Speculative Wagers on the End of a World: Worldquakes, Speculative Fiction, and Climate Activism

In this article, we make the case that speculative fictions relay the tremors of an ongoing worldquake set in motion by the unfolding of anthropogenic climate breakdown. Speculative fictions both unsettle the entrenched convictions that the world of extractive capitalist realism is the only possible and desirable world, and afford environmental activists the capacity to cultivate the desire to compose the world otherwise. Applying affective methodologies, we show how speculative fictions resonate through the words, actions and affects of climate activists as wagers on those worlds that propose other ways of human and non-human living and dying well together on a damaged planet. We tell the necessarily incomplete and fragmentary story of how the other worlds intimated in speculative fictions insinuate themselves into this world and how this enables activists to articulate their desire for an alternative present, and to prefiguratively inhabit future worlds, as this world collapses.