Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical Shifts in Climate Consciousness
- Part II Current Issues in Climate Change Criticism
- Part III Ways of Telling Climate Stories
- Part IV Dialogic Perspectives on Emerging Questions
- Science Fiction and Future Fantasies
- 11 Ice-Sheet Collapse and the Consensus Apocalypse in the Science Fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson
- 12 Solarpunk
- Collective Climate Action
- Love Letters to the Planet
- Diverse Indigenous Voices on Climate
- Redefining ‘the Real’
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
11 - Ice-Sheet Collapse and the Consensus Apocalypse in the Science Fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson
from Science Fiction and Future Fantasies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical Shifts in Climate Consciousness
- Part II Current Issues in Climate Change Criticism
- Part III Ways of Telling Climate Stories
- Part IV Dialogic Perspectives on Emerging Questions
- Science Fiction and Future Fantasies
- 11 Ice-Sheet Collapse and the Consensus Apocalypse in the Science Fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson
- 12 Solarpunk
- Collective Climate Action
- Love Letters to the Planet
- Diverse Indigenous Voices on Climate
- Redefining ‘the Real’
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Summary
The breakdown of what Donald Wollheim once called the ‘consensus future’ of science fiction – a spacefaring human civilisation migrating to the moon, Mars, the outer solar system, and beyond – has coincided with increasingly dire warnings about the true consequences of technological modernity on the planet. Where the future once seemed to be a site of unlimited possibility, it now appears to be a site of ever-worsening catastrophe and collapse. This chapter considers what might be called the ‘consensus apocalypse’, but also looks beyond it to consider techno-utopian and ecotopian visions of a non-disastrous future for humanity, with a thematic focus on figurations of sea-level rise due to ice-sheet collapse, especially in the work of Kim Stanley Robinson.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate , pp. 179 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022