Dystopia Revisited: Environmental Issues in Kirsty Logan’s “The Gracekeepers”

Abstract

In the last few decades, dystopian narratives have been increasingly concerned with climate change and its cataclysmic effects, as witnessed by the emergence of a new narrative genre labelled ‘climate fiction’. Within this context, the present paper offers an analysis of Kirsty Logan’s fantasy novel The Gracekeepers (2015), a flooded dystopia in which environmental issues, though not programmatically announced, are nevertheless repeatedly foregrounded in the course of the story. Logan provides an original rethinking of the individual’s relationship with nature and of human presence in the world, in a powerfully imaginative effort to ‘reconfigure the possible’ by overcoming traditional boundaries and privileging a new approach based on inclusiveness and hybridisation.