Chapter 8: Scale and Speculative Futures in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312

Abstract

Any fictional text can be regarded as speculative—in the sense that all fiction invents alternative realities and thus engages with questions of how we understand our present worlds and ourselves, our knowledge of the past, and our con-ceptualizations of the future. As readers we enjoy the “cognitive provisionality” fictional texts provide us with, the opportunity to suspend disbelief, engage in “imaginative play” (Gallagher 2006: 347), and speculate about the (im)probable, the (im)possible, the (un)desirable of proposed realities. Some genres, however, have lent themselves particularly well to speculation about possible futures. Whether labeled “utopia,” fiction,” “speculative fiction,” or alyptic fiction,” future-oriented fictional texts all engage in the imagination of possible future worlds, thereby responding to the political, social, economic, or cultural challenges of the times in which they are written. In some way or another, these genres all share the qualities that Fitting (2010) regards as characteristic for modern science fiction. They represent “a response to the effects of the scientific transformation of the world beginning around the end of the eighteenth century: in the European awareness of history and the future, and in the increasing impact of the scientific method and of technological change on people’s lives” 1 This essay two novels that create speculative future worlds as re sponses to the economic, scientific, and technological challenges that marked the times of their writing: Robinson’s 2312 . Each of these novels very differently to terrors and delights of technological modernity” science fiction By explaining processes and out comes of re-scaling, we shed light on the local, temporal, and social settings from which the novels’ respective plots unfold. We compare scale-related strategies in the two novels, including failed attempts at scale-jumping in Riddley Walker and key instances of successful scale-jumping in 2312 . Our analysis focuses on the desperate and misguided mimetic attempts in Riddley Walker to regain access to atomic and molecular knowledge that promises to reopen access to distant parts of the planet, and on the plan to save Earth in 2312 by making use of the opportunities of an expanded scale system.