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Explainer: what is fanfiction?

by

Rukmini Pande, University of Western Australia

Consider yourself a stranger to fanfiction? It’s unlikely.

If you’ve read E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey (2011) then you already have at least one title under your belt. If you caught Robert Downey Jr’s turn as Sherlock Holmes (2009), that’s another.

So what is it? At its most basic, fanfiction is a genre of amateur fiction writing that takes as its basis a “canon” of “original” material.

This original material is most often popular books, television shows and movies – but can expand to almost anything, from the lives of celebrities to the travels of inanimate objects like the Mars rover.

Fanworks, including fanfiction and fanart, are created by fans who are invested in the source material. They seek to expand the narrative universe and share their personal creations with other fans for free.

Fanfiction in other guises

Alice in Wonderland fanart.
Mary Blair/flickr, CC BY

The main impulse behind fanfiction has always been a playful desire to engage with original works. Yet authors are still subject to modern copyright laws. In Australia, the US and the EU, copyright exists for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years.

Many early Disney film adaptations were derivative works based on out-of-copyright novels – think Alice in Wonderland (1951) and The Jungle Book (1967). In a way this could be considered a form of fanfiction.

Today, existing restrictions mean those interested in “remixing” copyrighted material create online communities to discuss and distribute their work freely. One of the aims of the fan-led Organisation of Transformative Works is to fight for the validity of fair use laws.

Still, the amateur status copyright law forces on fanworks is one of the reasons fanfiction as a whole is regarded with some derision.

This is one reason why the Twilight fanfiction origins of 50 Shades of Grey were obscured. Due to residual textual and thematic similarities, the question of copyright infringement remains open.

Sherlock Holmes fans gathered to raise money for the restoration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s study in London during 2014.
Andy Rain/AAP

Still, canonical works have remained a source of creative inspiration.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927) series has spawned a veritable industry of derivative works, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. Many successful novelists, including Colleen McCullough with The Independence of Miss Mary Bennett (2009), publish literary reimaginings of Jane Austen’s novels.

The “fanfiction” classification usually results from the context of creation and circulation rather than anything inherent to the subject matter or quality of writing.

It’s fiction, Jim, but not as we know it…

Popular culture academics in the US and the UK trace the beginnings of an identifiable fan culture and community from the 1970s. These tendencies were first identified by Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers (1992).

There is early evidence of fans coming together around science fiction television shows like The Man From U.N.C.LE. (1964-1968) and the original Star Trek (1966-1969).

Game of Thrones fanart.
MiMiKa Z/flickr, CC BY

Comparable communities formed around anime and manga in Japan during the 1980s. The influential all-female manga artist group Clamp first came to prominence through Doujinshi (amateur, self-published works) based on Captain Tsubasa (1983-1986) and Saint Seiya (1986-1989).

Today, thanks to the internet, connecting to other fans has never been easier. This level of accessibility has lead to a remarkable proliferation of what was once considered an obscure subculture.

In the digital realm, just one popular archival site – www.wattpad.com – currently hosts a staggering 40 million users a month.

It would be difficult to find a pop culture phenomenon today – from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Game of Thrones (2011-present) to K-dramas (Korean dramas) like Coffee Prince (2012-present) and Bollywood movies – that does not have fanfiction written about it.

Why do people write and read it?

Fanfiction enables readers, writers, and sometimes even literary professors to play in an imaginative sandbox, interpreting and reinterpreting events, relationships and characters to flesh out different scenarios.

Game of Thrones fanart.
MiMiKa Z/flickr, CC BY

The power of fanfiction stems from the fact that it actively invites writers to break down boundaries considered “natural” in a broader cultural context – primarily around sex, sexuality, and gender.

Fanfiction communities often critically engage with stories not written specifically for them. With doubts swirling over whether Marvel will ever make a Black Widow movie, is it any wonder female fans feel the need to create their own stories?

