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This paper responds to the theoretical recontextualization of the Anthropocene as put forward by Lynne Huffer in her 2017 article, “Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy.” Huffer’s return to the ontological categories of “truth” and “death” to theorize human ethical response to climate change speaks to a burgeoning thaumaturgical attitude, which the Anthropocene carries within contemporary theorization. This attitude finds powerful instantiation and enhancement in contemporary works of climate-fiction (Huffer 84). This paper will provide readings of three such novels: Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible (2021), Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), and Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021). Each of these works fronts religious and/or mythographical ritual and praxis as a way of creating a new inerrancy by which its human subjects must grapple with a revolutionized ethical life in the midst of climatic disaster.
Mythologizing climate destruction and action has become a regular undertaking of contemporary literature and cinema. Turning to novels by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Richard Powers and to films and miniseries from Darren Aronofsky, Patrick Somerville, Paul Schrader, and Bong Joon Ho, this paper shows how fantastic and realist climate stories similarly redefine reliable knowledge and meaningful intervention. Focusing on climate fiction’s embodied, messy depictions of scientific research alongside its mystical, uncontainable experiences of enlightenment, the paper suggests how theological and philosophical breakthroughs must now come in the midst of climate destruction and action. Eschewing simple optimism or pessimism, it finds in these tales evolved forms of the uncertain, risk-taking hope pursued by theologian-ethicists like Willis Jenkins, Catherine Keller, Jürgen Moltmann, and Michael Northcott. As our oldest wisdom books also attest, living well in the end-times means making them into beginning-times, too.
Contemporary apocalyptic fiction often relies on nostalgia to construct a dichotomy between the present troubles and an idealized (or at least tolerable) past. That construction assumes that the nostalgia is universally shared — that the present disruption to the status quo is dangerous and that a return to "normalcy" is the desired (if not actual) outcome. In Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), the author inverts nostalgia and apocalypticism to demonstrate how the Anishinaabe were already a post-apocalyptic people when the Internet, satellites and capitalism abruptly end. Many Indigenous thinkers understand the Indigenous peoples of North America to have already survived an apocalypse: From the theft of land to the theft of children, Indigenous communities have survived through multiple ends of the world. Rice’s novel highlights that a return to white settler capitalism is far from desirable since that system represents a continuing apocalypse that began in 1492.