Full Text Notes

• Abstract

• The Cultural Political Work of Climate Change

• The Readership of Climate Fiction: Who reads it?

The Influence of Climate Fiction

• Most readers attested that the value of cli-fi was to imagine potential climate futures
  • helps make the hyper-object of climate change: 'make it real' for readers
  • allows readers to visualise the shift caused by climate change: something which was once abstract and vague and make it become concrete and detailed
  • These comments sup- port cognitive psychologists’ claims that vivid imagery leads to more narrative engagement and recall.

As if potential futures, once colourless and hazy, were now vivid and clear. - p.482

Given that many works of climate fiction are set decades or centuries in the future, but explicitly draw connections to our actions in the present, it is not surprising that some readers reported reconfiguring their temporal perception of environmental processes or becoming aware of the 'slow violence' of climate change for the first time. (ref)

• ref: Nixon, Slow Violence. As Nixon observed, Climate Change poses a formidable representational challenge, since the origin of its slow violence (the production of greenhouses gases, the destruction of carbon sinks) is decoupled from its accretive consequences (which ovvus decades or centuries later). On the conflict between modern human and climatic (or geological) temporalities, see Pahl et all., Perceptions of Time in Relation to Climate Change
• By placing their stoires in the distant future, authors are able to illuminate what is otehrwise invisible: the gradual socioecological changes that occur too slowly for human perception.
• Climate Fiction helped the readers overcome the temporal distance that usually leads us to high-level (abstract) construals of the distant future.

A reader who read Clara Hume's Back to the Garden noted that: "the characters made me see how climate change could affect me on a far more personal level - one in relation to my family and friends - which I had never really pondered before" (p.486) and a public health administrator from Virginia, America stated that "I thought about climate change as primarily an environmental issue, but after reading this book, I began to see that it has so many other dimensions that I had not considered. Changes in climate have the potential to change the very fabric of society."

By explicitly framing familiar experiences such as anxiety, depression, loss, grief, and regret as related to climate change, these novels provided many readers with a vivid sense of the granular and quotidian impacts of unimaginably large-scale changes.

R: This is an excellent point. Stories of normal peoples lives (or more convential story telling, with the backdrop of climate change is far more powerful, as it gives the reader a pathway into imagining the future

Realistic Futures are essential to cultivate care and action

Emotional Responses

• Overwhelmingly people respond to climate fiction with intense negative emotions
  • Often self-directed
• While apocalyptic media often leads people to feelings of anxiety, climate fiction causes particularly intense emotions due to the length of time it takes to read a novel

<aside> 🌲

Does these negative emotions make for effective environmental persuasion? or just good storytelling

</aside>

when climate change is framed as an encroaching disaster that can only be addressed by loss, cost, and sacrifice, it creates a wish to avoid the topic. - psychologist Per Espen Stoknes

• Instead of taking actions, audiences resolve the cognitive dissonance by ignoring or avoiding the subject