbott), 123

Flood of Fire (Ghosh), 60, 61

Forster, Marc, 30

Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, 9

Freud, Sigmund, 15, 102

Furious 6 (film), 139

Gerber, Steve, 109

Ghosh, Amitav, 2, 3, 4, 15, 33, 37, 46, 47, 49, 50, 58, 59, 62, 65, 67

Gibson, William, 59

The God of Small Things (Roy), 53–8, 89

Gosling, Ryan, 89

The Great Derangement (Ghosh), 2, 66

Groot (fictional), 110

Grotius, Hugo, 73, 74

Guattari, Félix, 126

Gun Island (Ghosh), 66–7

Hadzihalilovic, Lucile, 97

Hanks, Tom, 83

Hardy, Thomas, 120–2, 134

Hegel, Georg, 73

Henry V (film), 23

Herce, Mauro, 79

The House of Secrets (comic), 107

How the West Was Won (film), 5

Howard, Jason, 111

Hungry Tide (Ghosh), 64–6

Independence Day (film), 23

‘Inexplicable’ (Moberly), 102–3

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film), 23

Jackson, Shirley, 47

James, C. L. R., 79, 137

Jameson, Fredric, 17

Jarmusch, Jim, 28

Jaws (film), 23

Jentsch, Ernst, 101, 102

Jia Zhang-Ke, 86

Jones, Indiana (fictional), 66

Kingsnorth, Paul, 49, 50, 67

Kingsolver, Barbara, 4

Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 37, 43–6, 69–70, 71

Kubrick, Stanley, 5, 6

The Lady and the Tramp (film), 23

Lost River (film), 89–93

Loveless (film), 105–7

Macherey, Pierre, 15–17

Mad Max: Fury Road (film), 3

The Magic Mountain (Mann), 35

‘Man of the Year Million – A Scientific Forecast’ (Wells), 111

Mansfield Park (Austen), 35–6

Man-Thing (fictional), 109–10

Mare clausum (Selden), 74

Mare Liberum (Grotius), 73

Marx, Karl, 131

Melville, Herman, 34, 137

Middlemarch (Eliot), 35

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy), 70

Moberly, Lucy Gertrude, 102

Moby-Dick (Melville), 34, 79

Moore, Alan, 108, 109

Moore, Jason W., 12, 13

Munch, Edvard, 44

Munif, Abdelrahman, 37

My Darling Clementine (film), 17

My Struggle (Knausgaard), 37, 43–6, 69–70, 71

Network (film), 23

Oil! (Sinclair), 53

Olivier, Laurence, 23

The Overstory (Powers), 122–30, 134

Pacific Rim (film), 28

‘Pictures Don’t Lie’ (MacLean), 125

Powers, Richard, 122–30

Putin, Vladimir, 104

Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 23

Raupach, Michael R., 10

Reid, Tara, 20

Riddley Walker (Hoban), 50

Rist, Gilbert, 72

River of Smoke (Ghosh), 60, 61

Rivers, Ben, 94

Robinson, Jackie, 41

Robinson, Kim Stanley, 3

Roman Holiday (film), 23

Roy, Arundhati, 49, 53, 57, 67, 70, 71

Said, Edward, 35

Saw (film franchise), 133

Scarface (film), 23

Scott, Ridley, 80

Sea of Poppies (Ghosh), 59–60

Selden, John, 74

The Shadow Lines (Ghosh), 63–4

Sharknado (film franchise), 19–27

Sinclair, Upton, 53

The Sound of Music (film), 23

Space Cowboys (film), 23

Star Wars (film), 23

Steffen, Will, 10

Stermer, Eugene, 7

Still Life (film), 86–9

Swamp Thing (fictional), 107–9, 110

Taxi (TV series), 22

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (film), 23

Thant, U, 77

Tolstoy, Leo, 35

Toy Story (film), 23

Trees (comic), 111–12

Trexler, Adam, 13

Trotsky, León, 59

Trump, Donald, 42

The Twilight Zone (TV series), 22

Two Years at Sea (film), 93–7

Updike, John, 37

Villeneuve, Denis, 113, 115

von Braun, Wernher, 5

Wahlberg, Mark, 83

The Wake (Kingsnorth), 50–3

Wallace, Edgar, 78

War and Peace (Tolstoy), 35

The War of the Worlds (Wells), 110–11

Waterworld (film), 3

Watt, James, 12

Wein, Len, 107–9

Wells, H. G., 110, 111

The Wizard of Oz (film), 23

The Woodlanders (Hardy), 120–2, 134

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Brooks), 29–31

Wrightson, Bernie, 107

X-Men: First Class (film), 17

Ziering, Ian, 20

Zvyagintsev, Andrey, 104–7, 110