Literature has long sounded ecological alarms and imagined our planetary futures, finds Lakshmi Krishnan Our oldest stories begin in the soil or by the sea, myth being the original ecological narrative. The Mandé and Sumerians tell of people growing from seeds or moulded from earth; Rigveda, the ancient Hindu sacred text, and the Kojiki, the earliest written Japanese chronicle, speak of births from primordial oceans; and Abrahamic traditions place us in Eden’s lushness. With industrialisation came a new imperative: writers began exploring not just our connection to nature but also our power to destroy it. Climate fiction is a recent literary genre confronting environmental and societal breakdown. But literature has grappled with the interplay of people and environment long before “cli-fi” exploded in the 2010s. These works offer more than historical perspective. They reveal how story and imagination might help us grasp what climate data alone cannot—the full scope of our crisis—while helping us to envision paths beyond catastrophe. Lionel Verney is the sole survivor of a global plague in a 21st century Europe torn asunder by political upheaval, societal collapse, and environmental catastrophe. Shelley is better known for Frankenstein (1818); Last Man pushes those Gothic scientific horrors further, to humanity’s extinction. Written after Mount Tambora erupted in today’s Indonesia, causing a volcanic winter that lasted over two years, and reflecting Shelley’s personal tragedy, this prophecy about human spirit in the face of disaster influenced a flock of apocalyptic subgenres: the trope of a lonely human roaming the planet after a “die-off” endures. Read it for the clarity of Shelley’s vision and her evocative prose: memorably, in Verney’s encounter with a sheepdog still guarding its dead shepherd’s flock—crystallising nature’s persistence against our impermanence and suggesting the …

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从瘟疫到地球危机：气候小说之前的气候小说


Lakshmi Krishnan 发现，文学长期以来一直在敲响生态警报并想象我们的地球未来我们最古老的故事始于土壤或海洋，神话是最初的生态叙事。曼德人和苏美尔人讲述了人们用种子生长或从泥土中塑造出来的;古老的印度教圣典《梨俱吠陀》和最早的日本编年史《古事记》都谈到了从原始海洋中诞生;亚伯拉罕的传统将我们置于伊甸园的郁郁葱葱中。随着工业化的到来，一个新的当务之急出现了：作家们不仅开始探索我们与自然的联系，还开始探索我们破坏自然的力量。气候小说是最近一种面临环境和社会崩溃的文学体裁。但早在 2010 年代“cli-fi”爆发之前，文学就已经在努力解决人与环境的相互作用。这些作品提供的不仅仅是历史视角。它们揭示了故事和想象力如何帮助我们掌握仅靠气候数据无法掌握的东西——我们危机的全部范围——同时帮助我们设想超越灾难的道路。莱昂内尔·韦尔尼 （Lionel Verney） 是 21 世纪欧洲全球瘟疫的唯一幸存者，该欧洲饱受政治动荡、社会崩溃和环境灾难的蹂躏。雪莱更出名的是《弗兰肯斯坦》（Frankenstein，1818 年）;Last Man 将这些哥特式科学恐怖进一步推向人类的灭绝。这篇关于人类精神在灾难面前的预言写于今天的印度尼西亚坦博拉火山喷发，导致持续两年多的火山冬天，反映了雪莱的个人悲剧，影响了一大群世界末日的子流派：一个孤独的人在“死亡”持续后在地球上漫游的比喻。阅读它，可以清楚地了解雪莱的愿景和她令人回味的散文：令人难忘的是，在 Verney 与一只仍在守卫着死去牧羊羊群的牧羊犬的相遇中——具体化了大自然对我们无常的坚持，并暗示了......