Plants in Science Fiction
Page 2
One of the greatest boons of sf is the way it allows us to confront that which is alien to us – worlds, thoughts, experiences, desires and lives that are not our own. It helps provide, if not a map for Le Guin’s forests mentioned in the introductory quotation, then, perhaps, a cartographic guide, a way of imagining the unknown. The defamiliarisation often considered to be inherent in sf – which Darko Suvin calls the genre’s capacity for cognitive estrangement – crucially produces an ‘imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’.7 And what alive is more alien to humans than plants? Plants are intriguing life forms that surround us, sustain us and even feed off of us, yet inhabit such different ways of being.
While serious scientific work and speculations alike on plants’ capabilities have increased greatly since the advances by Gustav Fechner, Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose in the nineteenth century, the past decade or so has seen exponential growth in both areas. Specialised studies such as Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life (2006), by František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso and Dieter Volkmann, and Anthony Trewavas’s Plant Behavior and Intelligence (2014), which have come at the topic from more rarefied angles, have been complemented by works aimed at broader audiences, such as Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola’s Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (2015), Daniel Chamovitz’s What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (2013) and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World (2016). Demonstrating the way an increasingly deep interest in plants has continued to build, a few forays into plant studies have even become best-sellers. Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001), for one, was adapted into a documentary by The Public Broadcasting Service in 2009, airing to a wide audience.
Critical plant studies have begun to reach far outside the fields of biology and into areas including philosophy, art and literature. Plant philosophers such as Michael Marder and Matthew Hall have revolutionised the way in which plants are treated in the humanities: Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), Grafts: Writings on Plants (2016) and Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016, with Luce Irigaray), as well as Hall’s Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (2011), have attracted significant attention in interdisciplinary studies. Likewise, Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetal Life (2015) explores connections between biopolitics, knowledge and power, providing a history of plants (or the absence thereof) in canonical philosophical thinking.
The distinctions between the familiar and the unfamiliar, or between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, abstracted, exaggerated or subtly held aslant as they may be, have real-world implications, including the ways that power is distributed from the micro- to the macro- or global scale. Closely considering the distribution of power across species, environmentally forward schools of thought argue, can, in turn, encourage sustainable relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world, including plants. As Anna Tsing shows in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), the way we think about vegetation is not simply central to the way we think about ourselves or even humanity; the way we think about vegetation may also be key to our continued existence. More and more, this is being recognised across disciplines, from art, as in Botanical Speculations: Plants in Contemporary Art (2018), edited by Giovanni Aloi, to wider media, as in Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (2013), edited by Randy Laist, Elizabeth Chang’s Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century (2019) and Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s edited collection Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (2016).8
A natural offshoot, then, of the rise of both science and fiction related to vegetal potentialities, the collected essays in Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation further narrow our purview, allowing us to speculate further on what – or who – plant life may be, while exploring how we understand ourselves in relation to the mute(?) sentient(?) world of flora. Both collectively and individually, these original essays argue that plant life in sf transforms our attitudes towards morality, politics, economics and cultural life at large, questioning and shifting many traditional parameters. They ask how plant-based characters or foci shift our understandings of institutions, nations, borders and boundaries, erecting – and dismantling – new visions of utopian and dystopian futures. Covering works dealing with various types of plants in sf (i.e. monstrous, partuitive, seductive, posthuman), ranging temporally from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, and geographically from the United States to Europe, Russia and Korea, the authors featured here explore the place where humans and plants meet, contemplating and challenging the widely held assumption that plants constitute the ultimate form of non-human life. A common thread throughout most of the essays is moving past this reflexive sense of difference to explore commonalities, hybridities and mutual forms of growth. Reflecting these shared concerns, then, this volume is divided into three sections that traverse the route from alienation to understanding: Abjection; Affinity; and Accord.
In the first section, Abjection, Jessica George, Jerry Määttä and Shelley Saguaro approach the traditionally held divide between plants and humans, broaching historical considerations of monstrous plant life as threats to commonly held conceptions of human superiority and anxieties about disturbing the ‘natural order’, be it taxonomic or social. In ‘Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale’, Jessica George argues that, in their focus upon evolutionary degeneration, non-human life and human insignificance, authors such as Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood returned repeatedly to a concern with the nature and status of ‘the human’, finally using vegetation to question human pre-eminence. Connecting abjections of nature and subaltern states, Jerry Määttä in ‘“Bloody unnatural brutes”: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids’ focuses on the symbolic possibilities of Wyndham’s triffids, and their relation to the novel’s contemporary colonial context, showing parallels between the treatment of plants and humans within the exploitative economic systems of colonialism. The triffids’ horror comes less from their absolute strangeness, Määttä finds, and more from horrors closer to home. Next, Shelley Saguaro, in ‘Tentacular Botanicals and the Chthulucene’, abuts The Day of the Triffids with two other seminal tales of botanical monstrosities, H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and John Boyd’s The Pollinators of Eden (1969), to show how the vegetal reconfigures a classical horror-bound configuration of tentacles into more generative possibilities. All three of these chapters challenge the easy division between human and non-human worlds, questioning the chasm long held between taxonomic categories.
