In that spirit, the thirteen chapters in this book explore thirteen such transformations, divided into three sections. In Part I, “Arcadias and New Jerusalems,” four critics explore and deconstruct utopian visions of ecological futures. In “Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells,” Christina Alt foregrounds the unexpected use of extermination imagery and mass extinction in Wells’s Men Like Gods as a marker of utopian potentiality—tokening a human race now fully in control of its powers and of the planet. In “Evolution and Apocalpyse in the Golden Age,” Michael Page traces a fraught dialogue between optimism and pessimism across such classic SF works as Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1933), Clifford Simak’s City series (1940s), Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think (1947), and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949). In his contribution, Gib Prettyman critiques the historic inability of Marxist critics to fully appreciate Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian philosophical interest in Daoism, and considers the opportunities made possible by this way of thinking for an ecological leftism that goes beyond economic socialism. Finally, Rob Latham takes up both Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (novella 1972, novel 1976) and Thomas Disch’s The Genocides (1965) to unpack the critique of exterminative and genocidal fantasy as presented in key texts of the New Wave movement in 1960s and 1970s SF.
Part II, “Brave New Worlds and Lands of the Flies,” turns to much more catastrophic imaginings of both the future of the environment and the people who live in it. In “‘The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People’: Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction,” Sabine Höhler reads the ubiquitous “Spaceship Earth” metaphor of contemporary ecological discourse as itself SF, and unpacks the political consequences of this figuration, tracking the way its use trends toward neoliberal calls for austerity, “lifeboat ethics,” and the “case against helping the poor.” Andrew Milner’s “The Sea and Eternal Summer: An Australian Apocalypse” and Adeline Johns-Putra’s “Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future: Maggie Gee’s The Ice People” take up two very different approaches to the present’s paradigmatic vision of generational ecological disaster, climate change, both of which deploy the retrospective viewpoint of the people of the future to speak to people in the present. Milner’s chapter also considers the unique role Australia plays in the global imaginary, both in and outside SF, while Johns-Putra’s consideration of Gee’s novel draws connections to the larger field of feminist and ecofeminist writing (Atwood, Lessing, Winterson) with which that novel is in conversation. Elzette Steenkamp’s reading of recent South African SF in “Future Ecologies, Current Crisis,” which traces figurations of gender, race, and indigeneity through Jane Rosenthal’s novel Souvenir (2004) and Neill Blomkamp’s film District 9 (2009), looks to apocalyptic futurity as a novum that reveals for us the absolute interdependence of self, other, and environment in the present, as well as suggests new possibilities for what it means to be “human” at all. Finally, drawing from such works as Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and China Miéville’s Kraken (2010), Christopher Palmer closes the section with a sustained consideration of how the tragic valence of the apocalyptic imaginary gives way to a more comic sensibility in an era when the many catastrophes and disasters have become so well-rehearsed as to have all already happened.
The final section of the text, “Quiet Earths, Junk Cities, and the Cultures of the Afternoon,” considers both recent figurations of postmodern (and post-human) hybrid landscapes, as well as the new ways of thinking that such visions suggest. Eric Otto’s “The Rain Feels New” explores the Cultures of the Afternoon presented in the short fictions of Paolo Bacigalupi, arguing that despite the despair that seems to permeate these works, they nonetheless maintain a utopian political charge. In “Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures,” Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman take up a new subgenre of apocalyptic fantasy they call “science faction”: Quiet Earth visions of a world totally emptied of people, in which our cities are left to rust, degrade, and rot. Bellamy and Szeman argue that texts like Life after People and its ilk, despite their popularity and their nominal focus on important environmental questions, in fact do little to provoke a genuine or effective ecological politics. In “Pandora’s Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought”—putting to one side the political questions about capitalism and globalization raised by the plot of the film in favor of interrogating its ontological grounding—Timothy Morton reads Avatar against the grain as a philosophical treatise about worlding and worldlessness, and the strange strangers of Earth’s biosphere who surround us both in similarity and in radical difference. The Na’vi become refigured here not as a vision of some imagined primitivist past, but as a figure for what a genuinely postmodern future might entail. Finally, using Stanislaw Lem and Greg Egan as her companion theorists, Melody Jue suggests in “Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and ‘Oceanic’” that we might be able to draw new modes of cognition, and new frames for theory, by thinking about the inversion and interplay of surfaces and depths at work in ocean environments.
An interview with my coeditor—“Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism”—serves as an afterword for the volume, exploring not only the central place of the environment in Robinson’s fiction but also the varied uses of science, religion, crisis, capitalism, human and nonhuman life, optimism, pessimism, apocalypse, and ecotopia in the wide constellation of texts that is ecological SF.
