This chapter considers contemporary environmentalism through the lens of ecotopia, a modification of the utopian form that includes the ecological as a core consideration. The idea that the nonhuman world should have meaningful political status is a radical transformation of the usual terms of utopia, rendering certain utopian tropes (like the technology-fueled extinction of vermin or pests) impossible while activating other new possibilities both for the transformation of the social and for individual self-actualization. In particular, ecotopias are distinct from most utopias in their abiding suspicion of technology; in an era of escalating climate disaster, this suspicion of technology becomes increasingly urgent even as it becomes complicated by the perceived need for some miraculous techno-fix to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change even in ecotopia. A short coda discusses real-world ecotopian projects, attempts to make such visions real as a model to others for what might yet be.

This chapter traces the waning of utopian literature in the 1970s following the end of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism. It argues that the downturn in the rate of profit related to production, and the resulting turn to economic growth predicated on financial speculation, resulted in a crisis for the utopian imagination and its ability to conceive of utopian alternatives to the present. As a result, the critical utopianism of the long 1960s gave way to a new wave of dystopian writings. Although these dystopias echoed the turn to weak utopianism and cognitive mapping in critical theory by convincingly illustrating the negative effects of neoliberalism on economic growth, income inequality, and the social safety net, they often struggled to imagine anything outside of these worsening conditions. The chapter culminates in a consideration of new utopian writing following the 2008 financial crash that foregrounds the socialization of debt.

This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

In New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017), the struggle between the oligarchy and the commons is posited as the genre of modern history, subsuming different instances under this synchronic form. The novel’s utopianism consists of the synthesis of such dialectical movements: between two kinds of revolution, a mass civil resistance and a conventional electoral capture; between past and future; between fictional and non-fiction genres. The revolutionary event in the novel becomes the radical recombination of the central themes of the near future as they play across the chasm of scale between individual and globe. The characters work as an allegorical assemblage, an interaction best understood in relation to the debate between symbol and allegory as it was inaugurated by the Romantics at the birth of capitalist modernity. However, the need to stabilise the macro structure in New York 2140 raises hard questions with regard to gender, race and class, which suggest the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual. Equally, however, this tension is the generative dialectic that underlies the utopian impulse as it takes form in the genre of near-future revolution.

In its emphasis on reading as bound up with agency, Red Moon repudiates not only the domestic near fiction but also the reading practices commonly labelled ‘surface reading’, as they would seek to reinstate a divide between aesthetics and politics. Although the novel registers the pull of the body, it makes it codependent on a social totality that is itself reconceptualised in the wake of ecological emergency. The collective vessel for this body is the superpower state, which not only wields power enough to change the course of the Anthropocene but is also accessible to a narrative that leads out from the present without heading straight into apocalypse. The chapter ends by considering Red Moon as an instance of the historical novel set in the future, in which the utopian nation state, and the collectivity that underpins it, only exists as a dialectical relationship between part and whole, space and time.

Chapter 4 deals with one of the most prominent themes in contemporary utopianism: the notion that science and technology can somehow be harnessed to elevate humanity beyond the current impasse. My argument entails that ecomodernism – the proposition that scientific and technological progress will exert a thoroughly positive impact on the Anthropocene – should be understood as a distinctive type of social dreaming. I analyze this constellation by first reconstructing various theoretical defences of ecomodernism. The chapter thus demonstrates that ecomodernism constitutes a broad movement in which both right- and left-wing defenders of scientific and technological progress have found ideological homes. In a second step, I embark on a reading of what is the most systematic endeavour to fictionally work through the profound contradictions and ambiguities of an ecomodernist response to climate change: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. Robinson’s oeuvre involves a meditation on how an optimistic response to the Anthropocene could organically grow from within the status quo, thereby eschewing both fatalistic resignation and arrogant hubris.

In “Narrating Nature,” Erin James considers how modern literature and theory grapple with the broader timescales, planetary conceptions of space, and inhuman perspectives that representations of climate change demand. Focusing on the “unnatural nature” of climate change, James undertakes a narratological analysis two recent “cli-fi” novels, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Maintaining a pedagogical emphasis, the chapter foregrounds strategies teachers can use to help students understand and write about climate change. The chapter ultimately considers how narrative can both perpetuate and subvert dominant ideologies about nature and how changing nature is changing the texture of modern narratives.

The breakdown of what Donald Wollheim once called the ‘consensus future’ of science fiction – a spacefaring human civilisation migrating to the moon, Mars, the outer solar system, and beyond – has coincided with increasingly dire warnings about the true consequences of technological modernity on the planet. Where the future once seemed to be a site of unlimited possibility, it now appears to be a site of ever-worsening catastrophe and collapse. This chapter considers what might be called the ‘consensus apocalypse’, but also looks beyond it to consider techno-utopian and ecotopian visions of a non-disastrous future for humanity, with a thematic focus on figurations of sea-level rise due to ice-sheet collapse, especially in the work of Kim Stanley Robinson.

This chapter considers the possibility of a form of literary realism fit for the Anthropocene, which would not only allow readers to participate and intervene in the disclosure of climate catastrophe but would also position them within a climate-conscious collective. It begins with a brief discussion of realism, particularly its reliance, as analysed by Fredric Jameson, on an interplay between readerly engagement with actions and consequences and readerly empathy with experiences and emotions. This realist effect is both rich in ethical potential for addressing climate crisis and deepens this crisis’s anthropogenic arrogance. In considering a new form of realism that would avoid this dilemma, the chapter deploys Gerard Genette’s structuralist theories of transtextuality, arguing for the relevance of these ostensibly external, but deeply integrated, aspects of narrative in extending realism’s ethical effects while building a collective consciousness. Using this as a framework, it then discusses two authors whose work, textually and transtextually speaking, responds in some way to climate crisis: Kim Stanley Robinson and Liu Cixin.

Cities are often the sites of apocalyptic ruptures, and more often than not, urban locations operate as spaces to flee after everything has gone sideways. Yet the city is more than a place to flee; the city –– in its predisaster moment –– already offers innovative and creative forms of community in everyday life that already speak to a potential for radically different modes for living. This chapter focuses on the tension between the apocalyptic as a stage for imagining a future world that reproduces more of the same and the apocalyptic that opens a space for actually reimagining the future is crucial to Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017). Two particular attributes make New York 2140 a crucial text in the post-apocalyptic genre, its dismissal of nostalgia for the pre-apocalyptic world and its thinking at multiple scales.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.