In Affinity, the second section, laughter, sex and parturition entangle physicality and communication, affect and instinct, pushing ever closer towards common ground. Brittany Roberts, T. S. Miller and Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook delve into human–plant similarities, moving from base functions to higher processes: from death to affect, desire and strange births. In ‘Between the Living and the Dead: Vegetal Afterlives in Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads’, Brittany Roberts probes into possible ramifications for human–plant hybridity, and reveals how Iufit and Maslov deconstruct Soviet scientific discourses around human perfection and superiority, particularly the early twentieth-century trope of the ‘New Soviet Man’. Roberts argues that through Necrorealism, Iufit and Maslov find ecological kinship among humans and plants in life through the cycle between life and death, bridging vegetal life and Homo sapiens. In ‘Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction’, T. S. Miller moves to another form of negotiation, that of sexuality, and juxtaposes the alternating denial of and succumbing to desire in Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1
791), Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms (1926) and John Boyd’s The Pollinators of Eden (1969). Miller finds that the convergence of human sexuality and plant sexualities holds both promise and threat. Fittingly, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook pushes past the desire on which Miller focuses to its common outcome: fruition. Looking to Robert Holdstock’s novel Lavondyss (1988) as well as works by Han Kang in ‘Alternative Reproduction: Plant-Time and Human/Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han’, Cook considers how these texts embody the radical possibilities of posthuman reproduction, focusing on the ways temporality is embodied in natural and preternatural impregnation and gestation. Thus, in Affinity, the authors examine not just human–plant dynamics but also qualities often thought of as solely human from a vegetal perspective.
In the final section, Accord, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Graham J. Murphy, Alison Sperling and Katherine E. Bishop illuminate deep rhizomatic kinship networks, tracing the hyphen in human–plant relations inset by the previous sections. Yogi Hale Hendlin focuses on scent in ‘Sunlight as a Photosynthetic Information Technology: Becoming Plant in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume’. Dissolving the modernist divorce between emotion and reason, body and mind, the lesson from plants in Jitterbug Perfume (1984) indicates that the fear arising from separation is overcome through connecting with our plurality as photosynthetic beings, much like the rhizomatic and asymmetric growth of plants. Hendlin investigates what it means for humans to access our plant aspect, reassessing the world through scent, as plants do. Graham J. Murphy turns to Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz (1994) for a ‘post-anthropocentric posthumanism’. Peering into the flower city’s archives, in ‘The Question of the Vegetal, the Animal, the Archive in Queen City Jazz’, Murphy argues that rethinking archives allows us to rethink how knowledge and power are stored, dispersed and disseminated, paralleling these ideas to taxonomisations of human, animal and plant. He describes the ‘question of the archive’ as ‘the question of the politics of archiving and archival codeterminations of materiality and meaning’. Alison Sperling’s ‘Queer Ingestions: Weird and Sporous Bodies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction’ considers the transformative work of New Weird fiction, maintaining that the vegetal focus of VanderMeer’s fictions infects the air of its writers and readers, opening them to otherwise uncanny impossibilities. Finally, Katherine E. Bishop’s ‘The Botanical Ekphrastic and Ecological Relocation’ considers the stakes for the aesthetic confrontations with plants forged by literary ekphrasis and the concomitant vegetal contact zones in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ (1919), Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Diary of the Rose’ (1974) and William Gibson’s ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’ (1977). Together, these essays speculate upon what it means to be vegetal as well as human, exploring the differences and similarities we often take for granted and emerging at more common ground than commonly thought possible.
These essays gesture at wide themes and indicate paths for future studies of plants in speculative fiction. They are, however, limited. Few of the texts covered in this volume are from non-Western perspectives, despite the universality of botanical fiction and its relevance to speculative fiction around the world; we encourage you to look beyond the confines of authorship, region, language, genre and form included here. None of these submissions contend with humour, poetry, video games, art per se or digital texts. None concentrate on terraforming, plants in space or plant technology. Much more can and should be said about ways of knowing, communicating and interacting. We look forward to what future scholars of plants in science fiction will add to our store of knowledge as we continue to explore rather literalised versions of Le Guin’s ‘forests in our minds’, finding our way together.
PART 1
Abjection
1 Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale
Jessica George
Despite a recent surge of critical interest in the weird, and particularly in the fiction of the American short story writer H. P. Lovecraft, the genre (if that is what it is) eludes definition. The Lovecraft critic S. T. Joshi has wondered if ‘the weird tale’ exists as a genre only because ‘critics and publishers have deemed it so by fiat’, and genre theory often foregrounds the ways in which genres are formalised by communities of practice, rather than simply recognised.1 In the words of John Rieder, genre is ‘messily bound to time and place’ through active interventions of naming and categorising.2 Genres are socially and historically situated constellations rather than fixed categories: as Amy J. Devitt argues, genre is ‘a dynamic concept created through the interaction of writers, readers, past texts, and contexts’.3 Such a conception of genre allows us to identify a loose canon of weird texts constituted as such by writers, editors, scholars and fans. There are, of course, commonly held reference points for the weird, such as Lovecraft (1890–1937) and the writers he included in his personal, rather idiosyncratic, weird canon. Arthur Machen (1863–1947) and Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), whose work I will also consider here, both appear in Lovecraft’s 1927 study, Supernatural Horror in Literature, where he defines ‘the true weird tale’ against Gothic tropes derided as formulaic: ‘secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’.4 Although not consciously writing in a weird tradition, both Machen and Blackwood continue to be identified as writers of weird fiction because of their inclusion in influential studies such as Joshi’s The Weird Tale (1990).
Still, we must, as Roger Luckhurst suggests, ‘acknowledge the difficulty and elusiveness of the weird, a genre that dissolves generic glue, a category that defies categorization’.5 A more useful way of reading the weird tale may be a modal approach: mode, in contrast to genre, ‘implies not a kind but a method, a way of getting something done’,6 or ‘an inflection or tone’.7 If, as Veronica Hollinger writes, the science fictional mode is ‘a way of thinking and speaking about contemporary reality … integrated with other discourses about late-capitalist global technoculture’, what exactly do we think and speak about when using a weird modality?8
Lovecraft named as essential to the weird a sense of ‘dread of outer, unknown forces’ and of the ‘suspension or defeat of … fixed laws of Nature’.9 A similar definition is offered by Mark Fisher – who also views the weird as mode rather than as genre – in The Weird and the Eerie (2016). Something that is weird, Fisher argues, ‘is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist’, yet its very existence also challenges our taken-for-granted knowledge of the world.10 The weird, in his view, is ‘a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete’.11 Its inflection is one of strangeness, of defamiliarisation. It is a way of thinking about the possibility that reality is not what we thought it was.
I emphasise the weird as a mode of thinking about the world in order to foreground its treatment of anxieties concerning the status of the human, particularly those generated by evolutionary theory during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Scholarship on the weird tale has been strongly influenced by the largely biographical criticism of Joshi and, more recently, by Graham Harman’s notion of ‘weird realism’ – the idea that a gap exists between the reality of an object and our ability to access it through the qualities we perceive. Such gaps, Harman argues, can be made visible by the speculative imaginings of weird fiction. Both the cosmic pessimism identified by Joshi and the ontological insights offered by Harman can yield productive readings of weird fiction, but these approaches have tended to elide how the classic weird tale returns obsessively to its concern with the nature and status of the human. Its challenge to anthropocentrism (never fully realised) both confronts and reinscribes attitudes concerning race and species that are endemic to Euro-American imperialism. This is particularly obvious in the portrayals of semi-human monsters and human transformations found in so many classic weird tales, but it can also be seen in the various ways that plants weave their way into weird fiction, creeping across the edges of speci
es boundaries and uprooting comfortable conceptions of anthropocentrism. This chapter examines the role of plants in stories by Blackwood, Machen and Lovecraft, exploring the ways they weirdly destabilise anthropocentrism in the wake of evolutionary theory and anxieties around common descent, hybridity and degeneration. I argue that this is where value may be found in weird representations of plant alterity: such representations offer the possibility of resistance to the backgrounding and instrumentalisation of nonhuman life. Since the weird tale, however, foregrounds anxieties concerning the nature and status of the human – and in particular that of the white, educated, European or Anglo-American human – it can never quite, as Fisher claims, take ‘the perspective of the outside’.12 The demolishing of anthropocentrism can only function as a source of horror from a human point of view – and it is usually a very particular, very Western point of view that is disoriented by the weirdness of plant alterity.
Plant Alterity
Dawn Keetley argues that plant horror is informed by the idea that plants ‘are the utterly and ineffably strange, embodying an absolute alterity’.13 Humans may (to some degree) acknowledge our relationship to animals, but the possibility of doing the same with plants has long been ‘foreclosed’ to us.14 Michael Marder’s work emphasises the inaccessibility of the plant to human knowledge: ‘The life of plants’, he writes, is ‘obscure, because it ineluctably withdraws, flees from sight and from rigorous interpretations.’15 This withdrawal from interpretation also evokes the inaccessibility of the object in Harman’s weird realism, wherein the gap between the reality of an object and human perceptions of it, and between the totality of an object and its qualities, renders ‘[r]eality itself … weird’.16 The ‘weird’ in weird fiction stems from how it recognises this resistance of objects to human attempts to know them. Plants, occupying their marginalised zone, make visible, if not comprehensible, the Other which resists.