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

Since the beginning of the millennium, postcolonial and decolonial studies, as well as the work of eco-socialist/eco-Marxists, have paid increasing attention to the ways in which the climate crisis produces states of precarity. As described by Ron Nixon (2011) in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor and, more recently, by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2017) in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and Kathryn Yusoff (2018) in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, already vulnerable people in the Global South suffer most acutely from the climate crisis. Central to the scholarship these authors represent is the notion that the climate crisis is essentially an effect of the project that began with European colonialism in the 15th century. The acquisition of vast territories beyond Europe, and the transformation of these regions into cheap resources for a rapidly expanding industrial and capitalist society, are, as Patel and Moore argue, the most important reasons why the globe is warming, and why natural phenomena like storms and forest fires are becoming increasingly severe.

So far, and despite hurricanes in Florida and forest fires in California, affluent populations in the Global North have been able to escape the most detrimental effects of the climate crisis. Armed, in places such as the US, with resilient medical and material insurance policies, the privileged can restore damaged bodies and properties, and rebuild lives and businesses. A question that haunts ecocritical scholarship is to what extent this situation will persist as the climate crisis worsens.

This article contributes to this ongoing conversation by first considering the division that exists in postcolonial and eco-socialist scholarship on what the climate crisis is likely to mean for the Global North and for the planet in its totality. In “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) proposes the collapse of a number of long-held, anthropocentric assumptions about the relationship between humanity and the planet, about the history of modernity, and about history as a discipline. He proposes that the climate crisis “will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital”, but also speculates that in the future, “there are no lifeboats [ ... ] for the rich and the privileged” (221). In other words, Chakrabarty argues that a deepening crisis will initially create an even larger gulf between the world’s poor and privileged communities, but also that the gulf that separates rich from poor will eventually go away as privilege becomes impossible to maintain in a world unable to sustain it. This proposition has been influentially critiqued by Malm and Hornborg (2014) who argue in “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative” that for “the foreseeable future – indeed, as long as there are human societies on Earth – there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged” (66–67). In other words, current social relations will persist despite the accelerating climate crisis. The disagreement expressed here remains an important issue in postcolonial and eco-socialist scholarship to date (see Chakrabarty 2016; Moore 2015; Malm 2018, 2019).

The present article approaches this problem via an investigation of Paolo Bacigalupi’s young adult Ship Breaker trilogy, published between 2010 and 2017, a series that takes place in a future where continued global warming has drowned most coastal cities and altered the social and economic geography of the planet. The study focuses on the first two novels of the trilogy and explores the way in which these texts describe the transformation of existing global social relations and the emergence of acute precarity in the Global North. By imagining futures where rich and poor still exist and class divisions remain, but where global relations have changed radically, the novels directly address the issue of capitalism and wealth (re)distribution under climate change. By describing migration as the only way out of precarity, the trilogy also connects this imagined future to lived realities in the Global South, and specifically to the need to escape precarity in this region of the world.

Precarity in the capitalocene

Since the concept of precarity began circulating in social science and humanist research in the early 2000s, it has often been used to describe the post-World War II dismantling of the regulatory labour system that emerged after the Great Depression, and the more recent rise of a global gig economy energized by neo-liberal deregulation of the global job market (Neilson and Rossiter 2008). These developments have deprived the global workforce of hard-earned social and health security, creating what Guy Standing (2011) has termed the “precariat”, a group that is extremely vulnerable to economic, medical, or ecological crisis, since the deregulated economy makes no provision for job security.

While Standing has proposed that the precariat may become a new global class capable of transforming social relations across the world, Ben Scully (2016) among others has critiqued the arguably Eurocentric notion that precarity is a new phenomenon. Expanding the material history of precarity far beyond the World War II deregulation of the so-called Fordist system, Scully argues that “[f]or workers in much of the former colonial world, precarity is not new, but has been a defining feature throughout the colonial past and into the present era of national independence” (162). If precarity is understood as a state produced by a deregulated economy that takes little or no responsibility for its workforce, it was arguably a defining feature of economic relations in the European colonies.

This does not mean that the neo-liberal deregulation of the economy has not impacted the Global South. This process, fuelled and accompanied by globalization, does make it necessary to think about the relationship between (former) colonizer and (former) colonized in new ways. Simon During (2015) has argued that “the analytic power of the concept of the subaltern” (a concept emerging out of Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist writing from where it migrated into early postcolonial studies) has been “undercut” (19) by global neo-liberalism and proposes that Standing’s concept of the “precariat” is a more suitable term to describe this group. Recent massive global migration streams lend this analysis additional credibility. While the subaltern could be, and arguably often was, imagined as a colonized or formerly colonized figure located in the Global South, the precariat is a much more geographically and culturally dispersed group produced by the networked and informal empire that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) have influentially described, rather than the formal colonialism that generated the subaltern state.

The emergence of precarity as a new analytical concept has coincided with the related realization that we have entered an era of climate crisis. Known as the “Anthropocene”, as labelled by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), this is an epoch where the face of the earth and conditions for life are changing, mainly because of global warming that creates desertification and rising sea levels (see Geist 2005), as well as a significant loss of biodiversity (see Bellard et al. 2012; Kolbert 2014). The concept of the Anthropocene recognizes that humankind has become, as Naomi Oreskes (2007) and Chakrabarty (2009) propose, a force capable of transforming the very geology of the planet, and thus the conditions for life upon it.

Just like economic precarity, this transformation is inconsistent and has variable effects throughout the world. Nixon’s (2011) influential term “slow violence” – “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2) – aptly defines anthropogenic climate change. Nixon also argues that “it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives” (4). Thus, the ubiquitous precarity caused by unregulated neo-liberal capitalism is strongly exacerbated by the climate crisis. As precarious communities lack the resilience afforded by regulated labour organization, they are especially vulnerable to the ongoing climate crisis.

However, the climate crisis is not merely folded into precarity as yet another stimulant of vulnerability. A growing body of humanities and social sciences scholarship claims that the climate crisis and precarity share material histories, so that the climate emergency arises from the same capitalist record as precarity. One problem with the Anthropocene concept is that it conflates all of humanity and thus does not acknowledge that different people and histories have contributed differently to the climate crisis. As Malm and Hornborg (2014), Moore (2016), Moore (2017), and Patel and Moore (2017) argue, the climate crisis is not the work of all humans, of the anthropos as species, but has been brought about by the capitalist (fossil fuel) economy enabled by colonization and first established in Europe during the early modern period. Thus, a more suitable framing category for the current era is capitalocene, a term that clearly links the climate crisis to its material history (Moore 2015, 2016).

The idea that we inhabit the capitalocene, and that precarity and the climate crisis arise out of the same material history, is important to any attempt to challenge these related phenomena and to any narrative that seeks to imagine their entangled futures. The recognition that ecology (the climate crisis) and precarity are intimately connected in the capitolocene era informs the term “ecoprecarity” as proposed by Pramod K. Nayar (2019), a concept which “is at once about the precarious lives humans lead in the event of ecological disaster [ ... ] and also about the environment itself which is rendered precarious due to human intervention” (7). Thus, ecoprecarity implies that any attempt to challenge human precarity must consider the impact that a damaged environment is having on humans, and also on all non-human life. This, in turn, makes it necessary to consider to what extent capitalism, even in its regulatory form, is compatible with a future in which precarity is challenged. In other words, if capitalism produces ecological crisis, and ecological crisis produces precarity, it is possible that an accelerating ecological crisis will widen this crisis until it engulfs all of humanity, including those who profit the most from global capitalism.

This is the problem that Chakrabarty (2009, 2016) and Malm and Hornborg (2014) debate. Neo-liberal capitalism may coexist happily with, in fact thrive on, precarity as it is commonly understood, but if what affects vulnerable communities across the globe is inseparable from the deterioration of the environment – that is, if it is effectively ecoprecarity – the question arises as to whether capitalism is a system capable of sustaining human society, and thus itself, in the long temporal perspective. Can capitalism adapt to the climate crisis, protecting its privileged few even as deforestation and rising sea levels change the face of the planet, or will continued resource extraction inevitably bring change to the way that human society is organized?

