Simon Orpana, Gasoline Dreams: Waking Up From Petroculture (Fordham University Press 2021)

“But what if we all just stopped?” So asks Simon Orpana, in his graphic novel, Gasoline Dreams, a tour-de force of both petrocultural criticism and eco-socialist political artistry. I mean, where else will you find an image of a skateboarder, suspended high above a half-pipe, deck emblazoned with “I tried to escape petroculture, but all I got was some air!” followed on the next page by an illustrated exegesis of Lazzarato’s autonomia-inspired theorization of the politics of refusal? And that is just one of the hundreds of alternatively arresting and exciting image-text combinations and juxtapositions that inspire both page-turning and page-lingering in this remarkable piece of work. Addressing multiple positionalities, media forms, cultural practices, modes of thinking and storying traditions, the book manages to be respectful and irreverent at the same time. This is an impressive statement and picture of what the energy humanities can look like, feel like, and do. - DB