The Historical Climate: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Long Crisis
Open AccessThis dissertation examines North American science fiction novels published since the formation of global climate change governance, delimited by the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The project shows how works of science fiction attempt to represent how climate change and its outcomes are linked to a capitalist mode of production that has been in a protracted crisis, denoted by the “Long Crisis,” a term coined by Joshua Clover. Science fiction texts, most especially those of Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, and N.K. Jemisin, provide a means of estranging and extrapolating upon this crisis, which has their works link to exacerbated ecological declension. “The Historical Climate” reads these texts as illuminating capitalist crisis, but also revealing a concomitant crisis within the Euro-American science fiction tradition to represent utopian change without recapitulating the very historical processes inherent to economic and ecological calamity. The project intervenes in the study of science fiction by providing a periodization nomenclature for changes that adhere to different moments in this twinned crisis of capital and genre; simultaneously, the dissertation intervenes in Marxist studies of culture by extrapolating from leading thinkers to suture political-economic concepts to the aesthetic. Finally, the dissertation challenges environmental humanities scholarship to center Marxist cultural analysis in order to grasp the political agencies potentially available in this historical moment.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.