Shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction Award 2020
Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2021

An Open Access edition of this book is available
on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.
Despite
the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst Anglophone
conservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near-consensus
amongst climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas
are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. The
resultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-cultural
phenomenon and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fiction
occupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takes
as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed ‘cli-fi’. It does not,
however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this
sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to
science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems
actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmann
adopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analysing print
and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especially
Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and the
United States. Inspired by Williams's cultural
materialism, Bourdieu's sociology of culture and Moretti's version of world
systems theory, the book builds on Milner’s own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive study
in the sociology of literature.