“In economic construction, like a child without experience, we declared war on the earth, unfamiliar with the strategy or tactics.”
Mao Zedong on the Great Leap Forward

Recent ecocritical scholarship has increasingly challenged the assumptions that underwrite dominant narratives of the Anthropocene, while renewed interest in socialist and communist traditions has reopened questions concerning planning, collective life, and planetary futures—as well as what work is necessary to accomplish those futures. Socialist science fiction occupies a particularly rich position within these debates. Across Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, Cuban, and other literary traditions, science fictional depictions of the role of humans in shaping nature to its “most perfect form” allow us to examine environmental transformation within broader visions of social revolution and world-making.

For this virtual seminar, we invite papers examining the intersections of ecocriticism and socialist science fiction from a comparative literary perspective. “Socialist,” in this case, need not be literature produced under nominatively socialist governments, but literature that broadly engages with historical materialist ideologies broadly writ. We seek contributions that explore how socialist speculative fiction imagines ecological transformation and environmental crisis, either historical—as with the great human-caused famines of the Soviet Union and Great Leap Forward-era China—or contemporary.

This panel is especially interested in the literary strategies through which socialist science fiction constructs the "near future" as a privileged temporal horizon. How do these texts regulate the proximity of utopian possibility, imagining transitional historical moments in which ecological and social contradictions remain legible? What narrative forms emerge around anticipation, delay, and historical mediation? How does the near future function as an aesthetic category through which political transformation becomes imaginable? And what formal and aesthetic vocabularies do they develop for depicting planetary change, collective agency, and the production of new relations between humans and the nonhuman world?

Possible topics include:

• Ecocritical readings of socialist science fiction
• Literary representations of the near future as a distinct temporal regime
• Planning and environmental governance in speculative fiction
• Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, Cuban, African, and Latin American socialist futurisms
• Comparative approaches to socialist and capitalist ecological imaginaries
• The aesthetics of planetary transformation, extraction, and restoration through a socialist lens

Comparative and multilingual approaches are particularly encouraged, as are proposals that place literary texts from different linguistic, national, or political traditions into dialogue.