Ecoprecarity in fiction

This article uses the term “ecoprecarious imaginary” to explore this question of social balance. As Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin (2010) argue in Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2011) shows in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, colonial and postcolonial fiction shed light on how precarious modes of existence are produced by the environmental violence that follows in the wake of colonialism and capitalism. From Joseph Conrad’s influential account in Heart of Darkness (1902) of Belgian ivory extraction in the Congo during the height of formal European colonization of Africa, to Nigerian writer Helon Habila’s interrogation in Oil on Water: A Novel (2010) of the impact that oil extraction in the Niger Delta has on the local population, colonial and postcolonial writing has been attentive to the ways in which slow environmental violence has produced, and is producing, states of acute ecoprecarity in the Global South.

However, while the postcolonial, realist novel does address the impact that colonialism and capitalism have had on the Global South, it has, as Amitav Ghosh (2016) observes in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unknowable, struggled to discuss the possible futures that are the concern of Chakrabarty (2009, 2016) and Malm and Hornborg (2014). Ghosh’s influential argument is that the realist novel that emerged out of modernity cannot easily speak about catastrophic climate change because it was conceived “through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday” (2016, 23). In realist fiction, the reader is “invited to ‘descry,’ to ‘view,’ to ‘see’” (19). However, as Timothy Morton (2013) has proposed, the climate crisis (as well as its connection to the capitalocene and to precarity) is so massively distributed across time and space that it cannot be observed in this straightforward way.¹ The climate crisis – whether generating a sudden, catastrophic event such as the hurricanes Katrina in 2005 or Maria in 2017, or the uncanny, slow violence that Nixon discusses – thus appears as unmodern and improbable to realist fiction, which remains preoccupied with what exactly can be seen. Because of this, Ghosh argues, “the very gestures with which it [realist fiction] conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real” (2016, 23). There are writers of fiction who refrain from this concealment and tell tales about future climate change but these, Ghosh notes, “court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence” (24), and thus risk “banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house – those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as ‘the Gothic,’ ‘the romance,’ or ‘the melodrama,’ and have now come to be called ‘fantasy,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘science fiction’ ” (24). Today, the collective term for these genres is “speculative fiction”.

Ghosh writes in the hope of changing the way that realist fiction functions, so that it becomes capable of addressing, rather than eliding, climate change. By contrast, this article seeks to investigate what happens when the “generic outhouses” of fiction are taken seriously. It is thus interested in exploring how some of the fiction that belongs to the genres that Ghosh sees as capable of speaking about climate change narrate the conjoined histories of empire and capitalism, and the intertwined phenomena of precarity and the capitalocene. Paolo Bacigalupi’s three novels, Ship Breaker (Bacigalupi 2010), The Drowned Cities (Bacigalupi 2012), and Tool of War (Bacigalupi 2017), serve as useful examples of such fiction. The trilogy belongs to a subgenre of science fiction that is typically termed climate fiction or cli-fi, as it explores a future world that has been transformed by anthropogenic climate change.

Before considering the trilogy in detail, it should be noted that cli-fi narratives coming out of the Global North investigate the social and economic futures that may arise from a world changed by climate disasters in many different ways. In Neill Blomkamp’s (2013) Elysium, or Robert Rodriguez’s (2019) Alita: Battle Angel, the rich (and still predominantly white) have left the polluted surface of the earth and live luxurious lives in elevated gated communities. In Cormac McCarthy’s (2006) award-winning novel The Road or in George Miller’s (2015) Mad Max: Fury Road, there are no truly affluent and privileged communities, and apparently no refuge for people once privileged by capitalism. Thus, speculative fiction provides many different answers to the problem that this article sets out to explore, and the Ship Breaker trilogy is not necessarily representative of the entire genre of climate fiction. Even so, the trilogy is a widely circulated narrative that considers the future of capitalism and privilege in a world that has been thoroughly changed by the climate crisis.

