In a recent essay for the journal Electra Street, Stephanie LeMenager urges her readers to read Octavia Butler in order to “get ready for climate change”— to “[skill] up,” as Butler’s protagonist “Lauren Olamina” in the Parable novels puts it.1LeMenager suggests that Butler’s Parable series figures a productive departure from an Anthropocene imaginary, whose teleological nature posits the “end of nature” as its most radical political horizon: “whereas [Bill] McKibben laments the end of Nature,” LeMenager writes, “because Nature has been a refuge from the inauthentic and conflictual qualities of social life, Butler recognizes the end of the Nature concept, which served to marginalize people of color, as an opportunity to begin genuine social building.”

Perhaps the essay should have included Donna Haraway on this score, although LeMenager is also concerned to place Butler in a genealogy of Black feminist thought and thus a “Black Anthropocene.” Nonetheless, both extol a gospel of radical collectivism, whether Butler’s “symbionts” (from the Parable series) or Haraway’s “terran critters” from Staying with the Trouble (2016).2Both imagine a future wherein environmental collapse, wrought from extractive economies and fossil capitalism will usher in not a new version of “possessive individualism” but instead what Ashley Dawson has called “disaster communism.”3So too, both employ the tools of speculative fiction to imagine such a world.

Contesting Amitav Ghosh’s argument regarding the dearth of “serious” fictional representations of climate change and its impacts, Butler’s oeuvre is essentially a praxis for “world-making through science fiction and activism” — “world-making” a term used by Shelley Streeby to describe “the transformative dimensions of the worlds and futures imagined by Indigenous people and people of color in confronting settler colonialism, environmental racism, and climate change” (149).4Of course, Butler’s creation of “hyperempathy” in Parable of the Sower (1993) — surely a catalyst for radical collectivism — applies primarily to Anthropos and not necessarily Haraway’s “multispecies muddle”; hence LeMenager’s assertion, like Streeby’s, that Butler is concerned with the human species — one in which intersectional solidarities can be forged among communities of color and about which histories of settler-colonialism and systemic racism shall no longer be elided in the historical record.

Streeby’s new book Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism traces a genealogy of speculative fiction — a category inclusive of science fiction — making a case for its political and imaginative utility, while also foregrounding (at least in part) explicit instances of fossil capitalism such as the Dakota Access Pipeline.5The book’s conceit is that figures like Butler, Rachel Carson, Leslie Marmon Silko and others, rely on the tropes of speculative fiction — primarily its alternative and transformative time scales — to figure new worlds. “Our answers about the future of climate change,” says Streeby, “must not come solely from the sphere of science and technology, or they will be too narrow, not capacious enough” (30). In fact, science fiction in her view is a means of world-making. As her many examples make clear, the world-making efforts of artists like Butler, along with writer and activist adrienne marie brown and Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor serve as guides for reimagining our dystopian present and making possible just futures. In many cases, as in brown’s Detroit, the line between aesthetic expression and political activism becomes blurred. Indeed, brown’s stories work directly toward realizing redistributive justice; in her view, “the realm of speculative and science fiction could be a great place to intentionally practice the futures we long for” (119).

Streeby’s is thus a far more expansive project than merely cataloguing science fiction writers: For example, she lovingly attends to the Butler archive at the Huntingdon Library in Los Angeles — its contents a testament to the imbricated chronologies of American neoliberalism and the emergence of global warming as a popular trope in political discourse; and she is equally concerned to demonstrate the role of world-making through activism. The book is the fifth installment of the University of California Press’s “American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present” series (which also includes primers on the BDS and Black Lives Matter movements) and it is divided into three sections that move deftly between science fiction and specific instances of direct action.6Following the introduction, which for such a slim volume demonstrates extraordinary breadth — effectively tracing the history of sci-fi from Mary Shelley to Jules Verne to W.E.B. DuBois to Rachel Carson and finally to the work of Silko and Butler — she devotes much of the book to Indigenous futurisms and world-making through movements ranging from #NoDAPL to earlier instantiations of water-protector movements during colonial occupation.

So too, Streeby offers a compelling history of direct action, tracing its inception (in the U.S.) to the Industrial Workers of the World through the U.S. Civil Rights movement and to the contemporary scene in the Dakotas. She states: “Indigenous futurisms are at the forefront of efforts to imagine a future of climate change other than that envisioned by the fossil fuel industry” (28). Toward that end, while she opens by lauding the 2013 film Snowpiercer for its critique of such geo-engineering projects as were also present in Jules Verne 1889 The Purchase of the North Pole—both imagining “a geo-engineering scheme hatched by avaricious capitalists in the service of resource extraction” (21)—she ultimately turns to Alex Riviera’s Sleep Dealer (2016) to make a case for world-making through Indigenous futurisms. This is, then, the thrust of the first chapter.

For the uninitiated, the introduction also includes “a brief history of global warming” before moving on to Rachel Carson and reminding her readers of the fable with which her famous book opens: “an allegory for tomorrow.” In Silent Spring, Carson succinctly demonstrates Samuel Delany’s contention that “science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present” (18). The tension between science fiction and speculative fiction is also addressed in the introduction. Margaret Atwood, it seems, was careful to distinguish sci-fi from spec-fi, arguing that sci-fi was squarely concerned with “green monsters on other planets or galaxies” (20). But this, Streeby implies, is a rather facile distinction, and one that Ursula LeGuin also contested. Pace Delany, LeGuin, whose “green monsters” in novels like the 1972 The Word for World is Forest were clear analogues for native communities in postcolonial states, if also Vietnamese citizens, stated: “‘one of the things’ science fiction does is ‘extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half-prediction, half satire” (20). It is precisely in this vein that Streeby considers Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 The Water Knife, which imagines a near future in the throes of dearth-induced water wars.

I would also recommend Bacigalupi’s earlier Shipbreaker (2011), which borrows from a contemporary site of salvage — Chittagong, a coastal city in Bangladesh — and which literary and cultural scholar Jennifer Wenzel reads as a documentary of our “accidental future.”7Thus Bacigalupi might, in a sense, be read as an “HistoroFuturist” like Butler, a term she coined to describe the ability to “[extrapolate] from the historical and technological past as well as the present in imagining the future” (24). Though Bacigalupi is also, and notably, imagining a post–fossil fuel future, Butler’s work examines a specifically racialized past offering, in the Parable novels, a “neo-slave narrative” albeit with global warming as a principle character.

In defining speculative fiction, Streeby also looks to Sheree Thomas’s 2000 Dark Matter: Speculative Fictions from the African Diaspora in which Thomas “used the term ‘speculative fiction’ to define the genre expansively and to highlight writing that had previously been invisible but was there all along” (25). Notably, Butler, at the 2005 “Black to the Future” festival, pointedly asked the audience who had read the book. More to the point, this more expansive notion of the genre allows for the inclusion of writers like brown and, consequently, for Streeby to explore different modes of world-making in the ensuing chapters that demonstrate the intersections between aesthetic expression and political action. She likewise traces the intersectionality of resistance movements from Flint, Michigan to the #NoDAPL movement in South Dakota.

In the first chapter, in highlighting the legacy of removal in the context of extractive economies, Streeby charts modes of Indigenous world-making as well as intersectional responses to environmental violence through allegiances forged between Indigenous and Black communities. Reminding her readers that both communities have long been at the “forefront of taking action against extractive industries” (45) and have tended to be the victims of “wastelanding” — “the extraction of resources in racialized spaces that combined with environmental racism renders ‘space marginal, worthless, and pollutable’” (44) — she proceeds to offer a robust history of resistance highlighting the struggles at Standing Rock and Flint. She further remarks: “the chemicals used for fracking and the materials used to build pipelines are also used in water containment and sanitation plants in Black communities like Flint” (47).

