4. Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (1990): 621–45; Brian W. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, with David Wingrove (New York: Avon, 1988), 120–21.
5. John Rieder, “Science Fiction, Colonialism, and the Plot of Invasion,” Extrapolation 46, no. 3 (2005): 373–94 (376).
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 378.
8. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
9. Brian Stableford and David Pringle, “Invasion,” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. Peter Nicholls and John Clute (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 623–25 (624).
10. John W. Campbell Jr., letter to A. E. Van Vogt, March 3, 1945, in The John W. Campbell Letters, vol. 1, ed. Perry A. Chapdelaine Sr., Tony Chapdelaine, and George Hay (Franklin, TN: AC Projects, 1985), 49–55 (55).
11. Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, rev. ed. (New York: Del Rey, 1990), 338. For a reading of the novel as an allegory of Cold War conflicts, see H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 98–101.
12. Rob Latham, “Subterranean Suburbia: Underneath the Smalltown Myth in the Two Version of Invaders from Mars,” Science-Fiction Studies 22, no. 2 (1995): 198–208 (201). For a discussion of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers that links it with Wells’s and Heinlein’s novels, see David Seed, “Alien Invasions by Body Snatchers and Related Creatures,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader, ed. Victor Sage and Allen L. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 152–70.
13. Cyndy Hendershot, “Anti-Communism and Ambivalence in Red Planet Mars, Invasion U.S.A., and The Beast of Yucca Flats,” Science Fiction Studies 28, no. 2 (2001): 246–60.
14. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), 131–32.
15. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, 255. For an alternative take on Wyndham’s work, which defends him as a more subversive writer than Aldiss allows, see Rowland Wymer, “How ‘Safe’ is John Wyndham? A Closer Look at His Work, with Particular Reference to The Crysalids,” Foundation 55 (1992): 25–36.
16. Roger Luckhurst, “The Angle between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 53.
17. Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science-Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (1982): 147–58 (152).
18. For an overview of the New Wave movement, see my “The New Wave,” in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 202–16. See also Luckhurst, Science Fiction, 141–95.
19. Algis Budrys, “Galaxy Bookshelf,” Galaxy 25, no. 2 (1966): 125–33 (130).
20. Ibid., 127.
21. Ibid., 130.
22. Ibid., 128.
23. David Hartwell, introduction in The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch (Boston: Gregg Press, 1978), v–xv (xiv).
24. Budrys, “Galaxy Bookshelf,” 129.
25. Ibid., 131.
26. Brian W. Aldiss, “Book Fare,” SF Impulse 1, no. 11 (1967): 51–54 (51–53).
27. See, for example, William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1962); David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Vintage, 1968); and Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1969).
28. Thomas M. Disch, The Genocides (New York: Pocket, 1979), 104.
29. See Frank B. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More Than the Sum of the Parts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
30. Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (London: Chapman and Hall, 1972).
31. Ibid., 31.
32. Ibid., 31–32.
33. Ibid., 109.
34. Ibid., 51.
35. Ibid., 77–93.
36. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1976), 177.
37. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).
38. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 279.
39. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 47.
40. Thomas M. Disch, “Introduction: On Saving the World,” in The Ruins of Earth: An Anthology of Stories of the Immediate Future, ed. Disch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 1–7 (5).
41. Ibid.
42. Hartwell, xiv.
43. Disch, Genocides, 49, emphasis in original.
44. Ibid., 206.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 26.
47. Ibid., 169.
48. The publication of Silent Spring is generally seen as the catalytic event that spawned the modern environmental movement: see Victor B. Scheffer, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 119–21, and John McCormick, The Global Environmental Movement, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 65–67.
49. Disch, Genocides, 208.
50. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 53.
51. Disch, Genocides, 78–79.
52. Ibid., 11. Emphasis mine.
53. Ibid., 51.
54. Michael Stern, “From Technique to Critique: Knowledge and Human Interests in Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, and The Sheep Look Up,” Science-Fiction Studies 3, no. 2 (1976): 112–30. See also Neal Bukeavich, “‘Are We Adopting the Right Measures to Cope?’: Ecocrisis in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 1 (2002): 53–70, and, for a review of ecological themes in post-1960s SF, Patrick D. Murphy, “The Non-Alibi of Alien Scapes: SF and Ecocriticism,” in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 263–78.
55. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Word for World Is Forest,” in Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 32–117.
