Climate Fiction and the End of Speculation

This paper reconsiders the idea of climate fiction as speculative fiction, arguing that this categorization has reached an impasse in the context of contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the genealogy of speculative fiction from mid-twentieth-century SF debates onwards, I situate climate fiction as the paradigmatic speculative fiction of the early 2000s, valued for its proleptic warning—this is what happens if we do not act. As climate change emerges as a pervasive condition of life today, however, the speculative premise underpinning this warning begins to collapse. I turn to the ethical and political pressures placed on climate fiction by authors, critics, and popular discourse that have accompanied—and, indeed, helped to construct—normative prolepticism as the sine qua non of climate fiction. The paper ends with brief readings of Jeff VanderMeer and Kim Stanley Robinson, identifying two ways forward for a post-speculative climate fiction.