Affect, materiality and embodiment in climate change fiction: John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats, and J.M. Ledgard's Submergence

The aim of this study is to explore the critical issue of climate change in the age of the Anthropocene over the period of the 1970s through the 2000s and its multi-dimensional impacts ranging from the embodiment of material bodies, social, political and economic systems of societies to the affective states and psychological responses of humans in the face of environmental collapse in the selected cli-fi novels: John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972), Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats (1998) and J.M. Ledgard's Submergence (2011). Starting with one of the earliest examples of climate change fiction, this study provides the basis on which three cli-fi novels underscore that climate change has transformed from an abstract risk threatening the future of the planet into a tangible and pressing reality of the contemporary world. Accordingly, the issue of climate change needs to be deciphered within the context of material-discursive entanglements among the natural environment, human-made systems, human and nonhuman bodies and material forces. To this end, this study discusses the selected texts within the framework of material ecocriticism and affect theory in order to highlight the agentic, transformative, narrative and affective capabilities of the material world and the interactive ways in which humans and nonhuman elements are involved in ecological relationships. This study concludes that such material and affective ecocritical engagement with critical environmental issues through the medium of climate change novel and its thematic and formal possibilities in the selected texts functions as an invaluable potential to overthrow the anthropocentric worldview that has resulted in ecological disasters and to adopt a planetary approach to nature and the material world we all live in, which could be effective in generating environmentally-conscious and greener attitudes and behaviours.