Should humanity prepare for life on a less habitable planet? Under the influence of human intervention, transformations of the terrestrial environments have been profound and, for the societies that have produced them, it has become increasingly difficult to act as if they were negligible. Pressures on the natural milieu have increased, but have also weighed in return on social functionings. As a consequence, the ability for humans to continue to dispose of ‘liveable’ environments is becoming more uncertain. As suggested by the term ‘Anthropocene’, intended to designate the possibility of entering a new geological era due to human influence (Berkhout, 2014; Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016), visible traces are no longer mere scratches on the planetary surface.

If, given the magnitude of human activities, the challenge is more and more to think about their consequences, it is also useful to explore what imaginative foundations can be used as a basis for collective reflections. From this point of view, science fiction may have the advantage of having anticipated the movement. It has already contributed to displaying these environmental issues in fictitious anticipations and, most likely, they will more often be present as recurring reminders of degraded situations that are being produced. In a sense, a significant part of the productions of the genre carries out the shift towards the narrative frames and conceivable prospects of the ‘Anthropocene futures’ for which Frans Berkhout (2014) pointed out the need to help human communities and organisations understand the situations in which they are likely to have to live in. If developing the role of anticipation in research agendas become desirable to know and govern environmental futures (Granjou et al, 2017) and if fictional resources can be useful for social theory (Beer, 2016), it seems that science fiction provides a material in its own right, rich in potentialities, which is available to be used as another knowledge base. Of course, the latter can appear more speculative, but precisely this dimension can also be considered as a quality or a stimulating resource.