A Flooded Thirsty World

New stories and images are necessary to bolster an ethical inquiry of climate change and mobilize climate action. But what form should such stories take? In this essay, I argue that speculative fiction can make public the climate crisis, not only as a calamity of the physical environment but also as a predicament of the cultural environment—of the systems of representation through which society has related to complex environmental issues among their various actors and in the vast scales of time and space. The essay amplifies the environmental uncanny to produce a speculative fiction that grapples with something as indescribable as climate change. In conclusion, “Of Oil and Ice,” a geostory, casts an iceberg as a planetary protagonist and relates its trajectory as it migrates from the Antarctic ice shelf to a glass of water in the Persian Gulf

Aesthetics · Climate change · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Uncanny · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction · Geology · Oceanography