I was interviewed by Swedish national radio as part of the standing series Vetenskapsradion (The Science Radio). The interview was aired on May 5 and you can listen to it here (in Swedish). The discussion revolved around how fiction can communicate the transformation of diets and food systems, and what stakeholders and scientists from other disciplines can …
In the early 2020s, the audio-book streaming service Storytel commissioned a new set of Sherlock Holmes stories from crime and thriller writer Anthony Horowitz (co-written with Sarah J. Naughton). Horowitz had already written two acclaimed novels set in Conan Doyle’s Victorian universe, but in penning the new series for Storytel, he moved the characters into …
Neo-Victorian Food Futures – A Case for Sherlock Holmes Read More »
I have not blogged in a while. It has been difficult to understand the priorities of my project when the new government of the most powerful nation in the world is actively dismantling climate research and climate advocacy, along with social science research and scholarship that study crucial phenomena such as diversity, equity and inclusion. The …
The Trump Administration, Sanity Collapse and Academic Activism Read More »
I participated in the inaugural conference of the new Fear Network at Warwick University. This is a truly interdisciplinary network that tries to understand fear from a number of different disciplinary perspectives: cultural, psychological, anthropological, judicial etc. The theme of the conference “Fear Studies in an Age of Fear” opened up the conversation to both social-ecological breakdown …
Naomi Alderman is best known as the author of The Power in 2016, a novel that tells the story of how women acquire the ability to produce electric shocks through their hands, thus putting an end to men’s monopoly on violence. Alderman’s most recent novel The Future (2023) is an entertaining blend of techno-thriller, solar/hopepunk and climate fiction that also considers …
The Technosphere, the Information Crisis and Food in Naomi Alderman’s The Future Read More »
A noted problem with much climate crisis discourse is that it tends to assume that the experience of ecological breakdown is shared equally across space and time. In the words of climate fiction scholar Matthew Schneider-Mayerson: “the advent of the Anthropocene concept has emphasized climate change as a slow-motion catastrophe facing an undifferentiated humanity.” However, …
All City by Alex DiFrancesco: Climate (Food) Inequalities Read More »
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize Award ceremony has always been followed by a very lavish banquet at the Stockholm City Hall, advertised as the “feast of feasts”. In attendance are the Nobel laureates, the Swedish royal house, the leaders of most major political parties, and other dignitaries connected to the scientific community in different ways, …
Like Tochi Onyebuchi, author of Riot Baby, Nnedi Okorafor was born in the US to Nigerian immigrants. Her writing thus explores socio-ecological breakdown both from the American and the African vantage. This double perspective is central to her novel The Book of Phoenix (2015) and aids in the book’s exploration of how the progress of global warming is connected to …
A Strange and Soulless Land: Food Futures in Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix Read More »
On September 20, I was part of a workshop called “Food as the Building Block of Society.” This workshop made up a small segment of the annual food fair MAT (mat=food in Swedish) and the audience consisted of stakeholders in the area: politicians, people working with food in schools, hospitals and elderly homes, small-time farmers and food …
This project is funded by FORMAS, a Swedish research council for sustainability. As such, it should be free from political bias and stay away from conventional party politics. This noted, it must also be observed that climate change research has been politicised and that different (party) political programs actively support or interfere with the effort …
The 2024 US Election: Politics and the Dark Food Futures of Donald Trump Read More »
The Swedish Research Council issued a call for Centres of Excellence last year, and Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) was awarded one of a total of 15 grants. With the help of this funding, KTH has been able to establish the interdisciplinary Centre for Anthropocene History. While the concept of the Anthropocene …
I am one of 4 speakers at the event The Environmental Humanities in Anglophone Literature and Media that takes place at Copenhagen University on 26 November, 2024. My talk will be on the topic “Tales of Violence and Extraction: Defining the American Climate Emergency Narrative”. This draws from the Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction …
Upcoming Event: The Environmental Humanities in Anglophone Literature and Media Read More »
As described in this blog post, research into future ways of eating often considers three different diets: the Optimized Omnivore (essentially the EAT-Lancet diet) diet, the Novel and Future Food (new types of food including cell-cultured meat, insect protein, solar food) diet, and the Vegan diet. A lot of food science research is currently devoted to understanding the nutritional composition of these …
The Blood of Angels: Writing (the Resistance to) Vegan Food Futures Read More »
Climate Fiction that explores food futures can be categorized in a number of ways. One useful way of approaching these texts is to consider the type of future food that they imagine people will consume in futures transformed by socio-ecological breakdown (climate change). Using categories that are already important to (future) food science allows for …
