Ice,fire and flood

Close reading and distant reading

We have described our conceptual framework as a combination of ideas deriving from Williams, Bourdieu and Moretti. From Williams, we take the general notion of ‘cultural materialism’, by which he meant ‘a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of “arts”, as social uses of material means of production’ (Williams, 1980: 243). On this view, the arts are a distinctive subset of socially specific, materially determinate, forms and practices. SF can thus be seen as a particular cultural form established in 19th-century Europe by way of a radical redistribution of interests towards science and technology within the novel and the short story. During the 20th century, this same concentration of interests extended into various theatrical, film, radio and television forms. And during the last half century, a distinctive concentration on extreme climate change has given rise to the sub-genre we can now designate as climate fiction, Bloom’s ‘cli-fi’. From Williams, we also take two more specific notions, ‘structure of feeling’ and ‘selective tradition’. The first denotes the patterned articulation of different texts and sign-systems. It provided him with a way to theorize the ‘historical formation’ of a ‘structure of meanings’ as ‘a wide and general movement in thought and feeling’ (Williams, 1963: 17). Moreover, he was particularly insistent that the new industrial science and its technologies were a crucial element in the emergent structure of feeling of mid-19th-century Britain. The ‘excitement of this extraordinary release of man’s powers’, he observed, became ‘central to the whole culture’ (Williams, 1965: 88). It is precisely this element that most clearly distinguishes the new worlds of SF from the alternative islands of older eutopian fiction. The second notion denotes the way cultural tradition necessarily entails ‘a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors’ (Williams, 1965: 69). For Williams himself, this argument was directed at the high literary canon, but it can also be seen to apply to what Darko Suvin calls the ‘SF tradition’ (Suvin, 1979: 220). This too is necessarily a retrospectively selective attempt to establish and maintain types of predisposed continuity.

Williams was well aware of the institutional grounding of both structures of feeling and selective traditions. Nonetheless, these are almost certainly better theorized through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘cultural field’. For Bourdieu, even disinterested and gratuitous practices can be treated as directed towards the maximization of some kind of profit. Applied to the arts, this approach produced a model of ‘the field of cultural production’ as structured externally in relation to the ‘field of power’ and internally in relation to two ‘principles of hierarchization’, or ways of allocating value (Bourdieu, 1993: 37–8, 40–1). The modern literary and artistic field is thus for Bourdieu a site of contestation between the ‘heteronomous’ principle, which subordinates art to economy, and the ‘autonomous’, which resists such subordination in the name of ‘art for art’s sake’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 40). In Bourdieu’s map of the late 19th-century French literary field, the principle of autonomy governs the left of the field, that of heteronomy the right, so that the most autonomous of genres, that is, the least economically profitable, are to the left, whilst the most heteronomous, or the most economically profitable, are to the right. Each genre is also characterized by an internal hierarchy, corresponding to the social hierarchy of its audiences, so that high social status audiences govern the upper end of the field, low status audiences the lower (Bourdieu, 1992: 176). Conventional wisdom often tends to treat SF as a necessarily heteronomous and low status genre. But if we factor in such variants as academic SF criticism, the ‘literary’ SF novel, the various SF ‘new waves’, ‘art house’ and ‘underground’ SF cinema – as Milner has done (Milner, 2012: 45) – then it becomes clear that the SF subfield is actually structurally homologous to the whole of the general cultural field rather than to any particular part therein. It also becomes clear that one of the subfield’s central social functions is to produce and reproduce the SF selective tradition.

Our cultural materialism differs crucially from Williams’s own in respect, not so much of our debt to Bourdieu as to Moretti’s appropriation of world systems theory. The latter is an approach to modern economic history developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, the enduring concern of which has been with how modern capitalism functions as a world system, comprising a ‘core’, ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’, defined in relation to three main variables: the degree of profitability, the degree of monopolization and the degree of state patronage. Core-like processes tend to constitute the bulk of production in comparatively few states, peripheral in a much larger number, semi-peripheral in an intermediate zone containing a near-even mix of core-like and peripheral production (Wallerstein, 2004: 28). This is the model Moretti applies to Comparative Literature and which Milner has, in turn, applied to SF (Moretti, 2013; Milner, 2014).

