David Shackleton is a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. He is writing a book on modernism and the Anthropocene.
David Shackleton
Contributions
The “bare germs of things to come”: H. G. Wells’s Utopias, Ecological Risk, and the Anthropocene
Recent fiction that portrays future climate-changed worlds might be seen as the foremost cultural expression of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls the “speculative age.” For Beck, such an age began as “risk society” emerged with recognition of the unprecedented dangers that modernity brought about as well as its benefits; this reflexive phase of modernity is characterized by a transition of