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2: Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age
- Wesleyan University Press
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Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age michael PaGe In the 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age, Isaac Asimov writes of The Man Who Awoke series of stories by Laurence Manning: “In the 1970s, everyone is aware of, and achingly involved in, the energy crisis. Manning was aware of it forty years ago, and because he was, I was, and so, I’m sure, were many thoughtful young science fiction readers.”1 At the time of Asimov’s writing, ecology as a topic in the cultural conversation and in SF was on an upswing. Books like Paul Ehrlich ’s The Population Bomb, Gordon Rattary Taylor’s The Biological Time Bomb, Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age, Frank Herbert’s New World or No World, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth were reaching wide audiences. In SF, several anthologies focused on ecological issues, including Fred Pohl’s Nightmare Age, Tom Disch’s The Ruins of Earth, Terry Carr’s Dream’s Edge, Harry Harrison’s The Year 2000, and Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd’s The Wounded Planet—as did numerous novels, notably Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive, Philip Wylie’s The End of the Dream, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, and films like Soylent Green, Silent Running, Logan’s Run, Phase IV, and Zardoz. Carr remarks in the introduction to Dream’s Edge that “concern for the problems and prospects of our earthly environment come naturally to writers and readers of science fiction—it is as intrinsic to the genre as knowledge of physics, chemistry, the workings of politics and human psychology.”2 Herbert similarly writes in the introduction to The Wounded Planet that ecology was the “hot gospel blasting at us from all sides . . . ecology as a phenomenon reflects a genuine underlying malaise. . . . The species knows its travail. This shines through every bit of ecological science fiction I have ever read.”3 For Herbert, SF writers and ecologists are fellow travelers. It has been nearly forty more years since Asimov made these remarks, and the ecological crisis (“energy” and otherwise) is now forty years further up the line. We seem to be in another upswing, both in SF and the wider culture. Eco2 41 E v o lu ti o n & Apo c Aly p sE in t h E G o l dE n AG E| pAG E logical SF is particularly “hot” right now, if some of the most recent titles are any indication: Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities, Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising, Rob Ziegler’s Seed, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, all released in the first few months of 2012 alone. Yet ecological issues have always been present in SF, integral to the background of the futures (human triumphant, apocalyptic, or otherwise) that SF writers imagine. Ecology is necessary for extra-planetary world building, according to Brian Stableford,4 as the classic examples of Herbert ’s Dune and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness attest. But it is just as central to any future-Earth scenario: what would future-Earth SF be without depictions of our planet either as degraded by the rampant waste and consumption of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or else as technologically sophisticated futures that have solved (or at least learned to manage) the crises precipitated by our era? Thus, almost all SF is foundationally ecological in nature. Just as SF is inherently ecologically oriented, so too is much SF criticism. In the years since Brian Stableford remarked that ecocriticism “tended to ignore SF,”5 many “ecocritics” outside of SF have begun to explore SF texts, including such critical writers as Stacey Alaimo, Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Timothy Morton, and Patrick Murphy.6 Indeed, ecocriticism and SF criticism have much common ground and seem to be beginning to merge. SF and SF criticism have much to offer the ecocritical movement. Certainly, the concerns of mainstream ecocriticism have important affinities with SF and SF criticism. Cheryll Glotfelty’s observation in the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader that “most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet’s basic life support systems”7 is compatible with the study of SF. Arguably, SF is the genre of literature best suited to probing these environmental limits. Ecocritic Glen A. Love goes so...