1In the year 1984, Alasdair Gray published the novel 1982, Janine, whose protagonist, a supervisor of security installations, confronts his complicity with a residual British imperialism that has warped Scottish aspirations. This essay will suggest how more recent Scottish dystopian novels represent Gray’s posterity as well as Orwell’s, while moving beyond ideas of Britain as Big Brother to dramatize the fact that future Scotlands will contend with global forces. Neoliberal exploitation of climate change and environmental upheaval dominates the worlds constructed in the three 21st-century works this essay discusses. Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000) audaciously projects a semi-authoritarian Scotland of 2090 that endures after global disasters have reshaped geographies and reordered economies and nation-states. John Aberdein’s Strip the Willow (2009) wittily yet ominously imagines an Aberdeen of the nearer future stalked by a transnational corporation bent on commodifying the area’s human, cultural, and natural resources. The multiple-author graphic novel IDP: 2043 (2014), edited by Denise Mina, vividly envisions a flood-ravaged Scotland of the title year where scarce resources are unevenly distributed under a secretive and increasingly ruthless autocracy.
2In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh articulates planet-wide concerns these Scottish novels address. Without mentioning dystopian fiction specifically, Ghosh evokes its possibilities quite precisely. He argues that “the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction” (Ghosh 2016, 26), centred on verisimilar representations of individual consciousness, has been slow to apprehend the scope of climate change. He suggests that the “new genre of science fiction called climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’” favours “disaster stories set in the future” and is insufficiently grounded in the “recent past” and the present (Ghosh 2016, 72). Yet he later emphasizes that “to reproduce the world as it exists need not be the project of fiction” and that fiction’s key capacity is “to approach the world in a subjunctive mode, to conceive of it as if it were other than it is” (Ghosh 2016, 128; original emphasis). Useful in delineating the territory between conservative realism and detached futurism that Ghosh points to is Umberto Eco’s 1984 article “Science Fiction and the Art of Conjecture,” which offers the term “Metatopia” for works where “the possible world represents a future phase of the world as we have it here and now, and however different it may be structurally from the real world, the possible world is possible (and life-like) [… because] the transformations underlying it merely carry to completion tendencies present in the world today” (Eco 1984, 1257). This “novel of anticipation” links a projected future world to present patterns that are not yet inexorable: Eco cites Nineteen Eighty-Four as a classic example of a “narrative [that] anticipates not in order to encourage but to deter” (Eco 1984, 1258). While the societies they depict may be ones damaged by dramatic natural and/or political disasters, Metatopian fictions emphasize continuity rather than complete rupture between the worlds in which they are imagined and the worlds they project. Metatopian fictions anticipate not the end of the world as we know it, but the materialization of dangerous tendencies and possibilities that we should recognize and work against in the present world we think we know.
3Citing Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Ghosh warns that “dissatisfaction itself [can] become […] a commodity” (Debord 1967, Ch. 59; qtd. by Ghosh 2016, 121). In a parallel vein, Tom Moylan contests the influence of a recent “output of dark narratives [that] has congealed in a ‘dystopia porn’ (as SF writer Vandana Singh puts it) that suppresses humanity’s social anxieties through a fatalist […] inoculation that normalizes […] a disarming anti-utopian pessimism” (Moylan 2020, 166). If the novels this essay discusses do not respond with unequivocal optimism to what Moylan calls “the utopian prophetic challenge of which the dystopian imagination is capable” (Moylan 2020, 166), they do, in distinct but complementary ways, meet Moylan’s and Ghosh’s calls for works that counter “passive resignation” (Moylan 2020, 182) to the hegemony of global capitalism and the hazards of climate change.
4Alasdair Gray’s first novel Lanark layers epic, dystopian, and realist modes in a vision of 20th-century Glasgow deformed by the “creature” that is global capitalism (Gray 1981, 491). Carla Sassi suggests that this “scenario […] of cities and individuals” manipulated and abused by “an elusive, transnational capitalist elite” seems closer now than ever (Sassi 2022, 309). Less celebrated than Lanark and more concise and grounded in references to the early 1980s, 1982, Janine is just as durably pertinent to dystopian concerns. The title evokes Orwell’s best-known book and also establishes distance from it. In at least one way, 1982, Janine begins where Nineteen Eighty-Four leaves off: the focal character Jock McLeish resembles Winston Smith not only in serving a repressive regime but also in using alcohol as a palliative. Whereas Smith is tortured physically, McLeish uses sadistic imaginings as further refuge: “Janine” stars in his repertoire of fantasies involving the entrapment of confident women, a personal form of “dystopia porn.” These fantasies make the text a dystopian experience for the reader, who is confined to the protagonist’s turbulent mind during the single night, 25-26 March 1982 (Gray 1984, 312), that encompasses the book’s present. Yet while McLeish’s head is its own bad place, his increasingly insistent awareness of the implications of his personal and professional choices points to a more concrete, external dystopia taking hold in late Cold War Britain. McLeish identifies himself as a Tory who regards leftist egalitarians as a delusional “gang of losers” (Gray 1984, 52). However, he acknowledges that he “voted for Scottish self-government” in the 1979 referendum because “it would be a luxury to blame ourselves for the mess we are in instead of the bloody old Westminster parliament” (Gray 1984, 56). Recalling the controversial failure of the referendum (see Bambery 2018, 253) brings up other events of 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher took office: “Then came cuts in public spending, loss of business and increased unemployment and now Westminster has decided to spend the North Sea oil revenues building a fucking tunnel under the English Channel” (Gray 1984, 56). On this occasion McLeish disciplines himself: “think about […] fucking Janine, don’t think about fucking POLITICS” (Gray 1984, 56; original emphasis). While the episode illustrates a pattern of retreat from actuality to fantasy that structures the first half of the narrative, it also registers McLeish’s persistent awareness of the British state’s exploitation of Scotland’s environment and resources.