These reinterpretations interact with canonical events – actual events from the original text – in different ways, “filling in” unexplored aspects of a scene, or “fixing” things that were dissatisfying or problematic.

Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s study, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), found that fanfiction is primarily written by women, of all ages and sexual identities, and tends to explore – or “ship” – intimate and romantic relationships between characters.

Fans themselves have attempted to quantify the demographic diversity of readers and writers, with over 10,000 participants taking part in one particular survey.

Game of Thrones fanart.
MiMiKa Z/flickr, CC BY

Situated within such a demographic, fanfiction becomes a unique space within which a much more fluid approach to ideas of what is “possible” or “realistic” is encouraged.

As a result, fanfiction faces the same criticism as many genres where women predominate, from romance novels to young adult literature. Sarah Rees Brennan, a fanfiction writer who went “pro”, writes about her experiences in this context.

Those fans not engaged in fanfiction sometimes mock fanfiction writers for being “delusional”, questioning the “realism” of the relationships featured in fanworks. Additionally, since a lot of fanfiction is explicitly erotic, it becomes the target of parody.

The sheer volume and variable quality of fanfiction makes it an even easier target. Instead, I’d argue that the uneven quality of fanfiction reflects the low barrier of entry to the community rather than an inherent lack of value in the genre.

What are examples of the pitfalls?

This is not to say that the potential for subversion is always expressed unproblematically.

While transgressive in some ways, fanfiction writers and readers remain enmeshed within social power hierarchies. These communities do engage in self-critique, but issues of sexism and racism still persist.

Coffee Prince fanart.
Liz Mogollon/flickr, CC BY

Most English language fanfiction, whether it involves straight or queer relationships, remains concerned with white characters.

This is partly a reflection of the racial biases that still plague the production of the (mostly US) popular films and television shows that form the basis of these communities.

However, it is a worrying trend that even when non-white characters have significant roles in a canonical work, fanfiction very often fails to register this – or worse, undercuts it.

In Marvel Cinematic Universe fanfiction, characters of colour receive significantly less attention than their white counterparts. Clearly, interracial pairings (red) receive far less attention.

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It is not surprising that Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Bucky Barnes’ (Winter Soldier) close canon relationship has prompted a great deal of fanfiction, but the difference concerning the number of stories about Sam Wilson’s (Falcon) pivotal relationship with Rogers is startling. The fact that there is more fanfiction for Rogers and Darcy Lewis, characters who have never met in canon, is further proof of this imbalance.

Although Clint Barton (Hawkeye) and Phillip Coulson barely interact in the films, they have prompted a very significant output of fanworks. Tony Stark’s (Iron Man) close friend James Rhodes (War Machine) is paired with him rarely whereas there are many stories featuring Stark alongside Rogers, Pepper Potts and Bruce Banner (The Hulk).

Similarly, while fanfiction based around non-US media like Bollywood films, anime or K-pop doesn’t have the same problems regarding race and ethnicity, it still must negotiate its own cultural prejudices.

Disrupting the canon

As Alexis Lothian, Kristina Busse and Robin Anne Reid conclude, fanfiction provides a fluid space for (mainly) queer women writers and readers to engage with the various pop cultural narratives that influence their lives.

These negotiations, while messy and problematic, retain the potential to (re)fashion the “canon” to be inclusive of a broader range of human experiences.

Hunger Games fanart.
Jade Lilly/flickr, CC BY

The Conversation

Rukmini Pande, PhD researcher in the fields of Popular Culture and Postcolonialism, University of Western Australia

La version originale de cet article a été publiée sur The Conversation.

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Barnes & Noble

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The link below is to an article that looks at some facts about Barnes & Noble.

For more visit:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/69259/14-page-turning-facts-about-barnes-noble

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How do libraries get away with banning books?

by

Clay Calvert, University of Florida

A dozen years ago, in his New York Times review of the best-selling British novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jay McInerney (of Bright Lights, Big City fame) called it “stark, funny and original.” Told from the perspective of a 15-year-old autistic savant, the book is now a Tony Award-winning play.

