Worlds Away From Here: Snowball Earth and Icy Speculation

• In Event: Confronting Worlds: The Concept of “World” and its Stakes - I

Abstract

World-building is a key tool in speculative fiction. It is the process through which writers craft multidimensional worlds that are believable because they have an internal logic of their own. As STS and multispecies ethnographers have shown, world-building is not just a tool to spin speculative fiction, but a literal process through which nonhumans such as ice, mushrooms, and microbes produce worlds today. This paper explores what it means for sea ice to world and the possibility that nonhumans can speculate worlds otherwise, too (Clark et al. 2018).
In particular, I explore the epistemic spaces that scientific knowledge of sea ice opens up. Sea ice profoundly influences the structure of ecosystems in the Arctic and Antarctic regions of today, giving rise to worlds rich in diverse life-forms and relationships. That said, geological evidence and computer models demonstrate that sea ice has also helped usher in global freeze-overs in Earth’s history that extinguished previous life-forms. Sea ice, in short, is both a world-making and world-destroying entity. What kind of worlding is this, which leads just as equally to an unbecoming as much as a coming-into-being, or “becomings-with”? Sea ice suggests a kind of worlding that does not take life (or death) as its endpoint. Can this be considered “worlding”? I close by considering how speculative fiction as an experimental mode of theorizing (Wolf-Meyer 2019) can help convey the implications of sea ice on world-building and nonhuman forms of speculation.

Author

• Julianne Yip, Mitacs