Green Planets (23 page)

37
. Ward,
Spaceship Earth
, vii.

38
. Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 130. Emphasis in original.

39
.
Logan's Run
, dir. Michael Anderson (2007; New York: Warner Bros. / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976), DVD. I quote from the written prologue introducing the film and from one of its opening dialogues. The movie is based on the novel
Logan's Run
written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (New York: Dial Press, 1967).

40
.
Soylent Green
, dir. Richard Fleischer, Warner Bros. / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973). The screenplay is based on a novel by Harry Harrison titled
Make Room! Make Room!
(with an introduction by Paul R. Ehrlich) (1966; New York: Berkley, 1973).

41
. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” [1965], in
The Science Fiction Film Reader
, ed. Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004), 113.

42
. Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 163.

43
. Ibid., 157–59.

44
. Ibid., 159.

45
. Ibid., 172. Edward A. Ross,
Standing Room Only?
(New York: Century, 1927); Sax,
Standing Room Only
(1955). See also Höhler, “Law of Growth.”

46
. Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 174.

47
. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1248, 1244.

48
. Garrett Hardin, “Editorial: Parenthood: Right or Privilege?”
Science
169 (1970): 427.

49
. In a short story titled “The Stowaway,” Julian Barnes has aptly summarized the themes of authority, order, and classification associated with the Ark (Old Testament, Genesis 1: 6–9). Julian Barnes,
A History of the World in 10
½
Chapters
(1989; New York: Vintage, 1990), chap. 1: “The Stowaway,” 1–30. An anonymous woodworm reports, “I was never chosen. In fact, like several other species, I was specifically not chosen.”

50
. Sloterdijk, 260–61.

51
. Borgstrom,
Too Many
(1969). See also Höhler, “Law of Growth.”

52
. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1244.

53
. Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,”
Psychology Today
8, no. 4 (1974): 38–43, 123–26. On Hardin's problematic premises see Petter Næss, “Live and Let Die: The Tragedy of Hardin's Social Darwinism,”
Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning
6, no. 1 (2004): 19–34.

54
. Garrett Hardin, “Ethical Implications of Carrying Capacity,” in
Managing the Commons
, ed. Hardin (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977), 112–25.

55
. Garrett Hardin, “Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept,” in
Lifeboat Ethics: The Moral Dilemmas of World Hunger
, ed. George R. Lucas Jr. et al. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 134.

56
. Garrett Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,”
BioScience
24, no. 10 (1974): 564.

6

The Sea and Eternal Summer

An Australian Apocalypse

ANDREW MILNER

Despite the international success of individual writers like Greg Egan and of individual novels like Nevil Shute's
On the Beach
,
¹
Australian
SF
remains essentially peripheral to the wider contours of the genre. Yet there is a long history of what Adam Roberts describes as “works that located utopias and satirical dystopias on the opposite side of the globe,”
²
that is, in Australia. The earliest example he gives is Joseph Hall's 1605
Mundus alter et idem sive Terra Australis ante hac semper incognita lustrata
(A world other and the same, or the land of Australia until now unknown), the last, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne's 1781
La découverte australe par une homme-volant
(The discovery of Australia by a flying man).
³
Lyman Tower Sargent's bibliography begins slightly later, with Peter Heglin's 1667
An Appendix to the Former Work, Endeavouring a Discovery of the Unknown Parts of the World. Especially of Terra Australis Incognita, or the Southern Continent
, and proceeds to list something like three hundred “Australian” print utopias and dystopias published during the period 1667–1999.
⁴

There are yet others overlooked by even Sargent and Roberts: neither mention Denis Veiras's
L'histoire des Sévarambes
, for example, first published in part in English in 1675, in whole in French in 1679.
⁵
European writers made very extensive use of Australia as a site for utopian imaginings well before the continent's conquest, exploration, and colonization; even Marx's
Capital
ends its first volume with an unexpected vision of Australia as an open frontier beyond capital's grasp.
⁶
There are two reasons for this, the one obvious, the other less so. First, Australia remained one of very few real-world
terrae incognitae
available for appropriation by European fantasy as late as the second half of the nineteenth century. And second, although Australia is conventionally described as a continent, it is also in fact an island,
⁷
possessed of all the properties of self-containment and isolation that have proven so helpful to the authors of utopia ever since Thomas More.

Most of the earlier Australian utopian fictions took the form of an imaginary voyage narrated by travelers on their return home. Such imaginings became increasingly implausible as European explorers brought back increasingly detailed accounts of Australia's climate, topography, and people. The utopias were therefore progressively relocated farther into the interior, until the realities of inland exploration eventually proved equally disappointing. Thereafter, in Australia as elsewhere, utopias were increasingly superseded by future-fictional “uchronias.” Robyn Walton cites Robert Ellis Dudgeon's
Colymbia
, published in 1873, as the first Australian
SF
utopia,
⁸
although Joseph Fraser's
Melbourne and Mars
is probably better known.
⁹
In Australia, again as elsewhere, as the twentieth century proceeded utopias were also increasingly displaced by dystopias. The best-known Australian examples are almost certainly Shute's
On the Beach
, a nuclear doomsday novel, and George Turner's
The Sea and Summer
, one of the first novels to explore the fictional possibilities of the effects of global warming. Both make powerful, albeit often scientifically implausible, use of Australia's self-contained isolation.

Much
SF
has been both deliberately intended by its authors and deliberately received by its readers as value-relevant. Some, but not all, science fiction consists in future stories; and some, but not all, is concerned either to advocate what its authors and readers see as desirable possible futures or to urge against what they see as undesirable ones. In short, the future story can be used as a kind of futurology. Science fiction of this kind is intended to be politically or morally effective—that is, to be socially useful. “We badly need a literature of considered ideas,” Turner himself argued in 1990: “Science fiction could be a useful tool for serious consideration, on the level of the non-specialist reader, of a future rushing on us at unstoppable speed.”
¹⁰
Three years earlier, in the “Postscript” to
The Sea and Summer
, he had written, “We
talk
of leaving a better world to our children, but in fact do little more than rub along with day-to-day problems and hope that the long-range catastrophes will never happen.” This novel, he explained, “is about the possible cost of complacency.”
¹¹

Much radical
SF
scholarship exhibits a certain antipathy to dystopia, essentially on the grounds that it tends, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, “to denounce and … warn against Utopian programs.”
¹²
But many dystopias, including some of those most disliked by Jameson, actually function as implicitly utopian warnings rather than as “anti-utopias” in the strict sense of the term. This is true, I would argue, for
On the Beach
and
The Sea and Summer
. Writing in the Australian newspaper
The Age
in January 2008, Peter Christoff, the then–vice president of
the Australian Conservation Foundation, observed that
On the Beach
had “helped catalyse the 1960s anti-nuclear movement.” Comparing the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s with that of global warming in the early twenty-first century, he warned that “we are … suffering from a radical failure of imagination.” When Christoff connected
On the Beach
to climate change, he did so precisely to urge the need for a parallel contemporary effort to imagine the unimaginable. “These are distressing, some will argue apocalyptic, imaginings,” he admits, “but without them, we cannot undertake the very substantial efforts required to minimize the chances of their being realised.”
¹³
The Sea and Summer
, it seems to me, had attempted more or less exactly this two decades previously.

THE NOVEL WITHIN THE NOVEL

Turner was born in Melbourne in 1916 and published the first of five non-
SF
novels in 1959. He began reviewing genre fiction for
The Age
during the 1970s, produced his first
SF
novel,
Beloved Son
, in 1978, which was followed by sequels in 1981 and 1983,
¹⁴
and by the time of his death in 1997 had become in effect the genre's Australian elder statesman. Four other
SF
novels of his were published between 1987 and 1994 and a collection of
SF
short stories in 1990, and two posthumous works, an unfinished novella,
And Now Time Doth Waste Me,
in 1998, and the novel
Down There in Darkness
in 1999.
¹⁵
All were essentially exercises in futurology, all preoccupied with the ethics of sociopolitical action, all distinctively Australian in tenor. By far the most critically successful was
The Sea and Summer
, which in 1988 won both the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award for the South East Asia and South Pacific Region and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best
SF
novel published in Britain (the previous year's Clarke Award had gone to Margaret Atwood for
The Handmaid's Tale
). In 1985 Turner had published a short story, “The Fittest,”
¹⁶
in which he first began to explore the possible effects of global warming on his home city. He quickly expanded this story into a full-length novel that was published in 1987 in Britain as
The Sea and Summer
and as
Drowning Towers
in the United States.
¹⁷

Like
On the Beach
,
The Sea and Summer
is set mainly in and around Melbourne, a vividly described place, terrifyingly transformed into the utterly unfamiliar. The novel is organized into a core narrative, comprising two parts set in the mid-twenty-first century, and a frame narrative, comprising three shorter parts set a thousand years later among “the Autumn People” of the “New City,” located in what are today the Dandenong Ranges to the east of Melbourne.
¹⁸
The core
narrative deals with the immediate future of our “Greenhouse Culture,” the frame narrative with the retrospective reactions to it of a slowly cooling world. The latter depicts a utopian future society, which uses submarine archaeology to explore the drowned remains of the “Old City,” but which is also simultaneously aware of the imminence of a “Long Winter” that might well last a hundred thousand years. The novel opens by introducing the frame narrative's three main characters: Marin, a part-time student and enthusiastic Christian, who pilots the power craft used to explore the drowned city; his great-aunt, Professor Lenna Wilson, an expert on the collapse of the Greenhouse Culture in Australia, who teaches history at the university; and Andra Andrasson, a visiting actor-playwright from Sydney, researching the twenty-first century as possible material for a play.
¹⁹
Together they explore the remains of the substantially submerged “Tower Twenty-three” (6–11) and investigate the ruins of the only twentieth-century “Enclave” never to have flooded (93–96), debating their meaning both on-site and at the university.

The core narrative takes the form of a novel within the novel, also titled
The Sea and Summer
, written by Lenna as a “Historical Reconstruction” of the thirty-first century's real past (15). In form it is polyphonic, tracing the development of the Greenhouse Culture through a set of memoirs and diary extracts written during the years 2044–61 by six main protagonists: Alison Conway, Francis Conway, Teddy Conway, Nola Parkes, Captain Nikopoulos, and Arthur Derrick. The only silent voice is that of the Tower Boss, Billy Kovacs, the novel's central character and also, perhaps, its central enigma, the remains of whose flat Lenna and Andra explore (9). This core narrative is counter-chronological, beginning and ending in 2061, but moving through the 2040s and '50s as it proceeds. The sections set in 2061 might therefore be considered a frame within the frame. In the first of these, Alison recalls her own childish delight in play on the beach at Elwood, from the vantage point of what we will later learn to be the last year of her life. She wistfully concludes: “The ageing woman has what the child desired—the sea and eternal summer” (20). In the second, her son Francis records his intermittent diary entries from the period February 2056 to March 2061, concluding with that for March 20: “Mum is dead…. Once, she said very forcefully, ‘I've had a
good
life, Francis. So full.' Full, I thought, of what would have been avoided in a saner world…. Billy came in later, but by then she was rambling about the past, about summertime and the glistening sea” (311).