Chapter 1 - The Domestic Near Future 1

Summary

This chapter reads three examples of what is now frequently labelled climate fiction and argues that rather than addressing climate change in the manner commonly assumed by criticism, such works frequently wish to evade it. Clade by James Bradley (2015) draws on the domestic novel and therapeutic fiction, and their concern with the personal, pairing these with climate events to become an anaemic version of the nineteenth-century historical novel. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (2017) replaces climate events with myth so as to scale up the personal to the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. These genre combinations convert the punctum of apocalypse into something more durable and suggest a cultural structure of feeling chiefly concerned with a fantasy subjugation of climate change to a continuation of the affluent lifestyle of the Global North. A reading of All Rivers Run Free by Natasha Carthew (2018) confirms the link between climate events and myth as replacements for the planetary forces that are truly frightening to the domestic near future: history, and other people.