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Chris Pak
Terraforming in SF
Today is a conversation with Chris Pak who is a scholar of speculative literature. Much of his work specializes in science fiction and ecocriticism.
His research interests are in the ecological and environmental significance of stories of terraforming and pantropy, which is to say the modification of other planets and the modification of bodies to enable the habitation of otherwise uninhabitable environments. His book (which we’ll be discussing today) is from Liverpool University Press called, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction. The book focuses on terraforming and its link to climate change and geoengineering, global politics and the relationship between the sciences, philosophy and the arts.
Chris Pak
Chris Pak specialises in the study of Science Fiction and was an Arthur C. Clarke award judge from 2018-2020. He obtained a BA in English Language and Literature, an MA in Science Fiction Studies and a PhD at The University of Liverpool’s Department of English. His first postdoctoral appointment was as a researcher on the Leverhulme-funded Corpus Linguistics project, “‘People’, ‘Products’, ‘Pests’ and ‘Pets: The Discursive Representation of Animals’” (Lancaster University), his second on the Volkswagen-funded Digital Humanities project, “Modelling Between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice” (King’s Digital Lab). He is the author of Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2016), a contribution to the Environmental Humanities, Utopian Studies and Postcolonialism that analyses how transformations to environments in science fiction interrogate the global politics of climate change and the Anthropocene.
