On the Uses of Science Fiction in Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences: Meaning and Reading Effects

ABSTRACT:Traditionally neglected if not despised by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, science fiction is changing status, being invested with new qualities and functions and, above all, a real epistemic value by leading scholars in the field of environmental humanities. Some of them not only turn to sf as a conceptual resource but go so far as to write counterfactual texts, told in the future or from impossible points of view, deploying sf narrative strategies to breathe new life into their academic writing. This paper considers what qualities these researchers explicitly attribute to sf, focusing on an emblematic case study—an article of speculative anthropology by Anna Tsing—to show how concretely these unconventional writing experiments can weave science and fiction into their textual fabric. Finally, we address the reading effects that these hybrid texts may stimulate by positioning Tsing's article in the field of contemporary sf, through the joint analysis of two fictions by Ted Chiang and Sylvie Lainé, which similarly ask how to account for a form of existence radically different from ours, relying on surprising comparisons between different sciences, living species, and instruments of knowledge. Our research approach contributes to grasping the current reconfiguration of knowledge and writing practices, allows us to formulate some hypotheses about today's use and relevance of sf in the field of environmental humanities, and finally points to new and unexpected areas of application for comparative literature in a time of ecological collapse.