Geoengineering, Empire, and the Politics of Climate Fiction: The Gulf Stream Novel, 1890–1925

Abstract This article adds an unusual perspective to current debates about global warming, as it reveals the myriad ways in which Western colonial powers felt vulnerable to the contingent climate conditions created by the Gulf Stream and its potential alteration through anthropogenic climate change. Focusing on the overlooked genre of the “Gulf Stream novel,” a type of proto–climate fiction that flourished in literatures in English, German, and French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essay shows that these fictions must not be understood as apocalyptical narratives. Instead, the genre develops a fine-grained epistemology of the climate technologies of imperial rule. The comparative examination of the Gulf Stream novel reveals that imaginations of climate change cannot be divorced from political and colonial imaginaries.