Planetary Futures
Reframing Climate Change through Geoengineering and Terraforming
Summary
This book examines geoengineering and terraforming stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, N. K. Jemisin, Jane Killick and M. Darusha Wehm (Terraforming Mars board game novelizations), Adrian Tchaikovsky and Annalee Newitz to understand how twenty-first-century science fiction uses these concepts to analyse and critique the dimensions of our contemporary climate context and our responses to its effects.
Understanding science fiction as generative of models that inform thinking about substantive contemporary concerns, this book ultimately argues that science fiction presents a diverse and dynamic creative field that can and should be used to shape public engagement and policy about climate change and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Modelling Geoengineering and Terraforming in Science Fiction
- Planetary Adaptation and its Emergence in Sf
- Terraforming, Geoengineering and Uncertainty in the Twenty-First Century
- Sf and Modelling
- Chapter 1 Catastrophe and Solar Radiation Management on Earth in Near-Future Stories of Geoengineering
- Unframing Stratospheric Aerosol Injection in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future
- The Technocratic Will to Power in Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock
- Framing and Consent in Near-Future Sf
- Chapter 2 Engineering Earth and the Exploitation of Life in Far-Future Stories of Geoengineering
- Structures of Exploitation in the Broken Earth Trilogy
- Energy and the Biopolitical Redefinition of Life
- The Anger of the Animate Earth
- Chapter 3 Narrative Games with Terraforming and the Expansion into the Solar System
- Terraforming as a New Frontier for Capitalist Expansion
- The Living Tool in Jane Killick’s In the Shadow of Deimos
- Terraforming as the Transformation of Life in Jane Killick’s In the Shadow of Deimos and Edge of Catastrophe
- Transformations to Cultures of Governance on Mars in M. Darusha Wehm’s Shores of a New Horizon
- Chapter 4 Engineering Worlds and Pantropic Communities in Far-Future Terraforming Stories
- Kinship and the Posthuman in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time
- Assimilation and the Erasure of the Other in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin and Children of Memory
- The Synthetic Living Tool and Biopolitics in Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers
- Conclusion: Knowledge Infrastructures for the Anthropocene
- Bibliography
- Index
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my editor, Laurel Plapp, for the invitation to revisit terraforming and geoengineering for Peter Lang’s Speculations series. In 2023, Sarah Dillon of Cambridge University invited me to contribute to the project ‘Future Uses of Space (FUS): Narrative Evidence for Science & Technology Advantage Through Linking Research and Policy’, where I first engaged with the storylistening framework to think through how the Humanities could inform policy about terraforming and geoengineering. I extended these examinations in a presentation at the annual Science Fiction Research Association conference, held in Tartu, in 2024. I would also like to thank Mateusz Borowski at Jagiellonian University for his invitation in the same year to participate in the workshop ‘Feral Attunements: How More-Than-Human Bodies Mediate Between Scales’, the second NCN Opus 22 workshop for the project ‘After Climate Crisis: Non-Scalable Survival Strategies in Speculative Fabulations of the Last Two Decades’, where I presented portions of Chapter 4. Thank you, too, to Jade Arbo of the Federal University of Pelotas and Judith Rauscher of the University of Cologne for their invitation to present at the EASLCE-funded workshop ‘Sustainability and Social Justice in Speculative Fiction: Local Practices – Transatlantic Conversations: An Ecocritical Workshop Series’, where I presented portions of Chapter 1 in 2024. I had the pleasure of hosting Arbo at Swansea University on a Visiting Scholarship in 2024 and am grateful for the conversations that we had. In 2025, Moritz Ingwersen at Dresden University of Technology invited me to teach a seminar on Atmospheric Imaginaries and to lecture, with Alison Sperling of Florida State University, on the Anthropocene. Moritz liaised with Kristen Heinig at the German Hygiene Museum to organize the talk, ‘Fixing Atmospheres: Geoengineering as Science Fiction’, as part of their exhibition The Air We Share. These were invaluable opportunities to develop my thinking around this book and to discuss aspects of contemporary geoengineering in a public conversation with Lili Fuhr of the Center for International Environmental Law. I would also like to extend my appreciation to the peer reviewers who reviewed my proposal and manuscript, and offered insightful comments for developing the latter. Thank you to all these people for their support.
