Ecocriticism, Genre, and Climate Change: Reading the Utopian Vision of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy

This paper calls for a rapprochement between ecocriticism and what it often disregards as theory. Specifically, it argues for the relevance of genre theory, which explores the dynamic relations of author, reader, text, and the worlds they inhabit. Texts are locatable within the environment of a given genre; further, generic environments reciprocally shape, structure, and determine our sense of the wider environment. This paper offers a generically inflected reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy, in which the representation of climate change is understood as a complex set of negotiations within the generic space of utopian science fiction. © 2010 Taylor & Francis