Can Science Fiction Help Us Imagine New Ways of Acting Together in the Anthropocene?

Theme: The Anthropocene

Published: 12 August 2025

Summary
In this episode of SCAS Talks, Mathias Thaler discusses how science fiction can help imagine new ways of acting together in the Anthropocene. Thaler, a political theorist, explores the relationship between political imagination and action, particularly concerning utopianism and ecological issues. He introduces his book, "No Other Planet," which examines utopian expressions in literature, especially climate fiction, and how these narratives can inform political debates. Thaler also addresses the contested nature of the term "Anthropocene" and the dangers of certain utopian visions, such as tech billionaires' dreams of escaping planet Earth. He emphasizes the importance of critically evaluating utopian ideas and their potential political consequences. Thaler reflects on his experiences as a scholar at SCAS, highlighting the institute's interdisciplinary environment and the benefits of intellectual collaboration.

Keywords
Anthropocene, science fiction, utopianism, political imagination, social theory

Suggested Link/s
SCAS Page: Mathias Thaler
Book: No Other Planet External link, opens in new window. (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Transcript of the Episode

Mathias Thaler 00:07
Literature and other forms of art can and often do change the way we perceive the world, and hence allow us to imagine new ways of acting together. So in a world governed by this sentiment that there is no alternative, perhaps the game is already over, we have no future to properly and sustainably shape our planet. I do believe that literature and art can perform an emancipatory and critical function. Change happens at the intersection of political imagination and political action.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:45
Welcome to SCAS Talks a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode I talk to Mathias Thaler, professor of Political Theory and the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. He was a fellow at scase During the autumn of 2024. Mathias Thaler regularly teaches courses on democratic theory, populism, human rights, the morality of war and violence, and also utopianism. Utopias. and also dystopias, will be something that we will talk more about today in this episode. And this is the fourth episode in our theme "The Anthropocene". Very welcome to SCAS Talks, Matthias, you are joining us from Amsterdam.

Mathias Thaler 01:29
Yes, thanks so much for the invitation, first of all. I'm still on sabbatical, and I moved from Uppsala to Amsterdam, where there's a similar center as the one in Uppsala, and I'm quite happy here, but still missing Uppsala, obviously.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:43
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Mathias Thaler 01:45
Yes. So I'm a political theorist, as you said, at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I'm originally from Vienna, Austria, but I've lived in the UK now for 13 years or so. And as you said, I was lucky enough to have received a fellowship during my sabbatical at SCAS, and I'm currently working, continuing to work on the project that I began in Uppsala.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:09
So very briefly, then, what is your research about - what are you doing?

Mathias Thaler 02:13
I'm a contemporary political theorist, so I'm particularly interested in political problems that we are currently dealing with, and those include things such as populism, democracy, increasingly also questions of ecological justice and injustice and utopianism, the topic of our conversation today. My research interests are broadly, I think, located at the intersection of the social sciences and the humanities. So that means the problems I engage with in my work are always political in nature, but I do believe that the arts and culture more widely, are important resources for understanding and responding to those problems. So if you wanted to use a cliche, perhaps I wouldn't be unhappy to be described as an interdisciplinary scholar.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:03
That, of course, fits very well with your stay at SCAS and, I guess also at your institute in the Netherlands,

Mathias Thaler 03:10
Absolutely.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:10
So this is an episode within our theme "The Anthropocene". This is a question I've asked to every guest within this theme previously, so I also ask you. What are your thoughts on this term, the Anthropocene?

