In celebration of Earth Day on April 22nd, the Online Book Group will be focusing on the genre eco-fiction or eco-science fiction as well as nonfiction works dealing with environmental concerns. The roots of eco-fiction extend as far back as people have written stories about our relationship to the natural world but it has only attained status as a genre in the late sixties and early seventies of the last century. With the growing importance of the issue of global warming to the viability of our civilization, eco-fiction is acquiring more attention now than it has received since its birth.
A number of works of nonfiction can be considered seminal in the inspiration for eco-fiction stories. These include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb and, more recently, An Inconvenient Truth. A number of environmental disasters have also stimulated interest. There was the Santa Barbara oil spill in February of 1969, the Love Canal chemical contamination disaster, which came to public attention in 1977, the Chernobyl power plant meltdown in April of 1986, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in March of 1989, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April of 2010, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in the wake of the March 11th, 2011 tsunami. The accumulation of data around the topic of global warming has also spurred growing concern. Rarely does a day pass when there isn’t news about some new consequence of human abuse of the planet.
It’s no surprise that these have become grist for the mills of past and contemporary science fiction writers. There is a display upstairs in the Reference of relevant fictional and nonfictional works and they can be checked out from there.
A number of works of nonfiction can be considered seminal in the inspiration for eco-fiction stories. These include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb and, more recently, An Inconvenient Truth. A number of environmental disasters have also stimulated interest. There was the Santa Barbara oil spill in February of 1969, the Love Canal chemical contamination disaster, which came to public attention in 1977, the Chernobyl power plant meltdown in April of 1986, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in March of 1989, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April of 2010, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in the wake of the March 11th, 2011 tsunami. The accumulation of data around the topic of global warming has also spurred growing concern. Rarely does a day pass when there isn’t news about some new consequence of human abuse of the planet.
It’s no surprise that these have become grist for the mills of past and contemporary science fiction writers. There is a display upstairs in the Reference of relevant fictional and nonfictional works and they can be checked out from there.
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