Return of the ‘Savage’ in Contemporary Climate Fiction

ABSTRACT

Climate fiction emerged in the twentieth century as a future-oriented project, but cli-fi’s eco-catastrophe scenarios are susceptible to backward-looking apprehensions about the breakdown of modern ‘civilization’ and an ensuing descent into a state of ‘savagery’ (figured as chaos, violence, and even cannibalism). Such apprehensions have their origin in colonialist teleologies of ‘progress,’ projecting Eurocentric constructions of ‘savagery’ onto climate-affected contemporary societies. The following analysis of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) offers illustrative examples of cli-fi’s continuing dependence on (neo)colonial ‘descent into savagery’ scripts that limit the imaginative possibilities of climate futurity.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate fiction
• savage
• futurity
• neo-colonialism
• cannibal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Two recent mixed-genre anthologies, Tales of Two Planets (2020), edited by John Freeman, and All We Can Save (Freeman 2020), edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, embody this commitment to current climate realities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Magdalena Maczynska

Magdalena Mączyńska is Professor of English and World Literatures at Marymount Manhattan College, where she teaches courses in climate fiction, contemporary Anglophone fiction, literary theory, and academic writing. Her research interests include climate fiction; intersectional ecocritical theory; postmodernist, postcolonial, and postsecular fiction; and critical pedagogy. Her work on contemporary climate fiction has been published in Contemporary Literature, ISLE, Frame, and the Journal of Modern Literature. She is the author of Gospel According to the Novelist: Religious Scripture and Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2015).