56. Ibid., 34.
57. Ibid., 35.
58. For a discussion of Le Guin’s ecofeminism, see Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 111–21.
59. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction to The Word for World Is Forest,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, by Le Guin, ed. Susan Wood (New York: Perigee, 1979), 149–54 (151).
60. Le Guin, “Word,” 73.
61. In her essay “Discovering Worlds: The Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin” (in Ursula K. Le Guin: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1986] 183–209), Susan Wood complains that the author was “unfortunately [not] successful in avoiding the limitations of moral outrage at contemporary problems” (186–87). In the afterword to the novel published in Again, Dangerous Visions (117–18), Le Guin herself acknowledged that she is “not very fond of moralistic tales, for they often lack charity. I hope this one does not” (118).
62. Ian Watson, “The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: The Word for World Is Forest and ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,’” in Bloom, Ursula K. Le Guin, 47–55 (48).
63. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 124.
64. Clifton Fadiman and Jean White, Ecocide—and Thoughts toward Survival (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1971). For a contemporaneous history, see Carroll Pursell, ed., From Conservation to Ecology: The Development of Environmental Concern (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973).
65. Among the many versions of this text is Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York:
Universe Books, 1974).
66. Le Guin, “Word,” 35.
67. Though both these works were published after Le Guin’s novel, the issues they treated were widely debated during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For an excellent overview of these debates, see Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
68. Ibid., 129. He goes on: “Fines would be assessed and collected (by guardians) on behalf of these creatures and used to restore their habitat or create an alternative to the one destroyed.”
69. On the emergence of Green activism, see McCormick, Global Environmental Movement, 203–24.
70. National Staff of Environmental Action, eds., Earth Day—The Beginning: A Guide for Survival (New York: Pocket, 1970), v. On the origins of Earth Day, see Scheffer, Shaping of Environmentalism, 124–25.
71. For a critique of essentialist views of nature, see Jeffrey C. Ellis, “On the Search for a Root Cause: Essentialist Tendencies in Environmental Discourse,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 256–68. Major theoretical/historical studies of nature as a social construction are Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
72. Le Guin, “Word,” 86. Emphasis mine.
73. On Lyubov in relation to other similar figures in Le Guin’s work, see Karen Sinclair, “The Hero as Anthropologist,” in Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, ed. Joe De Bolt (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979), 50–65.
74. On Romantic imagery in the novel, especially the anthropomorphizing evocation of the forest as “a metaphor for the landscape of consciousness,” see Peter S. Alterman, “Ursula K. Le Guin: Damsel with a Dulcimer,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Taplinger, 1979), 64–76 (65).
75. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in Politics and Environment: A Reader in Ecological Crisis, ed. Walt Anderson (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear, 1970), 338–49 (342). On the influence of White’s essay, see Nash, Rights of Nature, 88–96.
76. See, for example, Climate Ark’s continuously updated “Climate Change and Global Warming” website at http://www.climateark.org (accessed May 22, 2012).
77. See T. F. H. Allan, Joseph A. Tainter, and Thomas W. Hoekstra, Supply-Side Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 259–61.
78. J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 262.
2
BRAVE NEW WORLDS AND LANDS OF THE FLIES
5
“The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People”
Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction
SABINE HÖHLER
My fellow citizens: It is with a heavy heart that I bring you the findings of the council. After deliberating in continuous sessions for the last four months in unceasing efforts to find a solution to the devastating problem of overpopulation threatening to destroy what remains of our planet, the World Federation Council has considered and rejected all halfway measures advanced by the various regional scientific congresses. We have also rejected proposals for selective euthanasia and mass sterilization. Knowing the sacrifices that our decision will entail, the World Council has nevertheless reached a unanimous decision. I quote: “Because it has been agreed by the nations of the world that the earth can no longer sustain a continuously increasing population, as of today, the first of January, we join with all other nations of the world in the following edict: childbearing is herewith forbidden.” To bear a child shall be the greatest of crime, punishable by death. Women now pregnant will report to local hospitals for registration. I earnestly request your cooperation in this effort to ensure the last hope for survival of the human race.
