On “Making Sure No One Ever Travels Too Far”: The Climate Novel and Our Limited Imagination

Novelists whose work grapples with the climate crisis and the urgent need for structural transition return time and again to two questions: Why is it so hard for people to see what's happening? Why do we not seem to be able to imagine the transition to new environmental, social, or political systems? Authors of climate fiction show that environmental futures depend on our ability to renegotiate the limit between the “realistic” and the inconceivable, the boundary that strategically constrains our imagination and that limits social and environmental progress. How, authors ask, thereby responding to debates about the purported crisis of political and social futurity, should the novel respond to the sense that contemporary culture appears to be increasingly unable to generate convincing, hopeful visions of environmental and energy futures beyond capitalism? The contemporary novel engages with the problem of the limited imagination not as a way to dream up naive futures but rather to pinpoint the origins and causes of imaginative impossibility and obstacles to systemic transition. And by making legible the lack that is bound up with the limited imagination, the novel also asks how art itself functions as a specific form of critical and political thought.