Categorizing Future Food Fiction: From the Optimized Omnivore to New and Future Food Read More »
The Healer is a climate fiction crime thriller by Finnish author Antti Tuomainen. The novel was first published in 2010 as Parantaja and translated into English in 2014 (as well as into a number of other languages). As a relatively early Nordic cli-fi novel, it has amassed a certain critical heritage. It is often seen as a trailblazer …
Nordic Climate Fiction and Extractive Food Industries in The Healer Read More »
In a manner similar to Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars investigates the future through an exploration of the American prison system. Also like Onyebuchi, Brenyah’s focus is on the experience of black people within this system. This future this novel tells is as dystopian as any, but it is also very …
Starting in the late 1960s, science fiction authors began to explore futures very different from those imagined by dominant science fiction franchises such as Flash Gordon, Star Wars and Star Trek. One of these new trends was named Cyberpunk and drew from the emergence of new digital paradigms afforded by the computer and early forms …
Cyperpunk, Steampunk and Solarpunk: Food and Sci-Fi Subgenres Read More »
The journal Science recently published a large study that reported on the relationship between biodiversity and infant mortality. The study looked at how the white-nose syndrome (a fungal disease that has eradicated large populations of bats in various regions in North America and other places). When these bat populations were reduced due to this disease they could not, for …
Agriculture, biodiversity and Indigenous science Read More »
There is a great wealth of research that conclusively shows that the consumption of meat produces significant amounts of greenhouse gases (CO2, but also methane and other gases). As the EAT Lancet report makes clear, it is necessary to transition to a plant-based diet. In particular, nations in what is often called the Global North need to …
Meat, the food-industrial complex and fiction: “Meat Narratives” special issue Read More »
If you are interested in the theoretical approach of the project, here is a (long) blog post that begins to explain the basic premise. The name of this project is “Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction”. Unfortunately, the time allocated to the project, and the language skills of the PI, do not allow for a comprehensive …
Reading Global Climate Fiction: The World-Literature Perspective Read More »
Alien: Romulus premiered worldwide on August 16 and has since done very well at the box office. This film is not exactly climate fiction, but it does take place on a (colony) world exhausted by extractive capitalism, and it features a host of young people who realize they have no future and that something has got …
In late July this year (2024), my new book The American Climate Emergency Narrative: Origins, Developments and Imaginary Futures was published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book is completely Open Access, and you can download and read the entire text here: The American Climate Emergency Narrative. This book reports a previous project that was concluded before the Future Food …
New Book: The American Climate Emergency Narrative Read More »
Guest Blog by UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures Cornelius Holtorf. It was a series of changes of plan that generated my acquaintance with Werner Lorke and Bennett Encke’s “Fungi Furs” art in Reusten near Tübingen and with Kathleen Ryan’s “bad fruit” artworks in Hamburg. Figure 1: Performing fungi at the Fungi Furs exhibition at Süddeutscher …
Is conservation sustainable? Imagining a world of change Read More »
Ray Naylor’s debut novel The Mountain in the Sea (2022) introduces the reader to a future where the climate has continued to erode, where major conflict between states have taken place, and where fishing vessels, controlled by artificial intelligences and operated by shanghaied and enslaved labour, scour the ocean floors for protein. It is a very dark …
Automated Over-Fishing and Communicating Food Futures Read More »
Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter is a postapocalyptic climate narrative set in rural Appalachia that won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. The protagonist is 18-year-old Wylodine (Wil). She has recently been abandoned by her mother and the mother’s boyfriend Lobo, an abusive, small-time criminal. She is thus stuck in a trailer (euphemistically referred to as a …
This is another too-long blog post. Sometimes, you just have to give a novel the space it demands. So here goes: One of the most critically acclaimed and influential climate fictions from North America is Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Published in 2003, it was written at a time when the concept “Anthropocene” had only begun …
Oryx and Crake: Atwood, Food and the Capitalocene Read More »
This is the introduction to a special issue I edited with food scholar Ana Grgic. The article Climate Diaspora and Future Food Cultures that is write about here is part of this issue. As the abstract notes, the issue takes as its starting point the fact that much food culture is diasporic today. Thus, diasporic food cultures enter dominant societies through a variety of manners and spaces, in homes, at food fairs, restaurants, through cookbooks, in supermarkets, but also in visual media. With this as …
Special Issue Introduction: Representation of Diasporic Food Cultures Read More »
