Green Planets (27 page)

The novel is set in the middle of the twenty-first century, when global warming suddenly experiences a rapid reversal: the world enters an ice age, and anthropogenic climate change is countered by an even more destructive “natural” climate phenomenon. Much of the novel, however, is told in flashback, as Saul, the first-person narrator, looks back on a life that spans the onset and development of one environmental crisis and then another.

Saul is born in London in 2005, at the start of what will become known as “the Tropical Time” (16). By his teens and twenties, global warming has reached its
height, but this is a time during which young men and women—feeling all the invincibility of youth—revel in, rather than worry about, climatic conditions. Along with climate change, the world has also experienced dramatic social breakdown—epidemics of diseases such as Ebola and mutant
HIVS
have just about shut down entire governments, including Britain's. However, the younger generation's response to all this is a kind of apathy. The twentieth-century battle of the sexes has given way to mutual antagonism and a trend for gender segregation, or “segging” (23)—it has become fashionable for young men and women simply to avoid each other. Such a society is recognizable as the logical outcome of the kind of masculinist-scientist-capitalist complex in extremis detailed in other climate change dystopias; this is a world very like the worlds described by Atwood and Winterson. The biosphere has been irretrievably damaged, medical tinkering in the form of antibiotics has produced resistant strains of killer diseases, and an unrestrained profit motive only further encourages social, political, and environmental dysfunction.

Granting the similarities to other climate change dystopias, however, there is a crucial difference with Gee's novel. This lies, in part, in Saul's status as a narrator; specifically, it lies in authorial manipulation of narrator unreliability, producing an interpretive—and gendered—irony. Intelligent, likable Saul is made all the more sympathetic by his first-person perspective. The reader is initially drawn into the novel as one is drawn into the typical science fiction dystopia, through empathy with the protagonist as outsider: he or she is “like us,” and together we negotiate the brave new world of the text. It is difficult not to identify with Saul as he falls in love and settles down in an “old-fashioned,” “twentieth-century” kind of way (28). However, Saul's seemingly commonsense description of his society is strikingly unreflective of the gender dynamics at play. He describes segging but cannot understand it. He cannot see, for example, that it is motivated by women, as a backlash against what they perceive to be the gender inequalities that still predominate in twenty-first-century life. Thus, it is Saul's wife, Sarah, who provides us with an alternative insight into segging. Employed as part of a state initiative to combat segging and to improve falling fertility rates, she teaches teenagers how to fall in love and finds that, while boys are receptive enough to the idea of “having women to love and support them,” girls are “not all that excited about developing their nurturing sides” (36). The girls' concerns center on care as power imbalance: “I want to look after kids…. But why should I want to look after a man? They're not babies” (36). Sarah's attempts to explain the girls' perspective to Saul actually provokes an example of such imbalance:

 

“They're quite thoughtful, when you listen to them. I think they have a point about housework, too.”

“But you enjoy it,” I said. “Partly because you're so good at it. Your food always looks so beautiful. I mean, you turn that side of things into pure pleasure. I wish those girls could see what you do.”

She didn't smile, but nodded slowly. “It takes a lot of time, though, Saul, you know.”

“Time well spent,” I said, kissing her. (37)

 

Sarah's concerns and Saul's response only clarify the inequities of care in traditional male-female relations so familiar to twentieth-century feminism: it is not just that the woman's conventional role is to provide care, but care is too often neither returned nor adequately rewarded.

The novel's analysis of gender relations occurs alongside its depiction of increasing environmental chaos. First, the breakdown of Saul and Sarah's marriage is reflective of a global gender conflict: as Sarah and many women like her turn militant in their separatism, men like Saul become more resentful of women, more insistent on cultivating what they see as masculine traits, and, yet, more desiring of conventionally feminine care and attention. Then, the world descends into an ice age, and the trajectory of anthropogenic climate change is abruptly reversed. It is not just that Saul and Sarah's battle of the sexes is part of an all-out war; it is significant that it takes place within the novel's trajectory of two global climatic events—anthropogenic climate change and the onset of glaciation. In other words, the novel's interrogation of shifts in gender dynamics is, when read alongside its two environmental crises, also an interrogation of two very different—and differently gendered—solutions to these crises. That is, the novel first critiques a very masculinist response to
man
-made global warming and then studies an ecomaternalist response to the ice age crisis.

The initial crisis of global warming is readable as a component of a larger whole, as one of the outcomes of a thoughtless, even arrogant, indulgence in a technologically enhanced lifestyle. Once the reader becomes attentive to Saul's unreliability as a narrator, it is possible to read his careless description of these early days as part of a broader ideological context for runaway climate change: his casual jetting around the world for easy, exotic holidays; his soaking up the heat with no anxiety about the rate of temperature increase; his embracing a career in nano-engineering, with no consideration that technology might offer a solution to environmental crisis rather than a path to more affluence. Through
it all, Saul's experience—“I felt on the brink of owning the world. I was a man, and human beings ran the planet…. I was tall, and strong, and a techie, which qualified me for a lifetime's good money” (24)—is perceptibly gendered.

