Critical Survey

When, at the climax of Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 film Planet of the Apes, the astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) discovers the torch of the Statue of Liberty poking through the shifting sands of a postapocalyptic world, his horrified, despairing cry – ‘We finally really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up!’ – encapsulated the nuclear anxiety of dystopian fiction and film in the 1950s and 1960s. Thirty-five years later, that iconic image of Liberty’s torch engulfed by natural forces was knowingly echoed in both Steven Spielberg’s AI and Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, but in the first decade of the new millennium, the imagined apocalypse waiting to engulf the human race was not nuclear, but environmental: New York is swallowed by the rising waters of the Atlantic ocean, and frozen solid by the plunging temperatures of a new ice age. As these high-profile cinematic examples indicate, climate change has made its way towards the mainstream in recent years, on both the screen and the page, and has now eclipsed nuclear terror as the prime mover of the apocalyptic and dystopian imagination.

J.G. Ballard's early novels The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966) take a climatological approach to apocalyptic dystopia. This has led survey studies of climate fiction to identify these novels as founding texts of the genre. Yet Ballard wrote in an era before global warming had been identified by climate scientists, and his fiction is as much psychological and ontological as it is physiological. Ballard both adheres to and deviates from the global warming narrative now accepted by contemporary climatology, working within and beyond the SF subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction. This paper assesses the extent to which these dystopian narratives can be understood as climate fiction and explores the debt that more recent cli-fi may owe to Ballard.

This article offers an ecocritical reading of four dystopian films, two from the early 1970s and two from the late 1990s: Silent Running, Soylent Green, eXistenZ, and Gattaca. In particular, it interprets these films – which variously predict the probable ramifications of environmental catastrophe and biotechnological progress – in relation to contrasting conceptualizations of 'nature' that might broadly be termed either the 'postmodern' or 'ecological'. It argues that despite the genre's apparent preoccupation with technologically advanced, virtual or urban environments, the concept of 'nature' and 'the natural' remains crucial to dystopian cinema's characteristic critique of authoritarian power structures that restrict individual self-expression, and its interrogation of human individuality and selfhood. Moreover, it suggests that even self- consciously postmodern dystopias are rooted in the experience of embodiment, and point towards a reconceptualized idea of 'the natural' that is shaped by, and often fused with, technology.

This article rereads early dystopian eco-narratives and explores the ways in which Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy manipulate established generic conventions to make correlations between their fiction and the 'real' world. It explores the avenues of hope which both authors find necessary for the future by close textual analysis of the three novels under discussion. The article is significantly informed by eco-feminist theories, which centre on a basic belief that ecological crisis is the inevitable effect of a Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture. It explores the ways in which the symbolic equation of woman with nature is implemented by characters in the novels, and the consequences this has for other characters. The article explores the engagement of both authors with the eco-feminist idea of women's unique agency in an era of ecological crisis.

This article looks at the sub-genre of apocalyptic science fiction and explores the ways that a range of contemporary writers engage with natural, climatic disasters and the damage wrought to the planet in the Anthropocene era. The novels under discussion are Maggie Gee's The Flood and The Ice People, Adam Roberts's The Snow, Stephen Baxter's Flood and Stephen Jones's creative compilation Zombie Apocalypse. The novels are analysed as examples of revelatory eschatological and apocalyptic literature that implicitly borrow from canonical religious writings of the past. The article analyses the apocalyptic narratives as predictors of both the end of the world and the coming of a new age. It focuses primarily on the novels' relationship to apocalyptic discontinuity and to end-of-the-world scenarios that are predicated on the forces of nature.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road can be read as part of the burgeoning field of climate fiction. This article examines the way that environmental anxiety manifests in this text not only through the vision of a future earth that has been devastated, but, as I will argue, at a more symbolic and allegorical level through the metaphoric place of vision, sight, and blindness. Interrogating the metaphor of vision is central to considering this text as climate fiction because it positions the human as the chosen witness to the end of the world. This article examines the anthropocentrism at the heart of McCarthy's text, and reflects on the place of the human in broader debates about anthropogenic climate change.

As a film about a science fictional future in which genetic engineering is used to guard against the threat of overpopulation, Andrew Niccol's In Time (2011) bears a remarkable resemblance to Michael Anderson's environmental dystopia Logan's Run (1976). This article traces the narrative similarities of these two dystopian ecocinematic Hollywood productions, while demonstrating how they succeed as social critiques of technoscientific social regimes that wreak havoc on the Earth and its inhabitants. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's theories of a biopolitics of the population, this article argues that both film-makers' works contribute to our understanding of the potentially culturally and environmentally devastating implications of genetic engineering. Seen through the lens of Foucault's ideas about the disciplinary technologies of the self-regulated subject, the article suggests that Niccol's In Time is particularly noteworthy for its creative problematizing of the increasing normalization of high-tech bodily modification, enhancement, and digital quantification.

The People of the Book JULIE LUMSDEN

Lithuanian Cat's Cradle TONY DAWSON

A Masque For Dancing The Removal of Stone House, Dartford RENNIE PARKER

Gathering On Loan ROY MARSHALL

Italian Incident PETER DE VILLE

A Festival JOHN HARTLEY WILLIAMS

I Am a Magenta Stick by Anthony Rowland (Salt, 2012), 87 pp. ISBN 978-1-84471-862-7, £12.99

Jolly Roger by Keith Howden (Smokestack, 2012), 64 pp. IBSN 978-0-9568144-6-3, £7.95

Woke Up This Morning by Brian Docherty (Smokestack, 2012) 64 pp. ISBN 978-0-957172227 £7.95

Still Life by Gordon Hodgeon (Smokestack, 2012) 64 pp. ISBN: 978-0-957172203 £7.95

Melanchrini by Maria Taylor (Nine Arches, 2012) 69 pp. ISBN: 978-0-957098459 £8.99

Notes on contributors