Planetary Futures: Reframing Climate Change through Geoengineering and Terraforming

Geoengineering and terraforming are modes of planetary adaptation that were first imagined in science fiction. These rich concepts have become implicated in ideas about climate change in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This book examines geoengineering and terraforming stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, N. K. Jemisin, Jane Killick and M. Darusha Wehm (Terraforming Mars board game novelizations), Adrian Tchaikovsky and Annalee Newitz to understand how twenty-first-century science fiction uses these concepts to analyse and critique the dimensions of our contemporary climate context and our responses to its effects.

Understanding science fiction as generative of models that inform thinking about substantive contemporary concerns, this book ultimately argues that science fiction presents a diverse and dynamic creative field that can and should be used to shape public engagement and policy about climate change and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Chris Pak is Lecturer in English Literature and Media at Swansea University. He has published widely on terraforming, geoengineering and climate change in science fiction.