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Imagining the Future of Climate Change
This title is part of American Studies Now and available as an e-book first. Visit ucpress.edu/go/americanstudiesnow to learn more.
From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. Authors such as Octavia Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko, movie directors such as Bong Joon-Ho, and creators of digital media such as the makers of the Maori web series Anamata Future News have all envisioned future worlds during and after environmental collapse, engaging audiences to think about the earth's sustainability. As public awareness of climate change has grown, so has the popularity of works of climate fiction that connect science with activism.
Today, real-world social movements helmed by Indigenous people and people of color are leading the way against the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements-in the real world and through science fiction-help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future. Imagining the Future of Climate Change introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements, exploring post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making.
eBook
Poseidon's arrow
Ruthless Austrian entrepreneur Edward Bolcke has managed to steal a crucial component of the U.S. Navy's latest submarine technology--and he has found a way to hijack the world's supply of rare earth minerals. The three Pitts, along with longstanding sidekick Al Giordino, use their usual mix of brains and brawn to see that justice is served.
Book
Refugia
Relic species extinct everywhere else on the planet thrive on a
remote archipelago. Evolution requires isolation, and these islands
offer the perfect environment for genetic variation to take place,
fostering new and unique forms of flora and fauna. Evolutionary
biologists Emily and Roland have come on an extended field
expedition to this secluded world, eager to expose its unique
biosphere.
As they work to gather a large dataset of dead specimens for
study and description, Emily and Roland experience growing shifts
in their perception, in their bodies, and even in the flow of
linear time. The environment they have come to quantify acts upon
them, the species they collect observe and comment upon them, and
the controlled lens of science cannot save them. Succumbing to the
dynamic power of isolation, they find themselves irrevocably
changed.
A poetic novel told through field notes, letters, and scientific
data, Refugia is a story of discovery and transformation
that shows the hubris inherent in the idea that humans live both
outside, and at the center of, the natural world. This is a book
that reveals science in all its imperfect beauty, crossing the line
between observer and observed, scientist and subject, between what
is known and what is unknowable.
eBook
Submergence : a novel
\"In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, half-French, half-Australian, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with the life that multiplies in the darkness of the lowest strata of water\"--P. [4] of cover.
Book
H. P. Lovecraft, Photography, and the Transhumanist Imagination
This essay explores photography’s relationship to the transhumanist imaginary of American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft; transhumanism refers to the belief that humans can evolve through technological advancements. I argue that Lovecraft’s seemingly naïve conception of photography as unerringly “objective” actually reflects his understanding of photography as a transhuman technology that can transform human consciousness. However, Lovecraft’s transhumanist vision is plagued by the recognition that the endpoint of transhumanist evolution is the annihilation of the individual body and the specific desires on which one’s sense of self is grounded—a vision Lovecraft is attracted to but finally cannot embrace.
Journal Article
A perfect life : a novel
Jane Weiss is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine's Disease, a neurodegenerative disorder. Her pursuit is deeply personal. Valentine killed her mother, and she and her freewheeling sister, Laurel, could be genetic carriers; each has a fifty percent chance of developing the disease.
Book
A Roadmap for the Future: Social, Ecological, and Technological Imagineering in Climate Fiction
This thesis investigates why climate fiction turns to speculative and futuristic modes to represent the urgent contemporary crisis of climate change. Through an analysis of the three novels Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, Semiosis by Sue Burke, and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and four short stories by Vandana Singh, Lucy Zhang, Liam Hogan, and L.P. Melling, the project argues that the speculative mode enables authors to construct “new ordinaries”. Through an employment of the term imagineering, a fusion of “imagining” and “engineering,” the thesis explores how these texts offer imaginative frameworks for adaptation that remain connected to recognizable aspects of contemporary life. While the texts are set in the far future, their speculative visions and imagineerings of alternative modes of living remain grounded in the present. This temporal interplay between futurity and familiarity is essential to their ability to render large-scale transformation accessible and conceivable. Rather than alienating readers, the speculative mode enables critical reflection on existing ecological, social, and technological structures. The thesis is structured around three forms of imagineering. Ecological imagineering is examined through Annihilation and Semiosis, which imagineer new ecological modes of thinking about the environment through challenging anthropocentrism. The social imagineering section focuses on the revision of familiar social structures like family, capitalism, and gender in Butler, VanderMeer, and Burke’s novels, showing how these social frameworks both shape and hinder adaptation. Finally, technological imagineering is explored through four short stories by Vandana Singh, Lucy Zhang, Liam Hogan, and L.P. Melling, which imagineer futuristic and new technologies that are inspired by familiar ones in order to help adapt to ecological transformation. The thesis argues that the seven climate fiction texts imagineer alternative futures and ways to live by blending the unfamiliar with the familiar, which ultimately makes the idea of change more legible through continuity.
Dissertation
The love hypothesis
\"When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman's carefully calculated theories on love into chaos. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs. Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.\"-- Provided by publisher.
TC Boyle’s “Politics of Nature”
This paper offers a Latourian reading of T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done. It shows that the novel satirizes contemporary ecological debates and stages the cultural wars of our current ecological culture. It also demonstrates, however, that the novel does not merely point out the impasse of our current ecologies: its fiction intuitively diagnoses the contemporary “crisis of purity” in modern environmental politics and points us towards the kind of entangled ecologies sketched by Latour and other recent thinkers. Like Latour’s reinvention of a more hybrid and entangled “politics of nature,” Boyle’s novel allows us to reimagine a complex and contaminated new ecology, away from the purifications of our contemporary “NaturPolitiks”.
Journal Article