AustLit

'American farmer and poet Wendell Berry said of the first Europeans in North America that they came with vision, but not with sight. They came with vision of former places but not the sight to see what was before them. Instead of adapting their vision to suit the place, they changed the landscape to fit their vision.' (Introduction)

'Climate change fiction (cli-fi) is a relatively new and burgeoning genre. As creative writers, this paper’s co-authors find many questions regarding how to address our current climate crisis in ways that protest stereotypical representations and over-simplified political systems. In order to develop climate change fiction that engages with the climate as something more than a backdrop for the action or as an adversary for the protagonists, as authors of cli-fi, we need to interrogate the roles of recognisable details, such as food, in our fiction. In this paper, we use Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy as a case study of how cli-fi novels can interrogate climate change by making use of food as a symbolic and narrative device within the work. From that foundation, we argue that reading and research crystallises imaginative prowess and galvanises new ways of writing in the genre of cli-fi.'