The topic of climate change is epic in every sense of the word. Established conventions of the novel simply may not be equal to the task of representing the enormity of the issues we currently face, and climate change fiction authors are radically refashioning the novel. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future shakes the genre with its innumerable narrators and points of view, nonlinear narratives, radically weakened characterizations, dizzying narrative jolts and spasms, and its wealth of mechanically scripted hard science. In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh offers a more engaging narrative with a more passive science that listens not only to the data but also to local knowledges. Drawing on the work of Vandana Shiva and Macarena Gómez-Barris and building in the spaces opened up by the 2010 Configurations issue “Ecocriticism and Biology” (one of which has come to be known as “the blue humanities”), this article shows that how we conceptualize science will in large part determine the impact of the narrativization of scientific data on literary genres. Focusing on a facet of “the blue humanities,” this article argues that increasingly, there is serious attention—in both theoretical and fictional work dealing with climate change—to questions about what happens to biological systems and microfauna when aquatic systems are disrupted, to ways in which our oceans are becoming slimy, and to what our responses to this sliming may mean, questions that are vital to how we will proceed and how literary genres will fare.

气候变化这个话题从任何意义上来说都是史诗般的。小说的既定惯例可能根本无法胜任代表我们当前面临的严重问题的任务，气候变化小说作者正在从根本上重塑小说。金·斯坦利·罗宾逊的《未来部》以其无数的叙述者和观点、非线性叙事、极度弱化的人物塑造、令人眼花缭乱的叙事震动和痉挛，以及大量机械化的硬科学，震撼了这一类型。在《饥饿潮》中，阿米塔夫·戈什（Amitav Ghosh）用更被动的科学提供了更具吸引力的叙述，这种科学不仅倾听数据，还倾听当地知识。借鉴 Vandana Shiva 和 Macarena Gómez-Barris 的作品，并在 2010 年《配置》杂志“生态批评与生物学”（其中之一被称为“蓝色人文学科”）所开辟的空间中进行构建，本文表明：我们如何概念化科学将在很大程度上决定科学数据的叙事对文学类型的影响。本文着眼于“蓝色人文”的一个方面，认为在涉及气候变化的理论和虚构作品中，人们越来越认真地关注当水生系统受到破坏时生物系统和微型动物会发生什么的问题，我们的海洋以何种方式变得粘稠，以及我们对这种粘稠的反应可能意味着什么，这些问题对于我们将如何前进以及文学流派如何发展至关重要。