Hope Out of Stock: Critical and Melancholic Hope in Climate Fiction

This edited collection offers an original investigation of into the changing landscape of emotion in dark and uncertain times. Chapter: Science fiction, dystopian, and disaster genres have imagined environmental crisis however these texts often deploy apocalyptic narrative structure in which near-total catastrophe precedes revelation of a new world for an elect. Horizons of hope and salvation, though seductive for writers and readers alike, too often reinforce progress-oriented ends, which frame the survival of individual humans as hope more broadly. On the other hand, narratives both literary and political, which refuse to offer hope, are criticised as nihilistic or promoting a politics of despair. This paper considers the position of hope in relation to climate change fiction via two novels, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, and James Badley's Clade. I argue these texts eschew reductive or deferred forms of hope and centre precarity, interconnectivity, and alliances between human and nonhuman bodies and systems, sketching possibilities for life and death in catastrophes, past, present, and future.