5McLeish ultimately cannot deny the connection of his fantasies with his work for National Security Limited. He describes his job at first with sinister supervisory pride and zeal: “the team knows that one day, with no warning, I will suddenly arrive, run a few tests, ask a few questions, and any weakness in the system will be at once exposed” (Gray 1984, 94). A page later, though, he puts his role into broader, bleaker terms:
I am the instrument of a firm which installs instruments to protect the instruments of firms which produce meat cloth machines and whisky, instruments to feed, dress, move and stupefy us. But the National installs most of its instruments around nuclear reactors – instruments powering the instruments which light, heat and entertain us – and banks – instruments to protect and increase the profits of the instrument owners – and military depots where the weapons are kept which protect the nation’s instruments and profits from the protective instruments of the Russian instrument-makers […]. Instruments serving instruments are the whole show. (Gray 1984, 95)
6This passage summarizes the world around 1984 as a self-perpetuating system where humans are mere components. It also defines the specific position that McLeish shares with many dystopian protagonists, including those of Fitt, Aberdein, and Mina, who are also instruments of the prevailing powers in their versions of Scotland – and who also, eventually, act on the impulse to resist their situations and the forces that have co-opted and entrapped them. McLeish’s reflections raise his fears of possible nuclear attack on military sites in Scotland (Gray 1984, 96; 124), and this prospect, plus painful personal memories, leads him to overdose on barbiturate pills (Gray 1984, 163). The ensuing chapter depicts the effect on his mind graphically in an eight-page section side-titled THE MINISTRY OF VOICES, which arranges angled, inverted, and perpendicular blocks of capitalized, italicized, and/or bolded text, with syntax fragmented (Gray 1984, 168-175). The section, chaotic yet intricately structured, and difficult to quote or even to describe, serves as a kind of accelerated enactment of descent into – and return from – an impossible place. “The Ministry of Voices” alludes both to Nineteen Eighty-Four and to God, whose presence is manifest in irregular blocks of small type at page left. Crucially, this presence urges McLeish to think again: “Listen come alive for gods sake work as if you were in the early days of a better nation […]” McLeish obeys and forces himself to vomit: “BOAK BOAK BOAK […],” as the text renders it in onomatopoeic Scots (Gray 1984, 175). After four blank pages of unconsciousness, McLeish revives, then confronts with renewed energy the toxic system he serves: “it is practical, scientific, technically-minded business and military and political folk who are treating the earth like bumpaper and if we flush it down the stank there will be nobody to replant the desert we make.” He emphasizes human responsibility for environmental damage by adding that God is “not extraterrestrial” and all-powerful, but simply “the small glimmer of farseeing, intelligent kindliness” (Gray 1984, 304). McLeish quits his job, vowing to lead a better life as the narrative ends. McLeish stands not only as a representative dystopian protagonist who reclaims belief in the possibility of a constructive and sustainable future, but also as a prototypical recovering climate change denier.
7The injunction “work as if you were in the early days of a better nation” that God voices has become emblematic of Gray’s influence on the purposeful confidence characterizing Scottish cultural production in recent decades, expressing the confluence of the “narrative of democratic emergence” centering on increased political autonomy and “the renewed currency and cachet of Scottish literature” (Pittin-Hedon, Manfredi, and Hames 2022, 2). The phrase appears both on the frontage of the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and among the literary quotations inlaid into the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament nearby. As such it represents a canny retort to the hectoring public slogans of dystopias such as the fascist England depicted in Moore and Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (Moore and Lloyd 2005, 11; 16). The line’s origins, however, complicate interpretation. Another book Gray published in 1984, the Penguin paperback of the 1983 collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly, presents the sentence as an epigraph, accompanied by the words “Scotland 1984,” plus the name “Dennis Lee,” acknowledging the Canadian writer whose long 1972 poem Civil Elegies contains the lines, “And best of all is finding a place to be / In the early days of a better civilization. / For we are a conquered nation…” (Lee 1994, 50). As Scott Hames notes, Lee’s poem actually emphasizes Canada’s subordination to the global agendas of the United States (Hames 2012, 13). Key in Gray’s motto is the subjunctive phrase work as if. A better Scottish nation is no historical inevitability, but the possible, never-guaranteed product of taxing and prolonged labour. The key implication in context is that bleak future states may be avoidable, but only if they are anticipated and prevented from developing. Working towards a better nation entails imagining a worse world, and cultural confidence must confront the potential for disaster.
8What McLeish resigns in 1982, Janine is not only an instrumental complicity with residual British imperialism – and environmental irresponsibility – but also a habit of seeing the British state as the main source of problems affecting Scotland. Looking past ideas of Great Britain as imperial overlord, as Fitt, Aberdein, and Mina go on to do, is in itself a deftly economical assertion of cultural sovereignty, a way of affirming Scotland as a nation with global concerns, albeit many of them daunting. Both England as a place and the United Kingdom as a polity are marginalized in all three novels’ projected worlds, while Scottish specificities of language, culture, and physical environment endure.
9Through its graphic medium, IDP: 2043 (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014) establishes a post-British environment in ways both prominent and understated. Ghosh suggests that visual media “have found it much easier to address climate change than has literary fiction” (Ghosh 2016, 83) and that the “rise of the graphic novel” as a serious medium is part of a “sea change” that will alter the nature of reading itself (Ghosh 2016, 84); IDP vividly illustrates some of the specific potential of image-text combinations. The cover image reveals central Edinburgh partly under water yet still recognizable, while the “Flood Map” shown on each Chapter’s title page has most of England submerged. The British state appears to have been washed away with little trace. With each chapter produced by a different author-artist team, the narrative offers an anthology of varied renditions of dystopian conditions, while charting the progress of an outspoken and determined working-class Scottish protagonist, Cait McNeil, against a devious regime that is more concerned with protecting economic privilege and controlling scarce resources than preserving any imperial heritage.
10But n Ben A-Go-Go (Fitt 2000) is comparably deft in setting aside present political configurations, while more elaborate in articulating Scottish endurance. In Fitt’s 2090, “God’s Flood,” resulting from the volcanic destruction of the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf in November 2039, has not only “drooned the African plains fae the Cape tae Senegal” (Fitt 2000, 10) but may also have obliterated England: there is one reference to landmarks “o twinty first century London” reproduced in one of the Virtual Reality environments that have proliferated as spaces of escape (Fitt 2000, 49), but English is notably absent among languages used in promotion of a celebrity virtual explorer’s “new bestseller”: “Flemish, Arabic, American an Scots” (Fitt 2000, 90). As Harry Josephine Giles notes, “the tempting suggestion is that it is the very submersion of England that has allowed the Scots language to flourish” (Giles 2022, 181). As in IDP: 2043, the virtual disappearance of England, or any British state, is indicated almost casually. Meanwhile, Scotland is a group of island “parishes,” collectively known as “Port.” Scottish survival is a constant presence in the text, since Scots is used not only in dialogue but also for the third-person narration throughout (see Giles 2022, 180-181). Thus, the protagonist, Paolo Stevenson Broon, is introduced visiting “his life pairtner Nadia,” comatose in the “twa-thoosan-storey muckle-structure” that has been “purpose-biggit” (Fitt 2000, 8) to contain Sangue de Verde, the endemic virus that has rendered “auld-fashioned sex” dangerous and illegal. Nadia has caught the virus from another man, and Paolo seeks to “ken the cairrier’s name” (Fitt 2000, 7) and obtain a DNA sample that “wid lowse Nadia fae her pain” into peaceful death (Fitt 2000, 12). However, the “Bluid Lawyer” (Fitt 2000, 8) Paolo has hired “on behalf o his undeid wife” (Fitt 2000, 12) drops the case when funds run out, after identifying the prime suspect as Desmond “Diamond” Broon (Fitt 2000, 17), Paolo’s own father, a celebrity DJ, gangster, and “legendary cybercowboy that had won his siller dobbyin data vaults” (Fitt 2000, 18). Incarcerated at Inverdisney Timeshare Penitentiary, where “inmates, aw o them lifers, were cried ‘guests’ an resided in penthoose apartments” (Fitt 2000, 20), Diamond has his own agenda, and the narrative builds to a confrontation at But n Ben A-Go-Go, the gangster’s luxury retreat in the Drylands, as the non-flooded parts of the Highlands are known. The Scots phrase “but and ben” refers to a small traditional cottage with outer (but) and inner (ben) rooms; it also evokes the ins and outs of the shifts between real and virtual environments in the novel’s version of Scotland.
- 1 Although Fitt includes no glossary, the book begins with a brief “how to read” section, and accessi (...)
