Green Planets (5 page)

The utopian potentiality implied—and, often, made possible—by apocalyptic critique is the necessary critical move to rescue us from a diagnosis of the world situation that would otherwise appear utterly hopeless. In his contribution to Mark Bould and China Miéville's
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction
, the collection that inspired this volume, Carl Freedman identifies as a central disjuncture in Marxist thought the distinction between deflationary and inflationary modes of critique. But, as Freedman shows, deflation and inflation necessarily function as a dialectic. The cold calculus of deflation—“the attempt to destroy all illusions necessary or useful to the preservation of class society in general and of capitalism in particular”—is predicated on the baseline moral recognition that the injustice, deprivation, and suffering that is being described
ought not exist
; and the soaring utopian heights of inflation can only surpass mere wishful thinking when they arise out of a historical-scientific understanding of capitalist reality as it now exists.
⁴¹
Ecocritique, like the cognitive estrangements of
SF
, and like the leftist project as a whole, necessarily operates along this same dialectic of deflation and inflation. And, like these other modes, ecocritique requires both deflation and inflation to stay vital. This is why the impulse toward the miserable, deflationary naming of all the various ongoing ecological catastrophes is always matched (if only in negative) by an inflationary, futurological impulse toward the better world that might yet be. Here utopia and apocalypse unexpectedly collapse into one another—they are each disguised versions of a single imaginative leap into futurity.

The essays in
Green Planets
are predicated on the proposition that two hundred years of
SF
can help us collectively “think” this leap into futurity in the context of the epochal mass-extinction event called the Anthropocene (which the literary theorists more simply call “modernity”).
SF
is our culture's vast, shared, polyvocal archive of the possible; from techno-utopias to apocalypses to ecotopian
fortunate fall
s, it is the transmedia genre of
SF
that has first attempted to articulate the sorts of systemic global changes that are imminent,
or already happening, and begins to imagine what our transformed planet might eventually be like for those who will come to live on it. Especially taken in the context of escalating ecological catastrophe, in which each new season seems to bring with it some new and heretofore-unseen spectacular disaster, my coeditor's well-known declaration that in the contemporary moment “the world has become a science fiction novel” has never seemed more true or more frightening.
⁴²
Indeed, such a notion suggests both politics and “realism” are now
always
“inside” science fiction, insofar as the world, as we experience its vertiginous technological and ecological flux, now more closely resembles
SF
than it does any historical realism. In this sense perhaps even ecological critique as such can productively be thought of as a kind of science fiction, as it uses the same tools of cognition and extrapolation to project the conditions of a possible future—whether good or bad, ecotopian or apocalyptic—in hopes of transforming politics in the present.

In that spirit, the thirteen chapters in this book explore thirteen such transformations, divided into three sections. In
Part I
, “Arcadias and New Jerusalems,” four critics explore and deconstruct utopian visions of ecological futures. In “Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells,” Christina Alt foregrounds the unexpected use of extermination imagery and mass extinction in Wells's
Men Like Gods
as a marker of
utopian
potentiality—tokening a human race now fully in control of its powers and of the planet. In “Evolution and Apocalpyse in the Golden Age,” Michael Page traces a fraught dialogue between optimism and pessimism across such classic
SF
works as Laurence Manning's
The Man Who Awoke
(1933), Clifford Simak's
City
series (1940s), Ward Moore's
Greener Than You Think
(1947), and George R. Stewart's
Earth Abides
(1949). In his contribution, Gib Prettyman critiques the historic inability of Marxist critics to fully appreciate Ursula K. Le Guin's utopian philosophical interest in Daoism, and considers the opportunities made possible by this way of thinking for an ecological leftism that goes beyond economic socialism. Finally, Rob Latham takes up both Le Guin's
The Word for World Is Forest
(novella 1972, novel 1976) and Thomas Disch's
The Genocides
(1965) to unpack the critique of exterminative and genocidal fantasy as presented in key texts of the New Wave movement in 1960s and 1970s
SF
.

Part II
, “Brave New Worlds and Lands of the Flies,” turns to much more catastrophic imaginings of both the future of the environment and the people who live in it. In “‘The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People': Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction,” Sabine Höhler reads the ubiquitous “Spaceship
Earth” metaphor of contemporary ecological discourse as itself
SF
, and unpacks the political consequences of this figuration, tracking the way its use trends toward neoliberal calls for austerity, “lifeboat ethics,” and the “case against helping the poor.” Andrew Milner's “The Sea and Eternal Summer: An Australian Apocalypse” and Adeline Johns-Putra's “Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future: Maggie Gee's
The Ice People
” take up two very different approaches to the present's paradigmatic vision of generational ecological disaster, climate change, both of which deploy the retrospective viewpoint of the people of the future to speak to people in the present. Milner's chapter also considers the unique role Australia plays in the global imaginary, both in and outside
SF
, while Johns-Putra's consideration of Gee's novel draws connections to the larger field of feminist and ecofeminist writing (Atwood, Lessing, Winterson) with which that novel is in conversation. Elzette Steenkamp's reading of recent South African
SF
in “Future Ecologies, Current Crisis,” which traces figurations of gender, race, and indigeneity through Jane Rosenthal's novel
Souvenir
(2004) and Neill Blomkamp's film
District 9
(2009), looks to apocalyptic futurity as a
novum
that reveals for us the absolute interdependence of self, other, and environment in the present, as well as suggests new possibilities for what it means to be “human” at all. Finally, drawing from such works as Douglas Coupland's
Girlfriend in a Coma
(1998), Margaret Atwood's
Oryx and Crake
(2003), and China Miéville's
Kraken
(2010), Christopher Palmer closes the section with a sustained consideration of how the tragic valence of the apocalyptic imaginary gives way to a more comic sensibility in an era when the many catastrophes and disasters have become so well-rehearsed as to have all already happened.