Moretti argues that the study of what Goethe termed Weltliteratur can no longer be conceived simply as national literature writ large, ‘literature, bigger’, but should be reorganized around entirely different categories and conceptual problems. It ‘is not an object’, he continues, ‘it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method’. The model he proposes, directly adapted from Wallerstein, is that of a world literary system, simultaneously ‘one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery…bound together in a relationship of growing inequality’ (Moretti, 2013: 46). If this is how the system functions, then the appropriate mode of analysis becomes ‘distant reading’, where distance ‘is a condition of knowledge’, permitting the analyst ‘to focus on units…much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems’ (Moretti, 2013: 48–9). The result is a history of the modern novel understood as a ‘system of variations’, in which during the 19th and early 20th century pressure from the Anglo-French core tended towards uniformity, while variable local realities in the periphery and semi-periphery tended towards difference. Tendency and counter-tendency thus produced a series of localized structural ‘compromises’, between foreign plot, local characters and local narrative voice, in which the ‘one-and-unequal literary system’ became embedded in the form itself (Moretti, 2013: 57–9).

In Distant Reading, Moretti doesn’t so much apply world systems theory as invoke it. For there is no equivalent there to Wallerstein’s own detailed account of the interconnections between profitability, monopolization and patronage, only the borrowed vocabulary of core, semi-periphery and periphery. The nearest Moretti came to such detail was in the earlier Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, where he used the number of titles published and the volume of translations recorded in national bibliographies as key empirical indicators. There he shows how more than half of all 19th-century European novels were originally published in either London or Paris. French novelists were more successful in translation in the Catholic South and British in the Protestant North, but the whole continent nonetheless read Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo (Moretti, 1998: 186, 178–9). The number of titles and volume of translations need not necessarily correlate with profitability, monopolization and state patronage, but in the long run they are very likely to do so, and in the case of British and French publishing almost certainly did.

Our method here is much the same as Moretti’s, not so much an application of Wallerstein as an invocation, centred on the core-periphery model. However, the methodological problems entailed by an attempt to identify specifically science-fictional sub-sets of Moretti’s aggregate figures are considerable, not least those posed by changes over time in definition and nomenclature, and by the institutionalized effects of policing the boundaries between ‘genre fiction’ and the ‘literary canon’. We therefore intend to take our base data from: first, a combination of aggregate book publishing and translation data, drawn from UNESCO’s annual Statistical Yearbook and Index Translationum; and second, a distant reading of the history of the genre, derived in part from earlier close readings, in part from secondary accounts, especially those provided in the online third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Clute et al., 2011). The latter is, as Fredric Jameson observed of the hard copy second edition, a ‘superb’ resource (Jameson, 2005: 1n). Measured in these terms, we can identify an initial Anglo-French core, which is later supplemented by new American and Japanese cores, whilst Russia, Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia function as longstanding semi-peripheries. We might well hypothesize that Latin America also constitutes a newly emergent semi-periphery (Bell and Molina-Cavilán, 2003).

Ice, fire and flood

Climate is an important aspect of fictional scene setting, whether it be geographical – are we in the desert or in the tropics? – or seasonal – is it winter or is it summer? And SF seems particularly predisposed to use climate as explanatory shorthand. So, to take an obvious example, in George Lucas’s first Star Wars trilogy, Tatooine is rapidly established as a desert planet, Hoth an ice planet, Endor a temperate forest moon. Treatments of catastrophic climate change in both print and audio-visual media have tended to be organized around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world; or, more succinctly, ice, fire and flood.

Of these, only the last has a deep history in the western mythos, dating back to the story of Noah in Bereshith/Genesis VI–VIII and, beyond it, to the story of Utnapishtim in the Sha naqba imuru/Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI. Early modern SF continued this particular preoccupation: witness the flood sequences in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (Shelley, 1998 [1826]: 438–40) and Richard Jefferies’s After London (Jefferies, 2007 [1895]: 26–30). Cooling and warming are much more recent preoccupations, dating essentially from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory, following the publication of James Croll’s Climate and Time, in Their Geological Relations in 1875, and of greenhouse theory, following that of Svante Arrhenius’s On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground in 1896. For most of the 20th century both science and SF were more interested in cooling than in warming. In geological terms, the period we inhabit, the ‘Holocene’ as it is termed, is an ‘interglacial’, that is, a comparatively warm period within the longer, colder ‘ice age’ defined by the ‘Quaternary period’. When located in relation to the so-called ‘Malenkovitch cycles’, which measure the effects of orbital variation on the earth’s climate, we can be seen to live in a time of cooling that has lasted for some 6000 years. So the most likely future climate change was widely anticipated to be a return to the ice age. This motif recurs throughout the SF of the period, from John Christopher’s The World in Winter (1962) and Robert Silverberg’s Time of the Great Freeze (1964) through Michael Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner (1966) and John Gribbin and Daniel Orgill’s The Sixth Winter (1979) to Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann (1999).

The earliest exception to this observation is Kōbō Abe’s Daiyon Kanpyoki, often claimed as the foundational text of postwar Japanese SF, which as early as 1959 foresaw global warming leading to the melting of the polar ice caps and rising sea levels. But widespread concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling dates primarily from the 1970s. In 1979, both the US National Research Council and the World Meteorological Organization published predictions that then current levels of CO₂ emission would result in increases in average global temperature. In the early 1980s, Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term ‘Anthropocene’ to describe the two centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and in 2000 he and Paul Crutzen formally proposed it to the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000); in 1988, the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environmental Programme combined to establish the IPCC; and in 1990 it completed its First Assessment Report. This concluded that emissions from human activities had substantially enhanced the natural greenhouse effect; that CO₂ emissions were responsible for more than half the enhanced greenhouse effect; and that, if emissions proceeded on a ‘business as usual’ basis, this would result in levels of global warming during the 21st century greater than those seen in the previous 10,000 years (Houghton et al., 1990: xi). Where science and Kōbō Abe led, global SF followed. Arthur Herzog’s Heat explored the fictional possibilities of a runaway greenhouse effect as early as 1977. George Turner’s own most acclaimed SF novel, The Sea and Summer, appeared in 1987. Set mainly in Melbourne, it depicted a world of mass unemployment and social polarization, in which global warming had produced rising sea levels and consequent inundation of the city’s Bayside suburbs.

The range of imaginative responses to global warming appears to run from the gloomiest dystopia to the brightest eutopia by way of many kinds of intervening ambiguity. We use eutopia here as the antonym of dystopia, since, as Thomas More’s original usage makes clear, utopia is strictly speaking neither a better nor worse place, but rather a no place (More, 1995 [1516]: 18–19). These fictional responses run roughly parallel to the options available in real-world discourse. Contemporary climate policy distinguishes between mitigation and adaptation strategies and between positive and negative variants of adaptation, the former seeking possible advantages to be seized upon, the latter disadvantages to be minimized. To these we can add as a fourth option various forms of climate change denial; and, as a fifth, the kind of deep ecological anti-humanism sometimes associated with James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ (Lovelock, 1979). Instances of all five kinds of response – denial, mitigation, positive adaptation, negative adaptation, deep ecology – can be observed in climate fiction. Good examples of denial include Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) and Nele Neuhaus’s Wer Wind sät (2011); of the special kind of denial that calls into question the scientists rather than the science, Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) and Sven Böttcher’s Prophezeiung (2011); of mitigation, Herzog’s Heat (1977) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012); of positive adaptation, Bernard Besson’s Groenland (2011); of negative adaptation Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987), Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004–7), Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009b), Dirk C. Fleck’s Das Tahiti-Project (2008) and MAEVA! (2011); of fictional deep ecology, Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy (1982–5) and Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm (2004).

