ABSTRACT
Fantasy literature, whose authors are often interested in planetary-scale issues (other globes with their unique biodiversity, the earth in an alternative universe, or in a distant future), offers up possibilities to talk about alien ecologies in a way which appeals to the imagination. As early as in 1965, Frank Herbert famously claimed in his classic saga Dune that ecology is the science of understanding consequences. Although Dune is set on faraway planets, the book is inspired by terrestrial desert landscapes and indigenous peoples who learnt to live amidst aridity, and thus Herbert was making a point about human subjectivity, nature, and political awareness. In the following decades, texts devoted to dangers facing the human environment and an ecological crisis appeared in popular science series and the mainstream press, while more and more writers of speculative fiction published books devoted to ecological issues: climate, anthropogenic, and natural disasters, terraforming, and so on. Simultaneously, well- written popular science publications spread imagination-spurring images of polluted environments—the most famous of which is Rachel Carson’s fable of a silent spring; and fiction writers projected some of these onto fantastic landscapes. The mimetic and the imagined coexist in ecological discourse: the ability to imagine and empathise is considered necessary to avert climate catastrophe. Sherri Goodman in the foreword to Disaster Alley. Climate Change, Conflicts and Risks famously claims that climate change is a serious threat and may result in the obliteration of human civilisation because of our catastrophic failure of imagination. In order to make readers realise what environmental catastrophes are really like, popular science and disaster fiction writers devise poignant narrative strategies. Thus, it is fables, metaphors, similes, and images that characterise environmental discourse in fiction and non-fiction, and one of the major sources of vehicles for metaphors is geology.
