The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction

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In two long-running series by best-selling New Zealand genre author Nalini Singh, the shared problem is climate catastrophe - or rather, fictionalized analogues for it. (81)

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In both her Psy-Changeling universe, with twenty-one novels published between 2006 and 2022, and her Guild Hunter series, with fifteen books published between 2009 and 2022, a world with familiar geographies and broadly recognizable political and economic structures is inhabited by three distinct groups she calls "races." [...] As each series progresses [...], Singh ratchets up the stakes. She grapples with the possibility of large-scale Psy death with the fragmentation of the PsyNet in the Psy-Changeling novels, and the impacts of massive storms, agricultural devastation, and unchecked contagions in the Guild Hunter novels. Both the PsyNet deterioration and the Cascade have intensified dramatically in Singh's books as our real-life planet's dire situation has become increasingly clear. These fictional threats present roundabout means of both confronting climate change's spectacularly destructive potential and imagining responses to the threat it poses. (82)

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Singh's novels do not, of course, provide readers with precise directives for saving humanity or the planet on which we still reside. Popular romance, whatever its merits, is not a guide to action and paranormal and fantasy novels involve, by definition, a world that differs radically from our own. But speculative fiction, as Butler (2000) pointed out decades ago, still attends to topics and themes relevant to authors and readers who live in this world. Given the immediacy of anthropogenic climate change, it's to be expected that novels of all genres increasingly reflect, directly or slant, the urgent and extreme realities we confront. It is not the job of genre authors to tell us how to fix the mess we're in. It is, though, our job as readers to take seriously the possibilities fiction provides to think through the crucial issues of our time, including climate catastrophe and all it portends. (85)