‘There is still time, brother’: Apocalyptic Fiction and Climate Change

2024, the year that Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower begins, and it is hard not to feel that she was right: the world is ending. Since 2022, Pakistan has faced devastating floods which submerged 1/3 of the country during monsoon season. Between 2021 and 2022, Madagascar faced what was described as the first wholly climate-caused famine. Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Lagos, London, Mumbai, New York, and Shanghai are just some of the major cities threatened by sea-level rise, along with countless low-lying islands. The floods in the Southern US are one of the most recent ‘catastrophe’ stories to hit the news, adding to the list of ‘unprecedented’ events that are becoming commonplace.

Many have argued that climate change presents the threat of an end to life on Earth. Whether or not it would wipe out all living things, it seems reasonable to call the devastating change that looms on the other side of climate tipping points an ‘apocalypse’. After all an apocalypse, as the term is most often used, rarely implies a total end. It is not an extinction or rapture, but rather the end of a particular world. Apocalyptic fiction is most often post-apocalyptic fiction; in order for there to be a narrative, we must continue after the ‘end’. 

But there is more than one way to think about the apocalypse. 

In Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, an apocalypse looms on the horizon but has not yet reached the protagonists, who go about their lives in Australia awaiting the arrival of a nuclear cloud which is the only legacy of a war that has devastated the rest of the world. These people drift through the motions of living: going fishing, shopping, going to work; because they do not know what else to do.  

In Parable of the Sower, however, an apocalypse has already arrived. America has succumbed to environmental and economic devastation, and the majority of people fight to survive in conditions of scarcity. Despite this, our protagonist Lauren begins the novel in a walled community shielded from complete poverty and desolation. Here, too, we encounter people aware of the crisis that surrounds and threatens to destroy them, yet who are frozen, unable to confront this reality from their temporary positions of privilege. 

This seems to draw a prescient parallel to the situation of people who are temporarily sheltered from the worst effects of climate change. Butler’s novel was an incisive critique of inequality when it was released, in the 1980s: the wealthy and middle class cling to vestiges of privilege in an attempt to protect themselves, in the process worsening conditions for those ‘outside’ their walls. Now, we see the same inequalities heightened by climate ‘disasters’ which hit those with the least privilege and protection most devastatingly, while wealthier nations shore up their borders. 

As in Parable of the Sower, it makes sense to see our apocalypse as already-unfolding, but arriving in some places before others.  For those who have lost their homes, lives, and ways of being to climate disasters, it can be said that the world – at least a world – has already ended. If we stop seeing the apocalypse as a singular moment in time, we can see it as a process of devastation that unfolds on lines drawn by wealth inequality and colonialism. In some places climate change has brought about the end of a world. In places where wealth provides a slight shelter, however, these events can be made to seem distant, as they are for those in Butler’s enclaves. Seeing the apocalypse as unfolding now means seeing the reality of catastrophe even when it is not (yet) made viscerally obvious to you.  

This shift in vision is what enables Lauren to survive. For those in the walled community, the outside world is always breaking in. Life grows increasingly violent and desperate as the actions of the government, the wealthy, and climate disaster, steadily exacerbate poverty, drug addiction, and desperation. Lauren comes to realise that the walls which protect her will soon fall. She realises that her only chance of surviving the apocalypse is of surviving on the outside. It is therefore in her interests to make the outside survivable. Seeing our own ‘apocalypse’ in parallel to Butler’s reveals the hopelessness of building walls to shore up existing privilege. This only makes things worse when the walls inevitably collapse. This sort of warning should urge those who are shielded from climate change by privilege to act before it is too late, seeing their own fate as bound up with those who are already facing the worst consequences. 

But how do we survive the apocalypse? Drawing another example from Butler, Lauren gathers a community together and establishes a resilient and growing movement for collective survival. In this way, anarchist thinking – building in the margins in order to survive – could help us too. Anarchism focuses on mutual aid, organising on a grassroots level to provide the necessities of food, water, and housing without the need for a state. When larger structures of governance crumble or exclude you, this sort of organising is essential. We already see people participating in mutual aid in the aftermath of disasters - the recent floods in the US South and the Covid pandemic, for example - where neighbours organised to collectively source food and get it to the more vulnerable members of the community. Anarchism is suited to apocalyptic times because they involve the collapse of large structures of support. People must rely on each other for survival, but what they create also creates a new world. 

We can contrast this approach to survival with the approach embodied in On the Beach, to illustrate why it matters how we think of the apocalypse. In On the Beach, we witness the absurd apathy that arises when an approaching apocalypse seems inevitable. To some within wealthier nations, the threat of climate change can seem equally inevitable and our own situation equally absurd. The crucial difference between our world and that of the novel, however, is that for us there really is ‘still time’ to change our trajectory. In How to Blow up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm writes that for some, ‘it is easier to imagine learning to die, than learning to fight’. He warns against resignation to an apocalyptic fate in which we ‘learn to die’ quietly. Failing to do everything in our power to prevent the end of the world would be a catastrophic moral defeat. Capital and colonial power have the momentum to carry on ‘as usual’ for a significant amount of time, shielding the richest while the rest face devastation. To resign to ‘the end’ is to resign to this end, the end that will pertain without intervention. 

In Parable of the Sower, Lauren invents a religion that helps her community to survive the apocalypse. She writes, ‘God is change, but we must learn to shape God’. In response to claims that the world is ending, some point out that it is only changing. This may be true, but Butler helps us to realise that we must work to shape this change. The world could change so much that humans cease to exist, or, more likely, so that the most privileged survive at the expense of everyone else. In conclusion, the world might be ending, but how it ends and what grows in the ruins is up to us.