Energy Humanities routinely requires readers and authors to draw on an interdisciplinary and intersectional field, which is something the contributors to Oil Fictions amply demonstrate. This collection, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, engages cultural responses to petroleum in postcolonial states. It begins with a 2018 essay by Amitav Ghosh wherein he revisits the term petrofiction which he originated in a 1992 review essay about Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984). In Ghosh’s essay for this collection, he dates the beginning of the literary oil encounter to “quite precisely” September 11, 2001 (20). The essays do not bear this out, and readers would be justified in finding other departure points for this encounter. Oil Fictions concludes with an afterword by Imre Szeman whose 2017 essay “Conjectures on World Energy Literature” is also in the collection. In explaining the shift from petrofiction to oil fiction, the editors refer to Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence, as in the “extractivist economies that thrive on the off-siting of violence” (3).

In my reading of Ballard's short story 'Dream Cargoes', I find a post-growth imaginary that focuses on a profound species-wide change of pace in the context of future nano- and biotech waste. I compare this to Tom Wolfe's heady account of the Merry Pranksters set during the Great Acceleration of the 1960s and 1970s. While Wolfe captured multiple fragmented points of view located in scattered time frames in his account of the Pranksters, Ballard is suggesting that time and its specific contemporary associations with extinction, renewability and futurity has become a central concern for humanity at large. I argue that literary representations of toxicity yield insight by awakening the reader to the ultimate limits of consumer culture. Thus, this essay offers an approach to fictions such as Ballard's and Wolfe's seeing them as essential resources for assessing toxicity in our lives as a source of insight as well as motivation to look for alternatives to petroculture.

(2018). N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 250 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44774-2 (cloth); 978-0-226-44788-9 (paper); 978-0-226-44791-9 (e-book) Studia Neophilologica: Vol. 90, No. 2, pp. 273-274.

Goodbye Crude World : The Aesthetics of Environmental Catastrophe in Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things and Edward Burtynsky's Oil Photographs