School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Thomas Ford Although the phrase has not yet appeared in print, the cultural history of climate change is increasingly being recognised as a vital site of interdisciplinary interest. The reinterpretation of British Romanticism is essential to this emerging field, because atmosphere itself was constructed and functioned as a medium of communication in this period, linking culture and climate in new ways. In Modern Painters 3, John Ruskin defines Romanticism as the moment when the atmospheric mediation of perception and communication become central to art and literature. This corresponds, Ruskin claims, to a new awareness that visual and literary art use different media. Only once atmosphere is understood as a medium, that is, do other media (text and image) become visible as media themselves. Via a reading of Ruskin and Romanticism, this paper rethinks the material history of media with reference to today’s sense of ecological crisis and to Mark Hansen’s recent definition of ‘medium’ as ‘an environment for life’. Thomas H. Ford completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in British Romanticism. He has taught literary studies at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his translation of Boris Groys’s The Communist Postscript was published by Verso in 2010.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Nathaniel Avery In reference to Fredric Jameson’s work on utopia, and his understanding of (post)modern urbanism (as well as the work of theorists of the urban such as Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin), this paper will explore how urban space is constructed and negotiated by the player in the computer games Assassin’s Creed and Mirror Edge. It shall be argued that their gameplay mechanics, which reference parkour, represent a utopian response to an otherwise dull, technocratic, and rationalised city space that acts as a vector for consumption and distracted attention. As opposed to the flâneur that represents an aestheticising response to the city, parkour’s traceur acts in the text as the embodiment of a more active way of responding to city space. The game worlds represent dystopian urban sprawl, in dialectical conflict with the utopian gameplay mechanics, which provokes reflection on how we engage with the production of postmodern, late-capitalist urban space. Nathaniel Avery is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University. He is currently undertaking research on Fredric Jameson’s theorisation of utopia and periodising readings of postmodern culture.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Gord Sellar Environmentalism in South Korea has long been associated with the political left and its minjung ideology, constructed as oppositional to the pro-business, pro-American and authoritarian right-wing popularly identified with Korea’s postwar dictatorships. The resultant conflation of anti-Americanism and environmentalism has motivated Koreans to mobilise powerful folk-narratives of American crimes – environmental, political, and otherwise – within the debate over the presence and influence of American military bases in South Korea. One such folk narrative, exaggerating an incident involving the dumping of toxic chemicals into the Han River in Seoul, features prominently in the South Korean SF blockbuster The Host (Gwoemul, 2006), a narrative sporting a monster that embodies a leftist ‘minjung’ vision both of the ecology of dystopian politics and of the politics of ecological dystopianism. Now mainstream, this ideology has manifested in protests, and provoked the formulation of an alternative, techno-developmentalist right- wing rhetoric. Gord Sellar is an Assistant Professor within the Department of English Language and Culture at the Catholic University of Korea, in Bucheon, South Korea, and a professional science-fiction writer. His research focuses on science fiction, particularly Korean science fiction, and the adaptation of SF as a foreign literary and media genre to the Korean social and cultural context.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Andrew Milner In literary studies, the canonical artwork is conventionally understood as paradigmatic, the non-canonical work – of popular fiction, for example – as mere case-study. This paper will take the two most famous examples of Australian dystopian science fiction, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987), and ask whether either or both might be considered in some sense paradigmatic, despite their apparently non-canonical status. On The Beach has been continuously in print, has been adapted for cinema, television and radio, and translated into most European languages. It was a popular success. The Sea and Summer, by contrast, has long been out of print and has inspired no subsequent adaptations, but it was a (temporary) critical success. The paper will argue for a sociological understanding of the culturally paradigmatic, which will be loosely based on Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the genesis and structure of the literary and cultural field. Andrew Milner is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Ellen Greenham When we look to the projected future of potential ecological crisis, what do we see? Is it a planet parched and devoid of life? A planet resonating with the misery and degradation of humankind’s survivors? Or a planet transformed? The universe of ‘cold equations’ recognised by Tom Godwin is not some apocalyptic beast waiting for opportunity to rein down upon humankind, but rather, it is a landscape in which the proving ground of the dystopic can be sought and engaged. Through examination of selected fiction by Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and H.P. Lovecraft, this paper will examine the possibility that rather than seeking the green and fertile landscape of utopia, it is the active engagement of the individual with the dust of a new wilderness that refines and strengthens a sense of what it is to be alive and conscious in the universe. Ellen Greenham is currently enrolled at Murdoch University, Perth, in the second year of a research PhD. She is working with selected texts by Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and H.P. Lovecraft. The title of her thesis is ‘Neocosmicism: God and the Void’.