By this stage we need to invoke another aspect of the world of the novel. This is that there are no gaps in existence, only gradations that may be bridged or used as stepping-stones. It is a Derridean world of slidings and deferred differences, not so much interdependences as overlappings and metamorphoses. There is no absolute or broad division between death and life. Grisamentum is in process of coming back to life, by way of the ink of the squid and even of the writings about the squid or the kraken, added to his ashes. He utilizes “an interzone closer to life” (that is, closer than his apparent state of being dead), “a threshold-life” (401). Dane comes back to life after being tortured to death. The squid, dead and preserved in the huge glass tank of fluid at the museum, stolen, teleported to a truck, thence to the embassy of the Sea (literally thus: a place at which this vast power may be contacted) and back to the museum, comes to twitching life, dies again in self-sacrifice: transpositions, transformations. The way to spirit (that is, aliveness with more capacities than aliveness has in our world) is through matter, and often the grungiest of matter at that. Familiars or golems may be made out of “a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair” (215) for instance; magicians and esoterics animate and give purpose to a flock of pigeons or a cloud of dead leaves. And even though the plot is largely concerned with keeping the missing squid from a bunch of criminals who are capable of reckless violence and torture, there is a sense in which no distinction exists between good and evil, because both sides are united by a similar kind of manic energy. No one is really in control of the oncoming apocalypse, and both sides have to become manipulators of the forces and factions of alternative London.
The ultimate villain, the one revealed after all the preemptions, fakes, false leads, and inconclusive, supposedly climactic battles, is a certain Vardy, who has no moral character, or at least none that has any kind of manifestation comparable to the highly colored nastiness of characters like Grisamentum and the Tattoo. Vardy is the anomaly among all these personages whose anomalousness is bound into the rules of transformation that otherwise prevail in the novel’s apparently anarchic universe, but he is a mere shadow of the resolving third terms we have noted in earlier texts; it is the reimagining of imagined apocalypse as the scene of a dialogue between humans and universe that brings about resolution in this novel.
Each of the novels that have been discussed rethinks and restages the relations of the ordinary and the anomalous in our contemporary, apocalypse-obsessed culture. It is the value of the ordinary, and the threats to it from contemporary culture, that shapes each novel. Each arguably offers a democratic imagination of apocalypse, or apocalypses.
We can observe a shift from The Lathe of Heaven through Girlfriend in a Coma to Kraken, though in each case the governing condition is that reality is the product of human dreams. The struggle against the apprehension of future calamities gives rise to guilt and anxiety in George Orr, the main character in The Lathe of Heaven; the universe responds to his effective dreams, often in unexpected ways that give rise to more problems, but otherwise it stands aloof, and help has to come from outer space. Resolution requires an analogous but grander anomaly in Coupland: a teenage ghost, a fake apocalypse. By the time of the carnivalesque Kraken, however, we can speak of a release of human fearlessness in the face of apocalypses, and here the universe is “persuadable,” though it seems to be only by luck that what persuades it is the version of itself that Darwin advanced, rather than the more violent versions on offer in the world of the novel. The trajectory from The Lathe of Heaven to Kraken is, then, one that illuminates the issues at stake with contemporary apocalypse, because of the variations played on the relations between the human dream of apocalypse and the universe’s responses to it.
These novels further suggest that the ordinary cannot be imagined without being put into relation with the banal and commodified. It is this contemporary condition that challenges Coupland and Atwood, in particular, calling forth their strongest diagnoses. Both Coupland and Atwood give us bizarre and weird worlds, but make us recognize them as our daily and familiar creations, not as alternatives. In the society of Oryx and Crake language operates to conceal and trivialize the horribleness of the products of science and commodity culture; Snowman’s ordinariness is mediocrity at best, and Oryx, the elusive outsider to the system in this novel, does no more than haunt the aftermath of disaster. Coupland’s dealings with the banalities of consumer culture in Girlfriend are ambiguous, and incite him to a series of risky narrative moves that only just come off. In this regard Miéville’s tactic in Kraken is noteworthy in its difference: Miéville seeks instead to redeem and revitalize the banal in ordinary things and to knit them into a thoroughgoing erasure of and play with the blurring of ontological boundaries. Kraken thus builds an alternative to our current world not out of extremity or radical difference, but out of its most familiar and most ordinary bits and pieces—and the effect is freeing.
Notes
Javier Marías, Written Lives, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (London: New Directions, 2006), 99.
1. Perry Anderson, “The Force of the Anomaly,” London Review of Books, April 26, 2012, 3–13 (8).
2. Brian Stableford, “Man-Made Catastrophes,” in The End of the World, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 126.
3. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 160.
4. China Miéville, Kraken (London: Pan, 2010), 78.
5. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Avon Books, 1997).
6. Thanks to Rachel Ellis for discussions about Coupland.
7. Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 63. Additional references to this work in this section will be provided by parenthetical citation.
8. Ibid., 267–68.
9. Linus asks Richard what is the difference between the afterlife and the future:
“The difference,” I said, “is that the afterworld is all about infinity; the future is only about changes on this world—fashion and machines and architecture.” We were working on a TV movie about angels coming down to Earth to help housewives. (92)
10. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 27 and throughout. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.
11. See Veronica Hollinger, “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition,” Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (2006): 452–72. Hollinger suggests that it is almost as if Snowman is the only “real character” in the novel (467n.11).
12. Miéville, Kraken, 116. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.
13. A subgenre mixing SF, fantasy, and horror, as discussed by Roger Luckhurst; relevant authors include Peter Ackroyd, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair, and M. John Harrison. See Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn,’” Textual Practice 16, no. 3 (2002): 526–45.
3
QUIET EARTHS, JUNK CITIES, AND THE CULTURES OF THE AFTERNOON
10
“The Rain Feels New”
Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi
ERIC C. OTTO
With many of his stories, Paolo Bacigalupi instigates a reconsideration of dominant ways of thinking in response to ecological degradation and its related social consequences. As such, the author is an environmentalist and a utopian, an ecotopian whose environmental concerns influence his participation in a literary form that articulates “the desire for a better way of being.”1 In utopian literature, the gap between the actual world and the narrative world encourages readers to think about alternatives that would bring about a future better than the present or would prevent a future that is worse than the present. Because the gaps that Bacigalupi highlights are the results of a number of existing and identifiable
social and cultural forces, his stories participate in what Tom Moylan calls the critical utopian tradition. As Moylan notes of the revitalization of utopian literature and thought during the oppositional 1960s: “The critical utopias had and still have their place in furthering the processes of ideological critique, consciousness-raising, and social dreaming/planning that necessarily inform the practice of those who are politically committed to producing a social reality better than, and beyond, the one that currently oppresses and destroys humanity and nature.”2
Bacigalupi mobilizes critical utopianism in the interest of critiquing social and cultural forces that degrade nonhuman nature and the human communities that are imbedded in this nature. As ecotopias, his stories are “efforts to reimagine a sustainable human society,” as Kim Stanley Robinson notes of ecotopian efforts in general.3 In “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004), for example, Bacigalupi “argues for a nature that is not valued merely as a resource for humanity but that is irreplaceably, utterly different from us and valuable for that simple fact.”4 In “Pop Squad” (2006), Bacigalupi works at the nexus of economic and cultural production and biological human reproduction, engaging socialist ecofeminist questions about the tensions between production and reproduction and implicitly arguing for a more ethical relationship between the two.5 In “Pump Six” (2008), he argues for a revised understanding of the connection between humanity and nonhuman nature as he thinks about the long-term sociocultural consequences of the infrastructural efficiencies we often take for granted—technologies like sewage pumps, which foster misapprehensions about human being and ecological being.
To say Bacigalupi mobilizes utopia to prompt a reconsideration of ethics, economy, thinking, and being in light of ecological and social degradation is not to say his imagined societies are themselves utopian. Bacigalupi’s fictions are not about future societies that we can assume the author “intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived.”6 On the contrary, dystopia is Bacigalupi’s self-admitted “natural zone.”7 A generic sibling of utopian fiction, dystopian literature “takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions.”8 These developments, for Bacigalupi, are the ethical, economic, and epistemological assumptions and consequent practices that prevail today and structure modern life; the “devastating conclusions” are the rationally extrapolated but imaginatively rendered environmental and social costs of the present. “The People of Sand and Slag,” for example, is set in a future when humans have fully transcended the biological world and accept as normal an industrially decimated land and sea, as well as their own post-biological, superhuman, radically atomic being. In “Pop Squad,” women who are caught with children are shipped to work camps, their kids murdered by a population-control police force, while complicit citizens wonder what could make women abandon lives of economic and cultural productivity to have kids. In “Pump Six,” malfunctioning sewage pumps threaten to flood residents of New York City with their own waste, but apathy among the population prevails as citizens in this polluted future have devolved into thoughtless troglodytes.
