Southasia’s place in contemporary climate fiction

"It was getting hotter."

Kim Stanley Robinson, the popular American writer of science fiction, opens his blockbuster climate-fiction novel The Ministry for the Future in India. One of his main protagonists, Frank May, is a white American working at an unidentified NGO. Through his eyes, we see one of the most devastating depictions of climate change ever written. In Robinson's imagined future, India is one of the first countries ravaged by the bizarre weather conditions brought on by climate change. It is also the first country to truly rise to the occasion, becoming a global climate leader as it rejects carbon-based development and successfully adapts to the planet's new reality.

Robinson's novel is far from unique in depicting our shared climate future with reference to Southasia. Numerous other Western cli-fi writers engage with the region too. Stephen Markley's 2023 cli-fi epic The Deluge pulls no punches when it comes to the worst-case scenarios of climate change, and references Bangladesh, Pakistan and India throughout. Unlike in Robinson's work, here Southasia is subject to disaster with little hope in sight. In American War, by Omar El Akkad, Bangladesh is obliquely and ominously referred to as the "Bangladeshi isles," alongside brief descriptions of "northward death marches" away from rising seas. Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land describes a future Mumbai: "Boats are tethered to second-floor balconies; someone is frozen atop the roof of a submerged car, her arms raised for help, her scream blurred off her face." In Blackfish City, Sam J Miller's novel set in an artificial island nation designated a home for the world's climate refugees, the Southasian diaspora has found fraternity in the wake of destruction: "[a] quarter of the city's population hailing from the various South Asian nations, rent asunder by imperialism and Partition and the Water Wars but reunited by Qaanaaq's xenophobia."