Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  In the novel an itinerant salesman, Albert Weener, interviews Josephine Francis, inventor of a process called the Metamorphizer that transforms the genetic structure of plants. Francis’s hope is to increase the fecundity of the harvest, thus eliminating hunger and poverty: “It will change the face of the world, Weener. No more used-up areas, no more frantic scrambling for the few bits of naturally rich ground, no more struggle to get artificial fertilizers to worn-out soil in the face of ignorance and poverty…. Inoculate the plants with the Metamorphizer—and you have a crop fatter than Iowa’s or the Ukraine’s best. The whole world will teem with abundance.”38 Weener sees a moneymaking opportunity, and before Dr. Francis can finish her laboratory fail-safes, he applies the substance to a barren lawn in the San Fernando Valley. The sparse devil grass instantly begins to grow out of control, and Los Angeles is soon absorbed by an unrelenting patch of grass. Weener later comes face to face with the green colossus: “As I stood there with fascinated attention, the thing moved and kept on moving; not in one place, but in thousands, not in one direction, but toward all points of the compass. It writhed and twisted in nightmarish unease, expanding, extending, increasing; spreading, spreading, spreading. Its movement, by human standards, was slow, but it was so monstrous to see this great mass of verdure move at all that it appeared to be going with express speed, inexorably enveloping everything in its path.”39

  Dr. Francis is called before a congressional hearing by the “Committee to Investigate Dangerous Vegetation,”40 and here Moore’s political satire is at its finest. Francis works for a solution, but the grass spreads across the continent, and war soon breaks out between the United States and Russia as the grass begins to gain footholds around the globe. As the narrative continues, Weener invests in a food substitute, which becomes essential to survival as the grass ravages farmland, and he becomes a wealthy magnate. His abject acquisitiveness and brutal disregard for the victims of the disaster he has caused is a biting attack on industrial capitalism and the quest for power. Weener is certainly one of the most despicable lead characters in all of SF, but a fitting foil for Moore’s satiric purposes. Eventually, as the entire planet is consumed by the grass, Dr. Francis’s efforts to find an antidote have failed, and Weener, on his extravagant yacht, filled with nubile women, sails the ocean, until the grass begins to take hold there as well. The black comedy of the final line is devastating: “The Grass has found another seam in the deck.”41 Moore’s satiric vision anticipates the ironic apocalypses of J. G. Ballard and forces us to take a stern look at contemporary values that threaten the very sustainability of our planet.

  George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides is an elegiac apocalypse depicting the end of the modern era when a disease strikes down all but a small fraction of the human population, leaving all other flora and fauna intact, until the lack of humanity begins to alter the ecosphere. It has been tremendously influential upon works such as Stephen King’s The Stand, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, and David Brin’s The Postman, among others—and, as Gary K. Wolfe notes, it is “one of the most fully realized accounts in all science fiction of a massive catastrophe and the evolution toward a new culture.”42 It is fairly obvious that Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” looms behind Earth Abides; however, Wolfe notes that “the sources of the novel seem to lie less in the tradition of science fiction catastrophes than in Stewart’s own abiding concern with natural forces which seem almost consciously directed against human society.”43 Prior to Earth Abides, Stewart’s commercially and critically successful novels Storm (1941) and Fire (1948) examined natural forces acting beyond human control.

  The central character, Isherwood “Ish” Williams, a young graduate student studying ecology, is isolated in the mountains when the plague strikes. Bitten by a rattlesnake, Ish comes down the trail to the nearest dwelling for help only to find it empty. He finds a newspaper that gives details of the catastrophe:

  The headlines told him what was most essential. The United States from coast to coast was overwhelmed by the attack of some new and unknown disease of unparalleled rapidity of spread, and fatality. Estimates for various cities, admittedly little more than guesses, indicated that between 25 percent and 35 percent of the population had already died…. In its symptoms the disease was like a kind of super-measles. No one was sure in what part of the world it had originated; aided by airplane travel, it had sprung up almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine.44

  As an ecologist and a student of nature, Ish has an observer’s temperament, and thus, rather than panic and fall into despair, he determines to travel across the country to see the extent of the changes wrought upon humankind and the subsequent environmental consequences. This is indicative of what Wolfe posits as the “journey through the wasteland,” where the protagonist must witness the aftermath of the catastrophe. As an ecologist, Ish is particularly well-suited to this role of witness: “Even though the curtain had been rung down on man, here was the opening of the greatest of all dramas for a student such as he. During thousands of years man had impressed himself upon the world. Now man was gone, certainly for a while, perhaps forever. Even if some survivors were left, they would be a long time in again obtaining supremacy. What would happen to the world and its creatures without man? That he was left to see!”45 And what Ish discovers is that the ecology begins to change dramatically: the various animals and plants dependent upon and cultivated by humankind die out; they can only survive by humanity’s stewardship; this includes such surprising creatures as rats and ants, both of which suffer massive die-offs because of overpopulation, since their populations aren’t checked by human practices. This illustrates the extent to which humankind has shaped, shepherded, and cultivated the environment. Since all is interconnected, to eliminate humanity would fundamentally alter the ecology of the entire system. Ish realizes that new adaptations will occur and additional die-offs will open new niches; the evolutionary process begins to reassert itself throughout the biosphere.

