| dc.description.abstract | Results of anthropogenic environmental changes have become even more visible in the recent years with the ongoing climate crisis calling for sustainable alternatives to our current ways of living globally. Fiction has been in engagement with the issues of global climate crisis, however, the scales of it pose representational challenges on climate narratives and, additionally, most current literary narrativizations of the crisis embrace dystopian modes of representation. This thesis investigates the narrative strategies in The Ministry for the Future (2020) and how they allow Kim Stanley Robinson to mediate the complexity of the global climate crisis and its possible solutions in his anti-anti-Utopian vision.
I argue that the narrative strategies that Robinson deploys, render the complexity of the climate crisis more accessible to the readers and do so in the following ways: firstly, I propose that to respond to the representational challenges associated with the scales of the global climate crisis and the interconnected environmental and socioeconomic issues it entails, he adapts the form of The Ministry for the Future; secondly, I suggest that relying on re-imagining human agency in the narrative, allows him to challenge and propose alternatives to the status-quo of neoliberal capitalism, which is portrayed as the main antagonist in the face of the climate crisis. Ultimately, these narrative strategies enable Kim Stanley Robinson to both challenge the neoliberal capitalist ideology which halts a transition to sustainable ways of living, and, as part of the utopian impulse, to fictionalize scientifically informed paths of mitigating the global climate crisis. | |
