Telling Stories about Climate Change: Maritime Fiction and the Global Novel

Abstract It is proving difficult to write novels about climate change, especially nonspeculative ones, and classical narratology goes a long way toward explaining why this would be. Many of the basic techniques of novel writing seem ill-suited to the distributed nonevent that is climate change. This essay considers recent work on climate fiction by Ursula Heise and Amitav Ghosh before recommending maritime literature as one possible genre whose distinctive conventions suggest new possibilities for the fiction of the turbulent present.