Retrofutures and Petrofutures
Retrofutures and Petrofutures
Oil, Scarcity, Limit
This chapter discusses historical efforts to grapple with the inescapable transience of oil. Focusing on a series of twentieth-century science-fiction novels, it charts the development of two interpretive perspectives that continue to inform understandings of petroleum’s end: a techno-utopian belief in the capacity of modern invention to supplant oil with more sophisticated energy systems, and an apocalyptic terror of oil exhaustion as the end point of human history. In particular, it considers how the necessity of oil is put under erasure in much early and mid-twentieth-century science fiction, whereby oil is retrospectively imagined as a quickly discarded transitional technology and we can see oil’s inescapable centrality to liberal capitalism. It also examines various recent manifestations of peak oil from the ecological science fiction of the 1970s through allegorical films such as Avatar, Moon, and Daybreakers. The chapter analyzes the notion of oil ontology, in which oil becomes synonymous with progress, and concludes by assessing the claim that technological modernity, and its consumer lifestyle, may have no future at all.
Keywords: novels, energy, oil exhaustion, science fiction, liberal capitalism, films, oil ontology, progress, technological modernity
Minnesota Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
