Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

Preface

PreFace As its title suggests, this volume was first inspired by Mark Bould and China Miéville’s Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. But where that book focused primarily on the long-standing connection between science fiction and political leftism, Green Planets takes up instead the genre’s relationship with ecology, environmentalism, and the emerging interdisciplinary conversation variously called ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, and the ecological humanities. The oxymoronic combination of “science” and “fiction” in the term “science fiction” suggests in miniature the internal tension that drives analysis of the genre. Is science fiction primarily “science” (knowledge, fact, truth), or is it primarily “fiction” (whimsy, fantasy, lie)? Does the genre offer a predictive window into the world of a future that is soon to come, or does it instead merely reflect the assumptions, anxieties, and cultural preoccupations of its own immediate present? It’s little wonder that for decades many writers and critics of science fiction have chosen to eschew the name “science fiction” entirely, preferring “speculative fiction” or (even more commonly) the ambiguous shorthand “SF” as a means of avoiding the problem of the “science” on which the genre is nominally based. In fact almost none of the fantastic, otherworldly tropes most closely associated with SF in the popular imagination are “scientific” in any meaningful sense; the physical laws of reality, as far as anyone can tell, prohibit all the best-loved plot devices, from hyperdrives to mutant superpowers to time travel to perpetual motion machines. Despite frequent pretensions to the contrary from fans and promoters of the genre, the popular designation of a text as SF still typically registers not its careful fidelity to current scientific understanding but rather the extremity of its deviation from what science tells us is true. And yet, despite all the necessary caveats and disavowals, it cannot be denied that we find ourselves living in science fictional times. Waiting in a doctor’s office for the results of a genetic test that will tell her the true story of her own future, using a cheap handheld device that can in seconds wirelessly access a vast digital archive of all human knowledge, a person can effortlessly browse all the latest apocalyptic predictions about mankind’s radical destabilization of the x Pre fac e planet’s climate and the concurrent mass extinction of its animal and plant life in between breaking news reports about the latest catastrophic flood, drought, or oil spill. As noted SF author William Gibson once put it: “Today, the sort of thing we used to think in science fiction has colonized the rest of our reality.”1 It’s true that cars still don’t fly—but they have started to drive themselves. Nowhere is the science fictionalization of the present clearer than in contemporary considerations of humanity’s interaction with its environment, which frequently deploys the language and logic of SF to narrativize the dire implications of ecological science for the future. Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet, published in 1948, briefly paused its ecological critique to wonder if perhaps there aren’t humanoids somewhere else in the universe treating their planet better than we treat ours; two years later Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, took stock of energy scarcity and entropic breakdown to unhappily declare us “shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet” in his The Human Use of Human Beings.2 Paul Crutzen’s recent assertion of the Anthropocene—a proposed postHolocene “epoch” that posits that the multiple impacts of human civilization on the planet will be visible in the geologic record—takes up the cosmic viewpoint native to SF to imagine the future scientists who will uncover the scant evidence of our existence on a long-deserted, post-human Earth; in Man the Hunter, from 1969, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore deployed the same imaginative frame to consider the “interplanetary archaeologists” of the future, from whose perspective “the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear as essentially simultaneous.”3 Rachel Carson, who jump-started the contemporary environmental movement with her stirring denunciation of chemical pesticides, famously chose to begin her book not with some detached presentation of the facts at hand but with a science fictional parable, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” about the inhabitants of a small town “somewhere in America” whose hubris destroys paradise.4 The “Spaceship Earth” metaphor for discussing resource scarcity and sustainability has become so naturalized that most completely forget its origins in SF. Even now, contemporary debates over the reality...