Awen Publications

One of the more immediately obvious impacts of human action on the natural world is roadkill. It always upsets me to see the flattened and mutilated badgers, muntjacs, rabbits, pheasants. Three weeks ago the impact struck closer to home: our beloved cat, Gwen, just four years old, in perfect health, and with a tremendous zest for life. We don’t know exactly where Gwen died; she was left on a vet’s doorstep a mile away. But her death on the road put me in mind of a story by

This volume in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series gathers stories mainly about extreme weather, but includes also some other ecological subjects: a tidal whirlpool (Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström); swarming locusts (Doris Lessing’s ‘A Mild Attack of Locusts’); earthquakes (Margaret St Clair’s ‘The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes); aggressive birds (Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’). In all the selected stories the phenomena in question are in some sense ‘weird’

In Rob Latham’s Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014) the field of ecocriticism was conspicuous by its absence. That gap could have been nicely filled by Gerry Canavan’s Introduction to Green Planets, or indeed Latham’s own contribution to this book. Ecocriticism and SF may have been reluctant bedmates, but in this book we see an explicit insemination of SF criticism with ecocritical thinking. Not only that, Canavan argues that science fiction itself is an ideal means of