GREEN PLANETS
Green
Ecology and Science Fiction
Planets
Edited by Gerry Canavan and
Kim Stanley Robinson
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
Wesleyan University Press
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Title page and part title art: Brian Kinney | shutterstock.com
Cover illustration: Abstract art green stars backdrop on black background, © Brian Kinney. Shutterstock.com
FOR THE FUTURE
CONTENTS
ix
Preface
1
Introduction: If This Goes On GERRY CANAVAN
Part 1
Arcadias and New Jerusalems
25
1 ► Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells CHRISTINA ALT
40
2 ► Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age MICHAEL PAGE
56
3 ► Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin’s Utopian Fictions GIB PRETTYMAN
77
4 ► Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction ROB LATHAM
Part 2
Brave New Worlds and Lands of the Flies
99
5 ► “The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People”: Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction SABINE HÖHLER
115
6 ► The Sea and Eternal Summer: An Australian Apocalypse ANDREW MILNER
127
7 ► Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future: Maggie Gee’s The Ice People ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA
143
8 ► Future Ecologies, Current Crisis: Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction ELZETTE STEENKAMP
158
9 ► Ordinary Catastrophes: Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions CHRISTOPHER PALMER
Part 3
Quiet Earths, Junk Cities, and the Cultures of the Afternoon
179
10 ► “The Rain Feels New”: Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi ERIC C. OTTO
192
11 ► Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures BRENT BELLAMY AND IMRE SZEMAN
206
12 ► Pandora’s Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought TIMOTHY MORTON
226
► Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and “Oceanic” MELODY JUE
243
Afterword: Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism GERRY CANAVAN AND KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
261
Of Further Interest
281
About the Contributors
283
Index
PREFACE
As its title suggests, this volume was first inspired by Mark Bould and China Miéville’s Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. But where that book focused primarily on the long-standing connection between science fiction and political leftism, Green Planets takes up instead the genre’s relationship with ecology, environmentalism, and the emerging interdisciplinary conversation variously called ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, and the ecological humanities.
The oxymoronic combination of “science” and “fiction” in the term “science fiction” suggests in miniature the internal tension that drives analysis of the genre. Is science fiction primarily “science” (knowledge, fact, truth), or is it primarily “fiction” (whimsy, fantasy, lie)? Does the genre offer a predictive window into the world of a future that is soon to come, or does it instead merely reflect the assumptions, anxieties, and cultural preoccupations of its own immediate present? It’s little wonder that for decades many writers and critics of science fiction have chosen to eschew the name “science fiction” entirely, preferring “speculative fiction” or (even more commonly) the ambiguous shorthand “SF” as a means of avoiding the problem of the “science” on which the genre is nominally based. In fact almost none of the fantastic, otherworldly tropes most closely associated with SF in the popular imagination are “scientific” in any meaningful sense; the physical laws of reality, as far as anyone can tell, prohibit all the best-loved plot devices, from hyperdrives to mutant superpowers to time travel to perpetual motion machines. Despite frequent pretensions to the contrary from fans and promoters of the genre, the popular designation of a text as SF still typically registers not its careful fidelity to current scientific understanding but rather the extremity of its deviation from what science tells us is true.
And yet, despite all the necessary caveats and disavowals, it cannot be denied that we find ourselves living in science fictional times. Waiting in a doctor’s office for the results of a genetic test that will tell her the true story of her own future, using a cheap handheld device that can in seconds wirelessly access a vast digital archive of all human knowledge, a person can effortlessly browse all the latest apocalyptic predictions about mankind’s radical destabilization of the planet’s climate and the concurrent mass extinction of its animal and plant life in between breaking news reports about the latest catastrophic flood, drought, or oil spill. As noted SF author William Gibson once put it: “Today, the sort of thing we used to think in science fiction has colonized the rest of our reality.”1 It’s true that cars still don’t fly—but they have started to drive themselves.
