Ecocritical analysis of Frío by Rafael Pinedo: environmental metaphor and animal alliance in the Anthropocene of the Southern Cone

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the reports with the diagnoses, projections, and the impact of climate change haven’t stopped growing. From the analysis of the adaptation of a given ecosystem to the struggle of activists and communities for environmental justice, terms such as “climate change” and “global warming” entered the international political agenda, the headlines of the news and the narratives of our time. A line of science fiction research along with some academic activism, has sought to incorporate the category of climatic fictions (cli-fi) into speculative fictions and whose particularities will be presented in this article. In it, I intend to study the second novel of the trilogy of the Argentine author Rafael Pinedo, Frío, as speculative fiction in the cultural and environmental context of the Southern Cone of recent decades. From the identification of the environmental metaphors that appear in the novel’s climate scenario, I analyze how the animal alliance between the protagonist and the rats takes place from an eco-critical perspective in the unprecedented cross between religion and climate. I intend with this paper to contribute to the more general discussion of the relevance of the study of climatic and speculative fictions in the context of regional science fiction and the global climatic emergency