Programm

Board games not only increasingly feature ecological and climate-related themes, but are also increasingly understood and promoted as knowledge-transferring communication tools. They are ascribed a special, if not central, role as a "didactic tool" (Ventuno/Corridoni 2019) when it comes to sensitizing people to the threat of the climate crisis and encouraging them to act sustainably. It is hoped that board games will allow players to "directly experience the consequences of climate-relevant actions" (Bathiany 2020). This is necessary because previous climate communication "either operates [...] with concepts that are too abstract [...] or deliberately stirs up negative feelings such as fear [...]" (ibid.). Board games are therefore not only expected to be a sociable pastime, but also a knowledge-related impulse for better action: "Have fun, and make an impact!" (Play for the Future 2021). If one follows the thesis that facts are necessary in the debate about the climate crisis, but not sufficient to enable the necessary level of action by society as a whole (Böhnert/Reszke 2022a), games could fulfill a communicative mediation function at this interface, beyond the political debates that are often perceived as heated. Our research interest focuses on the exploration and analysis of science-communicative practices (Böhnert/Reszke 2022a, 2022b) and processes of knowledge production and reception (Böhnert 2022). We consider board games to be an occasion and opportunity for external science communication (Janich/Kalwa 2018), in which laypersons interact with each other as players and there is not only space for follow-up communication after a reception action has been completed (cf. Zinken et al., 2021, Böhm 2023).

The key questions are:

• product-related: What knowledge is assessed as relevant by the game designers in order to model it in the game material for playful action as "directly experienceable"
• Communication-related: To what extent is climate communication here understood as a monodirectional transfer, in which only one specific (climate) strategy is conceptualized as successful, or initiated as co-design that considers different approaches on an equal footing
• action-related: To what extent are the players encouraged to activate existing knowledge and relate it to the game material/events?

Further information: https://www.climate-thinking.de/index.php?title=Brettspiele_als_diskursives_Medium_der_klimabezogenen_Wissensvermittlung

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"Yo, venus mecánica, maniquí humano" is how Obdulia Sánchez, the cabaret dancer at the center of Díaz Fernández's little commented, avant-garde short novel, describes herself. This article takes the image of the "mechanical Venus", a machine woman, as its starting point. It is significant that the (self-)designation "venus mecánica" does not appear explicitly in the narrative other than in chapter 17 (from which the quotation is taken) and in the title itself. How can the absence of this unusual, seemingly fantastic image be interpreted despite its titular function? And what a priori underlies the connection between machine and woman? In order to be able to pursue these questions, the first step is to classify the motif of the machine woman in terms of literary and film history. To what extent are there references to the probably best-known feminoid of the late 19th century from Villiers de l'Isle-Adams L'Ève future (1886)? The ideal robot woman Hadaly still retains romantic-fantastic elements, while Díaz Fernández's mechanistic image of women can be interpreted as a metaphor for his generation's critique of capitalism, which identifies women as the playthings of patriarchal structures. Here, Díaz Fernández's Venus seems to be closer to Fritz Lang's Maria from his silent film Metropolis (1927), which appears shortly before Venus mecánica. In a second step, the machine(n)-woman paradigm will be read against the background of posthumanist-feminist theories (Braidotti and Haraway) in order to examine whether the overcoming of a gendered understanding of technology, as called for by Donna Haraway in her "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), is already evident in Díaz Fernández.

In the narrative texts by Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin, family constellations are always characterized by the uncanny. Family relationships are damaged, inverted, transformed or literally poisoned, often tipping over into the oppressive or even horrifying. The seemingly 'natural' bonds and filiations of family relationships are stripped of their familiar character in order to depict dysfunctional or violent constellations instead. In the process, interior spaces (apartments, houses and dwellings) consistently lose their familiar character, while exterior spaces (gardens, landscapes) become threatening and dangerous.

Such an uncanny perspectivization of reproduction can be understood as a direct antithesis to the epic family stories that have been shaped by authors such as Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende since the 1980s. While their novels are characterized by cyclical structures and the depiction of traditional genealogies, Schweblin's stories contain (ab)breaks, interruptions and disruptions. A principle of repetition and transmission is replaced by a finite temporality that encompasses both the 'economy' and the 'ecology' of the family.

The planned lecture examines individual narratives from the collections Pájaros en la boca (2009) and Siete casas vacías (2015) against the background of disrupted or interrupted family structures. While previous research has mostly focused either on the influence of (neo)fantastic literature on Schweblin's texts or (also inspired by the short novel Distancia de rescate (2014) and its film adaptation) on the thematization of natural disasters and climatic deregulation, the focus on family constellations makes it possible to link the two approaches. The analysis focuses on the various methods used by the author to stage precarious border crossings and threshold spaces between inside and outside, which consistently undermine the secure familial order of the home.

"[E]sto no era el Génesis, era el cambio climático" (Rossi 2019: 174), quipped the brave Lalia recently in Anacristina Rossi's short story Abel (2019), in which the Costa Rican-born author reads apocalyptic tales about the "Last Man" (Horn 2018: 24) with an unashamedly feminist undertone against the grain. Growing up in what the story calls a "deteriorated world" (Rossi 2019: 169), Lalia is the sole survivor of a sudden global drop in oxygen levels that wipes out the human species in a merciless act of annihilation. Undaunted, Lalia settles into a post-apocalyptic disaster landscape that is weathering under the deep red sunlight: not heaven, but hell on earth, which becomes the setting for a categorical one-woman show . Its protagonist doesn't even stop at killing her own brother when his unexpected appearance upsets the delicate post-apocalyptic ecological balance.

In its golden age, the Herland (Perkins Gilman 1915), which is the godmother of Anacristina Rossi's dystopian setting, still offered a stage for a possible better society led by women, in which, once all men have disappeared and prevailing wars are amicably pacified, all goods are shared fairly and the earth is cared for and nurtured. In the literally heated climate of global warming, more recent offshoots of feminist utopias are creating a different scenario, as recently recognized by US writer Sandra Newman (2022), whose novel The Men (2022) also takes a literary stand in this debate (Dillon 2020): In Naomi Alderman's The Power (2016), Lauren Beuken's Afterland (2020) and Christina Sweeney-Baird's The End of Men (2021), women are no longer compellingly more cooperative or empathetic, but rather trapped in a collective grief out of which they act just as violently as their men. The imperative of feminist utopias - women naturally take care of nature - is increasingly being critically questioned.

Using Anacristina Rossi's Abel (2019) as an example, the lecture will discuss how current feminist utopias create post-apocalyptic scenarios in which species extinction, acid rain and rising temperatures create space to radically rethink gender concepts

In his treatise on the relationship between fairy tales and reality, the renowned fairy tale researcher Lutz Röhrich writes: "In many cases, storytelling itself is still a magical and not harmless thing. "¹ Storytelling is also used as a magical practice in the fight against nature, which is threatened by humans. Fairy tales of the Pawnee in North America, for example, contain songs that are intended to improve the much-hunted buffalo population^.2 In addition to these magical effects of words and songs, the taboos of storytelling times also play a role: stories may only be told in the evening or at night, the night is considered "the tale-telling season. "³ Storytelling in the summer season evokes a dramatic imbalance in the environment: "Myths must not be told during the day, nor in summer, as violation of this rule will cause snakes to come. "⁴ Frogs and "other disagreeable things "⁵ also appear in abundance. The storytellers can be threatened with death by storms, namely lightning, or "otherwise the clouds will fall on their heads. "⁶ Using magical endings, the storytelling even influences "the growth and prosperity of plants.^"7 In Asian storytelling traditions, stories are even told against storms - significantly, stories in which animals try to stop catastrophic, long-lasting rain are suitable for this.8 The climate in the fairy tale therefore sometimes influences the climate outside the fairy tale. The aim of the lecture is to find out why fairy tales are told - and what the fairy tale tradition suggests for today's climate-related storytelling.

1 Lutz Röhrich: Fairy tales and reality. Wiesbaden 1974, p. 163.

2 Cf. George A. Dorsey: The Pawnee. Mythology (Part I). Washington, D. C. 1906, p. 437.

3 Alex F. Chamberlain: Notes and Queries. In: Journal of American Folk-Lore 1900 (13), p. 146.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid, p. 147.

6 Paul Sartori: Storytelling as magic. In: Journal of Folklore 1930 (40), p. 45.

7 Ibid., p. 42.

8 Cf. Röhrich: Fairy tales and reality, p. 164.

In ancient Roman mythology, there is the concept of the "genius loci" - a guardian spirit of a particular place. This spirit looked after the well-being of the specific space and defended it if necessary. Not infrequently, this guardian spirit merged with the space as such and can therefore be understood as a personification of the place. Especially in the 21st century, due to the increasing destruction of the environment, this concept is being rediscovered and implemented in fantasy.
This lecture looks at the webcomic The Little Trashmaid by Stephanie Hermes and the novel Fast verschwundene Fabelwesen by Florian Schäfer and Elif Siebenpfeiffer. Both texts depict mythical creatures that are at home both in the water and on land. The constant intrusion of humans into the creatures' natural habitat, which humans pollute, reduce or even completely destroy, threatens not only the protective spirits, but also the space and other endemic species. The texts not only depict the destruction of the environment, they also address the idea of preserving these guardian spirits. Not only is the positive aspect of acting against pollution addressed, but a clear binary is also established, which characterizes the human actors as much more competent. They are thus placed as the more important subjects, while the environment and its genii locorum must be identified as passive and therefore inferior objects. This also indicates that the use of fantasy establishes a distance that pushes environmentally harmful actions back into the realm of the fantastic.

The emerging (sub)genre of speculative fiction, solarpunk, focuses on climate change in a distinct way, quite different from climate (change) fiction or dystopian fiction usually associated with this theme. The "punk" part of solarpunk is grounded in its emphasis on hope: humanity will be able to confront and/or adapt to anthropogenic climate change. However, the genre is not utopian, rather, it reveals that the livable, sustainable and just future requires a (pro)active position of individuals as well as communities and a critical approach to the society's structural inequalities rooted in racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism. Whereas anthropocentrism is arguably one of the reasons for anthropogenic climate change, it also depends on and enhances power hierarchies based on race, gender, species, class, ethnicity and other socially relevant categories. Therefore, to enable a more inclusive and sustainable future, it is crucial to approach anthropocentrism critically. This paper argues that the solarpunk short stories allow for deconstruction of the anthropocentric perspective and mediate the non- and post-anthropocentric agency of humans and other sentient beings in (climate-changed) futures. This paper predominantly relies on posthuman (critical) theory (Rosi Braidotti, Katherine Hayles and others), while also benefiting from feminism (Donna Haraway, Judith Butler) and ecocriticism (Timothy Morton). The following stories are analyzed: "Broken from the Colony" by Ada M. Patterson(Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors. The New Press, 2023), "The Song That Humanity Lost Reluctantly to Dolphins" by Shweta Taneja(Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures. World Weaver Press, 2021), and "The Death of Pax" by Santiago Belluco(Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation. Upper Rubber Boot, 2017).

In Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot (2021-2022) series, seemingly innocuous yet imaginative questions arise: What do a tea-serving monk and a robot have in common? And what might they discuss if they were to encounter each other in the wild? These questions serve as the backdrop for Chambers' exploration of themes such as belonging, purpose, and contentment within the self-exploratory quest set on the habitable Solarpunk moon of Panga, where AI and robots have abandoned humans for the wilderness, leaving behind small sustainable communities. A critically acclaimed science fiction writer, Chambers is often associated with the subgenre of Hopepunk, where optimistic narratives include diverse characters in cozy inspired worlds, exploring issues of values, identity, and relationships in futuristic settings. The protagonist, Dex, a gender non-binary monk, meets the wild-built robot Mosscap, and they discuss questions of belonging, purpose, and contentment together. Within the comfort of the Panga's rewilded nature, a companionship develops between Dex and Mosscap as they answer each other's profound and philosophical inquiries. Thus, informed by Donna Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto (1985), The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), this paper examines the creation of posthuman kinship between Dex and Mosscap in the novellas A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022). Haraway's concept of 'cyborg identities', 'significant otherness' and 'oddkin' becomes principal to understanding the bond between Dex and Mosscap as they embrace "counterintuitive geometries and incongruent translations" (Haraway, 'Manifestly Haraway' 117) that cement their kinship.

Becky Chambers' recent ecological Monk and Robot series has (to the author's approval) been deemed not only Solarpunk, but Hopepunk as well. However, few have noted the intertextual references that Chambers uses to position her text's "hopepunk" optimism within the evolving environmental discourse of science fiction.

As the non-binary tea-monk protagonist Sibling Dex and their robot companion Mosscap navigate the post-scarcity, post-factorial setting of Panga, they contemplate what Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels (H2G2; 1979-1992) playfully termed "Life, the Universe and Everything". Between further shared elements like tea and sentient robots, the protagonists of both Chambers' and Adams' series grapple with the absurdities of life in narrative universes that, even in their most utopian moments, fail to completely satisfy their characters' desires for purpose and fulfillment. However, Chambers' monk and robot expand these contemplations into an environmental humanism that is both more optimistic and constructive than Adams' text. The resulting dialogue with the SF and post-apocalyptic genres also reads as a response to Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) that goes beyond the series' titular allusions: Rather than perpetuating Miller's concept of ecological and social apocalypse, Chambers' quasi-utopia allows for positive change - and the hope for an apocalypse averted.

By treating Chambers' novels as an intertextual response to these previous SF texts it is possible to trace an evolution of science fiction's ecological and philosophical stances from nihilism to satire to cautious optimism.

Described by the feuilleton as an 'ecofeminist dystopia', Wendy Delorme's novel Viendra le temps du feu (2021) outlines the future scenario of a totalitarian state that radically controls resources and reproduction in the face of a climate catastrophe that has rendered large parts of the planet uninhabitable. On one of the few (still) fertile territories, the survivors found a state based on a heteronormative, xenophobic "Pacte national": protecting the borders against migrants from the Global South is just as much a part of the duties as a life "en pair", to which the inhabitants have been attuned since childhood, and whose ultimate goal is to guarantee the continued existence of the nation as a "contributor" or "contributrice". Libraries, historical documents from times before the "Pacte national" and the use of terms from the past such as "citoyen", "peuple" or "religion" are forbidden. At the margins of this society, however, there are figures who find clandestine forms of cohabitation in their violation of heteronormative relationship and family models. These secret communities develop utopian counter-designs in the sense of queer ecologies: be it by refusing the role of "contributor" and being displaced to the polluted outskirts as punishment, or by founding a stone city of sisters.

The novel is characterized by a polyphonic narrative style that initially reinforces the isolation and marginality of the protagonists, but allows these voices to enter into a dialogue as the plot unfolds: These include the voices of Ève and Grâce, the sole survivors of a community of women who had settled on an island on the outskirts of the city and ran a rock quarry there, which was initially tolerated by the state due to its usefulness, but was eventually destroyed. There is the voice of Rosa, one of her companions, who documented the destruction until her death and whose notes are woven into the text like voices from the afterlife. There are also the voices of Louise and Raphaël, who live together as a couple to protect each other from state reprisals and discover a secret library in a nightclub. The reading of banned books such as Les Guérillères (1969) by Monique Wittig and Un appartement sur Uranus (2019) by Paul Preciado accompanies the attempt by the members of the secret library to sabotage the totalitarian state and bring about a new society.

In particular, the lecture aims to examine the intertextual reference structure and ask how Wendy Delorme inscribes herself in a genealogy of ecofeminist, queer utopias from Wittig to Preciado.

Climate fiction (CliFi) has become an indispensable literary format in contemporary literature. In addition to its immediate literary value, CliFi can also take on a specific function in the process of raising awareness of climate change. T.C. Boyle already made an important contribution to this genre with A Friend of the Earth. Now he has followed up with Blue Skies. Blue Skies describes the situation of two generations of an established American upper-class family in the face of climate change. In terms of time, the text is set precisely at the generational threshold of the feared tipping points. The paper will argue that and why Blue Skies can be read as an allegory of the unwillingness in the US to tackle effective mitigation measures for climate change. We do this in terms of three levels, the first of which deals with the immediate effects of climate change, the second with the social-psychological mechanics of climate change, and the third with individual response strategies to climate change. It is precisely with regard to the third level that we argue in what respect Blue Skies can also be read as an ecofeminist text.

Jessica Hausner's science fiction Little Joe (X-Verleih 2019) deals with various care relationships. In addition to human-human and human-plant constellations, a plant-plant relationship is also narrated - it is about the "Matters of Care" (María Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) as "vital politics" (ibid. p. 5). At the center of the film are the relationships between 1. the single scientist and mother Alice Woodard (on "motherly love", see e.g. Schlicht 2016), 2. her son Joe and 3. the genetically modified plant breed Little Joe created by Woodard. The film uses these three relationships in particular to discuss forms of care and community. While a competitive situation between Woodard's gainful employment and her care work in relation to her son runs through the film and these are played off against each other (cf. Rutarux 2023, p. 71) and the "plant agency" that leads to people "care[ing] for" Little Joe (cf. ibid., p. 65, emphasis added) can be read in the context of the "monstrous" (cf. ibid., p. 63), it is precisely the 'relationship' of the plants to each other that is modeled as particularly successful and productive. The Little Joes assume (self-)care for the survival of their plant community and use humans for care work, regardless of gender. Infertile due to genetic manipulation, the plant 'pays' humans with an olfactory 'currency', an odor that promotes the release of oxytocin in humans (for the importance of oxytocin, see e.g. Uvnäs-Moberg et al. 2024). While the female characters in the film, Woodard and her colleague Bella, fail in their care relationships with their child and dog respectively, and care outside the human-plant relationship and thus the work context is not feasible for them, the male work colleagues are portrayed without responsibility for other beings. Their care responsibility is limited to the human-plant relationship right from the start. The film plays with a reliable narrative instance via image and color design as well as sound, but especially via the discourse on the mental health or successful self-assessment of the two women, Bella and Woodard, as well as the oscillation between possible reality and possible fiction. The lecture aims to shed light on the various narratives and networks of care (work) in the context of genre and gender in Hausner's film.

In 2019, war and crisis reporters Mika Mäkeläinen and Jani Saikko asked on the website of an immersion project: "Have you ever wondered what a nuclear explosion would feel like?" Their invitation led to the "heart" of the Pacific, to Enewetak Atoll, where more than forty US nuclear bomb tests were carried out between 1948 and 1958. The footage of Enewetak (which the reporters refer to) is disturbing; it is not for nothing that there are studies on nuclear history and spectatorship, as well as on the media's distancing from nuclear detonation and contamination sites, which were in isolated locations - in this case in the (paradisiacal) Pacific Ocean. French tests in the Pacific followed in the 1960s. In my lecture, I will shed light on the way in which Albert Serra's film Pacifiction - Tourment sur les îles (2022) tells the story of these of these tests (which are among the more than 2000 worldwide tests that have had a significant impact on global weather) onto the screen to reflect them in a contemplative, delayed, heavy-wave aesthetic, and not only in the ghostly form of a submarine, which materializes the assumption of the resumption of nuclear tests in the midst of the bizarrely sparse plot (the visit of an ambiguous diplomat to French Polynesia), but also in various immersive scenes in which the climatic conditions (in several senses) of a post-colonial world are conditions of a postcolonial world seem to implode. In this context, I will operate with the concepts of ghosting and fallout. I will also outline the criteria for nominating the film for the Queer Palm and link them to considerations of immersion, opsis, distance and contamination.

