6. Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37 (9).
7. Nijhuis, “Sci-Fi Writer,” no page.
8. Katherine V. Snyder, “‘Time To Go’: The Post-apocalyptic and the Post-traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Studies in the Novel 43, no. 4 (2011): 470–89 (470).
9. M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 15.
10. Maria Varsam, “Concrete Dystopia: Slavery and Its Others,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 206–7.
11. Ruth Levitas and Lucy Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 26.
12. Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Necessity of Utopian Thinking: A Cross-National Perspective,” in Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds, ed. Jorn Rusen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Reiger (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 3.
13. Paolo Bacigalupi, “The Tamarisk Hunter,” in Pump Six and Other Stories, by Paolo Bacigalupi (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2008), 132.
14. Paolo Bacigalupi, “The Calorie Man,” ibid., 114.
15. Dale Knickerbocker, “Apocalypse, Utopia, and Dystopia: Old Paradigms Meet a New Millennium,” Extrapolation 51, no. 3 (2010): 345–57 (349).
16. Bacigalupi, “Calorie Man,” 114.
17. Nijhuis, “Sci-Fi Writer.”
18. Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 151.
19. Peter Fitting, “Beyond This Horizon: Utopian Visions and Utopian Practice,” in Moylan and Baccolini, Utopia Method Vision, 261–62.
20. Levitas and Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times,” 17.
21. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 289.
22. Ibid., 288.
23. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review, 2010), 75.
24. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Ecology of Consumption: A Critique of Economic Malthusianism,” Polygraph 22, ed. Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu (2010): 117.
25. Ibid., 127.
26. Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 9.
27. Tidwell, “Problem of Materiality,” 100–102.
28. Paolo Bacigalupi, “The People of Sand and Slag,” in Bacigalupi, Pump Six and Other Stories, 60.
29. Ibid., 63–64.
30. Tidwell, “Problem of Materiality,” 104.
31. Bacigalupi, “People of Sand and Slag,” 64.
32. Ibid., 66.
33. Paolo Bacigalupi, “Pop Squad,” in Bacigalupi, Pump Six and Other Stories, 138.
34. Ibid., 153.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 161.
37. Bacigalupi, “Pump Six,” in Bacigalupi, Pump Six and Other Stories, 219 and 215.
38. Ibid., 229.
39. Ibid., 236.
40. Ibid., 238.
41. Varsam, “Concrete Dystopia,” 205.
42. Levitas and Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times,” 19.
43. Tidwell, “Problem of Materiality,” 105.
44. Levitas and Sargisson, “Utopia in Dark Times,” 23.
45. Ibid., 23.
46. Snyder, “‘Time to Go,’” 473.
11
Life after People
Science Faction and Ecological Futures
BRENT BELLAMY AND IMRE SZEMAN
In a May 9, 2012, New York Times article, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading environmental critic, made a startling and blunt declaration about Canadian oil extraction and climate change: “If Canada proceeds [in the tar sands], and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.”1 In a flash, the stakes on Hansen’s now thirty-year-old warning about climate change and the necessity of action on the environment have been raised precipitously. The intent of his article is all too clear: to convince us of the fact that the time for human beings to modify their life activity in a manner that will significantly offset their impact on the planet’s environment is now, as we have reached the point when the continued development of a single oil field (however large it may be) will push us over the ecological edge. He summarizes his predictions about the dire long- and short-term effects of collective ecological neglect with a strident declaration: “If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.”
What strikes us about Hansen’s interventions in the politics of climate—both his 1981 Science article about the speed of global warming due to CO2 production and this most recent piece in the Times—is his propensity to project and to extrapolate.2 Ecological thinking here remains inseparable from some form of thinking about the future; indeed, ecology in general has become so closely linked to narratives of the future that to even draw attention to this link between the environment and what-is-yet-to-come can seem beside the point or even tautological. It is the presumed effect of this link that interests us here as much as the presence of the connection itself. Hansen’s gambit, a play at the heart of ecological writing, is that this form of extrapolative writing can spur action—that depicting a future wracked by devastating weather patterns, rising ocean levels, species loss, crop failure and soil erosion, and so on, would of necessity result in the required political intervention, whether on a governmental or grassroots level or as some combination of the two, at the scale required by a problem that encapsulates and affects the whole globe.
