The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction by Daniel O'Gorman;Robert Eaglestone; & Robert Eaglestone

Author:Daniel O'Gorman;Robert Eaglestone; & Robert Eaglestone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

20

Anthropocene

Sam Solnick

In his 2008 book The Earth After Us the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz indulges in a kind of science fiction, imagining an alien visitor arriving on Earth a hundred million years into the future. Zalasiewicz’s extra-terrestrial finds traces of a sophisticated civilization that had the capacity to re-engineer parts of the planet’s surface, and begins to examine how our long-extinct species might have inscribed itself into the very fabric of the planet, analysing the rock strata to find traces of isotopes, chemical signals and fossilised remainders of specific products and technologies. In one striking comic moment Zalasiewicz points out that given ‘the uneven distribution of these resources among individual humans, one can predict that a Marks & Spencer’s pullover is more likely to make it into the fossil record than an Yves St. Laurent evening creation’. While such ‘vanity fossils’ are just a tiny fraction of what Zalasiewicz describes as the ‘time capsules’ available for analysis, their presence in the strata provide Ozymandias-like artefacts of human ingenuity, folly and finitude (2008: 171). This extinct Anthropos may have collectively shaped the planet, but the remainders left by different members of the species indicate that the type and distribution of this impact was determined by power, consumption and production as well as the technologies and materials of any given period of civilisation – ‘look upon my merchandise ye mighty and despair’. This chapter is an attempt to trace how contemporary literary fiction has explored the ways in which humanity writes itself into the fabric of the planet. It will show that the preponderance of environmentally aware fiction that relies on the perspective of science fictional futures has been supplemented by writers who have focussed on the geological and ecological inscriptions of the past and present. In rendering the economic, political and technological drivers of environmental change, the emergent literary fiction of the Anthropocene addresses associated issues of representation, responsibility and agency across a variety of spatial and temporal scales.

It is unusual to see a geologist employing science fiction; but these are strange times for stratigraphy. Zalasiewicz currently convenes what is known as the ‘Working Group on the Anthropocene’ (or, commonly, ‘AWG’ for ‘Anthropocene Working Group’), a team of scientists from varied disciplines tasked with critically analysing the proposal for what is a much-discussed but, at the time of writing in January 2018, still-informal geologic time unit: the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, as the AWG’s most recent summary (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017: 55) puts it, is ‘refers to time interval marked by rapid but profound and far-reaching change to the Earth’s geology, currently driven by various forms of human impact’. The AWG is a remarkable departure from geology’s business as usual. The related disciplines of stratigraphy and geochrononology – which would normally navigate deep time to map the relative position of strata to help establish geological time units – have been pushed to pronounce, with unprecedented haste, on shifting geologic conditions that are not only extraordinarily recent relative to the billions of years of Earth history, but which are still changing with alarming rapidity.

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