Gasoline Dreams: Waking Up from Petroculture. By Simon Orpana

Abstract

Simon Orpana’s graphic novel Gasoline Dreams is a clarion alarm to wake anyone who uses gasoline and its machines, and we all do. It enhances the growing field of popular, satirical approaches to climate change, such as the choose-your-own-adventure e-narrative Survive the Century (survivethecentury.net). Those already literate in petroculture theory will gain a graphic dimension to how our evolved nature/culture ontologies have been hijacked by the fossil fuel regime, and how it has seeped from derricks and refineries into the ways we relate to time and space, each other, consumerism, and the natural world—over which we gain despotic power with our petrochemical wands. For those new to the field, including undergraduates, the book will be a critical bootstrap to petroculture framed by Orpana’s dystopian and mythological illustrations. He leads us through critical theory by Imre Szeman, Timothy Mitchell, Patricia Yaeger, and Fredric Jameson, which deepens the bivalence of petrocultural mastery and subjection. The book may indeed result in some dejection for new readers, as the evidence is steep and compelling, and Orpana is more invested in the spectacle of petro-horror than in providing actionable alternatives. A leitmotif is his rendering of alarm clocks and pump gauges as indices of rising CO2 through time; the book’s initial alarm clocks 400 PPM; its final readout is the infinity symbol.