The Ship Breaker trilogy

Paolo Bacigalupi began writing short stories around the turn of the millennium and received wide recognition with the publication of his first novel The Windup Girl (2009), the recipient of prestigious science fiction prizes such as the Nebula and the Hugo Awards. Like most of Bacigalupi’s fiction, this novel takes place in a dystopian world where seas have risen due to global warming and where humanity still competes over what remains of the planet’s ability to sustain human life. As an author of science fiction, Bacigalupi is not formally considered a postcolonial writer, but, like the work of Ursula Le Guin or Margaret Atwood, much of his fiction explores the same issues of global injustice and oppression as the postcolonial novel. This is true also of his Ship Breaker trilogy published between 2010 and 2017. While this trilogy is available worldwide, its primary audience is arguably located in the Global North, and in my analysis I will consider how it addresses and provokes a reader who has grown up in the embrace of normative, white, anglo-empire, assured of the presence of lifeboats.²

While most of Bacigalupi’s writing explores ecoprecarity in a dystopian future, the main characters are frequently adults who have an understanding of the world they exist in and a modicum of agency. The Ship Breaker trilogy stands out as a series of novels that revolve around teenage children who try to survive at the very bottom of societies where all social support systems have been washed away with the rising sea levels and the storms that are part of the accelerating climate crisis. These children know very little about the history of the worlds they inhabit, and they expect nothing from the predatory economic systems of which they are a part. Despite the fact that the trilogy takes place in the future, their lives are not new but modelled on existing societies in which the experience of systematic suffering and violence is common.

The novels do not initially explain the world in which they are set, but open it up slowly through the protagonists’ experiences via a narrative that allows readers to identify with their process of discovery. As the first novel in the trilogy, Ship Breaker opens in medias res inside a vast, abandoned oil tanker stranded on a beach in a tropical climate. Inside the tanker, a small teenage boy named Nailer clambers through a service duct in order to salvage the copper wire that has been stapled to the wall. Nailer is part of a crew that mines old ships of their still valuable metals and sells them to the firm “Lawson & Carlson, the company that made all the cash from the blood and sweat of the ship breakers” (Bacigalupi 2010, 7). It is dangerous work. Nailer’s only protection against the asbestos dust and other pollutants in the ducts is an old face mask, a “hand-me-down” (2) from his father. Nailer is still glad to be making money since there are few other jobs to be had on the beach. Those who are unable to find conventional work are thrown into an economy where the only marketable commodity is their own bodies, sold for sex to those who can pay, or piece by piece to organ buyers. Even when a form of income can be secured, survival is a struggle. In the marshland that surrounds the beach, malaria-carrying mosquitos thrive and the rickety shelters in which people live are poor protection from these or from the storms that regularly afflict the area.

This is a recognizable image of precarity in the Global South. Nailer is being eaten by a completely unregulated and ruthless economy that understands human bodies only as a (cheap) labour resource: “We die here every day. Die all the time. Maybe I’m dead tomorrow. Maybe I was dead two days ago” (113–114), Nailer explains. His immediate surroundings and job recall the dumping and urban mining of electronic waste in various parts of the Global South. In particular, the world that surrounds him when he exits the ship, described as “a tarred expanse of sand and puddled seawater, littered with the savaged bodies of other oil tankers and freighters” (6), is reminiscent of the ship graveyards located in the bay of Nouadhibou on the coast of Mauritania, or in Chittagong in Bangladesh (see https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/chittagong-shipbreaking-yards for a rudimentary, photographic description of Chittagong).

However, as the story proceeds it becomes clear that it does not take place in the Global South. Although the climate and geography are tropical, the ethnic, cultural, and religious make-up of this society does not match any current context: the members of Nailer’s crew pay homage to an entity called the Scavenge God, the “boss girl” Pima is “black as oil and hard as iron”, while Sloth, the smallest of the crew and next in line for Nailer’s job, “is skinny and pale, bones and knots for knees and dirty blond hair”. The character Pearly is a practising Hindu with “black hair and dark tropic skin” (Bacigalupi 2010, 9), while Nailer himself is half “of something, a quarter of something else, brown skin and black hair like his dead mother, but with weird pale blue eye like his father” (10). The presentation of this multi-ethnic, transcultural, and diversely religious society is one of the first signals to the reader that the story is set in a (dystopian) future rather than in the present.

While whiteness appears to have lost its normative status in this society, class hierarchies still exist. These can be found on the beach itself, where some have discovered and sold particularly valuable items in the ships and now lead lives of relative comfort. Also, further out to sea, Nailer spots a very different type of ship: the “new clipper ships. Replacements for the massive coal- and oil-burning wrecks that he and his crew worked to destroy all day long: gull-white sails, carbon-fiber hulls” (Bacigalupi 2010, 7). These ships trade for the precious metals that Nailer helps mine and then take off to “Africa and India, to the Europeans and the Nipponese” (8). When the opening chapter references a past known as the “old world” or “the Accelerated Age”, and a place called “the Orleans”, it becomes possible for the reader to piece together the geographical and temporal setting of the novel: Nailer is eking out his precarious existence in what used to be Louisiana, on a strip of beach a short distance away from a New Orleans now largely submerged by elevated sea levels.

