“Nothing you can believe is not coming true”: Utopianism and Extinction Studies

“Then we buried our dead and we planted oak trees.”1 Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower ends with a poignantly conflicted image of death and regeneration. Faced with the unyielding weight of social and environmental collapse, Lauren Olamina’s Earthseeders forge a path of resilience through a world both depleted and somehow rejuvenated. In doing so, they push past what Tom Moylan calls the critical utopia.2 The conditions that plague Earthseed’s world are those that plague ours, in slightly exacerbated form; but Earthseed’s utopian response to these conditions finds wider purchase and potential in Butler’s narrative, despite—or perhaps due to—the extreme situation of the planet. A novel that counterposes resilience and retreat (the latter signaled by Lauren’s desire to settle on Mars), Parable of the Sower engenders a counterintuitively utopian sensibility; both the victims and inheritors of colonial legacies, its characters discover a utopian politics through the proximity of their own extinction.As I was finishing my book, Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science, I was not thinking explicitly about its relevance for utopian studies—but I was concerned with emphasizing the contingency of our historical predicament. The current global situation of climate and environmental crisis is not set in stone, although imagining our way out of it seems herculean. As scientists who study complex systems will admit, small changes can have widespread, impactful, unpredictable, and long-lasting repercussions.3 This is a lesson for humanists: that even the smallest changes now can lead to large systemic overhaul. I did not—and do not—want Writing Our Extinction to be misunderstood as doomsaying. I want it to be a reading of how the capacity for imagining alternative futures, extinctive or otherwise, is already inscribed into the present. The multiple possible contours of the future begin taking shape today.One contention of Writing Our Extinction is that reading literature for its spatial thematics and ekphrastic qualities—how it visualizes space—activates some compelling conversations between literature and its surrounding environmental dimensions. Throughout the book, I argue that the vertical topologies of post-1960 fiction reveal generative dialogues with techno-industrial endeavors that emerge out of World War II: namely, the space race, atomic testing and geoengineering, and geological drilling projects such as Project Mohole. The fictions I examine do not merely reflect these vertical sciences back to themselves but unmask them as modes of a deleterious planetary authorship that inscribe extinction into the earth itself. In this respect, the vertical sciences are bound up with new theories and epistemologies of planetary catastrophism, from the nuclear anxieties of a post-Oppenheimer era to the hypothesized impact events responsible for previous mass extinctions (the most notorious being the Alvarez hypothesis, concerning the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event). These emergent catastrophisms reframe the earth as a narrative subject wrapped up in extremely long, more-than-human timelines of environmental crisis and collapse.The catastrophist paradigm can make it difficult to imagine a hopeful future, and I have struggled to convey to students in my environmental humanities and environmental justice courses that there is always room for action and change. In one especially disturbing case, a student asked whether scientists would even tell the wider public if it was too late—if we are already doomed. It is too easy, and getting easier, to slip into the mode of ecopessimism and linger on the worse-case scenarios, a cultural affliction that has only been exacerbated by social media.4 Works such as David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) are enlightening in their scope but can inspire inaction as much as action. Paradigms of capitalist realism and strategic realism maintain ideological dominance partly through their foundational role in modern institutional organization, but also through the insidious feedback loop of rising CO2 emissions.5 “Carbon dioxide clouds the mind,” writes James Bridle: “it directly degrades our ability to think clearly, and we are walling it into our places of education and pumping it into the atmosphere.”6 The foreclosure of utopian critique is a major side effect of intellectual malaise, as regenerative social imagination gives way to a debilitating acceptance of the status quo.On the surface, the premise of extinction could be said to contribute to this malaise as it forces us to confront the end of life; but as a critical concept, extinction introduces us not merely to the end of life itself but to the end of life as we know it. That is, we confront the end of a way of living. There is a lot of critical and intellectual value in sitting with the prospect of extinction, something Roy Scranton touches on in his seminal piece “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” (2013). In this essay, which forms the basis of Scranton’s book of the same title, the author writes: “Now, when I look into our future—into the Anthropocene—I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82nd Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world. Our new home.”7 Such visions challenge readers with unsettling glimpses of an unfamiliar future—something that utopian narratives have done for a long time now. When I set out to write my book, I was not thinking of the fictions I planned to examine as utopian per se; but after some reflection and the exhilarating conversations during the First Book Roundtable at the Society for Utopian Studies conference in 2023, I revisited a genealogy of critical perspectives and theoretical positions that have long informed my own scholarly work—from the writings of Fredric Jameson to the contemporary ecocriticism of a vibrant cohort of environmental humanists. The following pages reframe this genealogy in light of my book’s argument and offer some justification for the role of extinction in contemporary discourses of utopian ecocriticism. The paper then revisits some examples from the book itself to elucidate their relevance of the utopian dimension of Anthropocene fiction.In his 1982 piece on the anti-representational temporality of science fiction, Fredric Jameson insists that “the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go.”8 In keeping with Jameson’s political project, his argument correlates literary narrative and ideology, perceiving in the contours of aesthetic form those of imagined cultural practice. The promise of narrative closure—of ending—sanctions linearity, development, progress, and other tenets of liberal capitalism. As Jameson notes, many readers of science fiction (SF) approach the genre as a conventionally representational mode; for such readers, SF’s endings partake of the same ideological impulse as those of the realist novel. Framed in such a way, the only difference between SF and realism is “that the full ‘presence’—the settings and actions to be ‘rendered’—are the merely possible and conceivable ones of a near or far future.”9 The ostensibly non-realist appearance of SF is just that: an appearance, a thin drapery hung loosely over the solid frame of realist storytelling. The problem, Jameson retorts, is that this view of SF is wrong, “[f]or the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us ‘images’ of the future [. . .] but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.”10 This special mode of defamiliarization constitutes SF’s “utopian vocation,” which Jameson renders in curiously Beckettian style: “to succeed by failure,” to reposition the present as history, and “to demonstrate and dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future.”11Of all possible futures, those dominated by the proximity of extinction would seem to offer the most salient affirmations of Jameson’s argument. How do we imagine a future that has extinguished imagination? Yet it has become obligatory in ecocritical and environmentalist discourses to trot out one of Jameson’s most apocryphal comments, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.12 It would seem, somewhat counterintuitively, that extinction has become increasingly easy to imagine—and what is more, that imagining extinction has quite possibly impeded our ability to imagine deep systemic change. Put another way, the spectacle of extinction has become a representational instrument of capitalist realism. In “Progress versus Utopia” and elsewhere, Jameson touts the power of anti-realist literary modes to trouble and undermine a form of positivist social perception.13 In the spirit of his Marxist processor, Georg Lukács—for whom realism embodied the most promising form of communicating the totality of capitalist social conditions—Jameson reads SF as arriving at the present in a manner complementary to Lukács’s reading of the historical novel: a form that “giv[es] poetic life to those historical, social and human forces which, in the course of a long evolution, have made our present-day life what it is and as we experience it.”14 Both genres reconfigure the present in material relation to the critical contents of narrative genre. This Lukácsian-Jamesonian vector of Marxist analysis gifts us a powerful working continuum between the historical novel and science fiction as mirror genres that darkly reflect the present, dismantling the fantasies of progress that compose capitalism’s social ideology.If extinction-as-spectacle only serves to impoverish the imagination under the aegis of capitalist realism, then extinction’s value for utopian thought must assume a different form. As Jameson reminds us, the defamiliarizing effect of science fiction works by “transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.”15 In other words, the utopian element of science fiction historicizes the present, intuiting in the present the conditions of a future that has not yet fully materialized and may never materialize. The present may be “determinate” in Jameson’s analysis, but its futures remain indeterminate. A very similar intuition is at work in the critical methods of Anthropocene studies and extinction studies, particularly insofar as the Anthropocene rewrites the planet itself as an archive: “The prospect of extinction broadens the relation between time and the archive,” I write in Writing Our Extinction:I argue that our extinction is one such untold story. Similar to Jameson’s “utopian vocation” of science fiction, which frames the present as the past of an indeterminate future, Anthropocene fiction frames extinction as a speculative story etched in the contours of our industrialized present. Offered as narrative, the speculative indeterminacy of extinction grants its readers the opportunity to apprehend the world from a future in which their existence has been foreclosed.Building on the Jamesonian tradition, recent critics have offered wonderful provocations for grasping the relationship between the present and the future in Anthropocene studies. Amitav Ghosh has controversially remarked that literary realism exhibits a perpetual inability to depict the long historical effects of either climate change or the Anthropocene as part of its narrative content. In an elegant re-reading of Ghosh, Thangam Ravindranathan argues that the Anthropocene and realism exist in an inverse relation to one another: that as global temperatures warm and sea levels rise, the realist novel tells a story “of the increasing safety and suitability—read the industrial, capitalist, ever more fuel-intensive securing, use, and development—of earth’s spaces for modern human life.”17 What was once cast as progress betrays the rot at its core. Relatedly, Kate Marshall suggests the ostensible realism of the literary Anthropocene is a metacommentary on fictional modes.18 As the comforts of the Holocene—an epoch defined by conditions that made liberal democracy possible—dissolve in a vortex of climate chaos, realism begins to look like fantasy. The Anthropocene names a world ravaged by the excesses of late capitalism, and whose existence derives from the same history that birthed the eighteenth-century realist novel. Rebecca Evans goes so far as to claim that the Anthropocene undoes the very taxonomies of realism and representation by recasting those taxonomies as fantasy—as a veil draped over the exhausted and exploited landscapes of extractive capitalism.19 This critical lineage of Anthropocene theory gives new support to Theodor Adorno’s remark that art “does not provide knowledge of reality by reflecting it photographically or ‘from a particular perspective’ but by revealing whatever is veiled by the empirical form assumed by reality [. . .].”20 In the Anthropocene, reality’s empirical form assumes the vector of progress, a momentum that finds partnership in the legacy of formal realism. As capitalism champions its ability to accumulate ever more wealth, it conceals the extractive fallout that plagues the planet; and as the virtual reality of extinction trends toward actuality, utopia becomes a salient framework for reading the extinctive imaginary being inscribed into the planet.In its complex relation to literary tradition, Anthropocene fiction exists on a spectrum that includes both conventionally realist styles and works of speculative science fiction and alternate history. My reading of Anthropocene fiction emphasizes what I see as a constitutive formal negotiation between the realist scale of human experience and that of planetary catastrophe, which is where the specter of extinction comes into play. To analyze this negotiation, I look to Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), a text not often considered in terms of utopian or speculative fiction. Underworld tells the story of Nick Shay, whose narrative begins in the 1990s and is told in reverse, making its way back to the 1950s, all the while exhuming the corrosive, exploitative, and often violent history of American triumphalism following World War II. At key points, the novel contextualizes this history in the deeper expanse of planetary time, such that moments of industrial modernity assume an inhuman and even catastrophist tone. For example, as Nick wanders through New York City during the 1965 Northeast Blackout, he passes idling cars, forced to a standstill by the no-longer-working traffic lights, describing the scene as the “dinosaur death of stalled traffic.”21 The language connects the fossil fuel emissions from cars with the of that have their way into through the of fossil the what is the most and extinction not the the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction a of that the of the he the in the to those by New those in and or in The of in this that “The always Nick the in the that it will us in the and then we begin to as I how the works only the image of the the of industrial modernity and the of extinction, but it the vertical of this The themselves or the surface, In an the of the not but it its through its becomes in time, in a planetary as the grid is to support its the boundary between and waste, even this into the of imagining what it for to assume the shape of an of as one A in the present, the in the of capitalism. This finds a in the of the on as by one of a of waste, a that both the of and the of fiction and in to have into a planetary the progress of modern into the of extinction into a deep time that both and human There in these and the novel a of what I extinction, the of extinction into an effect that its of and as if through a veil of extinction, a that the extinctive already in the with events such as the space the nuclear testing in the the of a fictional and other of catastrophe, DeLillo’s novel a history of capitalism in the American that the conditions of extinction into planetary In the Nick and a in that by it up with a nuclear This more waste, the of nuclear that both the planet and serves as a of planetary the of is and a In his book A a nuclear in are from the and an these the in its at to a complex space the temporality of extinction finds its spatial form as a vertical into the This is one particularly of vertical which an set of that and the earth after World War like Underworld this they their readers to with the temporality of our extinction somehow already inscribed the our case, in our Nick in an we comes back to The of vertical science into with the effects of such as we in and The both of which the complex relationship between the and the of nuclear In the of the of all the way out to the there is always the of by a novel the with a that to the planet to a The of this colonial is the of a inhuman planet. this the colonial of so by finds its in of Anthropocene as on with anxieties about planetary give way to critical of the Anthropocene from of who the temporality of extinction as not only something that present for but as a reality of and those subject to the of extractive capitalism. like and a long historical view in which environmental serves as the material for the of the vertical sciences after World War and from the systemic of colonial In his The and The for example, history in the as into the of the planet. by the of industrial capitalism as for discover in the earth a of and as a of in The and in The in the “the from the like and to the these the of between and the imagined colonial by which from are and into the of works of Anthropocene fiction by and we can the of as a virtual reality inscribed in the contours of industrial as a reality for the exploited and of the that fuel the of as the imagined of all life on and as the of a set of planetary conditions that themselves in the of extinction cultural the spectrum of Anthropocene fiction, which includes often in terms of a utopian element the temporal of In another from the Nick and his a of the a utopian on the nuclear they imagine the write they see possible to they in the American they on the but once they imagine in the it he can is not the power of utopian in an In to on the legacy of atomic the remark is by its such as can imagine will or can imagine is convey a hopeful unsettling if not It is as the world to its and up to and those that our of our has for a long time human history and only in the and As nuclear and mass extinction events to the as for how we to this and many of these traffic in of and human Yet it is also the such scenarios, and on extinction their way into works of Anthropocene fiction and other works of cultural to the specter of extinction the and of It is, in very utopian to about the end of the especially when the end in is not the spectacle of the or but rather a that the world we is not the world we thought it the of many Anthropocene fictions the contours of already inscribed in the industrial and colonial authorship of the a utopian from their of the present as the determinate past of an