Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  The Utopians’ manipulation and regulation of their natural environment demonstrates their scientific prowess. In The War of the Worlds, scientific knowledge and technological skill were not enough to ensure victory for the Martians, but Men Like Gods restages the contest between nature and the scientific knowledge of an advanced civilization, this time with a different outcome. Shortly after the arrival of the human beings from 1920s London in Utopia, it becomes apparent that they have unwittingly introduced earthly germs to Utopia and that these germs have the potential to cause deadly plagues among the Utopians, who, having long ago eradicated all the harmful germs of their own planet, have no natural immunity to these or any other diseases. In an inverted repetition of the alien invasion scenario from Wells’s earlier novel, the more belligerent members of the Earthling party regard their fortuitous biological advantage as a weapon to be employed in the seizure of this newfound planet. Ultimately, however, the Earthlings’ hopes for conquest by way of disease are disappointed. The Utopians successfully isolate the disease germs introduced by earthly humans and through vaccination neutralize the threat that they pose. The disease bacteria that function as the unexpected agents of humanity’s salvation in The War of the Worlds become in Men Like Gods mere “poisons” that serve no useful purpose and cannot withstand Utopian science.33

  In The War of the Worlds, humans and Martians alike exist at the mercy of natural forces on both the microscopic and macroscopic level, beset on one scale by disease germs and on another by the cooling of the sun and planetary climate change. In Men Like Gods, however, the Utopians are no longer constrained by these forces but are instead masters of them. First hypothetically and then practically, Wells raises the possibility of limits to the Utopians’ power, only to dismiss this possibility: surveying the order of Utopia, Barnstaple asks, “Might not some great shock or some phase of confusion still be possible to this immense order? … Might not the unforeseen be still lying in wait for this race? … No! It was inconceivable. The achievement of this world was too calmly great and assured.”34 Barnstaple’s confidence in the indomitability of the Utopians is subsequently confirmed when, confronted by the beginnings of a potentially global epidemic, “the science and organization of Utopia had taken the danger by the throat and banished it.”35 Wells likewise presents the Utopians as masters of natural forces on a macroscopic level. When Barnstaple asks a Utopian scientist if his people do not fear, as the people of Earth fear, “that at last there must be an end to life because our sun and planets are cooling,” the Utopian responds, “Perish! We have hardly begun! … Before us lies knowledge, endlessly, and we may take and take, and as we take, grow.”36 By this, Barnstaple is convinced that the Utopians, and by extension the future inhabitants of Earth, will one day “lift their daring to the stars” and thus escape the end that must eventually await all life on a slowly cooling planet.37

  The Utopian conviction that scientific mastery of nature and physical laws makes it possible for humanity to permanently escape extinction promotes an attitude toward other organisms wholly different from that depicted in The War of the Worlds. In Wells’s earlier novel, human beings’ recognition of their animal condition and their sense that all organisms face the threats of competition, subjugation, and extinction led to a sense of identification and sympathy with the nonhuman world. In Men Like Gods, however, the idea of extinction or subjugation as a shared threat is replaced by an assurance that by taking control of nature for themselves and meting out extinction to other species as they see fit, human beings can ensure their own survival (and dominance) as a species. The sense of identification and sympathy with other species suggested in the earlier novel is replaced by a divisive, dismissive, and hierarchical attitude that aims to elevate human beings above the natural world and results in a program of calculated control and extermination.

  This divisive and dismissive attitude is made apparent not only through the practical program of control and eradication to which organisms are subjected in Men Like Gods but also through the metaphorical use of animals in the novel. Animals categorized as pests and targeted for extermination are employed as embodiments of the qualities that Utopians wish to eradicate from their society. The Utopian Urthred states, “The gnawing vigour of the rat, … the craving pursuit of the wolf, the mechanical persistence of wasp and fly and disease germ, have gone out of our world…. We have obliterated that much of life’s devouring forces. And lost nothing worth having.”38 As a convert to Utopian values, Barnstaple similarly expresses his disgust with earthly society through a series of animal comparisons. He criticizes the “parasitic host of priests” that governs earthly morality, compares the squabbles of his fellow travelers to “a dog-fight on a sinking ship,” scorns an Earth woman in his traveling party as “an unintelligent beauty-cow,” denounces the “trampling folly” of Earth’s political leaders, and declares that “the aggressive conqueror, the grabbing financier, the shoving business man, he hated as he hated wasps, rats, hyenas, sharks, fleas, nettles and the like.”39 He asserts that were he to tell the people of Earth of his experiences in Utopia, “They would not believe it…. They would bray like asses at me and bark like dogs! … So they must sit among their weeds and excrement, scratching and nodding sagely at one another, … sure that mankind stank, stinks, and must always stink, that stinking is very pleasant indeed, and that there is nothing new under the sun.”40 The attribution of animal characteristics to human beings in Men Like Gods is wholly disparaging, tempered by no redeeming sympathy with the animal. To align oneself with the animal here is to reject the possibility of progress and to associate oneself with stupidity, violence, and filth.

  These derogatory animal analogies culminate in Barnstaple’s expression of something akin to revulsion for the human inhabitants of his own time and place, whom he describes as “that detestable crawling mass of un-featured, infected human beings.”41 Barnstaple can envision only two possible outcomes to the standoff between the Earthlings and the Utopians: “Either the Utopians would prove themselves altogether the stronger and the wiser and he and all his fellow pirates would be crushed and killed like vermin, or the desperate ambitions of Mr. Catskill [the British war secretary] would be realized and they would become a spreading sore in the fair body of this noble civilization.”42 Whatever the outcome, the Earthling party consistently appears pestilent and pernicious to Barnstaple. Whereas in The War of the Worlds the narrator’s experience of being treated as an expendable or exploitable creature causes him to accord new value to other animals, in Men Like Gods Barnstaple’s comparison of human beings to despised animals leads him to suggest that human beings too warrant extermination if they impede or endanger progress. While human vulnerability promotes identification and sympathy with the animal, knowledge and power engender a dispassionate, impersonal, and controlling attitude toward nature that in turn promotes a dangerous disregard for human life. Thus, unexpectedly, Wells’s “pessimistic” early novel produces an impulse toward cross-species identification, while his more “optimistic” later novel produces a fantasy of total control through exterminative violence that is predicated upon anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism.

  The contrasting resolutions to comparable scenarios presented in The War of the Worlds and Men Like Gods suggest that the early twentieth century’s growing understanding of the interrelationships between organisms and their environment produced a new sense of power over nature that countered evolutionary anxieties regarding the dethronement of human beings but also potentially diminished the sympathy with the nonhuman that this sense of dethronement had made possible. This shift is made most evident through the contrasting perspectives on extinction that Wells’s two novels offer. Between the publication of The War of the Worlds and of Men Like Gods, extinction, in Wells’s mind, went from being feared as a threat to human survival to being viewed as a phenomenon to be harnessed by human beings so that they might decide for themselves the composition of “nature.” Subsequent works of SF se
em inclined to move away from the exterminatory optimism of Wells’s early twentieth-century novel. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), for example, depicts the extermination of the indigenous species of other planets as the inhabitants of Earth spread outward through the solar system, but the book offers no explicit commendation (or condemnation) of this process. C. S. Lewis’s subsequent Space Trilogy (1938–45) vehemently denounces from a Christian theological perspective such human presumption. Wells’s Men Like Gods preserves a historical moment in which ecological knowledge was seen as a means of increasing human beings’ ability to use and control nature and thus suggests the complex and variable aims, affiliations, and justifications of ecology over the course of its development as a discipline.

  Notes

  1. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Cherrybrook, NSW: Horizon, 2009), 169–70.

  2. Ibid., 62.

  3. Ibid., 34.

  4. Ibid., 74–75, 202.

  5. Ibid., 178.

  6. Ibid., 104, 100.

  7. Ibid., 1.

  8. Ibid., 61.

  9. Ibid., 169.

  10. Ibid., 175.

  11. A. D. Boney, “The ‘Tansley Manifesto’ Affair,” New Phytologist 118, no. 1 (1991): 3–21, and Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  12. Frederick Frost Blackman et al., “The Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching,” New Phytologist 16, no. 10 (1917): 242.

  13. Ibid., 246, 243.

  14. Ibid., 243.

  15. Ibid., 247.

  16. Julian Huxley, introduction to Animal Ecology by Charles Elton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), xiv, xv, xiv.

  17. Charles Elton, Exploring the Animal World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933), 66.

  18. Blackman et al., “Reconstruction,” 249.

  19. H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 51.

  20. Ibid., 92.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid., 94.

  24. Ibid., 165.

  25. Ibid., 92.

  26. Ibid., 93.

  27. Ibid., 91, 93.

  28. Ibid., 17.

  29. Ibid., 260, 170.

  30. Ibid., 34.

  31. Ibid., 307.

  32. It is possible to exaggerate the gap between Wells’s view and Carson’s. In Silent Spring, Carson sought to promote awareness of the dangers of the synthetic chemical pesticides used to eliminate pest species, but she did not reject the notion of pest control altogether. She asserted the importance of eliminating insect disease vectors such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and her condemnation of the overuse of synthetic pesticides such as DDT arose in part from the fact that the overuse of these chemicals allowed species to develop a resistance to these substances, which jeopardized future efforts to fight insects. Nevertheless, she recommends interference in natural processes only in extreme cases, stating, “All this is not to say that there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects” (Rachel Carson, Silent Spring [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002], 9).