Mathias Thaler 03:23
So the first thing I would like to say is that, like all terms that are circulating in the political sphere, the Anthropocene is a contested term. And it is contested on several levels, I would say. The initial contestation is really, I think, between the natural sciences and the rest of the scholarly debate, if you will. So the idea of a human planet in which our species has become a geological force, that's one of the definitions of the Anthropocene, remains already extremely controversial among stratigraphers and geologists. Now among social scientists and humanities scholars, on the other hand, the debate around the Anthropocene has developed somewhat independently from the natural sciences. There, the term has had an incredibly astonishing career, both in the study of politics, history and culture more widely. Many people, I think, nowadays use the term almost interchangeably with something like climate change, and that, I think, is obviously problematic, because that use of the term Anthropocene as synonymous with climate change sidelines many other aspects that are usually captured by the notion of the Anthropocene, such as biodiversity loss, and species extinction, for example. Even among social scientists and humanities scholars, I believe the term remains highly contested. Many critics have, over the last 10 years or so, observed that one of the major issues with the idea of a human planet is that it will fully disregard uneven responsibilities and vulnerabilities in our current moment. So very crudely put, but I think importantly, some members of our species are simply vastly more responsible for the climate emergency and biodiversity loss and species extinction, and those are the ones that are usually least exposed to the threat of the Anthropocene. So the very idea that we can speak of a uniform humanity that is responsible for the current ecological crisis has come under severe attack. That I think, is the second level of contestation, which we can observe, especially among social science and humanities scholars. And then this third level of contention, I think, relates to the public debate more widely, where we are currently witnessing, of course, a huge backlash against green policies in general, and a new turn against any form of emancipatory ecological politics. And the Anthropocene concept is affected by that particular political development as well. So nevertheless, I think for me, despite all of those contentious dimensions to the concept, it remains an important term that we should grapple with, and it's one that I use in my own work with the right kind of caveats. It's a concept that allows us to see the current conjuncture in a particular light, and especially in such a way as to connect ecological questions with other concerns about social and political justice.

Natalie von der Lehr 06:41
But then going back a little bit, how come you got interested in your research area to start with, and especially in aspects regarding the Anthropocene and the things you just mentioned.

Mathias Thaler 06:52
Thanks so much for that question. To explain how I ended up at this point, it might make sense to quickly tell you about the overall puzzle, scholarly puzzle, I'm trying to address in most of my work, no matter what I'm concretely studying, starting from the PhD to our conversation today. And the puzzle is really, how do political imagination and political action relate to one another? So how can we properly conceive of that relationship between imagination and action, which is a really big question, and one that sustained my curiosity and interest for many years now. Now, when I had finished my second book, which was dedicated to the study of political violence, I did realize in the process of continuing my work that there was an aspect of political imagination that I had not touched upon in that particular book on violence, and that was the question of utopianism. So what is utopianism? How can it be understood in the current moment? And in parallel I've always been very interested in ecological issues. So what I then thought was that there's an opportunity here to research utopianism in the Anthropocene, which became the topic of my third book, which we might talk a bit about in a moment or so. And in my current research, I continue and expand that interest on the political imagination and its relationship to political action in the context of the Anthropocene even further.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:26
You previously published the book "No other planet". In this book, you examine expressions of the utopian imagination in the literature, especially in science fiction, or that sub-genre that is called Climate Fiction, Cli-Fi. Can you tell us a bit more about this book and your project there?

Mathias Thaler 08:44
Yeah, in "No other planet", which came out in 2022 with Cambridge University Press, I did try to combine this interest of mine in what is probably the biggest challenge humanity is currently facing, namely the intertwined climate and biodiversity crisis, with my fascination with the radical imagination, the radical political imagination, and how it inflects and shapes our capacity to act differently. And the starting point of the book is an observation that the great philosopher and anthropologist Donna Haraway has made recently, namely, in order to move forward in this moment of crisis, we need to be very careful to avoid two problematic reactions, if you will. One is the hubristic self assertion of believing that we can innovate ourselves technologically out of this current predicament, and on the other side, is also a sense that the game is over, and defeatist sentiments of paralysis and nihilism are proliferating as well. The question is, then, what can be achieved by exploring the space between these problematic positions. And the book tries to respond to that question by homing in, in particular, on utopian proposals. It's really driven by two ambitions. The first is to uncover the key utopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene. What are those tendencies? How can we describe them? How should we assess them? And secondly, the book also aims to provide orientation for our precarious planetary existence by avoiding both defeatism and wishful thinking on the other hand. So these are the two major goals, if you will. The book also has a critical dimension to it. It tries to defend utopianism from some of its critics, but in such a way as to also remain attentive to the dangerous dimensions of utopianism. I didn't want to write a one sided celebration of social dreaming and of utopianism, but I really hope to have offered an even handed defense of utopianism for our times that also attends to its potential downsides. And as you said, a special feature of the project is to look at the potential of science fiction, and especially climate fiction, to inform political debates around the Anthropocene, and that's something that I think is also, perhaps a little bit original about the way how I approach these debates.

