Imagining the Anthropocene: The Weird Ecology of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy

Abstract

Some critics and writers have noted a scarcity of works of fiction dealing with climate change, and fewer confronting the challenges it poses for aesthetic representation. Some have gone so far as to argue that at the heart of the climate crisis lies a crisis of culture and of the imagination. This thesis explores the relationship between 21st-century environmental concerns and the imagination through the crucible of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), arguing that VanderMeer’s experimentations in “weird” ecology work to create new narratives and metaphors for ecological thinking in the Anthropocene. The first chapter discusses environmental philosopher Lawrence Buell’s concept of the environmental imagination and contextualizes that within the current climate crisis to which VanderMeer’s trilogy is responding. The second focuses on the strange ecosystem presented in the trilogy, Area X, as a hyperbolized model for imagining ecological entanglement and the relationship between humans and the environment in the Anthropocene. The third explores the various modes of responding to contemporary environmental crises represented by the characters in VanderMeer’s trilogy, and the role of the environmental imagination in these responses. I conclude that VanderMeer’s trilogy is an example of contemporary eco-fiction which strives to overcome the traditional boundaries of how we imagine ecology and seeks to create new paths for the imagining of (and responding to) the environmental conditions of the Anthropocene.