Energy and the Environment in Fiction

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course focuses on portrayals of the environment, energy production and climate change through fiction. It opens with an overview grounded in William Morris' late 19th century utopia News from Nowhere. After this, it takes the publication of J. G. Ballard's Drowned World and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 as a year zero for contemporary environmental fiction and criticism, and moves forward to environmental fictions of the present day. It considers conservationism and energy extraction, fictions of nuclear terror and fallout, the aesthetics of the Anthropocene, and environmental utopia and dystopia. The course examines a wide range of genres and media: there are realist, science-fiction, fantasy and literary fiction texts, in media such as film (including movies from the Mad Max series), graphic novels (When The Wind Blows), and video games (Final Fantasy VII) alongside written literature. Key titles include Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic parable The Road, Ursula K. LeGuin’s environmentalist science fiction The Word for World is Forest, and Jeff VanderMeer’s “weird fiction” eco-horror Annihilation.