Speculative fiction is an overarching term encompassing various genres that critique history and the contemporary world. When it comes to speculative climate fictions, there is a challenge in representing the vast scale of climate change and its impacts across time and space. A further representational challenge arises within this vast scale, inverting authors’ gaze toward the comparatively small-scale, unknowable and untranslatable of the nonhuman, which has become prevalent within the cli-fi novel. The entanglement of temporal and spatial issues of scale as well as the nonhuman pushes the boundaries and form of the conventional novel, blurring genres further under the overarching speculative fiction genre. These twin representational challenges at opposite ends of scalar size create unique opportunities to critique human-centrism in the world and the novel. In assessing the transgressive narrative elements of two speculative climate fiction novels, The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Dyschronia by Jennifer Mills, the unique elements of the speculative in climate fictions is shown to enable the weirdness of the spatial and temporal scales of climate change to reentangle humans with the equally unknowable nonhuman. In acknowledging the losses of natural environments and nonhuman lives as linked to human-generated disaster, these texts paradoxically discover hope and possibilities.
| Date of Thesis submission | 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | - Western Sydney University
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| Supervisor | Mette Jakobsen (Supervisor) & Jason Tuckwell (Supervisor) |
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From the ground up: intersections of scale and the nonhuman in speculative climate fictions
Doherty, M. (Author). 2025
Western Sydney University thesis: Master's thesis