Analysis of 'Climate controlled' by Rhiannon Cowan

Analysis of” Climate controlled “by Rhiannon Cowan (2014)

Picture this: you are living in a self-sufficient pod along with 500 others. You have everything you need food, water, entertainment and a comfortable bed to crawl into at night. Its only for a bit, only 49 weeks, just to test these so-called pods. To see if they are any good, and if our future depends on them, if tragedy struck. But then the unthinkable happens. The world is struck by floods, earthquakes and tsunamis and it takes all the earth’s residents with it. For 5 years this disaster sets the agenda. The earth is under apocalypse. You and the other 500 test subjects are now stuck on a destroyed earth and are without hope. This is the future that Rhiannon Cowan imagines for us in “Climate controlled” (2014). The writer describes what consequences we face and what our future might look like if we don’t act now.

This short story does not have many settings, we only have one. Though, the text gives us clues to where we are in the world. The entirety of the text takes place inside the pod, which we get introduced to in the start of the story” a highly controlled environment keeps me comfortable, all housed and protected in a self-healing shell. I have all the modern comforts and conveniences with plenty of windows to take in the remarkable alpine views.” (p. 1 ll. 17-19). From this we can gather that, we are not only in the pod, but also in the alpines. The pod is also described as being very modern, futuristic and almost sterile. We are never introduced to the outside world, which must mean that the writer is stuck in this pod. They describe the world in a “outsider looking in” kind of way, since they do not know what the circumstances are outside. We see that here in the text “I remain in a lock box. Self-sufficient and climate controlled.”(p. 2 ll. 54).