Novel Ecologies

"Allison Carruth's Novel Ecologies traces the convergence of ecology and engineering through three decades of literature, art, and popular writing. It pinpoints a new environmental imagination that Carruth calls Nature Remade, a distinctly West Coast framework drawing on fields from architecture and civil engineering to molecular biology and geoscience. At once futuristic and backward looking, Nature Remade at its worst is a quasi-religious conviction that only a redoubled capitalism can save us from ecological collapse. Carruth's account of this new, high-tech environmental disposition ranges across synthetic biology, de-extinction, and the Mars race to the feverish imaginations of players within Google, OpenAI, and many less well-known labs. Alongside these, Carruth discusses world-making powers of some remarkable recent fictions, most notably the multispecies multiverse of Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being; the radical, post-tech future of Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot novellas; and Jeff VanderMeer's dystopian Borne series. Other storytellers figuring in Carruth's book are Saya Woolfalk, Jennifer Egan, Richard Powers, Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro), Natalie Jeremijenko, T. C. Boyle, Tracy K. Smith, and Octavia Butler"--