Here, she also turns to the trope of “slipstream” — “a species of speculative fiction within the sf realm that ‘infuses stories with time travel, alternative realities and multiverses, and alternative histories’” — and the work of Gerald Vizenor, whose 1990 novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles is set in a near future wherein the U.S. government “invades reservations to extract resources in the dying days of the fossil fuel economy” (52). His earlier story, “Custer on the Slipstream,” which employs the trope to emphasize the historical continuities between colonial occupation and current modes of dispossession and removal, was featured in the syllabus created by the Standing Rock Collective.8Silko’s Almanac also features here in this regard: “Silko… extrapolates from her present and moves backwards, forwards, and around in time to create a powerful Indigenous futurism in the face of ongoing battles over resource extraction and the wastelanding of Indigenous places in the U.S. Southwest and elsewhere in the Americas” (69).

Almanac, Streeby argues, offers an example of “world-making” in its figuring of a transnational community of Indigenous peoples from across the Americas who forge an alliance under the banner of environmental justice. Such communities, it is noted, would exist well before the emergence of mainstream environmental movements during the post-war era, thereby attesting to the existence of a robust “environmentalism of the poor” in the Global North.9Streeby offers the example of Hopi leader Thomas Banyacya, who was imprisoned for refusing to serve in WWII. Later examples include the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and (in the Global South) the Declaration of Quito, which vowed to “defend and conserve [their] natural resources [from] transnational corporations” (60). In Streeby’s view, such Indigenous futurisms, as articulated by groups like the Southwest Network, also deploy slipstream by “remix[ing] older forms of culture and knowledge with new technologies” in order to “[imagine] a future of climate change” unhinged from fossil capitalism (68).

Butler would read about figures like Banyacya while researching her 1993 Parable of the Sower. “Critical of human efforts to remake places they settled in destructive ways,” Butler persistently chronicled such world-making activities; her archive at the Huntingdon reveals a lifelong commitment to climate activism (70). Contesting the emergence, really proliferation, of neoliberalism in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, Butler came to reflect on the bankrupt notions of the individual that allowed for the continued pillage of native communities. Here too she imagined the resonances of statelessness for African-American communities; thus, Parable reflects a desire to “write long horribly or beautifully seductive novels about Humans of Earth becoming true mutualistic symbionts of other individual worlds” — establishing, it seems, a community that would defy a neoliberal commitment to possessive individualism through an apocalyptic collectivism (80).

Butler meticulously catalogued the activities of Native activists, global warming science and an ascendant denialism under Reagan, citing “Reagan’s efforts to roll back new, post-1970 environmental regulations while opening up lands to oil, coal, and gas extraction” (87-8). Not surprisingly, Parable of the Sower was set in the “dry, harsh, austere world” produced at the hands of oil barons. According to Streeby, “Butler imagined neoliberal globalization from above as a kind of scorched earth disaster, one to which her imaginings of different worlds and communities and other, more sustainable ways of living responded” (98). It seems that Butler also prophesied the urban farms in places like Detroit, which are now being realized by activists Grace Lee Boggs and adrienne marie brown. Linking Butler’s work with that of Boggs and brown, Streeby again makes clear the relationship between science fiction and direct action.

brown figures as the fulcrum of the final chapter, “Climate Change as a World Problem.” Inspired by Butler, brown’s activist work is intersectional, moving between social movements, cultural production and world-making through direct action. Interested in the imbrications between climate justice and the legacies of systemic racism and settler-colonialism, brown’s work resonates with broader concerns regarding forms of “climate apartheid,” which render historically marginal communities more vulnerable to climate chaos. Given the failures of international governing bodies to enact binding legislation that would lower emissions and thus ameliorate the impact of climate change, climate justice organizations have assumed the mantel of resistance to an international economic community committed to fossil capitalism.