Following the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (Borikén), many on the island and in the diaspora are questioning their colonial relationship to the United States, imagining decolonized futures inspired by their indigenous (Taíno) and African heritage. This paper uses the concept of "speculative resistance", developed by sociologist and speculative fiction writer Malka Older, to analyze an emerging genre of art and fictions called Taínofuturism, which imagines decolonial Caribbean futures built upon Afro-indigenous logics, aesthetics, and values. This presentation surveys artworks, short fiction, and the novella Sordidez as examples of speculative resistance. Given that the Caribbean region is among the world's most vulnerable to climate change, the counter-hegemonic imaginaries and radical reconfigurations promised by Taínofuturism might provide a blueprint for survival.

The current climate change clearly shows the influence we humans have on nature and thus also on the climate through extractivist measures, and at the same time it becomes clear how much these climatic and specifically meteorological changes in turn influence us. This interaction is not only addressed in the literature of the 21st century, but in Latin American literature even before climate change became the focus of public debate. This is also the case in two works in which the natural and the supernatural are mixed in the climate and specifically in the weather and presented as reality: Viento fuerte(Storm, 1950) by Miguel Ángel Asturias and Cien años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. These authors, who are traditionally assigned to magical realism in literary historiography, can also be understood as authors of fantasy in a broad conceptual sense.

In Viento fuerte, the first novel in Asturias' so-called banana trilogy, a hurricane is caused by a shaman towards the end, in which the god 'Huracán' of the maya-quiché indigenous people manifests himself and destroys the banana plantations of the Tropicaltanera, the fruit empire. In Cien años de Soledad, caused by the director of the banana company Señor Brown, it rains and storms for four years after the so-called masacre de las bananeras (banana massacre) in the middle of the dry season. This climate change destroys the last remnants of the banana plantations, causes the company to pull out and, at the end of the novel, leads to an all-destructive hurricane.

With reference to ecocriticism with its focus on the representation of nature and the relationship between humans and nature, which is specified and further developed with regard to the weather, it becomes clear that the two novels reflect narrative concepts in which the weather is both a natural phenomenon and of supernatural origin, can be understood as a reaction to the exploitative actions of workers and nature on the banana plantations, and ultimately shows the influence but also the limitations of humanity in relation to the concrete weather and climate.

Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Mermaid" already testifies to the lack of concession of an independent voice and thus the right to have a say through the sea and its inhabitants. Christina Henry further intensifies the voicelessness in her gothic novel adaptation of the fairy tale, in that the mermaid does not become mute as payment for the transformation, but is only supposed to appear mute for advertising purposes. Mechanisms of oppression function through the lack of voice of the oppressed, as in the perception of the sea as a sublime backdrop and the treatment of the sea, which is recognized as a landfill, energy reservoir and buffet for fishing, but hardly as a habitat relevant to the entire ecosystem of the world. This voicelessness not only contradicts a "pact naturel", as Michel Serres called for as early as 1990, but also testifies, in the wake of Alfred Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism", to a human attitude towards the sea as an ecological habitat that needs to be examined from a post-colonialist and ecocritical perspective.

In the context of climate fiction, the sea occupies a position of its own that differs markedly from climate fiction, which focuses on the destruction of the land as the direct habitat of humans: When Frank Schätzing has his character Crowe remark "that even less is known about the deep sea than about outer space", even though the earth is covered by seas to the tune of around 71%, this shows an imbalance in the importance of the sea and how humans perceive it.

Works of climate fiction, which will be discussed in this article, address this ambivalent relationship by reinforcing the sublimity of the sea through the flooding of the land (e.g. Waterworld, 2012, Uwe Laub's Blow Out), through the connection of all sea creatures to a swarm (e.g. Frank Schätzing's The Swarm) or as a unit under an extraterrestrial life form (e.g. Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon). This is accompanied by an indirect reference to man's self-destructive treatment of the sea, which is explicitly transformed into a call to action to protect the sea and its inhabitants, particularly in works of children's and young adult literature (e.g. Die Pfefferkörner und der Schatz der Tieefsee, Katja Brandis Ruf der Tiefe and Seawalkers).

This presentation explores depictions of the sea in contemporary British literature - its ambivalences, contradictions and how it (metaphorically and literally) plays into configurations of individual and interpersonal relationships, specifically in the context of queer womanhood.

I will analyze two sapphic ocean narratives: Kirsty Logan's The Gracekeepers and Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under The Sea. Logan's novel draws a gently hopeful portrait of benign adaptation that allows the protagonists to carve out ways of living on the water in a post-apocalyptic world that has seen drastically risen sea levels and accordingly shrunken habitable landmasses. Armfield's novel, in contrast, shows adaptation to the sea as overwhelming, implacable, an unavoidable intrusion of water into once-peaceful, ordinary lives that must end in human capitulation. Sapphic love and longing play an important part in both stories, but where one is in some ways a traditional love story, in which the seas bring together the two protagonists, leading them through trials to a queer utopia, the other makes an almost cynical statement about lost love, showing grieving, the illusion of reunion and grieving again as a repeated - tide-like - process. The sea's partly antagonistic positioning is complicated by the ways it is often viewed as female-connoted, thanks to its close ties to the moon and monthly rhythms, the fluidity of water and blood and its frequent readings as both life-giving and repugnant, comforting and terrifying. Both novels raise questions on the nature of humanity, hybridity, and the possibility and limitations of empathy, understanding and support for non-human Others.

This presentation adds usefully to the conference topic by exploring one facet of a large factor in Earth's global ecosystem and climates, the ocean, in its interrelationships with human individuals and interpersonal bonds. Particular attention is paid to questions of bodily identity and conceptualizations of human bodies as relating to, coming from and blending into the sea, and how specific categories of social and individual significance, such as gender and sexual identity, play into the larger picture of humanity's uneasy and ambivalent relationship to the oceans.

Praised for its stunning visuals, Giant Squid's 2016 video game Abzû invites its players to take the role of a diver exploring an ocean teeming with wildlife. The diver's interactions with marine life forms are characterized by mutual curiosity and although the player can grab onto certain animals to move faster, the aquatic creatures are never reduced to mere tools to be used for the player's advancement or decorative background, as the very purpose of the game is the player exploring and learning more about their environment. Abzû's narrative is told without any spoken language making room for an experiential way of storytelling that still manages to convey the plot of an environment at risk due to (post)human interventions. This paper focuses on Abzû's envisioning of interspecies relationships. Building on Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble,I read the representation of more-than-human kinship in Abzû as advocating for a "cultivating of multispecies justice" through practices of "becoming-with" other species (3-4). Combining selected close readings of screenshots from Abzû with an analysis of gameplay mechanics and sound design, this paper employs an ecocritical analytical framework. Apart from Haraway, the analysis is also informed by Alenda Y. Chang's Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, and following her insights I suggest that Abzû uses its ocean setting "to create entirely new sets of relations, outside of those based on dominance or manipulation" (23). By focusing specifically on the opportunities that the game provides for exploring these non-hierarchical sets of relations, this paper supplements both Kate Galloway's Blue Humanities informed analysis of Abzû's sound design and Trépanier-Jobin et al.'s reception study of Abzû with an in-depth exploration of how the game imagines more-than-human kinship through having its human players take the role of a posthuman protagonist engaging in practices of becoming-with aquatic wildlife.

Works Cited

Chang, Alenda Y. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Galloway, Kate. "Climate Games, the Blue Humanities, and Listening to the Deep-Sea Ecosystems in Games in a Time of Ecological Crisis." AMP: American Music Perspectives (2021) 2 (2): 139-157.

Giant Squid Studios. Abzû. 505 Games, 2016.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Trépanier-Jobin, Gabrielle, Maeva Charre-Tchang, and Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega. "The Underrealized Ecocritical Potential of ABZÛ." Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, edited by L. Op de Beke, J. Raessens, S. Werning, and G. Farca, Amsterdam University Press, 2024, 311-331.

It is a symptom of the cultural zeitgeist that, with particular sharpness in the last two decades, the genre of the "fantastic" has undergone an important semantic shift: in addressing growing concerns for ecological liveability and its relation to social and environmental justice, the non-mimetic has increasingly shifted from referring to the marvelous to the apocalyptic. Such contradictory meanings, however, are embedded not just in the terms "fantasy" or "fantastic," but also in "apocalypse," "marvel" or "wonder," prompting discussions over the suitability of our jargon as well as over the inherent dichotomies in sff and its studies. This paper seeks to add to the conversation by tracing, in parallel, the histories of Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) and the theoretical discourse that has surrounded it. To do so, it considers Cli-Fi not as a modern literary development born in the last fifty years out of the necessity to address the concern for global warming, but as a subgenre with a long pre-history (cf. Milner and Burgmann) whose critical approaches likewise merit a longer diachronic analysis that Cli-Fi's consideration as "sf proper," with the temporal restrictions that its discourse warrants, has sometimes afforded to give them. By conducting this parallel analysis, this paper hopes to contextualize the presumed novelty of representations of climate change and its critical approximations, arguing that providing historical perspective on how environmental crises have been dealt with in literature and literary criticism can shed light on some of the pitfalls of the contemporary state of the question, and perhaps also go some way towards explaining the "vicious circle of apathy" that surrounds the climate crisis, as well as the ongoing search for representational and critical alternatives to discuss it.