But what’s hot on Broadway is sometimes too hot for Florida Panhandle high schools.

This past summer, the novel was pulled from the assigned summer reading list at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, Florida. As reported by the Tallahassee Democrat, “the move was made to accommodate offended parents,” who apparently took offense to the dozens of instances of profanity in the text.

Whether it’s challenging Harry Potter books for promoting Satanism and the occult or wiping Fifty Shades of Grey from the shelves for depicting “mommy porn,”, it’s become all too common for books to be challenged – and sometimes banished – from local libraries and schools.

The American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week, currently in its 23rd year, officially celebrates and promotes “the freedom to read” by raising awareness of books that are most frequently challenged across the nation.

Perhaps more significantly, however, Banned Books Week also provides both a rudimentary barometer of contemporary cultural concerns – the flashpoint topics, ideas and words that push our censorial buttons – and a test of our core commitment to the First Amendment.

Beware the parental penguins

The challenged books let us take the pulse of American squeamishness and, more bluntly, intolerance. They reveal the concerns of the day that rub some people the wrong way, so much so that they take the time and effort to file complaints rather just averting their eyes or cautioning their own children.

Not surprisingly, sex and sexuality, along with religion, are hot-button topics. Number three, for instance, on OIF’s list of most challenged books for 2014 is And Tango Makes Three. The children’s book, which was inspired by actual events in New York’s Central Park Zoo, tells the story of two male penguins who hatch and raise a female penguin named Tango. Publishers Weekly called it a “heartwarming tale.”

And Tango Makes Three was banned in a number of libraries across the country.
jessica wilson/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Those challenging it, however, find it anything but heartwarming. Instead, it is “anti-family” and “promotes the homosexual agenda.” Then again, at least the book was not the most challenged this past year, as it was in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010 (the 2014 honor goes to Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).

Culturally, the wrath heaped upon And Tango Makes Three suggests that one recent Supreme Court ruling aside, we are still conflicted when it comes to same-sex marriage (apparently for both humans and penguins).

Into the courtroom

Cultural questions, of course, sometimes spill into courtrooms. While the First Amendment explicitly protects freedom of speech, it also implicitly safeguards our right to receive speech.

As Justice William O Douglas wrote for the US Supreme Court fifty years ago in Griswold v Connecticut, “the right of freedom of speech and press includes not only the right to utter or to print, but the right to distribute, the right to receive, the right to read and freedom of inquiry.”

Griswold’s logic leads to convoluted case law surrounding public schools’ ability to regulate and ban books in their libraries.

In a 1982 case called Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v Pico, a New York school district sought to remove a number of books from library shelves, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and a Langston Hughes-edited collection called Best Short Stories of Negro Writers.

According to the school board, the titles removed were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-[Semitic], and just plain filthy.”

A fractured Supreme Court wrote that “the discretion of the States and local school boards in matters of education must be exercised in a manner that comports with the transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.”

In other words, school boards have discretion to pick and choose books, but that discretion is confined by minors’ rights to receive a wide swath of ideas and information, not just conformist doctrine.

US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote that schools couldn’t ban books ‘in a narrowly partison or political manner.’
Library of Congress

The court added that “just as access to ideas makes it possible for citizens generally to exercise their rights of free speech and press in a meaningful manner, such access prepares students for active and effective participation in the pluralistic, often contentious society.”

Lofty rhetoric aside, Justice William Brennan cobbled together a few rules that remain in place today: schools may not exercise their discretion “in a narrowly partisan or political manner,” and they “may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”

The court concluded there was enough evidence to suggest the school district’s reasons for removal violated the principles noted above, and it denied the board’s motion to have the case tossed out.

Indeed, the ALA makes it clear that despite a constant drumbeat to pull books from the shelves, “most challenges are unsuccessful and most materials are retained in the school curriculum or library collection.”

Of course, a few challenges do result in bans.

