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From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. Authors such as Octavia Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko, movie directors such as Bong Joon-Ho, and creators of digital media such as the makers of the Maori web series Anamata Future News have all envisioned future worlds during and after environmental collapse, engaging audiences to think about the earth's sustainability. As public awareness of climate change has grown, so has the popularity of works of climate fiction that connect science with activism.
Today, real-world social movements helmed by Indigenous people and people of color are leading the way against the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements – in the real world and through science fiction – help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future. Imagining the Future of Climate Change introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements, exploring post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making.
Shelley Streeby is Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and Director of the Clarion Writing Workshop. She is the author of Radical Sensations, American Sensations, and co-editor of Empire and the Literature of Sensation. She is Associate Editor of American Quarterly.
"Our climate – political, cultural, natural – is indeed changing. In this brilliant volume, Shelley Streeby takes us into a storm system where scientists, activists, and radical storytellers conspire to envision a new world. This is an original and powerful book that makes the case that the scientifically documented crisis of climate change must also be addressed through outsider imaginations."
– Alex Rivera, director of Sleep Dealer
"Shelley Streeby continues a lifelong project of anti-racist archive building in Imagining the Future of Climate Change. She offers readers a beautifully researched argument for how and why Indigenous peoples and peoples of color offer the most powerful imaginative responses to global climate collapse. The chapter on Octavia Butler alone – which gives evidence for Butler's brilliant, longstanding engagement with climate politics – makes the book a must-read for climate-change scholars and activists."
– Stephanie LeMenager, author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century
"The age of extinction(s) is seeping out from the permafrost every night. It is coming toward us fast from the future, and we find ourselves every morning selling off our planet from under us. This state of un-making the world is almost unstoppable, or so it seems, as Shelley Streeby's incisive new work points out – new earths are being created and have been created by the speculative fictions of Octavia E. Butler, indigenous futurism, and direct-action movements that are now fighting the ruins yet to come. Imagining the Future of Climate Change is a blossom of hope that emerges from deep intergalactic roots that call on us to save our water, our lands, and our air, and to stop selling away what little future we have left."
– Ricardo Dominguez, Electronic Disturbance Theater
