Polar Contagion: Ecogothic Anxiety across Media in the Twenty-First Century

Concerns about climate change have seen increased attention across virtually all media after 2000. In addition to raising ecological awareness, these concerns have inspired numerous gothic fictions, in which the polar thaw consequent on global warming becomes a source of paranoia, fear and horror. This article explores a specific group of twenty-first-century cultural products that associate polar melting with epidemics triggered by pathogens or infectious insects released after lying dormant in the ice. Often called ombie ire or baceria, hee pahogen appear in a ide range of fictions as well as in sensational articles that use gothic paraphernalia to describe the spread of terrible diseases. Like spectres, these agents of contagion return from the past to haunt the present; they also cast a dark shadow upon the future, as they become he iniible proagoni of dopian ecological iion in hich hmankind and oher pecie are at risk of annihilation. Four types of products are analysed to demonstrate that they convey similar anxieties by combining images of environmental disaster with pandemics. Different though they are in genre and medium, novels like "Thaw's Hammer" (2010), films like "The Thaw" (2009) and TV series like "Fortitude" (2015-18) not only interrogate the epistemological limits of science; they also shed light onto dangerous socioeconomic dynamics while posing ethical dilemmas about the human meddling with nature. Mostly produced before the spread of coronavirus, these fictions are made more appealing by the current pandemic, which has encouraged speculation over new potential sources of contagion. Their appeal is confirmed by the 2020 proliferaion of nepaper/magaine aricle focing on ombie pahogen. B merging objecii with sensationalism, these articles turn pathogens into spectral agents that seek revenge for human crimes against nature.