Gasoline Dreams: Waking Up from Petroculture

Review

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 ReviewGasoline 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-ZAnyone 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 ActivismThis is an impressive statement and picture of what the energy humanities can look like, feel like, and do. ― Grierson Research Group Book Shelf. . .[A] significant part of what Gasoline Dreams offers is an exercise in how to retain the word hope as a meaningful term while clearly understanding the immense scale of the task before us and future generations in making that happen. ― Journal of Energy History

---Joe Ollmann, author/artist of Fictional Father

“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, 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,