Scorched Earth: Discourses of Multiplanetarity, Climate Change, and Martian Terraforming in Finch and Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.

Abstract

This contribution discusses the current surge of Mars colonization narratives both in science and culture, and the ways these narratives are received and circulated in current ecocritical debates on a multiplanetary future of humanity. This analysis in this contribution takes its cue from the representation of the California wildfires of 2020 as an anthropogenic spectacle that is foreboding of a post-apocalyptic future in which Earth becomes Mars-like, and discusses how this discourse is reproduced in the Hollywood movie Finch and Kate Greene’s popular science memoir Once Upon A Time I Lived on Mars. As texts of quasi-science communication, they produce a contact zone between Earth/Mars which serves to legitimize technoliberal fantasies of terraforming Mars into Earth as a solution to climate change. With all paths to all possible futures of human habitation – utopian or dystopian – allegedly leading right through the Red Planet, there is an urgency to critically engage with the idea of planetarity being overwritten by a discourse of multiplanetarity that veils the continuity of extractivist capitalism/colonialism in a narrative of futurity and progress.