Fire and Snow

Marc Dipaolo

Description

Fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the mid-twentieth-century's triple threats of fascism, utilitarianism, and industrial capitalism. In Fire and Snow, Marc DiPaolo explores how the apocalyptic fantasy tropes and Christian environmental ethics of the Middle-earth and Narnia sagas have been adapted by a variety of recent writers and filmmakers of "climate fiction," a growing literary and cinematic genre that grapples with the real-world concerns of climate change, endless wars, and fascism, as well as the role religion plays in easing or escalating these apocalyptic-level crises. Among the many other well-known climate fiction narratives examined in these pages are Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, Mad Max, and Doctor Who. Although the authors of these works stake out ideological territory that differs from Tolkien's and Lewis's, DiPaolo argues that they nevertheless mirror their predecessors' ecological concerns. The Christians, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who penned these works agree that we all need to put aside our cultural differences and transcend our personal, socioeconomic circumstances to work together to save the environment. Taken together, these works of climate fiction model various ways in which a deep ecological solidarity might be achieved across a broad ideological and cultural spectrum.
Acknowledgments

Introduction. Reclaiming Enemy-Occupied Territory: Saving Middle-earth, Narnia, Westeros, Panem, Endor, and Gallifrey

1. Star Wars, Hollywood Blockbusters, and the Cultural Appropriation of J. R. R. Tolkien

2. Of Treebeard, C. S. Lewis, and the Aesthetics of Christian Environmentalism

3. The Time Lord, the Daleks, and the Wardrobe

4. Noah’s Ark Revisited: 2012 and Magic Lifeboats for the Wealthy

5. Race and Disaster Capitalism in Parable of the Sower, The Strain, and Elysium

6. Eden Revisited: Ursula K. Le Guin, St. Francis, and the Ecofeminist Storytelling Model

7. MaddAddam and The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood and Dystopian Science Fiction as Current Events

8. Ur-Fascism and Populist Rebellions in Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road

9. Tolkien’s Kind of Catholic: Suzanne Collins, Empathy, and The Hunger Games

10. The Cowboy and Indian Alliance: Collective Action against Climate Change in A Song of Ice and Fire and Star Trek

11. What Next? Robert Crumb’s “A Short History of America” and Ending the Game of Thrones

Epilogue. Who Owns the Legacy of J. R. R. Tolkien?

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• USA
• United States of America
• Reino Unido
• Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Science fiction
• Mathematics
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• États-Unis
• Fantasy
• Science
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 11 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438470474
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

