Terrestrial Ecotopias

This work, though primarily based on the research that I undertook during my PhD, has been years in the making, crystallising especially after I first encountered the fields of science fiction and utopian studies during my undergraduate studies at the University of Miami. I’d like to thank my visionary and inspiring lecturers during those formative years for pointing me in the direction of radical authors and activists variedly challenging the status quo.

None of this work would have been possible without the ongoing support, encouragement and solidarity tirelessly displayed by my family and friends throughout the years: My mum Elaine Alonso-Cruz, my sisters Alexandra and Angela Cruz, my dad Jorge Cruz, my dearest friends and comrades James McIntosh, Alice Sibley, Pietro Gallanti, Rhiannon Firth, Nora Castle, Emrah Atasoy, Manuel Sousa-Oliveira, Athira Unni, Aiko Kurisutaru, Anja Wettergren, Tom Douglass, Luigi Daniele, Filip Nuyens, James Reid, Casper, and many more.

I also wish to thank colleagues and friends from the field of utopian studies – Tom Moylan, Laurence Davis, Darren Webb, Nicole Pohl, Ibtisam Ahmed, and many more. Since finding my disciplinary ‘tribe’, so much has fallen into place. The utopian ‘lens’ has helped me frame and articulate so many of our present injustices, and see that they are far from natural or inevitable. Thank you to Nottingham Trent University for supporting and variedly funding my research since 2016, and for the wonderful colleagues who’ve enriched my time at this institution.

A very warm ‘thank you’ to my friends and research participants from Earth first!, Hambacher Forst, Extinction Rebellion, SeaShepherd, hunt saboteur activist groups, and others for letting me gain further insights into the incredible work that you do. Your tireless efforts continue to inspire me.

To my wonderful, innumerable terrestrial kin, those with wings, scales and fur, those who crawl, fly, climb, run and swim; from the microscopic to the multi-tonned wonders … I love you, though I’ve only had the privilege of getting to know a few of you. I’m forever grateful to you for not only making ‘me’ possible, in a bio-physiological and psychological sense, but also for bringing such immense joy to my life since I can remember. This is for you.

After living through the upheavals of two World Wars and the Great Depression, an ageing H. G. Wells, often referred to as the father of science fiction, appeared to lose much of his former, seemingly boundless optimism for the establishment of a peaceful and egalitarian future.¹ In his final work Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), published one year before his death, he reflects on a chaotic and unpredictable war-torn world which has obliterated the ‘orderly development of life’ and thus the ability to ‘sketch out the pattern of things to come’ (5). In the ‘voiceless limitless darkness’ (15) that remains, Wells gleaned:

In a stark (and somewhat misanthropic) abandonment of his former hope in human perfectibility, Wells presages the imminent and inevitable end of the ‘human story’ (18) and life in general as we have known it, and gestures towards the emergence of a more adaptable posthuman species that shall inherit the earth (19). One can only speculate what Wells would opine if he were alive today, in a world plagued by crippling levels of socioeconomic inequality, the disturbing proliferation of far-right social and political mobilisations (Lazaridis et al. 2016), a climate system in disarray, the accelerating absence of other-than-human life forms and the incalculable misery that is yet to come as the above unfold in tandem. Here it is of the essence to recall one of Wells’s former admissions: that of the ‘black, blank and vast ignorance’ (Wells 1986, p. 120) of the to-come wherein hope continually resides. With so much on the line, now more than ever we must recall that the ‘Now’ of late capitalism, with its myriad socio-ecological exclusions and systematic eradication of life’s rich assemblages, is far from inevitable – it is merely one amongst innumerable possible worlds. That is what I will attempt to illustrate throughout this book. In this I follow Rebecca Solnit and others who, in her essential work Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2016), urges that now more than ever – amidst the greatest unravelling of life’s assemblages seen in millions of years, climate chaos, mounting socioeconomic inequality – we need hope. Hope functions as a life-saving light in the dark, one that refutes what is, whilst illuminating the other possibilities that lie around and ahead. However, crucially, hope is not reducible to mere wishful thinking or blind faith, nor ‘a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky’ … hope is …