11Fitt’s Scots contrasts with aggressively dystopian languages such as Nadsat in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, whose “intention was for the reader to be in some sense ‘brainwashed’” (Vincent and Clarke 2017, 249). Though Scots is the immersive medium of But n Ben, it is free from the menacing inflections of the first-person narration of Burgess’s text, which associates Nadsat with violently alienated youth as well as Cold War paranoia (Booker 2005, 38-39). Giles analyzes Fitt’s version of Scots as a “literary and formal” construction combining archaism and neologism with contemporary vernacular elements (Giles 2022, 177-178), but many individual passages read as plausible extrapolations from the voices and idioms of ordinary Scottish people of the early 21st century. Whether Scots is a full-fledged language remains under debate (see e.g. Lawson 2014, 151-152), and this liminal status helps it embody a challenge to authoritarianism in Fitt’s text: though describing features of a controlled society, phrases like “twa-thoosan-storey muckle-structure” carry demotic, informal associations. At the same time, as Lisa Harrison argues, Fitt’s futurization of Scots calls to “readers who will not only engage with his text organically, but who will work doubly hard to do so” (Harrison 2011, 159).1 Harrison argues that “the simple existence of a culturally-identifiable ‘Scotland’” in a drastically altered world “evokes a nearly indestructible sense of Scottishness” (Harrison 2011, 165; original emphasis). Another critic, John Corbett, provides valuable linguistic analysis of Fitt’s Scots, yet asserts that “[t]he formulaic plot and paper-thin characters exist only to project the Scots tongue into [the] future” (Corbett 2011, 130). But if language alone mattered, the novel might be narrowly experimental – or simply callous, in envisioning Scotland’s endurance alongside the destruction of other territories and cultures. While Giles argues persuasively that Fitt’s Scots is “a science fiction project” (Giles 2022, 176), a language that exists fully only in the virtual space of But n Ben, the novel uses this language as a medium for expression of persistent, all-too-actual, concerns that overlap national boundaries.
12Strip the Willow (Aberdein 2009), less dramatic than the other two novels in its leap to a nearer future, is also even more subtle in its marginalization of England and/or Great Britain, but Scottish language and localism are again key. LeopCorp, the investment firm with which a cash-strapped Aberdeen City Council has entered an uneven partnership, is represented by an Englishman who calls himself Guy Bord, and this renaming, evoking not only Debord the theorist of empty spectacle, but also a generic figure of contemporary rootlessness (guy, bored), figures the subsumption of specifically English or British power by transnational corporate forces. At the same time, however, resistance to such forces is grounded in Scottish identities. As the city is renamed Uberdeen and rebranded as a venue for commercial spectacles under the corporation’s “plans for world entertainment” (Aberdein 2009, 214), Guy Bord, as LeopCorp’s “events manager” (15), works uneasily with Aberdonians Lucy Legge and Alison Anderson of “ReCSoc, the Council’s ReCreation and Social Engineering Department” (Aberdein 2009, 28), to produce happenings with themes such as “Calving Glaciers” (Aberdein 2009, 31). Lucy’s sardonic suggestion that this event should include “Wet T-shirts: empathy for a drowning planet” (Aberdein 2009, 32) hints at the novel’s environmental engagement and indicates the local officials’ rising opposition to LeopCorp’s agenda. “Calving Glaciers” involves model icebergs obstructing the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, Union Street, as it is ceremoniously renamed UberStreet. Lucy’s private reflection on the event reads as an ironic variation on Alasdair Gray’s maxim, evoking the dystopian appropriation of encouraging words: “It was the early days of Spectacle […]. There would no doubt be better days” (Aberdein 2009, 35). After the explosive detonation of the mock icebergs causes injuries, Alison provokes Guy by using Doric, the Aberdeen variant of Scots, to describe resuscitating a victim: “Had tae turn masel intil a human hoover” (Aberdein 2009, 40). As in the other three novels, embodied and voiced Scottishness offers some resistance to ascendant post-British authoritarianism and glibly globalized discourse.
13But n Ben, Strip, and IDP all set forth trenchantly distinctive versions of the dystopian scenario of rule by the privileged, for the privileged. Strip the Willow depicts corporate capture of governance as something still in progress: more pervasive than the 1980s alliance of states and industries that McLeish confronts in 1982, Janine, yet also more unstable. A managerialist regime is installed under the guise of urban regeneration and environmental improvement, through spectacle and media manipulation backed by implicit threats of force. Even more sharply than the other two works, Strip the Willow illustrates the close relationship between dystopian extrapolation and satirical exaggeration of current tendencies (see Booker 2005, 32-33). As a centre for the oil industry, Aberdeen is Scotland’s wealthiest city, so bankruptcy may be a hyperbolic scenario, but corporate influence on governance is not. As Owen Hatherley describes in A New Kind of Bleak (2012), the city’s prosperity has generated ambitious and contentious urban projects, such as the proposed redevelopment of a unique city centre park, Union Terrace Gardens, into another shopping centre – an amenity whose oversupply in the city Hatherley notes (2012, 280-281) and Aberdein alludes to repeatedly, as when Lucy reflects on “Old shops swingballed, to maximise malls” (Aberdein 2009, 23). The Union Terrace scheme has been set aside, but Aberdein alludes to another developing influence: “We would not want to be trumped,” warns a LeopCorp executive in urging secrecy about the corporation’s plans (Aberdein 2009, 159). Lucy’s retort – “Who wants to trump you, I wonder?” – echoes the verb, which evokes the American real estate tycoon and reality television star whose controversial activities around Aberdeen began well before his presidency and continue after it.
