This chapter explores fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in the twin contexts of American writing after postmodernism and climate change. It argues that Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meat and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity both ultimately undermine the connection between individual agency and effective political action – the former because of its vacillating metamodernist sensibility, and the latter as a consequence of the author’s retreat to realism and undermining of character – but that Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, by gesturing towards a posthumanist perspective, intimates a way through the impasse.

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest”—that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer—would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedents, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

In this chapter, I show how Richard Powers’s 1998 novel Gain symbolically resolves the conflict between transnational corporate “stakeholders” and shareholders. In this way, the novel reveals what is already implicit in such “non-governmental” movements as “stakeholder activism,” which flourished during the 1990s in response to the rise of transnational corporations and right-wing critiques of the state. These non-governmental movements imagine a political field structured not by antagonism but by a plurality of interests, and they assume that these interests can be recognized and coordinated by a government (elected or corporate) that can somehow stand outside this realm of interests. I conclude this chapter by contrasting Gain’s post-political vision, as I call it, with that of Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), a novel about a “nomenclature consultant” hired to rename a small town. The novel’s resolution stages a rejection of the impulse to allow profitability to drive governance, and the discordant historical name selected by the protagonist — “Struggle” — also names the very thing hidden by corporate governance and non-governmental politics.

From questions posed by Wilfred Owen at a Craiglockhart War Hospital talk ‘Do Plants Think?’ and Alan Turing’s rhetorical echo ‘Can Machines Think?’ to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s query ‘Who is the we?’ in a postcolonial Anthropocene, times of crisis goad us into recognising wider sentience and reimagining collective agency. This essay considers how a collective comprised of humans, intelligent botanical or zoological life, and AI might respond to climate crisis using two literary case studies. Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Vandana Singh’s ‘Entanglement’ use contemporary tree science and quantum entanglement, respectively, as innovative, interdisciplinary narrative models. These models also dictate the resolutions of their stories – eventualities of collectivity that may still be evolving, but gesture toward potential climate-changed futures. As this essay argues, these two works offer contrasting visions based on how they deploy AI design potentials, the emotional responses of hope and despair, and the spectre of uncertainty as either a creative space for solutions or a reminder of impossible choices. These stories also pose important questions about corporate power, empathy, and social justice, reminding us that reckoning with human cultural diversity is still the soil from which any more-than-human climate collective must grow.

Mark Goble uses the concept of convergence to explore the implications of formal and temporal compression, economy, and slowness in an age of unprecedented expansion and speedup. Richard McGuire’s Here presents an extreme example of spatial restriction and temporal expansion, while novels by Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, and William Gibson juxtapose ecological, scientific, technological, and theological timespans to human ones in ways that echo postmodern and science fiction precursors, but with very different aims and warnings in mind for denizens of the Anthropocene.