Iconic futures: temporal aesthetics and social imaginaries in Italian climate fiction

Abstract

The climate crisis not only transforms ecosystems but also reshapes collective imaginaries of the future. While climate fiction (cli-fi) has emerged as a crucial site where societies process the unprecedented challenge of climate change, sociological approaches to emerging literary future imagination remain underdeveloped. Integrating Alexander's theory of iconicity with Mandich’s regimes of engagement with the future, this article conceptualizes cli-fi as a cultural form in which social and aesthetic dimensions converge, and where iconic condensations of meanings and affects are produced by various literary devices. We propose the concept of temporal regimes of iconic engagement to analyze how such aesthetic devices—e.g., narrative structures, stylistic choices, and temporal framings—produce several orientations toward climate uncertainty which are salient at the level of form and feeling. Empirically, we examine a corpus of 50 cli-fi novels published on the Italian market between 1990 and 2024, treating Italy as a strategic site that condenses a wide range of narrative strategies—from techno-scientific thrillers to solarpunk imaginaries. The results identify five macro-typologies of climate fiction books, where each deploys distinctive iconic devices to stage specific temporal regimes of engagement. We argue that climate fiction operates as a performative cultural form whose aesthetic devices are structured so as to stage imaginaries of possibility, responsibility, and hope. In doing so, our study advances general sociological theory by extending cultural sociology to the analysis of how symbolic forms iconically stage collective orientations toward uncertain futures.