Reading Climate Fiction with Tatiana Konrad

Rudolphina: Tatiana Konrad, your book Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis: The Industrial Revolution to the Present has recently been published. What is your book about and why did you write it?

Tatiana Konrad: This book is about popular narratives — British and American fiction — and how these texts reflect, interpret, and respond to climate change. While I focused on contemporary novels such as Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), I have also explored earlier works of literary fiction as climate change fiction. In my book, I expand and redefine the "cli-fi" genre, beginning with literary fiction written during the Industrial Revolution, including, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854-55) and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), as first examples of climate fiction. 

Using climate fiction as a lens, I singled out four core themes: weather, science, religion, and place. This helped me zero in on a variety of issues — from fossil fuels to relationships between the human and the more-than-human — to demonstrate how climate change fiction is not "just" about storytelling, but it is a tool through which climate crisis can be forecast, imagined, and understood. As my book demonstrates, climate change fiction can be used to address climate change.

Rudolphina: What is even climate fiction, and what are its main characteristics?

Tatiana Konrad: "Cli-fi", a term coined by news reporter Dan Bloom in 2007, is short for "climate fiction". The cli-fi I have analysed in my book are fictional stories of change, adaptation, or destruction that happen both locally and globally, as a result of climate crisis. Often these stories use the apocalypse to emphasise the dramatic transformation that occurs. They also foreground the role of the human in causing climate crisis, drawing on, for example, fossil fuels and cheap energy as well as exploitation of the environment more broadly. After all, the climate change that we are currently facing is anthropogenic, unlike other examples of climate change that happened earlier.

Rudolphina: How long has climate fiction been around, and how have its narratives changed over time?

Tatiana Konrad: That is exactly the key question that I raise in the book. I argue that the Industrial Revolution can be viewed as one possible trigger of climate change, and thus the groundwork for how climate change is understood today was established in that period. Of course, nineteenth-century writers could not be aware of the effects that industrialisation would have on climate. But their meditations on how industrialisation was impacting the environment — polluting water, soil, and air — are important contributions to cli-fi.

Contemporary cli-fi is different, for it directly addresses climate change, offering readers various apocalyptic scenarios, suggesting that climate change is a form of divine punishment or portraying scientists trying to solve climate change. In other words, climate change is immediately visible in present-day cli-fi.

Rudolphina: You mentioned that cli-fi can be a means to address climate change. What makes it effective in this role?

Tatiana Konrad: Cli-fi definitely has unique potential to communicate climate change. People read fiction. Many works of cli-fi are best-selling novels, which proves that the topic is popular. Imagining how climate change can affect and transform the world as we know it, cli-fi successfully visualises climate crisis, educating the lay public about this urgent issue.

Rudolphina: The media and the arts are brimming with dystopian visions of the future. Dealing with climate change, don't we need more hopeful stories?

Tatiana Konrad: I think there is hope in even the darkest stories about climate change. Readers might not immediately notice it because none of these stories shows that minimising the effects of climate change is an easy task. And this is, of course, correct. Yet many of these stories emphasise that solving climate crisis requires ending practices like using fossil fuels and exploiting the environment. The novels I have analysed never mislead readers, making them think that the dramatic transformation that is needed can be done quickly or easily — that is, after all, exactly why climate crisis is a problem that we are still facing.

Rudolphina: Whom would you recommend your book to?

Tatiana Konrad: This book is for various audiences. It is definitely for environmental humanities scholars. But it is also for academics and students interested in British and American fiction, environmental history, and postcolonial studies. It is also for the lay public — for everyone who likes reading cli-fi and wants to understand these stories better.

Rudolphina: I am new to climate fiction, where should I begin? Are there any standout books you would recommend?

Tatiana Konrad: While working on this book and since it has been published, I have been discussing cli-fi novels with my colleagues and students. Among the novels that have resonated with them the most are Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003-13) and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). They are entertaining, complex, in many ways unique, and they will definitely make everyone think about so many issues that have led to climate crisis and prevent humans from addressing it effectively. Both Atwood and Bacigalupi imagine a world transformed by, among other things, climate change. Drawing on various environmental problems, from dependence on oil to sea level rise, these novels foreground various important issues, including inequality and how environmental crises further intensify it.

Rudolphina: What book is currently on your bedside table?

Tatiana Konrad: I am about to start reading Amy Rogers’ Petroplague (2011). It is long overdue! The novel is about oil, biotechnology, and eco-terrorism. I expect it will be relevant to my research on "Air and Environmental Health in the (Post-)COVID-19 World".

Rudolphina: Thank you very much!