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The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction explores the ways in which the Arctic is imagined and what function it is made to serve in a selection of speculative fictions: non-mimetic works that start from the implied question “What if?” Spanning slightly more than two centuries of speculative fiction, from the starting point in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to contemporary works that engage with the vast ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, analyses demonstrate how Arctic discourses are supported or subverted and how new Arctics are added to the textual tradition. To illuminate wider lines of inquiry informing the way the world is envisioned, humanity’s place and function in it, and more-than-human entanglements, analyses focus on the function of the actual Arctic and how this function impacts and is impacted by speculative elements. With effects of climate change training the global eye on the Arctic, and as debates around future northern cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability intensify, there is a need for a deepened understanding of the discourses that have constructed and are constructing the Arctic. A careful mapping and serious consideration of both past and contemporary speculative visions thus illuminate the role the Arctic has played and may come to play in a diverse set of practices and fields.

I kapitlet undersöks hur Arktis för artonhundratalsförfattare är en plats och en idé som erbjuder ett fritt spelrum för fantasin, men hur detta spelrum också begränsas i takt med att Arktis kartläggs och hur berättelser förläggs i en ihålig planet, under Arktis yta. I det första avsnittet ligger fokus på föreställningar om ett öppet polarhav och fantastiska öar i kortromanen “The Extraordinary and All-Absorbing Journal of Wm. N. Seldon” (1851; anonym författare), Jules Vernes Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1864), Vidar Berges Den hemlighetsfulla nordpolsön (1902) och Robert Ames Bennets Thyra: a Romance of the Polar Pit (1901). Samtliga texter fyller vad som uppfattas som ett tomt Arktis, eller luckor i historien, med eget innehåll. I det andra avsnittet analyseras Mary E. Bradley Lanes Mizora: A Prophecy (1889), och William R. Bradshaws The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892) som exempel på texter där handligen förläggs till utopiska samhällen under jord i den Arktiska periferin. I det tredje avsnittet diskuteras hur författare skapar logiska förklaringar till hur texter om upptäckter i eller under Arktis når en publik.

Migrating from the periphery into the global consciousness, the vast Arctic is central to discussions about anthropogenic climate change. The spatio-temporal scope of environmental changes poses complexities for scientific and cultural debates but also allows for imaginative responses in fiction. Speculative climate fiction is generated by real-world anxieties and aspirations but imaginatively and productively explores the effects of accelerated change. In this article, we apply Stacy Alaimo’s and Donna Haraway’s theoretical concepts, which assert entanglements between humans and others in the more-than-human environment, in our analyses of Laline Paull’s The Ice, Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, and Vicki Jarrett’s Always North, three novels that engage with climate change and its effects in the Arctic. Entanglements find different forms depending on the level of speculation in the works examined, but they all demonstrate the detrimental centrality of the human in past and future paradigms.

In this chapter, we take atopias as a conceptual starting point in examinations of Julie Bertagna’s speculative Young Adult novels Exodus (2002), Zenith (2003), and Aurora (2011), demonstrating how imaginary and unstable spaces through various processes are rendered un-atopic. In speculative or non-mimetic fiction, the reader is presented with alternatives to ordinary reality, yet texts are grounded in already existing situations, relations and circumstances. In the examined novels, contemporary climate change and attendant anxieties are extrapolated in the depiction of a world covered by water: an extended atopic space. The Arctic fills a specific function in the novels because of climate change and Greenland in particular emerges as a possible future home for the surviving humans. The atopic space that the inhospitable and inaccessible Arctic traditionally constitutes, is transformed into space available for new forms of colonization. In earlier examples of speculative fiction set in the Arctic, open water replaces ice in fantasies about conquest or discovery, and there is a large body of fiction connected to flooding caused by climate change. By situating the trilogy in these literary contexts, we demonstrate how both water and the Arctic have been perceived of as unstable, atopic spaces, particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic change.

Via thematic content analysis, this article combines approaches from educational and literary research to explore representations of nature, climate change and sustainability by children in their own reflections and for children in fiction. The primary materials consist of ethnographic studies conducted in Swedish schools in 2011 and 2013, and of close readings of Julie Bertagna's trilogy Exodus (2002), Zenith (2003), and Aurora (2011). Representations by young learners, as well as themes in climate fiction, reflect concerns regarding climate change, a critical awareness of anthropogenic influences, and a conviction that cooperation is essential to promote change. Speculative climate fiction can assist when re-thinking current structures and patterns by letting readers encounter possible scenarios in a safe space, in this way broadening discussions regarding future sustainability. We identify a number of contact points between our materials and suggest how findings point to bright spots when re-thinking the role of literature in education for sustainable development (ESD) and, conversely, the importance of young learners' voices within ESD for literature studies.

