What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and 'climate fiction' get wrong
Moho FilmsNovels and films that tackle global warming can inadvertently lead to paralysis, writes Tyler Harper.
In the opening scene of The Last of Us, HBO's immensely popular zombie prestige drama, a pair of epidemiologists sit cross-legged on the set of a talk show in 1968. As the playfully mild-mannered host queries his guests about viral threats to the human species, one of the scientists – a man named Newman – responds that fungi, not viruses or bacteria, pose the greatest risk to mankind. The crowd jeers, but Newman presses on undaunted, suggesting that – were Earth's global temperatures to one day rise – an incurable fungal plague could become a very real possibility. Minutes later, we flash forward to a future in which a pandemic has led to the collapse of human civilisation by 2023, the epidemiologist's fungal prophecy fulfilled.
This opening is jarring, not least because it alerts viewers to the catastrophic dangers of planetary warming, only to implicitly critique them for not heeding that same message. Like the disregarded epidemiologist whose concern falls on deaf ears, HBO's drama is clear from the start that its zombie metaphor is meant as a thinly veiled warning about our own, all-too-real climate crisis. The implication of the talk-show scene and its apocalyptic aftermath are straightforward: the future will be a hellscape if you don't listen to the scientists.
In this, The Last of Us is like most works that belong to the ever-expanding roster of cultural products given the moniker "climate fiction". Coined by the environmental activist Dan Bloom around 2008, "cli-fi" is the term used to describe a loose genre of novels, films, and other forms of media that depict climate change, generally through the lens of speculative or science fiction. Spanning bona fide literary classics like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower to densely allegorical (and shamelessly pretentious) films like Darren Aronofsky's Mother!, works of cli-fi are commonly apocalyptic in both tone and content. And like The Last of Us, they caution their audience about the world to come.
Public discourse around this new genre has been largely unquestioning. Novels and films about climate change are frequently described by the media as "prescient" or "prophetic", and invariably as offering a "dire warning" about the future. What's more, climate works are nearly always heralded as a kind of call to arms. We are led to believe that reading or watching climate fiction is going to inspire activism, that "cli-fi" can foment an appetite for real societal change either by "scaring audiences straight" or by communicating climate science more persuasively than actual climate scientists. These are assumptions that have been part of public discussion about "climate fiction" from the very beginning.
The first major article about this emerging genre, a 2015 piece in The Atlantic, bore the lofty title: "Climate Fiction: Can Books Save the Planet">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });