Contemporary American science fiction focuses on the construction of earthbound imaginaries that reconfigure the representation and visualization of ecological futures on planet earth. These imaginaries engage with the realities of climate change and environmental degradation to conceptualize new narratives of hope in the face of natural disaster scenarios. Understanding an earthbound imagination generates a distinct earth-centric (emphasizing the indispensability and centrality of the earth) consciousness that emerges in response to the global dynamics of the Anthropocene.
This presentation portrays how the earthbound imagination in contemporary American science fiction manifests itself in the form of ‘geostories’ and ‘earth writing’. It highlights Paolo Bacigalupi’s geostories, The Windup Girl (2009), Ship Breaker (2010) and The Water Knife (2015), as examples of earthbound narratives within the genre of science fiction that engages with the representation of planetary reality (pertaining to the reality of earth as a planet) instead of the global reality (pertaining to the reality of global-human civilization). They examine how earth’s geography, in terms of its physicality of place, is imagined through science fiction and assert that the science fictional geostory is a medium through which most people discover the world and its spaces they otherwise do not physically experience. The presentation will also identify T.C. Boyle’s historical science (meta)fiction narratives, A Friend of the Earth (2000), Blue Skies (2023) and The Terranauts (2016), as being in consonance with the literary tradition of imagining, writing and conceptualizing the earth (earth writing) in the age of mankind. Focussing on how science fiction has become an extremely powerful mode of speculating geographical imaginaries, this presentation explores how earth writing has become an integral tool in theorizing the contemporary earthbound imagination. Finally, the presentation will examine how earthbound science fiction and geography can converge in an experimental field in which the matter of the earth becomes writing, while writing, in turn, comes to matter as an extension, representation, or reimagination of the earth.

Keywords: Earthbound, Science Fiction, Geostory, Earth writing.