BBC R3 Programme
My brilliant colleague Amy Butt and I were invited to make a 45-minute programme for BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking on the subject of “Science Fiction.” The programme was recorded in late February, shortly before lockdown, and broadcast on 15 April 2020. It features Amy and I in conversation with presenter Dr Hetta Howes and was produced by Luke Mulhall.
In the programme we discussed our favourite science fiction texts, including writers such as J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Tade Thompson, Rachel Armstrong, and N. K. Jemisin; the relationship between science fictional worldbuilding and architectural theory; genre and literary experimentation; climate change and ecocatastrophe; flood fictions; contemporary utopias and dystopias; late nineteenth-century Martian utopias and pollution; the urban and the pastoral in science fiction; capitalist inequality after the apocalypse and repurposing the built environment during catastrophes; and the vegetal monstrous in posthuman science fiction; new energy resources in science fiction that features metabolic architectures; and how SF narratives can be read in the context of speculative volcanology, which analyses the fossil record to consider the dangerous, violent interface between inner Earth (magma) and human social relations.
For more information, see the BBC page for “Science Fiction and Ecological Thinking.”
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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