Towards the Cli-Fi Historical Novel; Or, Climate Futures Past in Recent Fiction

Abstract

In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson argues that the historical novel of the future will have to be science-fictional. My essay contends that it will have to be climate-fictional. Like Jameson, I focus on the connections between late capital’s reification of the present and the forms of time-consciousness that such reifications foreclose. But, I place Jameson into dialogue with Jonathan Crary and Andreas Malm to show that the foreclosed modes of time are intimately linked to a natural world that contemporary capital purports to have vanquished. This essay discusses two examples of cli-fi historical fiction—Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021) and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019)—in this context. Despite important differences, these works are both concerned with thinking the climate crisis historically. Both explore how the natural world persists in our “postnatural” present in the form of an uncanniness that denaturalizes the social. This uncanniness liberates traces of the past and future from a present that declares itself bereft of such ghosts. Each novel develops a fantastical form to grasp this temporal heterogeneity, and each retrieves the kernels of utopian futurity from the material history of our present—even and especially, from the climate-devastated and inexorably destructive tendencies of that present.When the deep time of the natural-historical negates yet preserves the historical time of intensified reprisal . . . then and only then will a new universality of the planetary be born.