Between Catastrophe and Hope: Environmentalism, Speculative Fiction, and The Man Who Fell to Earth

Pr. Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside

Monday February 6th, 5-7pm CET, Lecture hall E002 + Zoom session

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/82162099416?pwd=OEpWbDMyYlAvdXMwR0s1QUVuMzMyQT09

In her radical intervention into discussions of environmentalism in the US, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson opens with an act of speculative projection as she places her readers in the aftermath of an ecological disaster that has destroyed wildlife and agriculture due to overuse of pesticides and their ripple effect that quickly destroys the entire food chain. Drawing on the affective capacity of storytelling to make her policy point, Carson recognizes the capacity of sf to reorient our typical ways of looking at the given world, to mobilize readers both through catastrophic views of what might happen ‘if this goes on’ (in Robert Heinlein’s evocative phrase) or inspiring visions of the better future we might build through new technologies or—more compellingly—changed politics. This seminar will provide a brief overview of the myriad intersections between sf and environmental politics, focusing especially on the period form the 1960s to the present during which the modern environmentalist movement emerged, often in dialogue with influential sf texts. We will investigate as a particular case study The Man Who Fell to Earth, both Nicolas Roeg’s meditative 1976 film and Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet’s 2022 mini-series. Both texts demonstrate a long history through which sf has been entwined with environmentalist thinking—from the earliest days of imagining Mars as a previously lush planet that desiccated into sterility—and both reflect the complex ways that environmentalism is entangled with other sociopolitical forces, especially racial capitalism. By comparing the two texts, we will explore how sf helps us understand the politics of environmentalism and also reflect on shifting strategies and motifs between the 1970s and today.

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, and a Professor and the Chair of English, at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is currently an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science and Popular Culture. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow (2007), Animal Alterity (2010), The Wire (2013), Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed(2014); Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2020), and Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), as well as the co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011). Her co-authored book Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracywill appear in 2022 from Columbia UP. She has edited multiple books, including most recently Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life and the Politics of Reproduction (2022), After the Human: Culture, Theory & Criticism in the 21^st Century (2020), and Science Fiction and Culture Theory: A Reader (2015). A recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research and its Lifetime Achievement awards, and she is currently working on a research project on speculative finance and speculative fiction.