KSR ► Nonhuman values I take to mean human values in support of the nonhuman. In the case of animals, it’s very clear, I think; they exist as beings in their own right, they do not exist to serve us. We predate on them as food, but that is a violation of their existence. We are such powerful animals that we have even domesticated some other animals to make our predation on them easier, but they still live their own lives, whether enslaved to us or not. I think it’s best to consider all our fellow mammals as direct cousins, with mental lives much like ours. I’ve been learning to think similarly about birds, though these are much more distant relatives; fish even more so. I still feel it’s all right to eat them, because animals eat other animals, but that doesn’t mean the eaten animals were not existences in their own right, and should be treated respectfully and humanely. I think Temple Grandin’s position in these matters is impressive and persuasive.
I think what ecological thinking brings us here is the ability to see better how much we are interrelated to all the other species in our biosphere. If we drive them to extinction we are damaging ourselves too, because we are all part of a functioning network of organisms. There can be an anthropocentrism that acknowledges this physical reality and then goes on from there, continuing to value humanity first, but realizing every other living thing is part of us in a quite literal sense. Also, valuing humanity means valuing sentience, and that exists in other living creatures. So as a matter of self-regard and as a matter of respect for others, we need to care about all living creatures and act accordingly.
GC ► You once told me that you see part of your job as a science fiction writer as speaking on behalf of the people of the future—to ensure they have a voice in a present that is robbing them blind. Do you think much about the people of the future as readers of your novels? What might the people of 2100, or 2200, think about a culture that consumed stories of their radically transformed world as entertainment, while simultaneously refusing to act in the material realm?
KSR ► “Speaking for future generations” is a narrative mode or a rhetorical stance. It’s similar to the stance of writing as if from the future; in other words, a fictional position. Both can help to create an effect that Roger Luckhurst called “proleptic realism.”
As for people in the future reading my work, hopefully it would be like reading any literature from older times. Books are a window back into previous minds and their thoughts. Old science fiction inevitably looks creaky and dated, but in revealing ways, and hopefully despite the datedness, some of the ordinary pleasures of the novel will remain, if they were there in the first place. It is a worry, that SF becomes wrong in ways that obscure everything else about it. But when I was reading for Galileo’s Dream, I learned about the genre you could call renaissance fantasia, which includes works like the Hypnerotomachia, or Bruno’s The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, or Somnium by Kepler. These are strange texts, but they have an inventiveness and linguistic energy that reminded me of science fiction. Maybe they were the science fiction of their time, when science was still natural philosophy. In the future people may judge our science to be almost as unformed and primitive as natural philosophy (our science not yet ruling the world, after all, as it might in the year 3000), but hopefully our science fiction will still hold some pleasure as a kind of fantasia.
I don’t think people in the future will judge science fiction readers of our time as being especially hypocritical, just because we were reading science fiction while not acting on its lessons in the real world. We will be complicit with all the rest of our time, whatever happens, and it may be that science fiction readers will be judged to be among the secret agents of whatever good comes out of our time. It will be very hard to untangle all that and assign culpability or praise.
By and large I think science fiction has been fulfilling its role as a tool of human thought, while at the same time striving to entertain enough people to make money in the current economy. That’s the usual odd combination of requirements that art deals with.
GC ► How do you evaluate the influence of SF on ecological and environmentalist discourse? For every Silent Spring that uses science fictional imagery to mobilize people, there is a Star Trek that persuades us that we just have to sit back and wait for cold fusion to fix everything. Does SF generally steer us right, or wrong?
KSR ► Science fiction is a genre, and can hold many different kinds of content, across a wide ideological range.
It probably does have certain generic attributes that constitute its “content of the form.” For instance, as it is composed of stories set in the future, or in alternative histories, or in prehistory—thus, all the histories that we can never know—it does seem to indicate a commitment to history. It’s a strange version of that commitment, focusing as it does on the histories we can’t know; a kind of realism of the absent, made of thought experiments that use the counterfactual or the unknowable.
Another kind of content of the form comes from the genre’s focus on the future; this seems to be saying that there will be a future, and maybe a human future. And because future histories are sketched out to explain these fictional futures, there’s also usually the implication of causality, even an explanatory causality. Most stories have that, however.
Beyond these contents of the form, many different messages can be conveyed, some helpful, others harmful. Some thought experiments are so badly designed that their results (the contents of the form) are “not even wrong.”
Still, pretty prominent in science fiction is a body of work that concerns itself with planets and how humans live on them, and these stories are always ecological in some loose sense. And a subset of this group of stories is about Earth as a planet. One basic message they all convey goes something like, “We live on a planet, and planets are therefore interesting.” This is a good thing to remember and think about, as being inescapably ecological. So again, my feeling is that science fiction has by and large done its job as a form, and helped us to think ecologically.
GC ► How does this concern impact your own practice as a writer? What sort of research do you do when you set out to write? How do you square a commitment to the facts to your commitment to the art?
KSR ► Facts are stories, and often the raw material for my stories, so really it is just one single commitment. Most of my stories are realist stories in some sense.
