This article explores the difficulties that conventional narrative form has with
rendering the non-human temporalities of planetary history, with a particular
focus on the domestic. By drawing from several critical threads, including
Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene concept, I aim to explore how fiction interrupts
static historical narratives. My position is that writing against anthropocentric
thinking can act as a literary disruptor, and. as experimental narrative forms of
the domestic are emerging, new imaginaries and conceptual frameworks are put
forward for reconstructing ideas between human and non-human life forms in a
world coming to terms with multiple cascading crises. This paper also explains
how contemporary science fiction reconfigures domestic fiction acting as
a mode of cultural repair at a time when the everyday and local are disrupted
by the global polycrisis. By examining uncertainty, in both theme and form, we
discover how contemporary authors are exploring the idea that another world is
not only urgently needed but is also possible. In Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of
the Living God and T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth readers encounter planetary
catastrophe from the perspective of everyday spatialities and displaced futurity
in domestic spaces. Each narrative provokes an attempt to wrangle with the
institutional conditions of Western modernity by (re)claiming these domestic
spaces and inserting human/non-human entanglements into the literary mode.
This produces an ecocentric introspection against the backdrop of an apocalyptic
climate on the global scale to revive a collective consciousness of uncertainty
with the potential to rethink a future.