The final section of the text, “Quiet Earths, Junk Cities, and the Cultures of the Afternoon,” considers both recent figurations of postmodern (and post-human) hybrid landscapes, as well as the new ways of thinking that such visions suggest. Eric Otto's “The Rain Feels New” explores the Cultures of the Afternoon presented in the short fictions of Paolo Bacigalupi, arguing that despite the despair that seems to permeate these works, they nonetheless maintain a utopian political charge. In “Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures,” Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman take up a new subgenre of apocalyptic fantasy they call “science faction”: Quiet Earth visions of a world totally emptied of people, in which our cities are left to rust, degrade, and rot. Bellamy and Szeman argue that texts like
Life after People
and its ilk, despite their popularity and their nominal focus on important environmental questions, in fact do little to provoke a genuine or effective ecological politics. In “Pandora's Box:
Avatar,
Ecology, Thought”—putting to one side the political questions about capitalism and globalization raised by the plot of the film in favor of interrogating its ontological grounding—Timothy Morton reads
Avatar
against the grain as a philosophical treatise about worlding and worldlessness, and the strange strangers of Earth's biosphere who surround us both in similarity and in radical difference. The Na'vi become refigured here not as a vision of some imagined primitivist past, but as a figure for what a genuinely postmodern
future
might entail. Finally, using Stanislaw Lem and Greg Egan as her companion theorists, Melody Jue suggests in “Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in
Solaris
and ‘Oceanic'” that we might be able to draw new modes of cognition, and new frames for theory, by thinking about the inversion and interplay of surfaces and depths at work in ocean environments.

An interview with my coeditor—“Still, I'm Reluctant to Call This Pessimism”—serves as an afterword for the volume, exploring not only the central place of the environment in Robinson's fiction but also the varied uses of science, religion, crisis, capitalism, human and nonhuman life, optimism, pessimism, apocalypse, and ecotopia in the wide constellation of texts that is ecological
SF
.

Notes

The editors would like to thank the network of writers, readers, editors, colleagues, interlocutors, friends, and spouses whose generosity and support made the completion of this work possible, as well as offer our most extravagant special thanks to Mark Bould and China Miéville for allowing us to build upon their very good idea.

W. H. Auden, “Vespers,” in
Collected Shorter Poems: 1927–1957
(London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 333.

1
. Samuel R. Delany, “On Triton and Other Matters,”
Science Fiction Studies
17, no. 3 (November 1990),
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm
. Delany also discusses these ideas in “Critical Methods / Speculative Fiction,” repr. in
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw:
Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
(New York: Berkley, 1977), 119–31.

2
. Marshall Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 13.

3
. Everett Bleiler and Richard Bleiler,
Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), xv.

4
. Delany, “Triton.”

5
. Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 2–3.

6
. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”
National Interest
16 (Summer 1989): 3–18.

7
. Fredric Jameson,
The Seeds of Time
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii.

8
. Timothy Morton, Kathy Rudy, and the Polygraph Collective, “On Ecology: A Roundtable Discussion with Timothy Morton and Kathy Rudy,”
Polygraph
22 (2010): 234.

9
. See Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,”
Nature
415 (January 2002): 23.

10
. Benjamin Kunkel, “The Politics of Fear,
Part II
: How Many of Us?”
n+1
(March 18, 2008),
http://nplusonemag.com/politics-fear-part-ii-how-many-us
.

11
. Joss Whedon,
Firefly
(Fox, 2002). This version of the opening narration opened several episodes in the middle part of the first and only season.

12
. Systems theory's reliance on feedback as a structuring principle links it closely with later developments in ecology.

13
. Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” repr. in
The Environmental Debate: A Documentary History, with Timeline, Glossary, and Appendices
, ed. Peninah Neimark and Peter Rhoades Mott (Amenia, NY: Grey House, 2010), 209.

14
. Ibid., 210.

15
. “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” The derivation of the “Zeroth Law” allows the robots to effectively ignore all the “Three Law” safeguards humans had installed to protect themselves from their creations, and ultimately leads to the establishment of a cabal of immortal robots that secretly orchestrates the coming millennia of future history, in accordance with what they determine to be humanity's best interests.

16
. Isaac Asimov,
Robots and Empire
(New York: Del Ray Books, 1985), 467.

17
. Ecology returns again at the end of the series in a somewhat unexpected form in Asimov's
Foundation's Edge
(1982) and
Foundation and Earth
(1986), set several millennia after
Robots and Empire
. Here, an aging R. Daneel Olivaw (the other of the two robots, the one who did not poison Earth's crust but who endorsed the decision in retrospect) offers a representative of the Foundation a choice between a Second Galactic Empire or a “Galaxia,” a galaxy-wide, deep-ecological communal mind. This character chooses Galaxia—a souped-up Gaia theory on an interplanetary scale—for an unexpected reason: he paranoiacally determines that the extinction of individuality in favor of group consciousness will make for the best possible military defense if any hostile aliens attempt to invade our galaxy, neatly linking environmentalist concerns with the needs of the national security state.

18
. Stephen King, “Video Interview: Stephen King on
Under the Dome
,”
Popeaters.com
(October 27, 2009),
http://www.popeater.com/2009/10/27/stephen-king-under-the-dome-interview/
.

19
. Ursula Heise,
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.