Everything is sad wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience
projected onto the world or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the
universe be forever weeping the tears of things? In this series of meditations Dominic Pettman
and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key negative affects - both eternal and emergent -
associated with climate change environmental destruction and cosmic solitude. In so doing
they unearth something so obvious that it has gone largely unnoticed: the question of how we
should feel about climate change. Between the information gathered by planetary sensors and the
simple act of breathing the air new unsettling moods are produced for which we currently lack
an adequate language. Should we feel grief over the loss of our planet? Or is the strange
feeling of witnessing mass extinction an indicator that the planet was never ours to begin
with? Sad Planets explores this relationship between our all-too-human melancholia and a more
impersonal sorrow nestled in the heart of the cosmic elements. Spanning a wide range of topics
- from the history of cosmology to the existential threat of climate change - this book is a
reckoning with the limits of human existence and comprehension. As Pettman and Thacker observe
never before have we known so much about the planet and the cosmos and yet never before have
we felt so estranged from that same planet to say nothing of the stars beyond.
