Novel Climates, National Catharsis: Local vs. Global Environmentalism in Californian Cli-Fi

Abstract

ABSTRACT California occupies a special place within contemporary American climate fiction and environmental history. It provides the key setting for cli-fi novels such as Edan Lepucki’s California (2014), Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015), T.C. Boyle’s When the Killings Done (2011) and A Friend of the Earth (2000), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). California also plays a key role in fostering the contemporary environmental movement with its stringent, groundbreaking environmental policies and history. California offers a defining trope and shorthand for climate change in the United States and beyond. This survey of California-based cli-fi places California as a flashpoint location for climate change catharsis within the American and global environmental imagination, offering a paradoxical productive and torpifying release. I argue the depictions of California highlight how the climate crisis is always experienced locally, but like ecological or tropic cascade, Californian cli-fi demonstrates repercussions beyond its individual bioregions. As a flashpoint for national climate change catharsis, California inspires change and problematically keeps climate change’s impact at a distant frontier, at least for those who do not live within its borders or who do not have the means to escape.