Ultimately, the problem of book banning and challenging won’t go away. Public libraries and schools with limited budgets must make tough calls on what to buy, remove or put behind the check-out desk. Their choices tell us much about where we stand culturally, while their willingness (for the most part) to combat challenges reflects their unwavering commitment to free expression.

The Conversation

Clay Calvert, Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication, University of Florida

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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What happens when you try to read Moby Dick on your smartphone?

by

Naomi Baron, American University

These days, when most of us think of a “book,” we have in mind something around nine inches by six inches, with mass market paperbacks shaving off an inch or two in each dimension.

But digital reading has redefined presuppositions about size and, more importantly, about what format is best for what’s being read: text messages, news articles, textbooks or fiction.

Conventional wisdom (including my own) typically suggests that serious digital reading calls for ample screen size (at least a tablet or e-reader), while one-off encounters with sports updates or tweets are fine on mobile phones.

But these rules of thumb are crumbling as users increasingly abandon larger mobile devices like Kindles and Nooks in favor of an all-purpose phone. While sales of e-readers and tablets are slowing, the real growth is in smartphones. In 2014, 1.2 billion smartphones were sold worldwide. With many newer generations of smartphones offering bigger screens – along with continued advancements in screen resolution – readers are turning to their mobiles for more and more of their onscreen reading.

Does size matter? For most of us, yes. When the reading platform size shrinks, it’s harder to focus on complex arguments or story lines. No wonder the bestselling e-books tend to be romance and erotica.

Convenient, yes. But at what cost?
‘Stack’ via www.shutterstock.com

It’s become commonplace to invoke Herman Melville or Leo Tolstoy when arguing about what kinds of reading work (or don’t work) on which digital media. “No one would read War and Peace on a mobile phone,” you might say – but that’s exactly what journalist Clive Thompson did earlier this year. Expediency was his basic motivation – knowing he was unlikely to lug the print version around with him, he turned to the device he was already carrying: his phone.

Thompson’s success story (he went on to polish off Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment on the phone) can be interpreted two ways: “I told you so” or “the exception proves the rule.” Knowing Thompson’s work, I’m confident he proved a serious reader of these meaty texts. But when my university students try the same feat, they often admit the results are more questionable.

To be fair, the main challenge of reading on mobile phones or smartwatches isn’t size, per se. (Historically, readers have been absorbed in books fitting in the palm of their hand – especially prayer books or poetry.) Rather, for the majority of readers, the issue is mindset. For those lacking self-discipline, there is Freedom software, which blocks internet access on digital devices if you’re trying to get some work done. Either way, reading serious literature on a mobile phone (rather than restaurant reviews or gossip) takes a level of concentration and self-discipline that few have.

Five hundred years ago, when people prayed using a book no larger than a mobile phone, there was no chance of being interrupted by a text message or a tweet. Today, our handy pocket devices are laden with temptations that snatch our attention away from an author’s words.

And distractions aside, there’s still the question of whether or not we can comprehend text on small screens at a level comparable to text in printed books or magazines. Here, there are several intertwined components: size, text length and the digital (as opposed to print) medium.

For size, when reading on a small digital device, the number of characters visible at one clip is abridged, from around 200 (on a mini-tablet or large smartphone) to, at best, a few dozen on a smart watch. Digital reading entails continual scrolling, and there’s little prospect of seeing a two-page spread (an essential format of the codex for nearly 2,000 years). Reading specialist Anne Mangen argues that constant scrolling on digital devices undermines mental absorption.

Now think about how much text people are willing to tackle in the first place. In the age of tl;dr (“too long; didn’t read”), those who read onscreen – even comparatively big screens – show less patience with lengthy prose (longreads.com informs time-conscious readers how many words each piece contains and how long it should take to work through them). As screens get smaller, it’s wildly unlikely that even our current attention spans will hold steady.

Finally, consider the medium itself. My research on university students in five countries revealed that 92% believed they could concentrate best when reading in print, not on digital devices.