14Like the American magnate, LeopCorp’s secretive CEO, Rookie Marr, seems both risible and monstrous: an embodiment of the intersection of satire and dystopia. He is an ostentatious predator, styling himself “The Leopard,” yet he fears poisoning from his diet of exotic meats. Having expropriated the Citadel of the Salvation Army, “[o]utdated competitors in the street spectacle market” (Aberdein 2009, 28), he renames the turreted structure LeopCorp Towers and uses its “perfect sightline down UberStreet” to conduct surveillance with his “Swiss Army Digigun,” a (fictional) device with “rifle, telescope, camera and mugshot database combined” (Aberdein 2009, 51). His targets include Alison, whose co-operation he coerces with compromising pictures of her daughter Gwen, one of his employees (Aberdein 2009, 147). Increasingly, LeopCorp drops pretences of partnership with the Council and asserts the dictatorship of “Big Money,” which decrees that “Spectacle […] be recast in a new spirit. The spirit of Lottery” (Aberdein 2009, 157; original emphasis). Accordingly, “UberStreet” will be converted into “a giant ball alley” (Aberdein 2009, 157): winning numbers in a globally televised lottery will be determined by a competition where 21 large transparent plastic spheres, each representing a top global company, and each with “nine beautiful young people lodged within” (Aberdein 2009, 204), are propelled by teams of nine athletes, each from a different country, up the street and into the Grotto under the Market (Mercat) Cross. This “GrottoLotto” evokes both the lottery described in Nineteen Eighty-Four as a means of distracting the Proles from subversion (Part One, Chapter 8) and, even more, the incoherent but imposing spectacle Guy Debord theorizes as part of the privatization of public space and consciousness (Debord 1967, 136-137; Ghosh 2016, 131).
15Spectacle and media manipulation are also key strategies of the somewhat more established plutocratic regime in IDP, along with more overtly coercive measures, including forcibly inequitable urban redevelopment. The title abbreviation stands for “Internally Displaced People,” and while Scotland’s elite occupy the self-contained City Tower, most citizens inhabit crowded camps below the megastructure, manipulated and intimidated under the pretext of a smallpox epidemic that requires quarantine measures. The protagonist Cait is a token proletarian cast member of a hit reality television series about the Tower’s built-in Sky Farm, whose experiments will ostensibly alleviate food shortages. IDP’s graphic immediacy foregrounds physical details both of overcrowding and of the Sky Farm’s use of genetic engineering to produce (for example) spider-goats that yield silk as well as meat or milk (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 13-15). The opening chapter by Pat Mills & Hannah Berry builds up to Cait’s conflict with her more refined fellow presenters Dan and Jools (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 17-19) and with the Board that oversees the Farm, which views Cait’s unsanctioned agricultural experiments as a threat to its own projects (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 11-13; 21-22). At her shipping container home, Cait narrowly escapes an attempt on her life (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 29-31), thanks to what the second chapter, by Will Morris, reveals as the intervention of another working-class character, Tom Sayers, a boxer working reluctantly for the gangsters to whom the Tower regime has outsourced enforcement. Sent to help kill Cait, Sayers instead engineers her escape (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 58-59). Suspending Cait’s, and Sayers’s, fate, the subsequent two chapters flash back to elaborate on the methods and aims of the Tower’s overseers. Chapter 4, by Irvine Welsh & Dan McDaid, is the work’s most classically dystopian and graphic-novelistic section: its exposition of the ruthless Gartman, chair of the Sky Farm Board and de facto leader of the city, is rendered in a shadowy, noirish style that reinforces the thematic influence of Moore and Lloyd’s V for Vendetta.
16But n Ben depicts a more stably and subtly authoritarian post-flood Scotland that seemingly accommodates certain progressive elements. Port has a Constitution enshrining “the sanctity o human life,” and state violence is proscribed under “legislation forbiddin the execution or assassination o ony its citizens – murderers, rapists, cyberjoukers includit. Agents o the Port Authority an its polis service, Ceilidh, had to uphaud this precept, or dree the consequences” (Fitt 2000, 40-41). “Ceilidh” is Gaelic for “celebration,” but critic Maggie Scott compares this usage with the ironic naming of Oceania’s “Ministry of Peace” and “Ministry of Love” (Scott 2017, 15). Port’s police are certainly venal, and “Ceilidh” also evokes the role of entertainment as a means of control, as it is in Strip and IDP. Personal Virtual Reality engines (Fitt 2000, 51) and global celebrity and athletic spectacles (Fitt 2000, 89-90) serve to divert ordinary citizens from their harsh circumstances. Paolo himself works for the Port Authority: as a “cyberjanny, third cless, in charge o delinquent Dano-Norwegian pish-hoose ancillaries,” he is required to monitor, and enforce the exploitation of, climate refugees who clean “commissars’ bidets or advocates’ hot tubs” (Fitt 2000, 58). As in IDP, such material perks are reserved for an elite minority.
