An Ecocritical Reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars

This study is an attempt to examine the concepts of ‘wilderness’ and ‘climate change’ and discusses ecological issues and environmental concerns in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. The paper calls for a rapprochement between ecocriticism and what it often disregards as theory. Specifically, it argues for the relevance of genre theory, which explores the dynamic relations of author, reader, text, and the worlds they inhabit. it offers a generically inflected reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy, in which the representation of climate change is understood as a complex set of negotiations within the generic space of utopian science fiction. The process of settling and terraforming a planet is often presented in terms of a utopian exploration of new social possibilities, an attempt to explore alternatives to destructive societal structures on Earth. Mars is seen as a possible solution to the problem of overpopulation, and therefore to the problems of the ecological crisis and the violence that these tensions encourage. But the text suggests that simply turning to technology as the answer to complex problems is not enough. Debates over climate change and the environment are addressed through the master motif of terraforming and are directly connected to a postcolonial geopolitics that Robinson identifies and shows to be essential for consideration in order to cope with contemporary social and ecological upheavals. Red Mars, however, chronicles the affects of transformation on many different levels: scientific, social, personal, cultural, and even evolutionary adaptation. Nothing in the novel escapes the influence of transformation.

کلیدواژه ها:

climate change ، Ecocriticism ، environmental concerns ، Post-colonialism ، Red Mars ، terraforming.