Asbestos

Asbestos has long been a staple lesson for the precautionary principle. As a toxic material, it is often something people hope not to encounter. But before this, it often appeared as a substance of hope, carrying the promise of safety and economic rewards. This article uses these conflicting accounts of asbestos’s hope as a starting point for thinking about the conditions of hazardous hope. Turning to a vignette about an asbestos facility in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016), the article considers how stories of hazardous hope may produce a diminishment of hope. Rather than dismiss this as insufficiently hopeful, however, the article addresses the form of the novel as an exemplar of accessible experimentalism, suggesting it models new ways of communicating complex problems. If narrativizing hope demands an openness to multiple possible futures, then the form of such hope might need to defer resolution in much the same way as that adopted by modernist writing.