Nowhere is the science fictionalization of the present clearer than in contemporary considerations of humanity’s interaction with its environment, which frequently deploys the language and logic of SF to narrativize the dire implications of ecological science for the future. Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet, published in 1948, briefly paused its ecological critique to wonder if perhaps there aren’t humanoids somewhere else in the universe treating their planet better than we treat ours; two years later Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, took stock of energy scarcity and entropic breakdown to unhappily declare us “shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet” in his The Human Use of Human Beings.2 Paul Crutzen’s recent assertion of the Anthropocene—a proposed post-Holocene “epoch” that posits that the multiple impacts of human civilization on the planet will be visible in the geologic record—takes up the cosmic viewpoint native to SF to imagine the future scientists who will uncover the scant evidence of our existence on a long-deserted, post-human Earth; in Man the Hunter, from 1969, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore deployed the same imaginative frame to consider the “interplanetary archaeologists” of the future, from whose perspective “the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear as essentially simultaneous.”3 Rachel Carson, who jump-started the contemporary environmental movement with her stirring denunciation of chemical pesticides, famously chose to begin her book not with some detached presentation of the facts at hand but with a science fictional parable, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” about the inhabitants of a small town “somewhere in America” whose hubris destroys paradise.4 The “Spaceship Earth” metaphor for discussing resource scarcity and sustainability has become so
naturalized that most completely forget its origins in SF. Even now, contemporary debates over the reality of climate change and the urgent need for renewable forms of energy production still frequently break down into accusations that one party or the other is dabbling in “science fiction,” not “science fact”; implicit in this petty sniping is the concession that it is increasingly hard for us to tell the difference between the two. In many ways—and many of them quite disturbing—SF looks less and less like “fiction” at all, and something more like the thin edge of the future as it breaks into the present.
The authors of Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction share this foundational assumption that science fictional ways of thinking have something useful to teach us about the way the contemporary moment thinks about nature and the world. In this respect it is the latest entry in a long tradition of SF criticism inaugurated by Darko Suvin in his 1972 article “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” which announced SF’s importance as the “literature of cognitive estrangement.”5 Here Suvin recasts that apparently hopeless contradiction between science/cognition and fiction/estrangement in much more positive terms: the estrangement of SF is an incredibly flexible artistic tool for disorienting and defamiliarizing the conditions of everyday life, opening up the mind to previously unimagined possibilities, while cognition functions as the reality principle that keeps our imaginations honest. The alienated view-from-outside offered by cognitive estrangement allows us to examine ourselves and our institutions in new (and rarely flattering) light; SF distances us from the contemporary world-system only to return us to it, as aliens, so that we can see it with fresh eyes. For Suvin, and for the generation of SF critics that followed, SF is thus at its core always about utopia: the dream of another world that wasn’t just a hopeless fantasy, a glimpse of the better history that could actually be ours, if we would only choose to build it. Even the dystopian nightmares and secular apocalypses that so dominate contemporary SF point us, by negative example, in the direction of utopia: whatever else you do, don’t do this. …
Two decades ago, in the introduction to a collection of ecotopian fictions called Future Primitive, my coeditor Kim Stanley Robinson offered up a succinct description of the crisis facing the human race in our moment of technological modernity: “We are gaining great powers at the very moment that our destruction of our environment is becoming ruinous. We are in a race to invent and practice a sustainable mode of life before catastrophe strikes us.”6 Our civilization, Robinson goes on, consequently finds itself today in the throes of an incomprehensibly vast project of “rethinking the future,” a Herculean and vertiginous task that links political environmental movements and radical animal-rights activists to politicians to venture capitalists to organic farmers to freelance inventors to biologists to physicists to chemists to economists to ecofeminists to philosophers to literary critics to writers of SF. Indeed, the recognition of the immense planetary scale of ecological crisis, and the shocking inadequacy of our response thus far, extends the Suvinian interest in cognitive estrangement and utopian dreaming across the entirety of politics and culture today—now the prerequisite for our collective survival. The future has gone bad; we need a new one.
For over a century the thought experiments of SF have been probing our possible futures, providing an archive of the imagination where science, story, and political struggle can converge and cross-pollinate. The ambition of Green Planets is to trace key moments in this vital and ongoing conversation.
Gerry Canavan
Notes
1. Mavis Linnemann, “William Gibson Overdrive,” Phawker.com (August 15, 2007), http://www.phawker.com/2007/08/15/coming-atraction-william-gibson-qa/.
2. Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), quoted in Eric C. Otto, Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 7–8; Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York: Da Capo Press, 1950), 40.
3. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Transaction, 1969), 3.
4. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 2–3.
5. Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34, no. 3 (1972): 372–82 (372).
6. Kim Stanley Robinson, ed., Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (New York: Tor Books, 1994): 10–11.
GREEN PLANETS
Introduction
If This Goes On
GERRY CANAVAN
And it is now that our two paths cross.
Both simultaneously recognise his Anti-type:
that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian.
He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly:
I note, with alarm, his Scorpion’s mouth.
He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would
like to see him removed to some other planet.
