Antoine Traisnel, University of Oxford
This talk approaches fiction as a contested terrain through which technofuturist climate ventures and speculative literature articulate competing visions of environmental futures in an age of mass extinction. As climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss intensify, science fiction has become, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s phrase, “the realism of our time,” even as counter-extinction initiatives increasingly draw on science-fictional tropes to authorise futures and reorganise present material conditions.
The past two decades have seen a proliferation of conservation initiatives—from frozen zoos to lunar arks to resurrection biology—that wager planetary survival on the reconceptualisation of life as a genetic reserve to be stored and reactivated. Cast as humanity’s “life insurance” against catastrophe, these projects rely on promissory narratives that shape the governance of ecological crisis. They signal the rise of a paradigm I call futureproofing, which is quietly displacing sustainability as the dominant environmental logic.
In turn, I read the speculative novels of Octavia Butler, Don DeLillo, Ruth Ozeki, and C. Pam Zhang as offering critical and ethical counterpoints to the abstraction of life—its separation from specific milieus, kinships, and cultures—undertaken by biotech imaginaries in the name of survival. Their literary experiments mobilise fiction as an ecocritical intervention, reaching beyond techno-optimism to imagine other ways of thinking and living amid environmental collapse.