There is no doubt that the rising water, and the precarious lives of the protagonists, are a result of anthropogenic climate change brought on by what is typically referred to as “the great acceleration” (see FutureEarth Staff Member 2015). Thus, as Saba Pirzadeh (2015) observes, the novel projects “climate change and resource depletion as results of capitalism, industrialization, and environmental exploitation” (204). It is these precise and entangled processes, the reader comes to realize, that have ultimately erased the affluent urban spaces of the present American south and replaced them with the precarious world Nailer inhabits.

By projecting a social reality and a lived experience today confined to the Global South, over a geography belonging to the Global North, Ship Breaker creates a kind of uncanny doubling where the potential homeliness of the Global North gives way to a blurring of temporal and geographical borders. The Global North and the Global South seamlessly intersect in the imaginative space of the narrative, dislocating normative notions of race, class, and gender. Because present-day New Orleans is already a socially and historically liminal space it is particularly suitable for such a double exposure. The US South has a central place in the history of colonial slavery, and it is difficult to see precarity in this region today as unrelated to this history. Also, with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans experienced some of the flooding and environmental violence that are endemic in the novel. In this way, Ship Breaker is an invitation to reflect on the material history of the climate crisis, and to consider its impact on the socially stratified US South.

Following the revelation that Nailer inhabits, and makes his meagre living out of, the crumbling remains of US industrial capitalism, the novel investigates the strategies for survival that are open to the residents on the beach. While a lucky find may elevate an individual to a position of relative security, most people live in a constant state of abject precarity. For Nailer, the only way out of his unsustainable existence is to escape the beach and seek refuge in a more stable part of the world. Fortunately, Nailer comes across a young woman whose white ship has foundered on the beach. Of South Asian descent, she belongs to the new stratum of privilege, and Nailer agrees to try to return her to her parents in exchange for a reward that can help transform his life. The novel narrates Nailer’s efforts to accomplish this rescue, and in its closing section he actually boards one of the white vessels with the young woman, effectively becoming a refugee heading towards an unknown but surely more affluent world.

If Ship Breaker investigates precarity in the maritime scrapyards, the sequel The Drowned Cities (Bacigalupi 2012) explores the even more insecure lives lived in zones where warlords fight over control of territory and the remains of the fossil fuel capitalocene. The novel takes place in the same future world as Ship Breaker, but in another part of what used to be the US. Just like in Ship Breaker, this world is not initially explained to the reader. The story opens in a semi-tropical marshland where small communities struggle to sustain themselves through a simple agrarian economy. They are surrounded by dangerous animals like alligators, and snakes, but also by predatory child-soldier gangs, that forcibly recruit people as soldiers or to serve as slaves in the extensive urban mining projects run by the warlord clans that control the local economy. The novel’s protagonist is a young girl by the name of Mahlia, a “war maggot”, a child orphaned by war. She is also an outcast in her community, tolerated only because the makeshift doctor of the village, a man who has hoarded moulding medical books in his house, has made her his nurse and disciple.

Mahlia’s outcast status is due to the fact that she is a “castoff”, the illegitimate daughter of a local woman and an officer of the Chinese peacekeeping force that once controlled the area. Like the United Nations (UN) in parts of Africa or Asia today, this military unit was tasked with supressing sectarian violence, an effort they have now abandoned. In the book’s opening pages, members of one of the warlord clans have entered the village and upon seeing Mahlia they call her a “castoff” and collaborator, seize her, and hold her down. Mahlia harbours no illusions of what is going to happen next: “Mahlia knew how this would go. First there would be screaming and then there would be blood and then at the end, if she was lucky, she would be dead” (Bacigalupi 2012, 87). She is saved by the doctor, who claims that she is his assistant and that he needs her to patch up the wounded soldiers. As she helps to dress the wounds of the child soldiers who were about to maim and kill her, Mahlia has the same realization as Nailer in Ship Breaker: there is no future for her in this place. Anything, even death, is preferable to her present existence. When she stumbles on a grown soldier fleeing the area and befriends him, she can begin a journey towards a place referred to as the Drowned Cities, that may offer escape.

