Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction
Author: | Kim Stanley Robinson Gerry Canavan |
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Wesleyan University Press, 2014 |
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Book Type: | Non-Fiction |
Genre: | Science-Fiction |
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Synopsis
Contemporary visions of the future have been shaped by hopes and fears about the effects of human technology and global capitalism on the natural world. In an era of climate change, mass extinction, and oil shortage, such visions have become increasingly catastrophic, even apocalyptic. Exploring the close relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism, the essays in Green Planets consider how science fiction writers have been working through this crisis. Beginning with H. G. Wells and passing through major twentieth-century writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and Thomas Disch to contemporary authors like Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Paolo Bacigalupi--as well as recent blockbuster films like Avatar and District 9--the essays in Green Planets consider the important place for science fiction in a culture that now seems to have a very uncertain future. The book includes an extended interview with Kim Stanley Robinson and an annotated list for further exploration of "ecological SF" and related works of fiction, nonfiction, films, television, comics, children's cartoons, anime, video games, music, and more.
Table of Contents:
- Preface - essay by Gerry Canavan
- Introduction: If This Goes On (Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction) - essay by Gerry Canavan
- Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H.G. Wells - essay by Christina Alt
- Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age - essay by Michael Page
- Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin's Utopian Fictions - essay by Gib Prettyman
- Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction - essay by Rob Latham
- "The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People": Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction - essay by Sabine Höhler
- The Sea and Eternal Summer: An Australian Apocalypse - essay by Andrew Milner
- Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future: Maggie Gee's The Ice People - essay by Adeline Johns-Putra
- Future Ecologies, Current Crisis: Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction - essay by Elzette Steenkamp
- Ordinary Catastrophes: Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions - essay by Christopher Palmer
- "The Rain Feels New": Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi - essay by Eric C. Otto
- Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures - essay by Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman
- Pandora's Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought - essay by Timothy Morton
- Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and "Oceanic" - essay by Melody Jue
- Afterword: Still, I'm Reluctant to Call This Pessimism (Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction) - interview of Kim Stanley Robinson - interview by Gerry Canavan
- Of Further Interest - essay by Gerry Canavan
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