Award Date
5-15-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Siddharth Srikanth
Second Committee Member
Steven Sexton
Third Committee Member
John Hay
Fourth Committee Member
William Ramsey
Number of Pages
316
Abstract
Future Orientations: Speculative Fiction, Settler States, and the Anthropocene examines “the future" as both a chronological extension of the present and a literary construct, exploring how future-oriented fiction can reveal new possibilities. The "real" future is bound to the past and present, often seen as merely an extension of our capitalist reality, while the literary future imagines a "radical break" from this continuity. Here, possibility emerges as the distance between these two futures—the real and the imagined—allowing influence to flow between them. This inquiry asks how speculative fictions that foreground the future challenge the established historical order and how they employ unique narrative strategies to navigate the socio-historical conditions of their creation This project contends that speculative fiction from settler states, through its genre-specific flexibility, offers a unique space for addressing the complex issues of the Anthropocene. Unlike literary fiction, which adheres to realism and thus struggles with climate-scale issues, speculative fiction liberates the imagination, sidestepping realism’s limitations, and thereby moves past such failures, engaging with the vast scope of anthropogenic concerns. “Future Orientations” reflects the intersections between literature, imaginaries of the future, and the global systems that have enabled the Anthropocene. The project is grounded in world systems theory engages with Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of the world capitalist economy and Walter Mignolo's exploration of the colonial matrix of power (CMP), a structure that permeates all aspects of the global capitalist system. The project argues that literature, especially speculative fiction, becomes a tool for challenging the CMP by imagining futures that both confront and transcend current historical realities. This project, therefore, explores how speculative fiction engages with the burdens of the past to imagine alternative futures and reveals that the Anthropocene invites a futurist lens on the environmental crisis, questioning how global capitalism shapes our collective imagination and embeds economic and social oppression into our visions of what’s to come.
Keywords
environmental humanities; futurism; global anglophone; speculative fiction
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Environmental Sciences | Philosophy
File Format
File Size
2000 KB
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Tkacz, Carlos Robert, "Future Orientations: Speculative Fiction, Settler States, and the Anthropocene" (2026). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 5638.
https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/5638
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/