This paper explores how George Turner’s The Sea and Summer utilizes nostalgic
narrative to develop an affective attachment to the climate disaster and instigates, in its narrative, meaningful change. Through a consideration of Svetlana Boym’s reflective nostalgia, the affective response the novel activates, and the affect created by Gothic tropes, I suggest that this combination produces an exemplary response. The narrative presents a frame story set in a distant future after the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, and the bulk of the prescient climate sf novel is presented as a novelistic rendering of this pre-apocalyptic scenario. This combination allows the reader to consider the
temporal scale, producing a medium scale, which allows the reader to grasp the
complexity of the problem without being overwhelmed by its vastness. I argue that rather than exorcising our fears, such literary narratives can make the realities of climate change more present to contemporary readers.