Narrating the Anthropocene: Scale, Agency, and Form in Climate Fiction

Abstract

This essay argues that climate fiction's distinctive achievement lies not in its capacity to make environmental catastrophe visible but in its formal reorganization around the very impossibility of doing so. Building on now-familiar diagnoses of a crisis of the literary imagination, the theory of hyperobjects, the collapse of human and natural history into a single timeline, and the concept of slow violence, the discussion identifies the genre's central problem as one of scalar disjuncture: the incommensurability between human-sized narration and planetary-scale process. Rather than resolving this disjuncture by abandoning realism for myth or science fiction, the most ambitious climate novels turn the gap itself into form. Through readings of six representative contemporary works, the essay traces three formal strategies by which fiction redistributes narrative agency away from the bounded individual protagonist toward nonhuman, collective, and distributed actants. Climate fiction, it concludes, contributes less a content than a poetics: a way of writing the Anthropocene as the structuring absence around which narrative must reassemble itself. Its realism is not betrayed but mutated, expanded to register forces that exceed the frame of the bourgeois life.