Plants in Science Fiction
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23. Perhaps Dannyboy’s Last Laugh Foundation puts new meaning in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s delightful image that ‘earth laughs in flowers’.
24. Marder, Plant-Thinking.
25. Yogi Hale Hendlin, ‘Multiplicity and Welt’, Sign Systems Studies, 44/94 (2016), 94–110.
26. Yogi Hale Hendlin, ‘I Am a Fake Loop: The Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection’, Biosemiotics, 12/1 (2018), 131–56.
27. Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992); Tyler Bennett, ‘The Semiotic Life Cycle and The Symbolic Species’, Sign Systems Studies, 43/4 (2015), 446–66.
28. Quizzically, Alobar Holoprosencephaly is a birth defect where there is no separation between the left and the right halves of the brain. While from an ableist perspective this is a deformity, from a plant perspective this union of left and right halves, the physical flight from separation, carries other evolutionary connotations. Since Robbins’s story begins with Alobar as a fertility king for a people with a strong collective consciousness and little individuality, the lack of bicameralism in Alobar’s namesake defect may hint at the queer asymmetries of the plant world.
29. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (1990) (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 11.
30. Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 244.
31. C. Bushdid and others, ‘Humans Can Discriminate More than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli’, Science, 343/6177 (2014), pp. 1370–2.
32. Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), p. 73.
33. Ackerman, A Natural History.
34. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 111.
35. Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 9.
36. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second revised edn, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 102.
37. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 104.
38. Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, Studies in Humanism: The Definition of Pragmatism and Humanism, second edn (New York: Macmillan Press, 1912), p. ix.
39. Jay Geller, ‘The Aromatics of Jewish Difference; or, Benjamin’s Allegory of Aura’, in Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (eds), Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 203–56, p. 205.
40. Geller, ‘The Aromatics’, p. 225.
41. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 128.
42. Kant, Anthropology, p. 269.
43. Jeffrey Librett, ‘Aesthetics in Deconstruction: Derrida’s Reception of Kant’s Critique of Judgment’, Philosophical Forum, 43/3 (2012), 327–44, p. 341.
44. Kant, Anthropology, p. 269.
45. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962).
46. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 19.
47. Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 89.
48. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, reissue edn (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 65.
49. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 44.
50. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 224.
51. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 222.
52. Gandhi’s famous response to a Western reporter, inquiring what he thought about Western civilisation: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’
53. The term vegetalista in the Amazon refers to a shaman who predominantly draws her or his power from the healing and (de)stabilising effects of administering plants (rather than other forms of spiritual medicine, such as song).
8. The Question of the Vegetal, the Animal, the Archive in Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz
1. Sherryl Vint, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), pp. 6–7.
2. Monica Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green: The Re-discovery of Plants and Nature’s Wisdom’, in Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano and John Ryan (eds), The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 19–35, p. 19.
3. Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green’, p. 20.
4. Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green’, p. 20.
5. Randy Laist, ‘Introduction’, in Randy Laist (ed.), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9–17, p. 10.
6. Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green’, p. 19.
7. Josh Gabbatiss, ‘Plants Can See, Hear, and Smell – and Respond’, BBC Earth, 10 January 2017, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-and-smell-and-respond (accessed 28 March 2019).
8. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 91.
9. Laist, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
10. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28/2 (Winter 2002), 369–418, p. 402.
11. Kathleen Ann Goonan, Mississippi Blues (New York: Tor, 1997), p. 21.
12. Goonan, Mississippi Blues, p. 21.
13. Goonan, Mississippi Blues, p. 23.
14. Goonan, Mississippi Blues, p. 21.
15. Goonan, Mississippi Blues, pp. 21–2.
16. Verity eventually discovers she carries within her the archived memories of Abe Durancy; therefore, there are sections in the narrative where she accesses these memories and lives Abe Durancy’s life, which also provides Goonan with a handy way to insert flashbacks in a logical fashion. Verity also eventually meets Dennis Durancy, an alternative version of Abe Durancy who is unencumbered by Abe’s emotional trauma.
17. Kathleen Ann Goonan, Queen City Jazz (New York: Tor, 1994), p. 324.
18. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, pp. 371–2.
19. Susan V. H. Castro, ‘Simulating the Informational Substance of Human Reality in Queen City Jazz’, Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics, 3/3 (October 2015), 27–65, p. 34.
20. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 57.
21. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 80.
22. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 181.
23. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 332.
24. Nic Fleming, ‘Earth – Plants Talk to Each Other Using an Internet of Fungus’, BBC Earth, 11 November 2014, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet (accessed 28 March 2019).
25. Goonan, Mississippi Blues, p. 22.
26. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 249.
27. Laist, ‘Introduction’, p. 14.
28. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 255.
29. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 298.
30. Vint, Animal Alterity, pp. 6–7.
31. Castro, ‘Simulating’, 32.
32. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 209.
33. Tom Bristow, ‘“Wild Memory” as an Anthropocene Heuristic: Cultivating Ethical Paradigms for Galleries, Museums, and Seed Banks’, in Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano and John Ryan (eds), The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 81–106, p. 84.
34. Bristow, ‘“Wild Memory”’, p. 84.
35. Bristow, ‘“Wild Memory”’, p. 85.
36. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 277.
37. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 203.
38. Bristow, ‘“Wild Memory”’, p. 85.
39. Castro, ‘Simu
lating’, 42.
40. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 362.
41. Claire Preston, Bee (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 15.
42. Part of the Bees’ addiction to stories, music and art is a direct consequence of Abe Durancy’s devotion to his mother. As a dutiful son, an obsessed Abe prematurely banked his mother, India, to save her from a terminal disease, but her heart stopped mid-transfer. The India uploaded into Cincinnati’s organic archive is therefore a vindictive, petty and wholly immature version of Abe’s mother that Verity must overcome to free the archived (and trapped) Cincinnatians.
43. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 277.
44. Juan Antonio Ramírez, The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudí to Le Corbusier, trans. Alexander Tulloch (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 24.
45. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 318.
46. Graham J. Murphy, ‘Archivization and the Archive-as-Utopia in H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon and “The Empire of the Ants”’, Science Fiction Studies, 42/1 (March 2015), 1–19.
47. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), p. 3.
48. Richards, Imperial Archive, p. 11.
49. Richards, Imperial Archive, p. 44.
50. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 18.
51. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 18.
52. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 18.
53. Vint, Animal Alterity, pp. 9–10.
54. Ursula K. Heise, ‘From Extinction to Electronics: Dead Frogs, Live Dinosaurs, and Electric Sheep’, in Cary Wolfe (ed.), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 59–81, p. 76.
55. Bristow, ‘“Wild Memory”’, p. 85.
56. Bristow, ‘“Wild Memory”’, p. 85.
57. Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green’, p. 20.
58. Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green’, p. 22.
59. Marta Zaraska, ‘Can Plants Hear?’, Scientific American, 17 May 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-plants-hear/ (accessed 28 March 2019).
60. Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green’, pp. 21–2.
61. Gagliano, ‘Seeing Green’, p. 21.
62. Murphy, ‘Archivization’, 1–2.
63. Stephen Dougherty, ‘Embodiment and Technicity in Geoff Ryman’s Air’, Science Fiction Studies, 39/1 (March 2012), 40–59, p. 43.
64. Jeffrey Fisher, ‘The Postmodern Paradiso: Dante, Cyberpunk, and the Technosophy of Cyberspace’, in David Porter (ed.), Internet Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 111–28, p. 112.
65. Fisher, ‘Postmodern Paradiso’, p. 120.
66. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 405.
67. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 27.
68. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 27.
69. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 27.
70. As Claire Preston writes, dancing is central to bee behaviour and it is ‘well established that bees have a language of dance by which they share precise information about the location of pollen and nectar. These dances … appear to convey ideas of distance and direction of food sources. Swarming bees (those looking for a new nest site with their queen) are also guided by such dancing by scout bees who locate and report on the new site.’ See Preston, Bee, p. 29.
71. Goonan, Queen City Jazz, p. 375.
72. Jenny Wolmark, ‘Staying with the Body: Narratives of the Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction’, in Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (eds), Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 75–89, p. 86.
73. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 65.
74. Douglas Barbour, ‘Archive Fever in the Technological Far Future Histories Appleseed, Permanence, and Psychohistorical Crisis’, Foundation, 94 (Summer 2005), 39–49, p. 39.
75. Murphy, ‘Archivization’, 1.
76. Gerry Canavan, ‘If This Goes On’, in Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson (eds), Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), pp. 1–21, pp. 16–17.
77. Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 80.
78. Nealon, Plant Theory, p. 91.
79. Anna Gibbs, ‘After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication’ in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 186–205, p. 187.
