Plants in Science Fiction
Page 1
New Dimensions in Science Fiction
Plants in Science Fiction
New Dimensions in Science Fiction
Series Editors
Professor Pawel Frelik
University of Warsaw
Professor Patrick B. Sharp
California State University, Los Angeles
Editorial Board
Grace Dillon
Portland State University
Tanya Krzywinska
Falmouth University
Isiah Lavender III
University of Georgia
Roger Luckhurst
Birkbeck University of London
John Rieder
University of Hawai‘i
Plants in Science Fiction
Speculative Vegetation
Edited by
Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins and Jerry Määttä
© The Contributors, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.
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British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-559-8
eISBN 978-1-78683-561-1
The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: Olaf Holland / Alamy Stock Photo
Series Editors’ Preface
Science fiction (SF) is a global storytelling form of techno-scientific modernity which conveys distinct experiences with science, technology and society to a wide range of readers across centuries, continents and cultures. The New Dimensions in Science Fiction series aims to capture the dynamic, worldwide and media-spanning dimensions of SF storytelling and criticism by providing a venue for scholars from multiple disciplines to explore their ideas on the relations of science and society as expressed in SF.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributor Biographies
Introduction
Katherine E. Bishop
Part 1: Abjection
1 Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale
Jessica George
2 ‘Bloody unnatural brutes’: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids
Jerry Määttä
3 Botanical Tentacles and the Chthulucene
Shelley Saguaro
Part 2: Affinity
4 Between the Living and the Dead: Vegetal Afterlives in Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads
Brittany Roberts
5 Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction
T. S. Miller
6 Alternative Reproduction: Plant-time and Human/Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook
Part 3: Accord
7 Sunlight as a Photosynthetic Information Technology: Becoming Plant in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume
Yogi Hale Hendlin
8 The Question of the Vegetal, the Animal, the Archive in Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz
Graham J. Murphy
9 Queer Ingestions: Weird and Sporous Bodies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction
Alison Sperling
10 The Botanical Ekphrastic and Ecological Relocation
Katherine E. Bishop
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
There are a host of people and entities, yes, even including plants if you’re holding a book with paper pages, to thank for helping to bring this book to, ahem, fruition. The errors, of course, are our own.
First and foremost, many thanks to Paweł Frelik, one of the editors of the series of which this is part, whose encouragement helped nudge this book into being. Our gratitude also goes out to his co-editor, Patrick Sharp, who is ever a font of useful knowledge, as well as to our peer reviewers and editors at the University of Wales Press, especially Sarah Lewis, who is indefatigable, kind, and has great taste in books. Second, thanks to the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), where our editorial triumvirate came into being and which has been warmly receptive to plant-centric papers over the years. Particular thanks to Andy Sawyer, Glyn Morgan, and the other Liverpudlians for hosting us in Liverpool, England, home of the John Wyndham Archive, where Jerry Määttä’s own contribution was born and bred. To the contributors of this volume, we salute you; we appreciate your joining us on this (when we started it) unique venture. Thanks, too, to J. J. Jacobson, who generously opened the Eaton Collection at University of California, Riverside to us for our research and assisted in its early stages. The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) also deserves a round of applause for its support of plant panels; so, too, do the participants and participating audience members of the Plants in Science Fiction roundtable composed of Alison Sperling, Brittany Roberts, Steven Shaviro and Graham Murphy that Katherine Bishop led in 2018.
So many others helped to make this volume possible. The list begins (but certainly does not end) with Scott Newton, Keren Omry, John Rieder, Sherryl Vint, Steven Shaviro and Brian Attebery, who provided invaluable feedback throughout the process. To our families who understand (and enable) our long hours spent on this project and incessant chatter about it, thank you; special thanks, too, for inspiring curiosity in us about the world, not least the green around us, to our parents.
We thank No Exit Press, Bantam Press, and Tom Robbins himself for permission to generously quote Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume.
Lastly, but not least, we are grateful to our institutions for providing necessary research and travel funding, which allowed this collection to come together. Thanks to Miyazaki International College, Uppsala University and Inver Hills College for their myriad means of support.
Contributor Biographies
Katherine E. Bishop received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She is an Associate Professor of Literature in the School of International Liberal Arts at Miyazaki International College (Miyazaki, Japan). Her recent publications have appeared in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and American Studies Journal. Her recent research has centred on the transgressive possibilities of plants, from anti-imperialism to aesthetics as well as epistolary literature.
