Introduction: Greening Italian Science Fiction - New Approaches to a Deep-Rooted Genre

In line with science fiction’s intrinsic intermediality and ecocriticism’s fundamental multidisciplinarity, our volume covers a wide variety of topics and media forms that span comics, music, visual art, prose narratives, cinema, and non-fiction. Our hope is that this innovative exploration of how Italian science fiction has addressed environmental concerns and metabolized ecological changes shall inspire further studies. The following chapters adopt theoretical and methodological perspectives including ecocriticism, ecofeminism, animal studies, posthumanism, eco-media studies, and the energy humanities, entering into conversation with the work of key authors like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Giorgio Agamben, Anna Tsing, and Timothy Morton. This collective investigation across disciplines is intended as an intervention in debates such as the predicament of petromodernity and the politics of energy transitions, non-human and new materialist ontologies, the history of utopian and dystopian imaginaries, critiques of anthropocentrism, species thinking and ecomodernism, the articulation of planetary and regional struggles for environmental justice, and the construction of post-depletion futures.