The “bare germs of things to come”: H. G. Wells’s Utopias, Ecological Risk, and the Anthropocene

Abstract

Recent fiction that portrays future climate-changed worlds might be seen as the foremost cultural expression of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls the “speculative age.” For Beck, such an age began as “risk society” emerged with recognition of the unprecedented dangers that modernity brought about as well as its benefits; this reflexive phase of modernity is characterized by a transition of concern from the production and distribution of wealth, to the production and distribution of risks.1 Certainly, much recent speculative fiction bears a striking resemblance to the future scenarios that are widely used to articulate environmental risks, such as the climate change scenarios that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has employed in its reports since 1990. For example, the special report Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018) develops four model pathways (see figs. 1 and 2), which use storylines backed up by quantitative models to represent how global warming could be limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the year 2100.2 Supporting Beck’s theory of the turn to a risk society, such projections play an increasingly important role in assessing environmental risks and generating policy for action.