If you’re reading on a laptop or average-sized tablet or e-reader, at least the physical spread of text offers an in-your-face inducement to read. As screen size shrinks, so, I’ll wager, does the mental holding power of a tiny window that displays only a small amount of text at a time.

The size of a printed page has an immersive quality, shielding readers from outside distractions.
‘Book’ via www.shutterstock.com

Once upon a time, reading was literally a big deal. Children actually learned to read by following the adventures of Dick, Jane and their dog Spot. My own first Dick and Jane primer was physically outsized – picturesquely called an elephant folio – measuring about 20 square inches and set in what seemed like 200 point type.

For me and others of my generation, those mammoth folios were a sign of the importance of reading. With today’s small-screen digital devices, can reading still be a big deal? For most of us mere mortals who yield to distraction and assume size matters, the answer will often be “no.”

The Conversation

Naomi Baron, Executive Director, Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning, American University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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True Blue? Crime fiction and Australia

by

Stewart King, Monash University

Australian Michael Robotham has taken home one of the most prestigious crime fiction awards around, the British Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger with Life or Death, beating out an impressive international field.


http://www.michaelrowbotham.com

Predictably, much has been made of Robotham’s nationality. The Guardian’s headline reads “Australian ghostwriter beats Stephen King and J.K. Rowling to top UK crime writing award” .

The Age’s Literary Editor Jason Steger notes that Robotham “is only the second Australian to win after Peter Temple in 2007 for The Broken Shore” .

While these writers take Robotham’s nationality for granted, I wonder whether
this is the best way to describe him or his fiction. As the winning novel is set in Texas and his earlier psychological thriller/crime fiction takes place in England, an interesting question is raised about the identity of his books.

Born and raised in country New South Wales, Robotham, spent a decade in England and returned in 2002. His literary peers consider him an Australian crime
writer, electing him chairman of the Australian Crime Writers’ Association.

He’s also won three Ned Kelly awards, a prize limited to Australians by birth, citizenship or long-term residency.

Robotham then is clearly Australian and he writes crime stories. So, what’s the problem with calling him an Australian crime writer? The answer depends on
whether we attribute nationality to the author or his work. In other words, does
Robotham write Australian crime fiction?

Locale and crime fiction

The crime genre is one of the most widespread literary genres. It has crossed
borders and languages to become a form of world literature. Its mobility and its
popularity are due to a combination of universal themes, portable conventions
and local settings.

Everywhere it has settled, writers have adapted it to reflect on
local issues. To some degree the local has become so important that it is
suggested that nationality be ascribed not to the author, but to the locus criminis of the novel itself.

Eva Erdmann argues that in the later half of the twentieth century, crime fiction has been used to interrogate increasingly specific national or regional identities:

Surprisingly, the crime novel of the last decades is distinguished by
the fact that the main focus is not on the crime itself, but on the
setting, the place where the detective and the victims live and to which
they are bound by ties of attachment.

Understood in this way, Robotham writes English and now American crime fiction. The late American author Alan Cheuse certainly embraced Robotham as one of his own, writing that Life or Death reads like a native Texan had written it.

Edgar Allen Poe.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Assigning nationality to where novels are set raises all sorts of complications,
however. Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) an example of French crime fiction because the story is set in Paris and features a French detective? Erdmann would say yes, but this is perhaps more due to his influence on French fiction through the translations of poet Charles Baudelaire.

Robotham is clearly good at offering readers convincing settings. His highly successful career as a ghost writer has perhaps prepared him to adopt alternative points of view with compelling strength. Not every writer has this talent. Returning to Australia, in Continent of Mystery (1997), Stephen Knight takes issue with:

English visitors who glimpsed a capital city, took a compulsory trip to the bush, and then dashed off a shallow thriller with sturdy stiff-jawed bush heroes and bush heroines as warm-hearted as the sun was hot.

If an author’s nationality or a novel’s setting are not satisfactory markers of
identity, then perhaps we should look at the author’s intended readership.

