From Nuclear War and Overpopulation to Climate Change and Alien Invasions: How Environmental Science Fiction Has Changed Between 1945 and 2020, and How It Is Being Read Academically

Abstract

This dissertation studies (largely American) Science Fiction (SF) texts that are in some way “about” climate change or the anthropocene. While environmentally themed SF has received a significant amount of scholarly attention in the past decade, such academic Science Fiction studies tend to take for granted the political and literary value of writing this kind of SF, trained in scholarly reading practices that conceive of literary texts as imparting valuable knowledge. I propose that contemporary SF is largely written with an acute awareness of what academic readers “do” with such literature, and that academic readings of SF are in fact part of the same literary system as the studied SF itself, sharing the status of being “second-order observations”. In this dissertation I will therefore closely consider what readers and writers of (environmental) SF hope to “do with” texts, studying both how the genre community has defined itself and how two schools of literary analysis – the “suspicious” approach exemplified by Fredric Jameson, and the “post-critical” approach exemplified by Rita Felski – have conceived of the usefulness of literature; it will be my argument that a full analysis of environmental SF as a cultural object must be aware of the fact that such SF is, in turn, already aware of how academics read it. My other contribution to the theory of environmental SF literature will be to argue that more attention must be paid to the implied temporal gap between present and future in such fiction (chapter two). With this in mind, I will then read three moments in environmental SF. I will begin with the emergence of an environmental SF in the second half of the twentieth century, concurrent with the emergence of the environmental sciences and environmental non-fiction; particular attention will be given to science-fictional fantasies of overpopulation around the 1970s, which were used for political purposes by various writers and editors (chapter three). I will also re-read the rather canonical work of cyberpunk author William Gibson (written between 1981 and 2014), arguing that his fiction is not only disinterested in ecology, nature, and climate change, but in fact actively antiecological; written from the perspective of an “end of history”, catastrophic environmental degradation as a historical event becomes unimaginable for the cyberpunk of Gibson (chapter four). Thirdly, I will consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent Ministry for the Future (2020) as an example of an ecological SF that is written explicitly concerned both with the temporal gap between present and future, and with the question of how ecological fiction is supposed to effect political change in our non-fictional world (chapter five). In my concluding remarks, I will consider the prominent position of Rachel Carson’s environmental non-fiction text Silent Spring (1962) both in academic history of environmental SF and in two further recent works of environmental writing (chapter six).