Utopia in Recent Climate Fiction: MaddAddam, MAEVA! and New York 2140

Utopia in Recent Climate Fiction: MaddAddam, MAEVA! and New York 2140 Although climate can be an important part of Actional scene setting, in science fiction it is also a constituent element of world-building - think, for example, of the frozen landscapes in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Da...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFoundation (Dagenham) Vol. 49; no. 137; pp. 19 - 30
Main Author Milner, Andrew
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dagenham Science Fiction Foundation 01.01.2020
Subjects
American literature
Anthropocentrism
Aquatic insects
Atwood, Margaret (1939- )
Canadian literature
Caribbean literature
Climate change
Coastal aquifers
Cosmopolitanism
Drought
Dunes
Ecocriticism
Environmentalism
Floods
Genetic engineering
Insect bites
Le Guin, Ursula K (1929-2018)
Literary canon
Literary characters
Literary criticism
Literary devices
Logic
Narrative techniques
Permafrost
Plot (Narrative)
Publishing
Publishing industry
Religion
Religious cults
Robinson, Kim Stanley
Science fiction & fantasy
Steppes
Storytelling
Tundra
Utopias
Websites
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Summary:Utopia in Recent Climate Fiction: MaddAddam, MAEVA! and New York 2140 Although climate can be an important part of Actional scene setting, in science fiction it is also a constituent element of world-building - think, for example, of the frozen landscapes in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) or, more recently, Paul McAuley's Austral (2017). Insofar as the series has a primary 'novum' (Suvin 1979: 63), this is the genetic engineering that allows OrganInc Farms to design the 'pigoons', intelligent, telepathic, genetically modified pigs, and Crake the 'Crakers', peaceful, herbivorous posthumans, immune to mosquito bites, who are occasionally sexually polyandrous but normally sexually latent. Global heating is nonetheless present as the mise en scene right from the beginning of Oryx and Crake: 'as time went on [...] coastal aquifers turned salty and the northern permafrost melted and the vast tundra bubbled with methane, and the drought in the midcontinental plains regions went on and on, and the Asian steppes turned to sand dunes' (Atwood 2003: 27). An environmental activist, professional journalist and sf writer, he won the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis in 1994 for GO! Since 1993 Fleck has been a supporter of the Equilibrist Society, founded by Eric Bihl and Volker Freystedt, the central idea of which is 'Lasst uns mit der Natur wirtschaften und nicht gegen sie!' ['Let us work with nature, not against it'].
ISSN:0306-4964