Retreat and Resilience in Climate Fiction

Through close readings of two contemporary novels, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, this article explores the existential value of retreat as a response to the ecological crisis. In these ‘fictions of retreat’ – as I call this strand of climate fiction – retreat is understood as a strategic gesture of stepping back from ordinary life in order to gain new perspectives on human – nonhuman relations. A key component of retreat is a reframing of resilience from an individual psychological attribute to a collective experience. Retreat takes profoundly different forms in Wood’s novel – whose protagonist, an atheist woman, retires to a convent – and in Harvey’s work, which is set aboard the International Space Station. In both narratives, though, retreat fosters experiences of community and shared rhythms that offer a distanced and affectively nuanced stance on our environmental predicament.