References

Milner, Andrew and J. R. Burgmann. "A Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction." Extrapolation, vol. 59, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-23.

Magical realism, once confined to the realms of postcolonial and Latin American literature, has emerged as a global phenomenon challenging established boundaries between the human and nonhuman realms. This paper aims to explore magical realism as an "environmental discourse" (Holgate) through an analysis of literary texts spanning from the 19th century to the present day. It contends that magical realism serves as a potent literary strategy; it is not just a decorative fantastic element, but emerges as a form of "artpolitical" writing (Sartwell), challenging the anthropocentric perspective. By redirecting the reader's attention to nonhuman subjects and their inherent agency, magical realist texts emphasize the complexity of human-nonhuman interactions.
For instance, in "Rappaccini's Daughter" (Hawthorne), nature and plants assume agency through the enchanting descriptions typical of magical realism, urging readers to reconsider their anthropocentric perspective and embrace a more responsible human-nonhuman relationship, one that goes beyond mere manipulation or idolization. Similarly, contemporary speculative texts by Margaret Atwood or Richard Powers incorporate magical realist elements into their narratives to evoke a sensory immersion in the environment. While the focus mostly lies on their uses of science and cautionary plots, this paper argues for a focus on their magical realist elements, which tend to be ignored. For example, The Overstory begins with the imagery of a pine whose needles scent the air, and "a force hums in the heart of the wood" (Powers 3). The importance of listening becomes apparent in this case, as these texts challenge conventional modes of perception centered on vision and emphasize the importance of a multisensory engagement with nature. Thus, they offer alternative frameworks for understanding human-nonhuman interactions and ecological interconnectedness.

Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret. The MaddAddam Trilogy. Bloomsbury, 2003-2013.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Rappacini's Daughter." The Norton Anthology of American Literature1820-1865. ed. Nina Baym. W.W. Norton & Co, 2007, pp. 1313-1333.

Holgate, Ben. Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse. Routledge, 2019.

Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Sartwell, Crispin. Political Aesthetics. Cornell University Press, 2010.

This paper explores the interconnectedness of three phenomena: the rise of the Anthropocene as a defining era, the emergence of non-human philosophy, and the cultural impact of H.P. Lovecraft's works. Divided into three parts - "Seeds," "Crops," and "Excrescence" - the study delves into Lovecraft's influences, his thematic elements, and their relevance in contemporary discourse.
In the first part, Lovecraft's roots in gothic and decadent literature are examined alongside the philosophical underpinnings of object-oriented ontology and new materialism. The second part focuses on materiality in Lovecraft's fiction, exploring themes of topography, object inventory, and ecology, while also discussing the weird amalgamations and phenomena that transcend conventional boundaries. The final section, "Excrescence," delves into the cultural impact of Lovecraftian themes in the modern world, touching on posthumanism, postsecularism, and the prevalence of oneiric perspectives. Through an analysis of Lovecraft's works, the paper addresses the challenges of a secular, disenchanted world and proposes a dark enchantment as a response. By bridging the gaps left by the onto-taxonomic fallacy, the conclusion synthesizes discussions on weird fiction to offer a bundled response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. It addresses issues such as correlationism, anthropocentrism, linguistic limitations, and discrepancies in our relationship with nature and the cosmos, as well as recent political and environmental developments. Overall, this paper contributes to the understanding of Lovecraft's work in the context of contemporary philosophical and environmental discourse, shedding light on its relevance in the Anthropocene era.

A new generation of authors has been fascinating the Hungarian science fiction and fantasy scene for several years now. They are characterized both by their literary level and the topicality of their themes, so that some have already made the breakthrough to the wider or international public. Attila Veres (b. 1985) was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award 2023 (Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection) for his collection of novellas The Black Maybe (2022), and Anita Moskát (b. 1989) regularly publishes short prose and novel excerpts in English translation on the Hungarian Literature Online website. What the two Zsoldos Péter Prize-winning authors have in common is that they combine fantasy with a dystopian diagnosis of the present. Veresʼ characters act against the backdrop of a politically and ecologically ruined fictional Hungary, and Moskátʼs novellas - especially in the collection A hazugság tézisei [The Theses of Lies] (2022) - are strongly influenced by social criticism. The transgression of boundaries, whether of the individual body and sexuality, or of the human species and humanity, is a constant theme of these texts. In this respect, their arrangement is always a struggle between (supra-)biological determination and deterministic sociality. The interaction of social criticism (dystopia), ecocriticism (post-apocalypse) and fantasy, which in Veres' work takes shape primarily as Weird and in Moskát's work as a combination of biological fantasy and speculative fiction, offers interesting material for analysis and will be evaluated in the context of the lecture with regard to the focus of the conference.

Literature:

www.thebramstokerawards.com/uncategorized/winners-nominees/

H. Nagy, Péter/Hegedűs, Orsolya: The Origins of Chimaeras. Mobilizing the boundaries of species in a contemporary weird fiction novel: Anita Moskát's Irha és bőr. In: Eruditio-Educatio 2022/1 (17. vol.), 91-97. https://mapopkult.com/posts/tanulmany_hnpho02/
Moskát, Anita: Story of a Firstborn Rabbit, hlo.hu/new-work/anita-moskat-skin-and-hide.html

Moskát, Anita: Short stories on Panodyssey, panodyssey.com/en/creative/room/fiction-snkpu9cwbpan

Rottensteiner, Franz: Attila Veres: The Black Maybe. Liminal Tales [...]. Quarber Merkur 124 (2023), 241-244.

Veres, Attila: The Black Maybe. Liminal Tales. Transl. by Luca Karafiáth. Richmond, Virginia: Valancourt Books 2022.

Veres, Attila: Odakint sötétebb [Darker Outside]. Budapest: Agave 2017.

This paper delves into an in-depth analysis of H.P. Lovecraft's literary philosophy, cosmicism, within the broader contexts of Old and New Weird genres, emphasizing their efficacy in portraying and scrutinizing various environmental, social, and existential crises. Particular attention is devoted to elucidating the portrayal of anxiety embodied by the concept of the "unknown", as well as explicating the potential for interpreting Lovecraft's narratives within the framework of posthumanist discourse, notably considering him as a "crisis author" as conceptualized by Daniel Doncel. Timothy Morton further draws from one of Lovecraft's cosmic entities, "Cthulhu," to explain his concept of the "hyperobject," which encapsulates what is beyond human comprehension. Lovecraftian cosmic entities, representing the "unknown" and constituting the "hyperobject," as well as the anti-narrative elements found in the works of both Old and New Weird serve to explore the unfathomable and emphasize its profound impact on individuals, manifesting as existential dread or anxiety. The presence of ecophobic elements in H.P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer's narratives further underscores humanity's response to danger or threats such as ecological crisis, highlighting the challenges of understanding vast and somewhat abstract phenomena. Thus, the genre not only endeavors to represent the unrepresentable but also analyzes its psychological and physical effects on individuals and highlights the differences in human responses. It provides a fertile ground for narrating intricate and multifaceted concepts such as environmental catastrophes, the climate crisis, and apocalyptic scenarios. Consequently, this paper conducts an analysis of selected works, including H.P. Lovecraft's two short stories "The Color Out of Space" and "Nyarlathotep" and Jeff VanderMeer's novel Annihilation along with its cinematic adaptation. Through this examination, the paper aims to deepen our understanding of the pervasive nature of anxiety within each individual and to contextualize it within contemporary philosophical discourse and environmental crisis.

Resulting in a "mile-thick layer of snow and ice" due to a "change in the angle of the sun's rays"(The Tower of the Swallow, 241f), the 'Time of the White Cold' is a catastrophic event prophesied to upset the world's ecosystems. Yet Sapkowski's narrative utilization of it noticeably foregrounds the various races' concern for their own preservation over the ice age's ecological impact, exemplifying anthropocentric ideology.

Though the Aen Elle elves constitute Sapkowski's take on the elder elven race archetype, they share none of the ecological stewardship exemplified in Tolkien's works, instead seeking to leverage the impending crisis in their ongoing war against the humans, planning to leave the world by magic and return once the ice has melted(Swallow, 241). Despite their naturalistic claim on the world, their ideology is characteristically anthropocentric as they separate "human and non-human values and experiences," unaware of the "interconnectedness" of lifeforms (Hupkes/Hedman 2022, 1). Similarly, emperor Emhyr var Emreis as the representative of the largest human faction is privy to another prophecy proclaiming the saving of the world at the hands of an emperor's son, which Emhyr uses to justify his military expansionism making up the narrative's background(The Lady of the Lake, 389).

Characterized as incidental rather than anthropogenic, and precluding a scientific solution via the generic conventions of fantasy, Sapkowski's 'Time of the White Cold' provides a narrative environment which facilitates the exploration of humanoid agency in the face of speculative extreme climate phenomena. Combining posthumanist and ecocritical perspectives in an interrogation of Sapkowski's presentation of the setting as well as his conceptualization of anthropocentric reactions, my presentation seeks to pose the question of whether "[wearing] warm britches" represents the extent of options, and how doing so contradicts the protagonist Geralt's identity as an ecologically interconnected agent(Swallow, 242).

