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- 1 See Milner, Andrew, J. R. Burgman, “A Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction,” Extrapolation, vol. 59 (...)
1Real and fictional cataclysmic phenomena, such as land flooding, terrestrial freezing, or scorched earth are perhaps as old as storytelling itself, the first of which dating back further than the Bible, and indeed Greek mythology, to Sumerian Gilgamesh. While catastrophic scenarios explored in climate fiction, notably from the early twentieth century to the present day, may be of various origins—theogenic (by divine will), geogenic (through natural phenomena), xenogenic (via alien intervention), or anthropogenic (from human activity)—contemporary cli-fi (or climate-oriented science fiction) is generally rooted in the latter, as a response to the scientific discourse of the past few decades, with which it continues to engage.1
- 2 Michèle Laframboise is a Francophone Canadian author with education and training in geography and e (...)
- 3 The story was first translated from the original French (Laframboise, Michèle, “Monarque des glaces (...)
2The purpose of this study is to identify the relevance of Michèle Laframboise’s2 short story, “Monarque des glaces,”3 [“Ice Monarch”] in a (sub)generic framework as well as to demonstrate its applicability to plausible scenarios of environmental crisis.
3“Ice Monarch” recounts the story of Dominique, an elderly man in a foreseeably distant future, who, at an advanced age, manages to prolong his life to 148 years thanks to a technology that grants a certain longevity by permitting the individual to transfer their consciousness into androids. In this case, the robotic, anthropomorphic body is that of a butterfly. Dominique remains at the service of the corporation that facilitated the extension of his being, ensuring a remote, supervisory role of the world outside its enclave. After significant climatic changes due to carbon emissions, global warming, glacier melting and methane release, the planet has for the most part been left in environmental and social ruin. The wealthiest and most politically savvy of survivors—those benefitting from the services of Dominique, among many other subordinates in varying roles—have constructed mobile domed palaces in order to weather the storm, as it were. Some thirty such self-contained cities are scattered over an artificial, moderately-sized continental ice shelf, sustained by itinerant factories that circulate in search of natural resources to extract, regardless of their impact on less fortunate survivors struggling to subsist in the outside world.
- 4 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” Mississauga: Echofictions, 2018, 11.
- 5 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 21.
4As Dominique surveys a variety of geographic regions and periodically sends relevant data to the Ice Lords (Pères Noël, meaning Santa Clauses, in the original French text), he comes across a community of nomadic cultivators in former Turkey, who appear to be keeping only steps ahead of warlords bent on dominating all remaining survivors in the vicinity, acting periodically as mercenaries on behalf of the Ice Lords. Such is the case on this occasion, as the community has settled provisionally, likely in an area where a “deep-water well”4 is present. While he had long ago resigned himself to serving the corporation, the scene triggers memories of the vulnerable position of his own role as a militant ecologist and especially that of his activist daughter and her children, so Dominique hesitates in respecting his “non-intervention pact”5 and instead transmits false information in order to alter the path of the warlords and thereby save the agrarians. His virtuous action is self-sacrificing as the corporation will discover in short order the subterfuge and cut off his access to the resources vital to his survival in the android monarch body.
- 6 My research is informed by the relevant work of Brent Ryan Bellamy, Roger Bozzetto, Gerry Canavan, (...)
5Among the objects of study that I will analyse are the issues raised by the climate crisis, as represented in Laframboise’s narrative, as well as the characters’ means of survival and intervention, for better or for worse. The passages that I have chosen for consideration are on the physical and ideological conditions of the story world, on the modified body as an adaptation for the characters, as well as on their agency, and on the continuing social fallout of catastrophe, which aligns with anthropogenic causes of and anti-capitalist solutions to climate change.6
6Before beginning the analysis of “Ice Monarch,” some preliminary definitions will help to direct the reader with respect to the conception of climate fiction (or cli-fi, as it is sometimes called), within science fiction (hereafter, SF). According to Roger Bozzetto, SF is a genre that offers
- 7 Bozzetto, Roger, La Science-fiction (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007), 11 (Author’s translation).
fictional narratives […] which present, in a very realistic, almost naturalistic way, adventures that aim to explore the potential of invented worlds, related in a more or less scientific context. These scenarios are “thought experiments” conducted through and within these “possible worlds.” Relying on a vocabulary steeped in that of science and technology, they evoke certain themes and notions as possible political, and even theological extensions of known reality.7
Indeed, Bozzetto continues:
- 8 Bozzetto, La Science-fiction, 11 (Author’s translation).
SF stories involve the narrative development of an idea or a serious question, such as the following: […] What will happen if global warming leads to changing our way of life? Will technology alone be able to ensure the survival of the human race? SF feeds on these types of questions, rendered relevant by virtue of the link they maintain with current events.8
- 9 Evans, Rebecca, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum: ‘The Anthropocene’ and/as Science Fiction,” Sc (...)
This recognition of discursive parallels between scientific representation and fictional literature seeks to underscore the idea that speculation is both a real and imaginative way to envision and respond to climate questions, through “[an] investment in futurity that characterizes environmental as well as science-fictional discourse; an engagement with the impacts of technology; and the [intrinsic] critique of past and present that structures the particular futures that are narrated.”9
- 10 Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New (...)
7Rebecca Evans addresses the need to render scientific discourse on climate more palatable for the casual, non-specialized reader, as both the communication of “scientific data” and “climate-activist rhetoric” can be overbearing and off-putting, whereas narrative intrigue can be more engaging: “Climate fiction is thus the natural (and natural-science oriented) extension of the parent genre of [SF]; as an eco-political subgenre, it serves, in Darko Suvin’s description of [SF], as ‘a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and—most important—a mapping of possible alternatives.’”10
- 11 Evans, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 487.
8Evans contends that “the tendency toward [SF] is embedded in the fabric of environmental discourse, shaping environmental narratives as well as technological ones.”11 For example,
- 12 Evans, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 489.
[the] “Anthropocene” as a term seems particularly calculated for narrative effect. It narrates the contemporary period as a story of rapid ecological transformation and disruption of familiar assumptions about the stability and separateness of the nonhuman realm, with the central narrative conflict triggered by disastrous human overreach and overconsumption. The story of this indelibly altered world can only be “resolved” by a dramatic change in global human behavior (the progressive resolution) or a dramatic shift in the scale of the human species (the pessimistic resolution).12
From geological timeframing of human activity that proves detrimental to survival, to more brief periods of excessive exploitation, consumption, discarding and pollution of resources,
- 13 Evans, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 495.
the novum of the Capitalocene [a term coined by Dipesh Chakrabarty] is quite different from the novum of the Anthropocene: while the latter is rooted in the particular ecological impacts that invisibly followed modern technoculture, the former is rooted in the social and ecological relationships that invisibly undergird modernity itself.13
- 14 Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 101, cited in Evans, Rebecca, “Nomenclature, Narrat (...)
9Hence the need to explore the issue through a variety of discursive approaches, via natural science, social science, the humanities and, of course, creative works: Suvin remarks that SF provides “an escape from constrictive old norms into a different and alternative timestream, a device for historical estrangement, and an […] initial readiness for new norms of reality, for the novum of de-alienating human history.”14
- 15 Canavan, Gerry, “Introduction: If This Goes On,” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, eds., (...)
10From science inspiring fiction to fiction inspiring science, Gerry Canavan proposes that “perhaps even ecological critique as such can productively be thought of as a kind of [SF], as it uses the same tools of cognition and extrapolation to project the conditions of a possible future—whether good or bad, ecotopian or apocalyptic—in hopes of transforming politics in the present.”15 Canavan’s statement brings real prospective activity closer to SF, as we usually distinguish between anticipation such as weather forecasting or market predictions and that of speculative literature in that the outcomes of the former are genuinely expected to manifest, whereas the latter is inscribed in a thought experiment rather than a genuine prefiguration of things to come. As more and more scientific research on the matter of climate change emerges and develops, however, SF must keep pace for the sake of plausibility for the contemporary reader, even when exploring more distant futures. Overall, this appreciation of SF as an estranged yet pertinent form of discourse with respect to real-world issues speaks to the recent proliferation of climate fiction, viewed by many, including myself, as a subgenre within the genre.
11For Kim Stanley Robinson, the thematic tendency of climate crises in near-future works is indeed simply a trope of SF. More important than subcategorizing is assessing the relevance of the text’s literary value and real-world application to climate crises:
- 16 Robinson, Kim Stanley, “Story Spaces of Climate Change,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, n° 3 (20 (...)
all near-future [SF] now has to include climate change or it becomes some kind of alternative history, which of course is not disallowed. Any kind of future is a story space, but the ones we are really going to live are going to be dealing with climate change. So there will be more and more climate-oriented science fiction.16
- 17 Milner, Andrew, J. R. Burgman, “A Short Pre-History,” 1. For an example of an article by Merchant o (...)
- 18 Milner, Andrew, J. R. Burgman, “A Short Pre-History,” 20.
12Whereas Amitov Ghosh and Brian Merchant, among others, “have prosecuted a case in mass media, including printed journalism, for cli-fi to be considered an important new genre in its own right, neither [SF] nor conventionally ‘literary’ fiction,”17 Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgman argue that science fiction does indeed encompass the contemporary subgenre of climate fiction by reason of its appeal to “real-world scientific anxieties about the prospect of global warming.”18 This, as opposed to other forms of climate fiction such as the traditional flooding or cooling scenarios which are generally far less reliant on scientific discourse on the matter, attributing the catastrophe to natural and supernatural causes, for example.
13Indeed, SF, and the cli-fi it encompasses, so preoccupied with science, technology and world issues, is perpetually evolving in tandem with and beyond the progress of empirical reality. This is a central concern for defining the genre and subgenre at issue.
- 19 Robinson, “Story Spaces of Climate Change.” 427.
14Beyond genre poetics, where political positioning is concerned, Robinson highlights the ideological orientations of climate fiction narratives, which “extend from dystopia to utopia[:]”19
- 20 Robinson, “Story Spaces of Climate Change,” 427.
Dystopia is obvious, because the possibility of causing the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history is all too real, and this kind of immense damage would impact humans hugely, as the whole biosphere is one integrated system. Sounding the alarm by way of dystopian cautionary tales is a valid response with an important role to play.20
15Conversely, still according to Robinson, a utopian imperative might trigger the political will necessary to confront radical change, to undertake the steps required not only with respect to adaptations to climate, but also, in the fallout, where ensuring social justice is concerned:
- 21 Robinson, “Story Spaces of Climate Change,” 427.
[A]t this point in history, our technological abilities and the energy flows on the planet are such that a “good anthropocene” is still physically possible. That may not remain true for too many more years, so there is an intense urgency to our moment, if we care about the biosphere and the human generations to come. […] [T]hat very urgency can be a spur to action. The need is clear, the solution is obvious: we have to invent a just and sustainable civilization, which will mean inventing postcapitalism […] against the intense resistance of currently existing privilege, greed, stupidity, and fear […].21
- 22 Bellamy, Brent Ryan, “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, n° (...)
- 23 Bellamy enumerates the following examples in Robinson’s work: “The office towers of lower Manhattan (...)
- 24 Bellamy, “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis,” 418.
- 25 Bellamy, “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis,” 418.
16Echoing Robinson on environmentally conscientious possibility, Brent Ryan Bellamy asserts that “[s]cience fictions that engage climate crisis offer more than catastrophism. Crisis is only ever one possible outcome of the present.”22 Indeed, Bellamy points to Robinson’s fiction as a case in point, drawing on the example of 2017’s New York 2140: “its story world features some already-enacted utopian practices.”23 […] Robinson’s hypothesis is that, in the wake of catastrophic climate change and sea-level rise, human beings will have found a way to live together and share the work in a highly localized, self-sustaining way.”24 Thus, “[t]he political challenge of overcoming the relentless drive of an ecologically and socially devastating fossil-fueled capitalism is just as much an imaginative project as it is a practical one.”25
- 26 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 2.
17All of the above matters of poetics and ideology apply to the status of “Ice Monarch” as it is inscribed in the discourse of climate-based SF. Much space is devoted to scientific explanation and political fallout in Laframboise’s story, namely of measures to counter climatic effects as well as to adapt, such as the development of “[s]ynthetic ice:”26
- 27 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 2.
Pale areas reflected sunlight back in space; dark areas absorbed the heat. Covering the pole with a white polymer sheet would augment the Earth’s albedo and curb global warming.
The Construction of this arctic jigsaw took twelve years. Hundreds of ships—freighters, converted whalers, passenger ferries, even luxury yatches [sic] from bankrupt CEO[s]—sailed north, their holds full of liquid polymer.
First, workers sprayed a rectangular segment of sea with polyurethane foam. The foam solidified as it touched water, its trapped air bubbles ensuring buoyancy. Next, additives hardened the upper surface. The result was a nice patch of synthetic ice, serrated edges ready to fuse with another patch. A new segment of sea was marked out and the process began anew.
Alas, political quarrels about cost-sharing erupted among the powers. Funding channels closed down before the new ice barely covered four million square kilomet[re]s. […]
Tossed around by sea currents, this big chunk of polymer bumped with clockwork regularity against the coasts of Greenland, Siberia, Alaska and Canada.27
18The ongoing environmental consequences of the climate crisis—again, global warming, glacier melt, and methane release—are discussed in relatively profound detail, but so is, perhaps more importantly, the social upheaval that takes place as a result. It is not only a matter of political indifference to the plight of the many, but of elite hoarding of resources and ensuring of safe refuge for the exclusive few:
- 28 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8-9.
Civil war and political assassinations ruined nations. Cities became concrete wastelands. Facing this calamity, the happy few dug again in their deep pockets, their Swiss bank accounts.
Most had their exit door ready.
A few opted for a lunar hotel ticket, some others for a mansion in the new metropolises of Siberia and Alaska. The North Pole beckoned, as the newly thawed Antarctica had been annexed by China.
The Ice Lords[’] cities rolled on.
By that time, long past retirement age, I cast my lot with the last oil magnate. I supervised the building of his rolling palace. I took some time away to find my family and invite Eliane [Dominique’s daughter] and her children to come with me. She refused.
[…] When my body, worn-out past all hope of recovery, began its final decline. I managed one last leap.
The ecologist became a butterfly.28
- 29 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 7.
- 30 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 6.
19Beyond the exterior scenes of vast wastelands and the widespread, suffering of the faceless populace, the portrayal and minute description of the posthuman body is an important part of scientific speculation in this story in particular and in climate fiction in general, as responses to new, more perilous conditions of existence present themselves. So, Dominique takes time to describe himself and the situations in which he finds himself as a result, from his electronic antennae and enhanced sensory perception, to his prosthetic median arms, to his “heartless, lungless”29 core, among other bodily modifications, parts added, subtracted, or rendered equivalent: “My emotions were toned down by the absence of a blood-circulation system and endocrine glands. However, my brain remained intact, mind as sharp as a scalpel[;]”30
- 31 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 5.
- 32 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 4-5.
my form: a black torso, four forearms to manipulate delicate instruments […], two powerful grasshopper legs to propel me towards the sky.
And my best feature […]: two immense wings, their vibrant orange striated with black lines. Soft as synthetic silk, they could resist the strong convection winds of mountain ranges and withstand the highest shearing stresses. You could suspend a five-ton truck from each of my wingtips without tearing them apart.
Some parts of me retained their original form: the mo[u]ld encasing my brain and spinal cord was sculpted into a human face, with large eyes. A small family of cameras and sensors lining my ocular globes gave me an eagle’s sharpness of vision. I could perceive the light range from ultraviolet to infrared. Perched atop a mountain, I could spot an ant scurrying on the floor of the valley.31
Few [servants] had kept their human form. Like me, they were modified and remodelled to add a few decades to their life expectancy. […]
[M]y lifeline looked after me, other ports opening, bottle green caterpillars spreading essential oils on my wings to keep them flexible, filling up my brain’s nutrient reserves, calibrating my sensors: thermometer, altimeter, anemometer… the works.32
20While technologically extraordinary, continued application is limited for logistical and economical reasons. Therefore, Dominique must accept that this existential leap is provisional, especially given his class:
- 33 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 12-13.
