51动漫

WE ALL know what the word 鈥渇uel鈥� means. We must do 鈥� the word litters our discourse around climate change, green energy and sustainable development goals. We surely couldn鈥檛 spend that much time and effort using a word we didn鈥檛 fully understand?

Academic Karen Pinkus would have it otherwise, and her book Fuel: A speculative dictionary is her attempt to (re)define this crucial term of debate. She is interested in the current futurist rhetoric around fuel, but rather than focusing on today鈥檚 much-hyped energy solutions, she reaches instead for the fiction shelf, bending and stretching the term in order to capture a surprising array of candidates for fuelhood.

It is this sense of potential that particularly exercises Pinkus: whether a substance can be articulated as a potential fuel of the future through narrative means. The ill-defined distinction between fuels and energy, which petroleum companies, among others, 鈥渉ave every reason to blur鈥�, is why 鈥済enuine 鈥榝uture fuels鈥� never actually come to be, for their time is never any precise moment of political-technical cooperation鈥�.

As I know from personal experience, calling into question the definition of key terms in energy discourse isn鈥檛 a popular strategy, and recommending that demand be reduced is anathema. Bring hope, say the policymakers, or stay at home.

The trouble is that hope is inherently speculative: to hope that X will work is to be implicitly uncertain that X will work. And so Pinkus is interested in the persistent metanarrative of 鈥渢he myth of future fuels鈥� that mobilises our collective aspiration to avoid having to address our energy consumption.

If that sounds like a lot of thinking for a fairly thin book, well, that鈥檚 not even the half of it. Pinkus totes a toolbox packed with allegory and alchemy, theories and thinkers with which to prod her materials, and there鈥檚 too much going on to allow for easy summary.

And that鈥檚 without even talking about the formal strategy of Fuel, which is laid out like a dictionary, with the terms to define in alphabetical order. Unlike a dictionary, however, it really does need to be read front to back for the argument to emerge. Even then, the line of argument has to work against the stop-start of the dictionary structure. This charming structural conceit might well also be the book鈥檚 greatest flaw.

The fuels catalogued range from the (seemingly) obvious 鈥� wood, coal, oil, uranium 鈥� through the more fictional-imaginative 鈥� the philosopher鈥檚 stone, dilithium crystals 鈥� to the (seemingly) absurd 鈥� albatrosses, goats, the arrow of Eros, patriotism. The idea of, say, an engine fuelled by patriotism is, outside some rightish political circles, patently preposterous. Nonetheless, patriotism is often portrayed as a motivating force that drives men 鈥� it鈥檚 almost always men 鈥� to action. Ditto Eros鈥檚 arrow.

鈥淩educing the demand for energy is anathema. Bring hope, say policymakers, or stay at home鈥�

Any project that multiplies or makes new distinctions between contested categories is unavoidably a project of complication. As such, I mean no insult to Pinkus when I say thatFuel left me with far more questions than answers, and that enthusiasts for simple statements and clear conclusions should look for enlightenment elsewhere.

But therein lies the rub, because it is precisely that impulse towards simplicity and 鈥渟olutions鈥� that Pinkus would like to squelch. No civil engineer or infrastructure policy wonk is going to make it through the first five pages of Fuel 鈥� it鈥檚 too ambiguous, too touchy-feely-thinky, too messy. In other words, it鈥檚 too much like the world outside the laboratory walls.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he meaning of fuel鈥