Chapter 7 directs critical attention to contemporary narratives that are coalescing in popular technology discourses that imagine climate crisis as an occasion to expand on structures of capitalism. This narrative template – whose leitmotif is making rather than saving nature – turns away from what Ramachandra Guha termed “varieties of environmentalism” in celebrating technological acts of inventing, designing, and rebuilding biophysical worlds. It begins by addressing the parallel emergence of a high-tech planet and a planet in peril as divergent stories of global capitalism. It then examines two visions of remaking the planet: geoengineering and terraforming. These overlapping engineering arenas draw an expressly environmental portrait of innovation that imbues the tech industry with quasi-magical capacities that can be leveraged either to improve on or to transcend the Anthropocene. Offering a counterpoint to this techno-utopia, the chapter concludes with an analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990), which satirizes the colonial logic of world-building fantasies while making the planet a charismatic character with a story of its own.

This chapter examines ecological science fiction’s (sf) use of terraforming to critique technological climate control as a form of colonial mastery. Terraforming - the adaptation of planetary environments to make them habitable by forms of life from Earth - has long been an important figure in sf and has recently become crucial to its engagement with the climate and climate change. Terraforming narratives portray the complex interpenetrations between the climate, society, culture, science, and politics, and explore how systematic climate control functions as a way to control society and non-human nature. Analysing terraforming in three narratives that have been influential in shaping the motif, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars (1951), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992, 1993, 1996), this chapter shows how they highlight the persistence of colonial frontier narratives in shaping representations of interplanetary colonisation, thus connecting terraforming to a tradition of totalising technological mastery over the environment.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.