This body […] was—I knew it long before signing my […] agreement—the last that [I] would inhabit.
In theory, my masters could transfer my brain and spinal cord into a biological vat-grown body. In practice, the high failure rate and the few available resources limited the application of this procedure, especially on a mere servant.33
21From the individual body to the collective mentality, the culture of the inhabitants of the domes involves social conditioning through troubling surveillance footage, to ensure consent among the more fortunate survivors. For example, while flying over a devastated continent, Dominique captures images for his employer of
- 34 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 11.
- 35 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 17.
Europe’s scars, dead cities with little rectangles of razed bungalows and large squares of collapsed supermarkets. Kilomet[re]s of empty shelves[;] their abundance forgotten. Murderous fights among scavenger groups also provided edifying pictures for the domes’ dwellers.34 […] The Ice Lords liked to show such images to their servants to remind them how lucky they were.35
22In the wake of environmental collapse, humanity declines into depravity, with a significant stratification of society according to, on the one hand, the survival of the fittest, and, on the other, the prosperity of the resourcefully influential. Indeed, nature has reclaimed civilization out in the wild world. Continuing his flight, Dominique bears witness to the devastation below:
- 36 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 13.
A chaotic landscape […] disputed by dozens of warlords. Columns of refugees faded into the dim horizon. More refugees lined up outside green tents at the desert’s edge. The rare relief organizations had to kowtow to warlords’ whims.
I recorded all this for the edification of the domes’ children. The Ice Lords weren’t cut off from the world. Their tank-factories ponderously rolled across ravaged lands. When one of these mastodons detected a deposit, it stopped and drilled into the soil. Factories also harvested trees and other resources for the domes. Automated barges conveyed the goods to the ice-field harbour.
Sometimes, people were already on site, trying to live off the land. If they interfered with the mobile factories, the Ice Lords would engage a local warlord’s militia. I had recorded these “pacifying” events. My employers made sure they were getting what they paid for.36
- 37 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 13.
- 38 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 14.
- 39 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 14.
- 40 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
- 41 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
- 42 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
- 43 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
- 44 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
- 45 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 16.
- 46 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 17.
- 47 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 19.
- 48 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 20.
- 49 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 20.
- 50 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 19.
23Upon the discovery of the “independent agrarian society”37 in an area that “had once been Turkey,”38 Dominique is delighted to discover two technological innovations: the first is “[a] two-way transmitter dangl[ing] from a large balloon,”39 suggesting radio communication within and possibly beyond this settlement, implying the existence of other “similar villages dotting the mountains;”40 the second is “moveable crops,”41 “plants grown in burlap bags filled with dirt”42 that permit the villagers to subsist without “hinder[ing] the tank-factories” as they can “pack up and move quickly.”43 Dominique qualifies the discovery of this provisional settlement as relatively paradisiacal, as “good news [that] needed to be relayed to [his] employers.”44 He hastily transmits the relevant data to the north for the enlightenment of the Ice Lords. However, in a short time, the danger this piece of information represents for the community soon becomes apparent, as the elite survivors are merciless in their takeover of spaces, sending mercenaries in short order to scatter the peasants of this “dissident village”45 before the arrival of a mobile factory meant to exploit whatever resources may be present. The Ice Monarch feels a kinship with these people, some of whom resemble his now-deceased daughter and indeed might plausibly be their descendants. In a self-sacrificing act, along with the transmission of further data, Dominique uploads via a virus he calls “milkweed juice”46 a “false trail”47 in order to lead the convoy of warlords and the mobile factory astray. By “tampering with [the] GPS [Global Positioning System] guide, as [well as] getting [the] factory to spread the news of a colossal new ore deposit,”48 Dominique sends his “employers’ and their rival’s huge land-rapers [sic] […] rolling toward the nearest sea.”49 In the meantime, he forewarns the villagers of a possible attack, based on the enemy proximity, informing them of the imminent danger as well as revealing a portrait of life elsewhere on Earth: “the European cities in ruins, the Ice Lords, the polar palaces with their spider servants, the mobile factories.”50 Dominique’s sabotage will be no secret to his employers and he accepts that he will die in exile without access to monopolized resources vital to his survival. A utopian hope for revolution counts among his final thoughts as he considers the consequences of his action:
- 51 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 20.
