By Gabriel Piser
McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, 2015. 304 pp.
The contentious concept of the Anthropocene asks us to examine the role of human activity in transforming the earth. Beyond recognizing and understanding these transformations, however, the Anthropocene demands intervention on the level of everyday human practices.
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By Brent Bellamy
Evan Calder Williams. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Zero Books, 2011. 264pp.
Evan Calder Williams’ Combined and Uneven Apocalypse tracks apocalyptic visions of the future back to their occluded origins, which for Williams is to say, back to the present moment. In different contexts, Teresa Heffernan and Slavoj Žižek have similarly asked: what if the apocalypse has already taken place, and we missed it?
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By Gerry Canavan
Mark Bould and China Miéville, eds. Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2009.
In 1972, Darko Suvin published “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”, where he announced science fiction’s importance as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (372). “SF,” Suvin writes, “is then a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment” (375).
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