All manner of assumptions are built into this narrative demand for action, including a continuing faith and belief in the drama of Enlightenment maturity outlined by Kant (in which we get smarter and better as we trundle along through history), the presumed power of scientific inquiry to guide political decision making, and the possibility of narrative to generate change (a long-standing dream of writers across the political spectrum)—and a hope, too, that latent species survival impulses still persist in human beings and can be activated by appeals to reason. Recently, no less a figure than leading environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki has suggested that such appeals to action have all been for naught: “Quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I feel all the effort that I’ve been involved in has really failed. We’re going backward.”3 Is there another way of naming the ecological crisis of the future that could generate the outcome that we are so desperately in need of—one that might marry scientific insight with political action in a way that would prevent the eco-apocalyptic outcomes identified by Hansen and others? As a way of probing the importance of form for ecological politics, we want to focus here on the problematic insights raised by a book that represents the ecological future in a narrative mode distinct from prevalent ways of imagining the future as either more of the same or post-catastrophe: Alan Weisman’s best seller The World Without Us (2007). This form—what we call “science faction”—has become increasingly prominent over the past decade, appearing not only in book form but in documentaries such as National Geographic’s Aftermath, the History Channel’s Life after People, and the BBC show The Future Is Wild. Such quasi-scientific, quasi-science-fictional texts depict the world after the final collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human race, often at hyperbolic geologic time scales extending millions of years. In addition to identifying the nature and function of this form, we want to critically examine what it tells us about narrative and political limits at the present time, and to consider what the problems of science faction tell us about what we might need to do to overcome such limits.
THE WORLD WITHOUT US
Weisman’s book unfolds around a thought experiment: If humans were to suddenly vanish from Earth today, what would happen to the world in our absence? He tells the story of a world without people by spri
ngboarding from a particular ecological context and its associations to another context of damaged nature and another zone of analysis and exploration, and so on throughout the book.4 Weisman attempts to chart the complicated web of relations that characterize the ecological history of the present even as he struggles to simplify these relations by removing humanity from the picture. The pleasure of the text comes from its patient and thorough investigation of the extent of human impact on the planet through thought experiments that imagine how long it would take nature to recover from the various damages we have inflicted upon it. The World Without Us is simultaneously a primer in environmental studies and a text that—like so many texts about the environment—identifies the need for rapid changes in the mode of human activity on the planet.
The book opens in the Amazon among the Zápara people, a scene that crystallizes one of the major internal contradictions of The World Without Us: thinking nature as the other of humanity. Weisman connects the demand for rubber trees created by Henry Ford’s mass-production of automobiles with the decimation of the Zápara. The point is straightforward enough: by draining Earth of its resources, we have become our own worst enemies, a fact once felt only on the (post)colonial peripheries of the planet but now a feature of daily life all over the world. Recognizing the position of human beings within nature—as opposed to the outsider status that many critics imagine humans occupy with respect to the environment—Weisman asks whether it is “possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”5 He poses this type of unanswerable question with frequency, as a reminder that the book aims to produce change in human activity with the insights produced from its attempt to “narrate the unnarratable.”6 The only reason to think of a world without us is to use the knowledge generated through such a narrative experiment to reimagine a world with us.
Weisman narrates what might happen after our disappearance by looking for evidence at sites that have already been left behind, performing an archaeology of abandonment, loss, and forgotten space. For instance, in the chapter “What Falls Apart,” he traces out what happens in Varosha, Cypress, a newly built tourist city that was forced to close in 1974 because of the ongoing border dispute between Greece and Turkey. Just six years after the city of twenty thousand had shut down, Metin Münir, a Turkish journalist who visits Varosha, is struck not by the absence of life in the city but by “its vibrant presence.” Münir reflects: “With the humans who built Varosha gone, nature was recouping it…. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement. Streets now rippled with white cyclamen combs and their pretty, variegated leaves.”7 While these enclaves emerge, in most cases, as the result of a spatial contradiction between politics and economics, the nation-state and global capital, Weisman’s narrative strategy posits them as representative examples of a world devoid of humans by treating them as if they were outside humanity altogether—a telling lack of attention to or interest in the place of politics in shaping the environment.
If such enclaves highlight the speed with which nature is likely to make a return to spaces previously occupied by humans, Weisman shows that elsewhere on the planet evidence of humanity’s presence and environmental impact will persist for much longer. The North Pacific garbage gyre—an immense “trash vortex” in the Pacific Ocean now said to be as large as the United States—marks the accumulative effects of the use of plastic polymers, a human legacy not set to disappear from Earth for one million years. We would be remiss if we failed to mention New York City—ever the apocalyptic metonym for the destruction or decay of humanity and urbanism. Weisman projects that within thousands of years, “what’s left of New York City [will be] scraped clean by glaciers. Only some tunnels and other underground structures [will] remain.”8 Weisman’s project, dialing back and forth from the massified minutiae of polymers to the destruction of the great cities to the reclamation of farmland by fast-growing plant species, maps out an imagined ecological future that is at the same time intensely informed and constructed by the contradictions and impasses of the present.
SCIENCE FACTION
The World Without Us has been dubbed an “eco-thriller” and a “thought experiment” by critics, and as a “love letter” to the planet and to the human race in an interview given by Weisman.9 We prefer to read it, and other works in this strange new subgenre, in relation to science fiction, but argue that it could be better described as “a fiction of science fact,” or science faction. Science faction represents a landscape devoid of people, an emptiness that bizarrely and of necessity generates an immediate challenge to narrative logic (that is, that narrative can persist even in a world without either narrators or audience). It is perhaps this founding antagonism that is one of the reasons why these fictions take the form of a didactic teaching of fact, science, and environmental politics, adopting a documentary form dominated by its presumed immediate relation to the real. As in science documentary, the “fact” of the narrated developments tends to displace questions about narrator, addressee, or audience. And yet, the fiction of the yet-to-be facts of texts like the World Without Us place them outside of documentary and closer to the mode of typical science fictions.
