A graphic novel that confronts our habits, narratives, and fantasies head-on to help
break our petroleum dependency
What if the biggest barriers to responding to climate change are not technological or governmental but, rather, cultural? In other words, what if we ourselves could help to enact change through a deeper understanding of our petroleum dependency? In a provocative graphic format that draws widely from history, critical theory, and popular culture, Gasoline Dreams explores and challenges the ways fossil fuels have shaped our identities, relationships, and our ability to imagine sustainable, equitable futures.
As our rapidly warming planet is pushed toward ecological collapse, we might often feel helpless or paralyzed by the enormity of the challenges confronting us. However, reflecting upon the cultural dimensions of our predicament helps reveal the great potential for social transformation inherent in the multiplying crises. Author and artist Simon Orpana engages with contemporary scholarship in the emergent field of Energy Humanities to confront the habits, narratives, and fantasies that support our attachment to fossil fuels. By revealing the many ways petroculture repeatedly fails to deliver on its promises of “the good life,” Gasoline Dreams calls us to the difficult work of waking up from the fantasies that inhibit us from working toward a global transition to renewable energy.
Written in an engaging graphic format that makes relevant historical, cultural, and political analyses of global warming and petrol dependency important to a wide audience, Gasoline Dreams refutes the progress narratives that depict contemporary, energy-intensive societies as the inevitable product of human history. By revealing the contingencies, coercions, and compulsions this myth disguises, the book allows us to imagine truly progressive alternatives. Rather than casting climate change as a problem for technological elites to solve, the book confronts the everyday realities that reinforce our dependence on fossil fuels, offering a space of hope and engagement from which concerned people can work to build a more sustainable future.
On the threshold of the single greatest transformation the human species has yet faced, Gasoline Dreams challenges us to start living, working, and dreaming differently to become less culturally dependent on petroleum.

Simon Orpana is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta researching the
rise of the zombie in popular film and television as a response to neoliberal austerity and
finance capitalism. He co-authored Showdown! Making Modern Unions (BTL Books, 2016), a
graphic history of organizing.

Simon Orpana's profile page

Imre Szeman holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and is the cofounder of the Petrocultures Research Group. He is the coauthor of After Oil and the coeditor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.

Imre Szeman's profile page

Mark Simpson is an inspirational speaker and writer committed to raising personal and collective consciousness. Originally qualifying and practicing as a lawyer, Mark is now a yoga and meditation teacher who encourages transformation, healing and awareness. His work invites and supports individual and organisational growth and visionary leadership that is based on compassion, kindness, empowerment and inclusiveness. He is the author of an accompanying collection of poetry entitled Waking World which is soon to be published, and a forthcoming work on the integration and embodiment of heart-based leadership and applied wisdom. He lives in Perth, Western Australia.

Mark Simpson's profile page

Anyone trying to understand how settler states, petroculture, and climate change shape everyday life as well as movements that imagine what the world might look like in a post-oil future needs to read this powerful book by a brilliant theorist, storyteller, and artist.---Shelley Streeby, author of Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism,

His thickly textured line-work, dense paragraphs of hand-written text, and high-octane arguments have the vibe of a Xeroxed anarcho-environmentalist zine from the 1990s.

Publishers Weekly, Comics Book Review

Gasoline Dreams: Waking Up from Petroculture by Simon Orpana (Sept. 7, $15.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8232-9772-6) rallies for a shift away from climate-destroying reliance on fossil fuels, using a graphic narrative to convince readers that happiness in contemporary life doesn’t require gas-guzzling.

Publishers Weekly, Fall Announcements

“This is an important book! We are floundering up to our necks in oil and Simon Orpana explains how we got here, the dire consequences of our dependence on fossil fuel, and posits ways forward to get out of the pool. It’s in-depth, academic and playful and examines petroculture through multiple cultural lenses coupled with visually inventive imagery, creating an incredibly readable book.”---Joe Ollmann, author/artist of Fictional Father,

“When I began reading Gasoline Dreams, I was immediately mesmerized. Our fossil fuels, in all of their smoggy reality, have never been so clearly interwoven with the abstract systems that maintain their hold on our lives. At once personal and in conversation with theories of the Anthropocene, Orpana’s Gasoline Dreams is a landmark work in nonfiction comics. Like Guy Delisle, Ebony Flowers, Sarah Glidden, and Joe Sacco, Simon Orpana uses the comics medium to represent our reality in all of its complexity. Gasoline Dreams transforms the major insights of the environmental humanities into a moving account of how urgent it is to transition from fossil fuels, right now.”---Daniel Worden, author of Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z,

This is an impressive statement and picture of what the energy humanities can look like, feel like, and do.

Grierson Research Group Book Shelf