W. H. Auden, “Vespers” (Part 5 of Horae Canonicae)
Borrowing his categories from Auden, Samuel R. Delany has written that two ideological positions are available to us in modernity, each one carrying either a positive or a negative charge. One can imagine oneself to be the citizen of a marvelous New Jerusalem, the “technological super city where everything is clean, and all problems have been solved by the beneficent application of science”—or else one can be a partisan of Arcadia, “that wonderful place where everyone eats natural foods and no machine larger than one person can fix in an hour is allowed in. Throughout Arcadia the breezes blow, the rains are gentle, the birds sing, and the brooks gurgle.” Each position in turn implies its dark opposite. The flip side of the Good City is the Bad City, the Brave New World, where fascist bureaucrats have crushed the soul of the human, machines have replaced work and love, and smog blocks out the stars; the other side of the Edenic Good Country is the Land of the Flies, where the nostalgic reverie of an imagined rural past is replaced instead by a reversal of progress and an unhappy return to the nightmare of history: floods, wars, famine, disease, superstition, rape, murder, death.1
These loyalties shape our political and aesthetic judgments. The person whose temperament draws her to the New Jerusalem, Delany goes on to say, will tend to see every Arcadia as a Land of the Flies, while the person who longs for Arcadia will see in every city street and every shiny new gadget the nascent seeds of a Brave New World. What seems at first to be a purely spatial matter (in what sort of place would you rather live?) turns out in this way to be as much about temporality and political projection (what sort of world are we making for ourselves?). Delany’s four categories imply speculation about the kind of future we are building and what life will be like for us when it arrives. In this respect Delany’s schema is of a piece with the dialectic between “thrill and dread,” between utopia and apocalypse, that Marshall Berman says in All That Is Solid Melts into Air defines “modernity” as such: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”2 Though Berman pays little attention to the emergence of SF in that work, his description of modernity as the knife’s edge between utopia and apocalypse nevertheless usefully doubles as a succinct description for virtually every SF narrative ever conceived. And little wonder: SF emerges as a recognizable cultural genre out of the same conditions of technological modernity that generated literary and artistic modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century, with the ecstatic techno-optimistic anticipation of Amazing Stories founder Hugo Gernsback matched always by the unending cavalcade of disaster, catastrophe, and out-and-out apocalypse that Everett and Richard F. Bleiler, in their massive index to the SF of the period, group under the single evocative heading “Things Go Wrong.”3 Indeed, the persistence (and continued popularity) of SF into the contemporary moment can perhaps be thought of as the last, vital vestige of the original modernist project
: from dazzling architectural cityscapes and off-world colonies to superweapons run amuck and catastrophic climate change, from Marinetti’s worship of progress, technology, and speed to Kafka’s deep and abiding suspicion of the project of modernity as such, SF extends the overawing directive to “make it new” to the farthest reaches of time and space.
Delany argues that the dialectics between city and country and between utopia and apocalypse that generate our New Jerusalems, Arcadias, Brave New Worlds, and Lands of the Flies are crucially operative in basically all SF. Thus the pastoral Arcadia of Wells’s Eloi in The Time Machine (1895) is revealed to require the Brave New World of the Morlocks as its true material base, just as Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) requires for its own continuation the preservation of an Arcadian “Reservation” as an internal safety valve. In 1984 (1949) the Arcadian refuge has always already been corrupted by totalitarianism, with secret microphones hidden in the flowers and trees. In a host of post-apocalyptic nuclear and zombie fictions from during and after the Cold War, a hopeless and wretched Land of the Flies is imagined as the only possible alternative to the New Jerusalem / Brave New World of American-style consumer capitalism and the national security state; in Soylent Green (1973), Silent Running (1972), and dozens of other 1970s and post-1970s environmental disaster narratives, we find capitalism hurtling hopelessly toward a final Land of the Flies anyway, as the bitter consequence of its insistence on ceaseless innovation and endless expansion on a finite and limited globe. Ernest Callenbach’s influential Ecotopia (1975) articulates in that moment of crisis the possibility of a New Jerusalem that is an Arcadia, precisely through the Pacific Northwest’s imagined secession from a United States that is rapidly collapsing into both a fascist Brave New World and starvation-ridden Land of the Flies. And even in something like the children’s film WALL-E (2008) we find tomorrow’s desolate Brave New World of plastic trash and consumer junk can still be recovered as an Arcadia, if only because our robots are smart enough to love nature more than we do.
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