Natalie von der Lehr 11:29
Definitely. It's very interesting, I think, to go from popular literature, so to say, popular culture, to to science. As a science communicator, I'm used to do it the other way around, to go from the hard science to something that is attractive to the non scientific community. Then, if we look a little bit at non fiction literature versus science fiction, What can science fiction or climate fiction offer that a non fiction book accounting for facts and so on, the state of science, cannot do?

Mathias Thaler 12:00
Right, so that that is sort of the key question of the whole project, right? And one that I've been contending with for quite a long time now. So in the book, I'm trying to trace the expressions of the utopian imagination in two parallel contexts. On the one hand, theory building, broadly speaking, about the Anthropocene. Now, on the other hand, fictional narratives about the future of our home planet, the kind of science fiction and climate fiction we just touched upon. So there is a wager behind this whole project, if you will, and that is really that speculative fiction can expand the horizon of our theorizing about the Anthropocene and vice versa. So we can read speculative fiction as informing non fiction theorizations and vice versa. We can also use non fiction political theory to try to make sense of speculative fiction. Now, the main motivation behind that move was then to really make the case for the value for the cognitive, emotional and political, ultimately, value of speculative fiction. And I have sort of two reasons why I think this is really the right way going forward. And the first is one that I already touched upon, namely that these different expressions of the utopian imagination on the one hand, the theorizing, on the other hand, the speculative fiction and storytelling can illuminate each other, revealing strengths and weaknesses in each other's understandings of the future. So for example, political theorists, social theorists, the kind of community I'm directly contributing to, tend to systematically address questions arising from the Anthropocene. Fiction writers, of course, respond to climate change and biodiversity loss in a much more poetic fashion, to the language, the very form in which ideas are expressed, looks already different. What speculative fiction is doing, I think, it adds experiential and affective texture and narrative complication to their reflections of social and political theories. So non fiction writers, of course, cannot produce these effects of making the climate crisis felt in some particular way. And storytelling has a very important function to perform, if it enables the readers and the audience more widely to try to emotionally almost bodily experience how certain transformations will affect their lives in the future. And secondly, I'm also trying to make the case that storytelling in the sort of fictional realm harbors direct relevance to social and political theories. So I'm trying to propose that literature itself can be read as a type of social theory, but we need to be quite careful to read the text that we are interested in in an appropriate way. So the central goal of the project is one that you touched upon already, to convince fellow students of the social sciences and the humanities that fiction should be taken seriously in our conversation regarding politics and the Anthropocene. And that's, I think, a quite long struggle, not least because speculative fiction, science fiction, climate fiction, is sometimes looked down upon by serious scholars. This is sort of a low level cultural product, and what I'm trying to do in my work is to say that's a really bad form of cultural snobbery, and there's a lot to be gained from taking the lessons that we can draw from speculative fiction seriously in the domain of social and political theory.

Natalie von der Lehr 15:50
Yeah, so talking about how other scholars view this kind of literature, what kind of reactions have you gotten after publishing the book, "No other planet"?

Mathias Thaler 15:59
To my surprise perhaps, overwhelmingly positive, as it were, which gives me of course great pleasure. The really great thing about the reception for me personally, has been that I now can speak to different audiences, because the book is not only addressed at my more narrowly academic home, which is social and political theory, but it also tries to reach out to students of literature, students of utopianism, and I've had the great pleasure of talking to and learning from those scholars as well. So the book is really the product of an attempt to go beyond the tendency towards academic over specialization. It's an attempt to try something different, perhaps. And the comments I've received so far and the conversations I've had over the past few years now make me think that there is some space for work that transgresses academic disciplines a little bit, and I feel very emboldened by the reactions and very grateful to anyone who engaged so far with my work on these topics.

