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There is nothing new about predictions that climate change will cause serious social problems in the twenty-first century. However, in recent years, some tendencies in the environmental movement have made an even stronger assertion: the climate-induced collapse of industrial society is highly likely and may have positive consequences. This claim, which I term the collapse thesis, is associated with the deep adaptation movement in Britain and the collapsology movement in France. In this article, I analyse the work of key theorists associated with these movements to outline the core tenets of the societal collapse thesis. Responding to the criticisms directed against the idea of societal collapse, I partially defend the thesis by reading it as a form of science fiction. Following Darko Suvin's notion of cognitive estrangement, it is argued that collapse encourages us to pinpoint the unstable ecological preconditions of everyday life and posit a new utopian world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the 1860s, the tendency of matter toward increasing chaos—or entropy—had become a fundamental tenet of the new science of thermodynamics. But in Victorian Britain, the ramifications of this second law of thermodynamics for a Christian conception of a progressive universe remained subject to heated ideological debate. Historians of thermodynamics have held up French astronomer Camille Flammarion's popular science fiction as comprehensive evidence that this entropic–theological debate was widespread across disciplines, media, and cultures. I show that Flammarion's argument has been misrepresented. Not only did Flammarion not employ entropic heat-death metaphors at all—instead evoking a hot apocalypse—but he interpreted entropy through a distinctive theology, at odds with that of British scientists. A study of Flammarion's theology, concept of entropy, and novels exhibits how investigating influential popular works can dismantle assumptions about the geographic and religious scope of the entropic–theological debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In eighteenth-century France, scientific progress and its spreading met a growing interest among public, an enthusiasm that was to be reflected in literature. Fictional works including scientific knowledge in their narrative made their appearance, paving the ground for a genre promised to a growing success in the following centuries--science fiction. The article presents three eighteenth-century French literary works, each one centered on a different domain of science: Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), Charles-François Tiphaigne's Amilec, or the Seeds of Mankind (Amilec, ou la graine d'hommes, 1753) and François-Félix Nogaret's The Mirror of Current Events, or Beauty to the Highest Bidder (Le miroir des événements actuels, ou la belle au plus offrant, 1790). The first one, an iconic Enlightenment work that promotes critical thinking, relies on discoveries made in astronomy and optics. Tiphaigne de la Roche is far from sharing the fame of Voltaire, but his odd Amilec is noteworthy as it is possibly the very first science-fiction work in which biology is central. Written in the unique atmosphere of the French revolution, Nogaret's work The Mirror of Current Events depicts androids-like interacting with humans. Our purpose is to show that these works were a precursor (proto science fiction) of the science fiction genre in literature, to describe how and what science or technology was depicted in them, and how they influenced the view of Man (humans) in eighteenth-century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]