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In a time of Global Pandemic, massive social justice demonstrations, and concerning political shifts, reality feels inaccessible and at times even unreal. With quarantine and social distance as the new norm, our human connections are abstract and digitized. My thesis will be a collection of short fiction that seeks to employ methods of the speculative genre and alternative narrative structure to explore our shifting understanding of humanity and connectedness. The introduction to this collection will lay out the process through which speculative realities better define our own.

1900s-Carlsbad Caverns-Southwest- Fiction 2.Korean War, 1950’s-General Enlisted-Fiction 3. Skin disease-Insanity- Science Fiction.

This dissertation offers a reappraisal of twentieth-century dystopian fiction in the roughly thirty years after World War II by identifying the environmental dimensions of many of the most genre-defining authors and novels of this period. Given the escalating climate emergency and the growing popularity of climate fiction (“cli-fi”), it would be difficult to imagine critical conversations about twenty-first-century dystopian fiction that overlook environmental anxieties in the genre. Yet, in scholarly discussions of postwar dystopian fiction, there is a limiting sense that environmental “themes” emerge only periodically, or are of secondary importance to the genre’s more typically “Orwellian” themes like totalitarianism, propaganda, the Cold War, automation, censorship, and conformism. In contrast, my dissertation shows how dystopian fiction from this period develops in conversation with emerging conceptions of environmental degradation in the anti-nuclear, anti-population growth, and modern environmental movements. By developing a history of dystopian fiction’s mutual imbrication with growing anxieties about ecological degradation, my dissertation shows that texts in the genre have grappled for decades with socioecological questions that still perplex us today: can nuclear energy power a safe and abundant future? Should there be hard limits to humankind’s population? How should humans interact with/in non-human nature? If there are ecological limits to economic growth, is humankind (a problematically capacious term) approaching ecological limits? If so, are we (another problematically capacious term) courting disaster? Over three chapters, I trace the co-emergence of dystopianism and environmentalism in the roughly three decades after World War II as major Western cultural heuristics for thinking about the future. In this historical context, my dissertation puts dystopian novels like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) in conversation with trailblazing environmental texts like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). As I will show, dystopian fiction produced during this period was influenced by and participated in debates about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, overconsumption and overpopulation, and the degradation and disappearance of non-human nature. At the same time, the anti-nuclear, anti-population growth, and modern environmental movements borrowed rhetorical strategies from dystopian fiction to warn about the (in)habitability of the future. In developing these arguments, I draw heavily from primary sources and historical accounts of these movements, utopian and dystopian studies criticism, Marxist ecology and Critical Theory, and a growing collection of scholarship in the Environmental and Energy Humanities that emphasizes the centrality of energy to modern societies. This history will contribute to a better interdisciplinary understanding of how modern environmental thinking is influenced by dystopianism, and how dystopian fiction warns readers about what John Brunner calls environmental “survivability” in an age when the spectre of climate breakdown looms large in the public’s imagination.

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<p>This creative thesis includes the first six chapters of <em>Aud of the Dead</em>, a novel that combines the genres of speculative science fiction, supernatural fiction, and dystopian fiction. The purpose of the novel is to provide an entertaining example of the soft science fiction genre where the plot exists for the characters, not the other way around.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The novel’s main protagonist is Aud, who was born on Earth in the year 2000. In the year 2024, Earth was invaded and subjugated by aliens called the Impixi. Years later, amid a successful Human rebellion, the actions of another alien species, the Architechs, left Earth in an apocalyptic shroud of toxic dust, vapor, and ash that would ultimately wipe out all life on the planet. But not every Human that died stayed dead. Millions of them became what would later be classified as a new sentient species, named “Anima” by the multigalactic scientific community. The former Humans, however, don’t believe they are a new species; they believe they are the ghosts, or “spectres,” of their living selves, and on their dead homeworld now called Quietus, they are essentially present-day Humans stripped down to the relentless pathos of the living dead. </p> <p><br></p> <p>The novel begins one hundred years after Earth’s apocalypse when the All Worlds War has come to an end. Aud is returning home from playing her part in the war when she suddenly finds herself responsible for an “Unquiet” called Ometa, a new Anima that was not born Human and did not die one century ago on Quietus. Ometa was an Architech in life, and now Aud must keep that epic secret while teaching Ometa how to navigate existence as an Anima. At the same time, Ometa teaches Aud how to overcome the limitations of living as the dead. </p>

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

<p> Emerging out of feminist and cyberpunk science fiction of the 1980s, feminist post-cyberpunk SF is a subgenre that is rife with anxieties over novel technologies (such as cloning, genetically modified foods, nanotechnology, virtual reality, telepresence, and artificial intelligence), as they infiltrate daily life and threaten to transform the definition of human being. In this project, Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl, Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, Tricia Sullivan's Maul, and Laura Mixon's Proxies are read as indicative examples of feminist post-cyberpunk, as they all give voice to the increasing shared cultural preoccupation with technology and the body. The thesis is particularly interested in the way these texts expose - and insist upon - the vulnerability of the fleshy body, rather than perpetuate notions of technophilia and technological transcendence. Drawing on the (corporeal) feminist theory of Elizabeth Grosz and Margrit Shildrick (in particular her theorization of the vulnerable body), and on the feminist posthumanist work of N. Katherine Hayles and Elaine Graham, this thesis focuses attention on issues of technological embodiment and the changing definition of what constitutes human corporeal experience and embodiment. Ultimately, the thesis proposes that feminist post-cyberpunk condemns the exploitation and control of, what Shildrick terms, the "visibly vulnerable" body and insists on recognizing the vulnerability of the flesh as a defining trait of what constitutes human being.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)