GSI Seminar - A History of Storms – Creative Writing Earth System Project - Ben Smith

In this seminar I will discuss some of the conceptual and methodological issues that I face as a fiction author attempting to write about (and in) the Anthropocene. What happens to the causality that fictional narratives rely on, when our most insignificant actions have global consequences? What happens to traditional notions of character and agency when we are living in a world that we have shaped, but over which we as individuals have no control? What happens when we attempt to impose order on what philosopher Timothy Morton calls ‘the daunting, indeed horrifying, coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology’?

As a way through this, I will explore some of the reframings and renamings of the Anthropocene that have taken place in the Humanities in recent years, and which have led to a shift in thinking about the Anthropocene less as an abstract, totalising concept and more as a network of interlinked concrete, material histories – no less complex and bewildering, but with identifiable and, to an extent, traceable (and therefore perhaps writeable) causes and effects.

I will discuss how my own work has responded to this context, through my debut novel Doggerland (4^th Estate, 2019) to my recent collaborative project Ghost Nets and Phantom Islands: Mapping the Anthropocene.  I also hope to use this seminar to talk through some of my ideas for a new project – A History of Storms – which will explore the intersection of historic climate change (in particular the 'Little Ice Age'), the development of climate and weather prediction science, and the emergence of systems of trade, colonialism and globalisation that have gone on to shape and characterise the Anthropocene. 

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