The Best Australian Essays 2015 by Geordie Williamson

growing library of books exploring environmental themes should be understood as a new genre, usually described as climate fiction or – to use the unlovely shorthand preferred by its proponents – cli-fi.
    Speaking personally, I’m unconvinced of the term’s utility. After all, there’s nothing new about books about worlds transfigured by environmental disaster or environmental change, as classic novels such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids , John Christopher’s Grass , John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or Australian author George Turner’s The Sea and Summer , which was recently republished as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, and takes place in a flooded Melbourne attest. Nor, given the fact many of these books are distinguished at least as much by their tendency to elide traditional genre categories as by their subject matter, does it seem useful to impose a rigid new category upon them.
    But more deeply, the notion seems to ignore the fact that novels such as California and Maddaddam are really only a subset of a much larger phenomenon, one that embraces not just the rapidly growing list of novels set against the backdrop of a world devastated by disaster or disease, like Emily St John Mandel’s luminous Station Eleven and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars , but television shows such as The Walking Dead , in which the characters are cast adrift in a world almost emptied of other humans, and even movies such as the nonsensical but visually sumptuous Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion , in which the world’s most famous scientologist spends his days exploring the remains of an Earth devastated by alien attack. For while not all are about climate change in any narrow sense – in Station Eleven and The Dog Stars , for instance, civilisation collapses in the aftermath of a flu pandemic – they speak to the same fears, the same sense of vulnerability and loss, the same grief.
    In one sense, of course, climate change is simply the latest in a long line of fears that have given rise to apocalyptic imaginings. Go back a decade and it was terrorism we were frightened of, fears that echoed through books and television shows such as The Road and Battlestar Galactica ; go back three decades and it was our terror of nuclear war that gave rise to television events like The Day After and books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker . Over and over again fictional narratives have afforded us a medium in which the anxieties of the day can be engaged with, explored and, hopefully, controlled.
    Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion there is something different about climate change, and not just because of the scale of the challenges it presents. The scholar and critic Fredric Jameson once remarked that it’s easier to imagine the end of world than the end of capitalism. And indeed it often seems we have lost our capacity to imagine the future, tending instead to imagine more of the same or total collapse.
    As the writer Robert Macfarlane observed almost a decade ago, part of the problem is that climate change as a subject lacks the charismatic swiftness of nuclear war; instead, it ‘occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary imagination with a series of difficulties: how to dramatize aggregating detail, how to plot slow change.’
    For writers of fiction this poses problems. Because it tends to focus upon character and psychology, fiction often struggles to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on timeframes that exceed the human. And so we tend to fall back on set pieces and stories we understand, of which the apocalypse is only one.
    Looked at like this, our passion for narratives about our own extinction begins to look vaguely suspect, a symptom of a larger failure of imagination. For while they give shape to our sense of loss and