GC ► Do you feel like these kinds of experimental enjambments are more successful than attempts to found “new” eco-religions, as Octavia Butler suggests in her Parables series and Margaret Atwood does in her MaddAddam books, especially The Year of the Flood? Perhaps this is really a question about historical continuity versus radical break, and the retention of old forms in the new.
KSR ► I don’t know. My inclination is to trying mixing elements we already have rather than invent something new, especially any kind of religion. We have the elements of a good eco-religion already, in science and Buddhism. So, possibly this new mongrel religion should be named, and its pedigree given, in order to impress it more clearly on the mind. As the exercise would hopefully be a thought experiment only (thinking of how several cults have come out of various books’ fictional religions), it could be a way to reformulate the concepts of ecology into new and revealing stories. On the whole, I don’t see any problem in trying both methods and seeing what kind of stories come.
GC ► You’ve spoken recently about the ways scientists have become politically engaged, even radicalized, and in some ways this is a major theme of both Science in the Capital and 2312. Do you find SF (of the kind you write, or even SF more generally) has a role to play in that? Do the scientists you meet still read science fiction? Does science fiction provide a framework through which scientists can begin to understand themselves as political agents?
KSR ► I think science fiction can help scientists, yes. I hope for that, and try to write some of my novels with that goal in mind.
Now it has to be said, many scientists do not read fiction of any kind; they’re like everyone else in that regard. Fiction readers are a subculture, maybe a big one, maybe a minority of the population and growing smaller; it’s very hard to say, especially in this stage of technological change, where so many people are very engaged with computers and therefore perhaps reading a lot. And it seems to me that as we are all addicted to stories, there is bound to be a certain draw to the best stories, and written fiction has almost all the best stories. So as we are a species of story addicts, there is always going to be a place for fiction, as being the best stories.
But scientists are busy, and the scientists who read fiction may be a minority among scientists. Still, these are the ones who tend to have philosophical interests in what they do, and to realize that doing science is by no means a natural or self-evident activity. In their curiosity they read, and of course science fiction comes up as a possible source of good stories about science, even illuminating stories. So, many scientists will give science fiction a try. Many used to read it when they were young, then gave it up when they got too busy, or when they came to realize that it did not seem to know much about real science, that it was naïve, a collection of power fantasies for younger readers. It’s hard to overcome that judgment and get those people reading SF again. It depends on their level of curiosity, but one very common personality trait of scientists is a lot of curiosity. So there is always the possibility that word of mouth will bring them to some interesting book that they will then check out; and if it pleases them, or even if it irritates them in a stimulating way, they may go on and read more.
I’ve seen scientists react very strongly against my assertion that science is a form of politics and that scientists should get more involved as scientists in policy making. That breaks what for them was a dichotomy, in which science was clear and good and pure, while politics was dirty and bad and corrupt. They say to me, “But if we spoke politically as scientists it wouldn’t be science anymore, and what is good in science would get wrecked.” There is some truth to that objection, and yet I still think it’s good to irritate them in that way. Subsequently they may see things from a different angle. There is a lot of “dirty politics” inside science, as they know better than anyone; they have to struggle to keep science “scientific.” Part of that struggle involves precisely diving into funding, policy, and politics. So it is a good problem to bring up in their minds. Really, scientists need science fiction, or could use it; but it needs to be good on science, or they will see that it isn’t, and it won’t work for them.
GC ► A recent slogan of yours—again echoed by one of your characters in 2312—has been that social justice is a survival technology. You’ve also recently discussed the ways in which scientific praxis (at least in some idealized form) reflects a kind of actually existing communism—cooperative, collaborative, rewarding work done outside a market logic. And yet in the bleakest of our dystopian fictions—John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, for instance, to choose one book you have been influenced by—we find reflected the ways in which science and scientific progress seem to be hurling us faster and faster toward final cataclysmic disaster. Where is the intervention point, or the Archimedean lever, for science to reorient itself toward survival and justice as ultimate goals? If story and narrative have power here, why don’t they seem to be working?
KSR ► But let’s imagine that they are working, just slowly, and against resistance from countervailing forces. This is how I imagine it to be happening. Also, you said “scientific praxis (at least in some idealized form)”: no, I mean to say that actually existing science is already working, not just outside market logic, but against market logic. This is my point, and it can be stated in different ways, one of them being that economics should become a subset of ecology, which already measures and values things that economics mismeasures and does not value.
Brunner is a good example of how stories can help here, and have. He did often represent science in a mode of reckless hubris, making the environmental situation worse; but he was writing in the era of the atomic bomb and thalidomide and DDT being sprayed in the streets. There was a postwar moment, in other words, when the scientific community was painfully overconfident in its ability to manipulate the world for human good. In essence they were being unscientific in this attitude, because they were acting on a belief not based on enough evidence to justify it. Their confidence was an arrogance, but having just won the biggest war in history (by way of radar, penicillin, and the atom bomb), as a community they lost their head and thought “We can do anything!”
But the scientific community is very self-regarding and reiterative; it is always trying to make a better scientific method, it is explicitly an unfinished project at all times, and implicitly, maybe even unconsciously, it is a utopian project trying to push history in directions that will reduce suffering and increase justice. So now the 1950s moment of hubris looks embarrassing to the scientific community, and in general there is a much more careful attitude and methodology. Science is better than it was in the 1950s, in ways that can be demonstrated; here too we have to historicize, to be aware of change and progress. In that longer account, Brunner’s books were one part of the corrective to the 1950s moment of hubris, joining the stories of Rachel Carson and many other sources of critique from all directions.
There’s always going to be the need for this kind of self-examination and corrective action. We are better now at doing science, partly because we’re better at doing theory, and partly because science fiction retold all the old stories about pride going before a fall. However, we’re still allowing capitalism to shape our actions and wreck the Earth, meaning our bio-infrastructure, meaning ourselves. So our culture is not yet scientific enough; when it becomes so, we will be making more rapid progress toward both justice and sustainability, as the two are stranded parts of the same project. At least this is the story I’m trying to tell.
Of Further Interest
GERRY CANAVAN
What follows is an annotated list of selected SF works (very broadly defined) that stake out some position on questions of ecological futurity and the environment. Not all of the authors and creators listed necessarily understood themselves to be producing “ecological SF,” and by no means are all of these texts equally recommended from either a political or an aesthetic perspective. All, however, are at least potentially of interest to re
aders interested in the way SF has both drawn from and influenced ecological thinking and environmentalist politics.
Literature and Nonfiction
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Earth is demolished to build an interstellar highway in this timeless satire of progress, technology, capitalism, bureaucracy, life, the universe, and everything. Adams’s concern for the environment is also evident in his elegiac Last Chance to See (1989), cowritten with Mark Carwadine, on endangered species across the globe.
Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972). Rabbits are people, too.
Chris Adrian, The Children’s Hospital (2006). A hospital must shut its doors and become a completely self-sustaining entity following a global flood in this American magical realist novel.
Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958; Starship in the United States). The novel explores life inside the artificial environment of a generational starship that has lost all memory of its mission or even that it is a spaceship at all. Aldiss fans might also be interested in Hothouse (1962), set on a hot future Earth whose new temperature has caused the entire planet to be completely overrun with plant life, as well as White Mars, or, the Mind Set Free (1999), his quasi-reply to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.
Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidactus (c. 1268–77). One of the earliest SF texts ends with an apocalyptic vision of radical climate change.
M. T. Anderson, Feed (2002). Dystopian cyberpunk novel set amid widespread pollution, ocean acidification, mass infertility, and even the replacement of natural clouds (which can no longer form) with artificial Clouds™.
Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves (1972). One of Asimov’s most technically sophisticated novels; the narrative concerns a free energy machine called the Electron Pump, which, alas, is too good to be true. Although he is not commonly thought of as an ecological writer, ecological themes appear across Asimov’s work in such texts as Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Robots and Empire (1985), discussed in the introduction, as well as in such texts as The Caves of Steel (1953), which converts Asimov’s lifelong struggle with agoraphobia into a vision of immense domed cities in which no one would ever have to go outside. In the Foundation series we also have the city-planet Trantor, a fully urbanized planet with no natural spaces left to speak of; only in later entries in the series do we begin to get a sense of the unimaginable influx of food and fuel that would be required, on a daily basis, to make such a situation possible.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003). The first entry in Atwood’s MaddAddam series finds a mad scientist crunching the numbers and determining that it would be best to eliminate Homo sapiens in favor of an upgraded and improved Humanity 2.0. After reciting a cavalcade of long horrors both historical and futuristic, the novel more or less dares us to agree with him.
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009). Set in Thailand after a cascading series of global calamities including Peak Oil, climate change, and plagues and food shortages caused by genetically modified foods; the Western multinationals are finally ready to start global capitalism up again by raiding the independent kingdom’s seed bank. Also of definite interest: Bacigalupi’s short fiction (collected in Pump Six and Other Stories [2006]) and Ship Breaker (2010).
J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962). Really, one could start with almost any of the apocalyptic and entropic disasters that appear across the early Ballard—The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Burning World (1964), The Crystal World (1966), etc.—but this novel’s rise of the sea levels and the spreading of the tropical zone as far north as England perhaps speaks most directly to our contemporary concerns about the future. Another noteworthy Ballard novel for students of ecological SF is High Rise (1975), which sees civilization utterly break down and all historical progress reverse in a modern apartment building once the lights go out.
Iain M. Banks, Excession (1996). The novel offers an extended rumination on what Banks called the “Outside Context Problem,” in which a society encounters something so wildly outside its historical-cultural-ideological assumptions that it is barely able to contemplate the situation in the first place. This is, to say the least, a very useful frame for thinking of the way modernity encounters ecological crises like climate change.
John Barnes, Mother of Storms (1994). A massive hurricane, caused by runaway climate change after methane release, breaks down into a series of even-more catastrophic global storms.
Greg Bear, Blood Music (1985). The nanobots get out.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888). One of the key improvements in the Boston of one hundred years hence is the elimination of smokestacks and smog, as well as pollution from the Charles River.
J. D. Beresford, “The Man Who Hated Flies” (1929). A perfect insecticide isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Alfred Bester, “Adam and No Eve” (1941). In this remarkable Quiet Earth fantasy, an inventor’s novel rocket fuel causes a chain reaction during the test flight that kills all life on Earth. Now the last man, the inventor commits suicide in the ocean so that the bacteria in his body can jumpstart a new cycle of life.
Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (2010). The inseparability of the human and the animal is staged in this inventive response to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which sees human beings receive a mystical animal “familiar” whenever they commit a sufficiently
grievous sin.
James Blish, “Surface Tension” (1952). Microscopic humans, descended from a crashed colony ship from Earth, befriend paramecia and battle predators under the ocean of an aquatic alien world.
T. C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth (2000). Novel following a convicted ecoterrorist, split between before (1980s) and after (2020s) an ecological collapse.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950). Bradbury’s epic of Martian colonization includes within itself a strongly elegiac sense of what has been lost in the process. Few stories in the book (or anywhere else, for that matter) are as powerful as “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which depicts the automatic functioning and ultimate breakdown of a computerized house years after a nuclear war has killed off all the people.
David Brin, Earth (1990). The novel—focused on an experiment with black holes that goes awry and threatens all life on the planet—depicts human civilization at an inflection point between growth and final catastrophe, as ecological disaster and energy crisis reach their shared climax. Also of interest is Brin’s long-running Uplift series (1980s–1990s), which concerns great apes and dolphins raised to sapience by human beings.
Max Brooks, World War Z (2006). One of the more innovative entries in the zombie craze of the 2000s, Brooks’s novel depicts the catastrophic consequences of a zombie outbreak on both governments and ecosystems.
John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up (1972). Formally modeled on John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, this innovative but utterly devastating work excoriates the denialism with which U.S. capitalism encounters the consequences of its own poisonous methods of production. Stand on Zanzibar (1968), about overpopulation, is also excellent.
Tobias S. Bucknell, Arctic Rising (2012). International intrigue amid rising sea levels and global warming.
Louis McMaster Bujold, Barrayar (1991). Harsh environmental conditions and lingering radiation from a nuclear war have led to a social tradition of killing “mutie” babies born with birth defects.
Kenneth Burke, “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision” (1971). Burke’s scathing indictment of the logic of progress deploys science fictional tropes about pollution, sustainability, and lunar colonization: “When you find that, within forty years, a great and almost miraculously handsome lake has been transformed into a cesspool, don’t ask how such destruction might be undone. That would be to turn back—and we must fare ever forward. Hence, with your eyes fixed on the beacon of the future, rather ask yourselves how, if you but polluted the lake ten times as much, you might convert it into some new source of energy. Thus, conceivably, you might end up by using the rotted waters as a new fuel.
Or, even better, they might be made to serve as raw material for some new kind of poison, usable either as a pesticide or to protect against unwholesome political ideals.”
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1994). In Butler’s near-future America nearly everything has gone wrong, from the disastrous neoliberal privatization of necessary governmental functions to global warming to widespread poverty. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, puts her hope in that great science fictional dream, the colonization of the stars, founding a religion based upon this supposed destiny for humankind. The sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998) significantly complicates this ambition by revealing it as a kind of apolitical (perhaps even antipolitical) quietism. Also of interest is Butler’s wonderfully ambiguous Xenogenesis series from the 1980s, in which an advanced alien race from the stars intervenes, following a nuclear war, to both interbreed with humanity and convert the entire Earth into one of their spaceships.
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872). Pastoral utopia in which all machines have been destroyed.
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975). The novel that coined the term, Ecotopia imagines an alternative to U.S. social and environmental collapse located in a politically separatist Pacific Northwest, whose revolutionary institutions have been inspired both by ecological science and by Native American cultural practices.
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