Our preliminary research has concentrated on novels and short stories, but it is clear that other media have also engaged in fictional and non-fictional representations of various kinds of extreme climate change. Examples of graphic novels and comics include: Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s Le Transperceneige (1982); Hayao Miyazaki’s Kaze no Tani no Naushika (1982–94); Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2010); Grant Calof and Eric Eisner’s H2O (2011); John Hicklenton’s 100 Months (2012); and Brian Wood’s The Massive (2012–14). Examples from film and animation include: Miyazaki’s adaptation of Kaze no Tani no Naushika for anime (1984); Kevin Reynolds’s Waterworld (1995); Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001); Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004); Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E (2008); Ivan Engler and Raph Etter’s Cargo (2009); Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013); Bong Joon-Ho’s Seolgungnyeolcha (2013); Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). There is also a large and growing body of young adult fiction, most recently, for example, JL Morin’s Nature’s Confession (2015).

Narrative strategies and tactics

An important issue relevant across media is that of how central a position climate change actually occupies within any particular narrative. Suvin famously described SF as a genre ‘distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic’ (Suvin, 1979: 63). In some SF, climate change functions essentially only as a setting for another more central novum, whereas in others it is itself the novum. In addition, we might note the presence of ‘hybrid’ texts, where climate change is the primary science-fictional novum, but where a non-SF component, such as romance or crime, is nonetheless actually dominant. Texts where climate change functions primarily as ‘mise en scène’, to borrow a term from theatre and film studies, include: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13), where genetic engineering is the primary novum; Michel Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île (2005), where it is cloning; Wolfgang Jeschke’s Das Cusanus Spiel (2005), where it is time travel; Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), where it is future agriculture and pharmaceuticals; and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014), where it is the struggle for immortality. Texts where anthropogenic climate change provides the primary novum clearly include: Herzog’s Heat, Turner’s The Sea and Summer, Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004), TC Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, Schätzing’s Der Schwarm, Jean-Marc Ligny’s AquaTM (2006) and Exodes (2012), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Ilija Torjanow’s Eis Tau (2011), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013). Examples of ‘hybrid’ texts would include Homero Aridjis’s ¿En quién piensas haces el amor? (1996), which is primarily a love story, Jordi de Manuel’s L’olor de la pluja (2006) and Antti Toomainen’s Parantaja (2010), both of which are primarily crime novels. The key issue here is not so much classification per se, but rather that of rhetorical efficacy. Our research suggests that all three strategies can work well, but that the second is likely to be the more rhetorically persuasive.

A second issue relevant across media is that of the relative efficacy of different cultural forms. The panel on ‘Climate Change Narratives’ held at the 2014 72nd World Science Fiction Convention debated the difficulties of telling human stories concerning ‘the distinctly larger-than-human problem of climate change’ (Sieber et al., 2014). This doesn’t seem to us as serious a problem as it might at first appear. All realist fiction tended to set human stories in larger-than-human contexts, and there is no obvious reason why SF shouldn’t have the capacity to do the same. If there is a problem it is that, by comparison with plague or nuclear war, climate change is a relatively slow process. But so too was the decline of Scottish clan society depicted in Scott’s Waverley novels, or the rise of bourgeois Paris depicted in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine.

There might be a specific problem for SF cinema, however, insofar as it finds itself obliged to work within much shorter time frames than those available to either the novel or the TV mini-series. This could explain why Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, for example, was so obviously scientifically implausible: climate change just won’t happen quite that quickly. One alternative approach would be to set the film well after the catastrophe, as in the 2009 Swiss SF film Cargo or the 2013 South African film Elysium. Jameson identifies a second alternative, however, in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004), and its 2012 film adaptation by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski. In these texts, Jameson argues, the artwork functions as ‘an immense elevator that moves us up and down in time’; and it does so precisely because ‘historicity today…demands a temporal span far exceeding that of the biological limits of the individual human organism’ (Jameson, 2013: 302). Interestingly, this is exactly the strategy subsequently adopted by Mitchell himself in his 2014 climate change novel The Bone Clocks and by Nolan in his Interstellar.

