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This article proposes a close reading of Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep, a recent eco-story about water, memory, and survival. Solomon’s work is inspired by a song called “The Deep” from experimental hip-hop group clipping, a dark science fiction tale about the underwater-dwelling descendants of African women thrown off slave ships during the Middle Passage. This imaginative alternate history, or counter-mythology, was invented by the Detroit techno band Drexciya, which, in a series of releases between 1992 and 2002, tells us the story of an underwater realm in the mid-Atlantic, where merpeople and their descendants establish a utopian society in the sea, free from the war and racism on the surface. My analysis uses Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to make productive sense of the gaps in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that silence the voices of enslaved women, listening to the voices of water to imagine not only what was but also what could be. Moreover, this article examines The Deep through a trajectory that moves from the ocean as a space that reproduces death only to the ocean as a generative force for posthuman and multispecies kinship. Using Black hydrocriticism, hydrofeminism, and econarratology, I will argue that this transition is made possible by the “despatialization” of the ocean—a concept introduced by Erin James—where the ocean is conceived not as a fixed or stable environment, but as a space in constant flux, defying stability, and the subsequent immersion in its waters.

This article considers the threat of environmental destruction in YA dystopian imagination by providing a close reading of Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2008) and The Carbon Diaries 2017 (2010) that particularly considers whether these texts espouse radical social change and whether they offer hope or despair. First, the article demonstrates that Lloyd’s novels do not merely portray climate change as a backdrop for human drama, but rather attempt to disentangle the environmental crisis from the post-political sphere (Swyngedouw 2010) where humanity as a whole is under threat. While its protagonists learn to cope with ecological uncertainty and the multidimensional challenges of climate change, indeed, they also come to terms with the social and political dimensions of climate change. Second, the article claims that one of the most important features of these two novels is their attempt to explore the challenges faced by the younger generations when dealing with the contemporary climate challenge. Young people in fact bear a disproportionate burden of the environmental crises the world faces today and are subject to climate anxiety. Moreover, they are not only disproportionately impacted by climate change, but their agency and visions of the future are often placed under erasure discursively. Lloyd’s novels, instead, provide a young adult perspective on the uneven universality of climate change. Finally, the article suggests that the presence of utopian hope at the conclusion of the novels does not provide a consoling and comforting happy ending but helps readers to come to terms with an imperfect world. The article’s close reading of The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017, therefore, attempts to underscore the novels’ projection of a possible future where a radical systemic change is envisaged.