Scholars have long conceptualized the night—its dreams, nocturnal animals, light/dark polarities, and more features—as vital to science fiction and other speculative genres. In this essay, I turn attention to how speculative writing is engaging with the vast environmental changes that Earth’s nights are undergoing, from lighting proliferation to rapidly warming temperatures. Australian author Robbie Arnott’s novel The Rain Heron (2020) offers a science-fictional world in which night has been multiply transformed beyond normative conceptions, from a reconfigured diel cycle to a living creature that embodies nocturnal elements such as atmospheric lights and falling temperatures. Through these speculative engagements, the novel draws attention to night’s often-unseen ecological importance, as well as to its entanglement in militarism, resource extraction, and climate change. Rather than simply conceiving of night as a resource for imagination, Arnott builds a form of contact between night and sf that includes recognition of nighttime vulnerability and upheaval.
Teresa Shewry (Sun,) studied this question.