As Mahlia enters these cities, she discovers a flooded urban area and can perceive skyscrapers and eventually also monuments in the water:

They were out in the open, a huge rectangular lake stretched into the distance. The slaves wading around the edge of it, using floating boardwalks and rubble for purchase as they dragged the barge along. She could hear them splashing. She caught a glimpse of a white monument spiking up into the searing blue sky, right out of the center of the lake, a monolith of marble, its face yellowing in places, and cracked, but still vertical. (Bacigalupi 2012, 376)

This scene makes use of the type of denouement created by films such as Planet of the Apes (Schaffner 1968), where the protagonist comes across the Statue of Liberty jutting out of a sandy beach and realizes that the planet he inhabits is the Earth, destroyed by nuclear warfare. Mahlia, of course, has no such relationship to what is clearly the Washington monument, and experiences no such feeling, but to a (western, US) reader the recognition of the iconic Washington National Mall is potentially striking. However, even this part of the drowned US does not offer refuge from precarity. Mahlia can only escape by boarding one of the sleek ships that trade for the remains of the drowned US empire. In the novel’s conclusion she has, like Nailer, become a refugee hoping to be allowed onto one of the white ships that may bring her into one of the privileged communities of the new world.

Again, just like the world that the reader encounters in Ship Breaker, The Drowning Cities offers the reader a double exposure where a specific and strongly symbolic US location is projected over a world of utter precarity typically encountered only in the Global South. The first of these images is Washington, the current home of the US federal government and thus the locus of anglo-empire. The other is the world described in narratives and non-fiction books such as Ishmael Beah’s (2007) A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier or Peter Eichstaedt’s (2009) First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, about the abject precarity that child soldiers, forced into the service of warlords, experience. While these texts, often ghostwritten, have been accused of factual inaccuracies, they arguably describe a very real, brutal, and abject violence performed by and on (child) soldiers in the most troubled parts of the Global South: Sierra Leone, The Congo, Yemen, and Uganda. By describing how similarly cruel violence takes place within the geographical boundaries of what is today the site of US power, The Drowned Cities shows clearly that the violence of the novel is a by-product of abject precarity, and that this precarity, in turn, is an outcome of the failing empire and of the eco-hostile practices it has generated. In other words, and as in Ship Breaker, there is no doubt that the material and existential precarity that destroys the lives of people in The Drowned Cities, has been caused by the environmental destruction that the capitalocene generates.

It is furthermore clear that to the extent that affluent areas or societies still exist in what used to be the USA, they are now fortresses. In the first two novels, such spaces exist primarily as rumours, but in Tool of War, the final instalment of the trilogy, they are briefly discernible as essentially gated communities. In these communities, highly technological and weaponized corporations, the new rulers of a still globalized but less accelerated world, continue to operate. In other words, this is still a world directed by a global, capitalist economy, and the borders that separate this world from the vulnerable new Global South are, if possible, even more impregnable than they are now.

These borders are not entirely impermeable, though. Possibly because the trilogy’s target audience is young adults, all three novels have uplifting closures. The main characters manage to board the white ships that traverse the world. In this way, they escape precarity and gain access to the new affluent communities that rule the transformed planet. These closures complicate the novels’ relationship to the real-world communities from which they draw inspiration. For most living in the Global South, the miraculous escapes enacted by the characters of the trilogy are impossible and absurd.

Even so, the focus in the novels on migration as the only solution to devastating precarity is important. In a world experiencing what European media has termed the “refugee crisis” and where the Trump administration is accelerating the deportation of migrants from the US, the opportunity to identify with the refugee should be noted. In the first two books, we learn very little of the worlds into which Nailer and Mahlia seek access. In fact, the endings of both novels are open and merely describe how the two make it onto white boats that may, or may not, deliver them to a more stable and privileged part of the world. In Tool of War, we understand that the protagonists of the first two instalments have been able to make lives for themselves inside the gated communities.

The crucial point here is not, however, the extent to which Nailer and Mahlia are able to find asylum in the new Global North of the future. Rather, these characters’ migratory escape from precarity functions as yet another palimpsest, where a situation common for people escaping precarity in the Global South is written over a geographical space that today counts as part of an affluent Global North. In this trilogy, Nailer and Mahlia seek to escape for the same reasons as people flee parts of the Global South today: to leave poverty and war behind, to enable a future free of acute precarity. But the geographical space these characters escape is one today characterized by relative affluence and privilege, and it is also the space where the intended reader of the novels resides. When considering the notion that the climate crisis may change conditions for the privileged, this reversal of fortunes is important.

Conclusion

The focus of this article is how the Ship Breaker trilogy describes a crucial shift in the distribution of privilege in a future transformed by the climate crisis. In view of this, it is clear that the Ship Breaker trilogy describes a future where the rich and privileged will have access to lifeboats in a world transformed by the climate crisis. The white ships that sail across the flooded world are precisely lifeboats for the privileged. In this way, the trilogy comments on the issue of wealth (re)distribution over which Chakrabarty (2009, 2016) and Malm and Hornborg (2014) disagree. In the future this trilogy envisions, global neo-liberal capitalism will begin practising less destructive modes of production, but even though it has ceased to mine deserts and seas for crude oil, it still considers human and non-human lives as dispensable resources. Nailer and Mahlia have value within this economy only as cheap labour, and the precarious lives they endure are directly related to the way that the local scavenge-economy is folded into this new, climate-adapted form of global capitalism. The trilogy thus imagines a future where privilege still arises out of capitalism, and where those enriched by this system have access not just to lifeboats, but to luxurious fortresses where they continue to live well in a world flooded by global warming. Contrary to Chakrabarty’s vision that the rich will not be spared when the climate crisis deepens, the Ship Breaker trilogy shows the capitalocene as extending far into the future with deregulated capitalism remaining the vortex around which global social relations are formed. Also, the people who are located outside capitalism’s protective circumference are left to their own devices.

The only way out, in Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, is by the (illegal) crossing of borders. There is little sense in the novels that the societies that Nailer and Mahlia spring from can improve, or that relations between the new affluent worlds in South Asia and Africa, and the new Global South that the south and east coasts of the US have now turned into, can flourish. What used to be America is now mostly a polluted, semi-tropical hell abandoned by this new world’s peacekeepers. Its only source of revenue is the submerged ruins of a now defunct society; the raw materials with which its cities and infrastructure were once built that are claimed by factions and fought over by warlords. Nailer’s and Mahlia’s only hope to escape acute precarity is to journey across the borders that separate their ruined world from the new centres of economic privilege. As these main characters were born within the geographical borders of what is today the US, the novels invert the current migration flow. People now seek to escape what used to be the US with the same desperation that is bringing people across the borders into the US and Europe in the present moment.

The Ship Breaker trilogy comments on capitalism and privilege in a climate-transformed world also in this way. It may imagine a future where capitalism has been able to adapt, and where the privileged remain afloat, but it also clearly negates the notion that current global relations will remain intact. As observed above, the rich and privileged of the Ship Breaker trilogy come partly from today's new economies India or China, and there is no indication in these novels that whiteness produces privilege any longer. In this way, the novels propose that the people who today reap the material benefits of a still smouldering anglo-empire in the US cannot count on lifeboats.

Of course, this does not mean that the Ship Breaker trilogy has in any way resolved the issue of whether capitalism and those it privileges in the present moment can survive the climate crisis. Fiction is not necessarily the best place for the type of sustained economic and sociological analysis that could help determine this particular problem. Even so, the Ship Breaker trilogy’s ecoprecarious imaginary does encourage a (Global Northern) audience to contemplate first the uneven and dispersed nature of privilege and precarity in the present moment, and then the ways in which an accelerating climate crisis may transform global social and economic relations for them. The current failure to actively address the lack of global justice and the (eco)precarity capitalism is likely to make endemic, must be related to a failure both of the imagination and of empathy. From this perspective, climate fictions such as the Ship Breaker trilogy are attempts at encouraging a transformative imaginative empathy that makes ecoprecarity comprehensible and, thus, possible to challenge.

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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.

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.