The behemoths would reach the water’s edge. They would mindlessly continue towards the ghost deposit, deeper and deeper, until water pressure finally crushed them.
The Ice Lords would attempt to remedy this lemming behavio[u]r remotely. It wouldn’t work. My “milkweed juice” had seen to that.
They would have to come out in person.
Out in the wreckage of civilization, predators far more deadly than polar bears waited, the warlord[s] who had until now carried their commands, the angry survivors chased [from] their homes. Whoever would emerge victorious was no more my concern.
But there would be changes.51
The apocalyptic vision of material and natural catastrophe, as well as of the descent into human violence, is overwhelmingly palpable. Individual hope is clearly lost as Dominique must resign himself to a form of death by starvation, with suicide as the only alternative option to hasten the inevitable and elude further personal suffering. However, collective betterment is an implied possibility as the story essentially concludes on an environmentally conscientious, post-capitalist vision of tabula rasa and revival.
- 52 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 3.
24Dominique’s final act of nobility stands in sharp contrast to his loyalties to his masters, for example in an earlier scene where he betrays the course of a “fugitive servant[:]”52
- 53 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 3-4.
[…] I spotted a dark speck on the whiteness. Not a lonely seal. This speck moved so fast no polar bear could hope to make a meal [of] it. […]
The dark blur resolved into the fugitive servant. His torso was bent forward as if praying non[-] existent gods, to keep off the cold. His mechanical spider legs threw up chips of polyurethane mixed with some real ice in his wake. […].
The man was trying to reach a competitor’s mobile palace. Few were in range, since the thirty or thirty[-]one surviving palaces were scattered over four million square kilomet[re]s of synthetic ice. The freezing cold or his failing batteries would soon kill him. […]
I computed the odds […][;] a faint chance to reach another Ice Lord’s palace. His determination filled me with admiration, mixed with sadness. I knew my duty. My employers would want the spider servant’s bio-implants back.
I recorded his speed and direction, then turned toward my base.53
25In later coming to the decision to violate the terms of his contract, Dominique is inclined to reflect on the evolution of the political climate and its fallout, as well as on his own changing role throughout, on what he should and should not have done, perhaps:
- 54 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 7-8.
Long ago, I led rallies, attended Climate Change Symposiums, took part in the laying of the first puzzle pieces of the artificial ice. Meanwhile, like an ice cube dropped in a glass of water, run-off from melting glaciers had chilled the local weather.
“What global warming?” industrialists asked, laughing out loud.
Worse, the warming sea stopped the Gulf Stream current. Paris, London, and most European capitals [experienced] the harsh winters that Canadians came to miss. Oil kings dug in their deep pockets to wash their hands [of] this “natural perturbation cycle.” They hired hackers and agents-provocateurs to disrupt and discredit the green organizations.
Funding to the North Pole puzzle project dried up. […]
As climate warnings sank to the bottom of the public opinion pond, my bosses returned to their usual pastimes: concentrating capital, abolishing workers’ standards, automating productivity.54
- 55 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8.
- 56 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8.
- 57 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8.
- 58 Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 9.
26Hence, “[s]heltered under their wing,”55 Dominique is an unhesitating part of the new status quo: “I jumped from one precarious contract to the next. I learned to code in the new protocols;”56 “I could always sense which way the wind blew—towards the money. Heading a small army of public-relation experts, I joined the winning side;”57 “So I continued to please and amuse, to optimize and manage.”58 There is of course a redeeming evolution of the character’s psychology and behaviour, away from an egocentric desperation for personal survival at all costs—as exemplified in his ongoing consent and collaboration with the Ice Lords—to an ultimately selfless act for collective betterment. A renewed sense of self-awareness is crucial to Dominique’s dilemma and agency, his passage from a relatively privileged posthuman life to that of a hero for the persevering underclass, as it were. He recognizes the error of past choices (having abandoned, with a sort of resigned fatalism, the remaining members of his family—who represented a microcosm of cooperative resistance at the time) and finally opts for a transgressive, self-sacrificing gesture for a future he will not know but which will ideally see improvement on the environmental and socio-political fronts.
