Rather than dwelling on routinely marked distinctions between realist and science fictional modes, this chapter identifies an emergent strand of writing about climate change that it calls ‘critical climate irrealism’. It builds on Michael Löwy’s ‘critical irrealism’ where the irreal – as in the fantastic, oneiric, or surrealistic – erupts within a predominantly realist text. ‘Critical irrealism’ describes fictions that do not follow realism’s ‘accurate representations of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. Critical irrealism is a notable feature of what World Literary Studies calls literature emerging from the ‘periphery’: territories that suffer from the violent extraction of labour and resources by the ‘core’ of the capitalist world system. This chapter argues that a comparable, and sometimes intersecting, process can be seen in contemporary fiction that uses the weird, the Gothic, the uncanny, and other modes of irrealism to engage with climate change. But it also suggests that climate change’s non-local effects and distorted temporalities complicate the core/periphery model. In bringing together ‘critical irrealism’ with a sense of ‘climate crisis’, ‘critical climate irrealism’ describes an important new trend, where the irreal negotiates radical environmental upheaval in a manner that realism’s recognisable individual experience cannot.

This chapter investigates the multiple ways that coal and oil generate story, revealing humanity’s abiding intimacy with unearthed matter throughout history. Spotlighting the influential term “petrofiction” coined by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (from Latin petra, meaning “rock”), it introduces authors, critics, and activists whose works interrogate fossil fuels’ lively and lethal geological agency. Recent tales of coal and oil often portray conjunctions between embodiment and environment that are unhealthy, chronic, and entrenched; furthermore, these detriments are predominantly borne by the poor, Indigenous peoples, and communities of color. Both Ida Stewart’s poem naming the many degradations caused by mountaintop removal mining (Gloss)and Ann Pancake’s novel narrating the failed containment of coal slurry impoundment dams (Strange as This Weather Has Been) confront the toxic enmeshment of human beings in the Appalachian coalfields. Petrocritical approaches magnify harms of coal and oil and point out their pivotal role in ongoing climate crises. Petrocriticism also suggests that paying attention to human and nonhuman voices inflected by coal and oil supplies the energy needed for ecological remediation, and for more just, and more inhabitable, futures.

Fossil fuels represent one of the primary drivers of the Anthropocene’s geological and ecological transformations while their production is bound up in different social, political and economic systems. This chapter traces some of the most striking features of recent literature engaging withfossil fuels, covering examples from theatre (Ella Hickson’s 2016 transhistorical play Oil), fiction (Jennifer Haigh’s 2016 fracking novel Heat and Light) and poetry (Juliana Spahr’s 2015 long poem on Deepwater Horizon, ‘Dynamic Positioning’). Moving through considerations of resource conflict, hydrocarbon extraction, environmental justice and industrial disaster, as well as the way the petrochemical industry permeates every facet of contemporary life, the chapter argues that emergent ‘petroliterature’ is at its most interesting when it tries to find a formal response – whether through stagecraft or metaphor or metre – to negotiate the duality of fossil fuels as both volatile substances and abstract commodities.