In this article we present a theoretical framework for addressing education for sustainable development in French lessons using science fiction. It is our belief that sustainability can only be taught in the specific frameworks of a school subject. Due to its speculative nature, science fiction stories invite the reader to suspend belief with regard to motifs (disaster, utopia, robots, extra-terrestrial and mutant beings). The genre particularly lends itself to education for sustainable development as its metaphorical poetics compels the reader to see these motifs as fictional constructs.
We started out from the problem of reconstituting and transferring new content to existing school curricular. Next, we developed a poetics of the science fiction text which departs from established perspectives to construct a new angle on the genre. A central argument in this regard is that the speculation which can be found at the heart of science fiction constitutes a metaphor (after Paul Ricœur). In the last section of the article, we take recourse to a number of science fiction titles for young people, before outlining two ways of working with text at secondary level.