Radically hopeful dystopian climate fiction: Exploring social dreaming, temporal re-sensitisation, and katharsis in Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne

This article applies Jonathan Lear’s concept of radical hope to dystopian climate fiction, using Jeff Vandermeer’s weird fiction novel Borne as a vehicle to explore the intra- and extra-textual impacts of revivals in dystopian climate fiction. Fuelled by the protagonist’s actions as a radically hopeful individual, Borne’s revival is weird and uncanny, subverting dominant Messianic and redemptive concepts of revival to reframe it as a critical act (Ursula Heise, L. T. Sargant, Tom Moylan, and Rafaella Baccolini), thereby enabling radically hopeful katharsis and temporal re-sensitisation in the reader (Kyle P. Whyte). This article argues that in dystopian climate fiction, not all revivals are not to be taken literally but, supported by evidence from empirical ecocriticism (Matthew Schneider-Mayerson) and psychoanalysis (W. G. Lawrence), are cathartic acts of social dreaming on the part of writers and readers alike. n this way—far from being promises of utopia, comfort, or even continuity—fictive radically hopeful revivals in dystopian climate fiction can support a needed examination of temporality, dreams, and impermanence to redefine what it means to be radical, courageous, and honourable in the face of the climate crisis.