  As the novel progresses, Ish encounters other survivors and forges a relationship with an African American woman named Em. Returning to the West Coast, they form a community, raising families and adapting to change as the infrastructure of civilization begins to break down. Ish hopes to preserve some of the qualities of the lost era, but the children are adapting to another mode of existence. His hopes are shattered when a disease brought by an outsider into their community wipes out many, including his son Joey, who had showed a penchant for reading and contemplative thought. This signals the end of the old ways. In the final section, as Ish comes to the end of his life, he is dubbed the “Last American,” and we poignantly witness the end of our era, though we are left with a rather melancholy promise of something new. Though Earth Abides has pastoral qualities much like Simak’s, the tone of this apocalyptic novel is decidedly more elegiac, perhaps because it is not about the transformation of the species but about the end of modern civilization.

  The apocalyptic environmentalism of Moore and Stewart warns us against ecological complacency and self-assured and unexamined species triumphalism. Both Moore and Stewart remind us that apocalypse might be just around the corner, as we eat up the planet, poison and degrade its biosystems, and put into jeopardy the continued sustainability of the human species, and most others. Though these apocalyptic narratives function within the same evolutionary paradigm as Manning’s The Man Who Awoke and Simak’s City, they leave us less assured that the ecological challenges ahead will be manageable, resolvable, or survivable. Although Manning and Simak show us in their evolutionary narratives that change itself is inevitable, they are far less pessimistic in their long-term vision of the evolutionary saga, whether universal fulfillment is achieved by human, canine, or some yet evolved species. The struggle between an apocalyptic pessimism and an evolutionary optimism is a defining characteristic of SF, and one of the reasons why these golden age ecological narratives, be they evolutionary or apoca
lyptic, are still relevant to the present. As Farah Mendlesohn has importantly noted, “Science fiction is less a genre … than an ongoing discussion,” an “argument with the universe.”46 The combined argument of evolution and apocalypse, optimism and pessimism, has the potential to coalesce in the reader and facilitate transformational ecological thought. It is in that struggle between optimism and pessimism, dramatized by these narratives and others like them, that we can begin to do the critical work of ecological transformation.

  Together, these four books not only show historically the engagement with ecological challenges by Golden Age SF writers, but they still offer valuable reflections and insights on ecological questions for today, as we edge closer to ecological crisis, and provide avenues for fresh ecological thinking, through the persistent struggle between optimism and pessimism. The importance of ecological thinking to our contemporary crisis is self-evident. SF provides us with a methodology to begin formulating alternatives. Lawrence Buell asks “whether planetary life will remain viable for most of the Earth’s inhabitants without major changes in the way we live now.”47 Studying SF (and more broadly literature) using an ecological lens can perhaps better prepare us for impending environmental change. Glen Love points to a possible future for literary studies: “Literary studies today may find new purpose in redirecting human consciousness, through our teaching and scholarship, to a full consideration of our place in an undismissible but increasingly threatened natural world. Paradoxically, taking nature seriously in this way—embracing the social within the natural—may provide us with our best hope of recovering the disappearing social role of literary criticism.”48 Ecocritic Patrick Murphy concurs: “How might the long-term attitude of our students and other members of our culture toward environmental protection and restoration be affected by the teaching of works … that are devoted to nature and environmental topics? The ideas taught today can become the practice of tomorrow, but only if they are taught today.”49 This is a call for a more ecologically oriented literary criticism, a call for a deeper engagement with the literature that examines the human animal in the fullness of its environment—which is to say, a call for all of us to read, study, and teach SF.

  Notes

  1. Isaac Asimov, ed., Before the Golden Age (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 344.

  2. Terry Carr, ed., Dream’s Edge (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books), 1.

  3. Frank Herbert, introduction to The Wounded Planet, ed. Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd (New York: Bantam, 1973), xi–xvii.

  4. Brian Stableford, “Science Fiction and Ecology,” in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 129.

  5. Ibid., 140.

  6. See Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

  7. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xx.

  8. Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 1.

  9. Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 56–57.

  10. Everett F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), 634–35.

  11. The last story, “The Simple Way” (“Trouble with Ants”) appeared in Fantastic Adventures in 1951.

  12. I have discussed this in my book The Evolutionary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). See, among other studies, John J. Pierce, When World Views Collide: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989); Nicholas Ruddick, The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009); Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). A good introduction to modern science is Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

  13. Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Seven Beauties, 90.

  14. See Michael Ruse’s The Evolution Wars (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO, 2000) and Monad to Man: The Idea of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  15. Wells’s fiction appeared in every issue of Amazing Stories from its inception in April 1926 to August 1928.

  16. Everett F. Bleiler, “Laurence Manning,” in Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, ed. Douglas Ivison (Detroit: Gale, 2002), 181.

  17. Laurence Manning, The Man Who Awoke (New York: Ballantine, 1975), 20–21.

  18. Ibid., 25.

  19. Ibid., 45.

  20. Ibid., 71.

  21. Clifford D. Simak, City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 1.

  22. See Gregory Benford and the Editors of Popular Mechanics, eds., The Wonderful Future That Never Was (New York: Hearst Books, 2010).

  23. Simak, City, 37.

  24. Ibid., 96–97.

  25. Ibid., 121.

  26. Ibid., 151.

  27. Morton, Ecological Thought, 7. Emphasis mine.

  28. Simak, City, 166.

  29. Brian W. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 225.

  30. Thomas D. Clareson, Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period (1926–1970) (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 45.

  31. Ibid., 48.

  32. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 9.

  33. Quoted in Bruce Shaw, “Clifford Simak’s City (1952): The Dogs’ Critique (and Others’),” Extrapolation 46, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 498.

  34. Jill Milling, “The Ambiguous Animal: Evolution of the Beast-Man in Scientific Creation Myths,” in The Shape of the Fantastic, ed. Oleana H. Saciuk (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 105.

  35. Gary K. Wolfe, “The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End,” In The End of the World, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 8.

  36. W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 187.

  37. Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1966), 425.

  38. Ward Moore, Greener Than You Think (New York: Crown, 1985), 3.

  39. Ibid., 53.

  40. Ibid., 90.

  41. Ibid., 322.

  42. Wolfe, “Remaking of Zero,” 16.

  43. Ibid., 16.

  44. George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 12–13.

  45. Ibid., 24.

  46. Farah Mendlesohn, “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–2.

  47. Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, vi.

  48. Love, Practical Ecocriticism, 163–64

  49. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations, 4.

  3

  Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin’s Utopian Fictions

  GIB PRETTYMAN

  For scholars who approach Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictions from the perspective of Marxist critical theory, ecology and Daoism can be problematic aspects of her work. In the effusion of Le Guin scholarship that coincided with the establishment of the journal Science Fiction Studies (SFS) in the earl
y 1970s, critics were quick to identify characteristic subjects of “wholeness and balance” and to link them to her ecological concerns and the Daoist dynamic of yin and yang.1 On the one hand, critical theorists saw in these subjects an inspiring awareness of systemic relationships, evocation of “non-capitalist habitats,” and rejection of capitalist alienation, particularly given the publication of her overtly anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed in 1974.2 On the other hand, they found her “mythopoetic” invocations of balance to be wishful thinking and to imply that radical political action was misguided.3 Sorting out this ambivalence was especially relevant to critical theorists in terms of assessing Le Guin’s utopianism, which they regarded as a positive historical development and a key aspect of SF as a contemporary cultural genre.

  Starting with the hugely influential work of Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson, then, critical theorists have worked to highlight the radical energies of Le Guin’s fictions while simultaneously downplaying politically troublesome aspects of her invocations of Daoism4 and ecology. Although experimentation with non-Western spiritual traditions was a hallmark of the postwar counterculture, Daoism was (and remains) a poorly understood tradition for most critics. Both Suvin and Jameson viewed Daoism with distrust and dismissed it as politically misleading. Ecology, by comparison, represented a major cultural and historical issue in the early 1970s. As Peter Stillman notes, Le Guin was writing at the outset of the modern environmentalist movement, symbolized by the first Earth Day in 1970.5 The field known as “deep ecology” was also coalescing at this time. Rather than treating this issue directly, however, Suvin and Jameson interpreted Le Guin’s ecological themes as fantasies that revealed the inescapable political contradictions of capitalism. In particular, Jameson described Le Guin’s approach as “world reduction,” which he saw as a fantasy of escaping from the history of capitalism. Reduced thus to the status of compensatory fantasies, neither Daoism nor ecology was engaged as a strategic framework in its own right. Indeed, serious doubts were suggested about Le Guin’s use of both.