Science fiction, reconfigured social theory and the Anthropocene Age: exploring and thinking about planetary futures through fictional imaginaries

Abstract

Should humanity prepare for life on a less habitable planet? The magnitude of human activities indeed makes it necessary to think about their consequences and to consider tackling them with renewed imaginative foundations. From this point of view, science fiction may have the advantage of having anticipated the movement. By initiating and accumulating thought experiments, its narrative combinations offer a cognitive reservoir and a reflexive medium for interpreting the world. Science fiction, and its imaginary constructions, provide a rare representation of how ‘future generations’ live, act and organise themselves. Faced with the need for new intellectual resources and frameworks fuelled by the notion of the Anthropocene, this contribution will first show that imaginary productions of science fiction are also of interest as a distinctive way to represent and problematise (in the sense of Michel Foucault) the relation of thinking species to their habitat, and therefore to cast the Earth’s habitability, its state and becoming as collective issues. It will then specify the intellectual operations (exploration, framing, and experimentation in particular) that can be engaged on these bases, and thus the type of participation that science fiction can offer to build an ethics of the future.