(Re)Imagining the Anthropocene: Narrative Strategies and Systemic Critique in the Climate Fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson and Amitav Ghosh

Climate fiction (cli-fi) has emerged as a battleground for reimagining agency and its responsibility in the Anthropocene. It invites us to explore new narratives and possibilities in a world grappling with climate change, urging us to envision a future shaped by our choices and actions. Analyzing works by Kim Stanley Robinson and Amitav Ghosh, this paper argues that their cli-fi rejects apocalyptic fatalism, advancing a “radical incrementalism” that bridges systemic critique with speculative courage. Robinson’s techno-utopianism (carbon coins, terraformed economies) literalizes extractive capitalism critique, while Ghosh’s mythic realism centres subaltern histories and non-human agency, by dismantling Eurocentric environmentalism and privileging Indigenous cosmologies over extractive science. Though divergent – Robinson engineers institutional reforms; Ghosh resurrects colonial erasure – both dismantle neoliberal green washing and human exceptionalism. Their narrative strategies (fragmented policy memos, cyclical temporality) redefine cli-fi as “speculative historiography,” where utopian futures and colonial pasts collide to map post capitalist alternatives. By analyzing textual innovations – from Robinson’s hybrid human-AI ecologies to Ghosh’s insurgent folklore – it demonstrates the way literature can rewire humanity’s relationship with crisis, transforming despair into a “politics of possibility”. In an era of climate apartheid, their fiction insists that another world is not just imaginable – it is being written, one radical page at a time.