Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  Karel apek, War with the Newts (1936). Čapek’s satire of imperialism and labor exploitation takes an apocalyptic turn in its final third, as the Newts transform the planet to their liking, sinking the continents so they have room to expand.

  Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game series (1985–). While the first book in the novel takes place almost exclusively within an anthropocentric context, later entries imagine alternative environments and ecologies, as well as the sorts of subjectivities that might be produced under radically different modes of life (such as hive consciousness). Ender’s crime rises even above the level of genocide: he exterminates the biosphere of an entire planet.

  Terry Carr (ed.), Dream’s Edge (1980). Anthology of ecological SF including Herbert, Le Guin, Niven, and Sturgeon, among others.

  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962). Carson notably chooses to begin her work not with scientific data nor with political polemic but a science fictional “Fable for Tomorrow.”

  Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (1977). Race war, sadomasochism, and rape culture in a decadent, disintegrating United States.

  Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry (1980). Charnas’s translation of the classic horror genre into a science fictional register imagines the vampire as a highly specialized predator operating in the very particular ecosystem that is human culture. Also of interest: her Holdfast Chronicles (1974–99).

  Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008). Transcendent novella in which a race of argon-breathing artificial life forms, living in some sort of sealed canister, confront the inevitable and tragic end of their civilization.

  John Christopher, The Death of Grass (1956). A virus kills off a huge swath of Earth’s plant biomass, including varieties of grass (like wheat and barley), leading to massive upheaval and starvation.

  Arthur C. Clarke, “The Forgotten Enemy” (1949). A new ice age comes to London. Clarke’s famous 2001 series of novels may also be of note, given its interests in space colonization and in evolution.

  J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (2001). Philosophical-ethical treatise on vegetarianism and justice for animals premised on the cognitively estranging notion that animals—despite the way we treat then—have a self-evident right to life and safety.

  Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008). Teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death in gladiatorial games in a post-apocalyptic America.

  John M. Corbett, “The Black River” (1934). A massive oil spill destroys Los Angeles.

  Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park (1990). Science brings back the dinosaurs for an amusement park. What could possibly go wrong?

  Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719). This is the unacknowledged template for any number of future post-apocalyptic narratives of survival after the collapse of civilization, beginning with the truly prodigious amount of material Crusoe is able to salvage from his wrecked ship.

  Samuel R. Delany, “The Star Pit” (1967). An extended mediation on the confrontation with limit, this novella takes as its central metaphor an “ecologarium”—the outsized, space operatic answer to a child’s ant farm. Apocalyptic themes—both ecological and cultural—are also quite important in Dhalgren (1975), Triton (1976), and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984).

  Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985). Airborne toxic event.

  Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (1987). Agriculture.

  Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Largely left out of the novel’s adaptation as Blade Runner in 1982 is its intense focus on animals as an object of both empathy and desire. Among Dick’s less-known novels can also be found The Crack in Space (1966), which depicts the first black president’s attempt to save his badly overpopulated, economically depressed Earth by invading the apparently empty one in the universe next door.

  Grace Dillon (ed.), Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012).

  This collection of “Native slipstream” speaks directly to debates over indigenous science and sustainable culture practice, as well as to native visions of the apocalypse—an apocalypse which, as Dillon notes in her introduction, is commonly thought of as having already taken place at the moment of North America’s disastrous first contact with Europe.

  Thomas Disch, 334 (1972). Overpopulation has caused shortages and made birth control compulsory in this novel of 2020s New York. See also The Genocides (1965), discussed in this volume, and the ecologically themed anthology Disch edited, The Ruins of Earth (1971), which includes stories from Dick, Vonnegut, Ballard, and du Maurier.

  Harold Donitz, “A Visitor from the Twentieth Century” (1928). A lack of cars makes the future a utopia after oil runs out around 1975.

  W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Comet” (1920). The end of the world briefly seems like it will, at least, include an end to white supremacy. Briefly.

  Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” (1952). The inspiration for the Hitchcock film is, if anything, even more stark and apocalyptic.

  Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember (2003). An underground city, founded after the surface became uninhabitable, faces an impending energy crisis.

  Harlan Ellison, “A Boy and His Dog” (1969). The ultimate in post-nuclear horror.

  Harlan Ellison (ed.), Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). This sequel to the original American New Wave anthology from 1968 marks the sea change in environmental consciousness that happened in those years; the first collection contains basically no stories about the environment, while the second contains multiple ecological stories, including the novella version of Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest.

  Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd (eds.), The Wounded Planet (1974). Only one of a dozen anthologies Elwood put out with ecological and apocalyptic thematic focuses during the period, among them The Other Side of Tomorrow (1973), Omega (1973), Crisis (1974), and Dystopian Visions (1975).

  E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909). An ur-text for the next century of stories about technological collapse. The people inhabiting Forster’s dystopia are hopelessly alienated from the natural world on which, they come to discover, their lives still depend.

  Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (1959). Life in Florida at the dawn of the “thousand year night,” after a one-day nuclear war.

  Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). Still the best known of the “Spaceship Earth” texts that combine a call for better technocratic management of Earth’s resources with a science-fictional reimagining of the planetary ecosystem as a starship.

  Sally Miller Gearheart, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1980). Ecofeminist lesbian utopian fantasy that takes place after men (and patriarchy) have been confined to the cities.

  David Gerrold, The War against the Chtorr (1983). Alien invaders seek to terraform Earth for settlement, while we’re still on it.

  Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome (1996). Medicine meets indigenous knowledge practices in this postcolonial critique of Western science.

  William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981). The story marks the shift away from (or perhaps the final grave site of) the glittering techno-utopias of the Golden Age, which appear within the story as ghosts quite literally haunting a grittier, dirtier future much more like the Junk City we’ve actually come to inhabit.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1914). Among the innovations in this influential feminist utopia text is the willingness of the Herlanders to rationally control their population growth. The increased importance of explicitly eugenic themes in the sequel, With Her in Ourland (1916), makes it uncomfortable reading today.

  Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day (1997). Quakers in space. Interconnected stories set before, during, and after the voyage of a generational starship to a harsh new planet.

  Nicola Griffith, Slow River (1995). Biopunk noir with large narrative interest in water purity and treatment.

  Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (eds.), Tomorrow, Inc.: SF Stories about Big Bu
siness (1976). The overarching attitude of this anthology of stories about capitalism run amuck is nicely suggested by the dedication the book bears: “To Fred Pohl, who tried to warn us.”

  Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The novel that brought us Soylent Green (1973).

  Jean Hegland, Into the Forest (1998). Teenage girls living alone in an isolated forest home try to ride out the collapse of civilization.

  Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). The quintessential novel of interplanetary settlement and revolution gives us the ecological proverb TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

  Frank Herbert, Dune (1965). In addition to its ambitious depiction of a wholly alien ecosystem, Dune ranks among the best allegorizations of U.S. energy policy and Middle East imperialism ever achieved in SF. Also of interest: The Green Brain (1966), which has the human race seeking to exterminate insect life.

  Arthur Herzog, Heat (1977). A scientist discovers that the imminent release of the ocean’s CO2 reserves will trigger abrupt, catastrophic climate change, but the government doesn’t want to tell anyone before the next election.

  Nalo Hopkinson, “A Habit of Waste” (1999). The anti-ecological practices of modern capitalism reach their apotheosis when people can simply discard their own body and select a new one.

  W. H. Hudson, The Crystal Age (1887). Another classic late-nineteenth-century pastoral ambiguous utopia, notable for its near-total rejection of technology and its anticipatory gender politics.

  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1931). The nightmare of the future retains a “Savage Reservation” as an internal release valve.

  Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005). Critically acclaimed alternate-history narrative of biopolitical exploitation run amuck through the harvesting of human clones for organs—in a world than seems to be in no other way different from ours.

  Richard Jefferies, After London, or, Wild England (1885). England returns to the wild after a catastrophe destroys civilization.

  Gwyneth Jones, White Queen (1991). Postcolonial reversal of the white, male alien invader narrative template set amid a future of ecological and economic collapse.

  Janet Kagan, Mirabile (1991). Environmental troubleshooting on an off-world human colony stocked with genetically engineered life.

  Stephen King, Under the Dome (2009). The sudden, inexplicable imposition of an impenetrable dome around a small Maine town—a story King had been trying to make work since the 1970s—highlights questions of sustainability and resource scarcity that have global implications. After all, the atmosphere may be much larger, but the sky is still a dome.

  Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, “The Dark Mountain Manifesto” (2009). The joyful apocalypse contained in these “Eight Principles of Uncivilization” is posited as the only possible response to our ongoing “age of ecocide.”

  C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants (1958). Wonderful novel, recently rereleased, which pits a capitalist world run by advertising execs against Greens with other plans.

  James Howard Kunstler, World Made by Hand (2008). America’s premier Peak Oil doomsayer—see his 2005 predictive nonfiction The Long Emergency—imagines capitalism returning to a mid-1800s craft economy following the age of cheap oil.

  Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (2005). The handbook for anti-ecological fantasies of technological Singularity. Technology got us into this mess, now it’ll get us out….

  Kurd Lasswitz, Two Planets (1897). German novel of a Martian base at the North Pole that likely inspired one of the founding fathers of American SF, Hugo Gernsback.

  Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1973). Le Guin’s “ambiguous utopia” pits a utopia of abundance (rich, fertile Urras) against a utopia of scarcity (its barren moon, Anarres). Near the end of the novel a new possibility is introduced when the ambassador at an interplanetary embassy describes her home world: the ruined planet Earth, whose inhabitants could not adjust their destructive cultural practices until it was far too late. Le Guin’s interest in ecosystem and in the environment extends across her work, playing crucial roles in the development of such works as The Word for World Is Forest (novella 1972, novel 1976) and the earthbound Always Coming Home (1985), set in a future, post-technological California.

  Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961). Made into very different films by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002), the novel depicts an encounter with absolute, radical otherness, a living ocean. Also of interest: Eden (1959) and The Invincible (1964), in which spaceship crews likewise encounter strange alien species and bizarre ecosystems—even necrosystems—while exploring truly alien worlds.

  Edward Lerner, Energized (2012). Solar satellites are our only hope for energy after catastrophic and permanent oil shortage.

  Ira Levin, This Perfect Day (1970). Anti-utopian treatment of a society of total technocratic control.

  C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The first book in Lewis’s Space Trilogy sees first contact with a Martian civilization that doesn’t have the vocabulary to think in the selfish, wasteful manner of humans.

  Laurence Manning, The Man Who Awoke (1933). A man from the twentieth century travels into the future by means of prolonged sleep, exploring future civilizations in crisis that are sometimes not happy to see a man from “the height of the false civilization of Waste.” The inevitable spirit of progress toward utopia, however, happily wins out.

  D. Keith Mano, The Bridge (1973). Ecodystopia in which the absolute legal equality of all life has left civilization stagnant.

  Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). SF published under the cover of magic realism, the novel (whose review in the New York Times Book Review famously declared it “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race”) explores the destructive influence of the introduction of foreign technology and global trade on the once-isolated, once-Edenic town of Macondo.

  George R. R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging (1986). Interconnected stories about a space trader who winds up in charge of Ark, a “seedship” with terraforming and planetary engineering capabilities.

  Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006). Father and son wander the blasted ruins of America scavenging for food after an unspecified apocalypse in what is surely the most depressing book ever to be chosen for Oprah’s Book Club.

  Will McCarthy, Bloom (1998). Humanity has retreated to the asteroid belt after a gray goo disaster consumes Earth.

  Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse (2011). Short story collection that includes catastrophes of all kinds, from ecological to pandemic to zombie.

  Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake (1978). In a post-apocalyptic (but also radically bioengineered) desert America, the bite of the dreamsnake produces drug-like hallucinations in humans.

  Bill McKibben, Eaarth (2010). The environmental activist argues that we have already so altered Earth’s natural systems and climate that it would be best to begin thinking of it as another planet altogether.

  Judith Merrill, “That Only a Mother” (1948). Nightmarish exploration of the effects of radiation on pregnancy and motherhood.

  China Miéville, Embassytown (2011). Miéville’s first foray into space opera, set on a human colony on an alien world at the margins of known space. See also the surreal, dark-comedic Kraken (2010).

  Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). Monks attempt to retain modern knowledge in the catastrophic dark age centuries following a nuclear war.

  Walter M. Miller and Martin H. Greenberg (eds.), Beyond Armageddon (1985). Bracing collection of stories of what happens after the end. Also of interest to students of the apocalypse: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (edited by John Joseph Adams, 2008) and The Apocalypse Reader (edited by Justin Taylor, 2007).

  David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004). Multiple futures populate the middle sections of this formally innovative novel: cloned human fabricants in a dystopic Brave New World, and then t
ribal hunters and gatherers in Hawaii in a post-apocalyptic, post-technological future a little further down the line.

  Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). This early feminist SF novel, anticipating later developments of the 1970s a decade in advance, is also noteworthy for its imagination of alternative biologies and ecosystems.

  L. E. Modesitt Jr., The Forever Hero trilogy (1987–88). Superhero story set after ecological collapse that has its nearly immortal hero seeking to salvage a devastated Earth.

  Judith Moffett, The Ragged World (1991). Aliens come and demand we clean up our mess.

  Ward Moore, “Lot” (1953) and “Lot’s Daughter” (1954). Deeply disturbing visions of life after nuclear catastrophe in which we will, Moore suggests, finally be free to be the monsters we always were.

  Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1516). More’s imaginary island remains the template for utopian form to this day.

  William Morris, “News from Nowhere” (1890). Socialist utopia that is both anticapitalist and anti-progress, functioning instead as a primarily agrarian society in tune with nature.

  James Morrow, This Is the Way the World Ends (1985). Survivors of a nuclear war are put on trial by the Unadmitted—the time-traveling spirits of the people of the future who will now never exist.

  Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye (1974). Overpopulation novel in which a space-faring humanity encounters an alien culture whose bioforms must either reproduce or die, leading to inevitable cycles of population explosion followed by total civilizational collapse. The Moties (as they are called) have a social archetype called Crazy Eddie who believes that there must be some solution to this cycle of boom and bust; the humans realize with horror that if the Moties were able to get off their home world, “Crazy Eddie” would be right, and furthermore their rapid population cycle would help the Moties quickly overrun the galaxy. Fans of the fantasy genre will also be interested in Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away” (1976), which imagines a magic fantasy world experiencing the shock of Peak Mana.