Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Pauline Heinrichs
Guest: Carl Death, author of "African Climate Futures" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Date: February 16, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores Carl Death's book African Climate Futures, which investigates how climate futures are envisioned by African authors and communities and how these imaginaries interact with politics, policy, and society. The discussion delves into African climate fiction, afrofuturism, policy imaginaries, and the interplay of materiality, spatiality, and temporality in climate narratives. It highlights the significance of centering African perspectives both in speculative literature and in climate strategy, and considers the power of stories to critique, reflect, and shape possible futures.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why This Book and Why Now?

• The Rise of Climate Fiction (Clifi):
  • Carl highlights the explosion of climate fiction globally, including by African authors, as a response to escalating climate anxieties and crises.
  • However, African contributions are often marginalized except for rare accolades (e.g., Abidare winning a clifi prize).
• Motivation:
  • Carl sought to counteract the dominance of stereotypical or dystopian depictions of Africa by showcasing diverse, radical African visions.
  • Personal factors: The shift to research amenable to family life led Carl to deeper literary exploration and reflection on storytelling.

"I wanted to use this research to explore some of the more diverse, interesting, challenging, countercultural, radical stories that emerge from African authors about visions of climate futures."
— Carl Death (04:38)

2. Methodology: Fiction and Policy Side-by-Side

• Carl's book integrates analysis of policy documents and fiction, treating both as equally valid sources for understanding how climate futures are conceptualized and debated.
• This approach is relatively novel, given mainstream academic reluctance to value fiction as much as policy texts.
• Policy futures and climate fiction can both be "fantastical," pointing to the need for interdisciplinary analysis.

"Sometimes these [policy strategies] seem just as fantastical or even more fantastical as some of the science fiction texts."
— Carl Death (08:55)

3. Theoretical Core: The Imaginary

• Distinguishing Imagination from Imaginary:
  • Imagination = individual capacity; Imaginary = social, stabilized, institutionally supported ‘mental pictures’.
  • African climate imaginaries embody visions that can challenge or uphold existing power structures (e.g., ‘whiteness’ as an imaginary).
• Power and Politics:
  • Imaginaries are linked to policy and culture and have material and institutional effects.

"Imaginaries are not just something that exists in our mind abstracted from the material world."
— Carl Death (14:58)

4. Limitations & Potentials of Policy Strategies

• African long-term strategies for net-zero and climate adaptation are ambitious but function more as "fetishistic substitutes" for real action.
• They often lack concrete pathways or recognition of diverse experiences and material realities.
• Climate fiction offers a richer palette for imagining ways of life, justice, and transition beyond static policy documents.

"They don’t seem to live up to the term strategy for me in the sense of a political intervention or evaluation of strengths and weaknesses..."
— Carl Death (17:11)

5. Materiality and Storytelling

• Climate change has an irreducible materiality, yet representation shapes action and understanding.
• Narratives by political leaders or authors have ripple effects, affecting real policies and public attitudes.
• Stories, including those with non-human perspectives, open new ways to grapple with these materialities.

"Representations have political effects and hence they have material effects as well."
— Carl Death (23:09)

6. Why Read Climate Fiction? What Does It Do?

• Fiction is not just escapism—it can foster empathy, challenge common sense, democratize climate discourse, and serve as a diagnostic mirror to society.
• It’s not necessarily propagandistic or instrumental; fiction that merely "communicates the science" is limited in political power.
• Critical theory benefits from speculative art, which can spotlight both utopian possibilities and dystopian warnings.

"Stories can reinforce inequitable power relations... they can hide truths and mystify as well as be fertile resources for critique."
— Carl Death (32:00)

7. African Self-Writing & Afrofuturism

• Draws on Achille Mbembe and others: Storytelling as self-reflection, resistance, and decolonial practice.
• Afrofuturism/African futurism centers African places, characters, and context—offering alternative temporalities and challenging Western linear notions of progress.

"[Mbembe] draws on Frantz Fanon to call for a resurgence of epic stories which will help imagine new ways of being in the world."
— Carl Death (34:01)

8. Spatiality and Temporality in Climate Fiction

• African climate fiction often flips the Western trope of "distant, dangerous Africa": deserts and other spaces become sites of shelter, beauty, and complexity.
• Temporality is non-linear: past traumas and detritus (social, technological, literal) are ever-present, complicating ideas of progress or transition.
• These narratives interrogate what must be ‘left behind’ and what persists across ages (trauma, waste, violence).

