Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction / Chris Pak

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910132493403321
• Autore: Pak Chris
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2016; ©2016
• ISBN: 1-78694-542-8
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (x, 249 pages) : digital file(s)
• Collana: Liverpool science fiction texts and studies ; ; 55
• Disciplina: 813/.0876209
• Soggetti: Science and state; Planets - Environmental engineering; Environmentalism; Science fiction; Space colonies in literature; Environmentalism in literature; Science fiction - History and criticism
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Previously issued in print: 2016.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-234) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction : terraforming : engineering imaginary environments -- Landscaping nature's otherness in pre-1960s terraforming and proto-Gaian stories -- The American pastoral and the conquest of space -- Ecology and environmental awareness in 1960s-1970s -- Edging towards an eco-cosmopolitan vision -- Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy -- Conclusion.
• Sommario/riassunto: "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 countercultural novels of Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ernest Callenbach; 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 are 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 its world."--Page 4 of cover.