‘Dark mirror of the water’: Spectrality in Climate and Hydro-Fictions & Museum of Water, a creative archive

Water is under threat. Rising temperatures, unchecked depletion of million-year-old aquifers, and widespread pollution are all having a catastrophic impact on the hydrological cycle. This creative-critical thesis examines how a capitalist-charged climate crisis is negatively affecting crucial water sources the world over and, ultimately, makes a case for greater hydrological and cross-species awareness. In the critical component, I bring material ecocriticism and environmental humanities thought to bear on climate and hydro-fiction texts to excite discourse on and wider acknowledgement of the inseparability between human and nonhuman, as well as everything and water. I examine how environmental spectres haunt the present and can effectively open a line of preventative communication if one is only willing to listen. I also put forward the new term ‘Energy-Gothic’ as a lens to essay texts that explore the ruination of resource-rich locations in the quest of power (energy/status). Similarly, the creative component highlights these ideas of interconnectivity in the face of ecological crisis through the form of a novel-length creative archive of hybrid work. This archive is asynchronous and atemporal, leaning heavily into Speculative Fiction techniques to illuminate today’s problems. Here, original work of poetry, prose and creative non-fiction runs alongside the fictional and factual work of others, often bleeding into one another to create one (dis)harmonious voice of protestation and anger. A problem as widespread as the climate crisis, after all, requires a global coming-together.