Ecofiction Collection

Contents: About the Collection | Tech

About the Collection

In environment-oriented works of fiction, namely ecofiction, environmental subjects are typically represented by nonhuman entities, including but not limited to plants and animals. In other words, scientific terms referring to environmental issues, such as climate change, global warming, deforestation, ozone depletion, and air and water pollution, are more likely to appear in environmental nonfiction books, rather than environmental novels. Instead, nonhuman agents in eco-fiction play a key role in revealing major and minor aspects of the current ecological crisis through their reflections of reality. Even if these nonhuman animals may not directly engage in the narrative, they represent marginalized realities of climate change, such as animal migration, in a fictional setting. In this regard, ecofiction provides nonhuman others with actor agency in uncanny ways that lead us to consider what the nonhuman can tell us about hidden aspects of the environmental crisis of our age.

This collection was based on the book by Jim Dwyer (2010), Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction, which is known as one of the most prominent works that established a theoretical and conceptual framework of ecofiction through a bibliographic study of contemporary science fiction and environmental literature.