British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Conference, 16-18 April 2015

This will be my first presentation at the BSLS conference, held this year from Thursday 16 April to Saturday 18 April at the University of Liverpool. Keynotes are Professor Keith Barnham (Imperial College London), Dr Patricia Fara (University of Cambridge), and Dr Claire Preston (Queen Mary University of London). My proposal is:

“The Rich Sun, / The Power of Growth, the Lever of the Future”*: The Sun in Science Fiction

As a fundamental source of energy for life, sunlight is central to the imagination of terraforming and biospheres in science fiction (sf). Suns signify the shared origin of life and matter and are often represented as objects of worship. Its radiation makes it an ambivalent motif, being both a danger and a cause of mutations that prompt evolutionary adaptations. The growth of plant life, the greenhouse effect and climate change are all driven by the Sun. This fact is central to terraforming stories, which speculate on the possibilities of adapting worlds for habitation by Earthbound life, and for contemporary ideas about geoengineering as a form of climate change mitigation. Sf explores technologically based alternatives to societal infrastructures and imagines the social arrangements these alternatives are coupled with.

In this talk I examine how terraforming narratives have imagined the Sun's centrality as a source of energy for new life in works such as Frederick Turner’s Genesis and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, among others. I aim to show how biospheres feature in these narratives and how they provide a model for the adaptation of planetary environments. I also consider how sf has melded scientific and metaphoric language to promulgate new myths based in science that attempt to locate humankind within a broad, evolutionary perspective to provide a narrative of our place in the universe.

Frederick Turner. 1988. Genesis. Web (2014) <http://frederickturnerpoet.com/?page_id=166>.