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | John Lenarcic The American inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil predicts the emergence of a technological singularity in the not-too-distant future. In his book, The Singularity is Near, he describes an era when humans will transcend biology and meld with information systems. This optimistic version of transhumanism offers speculative reasoning based in fact that reads like something out of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. The notion of the human-machine interface dichotomy vanishing in a unifying transformation is also suggestive of technopaganism. A philosophical critique of Kurzweil’s hi-tech eschatology will be presented using analogies derived from similar themes explored in science fiction, especially the works of Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Olaf Stapledon and, of course, Clarke. John Lenarcic is a physicist and applied mathematician by training, an IT academic by fortunate accident and an armchair philosopher by conscious choice. He is currently a Lecturer in the School of Business IT and Logistics at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Zachary Kendal During the nineteenth century, advances in geology and evolutionary theory brought traditional religious beliefs into question, igniting what has often been characterised as a ‘war’ between science and religion. Some of the most diverse treatments of religion in Australian utopian literature come between 1870 and 1900, during the ‘Victorian Crisis of Faith’. This paper will briefly examine the approaches to religion and science in some of the utopian writing from this period, considering how different Australian authors have envisaged the relationship between science and religion unfolding. Topics such as Darwinism, secularism, church reform and spiritualism will be addressed in an attempt to demonstrate that this literature displays a vast array of approaches to contemporary scientific and religious issues. It will be my contention that an examination of this utopian literature supports modern historical scholarship, which contests the ‘science versus religion’ dichotomy and observes a more complex relationship at work. Zachary Kendal is completing his Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University. He undertook research on Australian utopian literature at the Australian National University as part of a 2008/2009 Summer Research Scholarship. He works at the Monash University Library.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | David Farnell H.P. Lovecraft and Octavia Butler are not authors who are typically classed as utopian writers, and at first glance, this may seem to be the only thing they have in common. But though they are separated by race, gender, generation, genre and political outlook, they share a surprising number of similarities in their lives and their works. And while they have both publicly rejected the idea of utopia, dreams of utopia still manage to creep in and play an important role in some of their works. This presentation will explore parallel themes of biologically determined ecotopia hidden within Lovecraft’s horror tale ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ and Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic trilogy Lilith’s Brood (a.k.a. Xenogenesis), and consider the different ways these themes play out in the stories and what is revealed by the attitudes of the authors and readers towards these themes. David Farnell is Associate Professor of English at Fukuoka University, Japan. His research interests include utopian themes in American literature and culture, the fantastic and issues of race, gender, and sexuality, with particular interest in Herman Melville, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Iain Banks, Phillip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | David Holmes James Hansen, who is credited with sounding the first alarm on climate change in the 1980s, is a radical climate systems analyst, whose understanding of global warming is informed by his expertise in the meteorology of another planet: Venus. This paper explores the epistemological status of Hansen’s extremely dystopian brand of anti-positivist climate change science, which is critical of the linear models of the IPCC, and avoids linking global warming to the very latest media disasters, moral panics and media spectacles. The focus on such spectacles serves the needs of empiricist news cycles more that it does a depth-hermeneutic of global catastrophe. Instead, Hansen argues that the place to look to understand the future of life on earth is hidden from everyday perception and is distinguished by its passiveness, its lack of photo opportunity, and its constancy ... is the world’s oceans. David Holmes is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media, ECPS, Monash University. His books include Communication Theory: Media, Technology and Society, and he has been commissioned to write a chapter on climate change for the 3rd edition of Australian Sociology: A Changing Society (forthcoming 2011).

