An Investigation into the Role of Science & Speculative Fiction for Reframing Modes of Engagement with Urban Environments for Multispecies Collaborati

《科学事实、虚构与未来：科幻小说与投机小说在多物种合作中重塑城市环境参与模式中的作用研究》预计到2050年，城市人口将占全球人口的70%，并将吸收未来几乎所有的人口增长（联合国，2019年），因此，城市空间正成为未来改善人为气候变化努力的焦点，这并不奇怪。在科幻小说（SSF）中，城市环境经常被描述为赤裸裸的乌托邦或反乌托邦，被视为人类焦虑和胜利的表现场所。该项目将探索从1950年至今的SSF如何提供脱离城市环境二元表现的模式，这些模式考虑了替代感知的潜力，警惕非人类在城市组合中的存在、作用和重要性。20世纪50年代，人们意识到乌托邦式的完美是不可能的，这带来了阿瑟·C·克拉克的星际叙事，20世纪下半叶，城市环境的叙事变得越来越矛盾。从充满希望的20世纪60年代的城市前卫运动，到多丽丝·莱辛作品中对城市萎缩和退化的恐惧，再到梅根·亨特的《我们从终点开始》（2017）和特德·汤普森的《玫瑰水的救赎》（2019）所体现的谨慎而充满希望的文学语境，科幻小说中的城市景观一直是多物种环境和不断变化的文化话语。为了促进对非人类/人类和物质/话语在城市文学表现中的相互渗透的阅读，我将使用新唯物主义的观点，包括斯泰西·阿莱莫的超物质现实理论。通过将人类重新定位为“实质上和永久地与物质流动和环境机构联系在一起”（2012，第478页），超物质性将人类中心主义的话语中心化。通过在想象的城市环境中探索这些“流动”，在这些环境中，非人类的其他人被视为代理，与我们日常本性的更广泛和道德的互动可能被概念化。为了避免二元论的乌托邦主义和犹太教-基督教的天启结构，这些已经成为推动有意义的环境变化的流行虚构工具，我将参与唐娜·哈拉威（Donna Haraway）“与麻烦一起”的前提所阐述的持续变化的伦理，描述为：“学会真正地活在当下，不是作为一个在可怕或伊甸园般的过去与世界末日或救赎的未来之间消失的支点，而是作为一个凡人，纠缠在无数未完成的配置或地点、时间、物质和意义中。”（2016, p.1）“与其参与导致具体化结局的环境叙事，哈拉威建议我们通过检查我们的现状和与之互动的物质/话语模式来解决问题，以确定新的或现有的联系，这些联系提供了更多本体论和认识论上和谐的‘世界’。”作为构建整个世界或未来的类型，本研究将评估科幻小说和近未来小说叙事如何定位于前景城市空间，这些空间富有想象力地挑战以人类为中心的框架，以便与非人类合作者进行更道德和更广泛的接触。通过识别SSF文本中非人类/人类关系的叙事模式和结构，该项目将反映当前和可替代的可持续模式，以居住在我们的多物种城市中，以实现生态生成的未来。

Full title: Science Fact, Fiction and Futures: An Investigation into the Role of Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction for Reframing Modes of Engagement with Urban Environments for Multispecies Collaboration. With urban populations forecasted at 70% of the global population by 2050 and to absorb virtually all future population growth (UN, 2019), it's unsurprising that urban spaces are becoming focal points for future efforts to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change. Often narrativized as starkly utopian or dystopian, the urban environment has been taken as a site for manifesting anthropogenic anxieties and triumphs in science and speculative fiction (SSF). This project will explore how SSF from 1950 to present offers modes of departure from dualistic representations of urban environments which consider the potential for alternative perceptions, alert to the presence, role and importance of the nonhuman in urban assemblages.With the realisation of the impossibility of utopian perfectibility in the 1950's, which brought Arthur C Clarke's interplanetary narratives, the second half of the twentieth century saw an increasingly ambivalent narrativization of urban environments. From the hopeful 1960's urban avant-garde movement, to fears of urban atrophy and degeneration, as seen in Doris Lessing's work, up to a cautiously hopeful literary context embodied by Megan Hunter's The End We StartFrom (2017) and Tade Thompson's Rosewater Redemption (2019), cityscapes in SSF have consistently been multispecies environments and cultural discourses in flux.To facilitate this reading of nonhuman/human and material/discursive interpenetration in urban literary representations, I will use New Materialist perspectives, including Stacy Alaimo's theorisation of transcorporeality. Transcorporeality decentres anthropocentric discourses by repositioning the human 'as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments' (2012, p.478). By exploring these 'flows' in imagined urban environments, where nonhuman others are foregrounded as agential, a more expansive and ethical interaction with our everyday natures may be conceptualised. To avoid dualistic utopianism and Judeo-Christian structures of apocalypse which have been popular fictional tools for motivating meaningful environmental change, I will engage with an ethics of ongoing change as articulated by Donna Haraway's premise of 'staying with the trouble', described as: "learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations or places, time, matter, meanings. (2016, p.1) "Rather than engaging in environmental narratives leading to concretized endings, Haraway suggests we stay with the trouble by examining our present and modes of material/discursive interaction with it, to identify new or existing connections which offer more ontologically and epistemologically harmonious 'worldings'. As genres which construct whole worlds or futures, this research will evaluate how science fiction and near future fiction narratives are positioned to foreground urban spaces which imaginatively challenge anthropocentric frameworks for more ethical and expansive engagement with nonhuman co-collaborators. By identifying narrative patterns and structures for nonhuman/human relations within SSF texts, the project will reflect on current and alternative sustainable modes of inhabiting our multispecies cities for ecologically generative futures.