Chronesthesia, Biosemiotics, and Immutable Mobiles: Early Signs of Climate Change in James Herbert’s Portent

Climate change is extensively studied across both scientific and cultural paradigms. In each historical timeline, the climate change and environmental crisis are often registered indirectly as signs, anomalies, and narratives. The early proto–climate fiction did not rely on climatological data or predictive models; instead, it encoded ecological anxiety through signs and symbolic events. James Herbert’s Portent (1992) exemplifies this mode of early climate consciousness through its striking use of a real newspaper cutting as the novel’s opening device. This study analyses the newspaper cutting in the opening section of James Herbert's early proto–climate fiction Portent (1992). The central objective of the paper is to examine how Herbert’s use of an authentic newspaper article, making it function as an immutable mobile, documents the global planetary crisis across temporal, spatial, and epistemic boundaries. The findings of the study are threefold. Firstly, the penguin stampede operates as a sign-event that communicates ecological distress. Secondly, through Chronesthesia, the newspaper cutting activates a temporal awareness to interpret and record the present anomalies in the news as signals of an impending global planetary crisis during the early 1990s. Thirdly, the study situates Portent within the genealogy of climate fiction by mobilising biosemiotic signs and anticipatory temporality rather than explicit climate science. By positioning factual data before the fictional narrative begins, Herbert blurs the boundary between reality and fiction, thereby presenting literature as an early warning system capable of sensing environmental stress.