Although set in Texas, Life or Death has an Australian origin. It owes its existence to the true story of a career criminal who escaped from Sydney’s Long Bay jail the day before he was due to be released.

Robotham took the story and transposed it to Texas.

An 1852 illustration for The Mystery of Marie Roget.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

There is a long tradition of this in crime writing. In The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
Poe took a famous New York murder case and set it in Paris. Given Life or Death’s Australian origins, it’s fair to say Robotham had the opportunity to set the novel here, but he chose not to do so.

I don’t want to suggest that Australian crime writers have to write about
Australia, set their novels in Australia, treat Australian issues or have Australian characters.

The Miles Franklin Award has courted enough controversy in that area. Writers should be free to tackle any topic or to set their works wherever they want.

An example of the pitfalls of strict definitions of “Australian” is the exclusion of JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) from the Miles Franklin 2013 shortlist. This has been attributed to its imaginary Spanish-language setting, although the book was received as, among other things, an allegory for Australian attitudes to “boat-people”.

However, unlike Coetzee, Robotham does not engage with Australian national imaginary, its issues and identity. They address a different – international – audience.

If Robotham is an Australian writer who doesn’t write Australian crime fiction,
then how do we situate him and his novels? Google perhaps provides us with an
answer. Search “Michael Robotham” and Google adds “International Crime
Writer” to his name before taking you to his home page. In this globalised world,
that’s not such a bad category to belong to.

The Conversation

Stewart King, Senior Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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How To Raise a Bookworm

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The link below is to an article that gives some advice on how to raise your children to read.

For more visit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sara-keagle/6-steps-to-raising-a-book_b_8240756.html

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Ebook Subscription Services

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at what is currently available in the ebook subscription space now that Oyster and Entitle have closed shop.

For more visit:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/oysters-dead-whats-new-netflix-for-ebooks/

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Switch to E-Reading

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at why you should consider switching to ebook reading on an ebook reader.

For more visit:
http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/5-reasons-for-book-lovers-to-make-the-switch-to-an-e-reader

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Long Books

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at the lure of long books.

For more visit:
http://www.jamierubin.net/2015/09/28/the-lure-of-long-books/

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Writing for good in the contemporary novel of purpose

by

Alice Robinson, Melbourne Polytechnic

Anchor Point (2015), by Alice Robinson.
Author provided

In March 2015, when the days remained long and hot, so dry that the paddocks around my house were tinder, my debut novel Anchor Point was published.

The events of the novel occur under pressure from exponential environmental fragility and climate change.

As 2015 has worn on, cooling, growing bitter, as the rain failed to arrive, I’ve been invited to speak and write on the idea that “writing for good” – writing to enact positive social change – is a valid and important thing for fiction writers to do. A session at the upcoming National Young Writers’ Festival speaks to this topic.

I am deeply touched by the inherent optimism in this notion: that writers and artists who direct their work toward the prevailing issues of the time can somehow alter the real world, for the better.

The lineage of writing for good

Literature is constructive as well as reflective, and there is certain power in this.

Historian and literary critic David Masson, in British Novelists and Their Styles (1859), observed the development of novels written out of “contemporary earnest”:

We have to report, as characteristic of British novel-writing recently and at present, a great development of the Novel of Purpose.

This trend, of course, was not limited to Britain, but it certainly grew in strength across the nineteenth century.

Literary scholar Amanda Claybaugh, in her book The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007), finds that such nineteenth-century novels sometimes related to social reform movements and sometimes did not. Yet all took their “conception of purposefulness” from the desire to change society.

Fiction can underwrite understandings of what is deemed desirable and appropriate by a given culture; what is unacceptable, what is feared and abhorred. Novels rising from moments of conflict and hardship sharpen focus on the inequalities and struggles of those times.

In doing so, such narratives raise awareness of key social issues and potentially move the culture toward empathy, understanding, change – or else underscore unfortunate cultural resistance, the failure of those things to eventuate.

