Now that we are firmly in the anthropocene and starting to feel the effects of climate catastrophe, speculative fiction can do even more to challenge us and give us hope. Here, I will look at how speculative fiction can be thought of as a social technology itself and place it within the context of Pacey’s tripartite approach to understanding technology-practice, examining how authors like Frank Herbert, Octavia E. Butler, and Becky Chambers critique technological narratives of progress and efficiency.
When selecting texts to examine for this project, I settled on looking at these three series because they share a few things in common: world-building is a primary concern; they span multiple book; and their narratives take place within our universe, even if it’s a (sometimes far-flung) future iteration of our universe.