17Paolo’s lowly position is ongoing punishment for involvement in one of his father’s cybercrimes; meanwhile, Diamond Broon himself epitomizes the systemic corruption of 2090 Scotland. Though incarcerated, he exerts power through “shairp-nebbit lawyers” (Fitt 2000, 20), bought police, and extensive contacts in and out of cyberspace, as he plots to escape Inverdisney, lure Paolo to But n Ben, and harvest his son’s organs to replace his own failing ones (Fitt 2000, 50). Encountering a rare unbribable guard, the celebrity criminal reflects: “he had never richt unnerstood folk that he couldna buy. Siller wis The Diamond’s global tongue, his lingua franca” (Fitt 2000, 102). “Siller” talks in Scots, and it may be the more powerful language. As the Diamond’s hideaway, But n Ben A-Go-Go exemplifies gentrification, turning a simple cottage into a private luxury resort, in part of a pattern that has made the Drylands “forbidden tae ordinary Port citizens” (Fitt 2000, 86) as a recreational preserve for the “ubercless” (Fitt 2000, 164). The privatization of land as well as prisons intensifies notable tendencies now actually at work in Scotland (see Corbett 2011, 121-122; Bambery 2018, 308-309) and also evoked in IDP and Strip. In metatopian fashion, all four novels apprehend a Scottish and global future dictated more and more bluntly by wealth and its power to reshape and exploit environments without responsibility.
18Strip the Willow speaks not only to Debord’s work on spectacle – and indeed on dystopia – but also to his environmental concerns. In A Sick Planet, written in 1971 but not published until the 2000s, Debord observes that “industry is racing to get involved with the various palliatives to pollution,” especially since “a good part of the capital monopolized by the state is available for investment and manipulation in this sphere” (Debord 2004, 83-84). Strip, But, and IDP refine and update the environmental concerns that emerge in 1982, Janine, dramatizing states monopolized by capital and manipulating climate change in pursuit of profit and further power.
19LeopCorp’s GrottoLotto enacts such manipulation: “The winning ball’s nine propelling countries will each receive an SPP, a Sustainable Planet Prize,” consisting of a “bespoke GrottoLotto windmill” that will be “set in place by US Marine Chinook helicopter” (Aberdein 2009, 206). Debord links environmental damage to the “overdeveloped economy which turns everything – even spring water and city air – into economic goods” (Debord 2004, 84), and the “Calving Glaciers” spectacle incorporates advertising for “Mountain Heart,” a brand of spring water owned by William Swink II, Lord Provost of Aberdeen, LeopCorp’s top council contact (Aberdein 2009, 24; 36; 83-84). The Swink family’s history of profiting from the area’s resources emerges in the recovered memories of Peem, an amnesiac Lucy befriends. As a young man in 1968, Peem overheard Swink’s father meeting with a US senator to discuss production logistics of both spring water and North Sea oil and agreeing that “publicly-owned real estate does need to be managed creatively” (Aberdein 2009, 99). In the novel’s present, Peem takes a temporary job at an Uberdeen symposium for global mineral water executives, where he notes the paradoxically elaborate emphasis on unadulterated simplicity that forms a “litany of commodity” around the product (Aberdein 2009, 171-172). “I felt I was drowning amongst these people,” he remarks (Aberdein 2009, 181), figuring the sophisticated promotion of resource consumption – by those with privileged access – as a metaphorical disaster that may hasten literal ones.
20Green living is even more entrenched as the preserve, and exchange commodity, of elites in But and IDP. Fitt depicts a world where the effects of environmental damage have been normalized, yet not neutralized, under much the same neoliberal system of state power harnessed to private interests that permitted them to develop in the first place. The description of the 2039 floods casts responsibility onto global institutions:
Maist island cities at yon time were quarter-feenished hulks roostin on scaffoldin aside state capitals. The World Bank had gret loudly for their construction efter the Lomonosov Rig […] had cowped three year afore Ross, inundatin Bangladesh, Holland, and the lands o the Mississippi basin. But the island cities’ price tag flegged multi-national budgets in Frankfurt an New York an when parliaments jaloused that Lomonosov wid dae nae mair herm than wipe oot a puckle coastal nations, they sned the flow o siller.
Howanever, they were soon jigging tae a different tune […] [a]s the radge weather sent shock tsunamis skitin throu cities an continental plains. (Fitt 2000, 10-11)
21This description evokes the failures of imagination or anticipation that Ghosh warns about, and the narrative indicates that the changed environment – bringing extreme heat as well as potential further flooding – remains an elemental threat that is barely contained, even though its economic effects are being managed. The status of Danes and Norwegians as refugees living in oil-fuelled “favelas” after the destruction of their “hame-canton” by supertyphoon Genghis five years prior (Fitt 2000, 56-57) represents another glimpse of a seemingly unthinkable future, suggesting that even citizens of today’s progressive nations will have no guarantees of lasting privilege. In the novel’s present, another storm, Hurricane Elvis, brings chaos even as it provides Paolo with cover as he escapes towards the Drylands to confront his father.
22The tenacious young Ceilidh officer, Vermont, who is sent to monitor Paolo after his escape is introduced through her empathy for victims of Elvis, which capsizes an entire Parish: “Vermont sometimes couldna thole Port’s cauld uncouthie character. She hadna ever been on Selkirk but the loss o sae mony kenspeckle strangers made her hert as sair as if somebody had stobbed a peen through it” (Fitt 2000, 92). Pointing to the disproportionate effects of climate instability on ordinary people, this response takes in earnest Port’s Constitutional protection of human life. However, the official stance is closely linked to the theocratic assumptions behind the designation of the 2039-40 climate disasters as “God’s Flood.” Evoking exactly the kind of punitive deity that Gray’s McLeish rejects, this label downplays human, earthly influences on the global environment and deflects scrutiny from the Port Authority’s detached, calculating approach to environmental threats.
