ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two different literary texts that are concerned with oil technology in the North Sea. China Miéville’s short story “Covehithe” is an example of speculative fiction; the second text is a long poem by the acclaimed Norwegian poet Øyvind Rimbereid, “Solaris korrigert,” that also draws on science fiction tropes in its imagination of a future North Sea society negotiating the legacies of fossil fuel technologies. This chapter employs the insights of material ecocriticism, examining in particular the entanglements of humans in material worlds; both texts could be considered “petro-texts” for their entwined agencies of oil, human, and more-than-human forces. These petro-texts are analysed in the light of the Anthropocene concept, with particular reference to the scholarship of Dipesh Chakrabarty.
