Books | chrispak

Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction

Pak’s magisterially complete history of the idea of terraforming marks an important milestone in science fiction studies. He rightly sees the terraforming concept as the ideal test-bed for an astonishingly wide range of crucial gedankenexperiments in many fields. His analysis of the social, political, philosophical, spiritual, and moral dilemmas that the terraforming genre offers—humanity’s place in nature only the most obvious—makes this a book of importance far beyond the science fiction community.

— Frederick Turner, University of Texas, Dallas

Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction is the first study to trace the historical development of environmental science fiction, and it convincingly frames this development within the genre’s representation of planetary adaptation... Pak’s is a very good book.

— Eric Otto, Florida Gulf Coast University

'Chris Pak’s Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction contributes to environmental literary criticism with a specific focus on the trope of terraforming in science fiction from the twentieth century. Pak’s monograph provides an outstanding overview of the number of texts that engage with terraforming as well as how such texts engage with historical, political, and cultural understandings of humanity’s relationship to ecosystems as well as technological development’s impact on bioregions. Because Pak attends to shifts in literature that depict terraforming based on scientific and philosophical developments across the twentieth century, he powerfully traces contrasting literary concerns and trends from the 1950s despite consistent use of terraforming in science fiction. For example, Pak argues that, in the 1950s ad early 1960s, fictional play with terraforming drew upon ‘pastoral motifs and structures to engage in socio-political inquiry’; additionally, he shows how such texts also ‘draw from [the] convergence of the colonial and the utopian to inform their explorations of interplanetary settlement’ (pp. 56–7, 59). As he turns to discussion of works from the 1960s and 1970s, Pak shows how the popularizing of ecology, sustainability, and ecological design through publications like The Whole Earth Catalog influenced science fiction writers. During this period, Pak finds ‘the emergence of new ecological landscapes that reflected a sense of environmental urgency’ (p. 98). Because of its breadth, attention to historical shifts in the fiction of terraforming in response to scientific, philosophical, and cultural developments, and commitment to tracing the value of such fiction for environmentalist thinking, Pak’s Terraforming is a strong contribution to environmental literary criticism and studies of science fiction.’

— James Gifford, Margaret Konkol, James M. Clawson, Mary Foltz, Sophie Maruéjouls-Koch, Orion Ussner Kidder and Lindsay Parker. "American Literature: The Twenthieth Century." The Year's Work in English Studies 98 (2019), pp. 1077-1078.

'Terraforming ist eine exzellente und anschlussfähige Einführung in das Thema, stellt die Entwicklungen und Einflüsse über etwa 100 Jahre vor und bietet reichlich Material für eigene Forschung.’

— Peter Seyferth, "Pak, Chris. Terraforming. Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2016." Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung 7.1 (2019): 1–10.

'Terraforming is an eminently readable, enjoyable, and a well-informed criticism of selected science-fiction narratives. It is itself a kind of modulation, a transformation in our current thinking about the politics of SF and visions of how we might shape our world and other planets.‘

— Andrew Rowcroft, The British Society for Literature and Science (2018) <https://www.bsls.ac.uk/reviews/modern-and-contemporary/chris-pak-terraforming-ecopolitical-transformations-and-environmentalism-in-science-fiction/>

'Pak’s volume is indispensable to the study of terraforming stories. Both science fiction scholars and environmental theorists will find in this book a broad history of a complex idea expressed clearly and cogently. Pak explores an impressive number of texts and traces the development of terraforming sf with a deep understanding of its complexities, its social origins, and its philosophical import. This is a timely study that will surely become seminal to future scholars of terraforming stories. With climate change and environmental degradation continuing and even accelerating, terraforming narratives will no doubt continue to play a large role in the corpus of sf.‘

— James Hamby, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 28.3 (2017): 459–461.

'Terraforming offers a usefully detailed history and theoretically sophisticated analysis of an important tradition in contemporary environmental thought. The book will be useful to all scholars of science fiction and, more broadly, to anyone interested in the various ways that literary works shape and are shaped by environmentalism and environmental politics.'

— Connor Pitetti, Ecozon@ 8.2 (2017): 236 <http://ecozona.eu/article/view/1615/2079>

'Pak's Terraforming certainly rises to the challenge, making a strong case for ecological science fiction not simply as an important subliterature worthy of attention by English specialists but also as a mode of creative mythopoesis.’

— Gerry Canavan, Science Fiction Studies 44.1 (2017): 182–183

'[T]his is an important book and will be essential reading for scholars of ecocriticism and of the development of ideas in SF.'

— Anthony Nanson, The BSFA Review 2 (2017): 26–27

'Such a wide-ranging examination inevitably runs the risk of becoming unwieldy, or of collapsing under the weight of its own ambitious scope. Pak’s grasp of his material, however, is hugely impressive, and he moves with confidence through the whole of twentieth-century sf.'

— Thomas Connolly, SFRA Review 322 (2017): 15–16 <https://sfra.wildapricot.org/resources/Documents/SFRA%20322.pdf>

'Pak’s decades-spanning analysis of terraforming is an impressive work. It finds in sf an opportunity for a“disciplined thought experiment” (Pak 8)—a space for speculations about the future, yes, but also and especially for reflections on the present.'

— Benjamin R. DeVries, Fafnir—Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 4.2 (2017): 59–61 <http://journal.finfar.org/articles/a-book-revies-a-pathbreaking-study-of-terraforming-in-science-fiction/>

'Terraforming is a solid contribution to exploring the global weirding elements of speculative fiction and ecological futures—catatrophic, wonderful, and mundane. Pak's volume will likely introduce you to new literary texts, from masterpieces to monstrosities. What's more, Terraforming reinforces the deep ways in which we have never not been terraforming, right here on Earth, for better and for worse.'

— Andrew Hageman, Paradoxa: Global Weirding 28 (2016): 263

'Highlighting the popular speculative element, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction by Chris Pak should be mandatory reading in a number of curricula spanning a wide range of academic studies. But the interest should not stop there. Any reader picking up this book, students and fans alike, will walk away with a better knowledge of how the idea of terraforming evolved and an even greater appreciation for these speculative notions from some of the most influential writers in science fiction.'

— Ricky L. Brown, Amazing Stories (2016) <http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2016/10/review-terraforming-ecopolitical-transformations-environmentalism-science-fiction-chris-pak/>

Synopsis

This book explores the emergence and development of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2009). Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth – geoengineering – has begun to receive serious consideration as a way to address the effects of climate change. This book asks how science fiction has imagined the ways we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in stories by such writers as H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon in the UK, American pulp science fiction by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, the counter cultural novels of Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and Ernest Callenbach, and Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy, Frederick Turner’s epic poem of terraforming, Genesis, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy. It explores terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, the politics of colonisation and habitation, tradition and memory. This book shows how contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and how terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and many other readers a motif to aid in thinking in complex ways about the human impact on planetary environments. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world.