23IDP: 2043 is the starkest of the four novels in its depiction of the convergence of corporate and environmental menace and the uneven allocation of sustainable resources. Looking back to Cait’s experience before her firing, the third chapter, by Adam Murphy, delineates alternative possibilities the Sky Farm represents. After Cait responds contemptuously to Dan’s touting of the structure’s “aspirational” values, he takes her to the top of the City Tower, conceding that the project is “pandering to some rich do-gooders’ egos” but insisting that their investment will eventually support “actual make-a-difference work” (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 75; 79). A full-page overview captures the tower’s commanding physical aspect but also helps evoke the idealism the structure stands for, and Dan goes on to speak vertiginously of his hopes that “thousands” of Sky Farms could sustain everyone in post-flood Scotland (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 80-81; 83). But the minimalistic Chapter 5, written by Mina and illustrated by Barroux, traces Dan’s growing disillusionment with the project, and the final chapter reveals the Sky Farm Board’s ruthless instrumentalization of his middle-class utopianism (a naïve vision of making “green” living universally available) in the narrow interests of a deterministic brand of environmentalism that treats most humans as expendable resources.
24But n Ben, Strip, and IDP all feature climactic raids by protagonists on the strongholds of dystopian overlords, yet all three narratives avoid facile suggestions that heroic individual actions can decisively overcome either harsh regimes or hostile environments, much less the two in combination. At the same time, these raids dramatize the principle that active resistances to political abuse and remediation of environmental dangers are possible.
25After epic journeys to But n Ben, Paolo and Vermont join forces to defeat both The Diamond and Vermont’s corrupt superior, Craw, who is implicated in the gangster’s machinations. However, a larger challenge to the regime remains beyond the scope of the narrative. The final chapter takes the melancholy perspective of the medical centre worker who cremates Nadia’s body, and Fitt’s narrative leaves its world – and its Scotland – in a limbo state of bare, uneasy survival. As Thomas Christie summarizes, Fitt “does not posit any comfortable solutions” (Christie 2013, 100). However, the depiction of the intractable natural environment that Christie aptly highlights (Christie 2013, 104) illustrates how But n Ben anticipates Ghosh’s challenge to the still-influential belief that nature is “moderate and orderly” (Ghosh 2016, 22) and his questioning of assumptions that (neo)liberal-capitalist management of climate change will protect the many as well as the few.
26Strip the Willow’s conclusion is more exuberant but equally open to interpretation. When GrottoLotto (held on May Day) turns chaotic under its own absurdity plus local protests, Rookie Marr reacts foolishly and discredits himself, while Swink, the Lord Provost, calmly decamps for “his Mountain Heart HQ at the summit of Braeriach” (Aberdein 2009, 235). As he does so, the Lord Provost offers disingenuous advice to a doorman: “If I was you, I’d get out too. More tanks are coming, and we folks in the toon have but small power over the likes of them” (Aberdein 2009, 235; original emphasis). Though he himself has summoned the tanks, the politician poses as a powerless ordinary citizen. The episode evokes the covert militarization and securitization that both Jock McLeish and Debord warn about (see Debord 1988, XVIII), and Swink also illustrates the alliance between landed wealth and mobile capital, underscoring how “British” imperial power has long been globalized. Further, Swink’s role implies that resource exploitation may indeed be LeopCorp’s main agenda. However, resistance to the forces LeopCorp and Swink represent is also international, involving an alliance of long-established Aberdonians and more recent migrants. The rebels’ communal dance of Strip the Willow, a traditional Scottish barn dance, is menaced by the arrival of a military helicopter (Aberdein 2009, 251), but the machine holds fire. As the narrative ends, Alison’s daughter Gwen, repaying Marr’s abuse, leads Peem and a Polish worker, Pawel, in a raid on Swink’s Highland water-bottling plant that aims to “clean up the source” (Aberdein 2009, 253) of the city’s problems. The raid may be quixotic, and the suggestion that political corruption and elitist manipulation have environmental origins, as well as environmental consequences, may be figurative, but the idea of dystopia itself as a poisonous physical substance both extends the novel’s attention to literal environmental dangers and links political and environmental resistance.
27IDP’s concluding Chapter 6, by Mary Talbot & Kate Charlesworth, returning to the narrative present immediately after Cait’s escape, is both dramatic and ambiguous. Cait breaks back into the City Tower and with Dan’s help confronts the Board meeting where Gartman has just announced her death. Faced with evidence that Sky Farm’s activities may have accidental or intended lethal consequences, Gartman makes a blandly fascistic admission: “Moving forward, it is quite possible that population reduction to sustainable levels may become corporate strategy” (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 159). However, Cait and Dan persuade the other board members to shift the agricultural operation from toxic experiments with “giant mutant bacon” to sustainable production of alternative food such as insect-based protein bars (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 144, 162-163). The final pages leap ahead to the premiere of “Sky Farm Comes Down to Earth,” a revamped television production in which the enterprise appears to have been democratized, with the snobbish Jools demoted to “[h]elping the local children with a drainage ditch” while Dan and Cait supervise. The final image has a smiling Cait exhorting, “If you want food, let’s get planting” (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 164-165).
