Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach

Science Fiction and Climate Change is a book that explores the relationship between science fiction and climate change. It was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction Award 2020 and the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2021. The book argues that science fiction occupies a critical location within the nature/culture nexus and that it is obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems thrown up by contemporary scientific research. It adopts a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analyzing print and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, and builds on Milner's own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive study in the sociology of literature.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 01 August 2022
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction Award 2020, Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2021, An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change skepticism amongst Anglophone conservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near-consensus amongst climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. The resultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-cultural phenomenon, and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fiction occupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed 'cli-fi.' It does not, however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmann adopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analyzing print and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especially Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Inspired by Williams's cultural materialism, Bourdieu's sociology of culture, and Moretti's version of world systems theory, the book builds on Milner's own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive study in the sociology of literature.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781802076943