Overview

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction Award 2020 Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2021 Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism 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, analysing 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.  

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9781802076943

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Reviews

'[This] volume offers an interesting introductory overview covering a variety of climate fictions... The clear, easily accessible writing style and overall useful introductory nature of the material would definitely recommend the volume as a text for undergraduates studying climate fictions as part of a literary studies or cultural studies curriculum.' Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

'[This] volume offers an interesting introductory overview covering a variety of climate fictions... The clear, easily accessible writing style and overall useful introductory nature of the material would definitely recommend the volume as a text for undergraduates studying climate fictions as part of a literary studies or cultural studies curriculum.' Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 'Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann's Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach adds some vitally needed critical rigor to the burgeoning subgenre of SF literature and media Daniel Bloom has labelled cli-fi, that is, climate fiction.' Jerome Winter, SFRA Review

Author Information

Andrew Milner is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. J.R. Burgmann is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Monash University.

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