Transitions: Energy Futures and Multispecies Relations
摘要
This chapter contends with the subject of energy transition and multispecies ethics, a movement away from the extractive paradigm the previous chapters explored and their violent consequences on nonhuman life. I now look towards hopeful horizons of a world without oil. I turn specifically to the genre of science fiction as holding potential capacity for envisioning a life after oil and new and alternative multispecies ethics. Opening with an exploration of the possibilities of science fiction’s ability to practise a world-building rooted in a just and decolonial politics to a post oil and ethical future. I first analyse Liu Cixin’s ‘Moonlight’ from Ken Liu’s Broken Stars collection in which energy transition fails in the face of green capitalist solutions and a techno-utopian imaginary. In contrast, the following two science fiction narratives I then explore, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, look to a vulnerable mode of undoing human mastery which captures an invitation for renewed energy ethics attentive to nonhuman life, a non-anthropocentric mode of relating to energy. In The Dispossessed, I look to the inherent ecological aspects of the novel, which are engendered through an attention to shared suffering. With Solaris, I examine how the space scientists attempt to master this nonhuman agential planet fails, and new more mutualistic relation and a sense of vulnerable co-existence emerges. These science fiction texts immerses us in worlds with the alien and the unfamiliar, where we encounter animal-like creatures who are untamed and unmastered; the texts demonstrate an alternative from an extractive view and paradigm, a multispecies ethics which can inform a just energy transition away from the world of oil.