Natalie von der Lehr 17:08
And potentially you could also engage with the readers of that kind of literature and the writers, right?

Mathias Thaler 17:15
Absolutely. So that's that's one of my goals, perhaps for my next project. I've been so far a little bit hesitant to share my scholarly work with the authors I've been reading and engaging with. But of course, it would be wonderful if that worked as well. That kind of translation, not only between the readers and my work, but also perhaps with some of the authors of the speculative fiction I'm interested in, that would be one of my dreams for the future.

Natalie von der Lehr 17:41
But then talking about a different group, how can this kind of literature, science fiction, climate fiction, inform politics?

Mathias Thaler 17:49
Yeah, so that's sort of the second big question for the whole project that I'm also trying to respond to. And here I want to be careful and really properly add some caveats to any claim about influence or informing that you just propose. I think potentially, there is some space for an indirect impact on politics. Any other claim might be a little bit overdrawn. I don't believe that literature or art or the reception of literature and art can directly impact on politics.But what it can do, and this is really why I would insist on the value on the merit of paying attention to cultural products in the context of social science debates, is that literature and other forms of art can and often do change the way we perceive the world, and hence allow us to imagine new ways of acting together. So in a world governed by this sentiment that there is no alternative, perhaps the game is already over, we have no future to properly and sustainably shape our planet, I do believe that literature and art can perform an emancipatory and critical function under certain conditions obviously, that need to be propitious to that function. But it is indeed one of the things that we can I think, even if we look at these debates very critically, observe that change happens at the intersection of political imagination and political action, and the focus on literature and the arts more widely is really an attempt to investigate the extent to which political imagination can have a radically transformative dimension to it, and that's one of the projects that I'm currently pursuing as well.

Natalie von der Lehr 19:41
So let's move to your current project then. What are you doing there?

Mathias Thaler 19:47
The project I'm working on is a continuation of the utopia idea and utopia work that I've been doing over the last few years. And I'm calling it the Anthropocene interregnum. That's the idea that I'm currently pursuing. It's an attempt to look at the current political moment that includes many really difficult ruptures we are experiencing, both domestically, in our domestic politics and especially internationally now, from populism to the ongoing and accelerating climate and biodiversity crisis, etc, to look at this particular moment not through the traditional lens of progressive politics, which is really nowadays, it has been for many years now, the lens of a transition to a world without fossil fuels. But to look at it through this idea that I take from Antonio Gramsci that we're living through an interregnum. And an interregnum is a period in which the old order is dying, or is in the process of falling apart, but the new order cannot yet arise. And I'm trying to understand in this new project, what are both the psychological questions arising from this moment of interregnum for us, individually and collectively, and what are potentially political responses to it. How can we properly answer to this difficult moment? I'm at the beginning of this project, and I'm currently working on a couple of chapters which hopefully will at some point in the indeterminate future cohere into something like a book manuscript.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:38
You mentioned previously that there are also dangerous types of utopianism. Can we go back to that? What do you mean by that? What can be dangerous?