Christian Petzold's film Roter Himmel (2023) addresses the issue of psychological, social, and institutional complacency in light of the catastrophic effects of global climate change by way of a meta-discursive commentary on the apocalypse as a cinematic genre. In this regard, it asks the question to which degree popular representations of global climate disaster contribute toward public complacency, or, conversely, toward interventionist engagement and activism. While the film signals its allegiance to the disaster film genre on several occasions-a central scene of a group of characters looking worriedly toward the horizon provides the image for one of its promotional posters-it also maneuvers cautiously around the apocalyptic hyperbole that characterizes the genre in its more popular incarnations. At first glance, the central character's narcissistic self-absorption in moments of environmental crisis registers simply as an indictment of a psychological unwillingness to confront climate change. Meta-discursively, however, the film goes a step further. It posits characters who are not acting in accordance with conventions of cinematic genres. As characters signal their uncertainty about the genre of the film in which they appear, Roter Himmel foregrounds genre conventions themselves as both the means of articulating climate change in the register of popular cinema, and the means to restrict, moderate, and mute this articulation. The film's willed ambivalence toward cinematic apocalypse makes it a useful instrument to measure, by comparison or contrast-or even to critique and challenge-the effectiveness of more popular cinematic discourse in the cultural mainstream that subscribes to a visually spectacular, generically simplistic, and hyperbolically alarmist take on the destructive impact of global climate change.

This article examines the depiction of climate catastrophes and geoengineering using the example of two novels: Marc Elsberg's Celsius (2023) and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020). The aim is to show that these novels not only serve as entertainment, but also as platforms for communicating scientific knowledge and political ideas.

In Elsberg's "Celsius", climate catastrophes are presented partly in the form of a thriller that transports the reader to a world in which China has taken control of the global climate. In this way, the novel raises questions about responsibility, political agency and the potential impact of geoengineering. Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future" in turn creates a vision of the future that is characterized by political and social interventionism. Robinson shows the reader how a sophisticated interplay of fiscal policy measures, technical interventions (such as geoengineering) and violent political and social pressure will ultimately lead to a decrease in _{CO2 concentrations} and thus enable a more sustainable future for future generations. This raises complex political and ethical questions around geoengineering, environmental protection and global justice.

This article examines how the novels Celsius and The Ministry for the Future are used as instruments of knowledge transfer by integrating difficult scientific concepts and political debates into narrative structures, while at the same time managing to function as political and social interventions. The aim of my contribution is thus to analyze how narrative structures and rhetorical-stylistic means are used to raise awareness of the urgency of climate change, but also to stimulate discourse on possible solutions.

Accordingly, the analysis focuses on the following problem constellations: What narrative strategies do the authors use to incorporate complex scientific concepts and political debates in order to appeal to a broad audience? How are climate catastrophes staged narratively? What role do the main characters play in the thematization of climate disasters and geoengineering? Are certain political ideologies or worldviews promoted or criticized by the texts? What ethical considerations are raised in the novels in connection with the problem of geoengineering and dealing with climate disasters?

We are indeed "very worried" at the prospect of our world perishing. Yet, this distress merely seems to result in a perpetual state of inertia and adherence to established habits in subjects facing the invincible inevitable monster of the Anthropocene. How, then, can the subject descend its paralysis to familiarize itself with the self-made crisis and acquire new forms of dwelling? How can it avoid the inclination towards an anti-humanist nihilistic yielding to crisis reminiscent of the postmodernist subject amidst crumbling dogma?

To regain agency, this paper proposes that overcoming the climate crisis necessarily requires reconceptualizing subjectivity and embodiment to move away from hubris-driven habits of humanity that work against nature toward a notion of subjectivity that bridges the destructive dichotomy of nature/culture. It turns to speculative fiction as a tool that facilitates the confrontation of the Anthropocene subject with its own climate anxiety while offering a protected space for a renegotiation of subjectivity in posthumanist, symbiotic terms.

In Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (2014), the ecosystem Area X is awash with inconceivable monstrosities. It emerges as a threatening "hyperobject "¹ symbolizing the climate crisis and defies human comprehension that relies upon established structures of meaning-making. Similarly, Matt Bell's Appleseed (2021) displays the inadequacy of traditional dogma, problematizing the tenacious retention of anthropocentric habits in a world deteriorating due to continuous human progress. Survival and agency in both novels depend upon the assimilation to the nonhuman, developing visions of a pluralized posthumanist subject embedded within nature.

Accordingly, this paper delineates the path from postmodernist inertia toward hopeful visions of posthumanism. It extends the postmodernist/poststructuralist deconstruction of metanarratives, reframing the end not as terminal doom of the human but as end of traditional humanism and the dawn of new beginnings, to find - as echoed by Annihilation's protagonist - "a death that would not mean being dead. "²

¹ Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota P, 2013, p. 2.

² VanderMeer, Jeff.The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance. 2014. 4th Estate-Harper Collins, 2017, p. 38.

Exploring Steven Erikson's first contact novel Rejoice - A Knife to the Heart as an actor in Latour's sense, the lecture will question how narrative and the real world interact in order to detach the process of man-made climate change from the familiar cycle of excessive demands, apathy and resignation due to multi-causal and multi-factorial processes and to make it tangible for readers.

The allegorical parallelization of the hyperobjects (according to Morton) of extraterritorial contact and climate change allows a situation-related reflection of cause and effect with simultaneous depersonalization, while at the same time challenging established genre boundaries. Contrary to the majority of known first contact narratives, the human-centric one takes a back seat to a post-human confrontation oriented towards the overall biome of the planet and accompanies the transit from the current state of the world to a post-scarcity society. Whether we can speak of a utopia will have to be discussed.

Building on this, the use of narrative structures and familiar tropes, as well as the active break with associated expectations and schemata, will be scrutinized in order to explore the overall network of the composition and to draw conclusions about the narrative processing of a future-oriented examination of the topic of climate change. The potential of fantastic literature in particular will be highlighted here.

"I fear the vermin, but it's nothing compared to my fear of others. I'm terrified by what remains of us." Julien Blondel chose this tagline for his pen&paper RPG Vermin 2047 (2022). He has carefully monitored the development of our societies and ongoing multiple and interconnected crises we have been inflicting on the biosphere ... and each other. Using the popularity of dystopian, post-apocalyptic narratives, his extrapolation is based on "the demographic, geopolitical, technological and environmental state of our world in the late 2010s" (2022, 10). Rather than a single, civilization-disrupting megaevent, here the collapse is a cascade of climate change, natural disasters, and epidemics resulting in converging food-, humanitarian, and economic crises and political radicalization (Blondel 2022, 10). The Vermin have replaced humanity on top of the food chain, and the "invisible, natural principles underlying evolution and the behavior of all living things" (58) manifest in totems structuring an emerging world. Vermin 2047 negotiates collapse, embeddedness, and scarcity in its eco-horror post-Anthropocene.

Using theoretical frameworks of the environmental humanities (Marshall 2002, Rose et al. 2012) and collaborative storytelling (O'Gorman et al. 2019; Shenk, Franz, and Gutowski, jr. 2023), this paper investigates how Blondel's RPG can be an impactful vector for change. Horror, with its visceral effect on audiences (Stableford 2009, 204) and paradoxical nature to attract and repulse (Carroll 1990, 195), transcends ideological boundaries (206). It moves us on a fundamental human level with the power of affect, increasingly the focus of game studies (Anable 2018). Agency, the responsible configuration of designed possibility spaces (Bódi 2023, 30), fosters systemic awareness and ideally ethical and political change (Schallegger 2017). With Vermin 2047, Blondel harnesses these interconnected dimensions to create a highly topical game and conduit for transformational impulses in a shared and co-creative learning space, questioning "what remains of us" in post-anthropocentric embeddedness.

References

Anable, Aubrey. 2018. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. Minneapolis/MN and London/English: University of Minnesota Press.

Blondel, Julien. 2022. 2047 Vermin - Survival Kit. La Garenne Colombes: Studio Agate.

Bódi, Bettina. 2023. Videogames and Agency. London/Engl. and New York/NY: Routledge.

Carroll, Noel. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York/NY and London/English: Routledge.

Marshall, Alan. 2002. The Unity of Nature: Wholeness and Disintegration in Ecology and Science. London/English: Imperial College Press.

O'Gorman, Emily, et al. 2019. "Teaching the Environmental Humanities: International Perspectives and Practices". Environmental Humanities 11:2 (November 2019). 427-460.

Rose, Deborah Bird, et al. 2012. "Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities". Environmental Humanities 1 (2012). 1-5.

Schallegger, René Reinhold. 2017. "Choices and Consequences: Videogames, Virtual Ethics, and Cyber-Citizenship". Post-doctoral Thesis. University of Klagenfurt (Austria).

Shenk, Linda, Kristie J. Franz, and William J. Gutowski, jr. 2023. "Minding the Gaps: How Humanists, Climate Scientists, and Communities Can Become Collaborating Storytellers". Environmental Humanities 15:3 (November 2023). 83-103.

Stableford, Brian. 2009. The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Lanham/MD, Toronto/ON, and Plymouth/English: The Scarecrow Press.

"Are digital games doing--or could they be doing--anything similar to what cli-fi does in a literary context to contribute to our response to the ongoing climate crisis?" (Abraham & Jayemanne 2017, 76) Reckien and Eisenack already identified over 52 video- and boardgames dealing with climate change in 2011 and the multitude of following games like Fate of the World (2011); Keep Cool Online (2015) or the recent Terra Nil (2023) demonstrate an ongoing trend. Games can deal with the climate crisis both as a central or peripheral topic where they "locate[] the player within a particular vision or idea of the future, one that is not necessarily consciously engaged with, but which is nevertheless sensibly or cognitively apprehending." (Abraham 2015, 3) Edugames like Minecraft's Sustainable City (2021) or NASA's Climate Kids choose a didactic approach of conveying information via games thereby fostering an "interdiscourse" (Endl, Preisinger 2018, 204) between sciences and the public. While these games address kids and try to simplify and gamify the conveyed information, climate change as a 'wicked problem' poses the challenge of varying factors contributing to the problems and possible solutions (Endl & Preisinger 2018, 211). Commercial games therefore often use strategy or simulation genres to investigate perspectives on possible 'futures of scarcity' (Kelly & Narda 2014) via games. These genres still frequently rely on the economic logic of constant growth and exploitative resource management encapsulated by the term '4x' which can lead to a ludonarrative dissonance. The talk aims to explore this disjunction between game mechanics and storytelling, focusing on examples of current climate strategy games.

The paper's purpose is to theorize futurity/ futurism by juxtaposing, on the one hand, the ideologies of humanity's compulsory survival in post-apocalyptic/ eco-catastrophic narratives, and, on the other hand, queer critiques of the so-called "reproductive futurism" (Edelman 2004), an imperative to bring children into the world to assure a future and to protect the child from any non-reproductive forms of sexual enjoyment. The paper focuses on narratives that do not comply with - or at least question - compulsory survivalism in the face of climate-related or other kinds of human extinction, such as in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995), with the movie's unforgettable images of wild animals roaming city streets after human beings have disappeared from the Earth's surface. The motif of "ecoterrorism" combined with antihumanism - as in Gilliam's movie or Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, for example - will be the paper's main focus. That kind of "eco-centric antihumanism" will be compared with discourses involving "homoterrorism" - a term used mostly in a derogatory way by conservatives and right-wingers to describe LGBTQ rights movements, but also - on a much smaller scale - as a strategic tool in radical queer theory, fiction and activism. As anti-LGBTQ circles have it, giving in to "homoterrorism" will lead to nothing less than humanity's species-wide suicide (which, incidentally, shows the fragility of the construction of reproductive heterosexuality in that it must be actively maintained and ordained). Contrary to a common-sense repudiation of self-destructive tendencies (with voluntary childlessness as a special case thereof), radical queer cinema has been exploring an ethics and aesthetics of self-extinction as driven by the inseparable jouissance/death drive dyad; examples include Gregg Arkis's early 1992 classic The Living End or Alain Guiraudie's 2013 By the Lake. The paper explores how the two kinds of discourses and imaginaries - both anti-futuristic and anti-human, so to speak - permeate, inform, enhance or contradict each other.

"[E]veryone was trapped in its fouled and collapsing lungs"^:1 the planet is dying - and so is Anna's mother. But what appears to be a catastrophe is only the latest in a chain of crises and for Anna, numbed by doomscrolling and an overexposure to imminent disasters, merely poses another nuisance to be disregarded. Not even the disappearance of her finger can penetrate her (emotional) apathy: "There was no immediate sense of ache or loss. There was just a vanishing.^"2 Incapable of confronting complex feelings of dread and loss, Anna and her brother Terzo decide to exert control over the incontrollable and put their mother's death 'on hold'. It is only when the 'vanishings' continue that Anna slowly begins to accept the losses in her life and thus becomes able to mourn and move on.

Published in the context of Australia's 2019/2020 bushfire crisis, Flanagan's novel captures "the ensuing sense of spiritual and moral destitution compounded with a new register of anxiety and dread"^.3 His protagonist's initial apathy and refusal to accept and mourn the losses in her world mirrors the complex emotional response that climate change elicits. Yet, as Lesley Head points out in Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene (2016), the experience of grief and mourning is a necessary process "pivotal to a fundamental reconceptualization of the human self"^.4 Similarly, Cunsolo and Ellis (2018) argue in their research of ecological grief that grief as a response to loss and mourning as a process of transition after loss create and expose connections between humans and nature^.5

In my talk I will explore how the novel's different dimensions of loss and grief make ecological grief more palpable and, combined with its magical realism that employs 'vanishings' as a representation of the unimaginable and obliterating qualities of loss, expose the characters' meaningful or lack of connections with other humans and the nonhuman world.

[1] Flanagan, Richard. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. Vintage, 2022, p. 13.

[2] Flanagan, Richard. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. Vintage, 2022, p. 15.

[3] Harris, Stephen. "Fear and Loathing in the Anthropocene: Grief, Compassion, and the Benefits of Literature." Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 4.1, 2020, p. 171.

[4] Harris, Stephen. "Fear and Loathing in the Anthropocene: Grief, Compassion, and the Benefits of Literature." Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 4.1, 2020, p. 174.

[5] Cunsolo, Ashlee and Neville R. Ellis. "Ecological Grief as a Mental-Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss." Nature Climate Change, 8.4, 2018, pp. 275-76.

The ever-evolving discourse surrounding climate change necessitates innovative communication strategies to effectively engage diverse audiences and inspire concrete action. Given the partly linguistic-discursive character of social and cultural processes, the way a medium communicates facts becomes crucial. This study explores the communication strategies employed by It's Freezing in LA! (2019), a biannual print and online independent climate change magazine from the UK. Positioned at the intersection of science and activism, the magazine aims to explore the multifaceted impacts of climate change on society and provoke critical reflections on environmental issues.

It's Freezing in LA! emerges as a distinctive voice within the realm of climate change discourse, challenging traditional narratives through its unique blend of unconventional storytelling techniques, thought-provoking content, stylized visual design, hand-rendered illustrations, and bold new climate writing. Applying Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this paper examines how the magazine integrates various communication modes-language, imagery, and visual design-to construct an impactful discourse that conveys complex climate change messages and engages audiences. This analysis of the magazine's innovative engagement strategies and content reveals how It's Freezing in LA! pioneers a fresh narrative style that resonates with diverse audiences, fostering a deeper understanding of climate realities and amplifying the urgency of climate action. Furthermore, to contextualize the analysis, the research will consider conducting semi-structured interviews with the magazine's editors. This approach aims to gain insights into their editorial strategies and the broader socio-political context that shapes the magazine's operations.

Then I saw a man sitting in the middle underneath me:
I drank the wine.
But when I came closer to him

And I was called his name, and I saw him as if he were an animal, a man.

(Iwein, 418-424)

Then I saw a man
sitting among the animals,
which instilled confidence in me again. But when I approached him and could see him clearly, I feared him as much
as the animals, if not more.

This is how Kâlogrenant describes his encounter with a waltman (forest man) in the forest of Breziljân in his aventiure narrative at the beginning of the Arthurian romance Iwein (v. 263). The figure of this "wild" man is described as an ungehiure crêatiure (uncanny being) (v. 985 f.) and has both human and animal attributes. Kâlogrenant is shocked by the appearance of the waltman, who, however, undoubtedly sees himself as a man, as dû gesihest nû (a man as you see) (v. 488).
Todorov's theory would assign such encounters with posthuman beings in medieval literature to the realm of the unmixed miraculous or the allegorical rather than the fantastic, for he claims: "The fantastic lies in the moment [of] uncertainty"^.1 The Christian-influenced Middle Ages, however, anticipate this through the explainability of everything through divine action. This lecture will use the Waltman encounter and approaches from emotion research and spatial theory to operationalize the concept of the fantastic for the Middle Ages to such an extent that fantastic moments can nevertheless be identified. On the one hand, the focus will be on the moment of irritation as shown by Kâlogrenant at the sight of the "other", although he should be able to explain it through divine action. On the other hand, spaces that, like the forest of Brezilijân, create the conditions for imaginations of the "other" will play a role in the identification of fantastic moments.

¹ Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to fantastic literature. Wagenbach, 2018, p. 34.

Der iemer und iemer solde weln, ern fünde sô ungehiure deheine krêatiure (whoever should ever choose (from all creatures) would never find such an uncanny creature, v. 1896-1898): This is how the narrative voice in Daniel of the Valley of Flowers (1st half of the 13th century), a late, parodic Arthurian romance by Stricker, describes the strange creatures Daniel encounters on his âventiures. Whether red, bald blood drinkers, bulbous Medusa-like creatures or giant wizards from the Orient, the narrative voice and characters are baffled by these post-human apparitions. But surely these hybrids should be explainable as creations of the Christian God in the Middle Ages? If the work is not fantastic in its entirety, where is the fantastic to be found against the background of medieval thought patterns? In Daniel , fantastic moments are created via the narrative voice and the characters' speech, and only a little via the sometimes surprisingly stoic protagonist Daniel. Seen anthropocentrically as a human hybrid, the peculiarity of the various monstra that the knight Daniel encounters and their climatically "different" habitat is described in a richly imagined way. Foreign space and post-human bodies become fantastic here; for only in foreign space are there crêatiures that cannot be found anywhere else.
It is therefore necessary to apply the previously elaborated approach to fantastic moments in medieval texts to a still under-researched Arthurian novel. To this end, an ecofeminist reading is used as a supplement, as the narrative voice and characters depict the physical and spatial "other" with horror and astonishment in descriptions that are at times lengthy. Relevant here is the space, an oriental-foreign paradise in which posthuman figures can live and thrive - until Daniel arrives. Because: who is the unhistorical krêatiure in Daniel is a question of perspective.

"Here are desolate wastelands and seemingly inhuman, misshapen peoples. Some have no nose and a completely flat, ugly face. Others have grown their mouths together and eat through a thin reed."

This is how the wonder peoples on the continent of Africa are described in an inscription on the Ebstorf world map (c. 1300). In contrast to geographically precise modern world maps, medieval world maps (mappae mundi) depict people's imagined world. They include cultural and religious elements that reflect the medieval conception of the world.

The Ebstorf world map has attracted attention in historical medieval studies since the early 20th century. While most of the early research from the 1970s onwards focused primarily on the authorship and creation of the map, the last 20 years have seen an increase in cultural-historical research into the map. From a cultural studies perspective, medieval world maps can provide an insight into people's world views. This lecture will then expand historical-cartographic research to include a cultural and literary studies perspective.

Fantastic figures such as the Syrbotae - an Ethiopian race of 12-foot (approximately 3.70 m) tall creatures - are not only depicted on world maps, they are also geographically located. In particular, the geographical location and thus climatic classifications are to be analyzed in relation to the wonder peoples. For it is quite clear that posthuman figures are imagined away from the center of human life in distant and foreign regions. With the help of an ecocritical, ecofeminist approach and the theory of fantastic moments, the extent to which medieval world maps contain fantastic moments from the first lecture of this panel and can be read ecocritically when the narrative voice and figure speech are omitted will be tested using the example of a historical source. Thus, in the process of othering, post-human, fantastic characteristics are assigned to the wonder peoples and located in the medieval world view at the edge of the Ebstorf world map.

This paper examines the Gothicization of Nature in Game of Thrones (2011-2019) and proposes that the application of ecoGothic to the critical reading of fantasy fiction enhances the exploration of ecocritical discourses inherent in the genre. In this way, the effectiveness of "the negative sublime" (Botting 48) in addressing issues and processing emotions related to anthropogenic climate change is illuminated. In the negative sublime, Nature is established as animate and marked as chaotic, monstrous, and beyond human control. As Gothic Nature becomes "a symbolic whole" in stark contrast to human nature, the re-mystification of Nature is enabled, which foregrounds the anxieties and concerns "that haunt our relationships to the non-human world" (Parker 20). In Game of Thrones, the ever-present threat of consumption through the Walkers becomes an uncanny manifestation of the negative sublime that denies the audience the ability to distance themselves from the non-human, inanimate world--insofar as the deadly threat posed by the 'ice zombies' that induce climate change is revealed to be "none other than us" (9). Furthermore, the arctic Gothic Nature 'beyond the Wall' and the portrayal of the White Walkers as both agents of Nature and eerie hyperobject (Morton) in the fantastical Terracene (Mameni) of Westeros re-enchants Nature and reveals those emotions "that are often ignored and/or repressed" (Baker 39). Applying Alaimo's trans-corporeality to the Gothicized Nature of Game of Thrones, it can be argued thatthe negative sublime negates an anthropocentric focus, in favour of Haraway's Chthulucene and the collapse of the boundaries between humans and nature. At "a time when global warming turns the sheltering ice and starving bears into victims of hubris rather than the monsters of the yore" (Smith and Hughes 6), the White Walkers as arctic Gothic monsters are an apt trope for exposing human complicity in climate change (300).

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.

Baker, Daniel. "Why We Need Dragons: The Progressive Potential of Fantasy." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.3 (2012): 437-459.

Botting, Fred. Gothic. Routledge, 1996.

Haraway, Donna. "Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene." E-flux Journal 75 (2016):
1-14.

Mameni, Salar. Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics. Duke University Press, 2023.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Parker, Elizabeth. The Forest and the EcoGothic. The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2013.

This paper will look at so-called 'nature strikes back' or 'eco-horror'-narratives in fiction and film, in which 'representatives' of nature (animals, plants, small organisms) or entire ecological systems (forests, oceans, fields) begin to target and kill humans for invading, vandalizing or entirely destroying nature. Although this kind of narrative begins to form as a popular genre in the 1950s (mostly in the USA, but also in the UK and Japan, for example with Tarantula or Godzilla), it massively proliferates only in the 1970s, which is unsurprising given the historical context (e.g. the first Club of Rome report in 1972). While the genre has been productive ever since, the last two decades have seen another "proliferation phase" with novels such as Frank Schätzing's The Swarm or films such as The Happening, The Bay or, recently, Black Demon.

While it is obvious that the generic script and the individual narratives come with a fundamental ecocritical and political investment, it is worthwhile looking at what precisely that investment looks like and how it is 'spelled out' or narrativized - at a closer look, as the paper argues, it turns out that in these recent narratives, individual and systemic/societal accountability and responsibility are actually formulated in quite different ways and with radically different (political) implications. This talk will discuss exemplarily what these are and what that means for wider cultural narratives of climate change, ecology, and political activism.

The core of plant horror, as part of eco-horror, has its roots in the human fear of the wilderness of plant nature, which is seen as untamable, impenetrable and difficult to control in its growth. Plants embody an otherness that human culture is constantly trying to tame, to make accessible to humans. These attempts to organize, control and even subjugate nature are human reactions to plant otherness. PlantHorror revolves around the man-made dichotomy of (plant) nature and (human) civilization and concentrates on violations and transgressions of this demarcation. These transgressions are symbolic transgressions that serve as a magnifying glass for the fragility of an anthropocentric world order. PlantHorror criticizes the anthropocentrism of the world, the self-imposed specialness of humans, which goes hand in hand with the destruction, exploitation and devaluation of everything non-human (cf. Keetley/ Tenga 2016; Tidwell/ Soles 2021). The plant in PlantHorror symbolizes everything that is repressed and suppressed by humans - and thus becomes a moment of reflection on the relationship between humans and nature. In its historical dimension, EcoHorror or PlantHorror reaches into the discourse fields of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) or the report to the Club of Rome The Limits to Growth (1972) and is thus closely linked to discourses on environmental destruction, species extinction and climate change. With a focus on eco-horror and plant horror in particular, this article aims to use selected films such as The Girl with all the Gifts (Colm MacCarthy, 2016), Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018), The Day of the Triffids (Steve Sekely/ Freddie Francis, 1963), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philipp Kaufman, 1978) and series such as The Last of Us (Various, 2023-) to demonstrate the potential of plant "monsters" to reflect on and re-perspectivize nature-human relationships.

relationships. Here, the article places a special focus on the historical and social

social dimension of the plant horror film from the 1960s to the present day.

Films

Annihilation (2018): Directed by: Alex Garland; Written by: Alex Garland/ Jeff VanderMeer;

Production: Andrew MacDonald/ Alion Reich; Country/ Countries: USA.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978): Directed by: Philip Kaufman; Written by: W.D.

Richter; Production: Robert H. Solo; Country/ Countries: USA.

The Girl with all the Gifts (2016): Colm McCarthy; Written by: Mike Carey; Production:

Camille Gatin/ Angus Lamont; Country/ Countries: United Kingdom.

The Day of the Triffids (1963): Directed by: Steve Sekely/ Freddie Francis. Written by:

Bernard Gordon/ Philip Yordan. Production: George Pitcher/ Philip Yordan; Country/

Countries: UK.

The Last of Us (2023-): Directed by: Various; Written by: Craig Mazin/ Neil Druckmann;

Production: Various; Country: USA.

Literature

Keetley, Dawn; Angela Tenga (2016) (Eds.): Plant Horror. Approaches to the

Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Tidwell, Christy; Carter Soles (2021) (Eds.): Fear and Nature. Ecohorror Studies in the

Anthropocene. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press.

This paper delves into the symbolic parallels between the fictional planet Arrakis from Frank Herbert's renowned science fiction series Dune and the potential fate of planet Earth. Through an exploration of environmental degradation, resource exploitation, and societal consequences, the paper elucidates how the narrative of planet Arrakis as portrayed in Herbert's story and Villeneuve's cinematic adaptations(Dune: Part One 2021; Dune: Part One 2021; Dune: Part 2 2024) serves as a poignant allegory for the challenges humanity faces. Drawing upon themes of ecological collapse, cultural resilience, and the pursuit of power (Kennedy 2022), the narrative of Arrakis offers profound insights into the precarious balance between human civilization and the natural world. By examining the intricate interplay of politics, ecology, and technology on Arrakis, this article explains how the planet's destiny mirrors the potential trajectory of Earth toward desolation.
Through an analysis of the socio-political dynamics on Arrakis based on the first Dune novel and Villeneuve's movies this paper presents the parallels with Earth's geopolitical landscape, where resource scarcity and rivalries exacerbate conflicts and perpetuate cycles of violence. Moreover, the ecological transformation of Arrakis through terraforming projects underscores humanity's hubristic attempts to control and manipulate the natural world, often with unforeseen consequences. This idea is elaborated on by drawing upon the support of the chaos-theory as described by Palumbo (1997).
The symbolism embedded within the narrative of Arrakis offers a cautionary tale for the future of planet Earth. By examining the parallels between Arrakis and Earth, this article highlights the urgent need for collective action to address environmental degradation, promote sustainable development, and foster socio-ecological resilience. Drawing upon the lessons of Arrakis, humanity can strive to forge a more harmonious relationship with the planet, recognizing the interconnectedness of all life and the imperative of stewardship for future generations. As the fate of Arrakis hangs in the balance, so too does the destiny of planet Earth, underscoring the profound significance of the symbolism encapsulated within Herbert's visionary masterpiece (Senior 2007).

