Climate Issues And Social Satire In Ian McEwan’s Solar

Climate fiction,centered on the narrative of anthropogenic climate change,is a new genre in the discourse of environmental crisis.This type of work aims to outline the ethical dilemmas--such as ethical responsibility,inter-species and inter-generational problems--and social changes such as inter-temporal and institutional order brought about by the unprecedented environmental crisis of climate change,which has attracted widespread attention because of the strong realistic views it proposes.In 2010,Mc Ewan published the climate fiction Solar,discussing the current global warming issue in a satirical and playful tone.Different from the crisis writing dominated by disaster narratives and dystopian imagery common in climate fiction,Mc Ewan uses the protagonist Beard’s multiple ethical identities as climate scientist,politician and divorced middle-aged man,as well as his climate research and personal life to show the relations between climate knowledge and power in the economic,political and scientific arenas of British society,as well as the power effects of climate knowledge.In this way,Mc Ewan targets his satire at the deep-seated collapse of social order and moral corruption behind the climate issues.This paper attempts to interpret Solar as a climate fiction and will approach the climate issues depicted based on Foucault’s theory on power and knowledge.This paper focuses on the representation of the relationship between climate knowledge and power in British socio-political,academic,and scientific field in particular.Based on these analysis,this paper works to explore the moral critique of both the British society and individuals underlying the climate issues.This paper argues that Solar provides a new narrative paradigm and thematic focus for the climate fiction genre,and unveils the essence of current controversy over “climate change” in British society--climate knowledge is integrated into the knowledge/power mechanism and serves a power function.The crisis in the world of Solar is written not as an allegory of apocalyptic catastrophe,but as a portrait of the British society with its social disorder and moral crisis.In such a society,climate change is not treated as it should be,but rather is utilized in the battle for power;it is not studied in a meaningful way at all,but is instead reconstructed and integrated in the existing social order as a link in its power network.The objective of this climate-power interpretation of Solar works to provide new enlightenment for the current climate change issue,and a new perspective for the study of Mc Ewan and his works.