Reimagining climate futures: Reading Annihilation

In this paper we explore how reading speculative fiction (SF) can be understood as a generative way to participate in wider reckoning with the idea, and increasingly experience, of climate crisis. Focusing on Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation an example New Weird fiction, examine uncanny atmospheres brought life by text, affective responses some its readers, create new ways imagining futures. SF critics other cultural commentators have focused what novels, authors genres do reconfigure narratives climate-changed world, their impact or effect imaginations readers. But they rarely empirically nonprofessional readers are engaging fiction. Our contribution assessments power fictional imagination age Anthropocene focuses detailed qualitative make texts rather than said We centre social experiences sense-making, foreground collectively discuss pleasures that dwells these themes affects. Drawing Verlie’s (2021) work adaptation, suggest medium constitute rich understand live