Speculative and futuristic visions of environmental calamity are being imagined globally through environmental fiction. Eco-dystopian novels help people process their fears or mourn the loss of a more stable climate. My forthcoming book, Nature’s Return, shows that while anti-environmentalism is gaining traction in the West, the diversity and urgency of environmental visions from across Africa and Asia are coming into view.
“You are bugs” is the sobering message of the aliens in Liu Cixin’s bestselling trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Liu’s vision of environmental retribution is anchored in a visceral portrait of Mao’s so-called “war against nature”, which reshaped the environment through mass irrigation and deforestation to boost economic production. The trilogy is a leading example of a wide-ranging ecological turn in Chinese science fiction. As critics Yue Zhou and Xi Liu explain, the story routinely takes aim at rampant pollution, water shortages, natural resource depletion, and electronic waste.
Cara Healy, a professor of Chinese Studies, argues that for centuries, Chinese intellectuals wrote about the past to critique the present, but today the future is deployed to comment on our contemporary world. In Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, readers are told that science fiction is “the greatest realism at the present time”. Set on a gang-ridden island covered in tech trash and populated by desperate migrants and mutant humans, Waste Tide is a bleak parable of China’s abundance of garbage. The themes of tech waste and contamination have a particular resonance in modern China but are understandable to readers everywhere.
Climate catastrophe also frames the drama and ethical vision of Lost Ark Dreaming by Nigerian author Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Lagos has been drowned, and people are crowded inside the Pinnacle, a vast, partially submerged high-rise in which the wealthy and powerful live on the upper levels, trying to keep the poor and the rising waters at bay. In Nigeria, as in China, the eco-dystopian imagination is animated by images of injustice and cruelty, often in ways that refract colonial history.
Indian contributors to the genre include Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual and Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay. The latter is set in 2041 in a post-Mumbai in which the population has crowded into a towering redoubt called the Bombadrome, surrounded by a barren wasteland. The mistrust of technologically driven change is a distinctive feature of Indian science fiction, but the new wave of eco-dystopias is part of a global conversation. They are diverse but united in their effort to make use of the future to register loss, yearning, and possibility.
Malformed landscapes, biodiversity loss, and tides of industrial debris are encountered throughout the genre, though climate change looms large in many examples from South Asia and Africa. The Egyptian author Emad El-Din Aysha once speculated that dystopia was a Western genre because those with real-life anxieties had no need to invent them. But it appears that real-life anxieties are not a brake but an engine for the imagination. Today’s dystopian imagination is ecological and urgent, asking us to travel into the future and into every part of the world.
The Conversation