Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science by Patrick Whitmarsh (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science by Patrick Whitmarsh
• Erin James

WHITMARSH, PATRICK. Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science. Stanford University Press, 2023. 209 pp. $80.00 hardcover; $26.00 paper.

In the opening pages of Patrick Whitmarsh’s Writing Our Extinction, native Greenlander Arnarulunnguaq stands atop a newly-built New York City skyscraper in 1924 and looks upon the city below. Bewildered, she puts to words the uncanny vision of humanity that this vertical perspective allows: “I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we know, and that this is part of another life” (3). For Whitmarsh, Arnarulunnguaq’s terror neatly summarizes the affordances of a vertical perspective: viewing the world—and ourselves— along the vertical plane, he argues, necessitates engaging with speculative understandings of the planet and the place of humans in it, as well as grappling with our own absence from it. The rest of Whitmarsh’s provocative and illuminating book fleshes out Arnarulunnguaq’s experience, reorienting post-WWII narrative fiction along an up-and-down axis. His survey foregrounds aerial representations of the earth from above and subterranean explorations of the earth from below and persuasively accounts for the way that this orientation illuminates increasing environmental precarity and anxieties about human extinction.

In the titular “vertical science,” Whitmarsh refers to postwar-era advancements in air and space travel, resources extraction, and nuclear experimentation that we most clearly see in the decade spanning 1957–1958’s International Geophysical Year and the publication of the Earthrise photo ten years later. For Whitmarsh, the “vertical decade” not only ushers in radical scientific developments and their affiliated technological and militaristic projects, but also “a vertical thematics of cultural progress” (10). This vertical science, in turn, coordinates with a post-1960 Anthropocene fiction that offers readers “vertical perspectives on the planet, an increased attention to the ecological connectivity between human development and geophysical systems, and a sense of the earth as a script for humankind’s accelerating extinction” (11). By reconceptualizing “Anthropocene fictions” not as texts that feature explicit representations of the epoch or anthropogenic climate change but as those that foreground a vertical imagination, Whitmarsh nicely expands what novels we might place in this category. He argues that “Anthropocene fiction is not ostensibly about climate change at all,” but rather “works to focalize vertically the geophysical mesh in which climate change occurs and in which human actors conceptualize the sensitivity of their actions (or inaction)” (21). The corpus of texts that Whitmarsh organizes into Anthropocene fiction contains [End Page 112] familiar titles—Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (1992)—as well as a host of new novels that greatly broaden the scope of this category, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) and The Underground Railroad (2016), and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), among others.

The chapters in Writing Our Extinction revolve around key concepts that Whitmarsh introduces to illuminate the connections between vertical science and Anthropocene fictions. Chapter One focuses on planetary realism, or texts that render “strategies of realist and historical fiction...alongside descriptions of a strikingly nonhuman world” (33). Via a deep dive into DeLillo’s Underworld, this chapter also proposes the concept of archival geology, by which we can read the documentation of our species in geophysical verticalities—landfills, boreholes, orbital arcs, nuclear debris and fallout, and the underground vestiges of imperial genocide—as a means of grappling with time beyond human measure. In Chapter Two, Whitmarsh focuses not on the work of a single author but on a single (failed) scientific endeavor: Project Mohole, which in 1957 sought to investigate the hypothesized change in material composition between the earth’s crust and its mantle. Project Mohole offers Whitmarsh a unique set of parameters to lump together novels such as Red Mars, Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), all of which he...