This chapter explores the deep connections between speculative fiction and the Anthropocene, arguing that their histories and futures are mutually constitutive. While the concept of the Anthropocene gained prominence in the early 2000s, speculative fiction has long engaged with planetary-scale ecological imaginaries, from proto-science fiction shaped by colonial expansion to twentieth-century narratives responding to nuclear threat and environmental crisis. The chapter traces how speculative genres – science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the gothic – have mediated Anthropocene consciousness through extrapolation, allegory, and affect, encompassing dystopian, apocalyptic, and utopian visions. It examines the emergence of climate fiction (“cli-fi”), tensions around genre boundaries and literary prestige, and the emergence of counterhegemonic narratives that foreground racial capitalism, colonial histories, and Indigenous futurisms. Recent trends such as hopepunk, solarpunk, and visionary fiction signal a shift from despair toward ecological and social resilience, reflecting broader discursive moves toward climate optimism. Ultimately, the chapter contends that speculative fiction is not merely a response to the Anthropocene but a constitutive force in shaping its cultural imagination, and that this reciprocal relationship will persist as both evolve.

This chapter explores the category of the “EcoGothic” that has emerged out of the attempt by Gothic Studies to confront the reality of the climate crisis and ideas of the Anthropocene. The Gothic is often presented as a privileged mode, given its interest in affective states of fear and horror and its ability to operate at different scales from domestic realism. It can evoke apocalypse and planetary transformations, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Ruskin’s late lectures on storm clouds. The chapter proposes the EcoGothic be considered less as a set of objects or texts than a method of apprehension of many kinds of Victorian cultural objects. Authors discussed include Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, M. P. Shiel, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and others.

The haunted house in contemporary Gothic literature and film serves as a means of conceptualising the current environmental crisis and troubled relationships with the humanity-supporting ecosystems that this brings. The ‘bad oikos’ – a haunted house whose haunting derives from the ‘malign sentience’ of a living house – confronts audiences with both nonhuman agency and the human entanglement with it, and so demands that we extract ourselves from what Amitav Ghosh has termed ‘modes of concealment’ regarding climate change and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. This chapter examines the development and recent popularity of the bad oikos, exploring its origins in 1970s debates over ecofeminism and fossil fuels in texts such as Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978), and then sketching its contemporary contours in a recent spate of texts from Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) through Netflix’s hit show The Haunting of Hill House (2018) to It! (2017) and the surreal YouTube animated series Ghost House (2018–). Investigating the specific anxieties that impel these new versions of the bad oikos, the chapter considers the links that such texts forge between between large-scale environmental degradation, child abuse and identity-shifting transcorporeality.

While land improvement is a commonplace theme in Scott’s writing, this chapter looks at counternarratives in which he foregrounds negative environmental impact. Literary forms that are discussed include elegy and gothic. Theories used include ecogothic and ecophobia. Species loss is shown to memorialize the untimeliness of war deaths. Case studies look at environments in which evidence of cruelty, including violence against the land, refuses to be buried or, conversely, remains manifest in the form of depletion and absence. Scott’s most disturbing fiction often features trees and other plants that have been mutilated, grow unusually and in strange places, or do not grow at all. The effect is a disruption of places more usually understood to be reliable, familiar or homely. The chapter demonstrates how Scott shows aesthetics commonplace to Romantic thought to be destabilized by what grows or fails to grow, creating uneasy and uncanny ecologies.