The Question:

How does the shift in views and expressions of gender and social status effect the potential future climate outcomes in Gosh’s The Hungry Tide and Butler’s Parable of the Sower?

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.

Hampton, Gregory J. “MIGRATION AND CAPITAL OF THE BODY: OCTAVIA BUTLER’S ‘PARABLE OF THE SOWER.’” CLA Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, 2005, pp. 56–73. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44325296.

Patrick D. Murphy. “Community Resilience and the Cosmopolitan Role in the Environmental Challenge-Response Novels of Ghosh, Grace, and Sinha.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2013, pp. 148–68. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.50.1.0148.

Naumann, Lalita Jagtiani. “The Other Woman in The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh”. Dove-Rumé, Janine, et al.. L’autre. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2008. (pp. 271-278) Web. <http://books.openedition.org/pufr/5061>.

Nilges, Mathias. “‘We Need the Stars’: Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ and ‘Parable of the Talents.’” Callaloo, vol. 32, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1332–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27743152. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.

Theiss, Derek. “Care Work, Age, and Culture in Butler’s Parable Series.” Femspec, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 63-99,208. ProQuest, http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/care-work-age-culture-butlers-parable-series/docview/1726394732/se-2.

First, a revised question. Rather than considering the readers take on “time travel” in Cli-Fi novels, I’d like to shift the focus over to the authors themselves. The new question being, What can authors do, within their written work, to better portray the severity and significance of climate change to broader audiences?

OR

What can writers, and artists in general, do in order to better capture the attention of the audience?

Alexander, Jake M., et al. “Novel Competitors Shape Species’ Responses to Climate Change.” Nature, vol. 525, no. 7570, Sept. 2015, pp. 515–18. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/10.1038/nature14952.

• When it comes to climate change, there are many areas of concern. One of the main concerns are the effects that climate change can have regarding wildlife. The well being of animals is something most people with even half way decent morals care about. I personally have not read a novel that detailed any explicit harm or devastation to animals outside of non-fiction nature books. Perhaps including that more in fictitious novels focused on climate change can reach wider community types.

Archer, Neil. “Transnational Science Fiction at the End of the World: Consensus, Conflict, and the Politics of Climate Change.” Cinema Journal, vol. 58, no. 3, 2019, pp. 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0020.

• Not everyone is a book worm. There are many people who prefer film over a pile of pages. This article focuses on ways to incorporate science fiction into popular genre cinema. By doing so, film writers can find ways to ask/present important environmental questions.

Canavan, Gerry. “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.” American Literature, vol. 93, no. 2, 2021, pp. 255–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003582.

• Canavan talks about pieces of literary and cinematic works that have already made impact in the representation of climate change in the creative world. He also goes into detail of when and how the Anthropocene began. This article can aid in solving my question by providing answers to what has already made cultural impact.

Nikoleris, Alexandra, et al. “Narrating Climate Futures: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Literary Fiction.” Climatic Change, vol. 143, no. 3-4, 2017, pp. 307–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2020-2.

• This article covers the topic of “real life science meets literature.” It also shows how fiction can build a connection with climate change by telling the story in specific ways and providing new perspectives in a different way than what has been done before.

Archer, Neil. “Transnational Science Fiction at the End of the World: Consensus, Conflict, and the Politics of Climate Change.” Cinema Journal, vol. 58, no. 3, 2019, pp. 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0020.

Canavan, Gerry. “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.” American Literature, vol. 93, no. 2, 2021, pp. 255–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003582.

Nikoleris, Alexandra, et al. “Narrating Climate Futures: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Literary Fiction.” Climatic Change, vol. 143, no. 3-4, 2017, pp. 307–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2020-2.

Ortiz, Diego A., “How science fiction helps readers understand climate change” BBC, 15 January 2019. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190110-how-science-fiction-helps-readers-understand-climate-change

Levinson, Eliza.”The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.” The Story, 29 June 2022. https://the-story.media/articles/books-about-climate-change-cli-fi-sci-fi-science-fiction/

Vint, Sherryl. “A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment.” The Mit Press Reader, 20 July 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/century-of-science-fiction-environment-anthropocene/

My search began on old reliable, Google.  There I found some opinion pieces that mentioned Ghosh and Butler. I also found some pieces that simply covered the topic of the science fiction and climate change working together to reach and educate readers. Something else I did was go through the handy dandy class bibliography page where, after much deliberation, decided the Canavan could have a cozy spot on my very own bibliography. Finally, I used OneSearch on the Hunter Library to put the final touches on perfecting this bibliography pie. The two “words” that I used mostly in my searching were climate change and Sci-fi. As a result, my wonderfully beautiful (simple) bibliography was born.

How does the act of “time travel” in the novels we read aid in the delivery of climate impact to the reader? (relevant to Parable of the Sower and The Hungry Tide)

Something that appears to be a constant occurrence in the Lerner’s novel 10:04, much like Gosh’s The Hungry Tide, is the jumping back and forth between past and present. Except, in this novel, there is jumping between past, present, and alternate universe.

Personally, there is an odd sort of connection between the present me and the past unnamed narrator. Early in the novel he talks about going the WholeFoods in Union Square prior to a massive storm heading in the direction of New York and being met with almost apocalyptically barren shelves and subpar prepared foods. My connection with this scene particularly is that, currently, I work in that exact same WholeFoods and have worked there since 2018. I’ve gone through a semi similar experience as the narrator during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bare shelves, a sense of doom lingering in the air, the chaos whenever we did not have stock of water or toilet paper, and the chaos when we did.

“But how does this have any relevance with the plot Kayla? Just get to the point!” Alright, alright. I won’t withhold my genius. My point is, 10:04 has an almost unsettling way of connecting the past with the present with the future. The WholeFoods that existed then still exists today, but it doesn’t. There has been renovations and changes in management, yet the food is still subpar. (And if you ever find yourself considering eating from the self serve salad bar or hot bar, don’t. I promise you’re better off steering clear. I learned pretty early on working there that eating from the communal pot was a boundary best left untested.) The place itself is still there, but time has not left it alone. Just as time does not leave us alone. The same way time has a way of making us reminiscent, resentful, or both. What could we have done instead? Where could we have gone? Who could we have become? That is why writing is something that could be so marvelous and yet so daunting.

The amount of control that the author has over everything that transpires in a piece of writing is a power unlike any other. There is a meta presence of a novel within a novel (as we’ve seen in the previous novels this semester), that could arguably either be autobiographical for the narrator or a means of living out an alternate reality for the author. I believe that most of any written piece of fiction, has a long forgotten dream of the writer woven into it. Fiction, and writing as a whole, is an opportunity to be all that we could have been and experience all that could have been ours. All of the things that life, chance, and time would not let us be.