This chapter explores the origins of the US science fiction short story in transnational print networks featuring Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Throughout, we highlight the significance of women writers such as Lydia Maria Child, Judith Merril, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler. The chapter examines how struggles over science and technology shape popular turn-of-the-century stories of young white man inventors and the mostly white man-focused twentieth-century pulp magazine Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. We connect W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” to a long genealogy of US science fiction written by Black people, including earlier writers such as Martin Delany as well as later ones such as Samuel Delany. The conclusion considers anthologies and projects such as solarpunk that revitalize the genre by imagining the social effects of changes in science and nature in relation to new forms of technology, collaboration, and social movement activism.

This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.

The contemporary ecological crisis is also a crisis of human perception, representation, and agency. We are required to make frenetic alterations of scale, adjusting our daily experiences, actions and lifestyles to ever-changing global and atmospheric patterns and impacts. Yet the polysemy of climate and its diffuse presence in our lives – as extreme weather event, day-to-day expectation, scientific data, or urgent socio-political issue – also makes it amenable to multi-media or transmedia dissemination. Analogously, digital media is itself characterised by movement across and between microscopic (tweets, data) and macroscopic levels – i.e. a digital sphere marked simultaneously by ‘infowhelm’ and the possibility of mass global, networked, and resistant communities. This exploratory survey ranges from the quotidian dimensions of digital and online media – how changes in climate are being recorded and registered in tweets, blogs, and citizen science – to deeper qualitative storytelling formats adapted from and sometimes in dialogue with old media. The latter include online self-published fiction, podcasting (e.g. the BBC audio drama Forest 404), and personal ‘climate stories’ and testimonies. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued importance, and potential agency, of human-scale perspectives on micro- and macroscopic ecological complexities and for preserving distinct, often maligned human modes of narrative and storytelling.

Rather than dwelling on routinely marked distinctions between realist and science fictional modes, this chapter identifies an emergent strand of writing about climate change that it calls ‘critical climate irrealism’. It builds on Michael Löwy’s ‘critical irrealism’ where the irreal – as in the fantastic, oneiric, or surrealistic – erupts within a predominantly realist text. ‘Critical irrealism’ describes fictions that do not follow realism’s ‘accurate representations of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. Critical irrealism is a notable feature of what World Literary Studies calls literature emerging from the ‘periphery’: territories that suffer from the violent extraction of labour and resources by the ‘core’ of the capitalist world system. This chapter argues that a comparable, and sometimes intersecting, process can be seen in contemporary fiction that uses the weird, the Gothic, the uncanny, and other modes of irrealism to engage with climate change. But it also suggests that climate change’s non-local effects and distorted temporalities complicate the core/periphery model. In bringing together ‘critical irrealism’ with a sense of ‘climate crisis’, ‘critical climate irrealism’ describes an important new trend, where the irreal negotiates radical environmental upheaval in a manner that realism’s recognisable individual experience cannot.

Cities have traditionally been neglected settings in environmental writing and ecologically oriented literary criticism, but have played a central role in the thought and writings of the environmental justice movement. Recently, they have also come into focus as “novel ecosystems” of their own in fiction and nonfiction. This chapter surveys two thematic emphases in environmental literature that portrays cities at risk from either toxicity or climate change, both of which continue to emphasize the antagonism between urban landscapes and the forces of nature by describing cities as either sources or targets of environmental risk. It then focuses on a third and less explored approach to the city as a multispecies community to outline four recurrent templates: the awareness narrative in which individuals or communities discover urban species; the narrative of urban return in which wild species reclaim the city; narratives about cities as sites of newly emergent species through evolution or technological modification; and narratives of urban bonds between humans and nonhumans. All of these narratives shift the emphasis from the city as an ecological wasteland to a new understanding of novel urban ecosystems and novel biological habitats that need to be understood in terms of multispecies justice.

Heather Houser considers the conceptual frameworks of a topic that bears on nearly every other chapter in this Companion, contemporary “cli-fi” and ecocritical approaches to current literature. When writers presume transformational climate change as a starting point, rather than an abstract possibility, they narrate an “uncanny valley of familiarity and radical alteration” that extends, accelerates, or alters the logics of the present into near or distant futures of drought, warfare, destitution, and superstorms.

Environmental fiction and nonfiction writers began to use secular apocalypse in the 1960s and continue to do so as the emphasis has shifted over time from scenarios of pollution and population growth to biodiversity loss and to climate change and its consequences: natural disasters, refugee crises, and increased inequality. It has sometimes been considered environmentalism’s most powerful narrative strategy. But environmental projections of apocalyptic futures in popular-scientific texts must contend with the difficulty of balancing known facts and imagined futures. Fictional portrayals of eco-apocalypse, meanwhile, often rely on narrative templates that emphasize the breakdown of civic institutions and explore changing family configurations under these circumstances. But whereas the collapse of societies is intended as a warning about possible real-live developments, it is often portrayed without any accompanying imagination of new social structures. Eco-apocalyptic narrative therefore confronts the challenges of trivialization and spectacularization, with future environmental disasters so common in fiction and film that they have lost much of their ability to inspire fear or activism. This chapter argues that apocalyptic narrative no longer has much force as a strategy of environmental communication or aesthetics. The more promising forms of eco-futurist narrative are those seeking to outline new social forms that can emerge from current ecological crisis, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.