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Hans A. Baer Clive Hamilton counsels that on the issue of anthropogenic climate change ‘only by acting, and acting ethically, can we redeem our humanity’, but does not leave us with a vision for getting humanity out of the quagmire that climate change presents. Inspired by the dystopian Australia ravaged by climate change in George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, I seek to ‘push the envelope’ by proposing a utopian vision based on democratic eco-socialism, part and parcel of a larger international effort in which various anti-systemic movements, including the climate justice movement, play a role. It would entail these transitional steps: the creation of a new left party assuming the reins of state power; public ownership of productive forces; greater social equality; heavy reliance on renewable sources of energy; sustainable transport, agriculture and forestry; green jobs; resistance to the culture of consumption as an act of resistance; and a shorter work week. Hans A. Baer is Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Social Inquiry and the Centre for Health and Society at the University of Melbourne. He is the co-author, with Merrill Singer, of Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health: Emerging Crises and Systemic Solutions, and is writing a book with Verity Burgmann on climate politics.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Josiane Smith In The Road, a father and his young son are trudging on foot, carting their belongings inside an old supermarket trolley across an ash-covered America. Their long march south, in the hope of surviving the winter, is akin to walking on a gym treadmill: the landscape has been unified by a nuclear winter and the climate never changes. In this paper, I will argue firstly that The Road exemplifies an inverted mirror view of Paul Virilio’s theory on polar inertia and pathological fixedness. Secondly, I will explore McCarthy’s uses of relics from an extinct capitalist society as symbolising the perils of consumerism and the potential futility of modern technology, linking those to Virilio’s anti-futurist stand on the notion of ‘progress’. Josiane Smith (Behmoiras) is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Melbourne, looking at acceleration, deceleration and the literary imagination of the future. Her book Dora B: A Memoir of My Mother was published in 2005, and her short stories have been published in Heat and Strange.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Bradley Wells While not as well known as his fellow ‘Inklings’, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams nonetheless presents a unique and significant vision of the world through his fiction. His novels and plays subvert and even invert the traditional utopic and dystopic dichotomies, offering instead a new way to reconcile man to his environment. Through his unique vision of a co-existent natural and supernatural universe, Williams is able to imbue even simple objects such as a stone, cup or a pack of cards with a new sense of the sacred, thereby offering a new sense of hope to both his and our world. By radically challenging the social, literary and theological orthodoxies of his time, Williams is able to reveal in his novels, such as Descent into Hell, the true nature of the world: a world of eucatastrophe where even such things as evil can be a force for redemptive good. Bradley Wells is a full-time PhD student at the University of Sydney, researching the literary works of Charles Williams, a member of the early twentieth-century Oxford writing group known as ‘The Inklings’. Bradley ‘stumbled upon’ Charles Williams during research into his previous Masters’ thesis on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Chris Palmer This paper concerns Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004–7), which tells how the concerted interventions of science in politics might lessen the impact of climate change. How does the trilogy’s interest in collective work and exchange, and, in co-operation and in humans as ‘social primates’, relate to its awareness of secrecy and surveillance, and to its explorations of the ‘Palaeolithic’ life in the woods, and to its fascination with the sources and occasions of individual well being? Is its extraordinary inclusiveness and range of interests an appropriate formal and cultural response to the global dimensions and complexity of the challenge presented by climate change? In the third novel, an admirable new president begins to tackle the problems, but a dark secretive villain haunts the drama, summing up all that the trilogy’s positive thinking has had to sideline, while the main character struggles with the effects of brain damage. Chris Palmer teaches in English at La Trobe University. He has published articles on contemporary science fiction, and on Shakespeare and film, and a book on Philip K Dick. He is a present working on a book on castaway narratives from Robinson Crusoe to The Wasp Factory and The Beach.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Paul Sheehan In his earliest novels, Cormac McCarthy dismantles America’s national mythology as an ‘Edenic’ paradise where self-determined individuals can achieve social success. His most recent novel, The Road (2006), signifies the end-point of this counter-utopian narrative: a post-apocalyptic work that redescribes American achievement as so much cultural and industrial detritus, and exposes communal bonds as (at best) a cover for naked self interest. Yet there is also an imposing political agenda at work that shines an unflattering light on some present-day troubles. As a recent review has it, McCarthy is confronting the ‘ghosts that haunt the twenty-first century, particularly in the West and especially in America’. I propose to track the nature of those ghosts by exploring the hinterland between civilisation and barbarism, the fraught space where The Road mostly takes place, and through which McCarthy seeks to diagnose the current malaise of the West. Paul Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Macquarie University.

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Laurie Ormond This paper looks at Australian fantasy author Alison Croggon’s Books of Pellinor series, which was published by Penguin Books Australia’s Viking imprint from 2002 to 2008. In The Books of Pellinor, images of ecological destruction, fused with the technologies of war, provide a recognisable cultural imaginary for the evil forces of ‘The Dark’ that are encroaching on the more ‘natural’ landscape of the imagined world. Croggon’s Sharma, ‘The Nameless One’, is a shadowy figure of evil who sits at the heart of a nightmarish dystopia called ‘Dén Raven’, which exists to produce war and ecological devastation. A closer analysis of the cultural imaginary of the text reveals a productive tension between an ideological identification of the Dark as a severance from nature, and as the pollution and corruption of nature. The paper models the way in which the themes and approaches of ecocritical studies and genre fiction studies can each modify the other. Laurie Ormond is a PhD candidate and sessional teacher in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia. The title of her doctoral thesis is ‘A World Worth Saving: How contemporary Australian fantasy fiction negotiates genre’. Laurie’s research interests include contemporary fantasy fiction, medievalism, ecocriticism and neo-Victorian studies.