Abstract: This essay focuses on a set of recent US cli-fi novels that dance around settler colonialism—a primary driver of climate change—via comedic asides and other evasions. Comedy thus functions here as immunity in the sense of a conceptual prophylactic, allowing both white characters and white writers to imagine future adaptions that do not require a processing of the past or present. I link this metaphorical type of immunity to the literal, considering settler biowarfare (forced sterilization, spread of disease to nonimmune persons, etc.) and other attempts at Indigenous extermination as the unspoken background to these novels.
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