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7 Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future Maggie Gee’s The Ice People adeline Johns-Putra Anthropogenic climate change, global warming, the sixth mass extinction event—whatever we want to call it—is now fixed in the science fiction imaginary: witness the recent success of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2010) and consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future depiction of abrupt climate change in the Science and the Capital trilogy (2004, 2005, 2007).1 Perhaps just as noteworthy is the recent spate of novels about future climate-changed worlds by authors who are not usually identified with SF. This includes writers of so-called “literary” fiction on both sides of the Atlantic: Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Cormac McCarthy, Will Self, and Jeanette Winterson.2 Doris Lessing’s return to futuristic world-building in her “Ifrik” novels is worth considering in this vein.3 So too is British novelist Maggie Gee, and the environmental catastrophe she depicts in her novel The Ice People (1998).4 I will take as a critical given the idea that novels constitute spaces in which to explore inner life as it relates to the outer world of social appearance and action. The specific case of the climate change dystopian novel is no different. These dystopian visions consider the lived experience of climate change, and attempt to refract through the personal the almost incomprehensible scale of this global ecological crisis. They attempt, too, to adapt the conventions of the novel form—the insistently concrete questions of setting, character, and plot—to the notoriously abstract nature of climate change. Climate change, remarks philosopher of science Sheila Jasanoff, is “everywhere and nowhere”—everywhere because it is a global problem that has become a mainstay of our collective cultural life, but nowhere because it is knowable and solvable only at a remove, through the mediation of science and the machinery of politics.5 In response to these representational contradictions, the climate change dystopia constructs 128 Brav e Ne w wo rl ds & l aNds o f t h e fl ie s a vision of the future in which ecological crisis can be denied no longer and a consideration of its causes and possible solutions delayed no further. More often than not, in such novels, humankind’s culpability in a climate-changed world, as well as our potential for change, become part of the psychological texture of the narrative. In their assessment of humanity’s collective hubris, such novels imply that we simply have not cared enough, and that the way forward lies in caring more. Many climate change dystopias offer object lessons in environmentalist empathy , suggesting that—quite simply—love will let us save, survive, or escape an ecologically degraded planet. Where SF has conventionally reveled in technological world-building, these novels push the dark, dystopian side of science to the extreme, and insist on care and love as its only viable alternative. In Lessing ’s Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006), the eponymous sister and brother are a study in affective contrast: compassionate, motherly Mara is able to overcome the traumas of climate refugeeism, while emotionally blunted Dann finds only psychological dead ends. In Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2008), we find three interlocked time-shifting stories; each pits an environmentally and emotionally attuned protagonist called Billie (or Billy) against a world of technological brutality. The novel’s refrain that “Love is an intervention” is confirmed when the last Billie finds happiness in death, a moment that facilitates a return to her long-sought-for mother.6 Both Lessing and Winterson offer up eco-fables of a sort, but even in more considered assessments of environmental disaster, loving care provides the moral. In Atwood’s dystopia-turned-apocalypse, Oryx and Crake (2003), life on Earth has been genetically engineered and ecologically exploited beyond recognition. Crake, a gifted scientist who decides to destroy humankind to save the planet, is therefore both villain and savior. His ultrarational , anti-emotional solution effectively places the notion of environmental care under watch, even while science is taken to task.7 Atwood returns, however, to the notion of care as optimal response in her characterization of Toby in the companion novel The Year of the Flood (2009), which narrates the experiences of a group of female survivors of Crake’s apocalypse. Life for the women in both preapocalyptic dystopia and post-apocalyptic devastation is a...

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