Terraforming

Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction

First Edition

Chris Pak

Liverpool University Press

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies LUP

This is the first monograph to examine terraforming, geoengineering, the Gaia hypothesis and climate change in science fiction literature and film.
This book synthesises environmental philosophy, literary criticism, science fiction scholarship and critical theory in a new way to investigate how science fiction imagines humankind's transformation of the environment.
Unlike other related monographs on sf and environmental issues, this book situates acclaimed works of sf against a broad history of the terraforming theme, allowing it to track developments in the way landscaping is conceived over the course of the tradition.

Terraforming

Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction

First Edition

Chris Pak

Liverpool University Press

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies LUP

Description

This book explores the emergence and development of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009). Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth - geoengineering - has begun to receive serious consideration as a way to address the effects of climate change. This book asks how science fiction has imagined the ways we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in stories by such writers as H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon in the UK, American pulp science fiction by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, the counter cultural novels of Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and Ernest Callenbach, and Pamela Sargent's Venus trilogy, Frederick Turner's epic poem of terraforming, Genesis, and Kim Stanley Robinson's acclaimed Mars trilogy. It explores terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, the politics of colonisation and habitation, tradition and memory. This book shows how contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and how terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and many other readers a motif to aid in thinking in complex ways about the human impact on planetary environments. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world.

Terraforming

Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction

First Edition

Chris Pak

Liverpool University Press

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies LUP

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Terraforming: Engineering Imaginary Environments

1: Landscaping Nature's Otherness in Pre-1960s Terraforming and Proto-Gaian Stories

2: The American Pastoral and the Conquest of Space

3: Ecology and Environmental Awareness in 1960s-1970s Terraforming Stories

4: Edging Toward an Eco-Cosmopolitan Vision

5: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy

Conclusion

Works Cited
Index

Terraforming

Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction

First Edition

Chris Pak

Liverpool University Press

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies LUP

Author Information

Chris Pak is Editor-in-Chief of the Science Fiction Research Association's SFRA Review and Research Fellow at Lancaster University.

Terraforming

Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction

First Edition

Chris Pak

Liverpool University Press

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies LUP

Reviews and Awards

"Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction is the first study to trace the historical development of environmental science fiction, and it convincingly frames this development within the genre's representation of planetary adaptation...Pak's is a very good book." Professor Eric Otto, Florida Gulf Coast University

'Pak's volume is indispensable to the study of terraforming stories. Both science fiction scholars and environmental theorists will find in this book a broad history of a complex idea expressed clearly and cogently. Pak explores an impressive number of texts and traces the development of terraforming sf with a deep understanding of its complexities, its social origins, and its philosophical import. This is a timely study that will surely become seminal to future scholars of terraforming stories.' -- James Hamby, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts