Expanded Reality: Science Fiction in Environmental Humanities
Overview
The excerpt argues that science fiction (sf) has become a valuable resource for environmental humanities and related social sciences, not as a fixed genre with a strict definition, but as a flexible mode and repertoire of cognitive attitudes that can be mobilized across genres (from literature to scientific writing) to expand how reality is understood and studied.
Key premise: many scholars in environmental humanities justify using sf because standard scientific writing is constrained by codes, rules, and habits that may fail to capture the complexity and fragility of the Anthropocene. Sf offers a way to bridge gaps between reality and its textual accounts by expanding the range of subjects, futures, and nonhuman actors.
The authors emphasize that these analyses do not attempt to define sf or situate it within the traditional genre system; instead, they examine how sf is used, repurposed, and re-voiced in scientific and interdisciplinary writing to unlock new forms of meaning, truth, and inquiry. Sf is treated as a “mode” or form of organization of the imaginary that can be activated in other genres.
Ontological claim: sf helps reveal that scientific writing is a particular, standardized way of representing reality; reality itself often exceeds these formalized narratives. By bending or breaking those codes, researchers can broaden their vision of the world, especially under ecological crisis.
The central empirical rationale is framed around the Anthropocene: a reality in which natural realities once taken for granted are changing and degrading rapidly, requiring new epistemic tools and narrative capacities.
The authors move from a critique of genre-defining debates to a focus on uses of sf, i.e., what sf can do for science, ethics, and policy in environmental contexts.
Key Concepts and Terms
Science fiction as mode, not a fixed genre
Sf is used as a pragmatic, performative set of tools rather than a single, stable thread uniting all sf texts.
Rosmarin (and related scholarship) describe genre as process: pragmatic, defined, and used, rather than natural or merely described.
Sf anthropology/history/philosophy
The essays treat sf as a form of inquiry that mobilizes narrative, cognitive attitudes, and imaginative structures to do work in non-literary genres (e.g., scientific writing).
Sf as an “expressive capacity” and “mode of reality expansion”
Sf activates specific speaking positions, meanings, and truths when transposed into scientific discourse.
Three lines of sf-inspired expansion of reality (essential for addressing ecological emergency)
Line 1: Enlarge the time horizon by envisioning futures.
Line 2: Use a future-oriented perspective to distance from the present and better understand it.
Line 3: Envision resistance and plurality of possible worlds beyond the allegedly necessary or normal, thereby expanding the field of the possible.
Expanded sense of time, distance, and vision
Futures as tests for present decisions; “a device helping to fictively work through and test ‘society’s choices’” (Yannick Rumpala) and as a means of knowing the present by transforming it into the determinate past of a future event (Jameson).
The Anthropocene and “expanded reality”
The natural world is degraded at unprecedented rates; sf helps broaden which subjects count as legitimate objects of inquiry (future, nonhumans, etc.).
Pragmatic and political dimensions of sf
Sf is not escapism but a tool to enlarge political imagination, reveal alternative relations with other creatures, and imagine cooperative futures.
Isabelle Stengers on sf and political imagination
Sf “explores the questions and speculations that our era makes thinkable” by shifting the borders of what is possible/acceptable.
Sf crafts a narrative that experiments with the pragmatic consistency of a different world and avoids simply assimilating our world to a single, controlling frame.
Quotation emphasis: sf “positively proposed not to assimilate our world to ‘the world’” (Stengers 31).
Another possible world entails different relations with nonhuman beings, underscoring the need to hybridize histories of social struggle with ecologies of disaster (Stengers, Résister au désastre, 2019).
Donna Haraway and speculative gestures
Haraway’s involvement with Stengers in exploring speculative forms culminates in sf stories like The Camille Stories: Children of Compost, which are invoked to propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016, 136).
Sf and radical otherness
Sf provides narrative spaces in which nonhuman perspectives (animal, vegetable, mineral) and otherly intelligences can be foregrounded, prompting humans to question the boundaries of humanity and existing systems of knowledge.
This resonates with Animal Studies and multispecies anthropology, which seek to decenter humans and explore mutual dependencies across species.
Animal Studies, multispecies anthropology, and ethical representation
Sherryl Vint and multispecies anthropology (Kirksey and Helmreich) emphasize a shift away from human-centered world-making toward a decentered, interdependent web of life.
Multispecies ethnography raises twin representation challenges: ethical/political (speaking for or about the nonhuman) and literary/artistic (depicting the ‘other’ without silencing or misrepresenting them).
sf provides a repertoire of discursive strategies to conceive and represent radical otherness and to enable immersive engagement with other worlds (Jensen and Kemiksiz).
The broader methodological effect
Across the examples, sf is used to expand the scope of knowledge by integrating future possibilities and nonhuman actors into scientific inquiry, thereby challenging conventional scientific writing.
This expansion deconstructs the wall between concepts and stories, highlighting that concepts are always embedded in narratives and that narratives can shape scientific meaning in meaningful ways.
The Three Lines of Expanding Reality (Three Core Propositions)
Line 1: Enlarge our time horizon by visions from the future
sf can extrapolate current tendencies to visualize a variety of future scenarios useful for testing present-day decisions.
Yannick Rumpala describes sf as a device to fictively work through and test “society’s choices,” and, more ambitiously, to help with bearings or decision-making (Rumpala 20).
The future-tense perspective transforms the present into the determinate past of something yet to come (Jameson 288).
Line 2: A view from the future that distances us from contemporaneity to better understand the present
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway use a future historian character to reflect on strategies of denial and the difficulty of acting despite robust knowledge about climate change (The Collapse of Western Civilization, 2014).
Their approach applies a speculative exercise to analyze how Enlightenment inheritances hinder timely action in the face of global warming.
Line 3: Sf enables resistance and broadens the field of the possible
sf moves beyond escapism to expand possibilities, enabling resistance to “normal” or “necessary” arrangements under ecological crisis.
Isabelle Stengers emphasizes that sf makes thinkable alternative relations with other beings and helps imagine new modes of being in the world (résister au désastre; interview with Marin Schaffner, 2019).
Stengers describes sf as “the crafting of a narrative that experimented with the pragmatic consistency of a different world, and positively proposed not to assimilate our world to ‘the world’” (Stengers 31).
The ecological urgency amplifies the need for sf to restock political imagination and to reinvigorate speculative dimensions in social sciences and humanities (Stengers, 72).
The Ecological Rationale for sf in Environmental Humanities
Discrepancy between reality and scientific accounts
Scientific texts are designed to be rigorous and standardized, yet reality often exceeds these formalized representations.
Sf offers a means to bridge the gap by introducing expanded subjects (future, nonhumans) and alternative modes of inquiry.
Enlarging the range of subjects and subjects’ possibilities
Sf enables researchers to broaden what counts as legitimate objects of study beyond the present human-centric frame.
This expansion challenges conventional conventions of scientific writing and supports a new intersection between reality and fiction.
Breaking the wall between concepts and stories
As argued by Tsing (Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015), sf insights contribute to the “imbrication” of concepts and stories, helping produce meaning for the more-than-merely-human world (Mushroom 159).
The Anthropologist as Science Fiction Writer: Anna Tsing and the Auto-bios-graphy of a Fungal Spore
The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) centers on matsutake mushrooms
Matsutake thrive in forests damaged by human activity; they become a focal point for networked relations across disciplines, geographies, and species.
The matsutake interacts with pines, humans, and other organisms, creating a network where each partner contributes to a shared world-making project: “pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible” (Tsing, Mushroom 152).
Tsing’s methodological move: include nonhumans as legitimate objects of academic inquiry
Pursue new protocols, conceptual frameworks, and writing styles to address the disorientation produced by a misfit between empirical findings and available analytic tools.
The article “Strathern Beyond the Human” (dialogic piece) foregrounds this challenge by presenting a fungal voice in auto-bio-graphy form, with Tsing responding as the human co-author.
Key idea: the nonhuman as co-actor in ethnography
This approach seeks to destabilize anthropocentrism and showcase how human and nonhuman agents co-create worlds.
The role of auto-bio-graphy as method
The fungal “autobiography” is a narrative strategy to legitimate a nonhuman perspective within ethnographic writing, challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Interdisciplinary reach
The analysis traverses mycology, political economy, silviculture, and global labor histories, illustrating how sf-inflected methods can illuminate complex, transgenic networks of value, labor, and ecology.
Multispecies Ethnography, Animal Studies, and SF
Multispecies anthropology as a recent disciplinary development
Emphasizes decentering humanity in world-making and examining mutual dependencies among species.
Seeks to address ethical, political, and representational challenges of writing about nonhuman others without silencing them.
Sf as a tool for representing radical otherness
SF offers a repertoire of discursive strategies for imagining nonhuman perspectives and world-making practices.
Immersive engagement with other worlds is made possible by speculative fiction (Jensen and Kemiksiz, iv).
The broader project
By incorporating future-oriented thinking and nonhumans into knowledge production, sf helps reimagine scientific writing and knowledge systems as more plural and relational.
Sf, Human Sciences, and the Deconstruction of Boundaries Between Reality and Fiction
Across the discussed cases, the human sciences borrow from sf to expand their epistemic reach
They move beyond the present moment, expand to nonhuman actors, and incorporate future possibilities into knowledge-making.
This practice problematizes conventional scientific writing and fosters a dialogue between empiricism and narrative speculation.
The “wall between concepts and stories” is dissolved to reveal how narrative forms shape scientific understanding (Tsing, Mushroom 159)
The overarching aim is to give meaning to the world as more-than-human and to recognize the entangled fates of humans, nonhumans, and environments.
Case Study in Depth: The Mushroom at the End of the World and the Autofiction of a Fungal Spore
Matsutake as a case study of relational world-making
Matsutake mushrooms exemplify how nonhuman actors participate in global networks of labor, ecology, and consumption.
