Time and the Human/Nature Relationship: An Examination of Alternative Temporalities in Contemporary Climate Fiction

Abstract

In this three-part thesis, I examine three contemporary authors of climate fiction and how their works illustrate alternate views of time in their aims of creating more sustainable worlds. The first chapter focuses on Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), in the second I examine Rebecca Roanhorse’s The Sixth World duology (2018-2019), and the final chapter explores N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth series (2015-2017). Each work/series offers sustainable worldviews and ways of living that challenge dominant, global systems of imperialism/colonialism and capitalism. Through the lens of alternative temporalities, most often cyclical and ecologically regenerative, each author critiques the artificiality of linear, atomic time that has evolved to reflect the interests of western capitalism and global dominations at the cost of human and nonhuman life. As the global climate crisis worsens, it has become critical to not only examine the unsustainable components of contemporary worldviews, like that of the dominating West, but also portray solutions and imagine better worlds beyond today’s. In examining various temporalities and their resulting ecological sensibilities, I show how Le Guin, Roanhorse, and Jemisin each critique the societal structures that are clearly unsustainable in their dependence on human and natural exploitation, while illustrating worldviews that connect rather than separate the human and nonhuman. In doing so, I aim to illustrate the connection between cultural temporalities and their resulting ecological sensibilities, and point towards the sustainable, expanded, and complex worldviews Always Coming Home, The Sixth World, and The Broken Earth portray as we all seek to find sustainable ways of moving forward in the age of the Anthropocene.