Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  I think even the phrase “climate change” is an attempt to narrate the ecological situation. We use the term now as a synecdoche to stand for the totality of our damage to the biosphere, which is much bigger than mere climate change, more like a potential mass extinction event. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are representing the whole by the part most amenable to human correction. We’re thinking in terms of thermostats, and how we turn them up or down in a building. That image suggests “climate change” has the possibility of a fix, maybe even a silver bullet of a fix. No such fix will be possible for a mass extinction event.

  Lots of words and phrases are being applied to this unprecedented situation: global warming, climate change, sustainable development, decarbonization, permaculture, emergency century, climate adaptation, cruel optimism, climate mitigation, hopeless hope, the sixth mass extinction event, and so on. But maybe sentences are the minimum unit that can begin to suggest the situation in full. “This coming century looks like the moment in human history when we will either invent a civilization that nurtures the biosphere while it supports us, or else we will damage it quite badly, perhaps even to the point of causing a mass extinction event and endangering ourselves.” A narrative rather than words or labels.

  GC ► Is it a problem, then, that our narrative forms (both fictional and political) seem to rely on “crisis” for their internal energy? SF, especially ecological SF, seems to trend toward sudden, apocalyptic breaks that may not reflect the glacial pace of environmental change. Even in your Science in the Capital series (to take one example) you turn to “abrupt climate change” as a way of narrativizing, on human spatial and temporal scales, a complex network of feedback loops that in actuality is almost impossible to perceive at the level of day-to-day perception. Are there other models for thinking about change, and where do you see these at work in your work?

  KSR ► It’s true that I puzzled over how to narrate a story about climate change, which I got interested in when I went to Antarctica and listened to scientists down there talking about it. That was in 1995, and I could not think of a plot for such a story. Then in 2000 the results from the Greenland ice coring project showed that the Younger Dryas had begun in only three years, meaning the global climate had changed from warm and wet to dry and cold that quickly. That finding was a big part of the impetus behind the coining of the term “abrupt climate change.” By 2002 the National Academies Press had published a book exploring this new term and assembling a good explanation for the drop into the Younger Dryas; it appeared that the Gulf Stream had stalled, because the North Atlantic had gotten much less salty very quickly as the result of one of the massive outflows of fresh meltwater that were occasionally pouring off the melting top of the great Arctic ice cap. These same studies pointed out that the North Atlantic was now freshening again, because of the rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice cap.

  Major climate change in three years: that was a story that could be told, I thought. But while writing the novel I found that even in this crisis, abrupt on geological scales, events still resolved to individual humans living variants of ordinary life. There would be storms and freezes, power outages, and the threat of food shortages; these would make those years expensive and inconvenient, and give them a tinge of dread, it seemed (like now); but doing something about it was going to consist mostly of political action in Washington and elsewhere, and in geo-engineering projects of doubtful effectiveness and safety, which would be executed by some people, but not everyone. Beyond that, it would be daily life of a slightly different sort, and seldom more. I still wasn’t finding the crisis. And the movie The Day after Tomorrow showed me what can happen if you choose to represent climate change only as crisis. I wanted something better than that.

  So in Science in the Capital, and again in 2312, I kept coming up against the lack of a break to something radically different. It seemed as if the story of climate change was going to have to be told as some kind of daily life, which in narrative terms meant it could not be a thriller. Thrillers live in crisis mode, and anything extraneous is a category error. A review calling Science in the Capital “a slow-motion thriller” made me smile, because there can be no such thing. If a thriller stops to portray the protagonist frolicking in the snow with his toddler son, or changing his diapers, that’s a blatant genre break. It’s true I wanted those, and wrote in as many as I could. At the time I thought of it as just fooling around, giving the novel surprises, but maybe it was also a stab at representing how it might feel to live during climate change. The biggest crisis in the story is thus not any weather event, but the scientist Frank going through a change of consciousness. For any of us that is always a big crisis.

  Now I think that the novel proper has the flexibility and capaciousness to depict any human situation, including ordinary life. That’s what the modern novel was created to do, and that capacity never leaves it. It’s only when you shrink the novel to the thriller that you run into problems in representing ordinary realities.

  GC ► It seems to me that the dystopian or apocalyptic side of your work has increased in importance since Pacific Edge and the Mars trilogy, especially in your most recent novels. In the Science in the Capital trilogy our relationship to ecological crisis is much more contingent and haphazard, almost just-in-time. In Galileo’s Dream—though we don’t find out all that much about the transition between the present and humanity’s future on the moons of Saturn—the strong implication is that this has been a terrible, even tragic history, with great losses. And in your most recent novel, 2312, we return to something very much like the Accelerando of the Mars trilogy, only now the environmental problems of Earth have not been dealt with at all—leaving Earth a “planet of sadness,” home to starving billions. Does this reflect an increasing pessimism about the possibilities of the future? Or is something else at work?

  KSR ► I try to give my novels whatever attitude I think will help them work best. The bleak history sketched in Galileo’s Dream, for instance, is there because I needed a reason for people from the far future to be interfering in Galileo’s life, and what I came up with was a history so bad that some future people would want to erase and rewrite if they could. I’m always working like that, so I don’t feel my own sense of the future is well expressed by my books. Indeed in Green Mars I had the West Antarctic Ice Sheet slip off into the sea, just in order to create so much chaos that it would seem more plausible that Mars could successfully secede from Terran rule. That’s not pessimism, but just a somewhat brutal focus on making plots seem realistic.

  I do have a constantly shifting sense of what the future will “most likely bring,” like everyone else. And I am still very interested in writing about utopian futures. How to express that interest changes over time, and in the wake of previous efforts.

  GC ► 2312 in particular seems like a direct attempt to rewrite the situation of your Mars trilogy with significantly more pessimism, at least in terms of the Accelerando’s uneven distribution over class and species lines. One character suggests that even post-scarcity won’t be enough to end the problem of human suffering at all, and that in fact true “evil” might be possible only after scarcity: “Before [post-scarcity], it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, altruistic, cooperative, a lover of all…. However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.” Another chapter contains a long list of reasons why utopia is impossible, from original sin to greed to “because it probably wouldn’t work” to “because we can get away with it.”

  KSR ► For me that list is not a list of reasons why utopia is impossible, but rather a list of the shabby excuses we make for not making improvements when they are technically achievable. It was a pretty long list, and yet not comprehensive.

  It’s true that the situation on Earth in 2312 is presented as somewhat dire. It’s ve
ry much like the situation we are in now. The exaggeration of three extra centuries of damage merely heightens the representation of now. It’s a kind of surrealism, and it could mean that the book describes an impossible future history, in that if things were to go that badly for three hundred more years, they might long before the year 2312 have necessarily spiraled down into something very much worse than what the book depicts. But the way that we live now, in a mixed situation, with some in misery and some in luxury, suggested that we might limp along in a degraded manner for quite a long time. In any case the book’s scenario is a distorted image of present reality, in the usual metaphorical way of science fiction.

  Given that SF novels are always images of the times they were written in, maybe 2312 is somewhat more pessimistic than my earlier novels, even if I myself am not. In other words, it’s just the difference between 1990 and 2010. In those twenty years there’s been a lot of dithering, and that might seep into the text in unexpected ways. Still, I’m reluctant to call this pessimism.

  GC ► 2312 does point to the continued possibility of utopia as you define it in Pacific Edge, “struggle forever.” The characters do make an improvement in the situation of the solar system, and the logic of the novel’s encyclopedia-like interstitial chapters suggest that, in retrospect, a genuine historical break of some kind has been initiated.

  KSR ► Yes, that part of 2312 suggests humanity will have the means to repair damage to Earth, and also to make a more just society, and that the two efforts are parts of each other. Having started with a metaphorical description of our own time, there is then a prescription for action in the plot, again presented in surreal or symbolic form. Anything we do in reality will surely be messy and protracted, and the “we” will never be a unanimity. What I wanted to suggest is that because we have the ability to do better, our situation eventually will get so dangerous it will force us to do better. The desire will be there, and the tools are there (science and politics and culture), so the struggle is on, starting now and going on for some centuries at least. We don’t have to wait until the year 2312 to act, obviously, and it would be terrible if we did. Since we know now that we can greatly improve the situation by what we do, we should start now, and shoulder the frustrations of how long it will take without too much whining or quitting.

  GC ► You’ve said that there won’t be a sequel to 2312—no 2313, no 2412. Does this speak to the ultimate unrepresentability of utopia? Would it be possible to set an artistically successful novel in a “civilization that nurtures the biosphere”—or, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are all happy civilizations alike?

  KSR ► Well, as we have not yet seen any happy civilizations, the first one to come along should be interesting as a novelty at least. So yes, it should be possible to write an artistically successful novel set in a happy civilization. I would like to try one myself, but if I did, it would not be a sequel to 2312, as really it should be set much closer to now. It would be a new try at the subject that would follow on my earlier books, but in the way that a train of thought is followed (or not). I think it’s well worth coming back to the problem from time to time, as our current situation and its potentiality keep changing. So there is an opportunity to try something different.

  The problems that will remain even in utopian futures are big, like death, or heartbreak; others could be added without straining anyone’s imagination. If these big problems still occur in a social context of equality and well-being, might they not become even more acutely felt, as clearly unavoidable losses and sorrows? Doesn’t our inescapable biological fate mean the utopia should always shade into tragedy?

  GC ► A chapter in 2312 emphasizes the impossibility of a classic science fictional subgenre in which you’ve never participated: the galactic empire of the space opera, with human beings zipping between stars at supra–light speeds. You note that everything we currently know about physical reality tells us this is simply an impossibility—and further note that if it is an impossibility, Earth becomes tremendously important, the single best place we’ll ever know.

  KSR ► The only place we’ll ever know. I firmly believe this point made in 2312, that our solar system exists at human distances and constitutes our home, or our potential home—Earth our home, the solar system a potential home—while the universe beyond the solar system exists beyond human distances and will forever remain a backdrop only, to be observed but not visited.

  Clearly there is one exception in terms of stories engaged in real possibilities, which is the story of the generational starship. This is a really interesting science fiction subgenre, full of excellent work already, but it is almost always saying a variant of what I said above; we can’t get out to other stars and stay sane, as they are all too far away.

  GC ► I’m curious, though, as a thought experiment: if we could get beyond the solar system—if relativity were revised tomorrow—would that really change significantly your commitment to environmentalist thinking? Does ecological thought depend in some sense on a recognition of a limited futurological horizon for mankind, or, alternatively, does it draw from other modes of thinking besides the imperial-economic question of how far we can go and how much stuff we can bring back? Given how capitalism has acted on a planet it knows to be finite and limited, one can scarcely imagine how it would act if it genuinely had the entire universe to spread across. It seems to me from this perspective that ecological thinking may become more important, not less, when mankind faces no limitations on its endless expansion. The wall of the solar system almost makes this too easy a problem, by shifting the register from morality to self-interest; we have to protect our environment to keep ourselves alive, not because it’s right.

  KSR ► If we had the galaxy within reach … but this is something like the land of Cockaigne, which I’m not sure is science fiction. In any case it’s not a thought I can follow. I guess the way I come at it is to ask myself: What kind of story could I tell using this device of the galactic setting, that I couldn’t tell by way of a more realistic device? And when I don’t find any, as usually happens to me when I think about any fantasy devices, I can’t see the point of trying them, or at least, I can’t find my own way into them. If a good idea for a galactic story did come to me, I would immediately get much more interested. It doesn’t feel like that’s going to happen, but you never know. I enjoy reading some writers’ space operas, and I’ve written a time travel novel, a reincarnation novel, a shape-shifter novella; I don’t stick to realism on principle, it’s just a tendency.

  As for having to protect our environment to keep ourselves alive, rather than because it’s morally right, that’s fine by me; it’s probably better that way. I suppose if we had entire galaxies to play in, we could be more careless about housekeeping without killing ourselves. That would shift ecological thinking and morality both, I’m sure. But it is too much of a hypothetical.

  GC ► The moment from your work that frames this question for me most directly is the radicalism of the Red Martians from the Mars books, who insist on protecting Mars simply for its own sake, even though it has no persons on it at all. Part of the dystopian character of 2312, in fact, descends precisely from the fact that in that timeline Mars was settled quickly and maximally, with no regard to preservation, and with something like a seventh of the planet being permanently scorched in the process.

  KSR ► This brings up the question of intrinsic value, whether places have value in themselves independent of our use of them or even our regard for them. It’s a question in environmental ethics, but as Chris McKay pointed out in “Should Rocks Have Standing?”—echoing Christopher Stone’s famous essay “Should Trees Have Standing?”—when we speak of “nature” we tend to mean “life,” so that the lifeless rocky bodies of our solar system are not “nature” as we usually mean it. There’s slippages all over in our words of course, but this problem of nature’s intrinsic value became in my Mars books a way to discuss the possibility of Mars as it is now having a value for us that was great
er than its use value; and that if we felt that strongly enough, it would make sense to live there with as little impact on the place as possible, as a visitor almost, or at least an inhabitant that changes almost nothing. It seems like an extreme position, and yet desert lovers on Earth might already feel something like that. Greening a desert might have utilitarian value, but if you love deserts for their look and feel, then an aesthetic is being harmed if you green that desert. In the Mars books the Red position was analogous to that situation, with the added element of Mars’s exoticism and otherness, the way it is a very gorgeous rock right now with its own history inscribed on it. It’s a very odd special case in environmental thinking, if you think of it as a lifeless rock (as it may not be), and I’m not even sure it is much use to us in thinking about more general

  cases.

  GC ► In 2312 something similar happens with the animals—the final utopian reversal of the threatened “mass extinction event” with which our conversation began. So much of debates over animals both in and outside SF seems to hinge on the question of whether animals exist as beings in their own right or as something more like that desert, existing (or not) purely to satisfy human needs. I’m struck by Christina Alt’s essay on Wells that begins this volume, which finds Wells taking the deliberate extermination of animal life as a marker of utopian achievement. So much supposedly ecological thinking seems predicated on an anthropocentrism that denies the possibility of nonhuman values.