80. Nealon, Plant Theory, p. 114.
9. Queer Ingestions: Weird and Sporous Bodies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction
1. Michael Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics: Learning from Plants’, Continental Philosophy Review, 44/4 (November 2011), 469–89, p. 474.
2. Although this chapter looks to both plants and fungi in VanderMeer’s work, I will often just use ‘vegetal’ or non-animal to signal both, for the sake of brevity. Later in this piece I will note more clearly the important differences between the Plant and Fungi Kingdoms, and I do not mean to collapse them into a single entity except to say perhaps that it is non-animal nonhumans that this essay takes an interest in.
3. For examples of earlier weird writers engaging intently with plants, see Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ (1907), Luigi Ugolini’s ‘The Vegetable Man’ (1917), Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Seed from Sepulchre’ (1933), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), Donald Wandrei’s ‘Strange Harvest’ (1953) and Kathe Koja’s ‘The Neglected Garden’ (1991). (Regretfully, I admit that the best-known examples that come to mind are almost solely written by white men – there is work to be done here.)
4. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), p. 10.
5. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 28.
6. Jeff VanderMeer, ‘Introduction: The New Weird: “It’s Alive”’, in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds), The New Weird (San Francisco: Tachyon Press, 2008), pp. ix–xviii.
7. Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, ‘Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21/2–3 (June 2015), 183–207, p. 193.
8. Luciano and Chen, ‘Introduction’, 193.
9. Luciano and Chen, ‘Introduction’, 189.
10. Alison Sperling, ‘H. P. Lovecraft’s Weird Body’, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 31 (2017), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue31/sperling.html (last accessed 11 May 2019).
11. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 10.
12. Feminist science studies scholars have been interested in the question of toxicity for some time, thinking through not only the various forms of toxicity of our current ecological moment, but also about how the inequities of race, gender, age, ability and class collectively contribute to the ways in which bodies become toxic and experience so-called contamination. Although scholars such as Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Mel Y. Chen, Heather Davis, Alexis Shotwell and Nancy Tuana diverge in their specific views regarding toxicity, they have collectively and persuasively shown that all bodies are already intoxicated by the effects of human-induced climate change driven by the globalising reach of postmodern capital.
13. Alison Sperling, ‘Second Skins: A Body Ecology of Sickness in The Southern Reach Trilogy’, Paradoxa, 28 (2016), 214–38.
14. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 12.
15. Charley Locke, ‘Jeff VanderMeer’s New Novel Makes Dystopia Seem Almost Fun’, Wired, 25 April 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/04/jeff-vandermeer-new-novel-borne/ (last accessed 11 May 2019).
16. Lesley Head, Jennifer Atchison, Catherine Phillips and Kathleen Buckingham, ‘Vegetal Politics: Belonging, Practices and Places’, Social & Cultural Geography, 15/8 (2014), 861–70, p. 864.
17. Jeff VanderMeer, ‘Hauntings in the Anthropocene: An Initial Exploration’, Environmental Critique, 7 July 2016, https://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/hauntings-in-the-anthropocene/ (last accessed 11 May 2019).
18. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, ‘Intr
oduction’, in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (London: Corvus, 2011), pp. xv–xx, p. xvi.
19. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 25.
20. Catriona Sandilands, ‘Fear of a Queer Plant?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 23/3 (June 2017), 419–29, p. 426.
21. For more on the ways plants have historically disrupted botanical taxonomies, see Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
22. Randy Laist, ‘Introduction’, in Randy Laist (ed.), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9–19, p. 12.
23. Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 473.
24. Plato, quoted in Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 470.
25. Plato, quoted in Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 470.
26. Heidegger, quoted in Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 472.
27. Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 473.
28. Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 474.
29. Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 475.
30. Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 473.
31. Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 474.
32. Jeff VanderMeer, ‘This World is Full of Monsters’, Tor.com, 8 November 2017, https://www.tor.com/2017/11/08/this-world-is-full-of-monsters/ (last accessed 11 May 2019).
33. VanderMeer, ‘This World is Full of Monsters’.
34. Marder, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics’, 475.
35. VanderMeer, ‘This World is Full of Monsters’.
36. VanderMeer, ‘This World is Full of Monsters’.
37. Jeff VanderMeer, ‘Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose’, in Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia (eds), Fungi (Vancouver: Innsmouth Free Press, 2004). 91–98.