Introduction: Imagining Climate Change Futures

Abstract

The introduction to Climate Change Fictions discusses how our very understanding and experience of climate change has predominantly been shaped by scientific interpretation of this phenomenon and explains the importance of trying to understand global warming within a broader context of discourses and narratives. Consequently, as Antonia Mehnert explains, her book turns to a set of contemporary American works of fiction and reads them as an innovative alternative of communicating climate change. Climate change fiction—literature or film dealing explicitly with anthropogenic climate change—gives insight into the socio-cultural ramifications of this unparalleled environmental crisis. Moreover, in providing vivid imaginaries that bear justice to the representational challenges of global warming, climate change fiction actively shapes how we come to know this phenomenon.