Explores how feminist science-fiction writers engage with ecological and environmental speculation and memory-work. Science Fiction Ecologies traces how Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Judith Merril—three generations of groundbreaking feminist science fiction writers—used ecological imagination and rigorous memory-work to rethink environments, histories, and possible futures. Shelley Streeby mines their expansive personal archives of letters, journals, notebooks, annotated clippings, and other everyday materials to show how each writer documented environmental news, social movements, colonial and imperial legacies, and the accelerating militarism of the late twentieth century. This archival labor, Streeby argues, was not ancillary but central to their worldmaking: a form of “histofuturist” practice that linked creative speculation to the preservation and reimagining of knowledge.
Against a backdrop of shrinking public library budgets, intensifying weapons development, and the rise of privatization politics, Butler, Le Guin, and Merril fought for the survival of libraries and the democratic circulation of ideas. Their activism, along with their contributions to popular science-fiction culture and their public interventions, reveals how they imagined libraries, archives, and other knowledge spaces as living ecologies shaped by power, identity, and access.
Through speculative documentary methods, Science Fiction Ecologies illuminates the counter-histories embedded in their papers, tracing how their visions challenged ecologies dominated by state power, white Christian nationalism, violent masculinities, and entrenched class and race inequalities. Streeby ultimately shows how these writers’ intertwined lives and works open new ways of thinking about environments, human survival, and the futures we might yet build.
Shelley Streeby is Professor in the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism.
"The product of years of dedicated, meticulous archival research, Science Fiction Ecologies showcases the labor and legacy of three great women science fiction writers whose worldmaking practice went far beyond their published fiction. Through a careful, generous, and insightful engagement with the expansive archives they left behind, Shelley Streeby shows us how each of these writers speculated and enacted worlds that refused the colonizing white masculinities perpetuated in dominant narratives of science fiction’s genre history. She characterizes each of the three writers through a term from Octavia Butler’s archive “histofuturist,” meaning a practitioner of speculative archive-creation that gathers and preserves materials in the hope that understanding the past will make it possible to change the future. Herself a histofuturist, Streeby weaves together Butler, Le Guin, and Merril’s memory work to model prospects and possibilities for otherwise worlds." -Alexis Lothian, author of Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility
"Science Fiction Ecologies: Worldmaking with Butler, LeGuin, and Merril is an incredible work that bridges the process of research and its content, the dreaming of alternative ecofriendly lifestyles by some of your favorite feminist sci-fi writers into a work that we will keep coming back to for years to come." -Moya Bailey, author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance
