EVOLUTION
Let’s first consider the evolutionary mode. Evolution is paradigmatic in SF, as it is in science itself.12 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. notes that “looking at the corpus of sf in the twentieth century, we see veritable schoolbook applications of evolutionary ideas.”13 Both Manning’s The Man Who Awoke and Simak’s City exemplify the evolutionary mode of ecological SF. I would argue, however, that though there is much commonality between The Man Who Awoke and City, they engage with evolutionary ecological thought in rather different registers. As Norman Winters, the hero of The Man Who Awoke, awakens beyond the pastoral “forest society” of the nearer future, and technology reasserts itself, Manning’s evolutionary mode becomes a saga of humanity’s technological development leading to universal mastery, much in the manner of Stapledon’s Last and First Men. In City, though technology is ubiquitous in the background that makes the doggish utopia possible (unlimited atomic power and the guiding hand of Jenkins and other Asimovian robots that serve the dogs), Simak nevertheless emphasizes an antitechnological pastoral register.
The overall trajectory of The Man Who Awoke stories traces a progressive evolutionary model in which humanity follows its “destiny” and masters the larger universe. This brand of evolutionism has its origins in the evolutionary controversies of the mid-nineteenth century. Though Darwin made no special place for humanity in the evolutionary saga theorized in The Origin of Species, many alternative evolutionary theories did.14 In his late essay, “Evolution and Ethics,” T. H. Huxley, though firmly committed to the Darwinian evolutionary model in which all species must inevitably succumb to extinction, nevertheless suggested that human intelligence made possible an “ethical process,” what we call culture, from which we can collectively act within the universe to make it, at least for a time, a more sustainable and equitable place for us and the larger biosphere. This perspective greatly influenced H. G. Wells, the single most important influence on early American magazine SF,15 and much of Wells’s science fiction explores the implications of Huxley’s argument, as does the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon, clear influences on Manning’s stories.
The Man Who Awoke is one Norman Winters, a wealthy banker from the twentieth century who desires to see what the future will bring, and uses his wealth to create a sleep chamber that will allow him to awake in the far future. An obvious progenitor is Rip Van Winkle, but there are more immediate echoes in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age, and Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (which had been reprinted in Amazing Stories Quarterly in 1928). In the first story, titled “The Forest People” in the book version, Winters awakes three thousand years in the future, when the ruins of New York City are buried in a verdant forest landscape. He encounters a culture adapted to a forest economy, with no farming, manufacturing, or other practices of industrialization, much like that in A Crystal Age or William Morris’s News from Nowhere. Sustainability is practiced much in the manner of Ernest Callenbach’s later Ecotopia, and humans live in balance with the rest of nature. Bleiler calls this “a world that might be considered an ecological extremist’s ideal.”16 This ecologically centered society was evolved because of the consumption and waste of much of Earth’s natural resources during Winters’s era, referred to as the “age of Waste.” The Chief Forester voices a pointed indictment of our era:
The height of the false civilization of Waste! Fossil plants were ruthlessly burned in furnaces to provide heat; petroleum was consumed by the billion barrels; cheap metal cars were built and thrown away to rust after a few years’ use; men crowded into ill-ventilated villages of a million inhabitants—some historians say several million…. For what should we thank the humans of three thousand years ago? For exhausting the coal supplies of the world? For leaving us no petroleum for our chemical factories? For destroying the forests on whole mountain ranges and letting the soil erode into the valleys?17
But the Forest culture is not utopia. A growing discontent among the youth who are not allowed to step forth and create their own communities without careful population strictures and environmental management is emerging. Winters is captured by this underground movement and commiserates: “I understand you have a very poor opinion of my own times, due to our possibly unwise consumption of natural resources. Even then we had men who warned us against our course of action, but we acted in the belief that when oil and coal were gone mankind would produce some new fuel to take their place.”18 Catalyzed by Winters’s presence, the youth revolt, throwing their society into chaos; Winters must retreat to his bunker with the hope of finding utopia further in the future.
Taken by itself, this story fits well within the pastoral ecological mode, as an indictment of present ecological transgressions. But Manning’s intention was not to end Winters’s journey at this early period. Winters exits his chamber four more times and encounters various stages of human cultural, technological, and ecological evolution. At first glance the remaining stories might be left out of an ecological analysis, but each is crucial in its own right. In “Master of the Brain,” Winters emerges five thousand more years in the future and encounters a dystopian technological society, probably derived from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The energy crisis of the Forest period has been solved, and technology has again triumphed. The “Brain,” a vast computer, controls all human activity. Humans indulge in controlled pleasure palaces, but no longer have any sense of self: “Here was material to delight his historian’s soul—the very kind of future civilization that dreamers and prophets had imagined back in the twentieth century—a thrilling vista of wonders and a consummation of the mechanical evolution.”19 Once again, Winters’s presence facilitates a revolt, and he returns to his bunker. His evolutionary trajectory continues as he goes seven thousand years further in the third story, “The City of Sleep,” where “the climate had long since changed”20 and people now escape into what amounts to permanent virtual reality. The previous pattern again asserts itself, with Winters providing a solution to the future’s crisis, facilitating another change in the human social order. When Winters next awakens in another five thousand years in “The Individualists,” the problems he helped solve in “The City of Sleep” have led to a culture of sparse human population, where everyone is devoted to the pursuit of personal scientific interests. However, the society is out of balance, with each individual trying to best his fellows, leading to single combat using gigantic robotic machines, like those in The War of the Worlds. In the final story, “The Elixir,” Winters emerges in AD 25,000, where immortality has been achieved and humanity explores the galaxy in search of the meaning of existence. The final chapter within this story, “The Search for Infinite,” brings Winters to the ultimate understanding of universal existence and makes overtures to a grand finale for human evolution into beings of pure energy. With this finale Manning achieves one of the central themes of SF, depicting an extraordinary vision of technological, evolutionary fulfillment.
Simak takes an alternative evolutionary view in City (which ranks among the highest achievements from the golden age of Campbell’s Astounding), emphasizing the pastoral over the technological and making for a more pointed ecological fable, though ultimately he comes to a similar conclusion as Manning. Though humanity is the focus of the first several stories in the collection, our species eventually disappears from the scene, becoming a myth for our dog inheritors. Here Simak is more consistent with a Darwinian evolutionary paradigm, which gives no special seat to the human species, though the dogs’ evolutionary process is a result of human manipulation via genetic engineering and legacy technology (the robot guardians, the unlimited energy). By removing humanity from the picture, Simak is able to explore an ecological alternative to the world-destroying technological practices of contemporary humanity.
The first tale, “City,” tells of the dissolution of cities and the movement of humanity to a rural existence. The dogs find the very concept of the city unfathomable; doggish economists and sociologists
regard it as “an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well.”21 With the establishment of atomic power and hydroponics there is no longer need for urban centers or farms, reflections of the ideal of the technological future that was at the time being packaged in Popular Mechanics and similar publications.22 This in turn allows for the dispersal of families out of cities to rural acreages where they live in pastoral tranquillity. Improved transportation via “the family plane and helicopter” make travel easier and convenient and thus facilitate this new pastoral cultural formation. The story introduces the first in the line of Websters (notice the similarity to Manning’s Winters), John J. Webster, who is among the last to abandon the city. Ironically, the city becomes a sanctuary for displaced farmers who have moved into the abandoned houses after their farms have collapsed. Simak here illustrates the economic and social fallout that any new cultural formation will necessitate.
The second tale, “Huddling Place,” set in the second decade of the twenty-second century, involves Dr. Thomas Webster, John J.’s grandson. By now humanity has fully adapted to the rural, isolated life. But it comes with a cost. Contact with Martians has taken place, and Thomas Webster, an expert in Martian brain physiology, is close friends with Juwain, a Martian philosopher on the verge of an insight that will alter the consciousness of both human and Martian. They communicate regularly through televisor technology that anticipates today’s Internet. Service robots take care of most human needs, leading to further isolation: “For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend theater or hear a concert or browse in a library half-way around the world. Could transact business one might need to transact without rising from one’s chair.”23 Webster suffers from acute agoraphobia, and when Juwain requires an emergency brain operation that only Webster is qualified to do, Webster is unable to overcome his fears and take the trip to Mars. As a consequence of Webster’s inaction, Juwain dies. The implication is that Juwain’s discovery would have led humanity to a more balanced, ecologically sound existence, and thus opened the door for universal fulfillment. Thus Simak explores the possible consequences of isolated existence facilitated by technologies—technologies, it is worth noting, that are now commonplace.
The next three tales—“Census,” “Desertion,” and “Paradise”—show humanity’s gradual migration to Jupiter and transformation into another form, which is condemned as a retreat from the universal fulfillment implied by Juwain’s lost insight. The interstitial material for “Paradise” is important. The dog editor writes:
Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more that pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor. So far its lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character.24
With the sixth tale, “Hobbies,” humanity has mostly abandoned Earth, leaving it to the dogs. The dogs live, as the previous story suggested, in a pastoral paradise. In the prefatory note to “Hobbies,” the editor raises the question: “If Man had taken a different path, might he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog?”25 This is an important subtle critique, not only mocking anthropocentric narratives of evolutionary history but suggesting that the dogs’ pastoral social order is a viable alternative to the mechanistic civilization of twentieth-century technological man. Ironically, however, the dogs are embedded in a technological civilization left them by humanity. Robots serve as their “hands” and caretakers. Yet this allows the dogs to maintain their doggishness and pursue a balanced (innocent?) existence. The dogs have formed what Jenkins calls “a civilization based on the brotherhood of animals—on the psychic understanding and perhaps eventual communication and intercourse of interlocking worlds. A civilization of the mind and of understanding … a groping after truth, and the groping is in a direction that man passed by without a glance.”26 In his recent book, The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues that, “the ecological thought is interconnectedness in the fullest and deepest sense.”27 Simak here said much the same thing seventy years earlier. This animal society is realized in the seventh tale, “Aesop,” where the robot Jenkins becomes the teacher and storyteller for the dogs and their animal brethren, who are now completely free of humanity. The interrelation of all animals is again a central topic: “Man never thought of one great animal society, never dreamed of skunk and coon and bear going down the road of life together, planning with one another, helping one another—setting aside all natural differences.”28 However, harmony is soon lost when a fox kills a chicken. A crisis ensues, but is curtailed from a threat from the outside, from another dimension, and the dogs must leave Earth for a parallel world, leaving it to mutated ants. The interstitial prefaces throughout City suggest the dog utopia is restored in this alternate world.
