Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary

(Paperback)

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Fuel is an idiosyncratic, speculative dictionary of fuels, real and imagined, historical and futuristic, hopeless and utopian. Drawing on literature, film, and scientific treatisesmost produced long before "climate change" was in circulationFuel argues for a distinction between energy and fuel as it endeavours to undo the dream that we can simply switch to renewables and all will be golden.

Reviews

"From the first we realize Fuel is not a traditional academic essay, but a fantastic dictionary, full of tall tales, craziness, real history, fake history, anticipations of the future, segues from one fuel form or fantasy to another, and sheer nonsense tied to hard truths. In this sense it's like fuelthere at the beginning and still with us, kicking and screaming, to the bitter end."Allan Stoekl, Pennsylvania State University

"With a nod to dictionary mania of Jules Verne, Fuel maps what starts as the common law right to a small bundle of wood but becomes an ever more dangerous dream of the power of pure fuel-less energy. Air, amber, bitumen . . . coal, cobalt, coke . . . Pinkus brilliantly punctures this gaseous utopian fantasy of an immaterial fuel and gestures toward a present less addicted to future fuels."Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University

"Pinkus totes a toolbox packed with allegory and alchemy, theories and thinkers with which to prod her materials. The fuels catalogued range from the (seemingly) obvious wood, coal, oil, uranium through the more fictional-imaginative the philosophers stone, dilithium crystals to the (seemingly) absurd albatrosses, goats, the arrow of Eros, patriotism."New Scientist

"An illuminating read for those engaging in interdisciplinary work on the concerns of climate change."CHOICE

"A heroic effort to remind us that sustainability is often an illusion caused by our human-sized view of the world."The Manchester Review of Books

"Inventive and engaging."Los Angeles Review of Books

"Pinkuss innovative and eccentric book proves to be the perfect gateway to analyze underrepresented perspectives of the energy world, destabilizing existing narratives about fuels." PoLAR

Author Bio

Karen Pinkus is professor of Italian and comparative literature at Cornell University and chair of the Faculty Advisory Board of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. She has widely written on climate change and the humanities, as well as on literary theory, visual arts, Italian culture, and cinema. Her books include Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minnesota, 1995) and Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence.