The Earth in Contemporary Fiction and Science

Contemporary fiction and science tend to represent the earth as a manufactured planet—not a natural body but one deeply impressed upon and inscribed by human-built infrastructures. Since 1950, a number of revelations have shaped how we understand the earth. In the sciences, the growth of oceanography, geology, and atmospheric chemistry gave rise to the discipline of earth system science in the 1980s, while theories of plate tectonics and catastrophism illuminated a shifting, fluid, and mobile planet. Along with these scientific developments, themselves often funded and promoted by military and corporate interests, technologies of global surveillance, subterranean drilling, geoengineering, and nuclear energy added new dimensions of risk to the planetary picture—risk compounded by the surge in plastics, transportation and infrastructure, refrigeration, and accumulating global waste. Questions of earthliness and planetarity have long received attention from the genre of science fiction; in the 21st century, however, the unfolding climate crisis attracts literary attention beyond genre fiction, which has in turn sparked critical conversations about the boundaries of genre and the novel form. Scholars frequently point to climate change and other emergent environmental crises as socio-scientific discourses that bear on how we talk about things like form, genre, and narrative. Contemporary fiction and science position earth within the emergence of the geosocial concepts such as climate change, the Anthropocene, and the Great Acceleration, all of which invoke narrative frameworks about how humans have impacted earth systems throughout history and increasingly in recent decades. Four of these frameworks offer a helpful overview of ways the earth features in contemporary fiction and science: the persistent catastrophe, in which the earth is represented in the midst of calamitous transformations that have repercussions for how we describe the world realistically; the unquantifiable earth, in which scientific theories, computational models, satellite imaging, and other analytical methods struggle to capture the planet in all its complexity and volatility; the geological color line, which filters the earth’s history through the legacies of racism, colonialism, imperialism, and environmental injustice; and the inhabitable earth, which draws on different storytelling modes to imagine practices and ways of organizing in the future, and to clear pathways for human existence on a manufactured planet. Each of these frameworks highlights unique dimensions of the earth in relation to human experience and history and provide platforms for considering the production of narrative fiction in the late 20th and 21st centuries.