  33. Ibid., 198.

  34. Ibid., 173–74.

  35. Ibid., 252.

  36. Ibid., 301, 303.

  37. Ibid., 314–15.

  38. Ibid., 104–5.

  39. Ibid., 168, 195, 230, 230, 205.

  40. Ibid., 308.

  41. Ibid., 285.

  42. Ibid., 204.

  2

  Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age

  MICHAEL PAGE

  In the 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age, Isaac Asimov writes of The Man Who Awoke series of stories by Laurence Manning: “In the 1970s, everyone is aware of, and achingly involved in, the energy crisis. Manning was aware of it forty years ago, and because he was, I was, and so, I’m sure, were many thoughtful young science fiction readers.”1 At the time of Asimov’s writing, ecology as a topic in the cultural conversation and in SF was on an upswing. Books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, Gordon Rattary Taylor’s The Biological Time Bomb, Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age, Frank Herbert’s New World or No World, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth were reaching wide audiences. In SF, several anthologies focused on ecological issues, including Fred Pohl’s Nightmare Age, Tom Disch’s The Ruins of Earth, Terry Carr’s Dream’s Edge, Harry Harrison’s The Year 2000, and Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd’s The Wounded Planet—as did numerous novels, notably Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive, Philip Wylie’s The End of the Dream, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, and films like Soylent Green, Silent Running, Logan’s Run, Phase IV, and Zardoz. Carr remarks in the introduction to Dream’s Edge that “concern for the problems and prospects of our earthly environment come naturally to writers and readers of science fiction—it is as intrinsic to the genre as knowledge of physics, chemistry, the workings of politics and human psychology.”2 Herbert similarly writes in the introduction to The Wounded Planet that ecology was the “hot gospel blasting at us from all sides … ecology as a phenomenon reflects a genuine underlying malaise…. The species knows its travail. This shines through every bit of ecological science fiction I have ever read.”3 For Herbert, SF writers and ecologists are fellow travelers.

  It has been nearly forty more years since Asimov made these remarks, and the ecological crisis (“energy” and otherwise) is now forty years further up the line. We seem to be in another upswing, both in SF and the wider culture. Ecological SF is particularly “hot” right now, if some of the most recent titles are any indication: Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities, Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising, Rob Ziegler’s Seed, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, all released in the first few months of 2012 alone. Yet ecological issues have always been present in SF, integral to the background of the futures (human triumphant, apocalyptic, or otherwise) that SF writers imagine. Ecology is necessary for extra-planetary world building, according to Brian Stableford,4 as the classic examples of Herbert’s Dune and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness attest. But it is just as central to any future-Earth scenario: what would future-Earth SF be without depictions of our planet either as degraded by the rampant waste and consumption of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or else as technologically sophisticated futures that have solved (or at least learned to manage) the crises precipitated by our era? Thus, almost all SF is foundationally ecological in nature.

  Just as SF is inherently ecologically oriented, so too is much SF criticism. In the years since Brian Stableford remarked that ecocriticism “tended to ignore SF,”5 many “ecocritics” outside of SF have begun to explore SF texts, including such critical writers as Stacey Alaimo, Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Timothy Morton, and Patrick Murphy.6 Indeed, ecocriticism and SF criticism have much common ground and seem to be beginning to merge. SF and SF criticism have much to offer the ecocritical movement.

  Certainly, the concerns of mainstream ecocriticism have important affinities with SF and SF criticism. Cheryll Glotfelty’s observation in the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader that “most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet’s basic life support systems”7 is compatible with the study of SF. Arguably, SF is the genre of literature best suited to probing these environmental limits. Ecocritic Glen A. Love goes so far as to say that “environmental and population pressures inevitably and increasingly support the position that any literary criticism that purports to deal with social and physical reality will encompass ecological considerations.”8 We could push this one step further and say any literature. SF is an ideal venue for the type of engagement with biological and ecological issues that Glotfelty and Love c
all for here. If science fiction writers are inherently ecological writers, by extension science fiction critics are necessarily ecocritics in one way or another. Ecocritic Lawrence Buell, who works considerably outside SF, recognizes this centrality of SF to ecocriticism: “For half a century science fiction has taken a keen, if not consistent interest in ecology, in planetary endangerment, in environmental ethics, in humankind’s relation to the nonhuman world…. No genre potentially matches up with a planetary level of thinking ‘environment’ better than science fiction does.”9

  The science fiction writers of the genre’s golden age, like Asimov, who read the early issues of Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder were introduced to ecological issues in various ways in the often crude but insightful stories of the era. In his monumental catalog of the early magazine stories, The Gernsback Years, Everett Bleiler lists over sixty stories under the heading “Earth, future geography” alone that have some degree of ecological content.10 Granted, most of this is the extrapolated background setting for what is often a crudely executed adventure story, but it is that very setting that is so crucial to the contemplation of futures built upon the consequences of present actions or the extrapolation of future alternatives. By the time Asimov’s generation came of age, this ecological awareness had become so embedded into the discourse of SF that it was virtually invisible, assumed by the reader to be part of the scenario of the typical SF story.

  Here I consider four exemplary works of ecological SF from that golden age: Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke stories, published in consecutive issues of Wonder Stories in 1933 and later put in book form in 1975; Clifford Simak’s City series, published in John W. Campbell’s Astounding throughout the mid-40s;11 Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think (1947); and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, which, though written outside the generic SF discourse, has nonetheless become a genre classic since its publication in 1949. These four books participate in the two major modes of ecological thought as it appears in SF: the evolutionary and the apocalyptic.