The book tracks matsutake across places (Japan, the United States, Finland) and across actors (immigrant laborers, veterans, harvesters) to reveal a web of interdependencies.
Ethical and epistemic implications
Recognizing nonhuman agency requires reframing what counts as knowledge and what forms of writing are legitimate for capturing such knowledge.
The nonhuman subject (the mushroom) forces researchers to consider new tools, languages, and ethical commitments for representation.
The endnote on “In Conversation” and methodological disorientation
Tsing notes a lack of fit between field observations and existing analytic tools, motivating a methodological shift toward sf-informed approaches.
Strathern Beyond the Human as a companion piece
The article is framed as a dialogic exchange: a fungal voice presents an auto-bio-graphy, and Tsing counters with human analytic commentary, illustrating the potential and tensions of multispecies representation.
Implications for Practice, Ethics, and Future Research
Redefining what counts as knowledge in the environmental humanities
By incorporating sf techniques, researchers can produce more flexible, imaginative, and potentially more effective understandings of ecological crises.
Ethical representation of nonhumans and otherness
The multispecies approach demands careful attention to how nonhuman others are depicted and named, avoiding silencing or instrumentalization.
Interdisciplinary collaboration
The use of sf helps bridge disciplines (anthropology, ecology, philosophy, literary studies) by providing shared narrative tools and conceptual openings.
Educational and methodological recommendations
Foster training in sf-informed writing and thinking as a component of environmental humanities pedagogy.
Encourage the development of hybrid genres (dialogues, auto-bio-graphs, imagined futures) to rehearse and critique possible futures.
Notes on Key References and Quotations (Selected)
Rumpala, Yannick: sf as a device for testing “society’s choices” and for getting bearings (Rumpala 20).
Jameson: sf as transforming the present into the determinate past of what is yet to come (Jameson 288).
Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway: The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014) – use of a “view from the future” in historical analysis of climate inaction.
Isabelle Stengers: sf as a mechanism to shift borders of the possible and the impossible; sf as “crafting of a narrative that experimented with the pragmatic consistency of a different world” (Stengers 31); “the worlds of science fiction diverge from the world that wants to make us believe it is the only possible one” (Stengers 73); Réf. Résister au désastre (2019) interview with Marin Schaffner (Stengers) on alternative relations with other creatures (p. 19; our translation).
Donna Haraway: The Camille Stories in Staying with the Trouble (2016) – sf as invitation to participate in near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows (Haraway, 136).
Sherryl Vint: sf and Animal Studies; multispecies approaches.
Kirksey & Helmreich: Multispecies Anthropology (definition: a genre of writing and mode of research; decentering humans in world-making; 545).
Anna Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) – matsutake mushroom as a central nonhuman protagonist; “pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible” (Mushroom 152).
Tsing, In Conversation: discussion of the lack of fit between field observations and analytic tools (12).
“Strathern Beyond the Human”: Tsing’s collaboration in a dialogic form with a fungal auto-bio-graphy.
Key Figures and Works (for quick reference)
Yannick Rumpala, political science approaches to sf (future ethics)
Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014)
Isabelle Stengers and Marin Schaffner, Résister au désastre (2019)
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016) and gestis spéculatifs (with Stengers)
Sherryl Vint, Animal Studies and sf
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)
Jane Strathern, Strathern Beyond the Human (dialogic sf-in-ethnography piece)
Kirksey & Helmreich, Multispecies Anthropology (theory and methodology)
Quick Cross-References to Concepts (formatted for quick study)
sf as mode vs sf as genre: sf is used as an organizational form of the imaginary, enabling new cognitive attitudes and narrations across disciplines.
reality vs. textual accounts: sf helps address discrepancies between what reality is and how it is described in scientific texts.
future-oriented epistemology: view-from-the-future exercises to understand present-day actions and their consequences.
nonhuman agency: matsutake mushrooms (and other species) act as participants in world-making and knowledge production; multispecies approaches require new representational practices.
ethical representation: how to write about nonhumans without silencing them; how to convey ecological interdependencies responsibly.
deconstruction of the wall between concepts and stories: concepts are always embedded in narrative, and stories can illuminate scientific understanding.
(Science Fiction Studies, Volume 50, 2023)
(publication year)
(pages in the cited section)
(tricentennial framing in The Collapse of Western Civilization)
(Camille 5 year in Haraway’s Camille Stories)
(Camille 1 year in the Camille sequence)
(The Mushroom at the End of the World)
(Staying with the Trouble; Camille Stories publication context)
(Résister au désastre interview publication date)
(Jameson’s page reference for “the determinate past of something yet to come”)
(Stengers and related page numbers within Stengers and Schaffner, and Tsing Mushroom citations)
(Mushroom 159 – the deconstruction of the wall between concepts and stories)
(Rumpala, a device for testing society’s choices)
(Tsing, In Conversation, note on lack of fit)