Extrapolation and speculation: the Anthropocene in the novel by Daniel Galera, “Tóquio”

Abstract

The article deals with Daniel Galera’s short story entitled “Tóquio”, published in 2021 in the book O Deus das Avencas. The first objective of this paper was to study the inclusion of the Anthropocene into the story, analyzing how climate change is presented by the author, in order to show that Galera (2021) extrapolates the scientific knowledge to create an inhospitable future where the characters live. Later, the paper investigated the plot, intending to explore the speculation over political and social organizations yielded by the spreading of the cybernetics based on contemporary sociological theories. Extrapolation and speculation are both procedures that combine to generate an antiutopian fiction that still depends on the literary conventions of the modern bourgeois novel, despite the presence of the Anthropocene. The final objective of the article was to evince that Galera’s (2021) short story suggests a relatively conservative position as far as the challenges and possibilities of literature in the context of climate catastrophes go.

Keywords:
Anthropocene; Daniel Galera; speculation; politics; aesthetics