To Ireland in the end times: figuring the future in contemporary Irish fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines a new strand of speculative Irish fiction that has emerged in the post-Celtic Tiger era. Focusing on novels by Kevin Barry, Sarah Davis-Goff, Catherine Prasifka and Danny Denton, I analyse how the speculative mode, with its ontological obliquities and temporal distortions, is particularly commensurate to the environmental and socio-economic complexities and predicaments facing Ireland at present. Specifically, these novels centre on problems and crises that have national and regional manifestations, but are ultimately global in scale and extent: ecological degradation, sea-level rise, food scarcity, pandemics, and the social and psychic effects of neoliberalism and surveillance capitalism. In coming to terms with such issues, particularly the hyperobject of climate change, these novels are often at their most effective in moments that de-privilege anthropocentric perspectives by establishing existential intimacies and political affinities with the natural and non-human realms.