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In the words of Disney, “the happiest cruise that ever sailed” was borne of a small world. The Disney ride ships visitors by countless cultural caricatures to create the illusion of a happy world. In reading Pacific Edge, this image of adjacent idyllic worlds came to mind. The culture of Orange County…

During this week’s discussions, the importance of absence really stood out to me. Although most of my previous literature classes have spent hours analyzing every detail in a book (i.e. “the curtains are blue because the protagonist was depressed”), I’ve never been asked to look at the importance of things…

(image: Mad Max – drinking water) Fiction can positively or negatively shape our narratives of the design of nature’s future because fiction is able to make abstract, convoluted visions of the future into something, usually a story, that everyone can understand. Imagining a future earth that is radically different from…

In the academic world, we are often taught to sift fact from fiction as a means of making decisions. I remember learning how to detect bias in the news as a sixth grade student. My teacher described the act as a civil responsibility. However, civilians must also consider the bias…

It’s not hard to see why people can be critical of fiction’s role in society. We spend a huge amount of time lost in stories, with the average American spending four hours per day watching television alone according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. Thus it is easy to see why critics…

In objecting Plato’s disapproving the value of fiction (poetry at the time), Aristotle argues that reading fiction develops and exercises our understanding of the world as fiction explores the possibility of a particular situation. In environmental science fiction, various possibilities of future are explored with imagination and speculation. Compared with,…

Fictional media definitely influences the way that we envision the future, and whether we see mostly negative or positive depictions shape our ideas on how we think future society might look. Novels and movies are important vessels in influencing human visioning because novels engage the imagination and lead us to…

Fiction (or simply a space to dream crazy worlds) is critical in the development of disruptive change – it allows the development of revolutionary processes rather than the evolutionary processes that currently dominate environmental science. While some fiction allows us to imagine worlds where dragons spit fire, dead people walk…

I think fiction has the power to shape our narratives around the design of nature’s future, whether in a positive or negative way. When we read a piece of fiction, we enter a new and fresh world constructed by the author. We are asked to leave behind our biases, our…

More than 70 percent of people in the world are visual learners, yet the overwhelming majority of studies and news on climate change comes in text form. Scientists and activists can use fictitious representations of the Earth in order to simulate the future and to help increase awareness of the…