George Orwell, 1984. Shortage, fascism, and misery after an atomic war.
Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010). One of the more interesting entries in the steampunk subgenre from an ecological perspective, as it begins with the fantasy of advanced machinery without the horrors and limits of the twentieth century, only to have the machines all fail in the end anyway.
Edgar Pangborn, Davy (1965). Science is suppressed centuries after an atomic war. Also recommended: West of the Sun (1953).
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). In this classic work of 1970s ecofeminist SF, a woman incarcerated in a contemporary mental institution travels to two possible futures—a pastoral ecotopia and an urban, technologized dystopia—and comes to realize her actions in the present will determine which one becomes real. Piercy’s excellent He, She, and It (1991) is also notable for its biopunk-inflected exploration of a post-apocalyptic America following an ecological collapse.
Frederik Pohl, The Cool War (1981). “Power piggery” is outlawed in world facing crisis at the end of the fossil fuel age. Pohl also edited an anthology called Nightmare Age (1970), which included work from Paul Ehrlich alongside C. M. Kornbluth, Mack Reynolds, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Heinlein, among others.
Christopher Priest, The Inverted World (1974). Sublime novel in which a city on rails (called “Earth”) must continually move forward in advance of a singularity that has inverted the categories of time and space, wonderfully allegorizing on the levels of both form and content the absolute dependence of civilization on resource management and the natural environment.
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992). In this cult classic continually being rediscovered on college campuses, a talking ape metaphorizes agricultural civilization as an outlandish nineteenth-century flying contraption rolled off a cliff; we think it’s working only because we haven’t crashed yet.
Mack Reynolds, Lagrange 5 (1979). Socialism in a closed environment in high orbit.
Adam Roberts, The Snow (2004). It starts snowing and just won’t stop.
Keith Roberts, The Chalk Giants (1974). Linked stories set in a dark age after the bomb.
Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy (1990s). While one could explore ecological themes almost anywhere in Robinson’s work, from his Three Californias trilogy (1980s) to his Science in the Capital trilogy (2000s), the incomparable Mars trilogy stages these questions in particularly unforgettable form. As the colonization of Mars gets under way, the colonists find themselves in two camps—the Green Martians, progressives who want to develop the planet, and the Red Martians, ecologists and aesthetes who wish to preserve Mars in its original state for its own sake. Robinson’s latest novel, 2312 (2012), is set in a kind of parallel history to the Mars books; here, Mars was maximally terraformed immediately upon settlement, bespeaking in miniature the crisis of a solar system where the problems posed by the Mars books never got solved.
Kim Stanley Robinson (ed.), Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (1994). Short-story anthology, collecting visions of primitivist and anarchist ecotopias.
Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975). Much of this novel is set on the beautiful ecotopia of Whileaway, a planet populated by only women centuries after a plague has killed off all the men—or, at least, that’s how they remember it.
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God (1998). Jesuits in space. First-contact novel that depicts a planet with two sapient races: one a predator, and one
their prey.
José Saramago, Death with Interruptions (2005). Death takes a holiday, leading to the catastrophic breakdown of all human institutions. Saramago’s Blindness (1995), while not focused on the environment per se, is nonetheless a riveting depiction of apocalyptic urban breakdown and radical scarcity following a city-wide epidemic of blindness.
Nat Schachner, “The Revolt of the Scientists II—the Great Oil War” (1933). Heroic scientists invent a device capable of transforming the world’s oil into useless jelly if their anti-monopolistic demands for oil industry reform are not met.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). First published anonymously the same year as her husband Percy’s poem “Ozymandias” (below), Frankenstein, widely acknowledged as the first SF novel, dramatizes man’s overstepping of his natural bounds in a manner that would become paradigmatic for the genre.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818). As discussed in the introduction, this poem templates a thousand visions of decadence and ruin that would follow both in and outside the science fiction genre.
Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957). The last survivors of mankind, living in Australia, await salvation or death, depending on the winds that may or may not blow radioactive fallout from the destroyed Northern Hemisphere southward after the last war.
Robert Silverberg, The World Inside (1971). Overpopulation pressures have forced massive changes to U.S. society.
Clifford Simak, City series (1940s). Earth goes to the dogs.
Dan Simmons, Hyperion series (1989–1999). Space opera detailing a human diaspora following the destruction of Earth during the “Big Mistake,” which frequently touches on ecological themes.
Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean (1986). Feminist ecotopia set among a community of “Sharers” on an ocean planet.
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937). Alongside Stapledon’s career-long fascination with the cosmic drama of life, the universe, and everything, we find here created dozens of alternative forms of sentient life as adapted to alternative planetary niches, from Insectoid Men and Echinoderm Men to Plant Men and intelligent flocks of birds. Also of significance: Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), which details the repeated collapse of human civilization across millions of years and eighteen evolutions of Homo sapiens, and his inventive, tragicomic Sirius (1944), which borrows from Frankenstein to imagine the life of a dog raised to human intelligence.
Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993). Life in an ecotopia, following the apocalyptic crash of the United States, is threatened by invasion from a dystopian theocracy.
Neal Stephenson, Zodiac (1988). Trash, toxic waste, and conspiracy in Boston Harbor.
George Stewart, Earth Abides (1949). After a plague kills nearly everyone in the United States, survivors band together to survive. The years-later final third depicts the old age of our protagonist, who has managed to build a new tribe but who is not of it; to his descendants, the word “American” connotes the time of myth, not real or relatable history.
Charles Stross, Accelerando (2005). Contact with interstellar civilizations means the introduction of Capitalism 2.0, in which corporations no longer require human beings for their smooth operation and can begin consuming the Earth directly. The last humans flee out into the far reaches of the solar system looking for refuge. Stross’s dystopian Singularity is thus not the moment computers become self-aware—it’s the moment corporations do.
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Beetle in the Anthill (1979). The title derives from the possibility that aliens interfering with Earth’s people and ecosystem might be akin to the human child who puts a beetle in an anthill just to see what will happen. Aliens are similarly thoughtless and incautious in Roadside Picnic (1972), the loose inspiration for Tarkovsky’s cinematic Stalker (1979), which suggests that the bizarre artifacts left behind after an alien Visitation might simply be the discarded trash from their lunch.
Theodore Sturgeon, “Thunder and Roses” (1947). Definitive staging of that central moral recognition of the Cold War—that there would be no point in firing back, even if the other side launched first. Our hero chooses life over universal death, even if he has to kill to ensure that the future gets its chance.
Leo Szilard, “The Voice of the Dolphins” (1961). Once we learn to speak with the dolphins, they ask us to please not destroy the planet with our bombs.
Sherri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988). Another secessionist ecotopia set in the Pacific Northwest, this one with more radical gender pol
itics than Callenbach’s.
Sheree R. Thomas (ed.), Dark Matter (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004). Afro-futurist anthologies that each contain stories of ecological crisis, environmental justice, and environmental racism.
Lavie Tidhar (ed.), The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012). Stories across both collections of global SF suggest the increasing indistinguishability between postcolonial theory, anticapitalism, antiglobalization, and ecocritique. Also strongly recommended along these same lines: So Long Been Dreaming (edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, 2004).
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” (1969). Another mad scientist decides the only answer to the ecological crisis is to destroy the human race through a virus. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) is also noteworthy for its refreshingly straightforward articulation of the premise of much 1970s feminist and ecofeminist works of SF—“First, let’s kill all the men.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954). Another fantasy entry, The Lord of the Rings depicts a clash between the Brave New World of the orcs and the Arcadia of the hobbits, culminating with a snake-in-the-garden moment of attempted industrialization within Hobbiton itself.
Karen Traviss, City of Pearl (2004). The first book in Traviss’s Wess’har Wars series of novels details competition between colonizing groups with very different cultural assumptions on the alien world Cavanaugh’s Star.
George Turner, The Sea and Summer (1987). A future historian looks back on the society whose collapse (ours) created his own. A new edition has just been released from Gollancz.
Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (1950). Seminal fantasy series deals with an Earth near the end of time, with a transformed climate and biosphere.
Gordon Van Gelder (ed.), Welcome to the Greenhouse (2011). An anthology of previously unpublished stories about climate change from well-known authors across the genre.
Jules Verne, Invasion from the Sea (1905). Verne’s last novel concerns the possibility of terraforming Africa by flooding the Sahara.
Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos (1985). Vonnegut’s evolutionary novel sees the last fertile human beings on the planet shipwrecked on the Galápagos Islands and evolving, over millennia, into creatures much like dolphins. The next evolution of man has much-diminished cognitive capacity, but for the darkly comic Vonnegut that’s just another argument in its favor. Also of note is Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), which has civilization end as a result of man’s propensity to invent insane, destructive, and totally unnecessary devices without ever stopping to ask first if it should.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996). Ecological disasters abound in this important novel of the near future, which also memorably treats consumer capitalism, nuclear war, and the porousness of the human-animal boundary.
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975). This strange but intriguing novel includes frequent trips inside the minds of whales. Fans of Watson will also enjoy his “Slow Birds” (1983), about an idyllic pastoral world that is periodically invaded by strange, metal cylinders, nuclear missiles from another dimension (ours).
Peter Watts, Starfish (1999). Grim novel finds bioengineered humans working power stations at thermal vents deep underwater.
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (2007). Speculative nonfiction concerning what would happen to human infrastructure following the disappearance of the human race, from the near term (days, weeks, months) to geologic time (hundreds of millions of years). Draws in part from Weisman’s journalistic work in the Chernobyl zone, a “world without us” that already exists in the present.
