Notes from Underground: The Depths of Environmental Arts, Culture and Justice ASLE Biennial Conferen

I'm travelling to Moscow, Idaho, to attend the US based ASLE conference, to be held from the 23rd-27th June 2015. Regrettably, this clashes with the SFRA 2015 conference, but I've been asked to present on an ASLE-UKI panel with Louise Squie, Adeline Johns-Putra, Joshua Shuster and Dana Phillips. I'm gratified to have been asked to represent ASLE-UKI at this conference.

There is an ASLE/SFRA panel at this conference, too, organised by Andrew Hageman, so the event promises to be very exciting!

Here's my abstract:

Sustainability and the Underground in Science Fiction

How can literature and literary scholarship help us think about how the theme of the underground relates to sustainability? Playing with the various ways the “underground” can be brought into the orbit of this question, I emphasise how science fiction (sf) has been positioned as a kind of underground literature that is often publicly disavowed. Stewart Brand disassociated himself from futurism and utopian thinking, but was both influenced by Robert Heinlein and was connected to sf writers and scientists such as Ernest Callenbach, Ursula Le Guin, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, all of whom contributed to the Whole Earth Catalog’s successor, the CoEvolution Quarterly. The pragmatic, libertarian environmentalism of the counterculture that coalesced around the Whole Earth Catalog (which Brand founded and which disseminated sustainability to a wider audience) is itself a kind of underground movement in a similar – and sometimes converging – sense.

Sf explores many instances of sustainable and unsustainable practices, but issues of energy, oil, water and the extraction of other resources have been persistent themes. The iconic drill connects the underground to issues of unsustainability and has appeared in much ecologically and environmentally oriented sf, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “When the World Screamed” (1928), Ray Bradbury’s “Here There Be Tygers” (1951), David Brin’s Earth (1990) and many others that use the drill to symbolise humankind’s mastery over the shaping of the landscape. What might sf be able to tell us about contemporary debates surrounding issues such as the Keystone Pipeline, fracking and climate change? In this talk, I explore how the motif of the drill in sf is connected to the underground via resource extraction, and how the environments imagined, both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, offer contexts that allow us to reflect upon the status of energy regimes in contemporary societies.