F IRE AND S NOW
F IRE AND S NOW
C LIMATE F ICTION FROM THE I NKLINGS TO G AME OF T HRONES
M ARC D I P AOLO
Cover image “Ice on Fire” photographed by John Perry.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Di Paolo, Marc author.
Title: Fire and snow : climate fiction from The inklings to Game of thrones / Marc DiPaolo.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017038441 | ISBN 9781438470450 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438470474 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction, English—History and criticism. | Science fiction, English—History and criticism. | Fantasy fiction, American—History and criticism. | Science fiction, American—History and criticism. | Climatic changes in literature. | Environmentalism in literature.
Classification: LCC PR830.F3 D45 2018 | DDC 823/.0876609—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038441
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No human being should ever have to fear for his own life because of political or religious beliefs. We are all in this together, my friends: the rich, the poor, the red, white, black, brown and yellow. We share responsibility for Mother Earth and those who live and breathe upon her … never forget that.
—Leonard Peltier
If we don’t put aside our enmities, we will die.
Then it doesn’t matter whose skeleton sits on the Iron Throne.
—Ser Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham), Game of Thrones
If we burn, you burn with us!
—Katniss Everdeen, “The Girl Who Was on Fire,” to President Corialanus Snow in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay
For Bill Murphy, Brian Stevens, and Mitchell Sherry
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Reclaiming Enemy-Occupied Territory: Saving Middle-earth, Narnia, Westeros, Panem, Endor, and Gallifrey
1. Star Wars , Hollywood Blockbusters, and the Cultural Appropriation of J. R. R. Tolkien
2. Of Treebeard, C. S. Lewis, and the Aesthetics of Christian Environmentalism
3. The Time Lord, the Daleks, and the Wardrobe
4. Noah’s Ark Revisited: 2012 and Magic Lifeboats for the Wealthy
5. Race and Disaster Capitalism in Parable of the Sower, The Strain, and Elysium
6. Eden Revisited: Ursula K. Le Guin, St. Francis, and the Ecofeminist Storytelling Model
7. MaddAddam and The Handmaid’s Tale : Margaret Atwood and Dystopian Science Fiction as Current Events
8. Ur-Fascism and Populist Rebellions in Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road
9. Tolkien’s Kind of Catholic: Suzanne Collins, Empathy, and The Hunger Games
10. The Cowboy and Indian Alliance: Collective Action against Climate Change in A Song of Ice and Fire and Star Trek
11. What Next? Robert Crumb’s “A Short History of America” and Ending the Game of Thrones
Epilogue. Who Owns the Legacy of J. R. R. Tolkien?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
[C]lassics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on culture or cultures they passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).
—Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?”
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
—Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast
Authors need a lot of emotional, intellectual, and financial support to find the time, energy, and inspiration to craft a monograph. I owe a great debt to everyone who helped me see this project to its conclusion. I would like to begin by thanking the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies for funding my research for this book with a 2015 Junior Scholar Grant. I am especially grateful to the close friends I have made through SWCRS while serving on the presidential line of the American Academy of Religion-SW, including Katherine Downey, Allen Redmon, Darren Middleton, Rachel Toombs, Joerg Rieger, and B. J. Parker. I would also like to thank theologian Robin Meyers for lending me the use of his cabin in Colorado to get away from it all and write, and Laura Schmidt, archivist at the Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, for locating research materials regarding Treebeard and Lewis’s alleged plagiarism of Tolkien’s Númenor.
My friends and former colleagues Karen Schiler, Brooke Hessler, and Marc Lucht deserve my heartfelt gratitude for introducing me to A Song of Ice and Fire and for reassuring me that my somewhat unusual vision of C. S. Lewis was spot on. They helped me learn to love the fantasy genre more than I ever had, completing a transformation in my thinking begun by my old college roommate Bill Murphy, now a visiting assistant professor of history at SUNY Oswego. He introduced me to Lewis through urging me to read The Great Divorce , and assured me time and again over the years that I would love The Silmarillion thanks to my research into medieval cosmology and The Cosmographia at SUNY Geneseo. Bill was one of the manuscript reviewers for this book, as was Arrash E. Allahyar, Nicholas Birns, Catherine DiPaolo, David C. Downing, Robert Colin Earle, Salwa Khoddam, Kenneth Kimbrough, and Janine Surmick. (And Tory Doherty did some mean typesetting for me.) Meanwhile, the following people recommended some truly excellent sources that I may not have found otherwise: Sofia Ahlberg, Kate Henley Averett, Amit Rahul Baishya, Ashley Bellet, Nancy Blankenship, Jim Buss, Bryan Cardinale-Powell, Rosanne Carlo, Susan M. Comfort, Matthew T. Dickerson, Daniel Farris, Tracy Floreani, Christopher Gonzalez, Erik Heine, Joe Jenen, Abigail Keegan, Marsha Keller, Joseph E. Kraus, Diana Maltz, Erin McCoy, Joe Meinhart, Frederic Murray, Rebecca Wisor Muszynski, Benjamin Myers, John Nelka, Santiago Piñón, Jo Pressimone, Stephen Prilliman, Rob Roensch, Nathan Ross, Amrita Sen, and Jerry Vigna.
My participation in two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College Teachers helped lay the groundwork for this book by exposing me to key concepts and sources that I employed in this monograph. They included “The Decadent 1890s: English Literary Culture and the Fin de Siècle,” directed by Joseph Bristow at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (June 22–July 24, 2009) and “Adaptation and Revision: The Example of Great Expectations” directed by Hilary Schor and Paul Saint-Amour at the University of California, Santa Cruz (July 1–27, 2007).
As I developed the idea for this book, I taught two sections of an honors junior/senior seminar at Oklahoma City University called Apocalyptic and Dystopian Literature in which I assigned many of the texts I examine in these pages. The students who enrolled were among the finest—the smartest, most engaged, and biggest-hearted—I’ve met during my nearly two decades teaching college classes. I would like to thank the director of the OCU Honors Program, Karen Youmans, for asking me to teach the course (and for just being her fantastic self). I also owe thanks to the many honors students whose fascinating insights helped stoke my enthusiasm to commit to this book: Megan Adkins, Kristine Bachicha, Ronald Bercaw, Madeline Boehlke, Noelle Bradley, R. E. Darby-McClure, Tiesha N. Davis, Audrey C. Harris, Sylvia Hayes, Kathryn Hirsch, Erin N. Langer, Kaitlin Moews, Eleanor Nason, Dana Nicole, Felicity Owens, Blakeley Pearson, Katie R. Schneider, Dylan Smith-Sutton, Rayne Sofley, Victoria Trujillo, Kyle E. Wardwell, Ken O. Williams, Kathryn Wonderly, and Damaila L. Young.
At this point, I am still getting to know my new colleagues at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, but I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to those who have made me feel welcome already, including James South, vice president of Academic Affairs; Peter Grant, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Kelley Logan, chair of the Department of Language and Literatures; and English faculty members Fred Alsberg, John Bradshaw, Kevin Collins, Christi Cook, Victoria Gaydosik, Tee Kesnan, Denise Landrum-Geyer, Amanda Smith-Chesley, Taylor Verkler, and Camilo Peralta.
I would also like to thank my journalism mentors at The Staten Island Advance, Tom Wrobleski, Paul McPolin, Rob Wolf, Eileen AJ Connelly, and Robin Eisner; my spiritual gurus, Tom Bierowski, Christian Matuschek, and James J. Mayzik, and my teachers, Frank Battaglia, Bill Cook, Daniel Fuchs, Jim Hala, Ronald Herzman, Janice Katz, Wes Kennison, Wendy Kolmar, Dennis Lord, Nadine Ollman, Blandford Parker, Anne-Marie Reynolds, Michael Shugrue, Gary Towsley, and Jim Wakeham.
Also, the world must be made aware: Dr. Preethi Krishnan is the best physician on the planet! She was the first doctor to ever get my ridiculous body to function somewhat properly.
Finally, I want to express my love and appreciation for my wonderful family: my wife Stacey, my children Keira and Quentin, my brother Brian, and my parents Ted and Cathy.
In