This leads us into yet another cross-media issue, that of whether art can ever expect to change reality. Creative artists and humanities academics are no doubt inclined to overestimate the likely effects of the arts, corporate CEOs and economists to underestimate them. The issue was canvassed directly in respect of climate change in a New York Times opinion piece in July 2014. JP Telotte, Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, argued that SF represents pressing cultural anxieties rather than real problems; George Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network, that it merely reinforces people’s existing prejudices; Sheree Renée Thomas, editor of the Dark Matter anthology series, that what is imagined can sometimes come true; and Daniel Bloom, predictably enough, that ‘“Cli-fi” movies and novels have the power to change minds. That’s their mission’ (New York Times, 2014). If this opinion piece is any guide, the issue clearly remains an open question.

Learning from On the Beach

One of the members of the 2014 ‘Climate Change Narratives’ panel, Euan G. Nisbet, Professor of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, volunteered the opinion that what climate science now most needs from SF is a contemporary equivalent to Nevil Shute’s nuclear doomsday novel On the Beach (1957). Much the same view has been expressed previously (Christoff, 2008). A novel from Australia, in the outer periphery of the world literary system, might seem an unlikely candidate as the template for contemporary climate fiction. And yet, as Moretti himself observed, peripheral literatures can in fact be sustained by historical backwardness (Moretti, 1998: 195–7). Shute’s novel was published in hardback in Australia, Britain and the USA, went through several re-printings, became a critical and commercial success, was very quickly republished in paperback, translated into at least 25 other languages, adapted for film by Stanley Kramer in 1959, later still for television and radio, and, last but not least, almost certainly changed the realities of the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and ‘60s. The great and not-so-great powers retained their nuclear weapons, of course, but Shute’s novel and Kramer’s film exercised an enormous influence, not only on the early mass campaigns for nuclear disarmament, but also on elite opinion in America, Russia and Britain; so much so as to contribute significantly to the climate of opinion that enabled the 1963 Test Ban Treaty between the USA, the USSR and the UK (Baker, 2012: 158–9). Obviously, we cannot predict the nature of the novel, film or other artwork likely to have a similar such effect on climate politics. But we can use On the Beach as a template by which to assess likely candidates. In this concluding section we will briefly examine the strengths and weaknesses of three such candidates, one each taken from the Australian periphery of the world cultural system, the German semi-periphery, and the North American core: respectively, Turner’s The Sea and Summer, Schätzing’s Der Schwarm and Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy.

The Sea and Summer is a comparatively early example of climate fiction, published in the UK by Faber and in the US by Arbor (under the title Drowning Towers), in both instances to considerable critical acclaim. In 1988 it won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, for the South East Asia and South Pacific Region, and the Arthur C Clarke Award for best SF novel published in Britain, and was shortlisted for the Nebula Award for best SF novel published in the US. It is today still the only Australian title in Gollancz’s series of ‘SF Masterworks’ (Turner, 2013). The novel mounts a stunningly powerful indictment of our 21st century ‘Greenhouse Culture’ (Turner, 1987: 4). And it has an interestingly complex structure, which moves between a frame narrative of three parts set in the 31st century (Turner, 1987: 3–16, 87–100, 315–16) and a longer core narrative of two parts, beginning and ending in the year 2061 (Turner, 1987: 19–20, 306–11), but moving through the 2040s and ’50s as it proceeds. This means, in short, that it is an interestingly early example of Jameson’s future-historical novel as elevator. But this very complexity, and its marketing as a ‘literary’ novel by Faber, the largest British ‘independent’ publisher, also help to explain why it was a less than spectacular commercial success and, perhaps, why it has never been adapted for film or television. Moreover, its peripheral status decisively tells against it in some significant aspects, which might explain why it has only ever been translated into Danish and Spanish. Like On the Beach, The Sea and Summer is set mainly in Melbourne. But whereas in Shute’s novel there are good global reasons for this exclusive focus – much of what is left of the human race, including the crew of a surviving American nuclear submarine, converge on the city after the northern hemisphere has destroyed itself in nuclear war – there are no correspondingly plausible reasons in Turner. In his novel, the state takes over the administration of the Australian economy when the world financial system collapses during the 2040s (Turner, 1987: 71). At this point, even Australian readers are left wondering what exactly has happened to the international parent companies of Australian subsidiaries, to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the United States Federal Reserve Bank, the European Central Bank, the People’s Bank of China, and so on. And for non-Australian readers, the question becomes more pressing and more general: what exactly has happened to the rest of the world?

We have said that climate change is the primary novum in Schätzing’s Der Schwarm, but this is not self-evidently so. An alternative candidate would be the eponymous Schwarm, ‘die Yrr’, ‘Der sich seiner selbst bewusst gewordene Ozean [the ocean become conscious of itself]’ (Schätzing, 2005: 965). But the Yrr play an essentially reactive role in the novel, merely responding to the anthropogenic environmental crisis which actually drives the narrative. The primary novum is thus ‘der globalen Klimaerwärmung [global warming]’, compounded by ‘Strőme von Schadstoffen, Űberfischung, die rűcksichtslose Erschließung der Kűsten [pollution, overfishing, reckless coastal development]’ and other human offences against the integrity of the seas (Schätzing, 2005: 234). Moreover, the ultimate source of this crisis, it is clear, is the ‘Mineralőlkonzerne [oil industry]’ with its ‘Interessengeflecht’ [web of interests] that has ‘den Planeten űberzog [overwhelmed the planet]’ (Schätzing, 2005: 366). Hence, the most spectacular of the Yrr’s counter-attacks: a Tsunami that destroys the North Sea oil wells (Schätzing, 2005: 402–4).

By contrast with The Sea and Summer, Der Schwarm was a very considerable commercial success, both domestically and internationally. First published in hardback in Germany and Austria, it was the bestselling German novel for eight successive months during 2004, was adapted for Hörspiel, or audio-play, in the same year, republished in paperback in 2005, and subsequently translated into at least 20 other languages. It was also critically well received, not least for the quality of its background scientific research, and in 2005 won both the Bauer Group’s Goldene Feder media award and the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis for best novel. A German-Italian film adaptation was announced in 2007, although this has still to appear, and was presumably delayed by the death of Dino De Laurentis in 2010. The novel’s success in Germany can be explained in part as the obverse of Turner’s in the Anglosphere, that is, by the fact that it was marketed as ‘Roman’ rather than ‘Science Fiction’. German literary culture, from the book trade through to the academy, tends to make sharp distinctions between ‘Literatur’ and ‘Trivialliteratur’, firmly consigning to the latter ‘Science Fiction’, written thus in English. That Der Schwarm was a novel, rather than mere SF, thus almost certainly enhanced its sales. Moreover, its status as an eco-fiction must have had special appeal to the sizable part of the German electorate that votes Green: die Grünen were the world’s first organized Green Party and are still amongst the most electorally successful, holding 63 seats in the present Bundestag. The novel’s ecopolitics are almost Lovelockian in character, insofar as the Yrr are in effect Gaia surrogates. Der Schwarm is a very long novel, 987 pages in all, but has a comparatively simple narrative structure, moving chronologically forward from 14 January to 15 August of a year in the near future, followed by a very brief ‘Epilog’ set exactly one year later. This too may have enhanced its commercial appeal.