One recent exception that might help illustrate my attitude toward these matters: Galileo’s Dream is a time travel novel, so I felt more comfortable writing that as a fantasia. Time travel does regularly get defined as a science fictional idea, of course, but I think it is unreal enough to be best presented as a fantasia, so that’s what I did. But more often I’m trying for science fiction with a strong reality effect, so the physical facts of the world are very much part of those projects.
My research consists mostly of a lot of reading, augmented by conversations with scientists, historians, and others. I generally sketch out a story in my mind and then start researching it, and what I learn often greatly alters the initial idea. I keep researching right to the end of the writing, so often the later parts of a book (especially the multivolume ones) will seem to know things that the earlier parts didn’t, and this is indeed the case.
Because I am trying to create a strong reality effect for variously unreal situations, research is important. It is always bringing me more stories, and many of these are at least as interesting as my initial idea, and they all seem to be woven together and lead off in all directions. It can become a problem finding where the appropriate edge of the spreading network of interesting stories should be cut. It’s like cutting a patterned fabric when you love all the patterns. Thus the length of my novels, and the crowded feeling they often have. But I am seeing better now that cut stories can be interesting in their cuts, and that’s been helping me to shape the latest novels.
GC ► Did earlier ecological SF provide examples or inspiration to you?
KSR ► Yes, my very first attrac
tion to science fiction had a lot to do with the strand in the genre that could be called the planetary romance. What I got was often simply the joy of exploration, something I had already found as a young reader in Jules Verne, but now that joy extended to a romantic feeling about visiting other planets, and regarding them as places or landscapes. My discovery of science fiction happened in the same years I was discovering the Sierra Nevada on foot, also the years I was first reading Gary Snyder and then Buddhist texts, so the three interests were wrapped together for me, they became parts of a single pursuit.
I particularly enjoyed books like Edgar Pangborn’s early novels (West of the Sun, etc.) and many of the planetary adventures of Jack Vance, who had a very evocative way with landscapes, no doubt because of the way he lived and sailed around Earth during his working life. I also enjoyed Clifford Simak, who managed to make Wisconsin a mysterious planetary surface, connected to places all over the cosmos. Then the first four novels of Ursula K. Le Guin cast a very strong spell, and in City of Illusions the exotic planet to be traversed was a far future Earth, which was nice as well. After that I read Herbert’s Dune as a planetary romance, but also an ecological primer on desert survival.
All these together won me over. It was then I read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar quartet, which made a very different impact, a somber corrective: planets were great, but we were wrecking ours. Quite a few of Brunner’s earlier novels had been planetary romances in the old joyful style, so for him to put the Dos Passos lens on the damage we were doing to Earth was powerful. This for me marked the moment when ecology was added to the original romance. That allowed me to resituate Ballard as more than a psychological novelist, and The Crystal World became a great novel of our alienation from a wrecked
Earth.
Since then I have continued to enjoy novels about other planets, everything from Lem’s Solaris to Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day. I’m sure this strand in science fiction is what led me to my work on Mars. There exists a kind of canon of planetary science fiction by now, and ecological science fiction is either a subset of that, or vice versa.
GC ► Do any particularly bad stories spring to mind from your early reading? Stories with ridiculous or repugnant premises that point us in a completely wrong direction?
KSR ► Oh, yes, there are several types of bad stories. One that points us in a completely wrong direction is this commonly expressed notion that Earth is humanity’s cradle. I know this story began with Tsiolkovsky, but it became a commonplace in American science fiction, and I still hear it a lot in discussions about inhabiting Mars or space more generally, both in the science fiction community and in the space advocacy community. The assumption in that phrase and the future history it suggests is that humanity can survive apart from Earth, which is completely unproven and is likely to be wrong. It further suggests that, as humanity has a destiny to colonize the universe, the “cradle” is of only momentary importance, a thing to be used in infancy and then discarded, or at most revered as “Old Earth.” This story therefore carries within it terrible mistakes in thinking about our reliance on our planet, and it rightly causes an instinctive revulsion against the space project on the part of people who are a little more grounded. It is much more accurate, considering that only 10 percent of the DNA inside us is human DNA, to recall Flora Thompson’s line from Lark Rise to Candleford, which is quoted in John Crowley’s Little, Big: “We are bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth!”
Another bad story is the one about “the Singularity,” which is also connected, though it is not exactly the same idea, to the notion of uploading human minds into computers. These both point us in wrong directions, as being disguised versions of immortality or transcendence—the rapture of the nerds, as Ken MacLeod put it. They are religious stories, misunderstanding or misrepresenting the brain, computers, consciousness, and history. And again they encourage carelessness toward Earth as our indispensable home, and even toward our own bodies, and our historical project as a species.
GC ► It’s interesting that you bring up religion, as in addition to denigrating climate change as a science fiction, the denialist Right has frequently insisted it is a “religion.” I think we’d both feel comfortable criticizing these characterizations in fairly strident terms—and yet it seems to me one must admit that reality has been taking on the aura of a biblical apocalypse of late. If science fiction is the realism of our time, as you have often said, what to do with the fact that it frequently seems to be the opening crawl for some B-movie dystopia?
KSR ► What I’ve said is that we are now living in a science fiction novel that we are all writing together. That doesn’t necessarily mean we are writing realistic science fiction. If our imaginations are crawling with B-movie dystopias, it may mark that in some Ballardian symbolic way we are hoping for these, rather than fearing them. The underlying feeling may be that anything would be better than now, and that only a big break will free us from the chains we have forged and wrapped around ourselves. But this is mostly hoping for an easy way out, an alternative to revolution where we don’t have to do anything. These dystopian scenarios would break the hold of the present order, yes, but they would also make things even worse. We would be freed of some constraints, but worse ones would replace them. This is where Ballard’s apocalyptic fantasies, depicting disaster as a flight to freedom, are wrong, because in the chaos he describes so lovingly (I’m thinking of the end of The Drowned World) we would be much less free than we are now. I think Ballard himself recognizes and says something like this in The Crystal World, the last and most beautiful of his planetary disaster series. The painfully ironic thing is that the kind of freedoms he seemed to crave, which were psychological and personal, can be had by merely walking outdoors, or by hanging out with people you love. It doesn’t take the collapse of civilization to defeat suburban alienation. In this project the Dalai Lama is a better guide to happiness than J. G. Ballard. I guess that should be immediately obvious, but I mean that focusing on present reality, and what you can do in it to better things for yourself and everyone, is better than the imaginary freedom expressed in the apocalyptic strain in our science fiction.
Maybe we can say that we need to see the real situation more imaginatively, while imagining what we want more realistically.
GC ► Along the same lines: Is utopia a religion? Or, perhaps it would be better to say: Is there continuity between the vision of utopia you set out and the (happy) end of history figured by something like the Christian kingdom of heaven?
KSR ► Is science a religion? I have trouble grasping exactly what a religion is, once you take it out of church. It’s a big word. I think the Christian kingdom of heaven is meant to be an end state, where the operating rules are fixed for good, and the inhabitants are immortal souls. That seems to me very different from an idea that we could try to make a more just society, which is my notion of utopia. That will always be a receding horizon ahead of us, which we can at best approach asymptotically, and will never reach. So it’s the difference between a desired end state (but what do they do there?) and a set of means to operate in a process that will never end.
GC ► Is there a fundamental conflict between mystical and scientific ways of thinking the environment that is registered in your work, or across SF generally? Is narrative SF on some level incompatible with eco-religion, deep ecology, and other attempts to derive reliably transcendent categories out of “Nature”?
KSR ► My principal criterion for science fiction is that it be set in the future, so if you depict a future in which some kind of eco-religion became widely believed, or was somehow revealed to be true, that’s just another science fiction scenario to me, which will work or not as a story, but still be an example of science fiction. So I don’t think there is a fundamental conflict.
For myself, I often regard the environment, meaning the planet but also the universe, as a miracle. I have mystical feelings for the Earth and the universe, but feel these can be joined to the most minut
e investigations of science; nor am I off-put by human attempts to manipulate the Earth or physical reality for human purposes. So science as investigation, and technology as manipulation, are both fine by me in principle, and not an impingement on my mystical feelings. We study and thus worship a sacred reality, which we manipulate in order to survive. This is an emotional state. It seems to me science is already the best eco-religion, in other words, therefore the one I adhere to, but as a lay person.
Deep ecology seemed to be suggesting that humanity was a planetary disease that would run its course and then die back or die out. This did considerable harm to the environmental cause, thus ultimately to the environment. To me deep ecology made it clear why environmentalism needs Marxist critical theory. That said, Marxism could often use a major infusion of ecological thinking, maybe even from the deep end of the pool, if not the drowned stuff. Quite a few of the original observations of Arne Naess were scientifically valid, or admirable in their values. But adding the adjective “deep” was a mistake. The point should have been that plain old ecology was already at the right depth to be very helpful.
GC: I’m reminded here of Gib Prettyman’s observations in his chapter on Le Guin, which suggests the ways in which Marxism, ecology, and Eastern religion sit in somewhat uneasy relation with one another. You yourself have frequently taken up non-Western ways of thinking in your novels, for instance your use of non-Christian religion in the Mars books and Tibetan religion specifically in both Years of Rice and Salt and the climate trilogy. Is this an attempt at crafting a synthesis, or more of an attempt to think the problem?
KSR ► It’s just thinking the problem. I’m not capable of a synthesis of those three. Maybe something more like a bricolage. I am interested in all three, and have tried plotting stories by putting them together in various combinations, and tracing what happens. I tend to use Marxist critical theory when thinking about history, ecology when thinking about the biosphere, and Buddhism when thinking cosmically or personally, although immediately when I say that I realize I often use all three in a slurry. My narrators often take “the most scientific view” of everything, even metaphysics, because that leads to funny sentences. And thinking of science as a critical utopian leftist political action from its very beginning—something like the best Marxist praxis so far performed in the real world—is very provocative and stimulating. Likewise thinking of science as a devotional practice, in which the universe is the sacred object of study. It can be almost a scissors-rock-paper thing among the three. The enjambments have been good for my books.
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