The first climate justice summit, we learn, was held at The Hague in 2000. Thereafter, the International Climate Justice Network created the Bali Principles of Climate Justice. This coalition sought, among other things, to charge “’Northern governments, particularly the United States’ with compromising the ‘democratic nature of the United Nations as it attempts to the address the problem’” of climate change, as well as violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in abetting threats to, for example, food security (108). Reminiscent of the Cold War–era Non-Aligned Movement, the Bali principles are centrally concerned with the legacy of colonialism as it obtains in discussions of climate change. In this chapter, Streeby also documents forms of climate injustice, citing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as well as a lawsuit filed by the Inuit Circumpolar Council against the United States for unchecked emissions that will directly compromise their existence. No decision was made, but this laid the foundation for the UN to adopt the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples the following year in 2007.

Returning to brown and a discussion of direct action in the face of political inertia, Streeby paraphrases brown’s commitment to direct action in the form of “guerillas putting up solar panels in the hood” (116) or “guerilla gardens” like those in Parable (115). Here too, Streeby discusses brown as a writer deeply committed to practicing world-making through science fiction. This is realized in her story “The River,” which imagines Detroit in the near future where the river “rises up tsunami-style to wipe out disaster capitalism, thereby allowing those who remain to make another world” (121). In brown’s view, it seems that “the key to surviving disaster is making movements that center on what people can create together rather than what powerful nation-states and corporations are willing to give” (126).

Streeby concludes with a plea to embrace more “collective envisionings of the future” — that this might just be “our best hope in imagining other worlds in the wake of the climate change disaster that is now upon us” (126). This may seem a utopian prospect, but such a perspective has become increasingly popular among scholars and activists. Some, like Haraway, also look to science fiction—what the veteran feminist calls simply “sf” to stand in for everything from science fiction to speculative fiction to “string figures” and what she calls “speculative fabulation.” Some, like Ashley Dawson, trace the material histories of disaster response in order to imagine our collective future. Each confirms that despite the best efforts of neoliberal thinkers to hijack evolutionary biology in support of pseudoscientific notions of an innate selfishness, humans are actually hardwired for the sorts of “collective envisioning” that sf writers have long imagined.10

One of the great strengths of Streeby’s study is its attention to the intersections between aesthetics and activism. The book reads as a primer for teachers of speculative fiction and Indigenous futurisms and a call to action for activists to recognize new modes of “world-making.” My only quibble is that it is a project that seems too expansive for its venue: at times, it felt (perhaps necessarily) elliptical. Particularly in light of the popularity of Ghosh’s latest book, I do hope to see the longer version soon.11As Sheree Thomas’s aforementioned anthology confirms, there is a great deal of “serious” fiction attending to our imperiled world.

1. Stephanie LeMenager. “To Get Ready for Climate Change, Read Octavia Butler.” Electra Street. (November 2017).
2. Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press 2016).
3. Ashley Dawson. Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (New York: Verso 2017).
4. Amitav Ghosh. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). The term “world making” was also used by the philosopher Nelson Goodman in the early 1970s. Others have used it since, such as Ian Hacking.
5. Fossil capitalism generally refers to the imbricated chronologies of fossil fuel use and modern capitalism. The two, according to critics, are inextricably linked. See also Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso Books 2016).
6. The series includes: Sunaina Maira’s Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine (2017), Jack Halberstam’s Trans: A Quick and Quirky History of Gender Variability (2017), Roderick A. Ferguson’s We Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017), Scott Kurashige’s The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit (2017), Macarena Gomez-Barris’s Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Americas (2018,) and Barbara Ransby’s Making all Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (2018).
7. Jennifer Wenzel. “Salvage and the Accidental Future.” Modern Language Association. New York, New York. 5 January, 2018.
8. The curriculum was created by the NYC Stands with Standing Rock Committee. The syllabus can be found here: https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/
9. Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martínez Aliers. Varieties of Environmentalism: North and South (London: Routledge 1997). See also Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2011).
10. See again Dawson’s discussion of “disaster communism” and the ways in which neoliberalism has successfully hijacked theories of evolution so as to cultivate a commitment to the selfish individual (2017).
11. As per my own review of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, the project offers a vital critique of the role of empire in anthropogenic climate change, not to mention a thorough critique of the carbon economy. It would usefully read as a companion to Streeby.