Rating: 6
Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction
Edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson | 2014
It’s hard to give a comprehensive review of this book since it’s composed of 13 essays all written by different authors and on distinct topics. They’re all academic in style and explore our relationship to ecology through science fiction. If you’re interested in the first essay there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy all of them. For those interested in the emerging genre of ecocriticism then this would be a great place to start. The text’s focus is to study science fiction media during the anthropocene and introduces the reader to some of the leading voices in this discipline.
“How might the long-term attitude of our students and other members of our culture toward environmental protection and restoration be affected by the teaching of works… that are devoted to nature and environmental topics? The ideas taught today can become the practice of tomorrow, but only if they are taught today.” — Patrick Murphy
“I think even the phrase “climate change” is an attempt to narrate the ecological situation. We use the term now as a synecdoche to stand for the totality of our damage to the biosphere, which is much bigger than mere climate change, more like a potential mass extinction event. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are representing the whole by the part most amenable to human correction. We’re thinking in terms of thermostats, and how we turn them up or down in a building. That image suggests “climate change” has the possibility of a fix, maybe even a silver bullet of a fix. No such fix will be possible for a mass extinction event.” — Kim Stanley Robinson