Natural Spaces under the Challenge of Dystopian Speculative Fiction

Speculative literature deeply engages with the nature/culture divide and the ecological consequences of the Anthropocene. Although recent scholarship has identified climate fiction and ecofiction as genres that address these issues, futuristic fiction had already explored them long before science fiction emerged. Within this tradition, many works adopt a dystopian approach, depicting communities in decline where the state of the natural environment is a key indicator of social breakdown. Degraded or vanishing landscapes often signal worsening conditions.

This “dysphoric poetics” of landscape manifests in multiple ways. Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera (1846) envisages hygienic urban planning, Verne’s Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum (1879) denounces industrial devastation, and Chousy’s Ignis (1883) illustrates the economic exploitation of natural energies. Farrère’s Les Condamnés à mort (1921) depicts forced urbanisation under social Darwinism, Barjavel’s Ravage (1943) portrays survival after catastrophe outside the city, and Langlais’s L’Île sous cloche (1946) illustrates unintended consequences of eugenic excess. Entropy and anthropisation appear intrinsically connected across these narratives, leaving the landscape as a fragile remnant of unchecked collective ambition.

The central hypothesis is that such representations of altered natural spaces occupy a structural role in dystopian fiction. By depicting hostile or degraded environments, these works deliberately cultivate anxiety to critique, satirise or caricature their sociocultural contexts. This paper offers a cross-sectional analysis of French dystopian novels from the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on their depiction of anthropised landscapes and on solutions for the future discernible from these worst-case scenarios where nature is mistreated and endangered.