I spoke on the topic “Fiction and Food Futures” at the Tasty Future Festival on the 16th of April, 2024. This event took place at Linnaeus University and was organized by Paula Schneewind and Larissa Zeiler, two MA students on the program Design+Change. The day consisted of a series of open lectures, a workshop, a luncheon and a …
The publication of Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl in 2009 marks an important stage in the writing of North American climate fiction. The novel was awarded the Nebula, Hugo, John W. Campbell, Compton Crook and Locus awards in 2010, as well as a host of other prizes. It is clearly inspired by previous sci-fi such as the early …
The first publication of the project is now online (Open Access). This is the article Climate Diaspora and Future Food Cultures in Snowpiercer (2013) and The Road (2009) that I (Johan Höglund) wrote with my colleague Niklas Salmose. It is part of a special section (soon) published in the journal Food Culture and Society and I edited this section with food studies scholar Ana …
Tochi Onyebuchi was born in the US to Nigerian immigrants. He is known for the young adult War Girls (2019) and Rebel Sisters (2020), novels set in a future Nigeria ravaged by climate change and civil war. These texts are interesting as widely circulated sub-Saharan climate fiction, but Onyebuchi is also the author of specifically American narratives set in …
(Beyond) junk food futures in Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi Read More »
Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind (2020) was well reviewed when it came out. It has also been turned into a Netflix movie, directed by Sam Esmail (best-know for the award-winning television series Mr. Robot) and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, and Myha’la, among others. This post is mostly about the novel, but it also …
As part of the project, I have organized sustainable dinners in collaboration with restaurants. The aim of these dinners has been to raise awareness of how the dominant food system contributes to global warming and to familiarize people with sustainable foodways: to introduce the idea that sustainable dinners can be tasty even though they are mostly vegan …
Foodunfolded is funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) located in Leuven, Belgium. I think there is good reason to worry about the potential of any initiative that emerges out of the attempt to enhance life within a particular region of the planet. That noted, Foodunfolded does try to understand how food …
Godzilla (or Gojira as the Japanese original calls this monster) is a cross-cultural franchise begun in 1954 in post-war Japan. Since then, the monster has mutated and invaded a number of other nations. The first attempt to launch an American Godzilla film occurred in 1998 when TriStar released Godzilla and Godzilla the (animated) series. This attempt petered out due to …
What does it mean for a book, a film or a game (or a piece of music, meme or painting) to be about food? Do people have to sit down to actually eat for a given text to be about food? Obviously, texts where this happens cannot help but say something about food, but food …
Becky Chamber’s started out like many other up-and-coming science fiction/climate fiction authors by self-publishing her fiction. Her debut novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet began in 2012 through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Shortly after its original publication, it was picked up by a big publishing house, and it was subsequently shortlisted for the …
According to conventional understanding, climate fiction (sometimes abbreviated as cli-fi) is a “new literary genre that focuses on the consequences of environmental issues” and that helps people “thinking about the Earth’s sustainability” as argued by J. K. Ullrich in The Atlantic. Thus, “climate fiction represents a vital supplement” to climate science because it provides “insights into how it might be to feel and understand” …
At the beginning of Blade Runner 2049, a “replicant” or android named “K”, an employee of the LAPD, arrives at a protein farm. This is run by another replicant named Sapper Morton, but Sapper is unregistered; a runaway that must be taken out of commission. In Sapper’s brown kitchen, among bowls of grubs, K and Sapper …
Marian Womack’s The Swimmers (2021) explores a future where climate change has become so severe that a large portion of humanity has escaped to an “Upper Settlement”, an enormous space station that revolves around the Earth. This is a common trope in speculative fiction where the space station is the ultimate gated community (see Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013) …
In Andy Weir’s sci-fi novel Hail Mary (2021), a microscopic alien life form has begun to consume the sun’s energy. This is slowly bringing about a new ice age that will eventually kill all human life. Humanity’s only hope is a star 16 light years away. Unlike other stars in the vicinity, this is not deteriorating. Fortunately, …
George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is about water, fossil fuels, sand and bonkers action. There is a lot that is problematic with this film, including the fact that while it clearly connects fossil fuel to hypermasculine, authoritarian patriarchy, it cannot help to also celebrate the awesome power of the roaring diesel engine as it motors …
Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012) was well received by critics and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2013 (alongside Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312). The novel plays out in a depleted future reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009). Ecology is failing due to climate change, a …
Having Your Cake and Eating It: Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars Read More »