Environments in Science Fiction: Essays on Alternative Spaces

The all-new essays in this book respond to the question, How do spaces in science fiction, both built and unbuilt, help shape the relationships among humans, other animals and their shared environments? Spaces, as well as a sense of place or belonging, play major roles in many science fiction works. This book focuses especially on science fiction that includes depictions of the future that include, but move beyond, dystopias and offer us ways to imagine reinventing ourselves and our perspectives; especially our links to and views of new environments.

There are ecocritical texts that deal with space/place and science fiction criticism that deals with dystopias but there is no other collection that focuses on the intersection of the two. The essays in this volume treat Shelley’s Frankenstein, Capek’s War with the Newts, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Marge Piercy’s He, She, It, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, Amitav Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.