27Given the content and form of the story, the text clearly belongs to cli-fi as a contemporary subgenre of SF in that it addresses the science of anthropogenic global warming and its fallout, serving at once as an ecological warning and as a call to act against potentially oppressive social restructuring. The protagonist moves from a place of vulnerability to empowerment in the face of systemic domination, his model dissidence against injustice constituting a thoroughly imaginative and meaningful reclamation.
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Notes
See Milner, Andrew, J. R. Burgman, “A Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction,” Extrapolation, vol. 59, n° 1 (2018): 1-23.
Michèle Laframboise is a Francophone Canadian author with education and training in geography and engineering. She is a prolific, multi-award-winning writer of more than forty short stories and seventeen novels, for youth and adults alike, as well as of comics and graphic novels, which she also illustrates.
The story was first translated from the original French (Laframboise, Michèle, “Monarque des glaces,” Solaris 175 [2010]: 7-21) into English by the author as “Ice Monarch,” online in Abyss & Apex 67 (2018). See Laframboise, Michèle, “Ice Monarch,” Abyss & Apex, 15 June 2018, accessed 6 Feb. 2020, https://www.abyssapexzine.com/2018/06/ice-monarch/ I will be citing the republished print version, whose text is slightly different from the online version: Laframboise, Michèle, “Ice Monarch,” Mississauga: Echofictions, 2018.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” Mississauga: Echofictions, 2018, 11.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 21.
My research is informed by the relevant work of Brent Ryan Bellamy, Roger Bozzetto, Gerry Canavan, Rebecca Evans, Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgman, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Darko Suvin.
Bozzetto, Roger, La Science-fiction (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007), 11 (Author’s translation).
Bozzetto, La Science-fiction, 11 (Author’s translation).
Evans, Rebecca, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum: ‘The Anthropocene’ and/as Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, n° 3 (2018): 487.
Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1979), 12, cited in Evans, Rebecca, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 484.
Evans, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 487.
Evans, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 489.
Evans, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 495.
Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 101, cited in Evans, Rebecca, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 497.
Canavan, Gerry, “Introduction: If This Goes On,” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, eds., Gerry Canavan, Kim Stanley Robinson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014), 17, also cited in Evans, Rebecca, “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum,” 487.
Robinson, Kim Stanley, “Story Spaces of Climate Change,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, n° 3 (2018): 427.
Milner, Andrew, J. R. Burgman, “A Short Pre-History,” 1. For an example of an article by Merchant of the kind written about by Milner and Burgman, see Merchant, Brian, “Behold the Rise of Dystopian ‘Cli-Fi’,” Vice: Motherboard, 31 May 2013, accessed 6 Jan. 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypp7nj/behold-the-rise-of-cli-fi.
Milner, Andrew, J. R. Burgman, “A Short Pre-History,” 20.
Robinson, “Story Spaces of Climate Change.” 427.
Robinson, “Story Spaces of Climate Change,” 427.
Robinson, “Story Spaces of Climate Change,” 427.
Bellamy, Brent Ryan, “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, n° 3 (2018): 418.
Bellamy enumerates the following examples in Robinson’s work: “The office towers of lower Manhattan have become residential cooperatives. They are largely self-sustaining, having whole floors converted to farming as well as being rigged up to generate more electrical energy than they draw from the grid. In some cases, they are also carbon neutral or carbon negative, meaning they either do not add CO2 to the atmosphere or they scrub it from the air.” (Bellamy, Brent Ryan, “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis,” 418)
Bellamy, “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis,” 418.
Bellamy, “Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis,” 418.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 2.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 2.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8-9.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 7.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 6.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 5.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 4-5.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 12-13.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 11.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 17.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 13.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 13.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 14.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 14.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 15.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 16.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 17.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 19.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 20.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 20.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 19.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 20.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 3.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 3-4.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 7-8.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 8.
Laframboise, “Ice Monarch,” 9.
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