Marian Womack’s The Swimmers (2021) explores a future where climate change has become so severe that a large portion of humanity has escaped to an “Upper Settlement”, an enormous space station that revolves around the Earth. This is a common trope in speculative fiction where the space station is the ultimate gated community (see Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013) and Robert Rodriquez Alita: Battle Angel (2019), based on Yukito Kishiro’s manga Gunnm for other examples). In Swimmers, the people living in the Upper Settlement have begun terraforming the Earth, producing what is known as the “Green Winter” when formerly arid land is very quickly colonized by forest, killing people living on this land. It is a remarkable novel in many ways inspired, as the author acknowledges, by both VanderMeer’s New Weird Southern Reach Trilogy and by South Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s postcolonial rewrite of Jane Ayre.
The Swimmers’ world-building is remarkable and Womack also does a great job showing how climate change is experienced in very different ways by different groups of people: how for some it is a horrific reality and for others an opportunity. For a detailed and enthusiastic review of The Swimmers, check out The Fantasy Hive.
What is especially interesting from the perspective of the Future Food Imaginaries project is how clearly the novel connects catastrophic climate change to the existing food system and unsustainable diets. In one passage, the main character Pearl talks to her childhood friend Eli. The latter is involved in an attempt to create a new and sustainable community outside of the existing unequal social order that reigns both on the surface of the still-polluted planet and in space:
We do not intend to farm animals here, plants only,’ she said, as she played with his muzzle.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Rearing animals for their meat was also one of the ways in which they warmed the atmosphere. Besides, it happens to be the most unproductive way of using land known to man.’
‘Where did you learn all this?’
‘My techie master, he taught me these things.’
Eli explained that right before the green winter, millions of people were starving; but the remaining millions, apparently, went on undeterred, had not given up their frenzy of meat consumption. Only the poor had been affected by the shortages of water and food, the bad air, the forced migration, malnutrition and death.
‘The ultra-rich continued evolving their technology as if nothing that was going on was their problem. First, they had escaped into exclusive compounds; then into orbiting houses; and lastly, into the ring itself. With time, half of us had been abandoned here.’
This is a passage that makes very plain first how a certain way of eating is central to the climate crisis, and then how this way of eating marks (indeed enables) the social and economic boundaries that structure the existing food system. This story is not told as often as it needs to be. If climate fiction is going provide roadways to sustainable futures, as Imogene Malpas has suggested in the Lancet , this ought to be central to the plot of all such texts.
I don’t know quite why living on a space station would be a good idea. The rich people would have an easier time going to live on an island that they could fortify, or go underground or even build an artificial floating habitat. Almost anything you can imagine is easier than going to live in space. The International Space Station cost over $100 billion to build and takes a few billion a year to maintain. It can only host a handful of people at a time and cannot make it’s own food or air. Space habitats are an interesting topic for writers to explore but you can’t ignore the difficulties or costs.
Apart from living in space the book sounds interesting. In our current world you could easily feed everyone using half the present amount of farming land by increasing the farming of plants. Animal production would have to be cut but we would still be able to eat a modest amount meat and dairy. 25 million km2 of land, nearly 3 x the area of the United States, would then be available to be turned back into forest or other natural landscapes. Of course it’s hard to imagine how you could actually make this happen in the face of political and economic objections