'The Promise of climate fiction: Imagination, storytelling, and the politics of the future' by Manjana Milkoreit takes a fresh look at climate change and challenges readers to consider how our collective capacity to cope with this great challenge of our times is limited in large part by our lack of imagination, both in terms of how we conceptualize the problem and in the solutions we put forward. Milkoreit explores the role of climate fiction as a tool for the imagination and examines how this genre of storytelling can help one think differently about the problem and perhaps approach it from an alternative perspective. Analyzing three pieces of fiction: Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy, and George Turner's The Sea and the Summer, Milkoreit's book chapter offers several lessons learned including meaning-making and complex systems thinking. The promise of climate fiction offers something new and begins an exploration into an area of research that is working at, if not dismantling, the boundaries of social science, arts, and the humanities.
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Full Citation:
Milkoreit, M. (2016). The Promise of Climate Fiction - Imagination, Storytelling and the Politics of the Future. In Wapner, Paul and Hilal Elver (eds.) Reimagining Climate Change. Routledge Publishing.
Keywords: climate fiction, imagination, cli-fi, climate change, storytelling
