Ursula K. Heise

Reduced Ecologies: Science fiction and the meanings of biological scarcity

Science fiction novels from the 1970s to the present have set their plots on planets with limited or no biodiversity so as to explore to what extent environmental conditions shape human cultures and codes of ethics, and to what extent humans themselves shape these conditions. Presenting scenarios of biological scarcity, they recast central questions of environmental ethics in the context of a largely synthetic nature. At their most complex, they portray more-than-human democracies in which nonhumans are humans’ interlocutors rather than merely their resources.

Journeys through the Offset World: Global Travel Narratives and Environmental Crisis

����� ��� In his classic Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson explores the challenge that globalization poses for individuals’ sense of situatedness through contemporary architecture. In a chapter entitled “Spatial Equivalents in the World System,” he focuses on the Frank Gehry House in Santa Monica, a building that consists of a new architectural envelope superimposed on an older structure so as to create spaces not adequately defined as either “inside” or “outside” in the conventional sense. These unsettling transitional spaces, Jameson argues, provide a metaphor for a broader shift in spatial experience as global networks of commerce, media, politics and culture make it increasingly difficult for individuals and communities fully to inhabit a single place. [I]n that simpler phenomenological or regional sense, place in the United States today no longer exists, or, more precisely, it exists at a much feebler level, surcharged by all kinds of other more powerful but also more abstract spaces. By these last I mean not only Los Angeles itself, as some new hyperurban configuration, but also the increasingly