Such eco-dystopian representations, while harrowing, are indeed part of the utopian project to imagine and bring about positive social change. Scholars of utopia have long recognized the utopian impulse—the impulse toward hope—in dystopian literature. If, as M. Keith Booker writes, “dystopian societies are generally more or less thinly veiled refigurations of a situation that already exists in reality,” then to represent such societies in fiction is an effort to alert readers to elements of social reality that might otherwise be undetectable as a consequence of their ubiquity.9 Darko Suvin coined the term cognitive estrangement to label the utopian literary effort to renew readers’ perceptions of normalized, unseen social reality by presenting unfamiliar objects and situations—nova—that are nevertheless rationally of this reality. Unlike Victor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, which is the artistic attempt to reinvigorate perceptions of the mundane, cognitive estrangement functions with a more political charge. In dystopia, as in all critical utopian fiction, “the real world is made to appear ‘strange’ in order to challenge the reader’s complacency toward accepted views of history and awaken, through the ‘truth’ of fiction, a new perception of the connections between history and the present world.”10
By highlighting the connections between fictional nova, the present, and historical forces, dystopian fiction operates as “the dark side of hope.”11 As Lyman Tower Sargent notes, “a defining characteristic of the dystopian genre must be a warning to the reader that something must, and, by implication, can be done in the present to avoid the future.”12 With this assertion, Sargent speaks for a critical dystopia that presents dark futures not to background the machinations of characters but instead to foreground the conditions of possibility for these dark futures’ emergence. One of Bacigalupi’s fundamental ecotopian strategies is to imagine what the future could look like given the full realization of current developments—in short, to prompt ecotopia through ecodystopian storytelling. His “The Tamarisk Hunter” (2006), for example, is about water—how societies use, abuse, and unfairly apportion it to the detriment of politically and economically disadvantaged citizens. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, rampant suburban development within the Colorado River Basin, careless water use, and the thirsty, invasive tamarisk tree have depleted the water table enough to prompt California to secure its allotment with lawsuits. No one on the river, including the protagonist, Lolo, and his wife, Annie, can touch the water without the threat of punishment, leaving Lolo to reflect on a past when “football fields still had green grass and sprinklers sprayed their water straight into the air.”13 Of course, this past is our now; the story’s dystopian nova draw our attention to the present and cue us to think about this present as having a role in bringing about a certain kind of future.
Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man” (2005) and “Yellow Card Man” (2006), both of which take place in the same literary universe as his Nebula- and Hugo-Award-winning novel The Windup Girl (2009), likewise extrapolate dystopian futures from specific present developments. These stories envision the inevitable end of the fossil fuel economy as a monopolistic business opportunity for global corporations who modify and patent food crop genetics. The world economy has run out of oil calories to power its machinery, but it has not run out of food calories to do so. With full legal rights to these food calories, biotech firms such as “AgriGen” and “PurCal” employ intellectual property police to crack down violently on people transporting, growing, and eating pirated food or using such food to nourish the genetically modified animals whose calorie-fed movements power spring winders and computers. The calorie companies have more than IP police, however: “What makes [AgriGen’s patented grain] SuperFlavor so perfect from a CEO’s perspective” is its sterility.14 Monsanto’s terminator technology has been perfected, and its consequences realized in this imagined future. As the protagonist of “The Calorie Man” has learned through childhood experience, planting seeds obtained from crops originally grown from calorie monopoly seeds is futile. They will not germinate—radically reconfiguring the relationship between farmers, corporations, and the natural world.
As Dale Knickerbocker argues, “it is possible to see dystopia as a call to pursue its opposite.”15 Bacigalupi’s fiction calls us to pursue modes of thinking and social being that would prevent, for example, the unjust privatization of “a privilege that nature once provided willingly”—the automatic reproduction of plant life.16 Of course, such natural resources as water and food are already unjustly politicized and privatized, and Bacigalupi’s fiction is of a piece with nonfictional modes of social commentary like critical journalism and documentary film that expose why, how, and to what effects. If we take Bacigalupi at his word, he creatively represents future consequences of current
developments to raise in readers the question “Does that seem like something we want to be going toward?”17 Bacigalupi has a clear ecotopian motivation for writing ecodystopias. He wants first to place readers in worlds where the negative consequences of present ways of thinking and being are distressingly palpable and second to use these possible worlds to influence readers to take action. In addition to imagining possible futures, another one of Bacigalupi’s ecotopian strategies is thus analogous to philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s strategy for social change. Dupuy, Slavoj Žižek notes, proposes to confront dystopian disaster like this:
We should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (“If we had done this and that, the calamity that we are now experiencing would not have occurred!”) upon which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny—and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.18
Ultimately, Bacigalupi’s ecodystopian fiction displays “some critical awareness of the present,” as Peter Fitting notes of critical dystopia in general, and it attempts “to explain how this dystopia came about” in an effort to get readers to think about and act in the world differently.19
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