Chapter 4 deals with one of the most prominent themes in contemporary utopianism: the notion that science and technology can somehow be harnessed to elevate humanity beyond the current impasse. My argument entails that ecomodernism – the proposition that scientific and technological progress will exert a thoroughly positive impact on the Anthropocene – should be understood as a distinctive type of social dreaming. I analyze this constellation by first reconstructing various theoretical defences of ecomodernism. The chapter thus demonstrates that ecomodernism constitutes a broad movement in which both right- and left-wing defenders of scientific and technological progress have found ideological homes. In a second step, I embark on a reading of what is the most systematic endeavour to fictionally work through the profound contradictions and ambiguities of an ecomodernist response to climate change: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. Robinson’s oeuvre involves a meditation on how an optimistic response to the Anthropocene could organically grow from within the status quo, thereby eschewing both fatalistic resignation and arrogant hubris.

Romantic nature writing emerges at roughly the same time as the industrial innovations that will eventually lead to global carbon capitalism and therefore is for some scholars coeval with the birth of the Anthropocene. This chapter takes a genealogical approach to the Anthropocene by suggesting that there are significant continuities between Romantic literature and contemporary discourses on environmental catastrophe. Focusing on two case studies – William Cowper’s The Task and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both of which responded to climate change caused by volcanic eruptions – this chapter shows how Romantic writers address what it means to be alive at a catastrophic turning point in planetary history. They are concerned with the power of the human imagination to shape its environments, yet also with our vulnerability to elemental forces that we may affect but that we cannot control.

Humans are the first species to be conscious of their own transforming of the Earth system. This has entailed a paradoxical doubling of the human into anthropos (humanity as a blind geological force) and homo (humans as self-conscious, rational actors). Anthropocene stories pivot on anagnorisis – moments of self-recognition in which homo and anthropos become identified with each other. In most Anthropocene stories, humans attempt to resolve this paradox either by wielding geological power consciously or by renouncing mastery and receding into earthly forces. This chapter examines how Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy seeks to keep the underlying paradox in suspension. Humans are confronted with an alien entity which embodies the geological force of anthropos, but they seek, nonetheless, to make sense of their fate. The novels thus reflect on a central task of literary writing in the Anthropocene: how to (re-)compose the human.