Fossil Fictions

This chapter explores twentieth-century fiction that registers how the extractive relationship between land and people described in Chapter 1 developed during the twentieth century. The first part of the chapter focuses on the specific emergencies that were connected to the turn to coal in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US, and the final section discusses how the militarization of oil energies in the US gave rise to an increasingly self-assured, but also progressively anxious, climate narrative that worries about both biospheric breakdown and world-system transformation. The chapter introduces the concepts of coal frontier narrative and Petrowar fiction as textual modes that contribute strongly to the formation of the American Climate Emergency Narrative.