Introduction Modelling Geoengineering and Terraforming in Science Fiction
Terraforming and geoengineering have become increasingly popular concepts for thinking through a variety of interventions into the organization of space and life during the twenty-first century. Anthropogenic climate change has been framed in science fiction (sf), popular science and environmental discourse as a mode of terraforming that foregrounds how transformations to ecologies, infrastructures and society are implicated in broader reconfigurations of each of these dimensions at the planetary scale. Anne Stewart argues that what she calls ‘angry planet fictions’ refuse the seizures and violences of colonial terraforming, which is exemplified by the transformation of infrastructures in North America, plantation slavery and Indigenous land expropriation and genocide. These colonial-capitalist relationships to the land and its inhabitants reorganize life such that it ‘makes the planet habitable for European colonial settlers, settler-adjacents, and domesticated nonhumans’ while simultaneously narrowing opportunities for other assemblages of life to flourish.1 This conceptualization of terraforming aligns with Alfred W. Crosby’s study of how settler-colonialism involves modes of ecological imperialism that sought to extend a systematizing project of control over nature by displacing Indigenous peoples, flora and fauna with a non-native portmanteau biota to facilitate the restructuring and habitation of colonized lands.2 This re-evaluation of colonialism as a form of terraforming has also been used to reframe and thus re-perspectivize contemporary modes of resource extraction. Naomi Klein opens This Changes Everything with an epigraph that quotes Kim Stanley Robinson and which asserts that ‘[s]cience fiction is rife with fantasies of terraforming – humans traveling to lifeless planets and engineering them into earthlike habitats. The Canadian tar sands are the opposite: terra-deforming’.3
Alongside this popularization and expansion of the concept of terraforming, geoengineering has become increasingly prominent in scientific and policy discourses as a group of speculative technological fixes aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change. In contrast to the broadening of terraforming to refer to multiple modes of transforming land and life, geoengineering has seen a narrowing of its reference within scientific, policy and public spheres. Discussion of geoengineering has occurred in isolation from the broader historical, cultural and socio-political dimensions of projects of planetary adaptation, often focusing instead on the strictly technical parameters for a suite of approaches aimed at modifying atmospheric carbon levels. Conceiving of geoengineering as a technological fix for anthropogenic climate change restricts inquiry into the possibilities for its conceptualization, implementation and consequences in ways that disconnect such scientific and public debate from the broader contexts that underpin the intensification of climate change and its effects. In response to this narrowing, Holly Jean Buck uses speculative storytelling to imagine how climate change and geoengineering will involve far-reaching social transformations and makes the case for serious consideration of such interventions.4 In contrast, Linda Schneider and Lili Fuhr argue that geoengineering ‘is yet another power grab. It would entrench existing inequalities, affirm existing power structures, and offer a means by which to avoid taking immediate climate action that might disrupt commercial interests’.5
This book engages with contemporary debates about terraforming and geoengineering to examine how sf imagines these processes and their relationship to the material, social and political contexts within which climate change is understood. It argues that portrayals of terraforming and geoengineering in sf can and should inform broader public debate about geoengineering for climate change mitigation and projects of planetary scope. This is because visions of terraformed and geoengineered worlds offer ways to think about the societies and communities that could emerge in contexts of radical transformation. These stories explore the rationales for and consequences of planetary engineering and its governance to understand how such endeavours reshape communities and what values such transformations express. These narrative visions invite interrogation and offer valuable spaces for readers to develop an awareness of the possible ramifications of terraforming and geoengineering. This book will thus analyse terraforming and geoengineering stories published during the twenty-first century to build on the investigation begun in Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction.6 It updates the insights in Terraforming by connecting sf to contemporary discussions of geoengineering beyond sf to show how sf can help to frame understanding of terraforming and geoengineering in ways that communicate to a variety of audiences these broader contexts and their societal implications.
