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Of Further Interest
- Wesleyan University Press
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Of Further Interest Gerry canavan What follows is an annotated list of selected SF works (very broadly defined) that stake out some position on questions of ecological futurity and the environment. Not all of the authors and creators listed necessarily understood themselves to be producing “ecological SF,” and by no means are all of these texts equally recommended from either a political or an aesthetic perspective. All, however, are at least potentially of interest to readers interested in the way SF has both drawn from and influenced ecological thinking and environmentalist politics. Literature and Nonfiction Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Earth is demolished to build an interstellar highway in this timeless satire of progress, technology, capitalism, bureaucracy, life, the universe, and everything. Adams’s concern for the environment is also evident in his elegiac Last Chance to See (1989), cowritten with Mark Carwadine, on endangered species across the globe. Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972). Rabbits are people, too. Chris Adrian, The Children’s Hospital (2006). A hospital must shut its doors and become a completely self-sustaining entity following a global flood in this American magical realist novel. Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958; Starship in the United States). The novel explores life inside the artificial environment of a generational starship that has lost all memory of its mission or even that it is a spaceship at all. Aldiss fans might also be interested in Hothouse (1962), set on a hot future Earth whose new temperature has caused the entire planet to be completely overrun with plant life, as well as White Mars, or, the Mind Set Free (1999), his quasi-reply to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidactus (c. 1268–77). One of the earliest SF texts ends with an apocalyptic vision of radical climate change. M. T. Anderson, Feed (2002). Dystopian cyberpunk novel set amid widespread pollution, ocean acidification, mass infertility, and even the replacement of natural clouds (which can no longer form) with artificial Clouds™. Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves (1972). One of Asimov’s most technically sophisticated novels; the narrative concerns a free energy machine called the Electron Pump, which, alas, is too good to be true. Although he is not commonly thought of as an ecological writer, ecological themes appear across Asimov’s work in such texts as Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Robots and Empire (1985), discussed in the introduction, as well as in 262 O f fu rthe r I nte r e st such texts as The Caves of Steel (1953), which converts Asimov’s lifelong struggle with agoraphobia into a vision of immense domed cities in which no one would ever have to go outside. In the Foundation series we also have the city-planet Trantor, a fully urbanized planet with no natural spaces left to speak of; only in later entries in the series do we begin to get a sense of the unimaginable influx of food and fuel that would be required, on a daily basis, to make such a situation possible. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003). The first entry in Atwood’s MaddAddam series finds a mad scientist crunching the numbers and determining that it would be best to eliminate Homo sapiens in favor of an upgraded and improved Humanity 2.0. After reciting a cavalcade of long horrors both historical and futuristic, the novel more or less dares us to agree with him. Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009). Set in Thailand after a cascading series of global calamities including Peak Oil, climate change, and plagues and food shortages caused by genetically modified foods; the Western multinationals are finally ready to start global capitalism up again by raiding the independent kingdom’s seed bank. Also of definite interest: Bacigalupi’s short fiction (collected in Pump Six and Other Stories [2006]) and Ship Breaker (2010). J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962). Really, one could start with almost any of the apocalyptic and entropic disasters that appear across the early Ballard—The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Burning World (1964), The Crystal World (1966), etc.—but this novel’s rise of the sea levels and the spreading of the tropical zone as far north as England perhaps speaks most directly to our contemporary concerns about the future. Another noteworthy Ballard novel for students of ecological SF is High Rise (1975), which sees civilization utterly break down and all historical progress reverse in a modern apartment building once the lights...