"Rather than... the familiar homey spaces of America being made strange, here we have some apparently inhospitable places like deserts being rendered somehow familiar and homely."
— Carl Death (39:04)

9. On Victory, Reparations, and Utopia

• Visions of victory are complicated—some stories envision post-revolutionary societies marred or shaped by persistent violence and trauma.
• The role of literature is more to unsettle the "inevitability" of current inequalities rather than to provide blueprints.
• Reparations and justice are explored beyond monetary terms; healing involves reckoning with the past and imagining plural, just futures.

"Rather than offering a floor plan of a future utopian society, I think it’s the critical estranging function of this kind of literature that leads us to ask how could things be different in our own worlds."
— Carl Death (52:18)

10. Personal Reflections and What’s Next?

• Carl recommends Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death as a powerful, disturbing, and inspiring entry point to African climate fiction.
• He’s interested in future projects involving how readers and communities engage with climate fiction, and is reflecting on the role of critical theory—and its susceptibility to being co-opted—at a time of crisis.

"It’s sort of like asking me to choose my favorite child... Okorafor’s story, a novel Who Fears Death, is still, I think, one of the most powerful, shocking, awful, but ultimately inspiring stories I’ve come across."
— Carl Death (55:44)

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the marginalization of African climate fiction
  "African characters and plots and authors and stories are kind of marginalized in discussions about global climate politics and global climate futures."
  — Carl Death (03:45)

• On the similarities between policy and fiction
  "Sometimes these [policy] strategies seem just as fantastical or even more fantastical as some of the science fiction texts."
  — Carl Death (08:55)

• On the imaginary versus imagination
  "The imaginary is... a socially shared and to some degree institutionally supported or stabilized mental picture."
  — Carl Death (13:18)

• On the limits of climate policy strategies
  "A literary theorist, Matthew Ito, describes them as fetishistic substitutes for social action."
  — Carl Death (17:43)

• On the radical potential of climate fiction
  "Reading fiction also has an important role... where there are multiple stories being told, listened to, discussed, debated. I think is really important for both the means and ends of any climate transition."
  — Carl Death (30:37)

• On history, temporality, and waste
  "These stories are full of relics and rubbish from the past... and a really interesting kind of exploration of contemporary waste culture and what this might mean to future civilizations as well."
  — Carl Death (44:29)

• On literature as an antidote to political despair
  "...These stories... function as a kind of antidote to how depressing so much of environmental politics, contemporary environmental politics, is."
  — Carl Death (53:32)

Important Segment Timestamps

• Carl discusses the rise and marginalization of African climate fiction: 01:55–05:40
• Methodology: integrating policy and fiction: 06:45–10:15
• Theoretical focus on the imaginary: 11:43–15:34
• Limitations of policy strategies & comparison to fiction: 16:41–20:55
• Materiality of stories and political effects: 22:47–25:58
• Why read climate fiction? Political power of stories: 26:44–32:51
• Afrofuturism & African self-writing: 33:03–35:12
• Spatiality, temporality, and transition narratives: 37:12–43:30
• On reparations, victory, and utopian horizons: 48:19–54:36
• Personal reflections & future work: 55:44–59:19

Memorable Moments

• Host’s reflection on climate fiction as both a mirror and a sharpened diagnostic tool. (32:51)
• Discussion of the “illusion of managerial control” in policy versus the imaginative openness of fiction. (21:39)
• The use of speculative fiction to decenter Global North narratives and foreground African voices and futures. (Entire second half; 33:03 onward)
• Carl’s candid admission of the challenges in reading for pleasure vs. scholarship, emphasizing the lasting impact of particular authors. (55:44)

Conclusion

Carl Death’s African Climate Futures and the accompanying discussion profoundly challenge the marginalization of African voices in climate discourse. Through rigorous juxtaposition of policy and fiction, the conversation illustrates how African and Afrofuturist imaginaries offer multidimensional critiques and visions—disrupting Western-linear time, spatiality, and technological narratives. Stories serve as tools for self-reflection, empathy, and critical theory, refusing fatalism and opening up plural futures. The episode underscores the power of narrative to shape—and resist—the material and political realities of climate change.