ZPG: Zero Population Growth
ZPG, released in 1971, deals with the rigid measures for population control that a densely populated Earth might require in the future. In the effort to ensure the survival of the human race the World Council rules that having children will be strictly illegal for the coming thirty years. Set in a thickly polluted American metropolis, the movie tells the story of the young white couple Russ and Carol, who, upset with having to make do with a surrogate robot baby, secretly give birth to a child, whom they hide carefully from friends and neighbors. However, the young family is discovered by a neighboring couple, itself with a strong desire for a child. A fight about proprietary rights results in blackmail and betrayal, and finally in the disclosure of the child to the authorities. The family is arrested, their elimination imminent.1
Around 1970, scenarios of population growth and restrictions on reproduction were explored not only in works of fiction. “ZPG—Zero Population Growth” was also the name of a US activist group founded in 1968 to raise public awareness of the “population problem.” The group sought to confront the white American middle class with its lifestyle of using up far more than its global share of natural resources and adding more than its share to environmental pollution. ZPG meant to secure a birth rate of 2.2 to achieve a desired replacement rate of 1:1 and to thereby realize the dream of a numerically stable population—zero population growth. The initial mission was to encourage citizens to reduce family size: “Stop at Two,” “Stop Heir Pollution,” and “Control Your Local Stork” were some of ZPG’s slogans advertised on bumper stickers, flyers, and posters, in public service announcements, magazines, and organized protest marches. ZPG also founded its own “Population Education Department” that produced classroom texts, and a video titled World Population that was used as an educational tool in public exhibitions, museums, and zoos. The organization did not confine its actions to showing movies and handing out condoms. It also urged changes in population policy and abortion legislation, and it opened vasectomy clinics.2
Among ZPG’s founding members was the biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose popular book The Population Bomb (1968) briefly boosted group membership to more than thirty thousand in its first year.3 Drawing on his studies of animal populations, Ehrlich warned about the impending destructive “explosion” of the human world populace. He became one of the founders of population ecology, which emerged from population biology by extending the realm of the natural sciences to the study of human societies in relation to their environments.4 As the historian Matthew Connelly aptly put it, “Political problems were assumed to be biological in origin, potentially affecting the whole species.”5
The “natural laws” of population growth leveled individual and social differences. People were aggregated into comparable numerical entities to make them “accountable”: commensurable for the sake of statistics and responsible for their reproductive behavior. The ecological and governmental calculus of allocating contested earthly living space along the lines and divides of biological, ecological, and economical eligibility of human beings and populations warrant more research, to which I have contributed elsewhere.6 This chapter, however, attends to the thin line between science fact and science fiction in population ecologists’ accounts.
THE SCIENCE AND THE FICTION OF POPULATION GROWTH
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the perceived “population problem” was neither about science nor about fiction only. Both ecological science and ecological fiction invented truisms about too many people sharing too little space and about how overpopulation would soon destroy what remained of planet Earth. “Ecocide” through unprecedented population increase, environmental degradation, and resource exploitation became the subject of numerous popular works of science. Ecologists employed alarming images of exponential growth of industrial pollution, the resource consumption of the rising world economy, or of sheer human numbers within the recently discovered limits of Earth as a “small planet.”7
To understand the popularity of population ecology around 1970, its science fictional elements need to be taken seriously.8 Population ecologists shared with science fiction writers similar sweeping concerns, like the “survival of the human race,” and similar narrative strategies, like shifting present observations to other times and spaces. As Connelly observes, the actors “seeking support for campaigns to control world population continually pointed to the future because they could not actually prove that it had caused any particular crisis or emergency” in the present time.9
Moreover, population ecologists were poignantly prophetic about the future of all of humanity on the global scale. They corroborated their planetary predictions with scientific references to Malthusian and Darwinian evolutionary theories of natural selection and differential reproduction. Numerical approaches to social and political problems were supplemented by forthright deliberations on technical fixes. Suggestions of selective euthanasia and mass sterilization were not limited to works of SF but were also openly discussed in ecological publications. And finally, population ecologists proved to be genuine science fiction writers when toying with new forms of supranational governments and “new ways in which the world might be divided and united”10 to allocate planetary living space and resources. How many people could the world support, who should live, who should decide, and how—these were the questions population ecologists concerned themselves with.11
I will focus on the work of Garrett Hardin (1925–2003), an American biologist and professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hardin was a prolific and provocative writer. His philosophy of reproductive restraints was highly contested during his lifetime and remained so after his death. Most notorious perhaps are his writings on the access to common resources and on reproductive responsibility, summarized in his 1972 book Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle.12 This book provides a case of ecological SF through its blending of analytic approach with fictional narrative. Drawing on the traditions of science fiction literature and film, Hardin asks his readers to suspend their disbelief in a near apocalyptic future. He sets his story on a spaceship, providing a perfect stage to a fast-motion recapture of humankind’s history and impending doom as the population exceeds the “carrying capacity” of its finite environment.
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