Abstract

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818 to the current novels of so-called ‘climate fiction’ such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, via Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s classics Brave New World and 1984, science fiction dystopias are in essence critical works of the Anthropocene. This early criticism can be seen as an expression of our collective unconscious. But since the 1960s many such works have been consciously critical, functioning as indispensable environmental alerts.