Challenging ecoprecarity in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy

ABSTRACT

The starting point of this article is the escalating climate crisis, the precarity it has already caused in the Global South, and the fact that nations in the Global North have also begun to suffer from climate change, a development that is likely to accelerate in the future. The focus of the article is the disagreement within eco-socialist and postcolonial scholarship on the future of capitalism and on how global relations will change in a world transformed by the climate crisis. These questions are approached via Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy (2010–17) which depicts how global social and economic relations have been transformed in a world altered by the climate crisis. The article argues that while these novels describe the future world as still capitalist and sharply class divided, and (illegal) migration as the only escape from precarity, they also imagine a profound shift in how wealth is distributed.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• ecoprecarity
• climate fiction
• anthropocene
• capitalocene
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Morton defines hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (2013, 1). To the extent that the climate crisis is an object, it is such a hyperobject that can only be inferred through its multiple and various symptoms, but never be observed as a single thing.

2. I am similarly located. As a white male professor of English literature employed by a Swedish university and educated partly in the US, I have a grasp of how anglophone speculative fiction may be received by a western reader, but my experience of precarity and of anthropogenic climate change is very limited.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johan Höglund

Johan Höglund is associate professor of English at Linnaeus University and director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published extensively on the relationship between imperialism and popular culture in a number of different contexts, including the late-Victorian era, the long history of US global expansion and decline, and the often-unrecognized era of Nordic colonialism. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (2014), and the co-editor of several scholarly collections and special journal issues, including the forthcoming Gothic in the Anthropocene: Dark Scenes from Earth with University of Minnesota Press.