Science Fiction and Climate Change

Shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction Award 2020Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2021An Open Access edition of this book is availableon the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Despitethe occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst Anglophoneconservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near-consensusamongst climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gasare sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. Theresultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-culturalphenomenon and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fictionoccupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takesas its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed 'cli-fi'. It does not,however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on thissub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation toscience finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problemsactually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmannadopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analysing printand audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especiallyAustralia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and theUnited States. Inspired by Williams's culturalmaterialism, Bourdieu's sociology of culture and Moretti's version of worldsystems theory, the book builds on Milner's own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive studyin the sociology of literature.