H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Vivisection horror. Environmental themes actually characterize most of Wells’s early fiction, from the pseudo-pastoral of The Time Machine (1895) to the near-miss asteroid collision of “The Star” (1897) to the climate change that causes the Martians to invade Earth in The War of the Worlds (1898). 1914’s The World Set Free depicts a human race saved from its plunderous waste of fossil fuels by the invention of atomic energy; Leo Szilard credits the book as his inspiration for the initial theorization of the nuclear bomb.
Scott Westerfield, Uglies (2005). The occasion for the formation of this Young Adult dystopia is a social collapse brought about by energy scarcity.
Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976). Environmental panics collide when, in a collapsing world of pollution, climate change, and overpopulation, an isolated planned community seeking to weather the storm discovers it is universally infertile and must turn to cloning for reproduction.
Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009). Set against a U.S. war in Canada with an emerging Dutch superpower over control of the thawed Northwest Passage, this inventive novel finds the people of a post-oil, post-climate-change future looking back on our era as “the Efflorescence of Oil”—the word “efflorescence” describing an evaporating of water that leaves behind a thin layer of salty detritus.
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (1997). Thematically intertwined, self-referential stories about the historical repetition of human-caused ecological disasters, in both the past and the future.
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96). Four-book series set on a generational starship in the Dying Earth setting of Wolfe’s even larger Book of the New Sun series.
Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia (1942). Arcadian utopia located in the South Pacific.
Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance (1996). The sudden, inexplicable appearance of H. G. Wells’s Time Machine in a London flat facilitates a trip into a depopulated future.
Philip Wylie, The End of the Dream (1972). Ecological catastrophe comes to America. Also noteworthy is When Worlds Collide (1933) and its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1933), in which a small number of humans flee Earth, before it is destroyed by collision with a rogue planet, to settle on Bronson Beta.
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951). Walking, intelligent plants take over the world. Also of interest: The Chrysalids (1955), set after an apparent nuclear holocaust that has altered the climate and mutated the biosphere.
Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Surreal and comic magical realist novel depicting a network of ecological and capitalist disasters centering on the threatened Brazilian rain forest.
Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967). In the end, alas, time and entropy only run the one way.
Film and Television
A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001). Decline and extinction for the human race, with only our robots left behind to succeed us.
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). Invasive species wrecks havoc on prey lacking natural defenses.
The Atomic Café (Jayne Loader, Kevin Raferty, and Pierce Raferty, 1982). Compilation and creative reframing of U.S. nuclear propaganda.
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). A human race desperate for energy sources to sustain their dying civilization attempts to steal unobtainium from the Pandora, only to be forced off the planet by a Gaia-like global consciousness uniting plants, animals, and the indigenous Na’vi.
Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D. Moore, 2003). Humans and their robot servants are locked within a cosmic cycle of destruction.
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963). Sublime allegory of our absolute dependence upon nature, as well as its radical alterity and unknowability.
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). Outstripping its source material, this adaptation of the P. D. James novel depicts the human race eighteen years after it has been spontaneously struck infertile.
The Colony (Beers and Segal, 2005). Reality TV series about people living in a simulated post-apocalyptic environment.
The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012). The conclusion of Nolan’s Batman trilogy sees billionaire Bruce Wayne mothballing a cold fusion device that would end class struggle and usher in universal global prosperity out of fear that it might be turned into a b
omb. The series started, of course, with Batman Begins (2005), in which the main villain is deep-ecological ecoterrorist Ra’s al Ghul.
Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978). U.S. consumer culture literally consumes itself.
The Day after Tomorrow (Roland Emmerlich, 2004). Abrupt climate change brings an instant ice age to New York City, convincing even a sinister Dick Cheney analogue of the seriousness of the problem.
Daybreakers (Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, 2009). Ten years after a viral epidemic has turned most of the global elite into vampires, humanity’s successors now face critical shortages after hitting Peak Blood.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961). Nuclear testing throws Earth off its axis, hurtling it toward the sun.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (Scott Derrickson, 2008). Updated remake of the Robert Wise–directed 1951 original has Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) issuing a grim warning about humanity’s failure to protect its ecosystem.
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009). An alien spaceship arrives over Johannesburg, bringing not the untold riches of the future but an even more wretched version of the present: miserable, starving insectoids called “prawns,” who are promptly housed in a concentration camp until some more permanent solution can be found.
Doctor Who: “The Green Death” (Michael E. Briant, 1973). The Third Doctor confronts the mad computer running Global Chemicals, which is hell-bent on polluting the planet. See also (among others) the Tenth Doctor’s “The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky” (Douglas Mackinnon, 2008) in which carbon-dioxide-free cars turn out to be poisoning the atmosphere even faster.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). U.S. Cold War militarism absurdly reaches its logical conclusion.
The End of Suburbia (Gregory Greene, 2004). Documentary depicting the coming collapse of fossil-fuel-intensive infrastructure in the United States.
Fail-Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964). U.S. Cold War militarism logically reaches its absurd conclusion.
Green Planets Page 38