In 2011, Miéville published the short story ‘Covehithe’ which documents
a father-daughter trip to the Suffolk coast to observe oil rigs lurching out
of the sea and birthing offspring. The tale appears to take place in a near-
future, but one far enough away to describe our period as ‘the earylish
years of the 21st Century’, wherein the first recorded instances of ‘what
had come back’ – sunken oil rigs returning to land – surfaced. Miéville
employs this use of time to craft what Pieter Vermeulen identifies as ‘an
imagining of the future as if it were already past’ (2017, p.872), wherein
mankind’s fears of our impact on the natural world have already been
realised. ‘Covehithe’ was published less than a year after the Deepwater
Horizon Oil Spill, which Miéville briefly alludes to in the text, as well as
around the time of the uneasy reign of Colonel Gadhafi, wherein the
price of oil was soaring but workers fled out of fear. Miéville grounds his
story in these political realities to depict how, in the Anthropocene, the
physical impact of mankind on the world has dislocated from the site of
the action and has instead become a ‘combustible mix of geopolitics
and geology’, in that the reality of the physical digging, fracking, burning
of fossil fuels has now become dispersed, politicised, so out of reach
for the everyman to change that we are left, like Miéville’s Dughan and
his daughter, ‘looking into the sea’ with an overwhelming helplessness.
It seems that ‘Covehithe’ parodies Macfarlane’s definition of ‘stuplimity’
by having the two characters be insignificant watchers on the beach,
marvelling at the ‘lurch[ing]’ and ‘hauling’ rigs. The scale of human
impact has been too large for them, now, to change. Dughan narrates,
‘What must have been ten feet of water lapped at the struts like a puddle
at a child’s shoes’ – pessimistically, we are such a puddle in the face of
environmental catastrophe like oil spills.
Oil, particularly, has its power in the hands of the few super-powers in
the Middle East and the U.S – its very industry is founded on capitalist
culture which, in the Western world, now feels irreversible. Some of the
most significant political moments of the millennial epoch have had their
foundations in the oil industry – Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990,
the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 – and Miéville seems to ask –
what can an individual do in these situations, but watch in horror? The
decision-making is ultimately in the hands of few world leaders. The
landmark geo-political tensions of the past few decades are a muted
past in Dughan’s world. Due to the impotence felt by the individual in
the face of the implications of the Anthropocene, political and geological,
hope appears to be lost for future generations. They are to stand on
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