Science fiction has been imagining altered planetary climates as far back as H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 1895. In the 21st century anthropogenic transformation of the environment has become a core preoccupation of the genre’s futurological speculations and extrapolations..

A new paper¹ by K Persinger, Sherryl Vint, and Gerry Canavan explores the relationship between science fiction and the Anthropocene (and related alternative framings like the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, the Anglopocene, the Manthropocene, the Plasticene, and the Chthulucene).

This article catalogs major recent trends in ecological science fiction (sf ), focused primarily on sf published after the completion of N.K. Jemisin’s paradigm-setting Broken Earth trilogy in 2017. Major subdivisions in the genre include dystopian and antiutopian narratives about climate collapse, technocratic solutionism, reckoning with climate change as a colonial project, intergenerational conflict, and posthuman formulation.Noting that sf both as literary genre and as fan community encompasses a wide range of political perspectives ranging from reactionary hypercapitalism to utopian socialism, the article does not seek to advance any particular political position but rather seeks to name the major currents of political and ethical debate within sf in this moment of ecological crisis. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the way the sf genre, in reframing the present as the history of multiple possible futures, calls on us to act to shape that future toward human thriving.

Key points:

1. Science fiction (SF) shapes how we understand what is happening now in ways that both encourage misleading fantasies such as the possibility of escaping to off-world colonies and help us to see climate change as real in a world that has yet to see its most dramatic, coming consequences.
2. Climate change emerges from and might be mitigated by complex relationships among technological, social, and economic factors, and SF helps to illuminate this nexus.
3. Science fiction is a literature based on estrangement from reality, whether by projecting into the future or by changing some given condition of reality, making it useful for thinking beyond the present moment.
4. The relationship between science and SF varies across texts, from geoengineering visions to decolonial critique that sees science as part of the problem.
5. There is a tendency toward apocalyptic framing in climate change narratives, but some works also critique this as a Western bias toward seeing only a recent crisis, not the inevitable outcome of centuries of capitalism and colonialism.
6. No single solution to climate crisis is proposed by SF, and works often contradict one another because they emerge from different positionalities and embedded assumptions.
7. The focus on the nonhuman in SF means it is often better able than realist fiction to help us remember the effects of climate crisis on other species because the genre’s narrative conventions allow it to give agency to nonhuman entities and to center nonhuman viewpoints.

Future Issues:

1. More interdisciplinary research is needed to explore the ways that fiction and the imagination shape attitudes and understandings in relation to environmentalism and the Anthropocene. In addition to fiction authors drawing on the research of social scientists and others—a practice already well established—we need to cultivate a greater capacity to recognize fiction as a necessary mode of research and engagement in matters of public concern.
2. Speculative fiction is an essential repository for non-Western and decolonial visions of the world and its possible futures, which includes ways of framing Indigenous science as part of a world built on more sustainable cultural and technological premises. Part of what taking fiction seriously as a research mode involves is continuing work that recognizes how climate justice and decolonial politics must proceed together.
3. Apocalyptic scenarios and settings can often be mobilized to shock people into recognizing the seriousness of climate change, but we need also to cultivate other narrative frameworks for thinking about how to recognize the urgency of contemporary environmental issues in other registers: Overreliance on the apocalyptic can lull us into believing that problems are deferred to a distant future and thus may encourage an overreliance on unrealistic scenarios of geoengineering fixes.
4. Research should continue to categorize and differentiate among a range of ways that speculative fiction can help us to acknowledge the reality of climate change and imagine possible pathways forward in light of this knowledge: Speculative fiction not only anticipates coming futures but also can reframe our relationship to the past in ways that help us to inhabit the present differently and can estrange our assumptions about the present by centering nonhumans as characters with voice and agency.
5. In continuing to recognize the role of speculative fiction in coming to terms with the reality of climate change and theorizing ways to mitigate the damage and create a more sustainable future, we must recognize that speculative fiction is not about the future. It may be set in the future, but its themes are about today, specifically about how our choices together concretely make possibilities for the future.

These ideas about science fiction can be easily (and necessarily) extended beyond climate change and the anthropocece.

We need to cultivate a greater capacity to recognize fiction as a necessary mode of research and engagement in matters of public concern.

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(1) K. Persinger, Sherryl Vint, and Gerry Canavan, ‘Science Fiction in the Anthropocene’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 49, no. Volume 49, 2024 (18 October 2024): 51–71, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-120622-120311.

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