A literary history

Many examples of this phenomenon already exist in literature across the world.

Author Alice Walker at the 2005 premier of Oprah Winfrey’s Broadway musical The Colour Purple.
Keith Bedford/Reuters

The Colour Purple (1982), Alice Walker’s gruelling novel of gender inequality and racism in 1930s Georgia, was published in the early 1980s. It simultaneously showcases conditions for black women before the civil rights movement and draws attention, by comparison, to the shortcomings of contemporary race and gender relations in the movement’s wake.

More recently, Dave Eggars’ novel What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) lays bare the heartbreaking difficulties and deep resilience of the refugee experience. It portrays the life of one Sudanese “Lost Boy” fleeing his nation’s civil war for the United States.

Children’s author John Marsden.
Glen Woodhead/AAP

In an entirely different kind of book, John Marsden addresses the refugee experience. His poignant and distressing illustrated work for children, Home and Away (2008), sits within the Australian context.

These texts exert complex cultural pressure around contemporary issues, inviting the reader to inhabit the terrible, but authentic, experiences they portray.

Such books write into the heart of historical and current difficulties with intrinsic hopefulness, spotlighting dark times so that they can be seen clearly for what they are.

In contrast, dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah (1974), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), P.D. James’ The Children of Men (1992) and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (2004), to name a few of my favourites, wrestle with the future.

Literary possibilities

Offering visions of frightening social, political and environmental breakdown, such novels convey the fear that our legacy will be danger and unrest, the future a terrifying context where humanities’ core qualities – capacity for kindness, compassion, cooperation – will be tested, even altogether razed.

So often these speculative narratives arise from periods of perceived genuine threat to our real-world way of life: slavery; industrialization; the spectre of nuclear obliteration; the AIDs epidemic; the digital revolution. By portraying perilous imagined futures, dystopian narratives help illuminate the cultural anxieties of the present day.

This is also true of the climate change novels currently surfacing in Australia and globally. According to UCLA Journalism and Media Fellow Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, in her article Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre (2013), the threat of climate change has become:

too pressing [for authors] to ignore, and less abstract, thanks to a nonstop succession of mega-storms and record-shattering temperatures.

Some novels, like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) and James Bradley’s Clade (2015) imagine grim social, political and humanitarian crises that could arise in response to profound degradation of the natural world.

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003.
Stephen Hird/Reuters

Others, like my own, are set in the early stages of environmental and systemic breakdown, when there remains a narrow possibility for turning things around.

Either way, just as the threat of nuclear war felt imminent in the 1950s, making way for the anxious cultural sense that bombs could drop at any moment, climate change is also imminent – and this is reflected in the stories we are telling.

But unlike the threat of life in a radioactive world, the impacts of climate change are now actual, and inevitable. While science can tell us what climate change is likely to look like in various regions from an ecological perspective, we just don’t know for sure what our lives will be like as significant change comes to pass.

Writing for the future

A work of fiction is a guess, a possible response to a question we have no other way of answering.

As another hot summer looms, as I contemplate my little children who stand to inherit the issues we are now failing to adequately address, as I turn in disgust from the governmental inertia around climate change in Australia, it feels clearer now than ever before that fiction writing alone cannot alter the collision course with disaster we seem determined to create.

A firefighter battles an out-of-control bushfire in Western Australia in 2015.
DFES WA/AAP

Whatever optimism there may be inherent in the ability of writing to enact meaningful change in the world, it seems both a heavy duty to bestow to individual practitioners, and too little too late.

When I think of writing for good in the context of writing about climate change, I see that there is power in fiction’s capacity to illuminate unknown futures for those living now, to show what life might be like in climatically altered circumstances, how they could be survived. I see that there is good, also, in recording our cultural despair in fiction as a message to those in the future.

We once imagined the perils of your experience, and we are sorry.

The National Young Writers’ Festival takes place in Newcastle, October 1-4. Details here.

The Conversation

Alice Robinson, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Melbourne Polytechnic

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