This chapter examines three contemporary novels aimed at a young adult audience that move from one example of realistic fiction: Marcus Sedgewick's 2009 Revolver, via a work that uses specificities of place to envision alternative ways of life only incrementally removed from the plausible: Rebecca Stead's 2007 First Light, to a text in which physical laws are radically reconfigured: Sarah Beth Durst's 2009 Ice. At focus is how the function of the Arctic varies with each work's connections to the real world, and how aspects of the Arctic destabilize the characters' possibilities for physical and existential orientation.

The article examines two Lost World novels that depict the discovery of a civilization beneath the North Pole: William R. Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1889). While previous criticism has focused on the imagined lands and the contrasts they provide with which to criticize or negotiate structures in the real world, this article addresses the brief sections in each novel that describe the travelers’ journeys through the Arctic. Siobhan Carroll’s definition of atopic spaces in An Empire of Air and Water (2015) is a point of departure for examining the function of the arctic landscape. “Atopias,” she writes, are “‘real’ natural regions falling within the scope of contemporary human mobility, which, because oftheir intangibility, inhospitality, or inaccessibility, cannot be converted into the locations of affective habitation known as ‘place’” (6). In contrast to the nowhere of the utopia, atopias are reachable but situated in both literal and figurative peripheries, and they are commonly only visited temporarily. The atopic Arctic resists visitors’ attempts to control, structure and colonize, disorients both the visitor andthe outsider’s perceptions and functions in both novels as a space of transition between real and imagined.

The chapter focuses on second journeys — a sub-genre of footsteps travelling — in which a traveler uses a previous travelogue as an explicit map to follow. Affinities with other forms of reiterations such as religious and secular pilgrimages, the Grand Tour, and literary pilgrimages are examined through a focus on issues of nostalgia, oversaturation, and authenticity. Finally, Bea Uusma's The Expedition: My Love Story (2013) is approached as an example of a postmodern, symbiotic second journey. It is argued that it demonstrates a mutualistic form of symbiosis as it re-actualizes the significance of the first journey: the 1897 Swedish Andrée expedition.

Studies have shown a slow but steady change in reading habits among students in Swedish upper secondary schools. The frequency with which they read fiction on a daily basis has decreased and reading comprehension has declined. Consequently, Swedish politicians and school authorities have taken measures to reverse these trends. Fiction reading has traditionally been a part of the Swedish subject, but whereas the course syllabi in the upper secondary school stipulate that fiction be taught, they pay little attention to how. This study examines how teachers describe the process of literary education. In doing so, it suggests that monitoring students is central to teachers’ didactic decisions, and that both teachers and students regard printed books more highly than both audiobooks and e-books. The data was collected using two focus groups interviews with upper secondary school teachers of Swedish, seven female and five male, age 28 to 61. The analysis was grounded in a phenomenographic examination of experience, allowing themes to emerge through iterative coding. The findings show that the teachers’ view on literary education is associated with instrumentality and teacher-centered activities—the discussions circled around practical aspects, with no mention of teaching objectives, approaches, or literary experience.

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and telling the tale of an all-male expedition to Svalbard. The Arctic as depicted in travelogues and fiction has traditionally been embodied and gendered according to heteronormative models of interpretation as a formidable male adversary or a lethal female seductress; constructions that Paver’s fictional expedition members attempt to enforce as representatives of the norm. However, several aspects of the Arctic blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories, and offer resistance to the expedition’s normative assumptions. With a starting point in Sara Ahmed’s discussions about both spatial and existential orientation in Queer Phenomenology (2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist, and how resistive features of the landscape and climate affect his ability to orient himself. Although hoping that the remote Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal, which is brought to a climax by strange events he experiences in the isolated bay where the bulk of the text is set. This article consequently analyzes how the Arctic is initially constructed as a stable place, how geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and how supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world and, from a heteronormative perspective, need to be ‘straightened’ are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic. These queer moments distort perspectives, sometimes in highly productive ways, and highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization.