The (Non-)Fictions of Extraction: Connecting Linguistic and Material Constructions in the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin

• In Event: Placing the Tigris and Euphrates in Global Environmental History

Abstract

A foreign firm. A utopian vision. A mythical terrain. Is this the stuff of science fiction or of an engineering plan? Turkish writer Orhan Duru is credited with bringing the concept of science fiction and its Turkish term, bilim kurgu, into the language in the 1970s, at roughly the same time as another genre, the engineering master plan, became a necessary factor in accomplishing massive infrastructure works on Anatolian rivers. Since that time, the two types of world-making—one literary and one infrastructural—have evolved in tandem. Writers have expanded the scope of science fiction in the Turkish language. Engineers have expanded the scope of master plans (the Southeast Anatolia Project [GAP] Master Plan runs to four volumes and nearly 600 pages). Both genres conjure on a fantastical scale. Both evoke imagined pasts, presents, and futures. Both rely on producing believable imaginative constructions that overtly or covertly predict the outcomes and extractions involved in human-driven environmental change. This research connects the production of master plans and other engineering documents with the cultural production of science fiction narratives in a Turkish context, illuminating how each genre expresses the boundaries of its world-making endeavors, imagines material transformation and human-nonhuman relations, and reflects social and historical processes.

Author

• Dale Stahl, University of Colorado Denver