This article aims to read the film Annihilation(directed by Alex Garland, US/UK 2018) as a - non-explicit - parable for the challenges facing humans in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene is a zeitgeisty concept of complex, interdependent relationality of human and non-human entities on local and planetary environmental levels. In this concept, it becomes clear that humans have overinflated themselves in their self-image as "rulers" over nature and in their dualistic demarcation from it and must recognize their dependence on it. This requires a turning point in the traditionally distanced and objectifying way of thinking about the world and acting with the world, and therefore also an insight into the human influence on the (unpredictable) shaping of the world through systemic changes. A socio-political conflict arises in the compatibility of a planetary-biospheric future for humans with the provincial status quo of prosperity and abundance, complicated by the fact that we are only just beginning to understand nature as an egalitarian interaction partner. We need pluralistic and flexible ways of thinking and spaces of experience that enable us to locate ourselves in the Anthropocene and in the world and that provide successful translations of scale; in other words, that simplify the complexity of the Anthropocene but do not work in a reductionist way, that limit the planetary to a perceptible size but do not deny us a view of the whole.

This is where the article wants to start: The film Annihilation visualizes theoretical, critical points of the Anthropocene discourse, especially the human-environment relationship, so that a story about the Anthropocene could be told. An extraterrestrial quasi-object strikes a lighthouse, symbolic of (intellectual) scientific paradigms, and a sphere (the "shimmer") spreads out, within which the flora and fauna change in the most peculiar way beyond scientific-logical explanation. Since the area cannot be controlled by military (executive, so to speak) force and also eludes the scientific-empirical view "from the outside", it is necessary to accept the shimmer as a space of experience and explore it from the inside. This is where the film takes up the criticism of the anthropocentric, transfigured hegemony of man and the resulting alienation from nature, in which nature is objectified and used as a borderline concept.

The film, which makes many biological forms in Shimmer appear as echoes of human imprinting and brings the motif of man's conflict with himself to a climax, does not evade an anthropocentric point of view, but shows the interweaving of man not only in his social, but also biospheric, transformed and mutable environment and not least with its references to evolution to a point of Malcolm Miles' ecocentrism: "Form and consciousness are outcomes of an ever-incomplete process of becoming." In this way, the film also presents the demands on the human perspective to view nature and humans as an ever-incomplete coexistence in the currently virulent environmental crises and to be dynamic in our knowledge and actions.

Simon C. Estok's theorizing of the word 'ecophobia' as a means to challenge "the modus operandi of a profit-based system" has been gaining currency in ecocritical studies in response to the openness of the field and to problematize how representations of certain nonhuman others can and have indeed bred their irrational fear. In configuring and conceptualizing the ecophobia, Estok seeks to promote the urgency of the matter through promulgating a kind of activism whose scope might seem too vast, yet whose possibility will "eventually," to borrow his own term, become perceptible and subject to action. Not only is ecophobia represented in various media, but with the advent of multimedia franchises, it has been reproduced and dispersed across multiple representations. This tradition of reproduction as a form of entertainment has left us with a body of misdirected fears and ecophobic mentality. Therefore, this study, as part of a bigger project of critiquing the transmedia franchise as an institutionalized practice of ecophobia, takes the multimedia franchise of Swamp Thing, first appearing as a comic book in the 70s and its perpetual reproduction over the years to the most recent form as a TV series and investigates the manifold ways through which a natural place such as a swamp is demonized. Examining the shift in representations and critiquing the constant reproduction of such a rebuke of a nonhuman other is meant to bring ecophobia to the fore of literary and cinematic discussions so that, as misogyny is fought by feminism, ecophobic representations could be addressed and challenged by ecocritics as well. Apart from the theoretical analysis of ecophobic discourse, my presentation will encompass a detailed visual map of these representations as well with the purpose of providing a clear picture of what it means to reproduce an ecophobic notion.

Recent scholarship repeatedly notes that the Anthropocene enforces a rethinking of supposed binaries such as "human" history and "natural" history (e.g. Chakrabarty) as human beings have become geological agents and the Earth itself an archive to be read (e.g. Colebrook). N. K. Jemisin's award-winning series The Broken Earth centers on the intersections of race, the inhuman, colonialism and geology. Set on an alternate Earth that threatens its inhabitants with permanent geo-climatological crises, the so-called Fifth Seasons, the three volumes focus on the materiality of the Earth, its stratifications and deep time. This paper turns to Jemisin's trilogy to ask how deep time can be thought (with) and represented. How can "human" and "natural" history be thought together through the geological inhuman? Who can read the archive of the Earth and how is it being read? Imagining forms of exploitation of resources that are based on colonial enslavement and the a priori commodification and extraction of inhuman life, Jemisin creates the orogenes, a racialized category of inhuman life, who have the ability to influence geologic strata of the Earth itself and cause or prevent earthquakes. Held and trained in bondage or living in death-like states of enslavement, orogenes are subjugated for their "usefulness" to the empire of "the Stillness"; or killed by other members of their communities. Drawing on conceptualisations of extractivism and the geologic inhuman, this paper investigates Jemisin's orogenes from a lithic point of view (Cohen) and understands them as representations of racialized geologic agency and deep time. In this vein, Jemisin questions the universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene "we" that often forget "that the geological record of human footprints [...], is actually a series of human footprints literally stepping on other human lives" (Erickson 115) and thus flatten racialized power imbalances.

Works Cited

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197-222.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

Colebrook, Claire. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Open Humanities Press, 2014. Critical Climate Change.

Erickson, Bruce. "Anthropocene Futures: Linking Colonialism and Environmentalism in an Age of Crisis." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 38, no. 1, 2020, pp. 111-28. doi:10.1177/0263775818806514

By the end of the^19th century, domestic horticulture was a well-established bourgeois pastime, with indoor cultivation of plants made possible, firstly, by a proliferating industry of plant importation from England's colonies, and, secondly, closely glazed glass cases which allowed for the protected transfer of plants. Named after their inventor, Nathaniel Ward, these cases revolutionized indoor gardening; the Victorian bourgeoisie were ecstatic about (re)creating nature under glass. Against the backdrop of increasing urban pollution and a plethora of botanical writings insinuating that the Victorian home had become a toxic space, Wardian cases were enclosed environments in which the laws of nature could be reproduced and performed. Building on Jesse Oak Taylor's conceptualization of the 'abnatural' as characterizing moments in which nature appears "other to itself, beside or outside to itself" (5), speaking both to its absence and uncanny persistence, denoting a manufactured environment wherein everything bears the traces of human action, this paper focuses on Victorians' conceptualizations of Wardian cases as (ab)natural spaces in which ecologies were conceived of in relation to, and contention with, their polluted atmosphere. Reading key texts of mid-century horticulture by Nathaniel and Stephen Ward, Joseph Paxton, and Shirley Hibberd against ecocritical perspectives on Victorian and fin de siècle writing (i.e., Dickens's Bleak House or H.G. Wells's The Flowering of the Strange Orchid), it traces radical nineteenth century visions for future urban existence informed by glasshouse culture, and probes both the destabilizing and formative force of 'cultivating climates' under glass.

#abnatural #anthropocene #ecocriticism #glassworlds

Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. U of Virginia Press, 2016.

This paper will discuss Cherie Dimaline's novel The Marrow Thieves (2017), which is set in a dystopian future when the catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic climate change have led to the collapse of North American societies. Imagining a post-apocalyptic world in which a new disease robs the non-indigenous population of the ability to dream, the novel relies on the conventions of speculative fiction in order to render the effects of anthropogenic climate change tangible in psychological as well as social terms. According to this future scenario, the novel's indigenous protagonists are on the run from government institutions created to extract their bone marrow as an effective cure for the new disease. This resurgence of genocidal and settler colonialist policies, the novel suggests, is a result of the climatic changes that occur in a historical continuum of Canadian settler colonialism spanning the past, present, and future. While the novel thus offers a cautionary tale about the disastrous social and political consequences of climate change for Indigenous communities, it also emphasizes the importance of Indigenous cultural practices to redress these catastrophic consequences. In the novel, storytelling is presented as an important vehicle for preserving individual and collective memories and identities in Indigenous communities. Storytelling disrupts the speculative reality of the story-world and prepares the grounds for anti-colonial resistance and cultural survival. As this paper will argue, the novel's depiction of storytelling creates, to borrow from Todorov's famous definition of the fantastic, a "hesitation" in choosing between Western conceptualizations of rational causation and alternative epistemic and explanatory frameworks. This opposition emerges as a central feature of the novel's critique of Canadian settler colonialism, its logic of resource extraction, as well as its future human and environmental consequences.

Over the last two decades, indigenous and postcolonial literatures depicting magical figures that symbolize a close relationship with nature and the environment have gained popularity. Legends, folk tales, and myths often function as a source of inspiration for such contemporary speculative fiction. This paper comparatively analyzes Cherie Dimaline's dystopia The Marrow Thieves (2017) and the Indigenous futurist novel A Snake Falls to Earth (2021) by Darcie Little Badger through the lenses of postcolonial theory, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. Set in a post-apocalyptic Canada, Dimaline's novel tells the story of how Indigenous people are persecuted with the goal to extract their bone marrow, the source of dreaming, an ability that is lost to the general population due to environmental destruction. The novel centers on a Métis boy traveling northwards in the hope of finding a resistance camp while he learns about the mythological heritage and oppression of Anishinaabe culture. The analysis focuses on the portrayal of environmental degradation, which is closely linked to Indigenous exploitation. In Darcie Little Badger's novel, in turn, the trope of exploitation of the environment is reimagined through the suffering of animals. It is told from the perspectives of a Lipan Apache girl in modern-day Texas and a cottonmouth snake person in the Reflecting World, a spirit realm inhabited by shape-shifting animal people, whose worlds collide and who need to rely heavily on each other to ensure their survival. The paper investigates how both stories draw attention to the cultural importance of mythology and mythological beings in Native American oral storytelling. Furthermore, it discerns the functions of the magical in the context of eco-fiction and shows how the texts establish sustainable relationships through learning about Native American mythologies.