Der Schwarm has an interestingly ambivalent attitude towards the United States. At one level, it is structured around a binary political opposition between European and Canadian scientists on the one hand, and the American political, military and intelligence elite on the other. But at another, it remains deeply indebted to American SF film and TV: Schätzing’s scientists don’t themselves appear to read many novels, but they do repeatedly draw deliberate analogies between their own actions and those of characters from Hollywood cinema. Moreover, some of the novel’s central sequences are clearly very well suited to American ‘blockbuster’ treatment, for example, that where Sigur Johanson, the urbane Norwegian marine biologist, arrives by helicopter at the Shetland Islands in the nick of time to rescue Karen Weaver, a British scientific journalist, from the imminent impact of the North Sea Tsunami (Schätzing, 2005: 410–17). But Schätzing’s treatment of the main US characters nonetheless sometimes borders on quite explicit anti-Americanism. So, for example, the US president is represented as a Christian fundamentalist believer in the literal truth of Genesis, in effect a kind of dumbed down George W. Bush (Schätzing, 2005: 591). Worse still, Judith Li, the commander of the USS Independence, a state-of-the-art helicopter carrier used to transport the international scientific taskforce to the Greenland Sea, turns out to be a murderous psychopath, who would rather kill the scientists than treat with the Yrr. This anti-Americanism might well have strengthened the novel’s appeal in Europe, but it could also explain why the English translation underperformed in the US. And the United States is still at the core, not only of the world economy, but also of the world literary system.

Which takes us, finally, to North America itself. Robinson was already a successful, well-established SF writer when he wrote the Science in the Capital novels. He had won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel for Pacific Edge in 1991, Hugo Awards for Green Mars and Blue Mars in 1994 and 1997 respectively, and a Nebula Award for Red Mars in 1993. His work thus enjoyed professional, fan and academic legitimacy: the Nebula Awards are made by a professional writers association, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; the Hugo Awards by a fan organization, the World Science Fiction Society; and the Campbell Memorial Award by a panel of experts appointed by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Interestingly, Fredric Jameson, the doyen of American academic SF critics, has dedicated two books to Robinson (Jameson, 2005: v; 2013: v). In 2008 Robinson was even named a ‘Hero of the Environment’ by Time magazine (Walsh et al., 2008). His work has also been translated into at least 23 other languages, although the complete Science in the Capital trilogy only into French and Dutch. Nonetheless, and perhaps surprisingly, none of Robinson’s work has ever been adapted into other media. For these particular novels, this might be in part an effect of their sheer length, 1632 pages in total in the first edition. But there are reasons pertaining to content as well as to form.

Robinson’s work is often described as ‘hard SF’ and is justly famous for the quality of its scientific research. But in the Science in the Capital trilogy, where the subject matter appears closest to its author’s deepest concerns, the reader is almost overwhelmed by the details, not only of the science, but also of the internal mechanisms of scientific policy-making. Indeed, remarkably little actually happens in the first volume, Forty Signs of Rain, until the spectacular flooding of Washington DC at its conclusion (Robinson, 2004: 326–56). Fifty Degrees Below, which deals with the stalling of the Gulf Steam, and Sixty Days and Counting, which recounts the opening stages of the presidency of the environmentally activist, former Californian Senator, Phil Chase, are more fast-moving, but still often overburdened with scientific and technical detail. Moreover, the whole trilogy suffers from a preoccupation with American internal politics that might not excite much international interest, even were the US still the only global superpower. The trilogy’s central protagonist, Frank Vanderwal, is a Californian biomathematician and rock climber, whose initial cynicism about science policy is eventually superseded by active enthusiasm for a Chase administration. Chase himself, a character Robinson takes over from an earlier novel (Robinson, 1997), is the radical obverse of Schätzing’s president, an idealized amalgam of an Al Gore who managed to get elected and a Barack Obama who managed to get things done. It’s not difficult to see why American readers might find the character both plausible and attractive, but Europeans neither. This is surmise, of course, but nonetheless only the first volume has as yet been translated into Spanish, none into German, Italian, Czech, Polish or Russian (or, for that matter, Japanese or Chinese).

All three of these texts have distinctive weaknesses and strengths that acquire their character in part from their distinctive geographical locations within the world cultural system. That none quite reaches the benchmark set by the On the Beach template no doubt tells us something of the scale of Shute’s often under-rated achievement. But it also suggests the scale of what might still need to be done.