Mathias Thaler 21:47
The book itself, "No other planet", really tries to focus on a particular group of utopian projects that try to channel the radical imagination for alternatives, so to say, down to earth, right? And that's, that's sort of the title of the book indicates that, there is no other planet for our species to thrive. Now, if you want an example of utopianism that I think is problematic and indeed, very dangerous politically in this current moment, we don't have to, you know, look for very far fetched fantasies. Just you know, open the news and look at Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos fantasies of escaping Planet Earth with starships. Usually, of course, only a small indeed, of humanity would be included in those projects, but these attempts of multi planetary civilization that is really, I think, not just a ludicrous fantasy of those tech billionaires, but really expresses a political project and an understanding of how we should react to a decaying Earth are, to my mind, expressions of a very dangerous and problematic form of social dreaming. And that's why I want the book not just to be a celebration of all kinds of utopianism, but I also want to investigate what forms of utopianism are actually helping us in solving the problems arising from the Anthropocene, and what forms of utopianism lead into a dead end, and in fact, are politically profoundly reactionary and dangerous. And the example of those tech billionaires dreams of escaping from planet Earth, I think, demonstrate quite vividly that there are many forms of utopianism that we should vehemently resist. Another example that I also believe is very problematic is the utopian dream of some so called eco-modernists who believe that continued growth fantasies, in terms of the economy, are compatible with sustainability, usually mediated through some groundbreaking technologies. These are also utopian fantasies and dreams that I would be highly skeptical of. And in the book, I discuss the problems that arise from those eco modernist utopias quite closely. There will be other examples, obviously, but these would be the two demonstrations for me where we can see very quickly that it would be a big mistake to uncritically celebrate utopianism in this current moment. What we rather have to do is we have to hone our critical skills to identify utopias that are useful and important and politically meritorious, and identify those utopias that we need to vehemently resist and call out for their wishful thinking and perhaps for their political reactionary consequences.

Natalie von der Lehr 25:13
So you have been a scholar at SCAS during the autumn of 2024. What was your experience of the mulit- and interdisciplinary research environment here at the Collegium?

Mathias Thaler 25:22
To really think about that question, I think, and I need to explain to anyone listening to this podcast who hasn't been at SCAS, what a wonderful place it is. And I mean it literally as a place. The institute is in a wonderful location. The building is wonderful. The material conditions of work are just exactly how you would imagine and dream about in in one of your fellowships. Now that makes then the intellectual, scholarly collaborations and engagements with other fellows much, much more productive. The staff at SCAS was also was incredibly helpful and supportive. That makes life again very easy. And then to finish, sort of the more superficial summary of what I liked about it, of course, the absolute highlight is the daily lunch with the best possible food imaginable and and that made, in other words, that made it really easy then to focus on why we came to Uppsala, which is to do our research. Most of these centers for Advanced Study, Institute for Advanced Study, have this peculiar feature of selecting one, sometimes two, fellows from each of the disciplines in humanities and social sciences, and that's, of course, on purpose, you want to mix people through and allow them to learn from one another. And on the face of it, that can be challenging, because we don't necessarily share the same language. We don't have the same starting points for our research. And hence there will always be an element of trying to translate one's research to others and learning about other people's translated research as well. But overall, my impression was incredibly positive. You know, not only did I receive really helpful feedback from the other fellows and also from the SCAS members, but I also learned a huge deal, and you are both in the formal settings of the seminars, but also during the lunches and coffees, permanently exposed to the ideas and conversations of very smart people. And that sort of stimulates your own thinking very, very strongly, I think, and it's something that you can only have in this sort of residential scholarships and fellowships. It would be much harder to have that in your in your ordinary, I think, place of work. I did also, I should say, receive very helpful, substantive feedback from other colleagues in Uppsala, working at the university. And in many ways, this was an added benefit that I had not even known about before coming to SCAS, that there are these colleagues whose work I had known before, but who were very open and helpful in engaging with me, and I learned a great deal from discussing my work with them.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:30
Thank you very much for joining me here virtually in the studio and our listeners, of course.

Mathias Thaler 28:36
Thank you so much for the questions, and it's been a real pleasure talking to you.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:41
Thank you very much.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:46
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, I have talked to Mathias Thaler, Professor of Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. He was a fellow at SCAS during the autumn of 2024. This was the fourth episode in our theme "The Anthropocene" and we have talked about his research on utopias and dystopias in science fiction, and what they can offer both to scientific scholars and decision makers. In the previous episodes within this theme, we have heard Gísli Pálsson on the discovery of extinction, Aaron Ellison on decentering ourselves from the Anthropocene, and John Stinchcomb on evolution, adaptation and resilience of plants in the Anthropocene. These are episodes 48, 50 and 56 respectively. SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the Collegium. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us, and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on Podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Mathias Thaler once again for talking to me, and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai