WE ALL know what the word “fuel” means. We must do – the word litters our discourse around climate change, green energy and sustainable development goals. We surely couldn’t spend that much time and effort using a word we didn’t 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’s 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, “have every reason to blur”, is why “genuine ‘future fuels’ never actually come to be, for their time is never any precise moment of political-technical cooperation”.

As I know from personal experience, calling into question the definition of key terms in energy discourse isn’t 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 “the myth of future fuels” 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’s 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’s too much going on to allow for easy summary.

And that’s 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’s greatest flaw.

The fuels catalogued range from the (seemingly) obvious – wood, coal, oil, uranium – through the more fictional-imaginative – the philosopher’s stone, dilithium crystals – to the (seemingly) absurd – 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 – it’s almost always men – to action. Ditto Eros’s arrow.

“Reducing the demand for energy is anathema. Bring hope, say policymakers, or stay at home”

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 “solutions” 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 – it’s too ambiguous, too touchy-feely-thinky, too messy. In other words, it’s too much like the world outside the laboratory walls.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The meaning of fuel”

Eavesdropping

In a small white room, deep inside the Lowry in Manchester, UK, a globe – a black sun, perhaps a metre across – hangs with its equator at about head-height. It is covered with tiny reflective squares, each bearing one of thousands of images of solar eclipses seen from Earth. Two beams of light strike the globe from opposite corners of the room, and eclipse images are reflected and projected in slow, dizzying pinwheel loops and arcs across the walls, the floor and people’s bodies. It’s like a glitterball at a fin de siùcle rave where disco and dark industrial finally get together to dance in the moment of totality.

It is part of Katie Paterson’s Syzygy exhibition. Paterson says she has never been much of a science-fiction fan, but her father read it avidly. Perhaps that’s how she has ended up making art that plays with one of science fiction’s favourite motifs, but does so in a quite contrary fashion, and to a different end.

Science fiction, whether literary or cinematic, has always enjoyed playing with the juxtaposition of the vast and the tiny, the very distant and the extremely intimate. This aesthetic has roots in the 19th-century concept of “the sublime”, which celebrated the capability of the “natural” world to leave a human beholder awestruck by their own scalar insignificance in the context of geological time and dynamics. Later, the technological sublime became associated with feats of mega-engineering, such as dams and railways and steamships, through which it was supposed that mankind – and I retain that gendered noun deliberately – was conquering that which it once held in awe, imposing rationality and order on the magnificent yet feminised chaos of nature.

Infinite space

Katie Paterson works with scales that make the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the pavement: the depths of geological and cosmological time, the breadth of the visible universe, the numbers of dead stars like grains of sand on an unmeasurable beach. The classical Ruskinian sublime was supposed to humble you before the awesome majesty of creation; the technological sublime, meanwhile, seeks to celebrate the power of science to bring nature to heel: the curation of creation, if you will. But despite working at scales of the utmost sublimity, Paterson is somehow doing neither of these things.

“Sublime” probably isn’t the first word you’d think of when walking around Syzygy; “stark” is more likely. The small irregular spaces of the gallery are painted pure white, populated by objects possessing a seeming ordinariness, if not exactly a familiarity. A black piano plays itself , some of its notes waylaid by interference while on a Morse Code trip to the moon and back. A rope of bulbs hangs from the ceiling, each one glowing as brightly as the light we see from the star of the distant constellation it represents.

On the wall, seven classic wall clocks, of the sort that might come from the props department of a film noir studio, show the differing passage of time as experienced on the surface of seven objects in the solar system. The sublime is always in there, somehow, conjured from deep silos of scientific data, before being made into simple things that wouldn’t look out of place in an old Bauhaus catalogue.

Just punctuation

Perhaps the sublime has been sublimated? What’s happening here is a sort of domestication of the cosmic sublime: an illumination and illustration of that sense of scale, which neither makes it monstrous nor claims to have tamed it. It’s less a bringing-to-heel than a bringing-indoors – folding all those impossible distances and sizes into everyday objects in the comparative intimacy of domestic space.

Paterson seems to have no agenda or particular message to impart; even her pieces concerned with glaciers are lacking in preachiness or panic. The point appears to be that, when you spend time working with timescales as long as the lives of glaciers and galaxies, humanity and its follies become little more than a punctuation mark in a book as long as time itself.

That’s a distinctive stance, if a muted one. Perhaps it’s timely, too. We needn’t be terrified of our smallness in the context of an immeasurably vast universe, Paterson’s work suggests, nor strive to build great works by way of compensation for our insignificance. We simply need to get accustomed to having it around.

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Her first permanent public work in the UK, , made from 10,000 tree samples from across the world, will open in Bristol Royal Fort Gardens on 9 May.

See also: The Toxic Sublime: Marc Quinn on our relationship with nature; Illusions, voids and convex ghosts