Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fictions: Narrating the Future ed. by Tereza Dìdinová et al.

Reviewed by: Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fictions: Narrating the Futureed. by Tereza Dìdinová et al. Chris Pak Forging an Anthropocenic Awareness Through Literature. Tereza Dìdinová, Weronika £aszkiewicz, and Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, eds. Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fictions: Narrating the Future. Lexington, 2021. 276 pp. $105 hc, $45 ebk. The challenges of the Anthropocene implicate numerous effects and concerns and call on readers, critics, and writers to respond in appropriately wide-ranging ways. The twelve chapters of Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Futureaddress the philosophical, formal, social, and political themes informing literary responses to the Anthropocene. This term is taken as an opportunity to engage in necessary boundary crossings among disciplines and fields of knowledge, given the wide-ranging and diverse impacts of the effects of climate change across societies. Central to this project is the power of speculative fictions for thinking through key Anthropocenic concerns: generational justice, dystopia, hope, and responsibility. This commitment to literature's role in the Anthropocene is grounded in speculative fiction's potential for exploring ideas about nature and its ability to portray the effects of climate catastrophe, its capacity to examine the social and political systems that exacerbate or ameliorate the destruction of non-human environments, and its ability to speculate on human and non-human relationships. Literature's role in speaking to the Anthropocene is convincingly outlined in the introductory chapter by the collection's editors. It frames the concerns detailed above against readings of Emma Itäranta's Memory of Water(2012, English trans. 2014), Paolo Bacigalupi's "The People of Sand and Slag" (2004), and David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks(2014). The Anthropocene itself, the editors argue, "can be conceptualized as a narrative, but it is not a universal narrative of humankind. It is a story woven from various voices and identities, with no omniscient narrator and no single protagonist" (11). The editors forcefully assert that storytelling and speculative fiction explore "the causes and consequences of the Anthropocene in ways inaccessible to other fields" (12). Of note is the editors' suggestion that the popularity of YA fiction works as if "preparing the younger audiences for the global challenges and, at the same time, assuring them that they will prevail and recover from their traumatizing experiences" (14). [End Page 384] The twelve chapters by various authors are organized into three sections. The first, "Nature and Culture in the Anthropocene," assembles four chapters that analyze works addressing storytelling and the nature-culture duality to show how they invite the expression of non-human agencies. These chapters investigate how the stories that have traditionally been told undergo revisions that contest humanist conceptions of human and non-human relationships. Part two, "(Post)Apocalyptic World and the Anthropocene," gathers chapters that analyze apocalyptic visions of the Anthropocene, whether caused by plague, nuclear technologies, zombies, or ecological crisis. The final part, "Society and Politics in the Anthropocene," explores the material, social, cultural, and narrative influences that have led to the Anthropocene. These three sections exhibit considerable crossover with one another, however, and also could have been configured in a variety of different ways. In part one, Tereza Dìdinová addresses literature's role in the Anthropocene in "The Being that Can Be Told: The Tellingby Ursula K. Le Guin as a Remedy for the Anthropocene." Dìdinová explores mimesis in fantastic literature—specifically science fiction—and seeks to connect such interpretive approaches to cognitive science, in particular Marco Caracciolo's notion of embodied readings and Patrick Colm's theorization of literature as simulation. Although the connections between cognitive science and theories of the fantastic and sf are not explicated, the chapter offers a useful bridge that could enrich understanding of such fiction's aesthetic, social, and political engagement. The three levels of mimesis addressed here—allusion to historical events and locations, the presentation of future philosophies informed by contemporary ones, and what Le Guin describes as "the patterned intensity of language" (34)—offer connections to sf as an extrapolative literature. Appeal to cognitive science's emphasis on embodied readings and these three levels of mimesis leads to an account of how fiction imitates a...