The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

This thesis employs practice-led research to add to this fictive exploration, comprised of a work of mosaic science fiction and exegesis.

Australian writers are using speculative fiction and “climate fiction” (cli-fi) to explore possible ramifications for their island nation, and the world, in a future affected by man-made climate change. With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now over 400 parts per million, Earth’s ecosphere is sliding over the edge of irrevocable destabilisation. The Earth has entered a new epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene, in which the actions of human beings are changing the global ecosystem in dramatic and potentially catastrophic ways. The resulting literature has the potential to recruit the reader into occupying a position of radical, critical subjectivity-one which not only understands the malleable, constructed nature of social reality, but understands their own part in its reproduction, and the potential they wield, along with others, to alter it. Culminating in the work of China Miéville, this thesis finds that the effort to represent the “break” requires techniques and tropes taken from various genres, in order to capture the becoming-the producing and being-produced-of the world, of social structures, of communities and of subjectivities. Beginning with the development of a new political theoretical approach to fantastic literature, this thesis seeks to identify, through a series of close readings, the mechanisms by which this ideological work is performed by sf and fantasy texts, and then seeks to identify alternative representational techniques and strategies that overcome these limitations, allowing the societal imagination to think communal political agency, and move beyond the imaginative confines of the neoliberal horizon. This thesis takes contemporary neoliberalism’s transformation of social structures and subjectivities to be driving this specific limiting effect on the ability to imagine alternative patterns of social relations and on the scope and potential of the imagination as such. It argues that these representations of agency, conceptually limited to individual action, occlude the reality and possibility of communal political agency.

This thesis considers this apparent impossibility to be a product of an ontology of atomised individualism that informs texts from mainstream Hollywood blockbusters to more putatively radical works of literature. The transformation of utopian impulse to utopian programme is traditionally understood to present a representational impossibility-a “break”-and to require a shift into a less rigorous fantastic or magical representational register. This thesis investigates the limitations and capacities of genres of the fantastic in their ability to represent the “break” between agency and structure, specifically the transformation of the former into the latter on the scale of radical social and political change.

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison