In “Narrating Nature,” Erin James considers how modern literature and theory grapple with the broader timescales, planetary conceptions of space, and inhuman perspectives that representations of climate change demand. Focusing on the “unnatural nature” of climate change, James undertakes a narratological analysis two recent “cli-fi” novels, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Maintaining a pedagogical emphasis, the chapter foregrounds strategies teachers can use to help students understand and write about climate change. The chapter ultimately considers how narrative can both perpetuate and subvert dominant ideologies about nature and how changing nature is changing the texture of modern narratives.

This chapter shows how the pervasive commodification of living tissue in biomedicine intensifies a neoliberal hegemony that encourages us to value all life in strictly economic metrics. Drawing on Hannah Landecker’s work on how cell cultures enabled the separation of living tissues from organisms, this chapter examines texts that narrate the experience of those whose bodies are targeted for extraction of vitality. Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves are both set in a future in which disenfranchised people have nothing beyond their biology to bring to market. Dibbell’s novel concerns clones and it deconstructs reactionary discourse that valorize the “natural,” showing how a fixed and unchanging notion of proper humanity reinscribes racialized divisions into valued and dispossessed classes of people. Dimaline’s novel literalizes the extraction of vitality in a grim future where the settler colonial state harvests bone marrow from indigenous peoples. Finally, Claire North’s 84K envisions a future UK in which all governance has been replaced by actuarial metrics, entirely displacing ethical and legal systems that adjudicate questions of justice with an accounting of financial gains and losses.