The onset of the ice age, however, coincides with the rise of an alternative, female political power. Wicca, the women's collective that Sarah joins during one of her many separations from Saul, is, in Saul's words, founded on “a wacky female nature worship, centring on ‘the Hidden Goddess,' who apparently ‘gave suck' to us all” (117). Wicca successfully wins the national elections on the promise of a “caring revolution” (137), with the tagline “Vote for Wicca. Wicca Cares” (138). This ecomaternalist appropriation of care—effectively rejecting the burden of caring for men but purporting to care for everything else—is expressed in Wicca's promises of “‘revaluing nature,' ‘nurturing the future'; ‘the future is green.' We would ‘bloom again' with the ‘cooling earth.' We would ‘give thanks to the Goddess' for water” (137). When the effects of glaciation become impossible to ignore, however, Wicca's technophobic stance means that it refuses to take seriously the “techfixes” (147) suggested by scientists, and neglects to meet the challenge of securing the necessary international cooperation and funding. In short, Wicca's ecomaternalist revolution, established as an alternative to the anti-nature, pro-technology, globally warmed generation, fails in its attempts to cope with the second environmental crisis. It gets caught up in arguments with its rivals, a men's collective that emerges as a kind of backlash to the backlash. The two sides become bogged down in a macro-version of Saul and Sarah's lifelong argument. Gender relations are exposed as a depressingly insoluble conundrum—where there is difference there is inequity—in both the “old-fashioned” world of domestic squabbles and the “segged” world of political point-scoring. The biosphere suffers collateral damage in the process.

The risks of an ethic of care are here laid bare. Wicca's political campaigning is a reminder of the extent to which ecomaternalist care is an ideological tool rather than an inherent aspect of female identity. To note this, recalling Sandilands, is not to undermine an ethic of care but to subject it to a different kind of assessment: ecomaternalism can be useful as a platform on which to initiate sociopolitical good. In the case of Wicca, however, it becomes not just means but an end, a way of asserting control in order to retain control, particularly over men. Care in this instance becomes a weapon in a gendered power play, with women claiming a monopoly on care and men counterclaiming it as something they can do just as well. This is evident in the controversy that escalates over the domestic robots called “Doves” (87). It is Saul's brand of nanotechnology
that is responsible for the Doves; thus, “as a techie, [he] is full of admiration for the basic Dove design” (94). Moreover, the cute, anthropomorphic Doves prove wildly popular with men like Saul, who rely on them not just for domestic chores but for affection and company. Meanwhile, the Wicca government exploits primarily female fears over incidents in which malfunctioning Doves have attacked animals and children, and the robots are banned. To men, the Doves symbolize the successful masculinist appropriation of the traditionally female functions of care; to women, they represent a flawed counterfeit of an authentically feminine trait. In all, the Doves underline the fraught gender politics of care.

The Doves' destructive side also points to the dark side of care itself.
The Ice People
is a sustained reflection on the efficacy of care as a human response. As Tronto reminds us, a relationship of care is actually definable by selfishness, as the decision to care is necessarily about caring for one (or some) over others. Competing priorities of care are not always compatible. Neither Sarah nor Saul could be easily described as uncaring, but their arguments about care have a destructive effect on the person they would seem to care most about—their son. Correspondingly, the wider gender conflict about who cares more proves detrimental to the nonhuman environment, one of the supposed beneficiaries of that debate. (In this implicit link between child and environment, that common slippage between caring for the “environment” and caring for the “future” cannot escape notice.) Of course, this critique is refracted ironically through Saul's first-person narrative, meaning that an understanding of the limitations of care must be gained alongside a compassionate response to this portrayal of fatherly love, for, because Saul cares about his son, the reader cannot help caring about him. As the world enters the ice age in earnest and European society begins to come apart, Saul abducts his son Luke from the Wicca commune. They head for the relative warmth and political stability of Africa (in another ironic comment, this time on the racial politics of environmental justice).
³³
However, if Wicca's brand of caring could not save the day and the planet, neither can Saul's. He stops at nothing to save his son, but this means caring for no one else. Not only do they rob fellow refugees; they leave for dead the sympathetic Wicca member Briony who travels with them when they flee attackers in Spain.
³⁴
Here, parental care has become Darwinian survivalism: “I told myself it was all for him. I had even sacrificed Briony” (272). Saul's regrets that Sarah would never acknowledge his love for their son—“She never knew how much I'd loved him…. She didn't know how much I'd cared for him” (301)—must coexist with his realization at the end of his life that “I wasn't a hero, or a villain, or any of the things they say
in stories—but merely one tiny unit of biology, stopping at nothing to save his genes” (273). Luke, as it turns out, rejects this kind of care; he and many others of his generation run away from their fragile, fighting families and become the Wild Children of the Ice Age.

Yet this novel must not be misunderstood as a preference for one kind of care against another, for it is, if anything, a careful weighing up of care per se. The novel exhibits a deeply ironic interest in care—it cares about care and draws us in on this basis. Still, it reminds us that the dangers of care reside both in its metaphorical and its metonymic slips: it is too easily used as an alibi (that is, a symbol that conceals its status as symbol) for power, and it is also proximal to much less altruistic tendencies such as jealousy, possessiveness, and exceptionalism. Against Saul's selfish, old-fashioned care sits Wicca's failed and vindictive ideology of care, and, against these again, sits the nonsensical affection of the Doves. Then, there is the version of human relations with which the novel ends: the Wild Children and their animalistic pursuit of only the most basic needs. Looking back on his life, which he now spends with an entirely new generation of the ice age, the aging Saul asks: “How can I explain it to these crazy kids, who live for food, and fire, and sex? How love was so important to us. How tiny shades of wants and wishes made us fight, and sob, and part” (63). Saul, in other words, recognizes both the apparent necessity and the shortcomings of love and care in his climate-changed world.

The Ice People
is, in common with other climate change dystopias, about an inadequacy in the contemporary human response to the environment. However, unlike these, Maggie Gee's thoughtful vision of the future is no simple account of the inadequacy of the contemporary response in terms of a failure to recognize the necessity of care. What makes this climate change dystopia so poignant is that, first, it is about the inevitability of care in shaping our responsibilities to each other and to the environment, and then it is about the terrible cost of taking care for granted as a way of fulfilling these responsibilities.

Notes

The research leading to this paper was carried out while a Visiting Fellow with the Humanities Research Centre, RSHA, Australian National University.