Configurations

ABSTRACT:

This paper identifies what it terms a sociology of failure at work in American climate fiction novels dealing with the subject of climate-induced migration within the United States. Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus exemplify this trend inasmuch as their accounts of future climate migrants derive from outdated migrant typologies. Drawing from C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination and Kim Stanley Robinson’s “ease of representation,” this essay argues such cases call attention to the imaginative failure that characterizes public understandings of climate migration in particular. Ultimately, this account identifies the sociological methods within cli-fi that mark imaginative failure as a problem both in-text and for readers of these texts.