Planetary Adaptation and its Emergence in Sf
Terraforming and geoengineering are conceptually related processes. Terraforming refers to the adaptation of planetary spaces and other cosmic bodies beyond Earth, while geoengineering labels transformations that are confined to Earth. In the twenty-first century, both terms have taken on new resonance in the context of anthropogenic climate change, particularly when it is recognized that climate change is a form of geoengineering insofar as it involves planetary-scale processes that are transforming Earth’s climate. While the cultural imaginary related to planetary transformation existed alongside and in constant feedback with science and futures thinking, this book examines how terraforming and geoengineering are imagined in twenty-first-century sf. Rather than a one-way transport of ideas from sf to science and futures thinking or vice-versa, all three have developed alongside and continually informed one another. Twenty-first-century sf thus inherits a long tradition of narrative thought and scientific speculation about the social, cultural, material and cognitive transformations that terraforming and geoengineering could entail, even as it transforms these narrative visions and scientific speculations into stories that imagine Earth’s climate futures from the position of the twenty-first century. This book does not trace the feedback between science, sf and futures thinking but rather shows how terraforming and geoengineering stories can inform thought and debate about climate change and real-world planetary adaptation. How we understand both terms is crucial as these interpretations will texture public discussion about geoengineering to address the effects of climate change on Earth. Equally important, however, is that a greater understanding of the development of both ideas and how they are incorporated into stories can enrich our understanding of the social and cultural values and priorities to which incarnations of planetary adaptation speak. Such scrutiny offers opportunities for rethinking our relationship to Earth and how we might develop modes of habitation that are ethical, inclusive and sustainable.
The word ‘terraform’ first appeared in Jack Williamson’s 1942 short story, ‘Collision Orbit’, but examples of sf that feature early engagements with planetary adaptation predated the term.7 Sebastian Egholm Lund shows how Jules Verne’s 1889 novel, Sans Dessus Dessous, functions as a critique of geoengineering.8 In this novel, the Baltimore Gun Club of Verne’s earlier works, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, intends to modify the Earth’s axial tilt to melt Arctic ice, thus granting access to priceless beds of coal.9 Thus, the connection between planetary adaptation, resource extraction and the opening up of previously inaccessible territory was established in some of the earliest geoengineering sf. Another story that speculates on altering Earth’s position relative to the Sun is Han Ryner’s 1909 ‘A Biography of Victor Venturon’, in which the eponymous protagonist proposes to move the Earth closer to the Sun to address the effects of a global ice age.10 Venturon’s proposal is rejected and the scientist mocked, but a devastating cometary collision sets Earth on a trajectory toward the Sun, necessitating Venturon’s intervention to arrest the planet’s fatal approach. While these stories concern what would now be called geoengineering, Octave Béliard’s utopian vision of the future, the 1910 short story ‘La Journée d’un Parisien au XXIe Siècle’, includes a section that details the terraforming of Earth’s moon.11 These stories, first published in French, point to how speculation about planetary adaptation emerged in non-Anglophone sf in contexts that connect these endeavours to entrepreneurial visions for the transformation of the social and material contexts for living. These themes persist and are refigured throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
H. G. Wells’ 1898 The War of the Worlds depicts Martians invading Earth to escape their own ecologically devastated planet.12 The invaders introduce Martian vegetation to Earth, which displaces Earth’s own ecologies and threatens to transform the planet into a second Mars. Informing Wells’ vision are the popular writings of the astronomer Percival Lowell, who theorized a declining Martian civilization in his 1895 book Mars, an idea which he continued to develop after the publication of The War of the Worlds with Mars and Its Canals in 1906 and Mars as the Abode of Life in 1908.13 Inspired by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and his use of the word canali to describe his observation of markings on Mars’ surface, Lowell claimed to have detected signs of canals that evidenced a vast Martian irrigation network – a global engineering project which Lowell suggests the Martians constructed in response to environmental pressure caused by Mars’ declining habitability.14 Thus, as early as the turn of the twentieth century, what would come to be known as terraforming and geoengineering were imagined as responses to climate change on planets other than Earth.
Details
- Pages
- VIII, 124
- Publication Year
- 2026
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781803746777
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781803746784
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781803746760
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22182
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2026 (September)
- Keywords
- Science fiction terraforming geoengineering climate change Anthropocene colonialism imperialism capitalism posthumanism biopolitics policy consent governance knowledge infrastructures modelling community identity
- Published
- Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2026. viii, 124 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