Brian Aldiss notes the significance of City for investigating “new relationships among living things,”29 while Thomas Clareson calls it the key work of “criticism of modern urban-industrial society,”30 observing that “not one of Simak’s immediate contemporaries condemned Western society so harshly; no one consigned humanity to oblivion…. He created a credible, nonhuman world capable of sustaining metaphors regarding the human condition.”31 This critique of technological society specifically conveys a pastoral emphasis, as Darko Suvin has pointed out. According to Suvin, the pastoral’s “imaginary framework of a world without money-economy, state apparatus, and depersonalizing urbanization allows it to isolate, as in a laboratory, two human motivations: erotics and power-hunger.”32 Simak himself said in a later interview: “At the time I wrote City I felt there were other, greater values than those we find in technology…. The city is an anachronism we’d be better off without.”33 Yet despite Simak’s seeming indictment of technology, it should be stressed that the doggish utopia is only possible because of the technological innovations of humankind that have been left to them: sustainable and unlimited power, robot servants, and the very ability to speak and thus to tell tales. As Jill Milling observes, “Though Simak’s fables appear to constitute a simple indictment of human destructiveness, the irony provided by the frame narrative and by the qualified resolutions of conflicts in this episodic narrative creates a moral ambiguity characteristic of many science fiction tales.”34
Like Manning, Simak takes a broad evolutionary perspective, but with an alternative trajectory: emphasizing balance and harmony in nature rather than technological development, and shifting the lens from humankind to other species. Simak is usually identified as SF’s most rural, pastoral writer, and some critics have disparaged his later work as too conservative and overly sentimental. But in City, Simak offers an alternative critique to the urban, techno-futurism of much SF and much SF criticism, and it remains an important moment in ecological SF.
APOCALYPSE
The second major mode of ecological thought in SF is the apocalyptic, which generally involves a widespread destruction of human civilization, but which also often works on a small-scale level of destruction of an insular group or ecosystem. While much SF explores the notion of human evolutionary progress, many stories examine the consequences of human destructiveness and species annihilation. The apocalyptic mode in SF is central to the early development of the genre, from Cousin de Grainville’s technological, Christian apocalypse The Last Man to the secular apocalypses of Mary Shelley—the micro-apocalypse of Frankenstein and the macro of her own The Last Man. Wells, of course, introduced the evolutionary apocalypse in several of his quintessential scientific romances, such as The Time Machine, The Island of
Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and The Food of the Gods. The apocalyptic tradition seems to me to break down into two modes: the pastoral-elegiac, which looks back upon a lost civilization but also often posits a new beginning; and the satiric-ironic, which imagines the end of humanity within the evolutionary saga and ironically reflects on human folly. To use Wells as a marker, we could, perhaps, consider The Time Machine, which is certainly the quintessential evolutionary SF story, as also the quintessential elegiac apocalypse for its meditation on the waning of the human species—whereas the insular apocalypse of The Island of Doctor Moreau or the near-miss Martian invasion of The War of the Worlds might both best fit within the satiric-ironic sub-mode. Gary K. Wolfe’s five stages of action in the apocalyptic narrative are useful for considering both Greener Than You Think and Earth Abides: “(1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world.”35
Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think, first published in 1947, is a consummate example of the satiric-ironic apocalypse, bringing into question humankind’s ethic of scientific innovation, consumerism, capitalism, and power. It engages with the possible threats of bioengineering and what could possibly go wrong when we manipulate the environment. Following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, SF was exploring the ecological implications of nuclear warfare; in Greener Than You Think, Moore showed that the coming doom might not come from the bomb, but from some other form of catastrophic technology. In his study of the secular apocalypse in literature, Terminal Visions, W. Warren Wagar calls the novel significant for depicting “the sense of man’s helplessness before nature raging out of control.”36 Initially, it reads like Wells’s The Food of the Gods (which starts as satire before shifting to Wells’s utopian agenda) before echoing The War of the Worlds, then ending bitterly with no hope for humanity, let alone all other life, as the grass covers the entire planet. Much of the novel develops into a satire of contemporary politics, both at home and abroad, anticipating the follies of the Cold War. Since the tone is generally satiric and witty—as Sam Moskowitz put it, “told with broad catastrophic sweep”37—the black humor somewhat masks the fact that this novel is as dark in its implications as Thomas Disch’s much more somber The Genocides.
Green Planets Page 7