28While several of the novel’s favourable reviewers (Smart 2014; Sneddon 2014) found its resolution too neatly optimistic, more challenging readings are possible. Key here is the role of Tom Sayers, the boxer. In Chapter 6, he reappears as Cait forces her way to the Boardroom but is knocked out by Dan before he can make his intentions clear (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 146-147). Chapter 2 has illustrated the working-class roots, and Scots speech patterns, that Sayers shares with Cait (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 49); he represents a fellow worker whose undervalued labour makes her success possible – or a Jock McLeish whose resignation requires self-sacrifice. Cait apparently never knows of Sayers’s role; still more glaringly absent in the final pages are any sanctions Gartman receives for his crimes. More moderate Board members appear motivated mainly by “major concerns about profitability” (Barroux, Berry, Charlesworth, McDaid, Mills, Mina, Morris, Murphy, Talbot, Welsh, 2014, 158), and a general reference to “safeguarding our futures” is the closest approach to acknowledging environmental challenges that may be beyond corporate management (Mina et al. 2014, 162). These gaps and ambiguities raise the distinct possibility that Cait will be co-opted by a money-driven agenda that remains in control of this particular animal farm.
29Arranged chronologically, by temporal setting rather than publication date, Strip The Willow, IDP: 2043, and But n Ben A-Go-Go construct a particularly foreboding narrative of possible futures for Scotland and the planet. Their depictions of corporate interests persistently exploiting both natural environments and climate change strikingly anticipate Ghosh’s critique of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Pointing out its reliance on terms “such as stakeholder, […] public and private participation, technology development, and so on,” Ghosh argues that this document’s rhetoric indicates “that its intention, and the essence of what it has achieved, is to create yet another neo-liberal frontier where corporations, entrepreneurs, and public officials will be able to join forces in enriching each other” (Ghosh 2016, 156). In turn, a 2020 article by Dominic Hinde sets forth specifically Scottish concerns about the prospect of this kind of governing alliance – even with the broadly progressive Scottish National Party in power in Edinburgh – attempting to treat “environmental crisis,” alongside rising economic inequality, as a problem to be managed through normal, already-established means and genres of thought and action (Hinde 2020, 5). Hinde goes on, though, to point to the capacities of fiction to complicate utopian narratives treating Scottish autonomy and sustainability as naturally linked (Hinde 2020, 7). In contrast, a 2021 opinion piece by an influential Scottish journalist, the late Ian Jack, asks whether novels may be “useless” against climate change (Jack, 2021). But n Ben (for example) has been in circulation for over 20 years while the crisis has escalated. Yet, Jack’s central contention that “[t]he idea of a better future has been replaced by one of a future not as bad as it could be” (Jack, 2021) might suggest the growing and salutary influence of Ghosh’s view that capitalist-utopian belief in endless improvement has been a major obstacle for efforts to mitigate climate change.
30Hope, in But n Ben, Strip, and IDP, lies especially in work. Compelled labour is of course central in very many dystopias, and a text that assigns its audience a passive role in its system might itself be considered dystopian. Moylan accordingly stresses the valuable anti-quietism of narratives that offer “open endings to be resolved by readers” (Moylan 2020, 182), as 1982 Janine, But n Ben, Strip, and IDP all do. These novels also cue constructive interpretative work through their distinctive features. 1982, Janine forces readers to navigate its protagonist’s troubled mind but then invites them to imagine his more hopeful future. But n Ben’s immersive and inventive Scots, as Lisa Harrison suggests, deters “lazy, auto-pilot reading” (Harrison 2011, 159), just as does Strip the Willow’s allusive wordplay. IDP’s image-word combinations cue close attention, and the departures from linearity, plus the use of a different writer/artist combination for each chapter, also encourage consideration rather than simple consumption of the narrative. A 2009 Scotsman review of Strip praises the novel’s “fine sense that the freedom to imagine underpins a great many other freedoms.” Urging heightened awareness and confrontation of dire possibilities, all four books credit readers with the responsibility to imagine alternatives to toxic futures that may ensue from present patterns. While no individual work can be considered a sovereign remedy for climate change, or neoliberalism, collectively these novels make metatopian space for voluntary interpretative efforts – especially in exploring challenges of distinguishing satire from prediction and of confronting daunting limits to future human possibilities that will come from nature as well as politics. In the Introduction to their 2022 collection Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New, Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon, Camille Manfredi, and Scott Hames observe that links between literary production and political-social engagement in Scotland have slackened in the years since the “Indyref” of 2014 (Pittin-Hedon, Manfredi, and Hames 2022, 4-5). However, in a wider world where, as Ghosh warns, it is no longer early days for addressing the causes and effects of climate change, the four Scottish novels discussed in this essay take on renewed currency.