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she offers courses on contemporary ecofiction and the early modern history of environmental ethics. Her article ‘Remaking Eighteenth-Century Ecologies: Arboreal Mobility’ appears in the Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment (2017). With Laura Auricchio and Giulia Pacini she co-edited Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660–1830 (2012), which includes her essay ‘The Vocal Stump: the Politics of Tree-Felling in Swift’s “On cutting down the old thorn at Market Hill”’. She is currentl
y completing a book project, ‘Talking Trees: Silviphilia and Silviculture 1650–1800’.
Jessica George received her Ph.D. from Cardiff University in 2014. Her doctoral research focused on evolutionary theory in the fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft, and she has published on this subject as well as on literary adaptations of myth and contemporary horror TV. She has interests in the Gothic, literature and science in the long nineteenth century, adaptations and transformative works, and contemporary Welsh writing in English. As JL George, she writes weird and speculative fiction and is a Literature Wales bursary recipient for 2019.
Yogi Hale Hendlin is an environmental philosopher working at the intersection of political theory, biosemiotics and public health. Hendlin is an Assistant Professor in the Erasmus School of Philosophy and core faculty of the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, as well as a Research Associate in the Environmental Health Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. As a plant philosopher, Hendlin has received an Austrian National Science Foundation (FWF) grant, and specialises in interspecies communication, using plants’ communicative capacities as a basis for ecological justice. Hendlin is an Associate Editor for the journal of Biosemiotics, co-organised the 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering at UC Berkeley, and is co-editor of the forthcoming book Food as Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective.
David Higgins, Ph.D. is the Speculative Fiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches English at Inver Hills College in Minnesota, and his research examines imperial fantasies in post-war American culture. David’s article ‘Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction’ won the 2012 SFRA Pioneer Award for excellence in scholarship. He has published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa and Extrapolation, and his work has appeared in edited volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction.
Jerry Määttä, Ph.D. is Associate Professor (Docent) at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden. His research interests include sociology of literature, ecocriticism, and Swedish and Anglophone science fiction. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the launch and reception of modern science fiction in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s, and since then he has primarily published on Anglophone post-apocalyptic narratives and literary prizes and awards. He is on the advisory board for Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.
Timothy S. Miller received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame, and he has taught both medieval English literature and contemporary science fiction at Sarah Lawrence College and Mercy College. He has published extensively on medieval literature as well as the relationship between genre science fiction and mainstream literary fiction, and his current work in progress explores representations of plants and plant being in later medieval literature and culture.
Graham J. Murphy is a Professor with the School of English and Liberal Studies (Faculty of Business) at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). He has co-edited Cyberpunk and Visual Culture and Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, co-authored Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion, and appears in such venues as The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: Bridging the Solitudes, More Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, Dis-orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, and a host of other publications. His most recent projects are the co-edited collection The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (early 2020) and a handful of other articles in various stages of development. He is an Assistant Editor for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and sits on the Editorial Board of both Science Fiction Studies and Extrapolation.
Brittany Roberts is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Languages at University of California, Riverside, where she researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian and Anglophone speculative fiction, especially the genres of horror, science fiction, and weird fiction. She is currently writing her dissertation, which undertakes a comparative analysis of post-war Russian and Anglophone horror literature and cinema focusing on depictions of humans, animals, the environment, and the ecological and metaphysical dynamics that link them. Brittany has published an article in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and has written book chapters for the forthcoming collections Ecohorror and The Spaces and Places of Horror. She is especially interested in how horror disrupts the human–nonhuman binary and in how speculative fiction reconsiders, challenges and reconceives our relations with other species.
Shelley Saguaro is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Gloucestershire. She is the author of Garden Plots: The Politics and Poetics of Gardens (2006) and has contributed several articles to Green Letters. These include ‘“Something that would stand for the conception”: The Inseminating World in the Last Writings of Virginia Woolf’ (2013) and ‘“The Republic of Arborea”: Trees and the Perfect Society’ (2013) in the Utopias and the Environment Special Issue. Among other publications focusing on trees and plants are ‘Telling Trees, Eucalyptus, “Anon” and the Growth of Co-evolutionary Histories’, in Mosaic (2009) and ‘Tolkien and Trees’ (with D. C. Thacker) in J. R. R. Tolkien (2013). Her current research focuses on ‘the botanical tentacular’ in science fiction and in ‘abcanny’ fiction.
