Fabulating Ecologies: Screening Caution, Citizenry, and the Machinic Apocalypse

Fabulating Ecologies: Screening Caution, Citizenry, and the Machinic Apocalypse undertakes a comprehensive exploration into the world of eco-fabulations within cinematic narratives. The chapters navigate speculative and futuristic possibilities in films, ideating entangled existences within domains that transcend the human experience. With such a framework, the work provokes a reassessment of established paradigms around environment, techno-apocalypse, citizenship, and anthropocentrism, all within the context of a fluid and evolving posthuman thought in contemporary science fiction cinema. Many recent films and media forms associated with the science fiction genre have effectively exhibited premonitions about impending planetary threats, and the ones explored in this book are a small part of a larger lineage of films. This book recognizes such films as “cautionary” forms of media because they create an instinctive feeling of urgency. Cautionary cinema efficiently transmits narratives of foreboding, comprising the capacity to portray both fear and hope, through a combination of disruptive shock and empathetic resonance. The argument for machinocene being a logical supersedence to the Anthropocene is strengthened by the ubiquitous presence of heavy machinery and unrestrained technology in these ecologies that tilt us toward a calamitous vision of the future.