Brent Bellamy

Trent University · Department of English Literature

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled tho...

The introduction situates the collection in the Marxian tradition, framing totality thinking as an aspiration that calls on theorists to understand the social whole as it is assembled by capitalism. This means doing away with the false division between socioeconomic critique and what is known as identity politics, instead understanding political ec...

In the collection’s closing essay, Brent Ryan Bellamy argues for the necessity of totality thinking in the fight against climate catastrophe. Demonstrating how two of the most well-recognized and well-respected contributions to the climate thinking fail to grasp the relationship between capitalist and climate crisis, he argues that they are both ex...

The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven development from Earth to the solar system, making the human reality of life lived in space a central concern. The Expanse envisions a colonized solar system, replete with a United-Nations-controlled Terra and Luna, a military dictatorship on Mars, and a densely...

Totality Inside Out breaks new ground by thinking beyond the now-traditional division between Marxian, socioeconomically oriented critique and identity-oriented critique. However divergent their analyses may be in other ways, many anticapitalist critics would agree that movements and programs designed to promote the inclusion of people previously e...

https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/remainders-of-the-american-century-bellamy/ Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. What, and who, might be still standing in the choppy wake of such cataclysmic events provides a through line for Remainde...

In the following sections, we address each of the three major renewable trends in Chinese energy production: hydropower, wind power, and solar power. Each area of energy generation speaks to a historical movement. Hydropower is an entrenched and slowly growing energy source; wind power has been steadily increasing capacity since the late twentieth...

In a reading of Carola Dibbell’s debut novel The Only Ones (2015), this article deploys the term “(non-)labour” in two senses: one is a cheeky description of cloning as the activity of reproducing human beings without the traditional sense of labour as delivery of an infant, and the other draws on Marxist-feminist accounts of care work as the remun...

Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990s utopian feat, the Mars trilogy, represents science and scientists at a planetary remove from Earth. Starting with the colonization of Mars, the trilogy tracks science and technoculture as they are harnessed to remake the red planet in Earth's image. In so doing, it follows the work of science in three distinct contexts....

Book Review

Presents thirty novel terms that do not yet exist in English to envision ways of responding to the environmental challenges of our generation Proceeding from the notion that dominant Western cultures lack the terms and concepts to describe or respond to our environmental crisis, this collaborative volume of short, engaging essays offers ecological...

This paper develops a take on the cultural moment of the long energy crisis (1973–1992) through two popular science-fiction texts. It divides the period in two: ‘oil shock’ and ‘oil glut’. Further periodizing Fredric Jameson’s intervention into the discussion of postmodernism and his successive naming of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late...

The Cambridge History of Science Fiction - edited by Gerry Canavan January 2019

The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven development from Earth to the solar system, making the human reality of life lived in space a central concern. The Expanse envisions a colonized solar system, replete with a United-Nations-controlled Terra and Luna, a military dictatorship on Mars, and a densely...

Full Book Available here: http://www.mcmprime.com/books/marxism-and-energy

This article explores the gender dynamic of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road (2006). It engages the novel's post-apocalyptic survival narrative from three different perspectives within the novel: first, the man, whom the world seems to be set against; second, the boy, who has a fundamental openness to the world; and third, th...

This paper seeks to define petrofiction as a critical genre. The usefulness of the term comes from its ability to name culture’s material connection to fossil fuels and, crucially, to identify the fictive quality of fossil capital. I do not mean to suggest that the carbon-based mode of production is a fiction, but rather that it requires fiction to...

This paper seeks to define petrofiction as a critical genre. The usefulness of the term comes from its ability to name culture’s material connection to fossil fuels and, crucially, to identify the fictive quality of fossil capital. I do not mean to suggest that the carbon-based mode of production is a fiction, but rather that it requires fiction to...

From “Leaving Representation Behind,” an excerpt: Confronted with those who fail to recognize themselves in our conspiracies of negation, we offer neither criticism nor sympathy but only our derision. Every burning dumpster is a refusal to organize, a blow against the teleology of the milieu, a recognition of the radical structure inherent in the a...

Frack, Gene-splice, Hinder, Immolate … We all have dystopias to write. With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground. The book comes to terms with a genre that appears to be, if anything, broadly conceived: while the sheer length of the project suggests that it might have benefited f...

This article intervenes in the newly resurgent nuclear debate, particularly in relation to carbon neutral energy production. Combining the critical study of nuclear energy to science fiction narratives and documentary film, I argue that Michael Madsen's film Into Eternity (2010) reframes debates about our energy commitments: what does it mean to re...

Contagion, like Steven Soderbergh's earlier Traffic (Germany/US 2000), maintains a dynamic - one might even say dialectical - relationship between space and time. Just as Traffic works as a realist mapping of social space, charting the transnational drug trade and the limits to politics over the US-Mexico border, so Contagion does more than just fo...

Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming follows an unnamed protagonist through nine vignettes, each with its own setting, plot, tone, and signs of the apocalypse. The novel begins on New Year's Eve 1999, with the narrator and his parents preparing to leave the city and (his father hopes) avoid the impending Y2K disaster. While it is never ex...

This article investigates the relationship between the concepts of freedom and confinement and the metaphor of "the road" in the works of three significant American cultural figures. A close analysis of the formal elements of the poetry of Walt Whitman, the novels of John Steinbeck, and the songs of Bruce Springsteen reveals a negation at the core...