Introduction
Katherine E. Bishop
We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone1
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Plants play key roles in human stories and cultures, from the dryads of Greek mythology, the Tree of Mercy sprung from the biblical Adam’s corpse, Green Man iconography and Odin’s Yggdrasil to fantastic stories of lamb plants and laughing human-faced Jinmenju. Floriography, or sending messages through flowers, has long buzzed through love letters from the Song of Solomon to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), eighteenth-century Turkish courts and nineteenth-century British drawing rooms. Then there were the numerous stories of monster plants and other botanical wonders that followed in the wake of Charles Darwin’s work on plants in the 1870s, still influencing horror fiction to this day. On a tamer note, tulips famously captured the attention (and wallets) of those who could afford them in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, and orchids and ferns particularly satisfied species-hunting Victorians just as air plants have become a byword for a certain breed of millennials. Plants are everywhere, if one just thinks to look.
Given their pervasiveness in our histories and imaginaries, it should be little surprise that plants run rife in science fiction (sf) novels, films, TV series, video games and graphic fictions.2 Who doesn’t know Audrey II’s cry of ‘Feed me, Seymour’ from the 1986 remake of Little Shop of Horrors, Farscape’s photogasmic-prone Delvians (1999–2003) or at least Groot, from Guardians of the Galaxy and beyond (1960–)? Others might think of the Plants from the PopCap Games hit, Plants vs. Zombies (2009), the home tree in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) or the many alien plants, ecosystems and pod people collected in the stories in Improbable Botany (2018), edited by Gary Dalkin. John Wyndham’s flesh-eating monster plants in his post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids, the sentient flora in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962), the gene-hacked crops of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), the invasive trees and mechaflowers of Warren Ellis’s graphic novel Trees (2014) and the galactic greenhouses of the film Silent Running (1972) represent just a few more that often spring to mind when the subject arises.3 Then there are the hordes of plant–human hybrids populating popular culture, the intriguing combination of self and so-far-from-self inspiring a vast range of possibilities. Numbering among such chimeras are the woman who turned to broccoli in the television series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004), the durian fruit-borne children of Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2008), Octavia Butler’s Oankali’s seeding of the universe in her Lilith’s Brood trilog
y (1987–9), DC Comic’s Poison Ivy (1966–) and the photosynthesising post-apocalyptic humans of Tam Linsey’s Botanicaust (2012). Moving away from the anthropomorphic side of the spectrum to the technocentric, there are the neural network-adaptable trees from Avatar (2009) which allow jacked-in users to communicate with the world and with the dead, as well as the empathic forest planet in Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’ (1971). As the title (borrowed from Andrew Marvell) suggests, the story pits nature against an Ozymandian humankind and finds us, for the most part, lacking, quite contrary to how most humans would see the opposition.
This profusion of plants in popular culture, especially in sf, suggests at least an uneasy acknowledgement that plants have capabilities that we humans neither share nor yet fully comprehend. We tend to think of plants as landscapes and love objects and metaphors and ornaments and lunch – when we think of them at all. When we try to think of plants on their own terms, in terms not dominated by human experience, we encounter a domain that is strange, difficult to describe, alien. The botanist Francis Hallé argues that, ‘plants represent absolute otherness to us’, an otherness plant-philosopher Michael Marder locates in ‘the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity’.4 We see them only enough to unsee them and then focus on the humans and non-human animals acting upon, around and through them in a phenomenon the biologists James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler famously named ‘plant blindness’.5 Too often, plants are there to be looked upon and ignored, used with little effect or affect. Consumed.
Indeed, the first step to seeing vegetal life is perhaps to interrogate how we look at it. In his 2015 poem ‘The Problem of Describing Trees’, Robert Hass writes that ‘There are limits to saying, / In language, what the tree did.’6 We can only see – and thus describe – arboreal subjects in human terms. But acknowledging the nature of these limits can ‘disenchant us’, allowing us to see how human perception inevitably colours our view: we tend to make trees ‘dance’ and ‘whisper’ and ‘shiver’ in our imaginaries, as Hass puts it, when they do nothing of the sort. Hass’s poem shows the folly of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, how anthropocentrically inscribing ourselves upon the world, including the vegetation surrounding us, can constrain our ability to see beyond ourselves.