Indeed, there are characteristically SF elements to the book. On the one hand, at times it imagines the evolution of humanlike intelligence all over again: “One hundred thousand years hence,” Weisman writes, “the intellectual development of whatever creature digs them up might be kicked abruptly to a higher evolutionary plane by the discovery of ready-made tools. Then again, lack of knowledge of how to duplicate them could be a demoralizing frustration—or an awe-arousing mystery that ignites religious consciousness.”10 On the other, it pictures the discovery of the post-human Earth by aliens who are then tested by the remaining objects of human civilization. Do they recognize us, in spite of our disappearance?
Supposing, however, that before such entropic vandalism occurs, the collection is discovered by visiting alien scientists who happen upon our now-quiet planet, bereft of voracious, but colorful, human life. Suppose they find the Rothamsted archive, its repository of more than 300,000 specimens still sealed in thick glass and tins. Clever enough to find their way to Earth, they would doubtless soon figure out that the graceful loops and symbols penned on the labels were a numbering system. Recognizing soil and preserved plant matter, they might realize that they had the equivalent of a time-lapse record of the final century-and-a-half of human history.11
In this sense, like SF, science faction encodes what appears to be a temporal displacement of contradictions from the present onto a narrative future in order to explore their full significance and consequences.
But the differences between the two genres are significant. Science faction makes an aesthetic-epistemological gambit toward solving or seeking the resolution of historical problems through its unusual, hybrid narrative form. In SF, this well-recognized process has been described by Darko Suvin as “cognitive estrangement.”12 Carl Freedman has rearticulated Suvin’s thesis about cognitive estrangement as a dialectic between the two elements, arguing that “the first term refers to the creation of an alternative fictional world that, by refusing to take our mundane environment for granted, implicitly or explicitly performs an estranging critical interrogation of the latter. But the critical character of the interrogation is guaranteed by the operation of cognition, which enables the SF text to account rationally for its imagined world and for the connections as well as the disconnections of the latter to our own empirical world.”13 The estrangement element of Weisman’s book is that humanity is simply gone. Weisman’s self-described aesthetic strategy was to dissipate the anxiety that typically attends ecological issues by killing off humans at the outset. He says, “You can take your time and really look at all this stuff, because we’re already out of the picture.”14 For a critic of SF like Suvin, this type of admission marks the book’s historical nature in a double sense: first,
that Weisman’s science faction could only appear at a particular moment in history, and second, that from moment to moment its estrangement (the disappearance of humans) will have different meanings (think, for instance, of the difference between post–World War II and Cold War anxieties about the atomic bomb compared to ecological anxiety today).
For Freedman, the “cognition effect” can be produced whether or not a text adheres strictly to a set of scientifically or empirically determined facts, as long as it bears out the logic of its science-fictional propositions immanently, with internal consistency. The key distinction between science faction and SF is that the former suspends the need to secure this cognition effect by relying on a future that is the same as the present, in so far as it is shaped by known scientific principles and data. The cognitive element, the fact of science faction in the case of The World Without Us, is secured through the expert testimony of architects, maintenance workers, climate change experts, and many, varied scientific researchers. The sole site at which Weisman’s book mimics the operations of SF is thus in its absence of people. But rather than being a site at which the cognition effect can play out, generating a social or political allegory based on the believability of the world that the book has crafted, it is here that the genre of science faction instead produces one of its primary contradictions. The answer to the central question of the book can’t help but betray itself by making it clear that a world without us is still intensely bound up with us. And Weisman knows it; he says, “And yet there’s a kind of paradox there too, isn’t there? It’s supposed to be a world without us, but the book is filled with people, too.”15
The aim of science faction is to mobilize some of the formal and imaginative energies produced by the tensions and contradictions of its form—not quite science documentary, not quite SF—to generate the kinds of political outcomes longed for by those concerned about human impacts on the environment. However, science faction tends to make at least two connected, problematic assumptions that impede or block such a politics: first, that humanity can disappear without impacting or altering nature in some significant way, and second, that nature would flourish in the absence of humans. Taken together, even given the potential effects of the text’s formal inventiveness, these two assumptions render a deeply conservative message about ecology—the opposite of what Weisman and the form of science faction more generally intend. In the first case, positioning humans as in some deep way external to nature—as outside nature to such a degree that their disappearance produces no tangible effect of its own—reinforces existing views of the divide between humanity and nature that have made the latter a mere instrument of the former. In a very real sense, from this perspective the world is always already without us, which is why nature need only address the consequences of human activity and need not try to manage the sudden disappearance of its largest mammalian species and the most dominant predator in the ecosystem.
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