Notes
The editors would like to thank the network of writers, readers, editors, colleagues, interlocutors, friends, and spouses whose generosity and support made the completion of this work possible, as well as offer our most extravagant special thanks to Mark Bould and China Miéville for allowing us to build upon their very good idea.
W. H. Auden, “Vespers,” in Collected Shorter Poems: 1927–1957 (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 333.
1. Samuel R. Delany, “On Triton and Other Matters,” Science Fiction Studies 17, no. 3 (November 1990), http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm. Delany also discusses these ideas in “Critical Methods / Speculative Fiction,” repr. in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (New York: Berkley, 1977), 119–31.
2. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 13.
3. Everett Bleiler and Richard Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), xv.
4. Delany, “Triton.”
5. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 2–3.
6. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18.
7. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii.
8. Timothy Morton, Kathy Rudy, and the Polygraph Collective, “On Ecology: A Roundtable Discussion with Timothy Morton and Kathy Rudy,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 234.
9. See Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (January 2002): 23.
10. Benjamin Kunkel, “The Politics of Fear, Part II: How Many of Us?” n+1 (March 18, 2008), http://nplusonemag.com/politics-fear-part-ii-how-many-us.
11. Joss Whedon, Firefly (Fox, 2002). This version of the opening narration opened several episodes in the middle part of the first and only season.
12. Systems theory’s reliance on feedback as a structuring principle links it closely with later developments in ecology.
13. Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” repr. in The Environmental Debate: A Documentary History, with Timeline, Glossary, and Appendices, ed. Peninah Neimark and Peter Rhoades Mott (Amenia, NY: Grey House, 2010), 209.
14. Ibid., 210.
15. “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” The derivation of the “Zeroth Law” allows the robots to effectively ignore all the “Three Law” safeguards
humans had installed to protect themselves from their creations, and ultimately leads to the establishment of a cabal of immortal robots that secretly orchestrates the coming millennia of future history, in accordance with what they determine to be humanity’s best interests.
16. Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire (New York: Del Ray Books, 1985), 467.
17. Ecology returns again at the end of the series in a somewhat unexpected form in Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), set several millennia after Robots and Empire. Here, an aging R. Daneel Olivaw (the other of the two robots, the one who did not poison Earth’s crust but who endorsed the decision in retrospect) offers a representative of the Foundation a choice between a Second Galactic Empire or a “Galaxia,” a galaxy-wide, deep-ecological communal mind. This character chooses Galaxia—a souped-up Gaia theory on an interplanetary scale—for an unexpected reason: he paranoiacally determines that the extinction of individuality in favor of group consciousness will make for the best possible military defense if any hostile aliens attempt to invade our galaxy, neatly linking environmentalist concerns with the needs of the national security state.
18. Stephen King, “Video Interview: Stephen King on Under the Dome,” Popeaters.com (October 27, 2009), http://www.popeater.com/2009/10/27/stephen-king-under-the-dome-interview/.
19. Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.
20. An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim (2006; Los Angeles: Paramount, 2006), DVD.
21. Chad Harbach, “The Politics of Fear, Part III: Business as Usual,” n + 1 (December 4, 2007), http://nplusonemag.com/politics-fear-part-iii-business-usual.
22. Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,” Harper’s, May 2008, 36.
23. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222 (208). See also Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).
24. Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer (1973; New York: Warner Home Video, 2003).
25. Margaret Atwood, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet,” Guardian, September 25, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-sciencefiction.
26. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 768.
27. Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature (New York: Random House, 2003).
28. “Pumzi,” directed by Wanuri Kahiu, Africa First: Volume One (2010; New York: Focus Features, 2011), DVD.
29. Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 151.
30. K. William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 231.
31. Octavia E. Butler, “‘Devil Girl from Mars’: Why I Write Science Fiction” (MIT Communications Forum, 1998), http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/butler.html.
32. Avatar, directed by James Cameron (2009; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2010), DVD.
33. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 342.
34. Daybreakers, directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig (2009; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2010), DVD.
35. Quoted in Darko Suvin, Defined by a Hollow, Ralahine Utopian Studies, vol. 6 (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 218.
36. Ibid., 11.
37. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May–June 2003), http://newleftreview.org/?view=2449.
38. “Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.” Geoff Manaugh, “Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson,” BLDGBLOG (2007), http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html.
39. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 34.
40. WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton (2008; Burbank, CA: Disney-Pixar, 2008), DVD.
41. Carl Freedman, “Marxism, Cinema, and Some Dialectics of Science Fiction and Film Noir,” in Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 66–82 (72).
42. Alison Flood, “Kim Stanley Robinson: Science Fiction’s Realist,” Guardian, November 11, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/10/kim-stanley-robinson-sciencefiction-realist.
1
ARCADIAS AND NEW JERUSALEMS
1
Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells
CHRISTINA ALT
Over the course of his long writing career H. G. Wells passed through alternating periods of optimism and pessimism in his views of humanity, science, and the future of the earth. In his late-Victorian works of scientific romance, he reveals a pessimistic attitude arising in part from evolutionary ideas circulating at the time. In The Time Machine he expresses anxieties over devolution; in The Island of Doctor Moreau he warns of the dangers of scientific overreaching and suggests the ineffectuality of human attempts to intervene in evolutionary processes; and in The War of the Worlds he challenges assumptions of human primacy and dominance by introducing a threat to humanity in the form of a highly evolved Martian competitor. These works taken together convey a sense of human beings existing at the mercy of natural processes beyond their control. However, as the twentieth century began, Wells found reason for new optimism, as evidenced by works such as Anticipations, A Modern Utopia, and Men Like Gods. One factor contributing to this modern optimism was the emergence of new scientific disciplines that promised to provide new ways of understanding and intervening in natural processes. Ecology was one of these emerging disciplines; however, perhaps unexpectedly, given current popular conceptions of ecology, in the early twentieth century the optimism engendered by the growing understanding of the relationships between organisms and their environments manifested primarily as a new confidence—even arrogance—in humanity’s ability to exert control over the natural world. In fact, Wells’s use of ecological ideas in his early twentieth-century works of SF suggests that in the early stages of its development as a discipline, ecology helped to restore the confidence in human dominance that had been unsettled by evolution’s revelation of humanity’s animal origins.
To illustrate this claim, I will compare the attitudes and actions toward the natural world depicted in Wells’s late-Victorian novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, with those represented in his early twentieth-century novel Men Like Gods, published in 1923. These two novels are useful texts to consider in an exploration of Wells’s changing views of science and nature because they center on similar scenarios. In both novels, terrestrial human beings encounter a more advanced species or culture that possesses greater scientific knowledge and technological skill than they themselves; in both novels, the advanced culture endeavors to exert control over the natural world through the management or extermination of other life forms; and in both novels, a struggle between the terrestrial human beings and the alien culture ensues and is ultimately decided in a contest between nature (in the form of disease germs) and biological science. However, despite the similar scenarios considered in these two novels, the resolutions that they offer differ dramatically, registering the shift in attitude that Wells underwent in the intervening quarter century.
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
The War of the Worlds famously describes the invasion of Earth in the closing years of the nineteenth century by a highly evolved and technologically advanced Martian species seeking a new planet to colonize as their own more distant planet grows cold. The Martians plan to first subdue human beings by force, destroying their homes and decimating their population, and then to cultivate the human species as a form of livestock and a food source. The threat to human dominance posed by the arrival of the Martians causes the hu
man narrator of the tale to experience “a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.”1 The War of the Worlds thus dramatizes the ways in which the promulgation of evolutionary ideas in the Victorian period stripped humans of their sense of special status as beings deliberately set above the rest of creation, leading them to recognize themselves as animals and, moreover, as animals subject to competition for their place in the hierarchy of nature and for their survival as a species. In an extension of this argument, Wells’s allusion to the obliteration of the indigenous people of Tasmania by European invaders alongside his references to the extinction of numerous animal species brought about by European exploration and colonization demonstrates that the history of imperialism, although typically driven by one human group’s belief in its superiority over others, ultimately refutes rather than confirms human exceptionalism and highlights human beings’ vulnerability to extinction.
Human beings are accorded little agency in The War of the Worlds. Wells stresses that in encounters with the Martians, both individual people and larger human groups survive largely by chance. The artilleryman that the narrator befriends is saved from the heat ray that kills the rest of his regiment only because his horse stumbles in a rabbit hole and throws him just as the alien weapon is fired.2 London is saved from immediate destruction not by human defenses but by the Martians’ decision to wait for the arrival of the rest of their invasion party before moving on the city. The narrator states that it is only “by a miracle” that he escapes the Martians in their tripods, and he speaks of feeling overwhelmed by “the immensity of the night and space and nature, [and] my own feebleness and anguish.”3 It is not any special capacity or insight that saves individuals and communities, but only luck and the unintended effects of the Martians’ own decisions and strategies.
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