REVIEW-ESSAY
Paweł Frelik
Greener Than You Think
Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. xii + 295 pp. $85 hc; $27.95 pbk.
The ecological imaginary and science fiction are such natural allies—as the frequent paper sessions and panels at the annual conferences of the Science Fiction Research Association, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts testify—that even someone inside the critical profession could be prompted to think: “do we need another book on this?” The short answer is “yes”; the longer one—“of course, we do.” It seems almost unbelievable that until 2014, there was no monograph or edited collection that had both “science fiction” and “ecology” in the title. Elsewhere, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database, one of the field’s most comprehensive resources, lists only 59 items with “ecology” in the title, including several from this volume and the volume itself. Naturally, that does not account for a wealth of other scholarship in journals and edited collections whose titles do not use the word but which still examine the multifarious connections between speculative storytelling and environmental politics. Nevertheless, a volume such as Green Planets is much needed—as much in our field as in the larger world of literary criticism.
Rachel Carson began Silent Spring (1962), a foundational text of the environmental movement, with a science-fictional parable, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” and Frank Herbert’s Dune started to appear in Analog a mere 14 months after the publication of Carson’s book, a clear clue to how closely attuned early science fiction has always been to ecological concerns. The genre’s long-standing investment in environmental issues has, however, been given short shrift in what, for lack of a better word, I call the eco-critical “mainstream,” which has remained rather short-sighted about the centrality of the fantastic imagination to questions of ecology and environmental protection. At the center of this omission, raising suspicions of the persistence of a skewed genre vision, is Lawrence Buell’s puzzling omission of sf from his definitive surveys of environmental and ecological writing in the United States. Buell’s Writing for an Endangered World (2001) does not use the words “science fiction,” “fantasy,” “speculative,” or “fantastic” even once, and his The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005) devotes only a few pages to the first of them. Here Buell duly notes the genre’s history of exclusion and points out the absence of environmental discussion from PMLA’s special issue on sf (2004). And yet he still surfs the genre megatext rather randomly, name-checking Dune, Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven (1971), Amy Thomson’s The Color of Distance (1997), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). No other writers or texts are even mentioned. Elsewhere, the critical coverage is equally stacked against sf. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s Ecocriticism Reader (1996) devotes two pages to the genre; Timothy Clark’s Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011) and Louise Westling’s Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2013) mention it several times but do not offer any extended discussions of texts; and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies (2011) mentions sf once only. Finally, Greg Garrard’s Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014) dispenses with the use of “science fiction” entirely. These glaring absences are even more striking if one considers, as Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman suggest in one of the articles in Green Planets, that “ecology in general has become so closely linked to narratives of the future that to even draw attention to this link between the environment and what-is-yet-to-come can seem beside the point or even tautological” (192). Clearly not for all, however, as the above list makes plain. Consequently, drawing its title from Mark Bould and China Miéville’s Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (2009), Green Planets seeks to fill this sorry absence and does it exceptionally well.
The thirteen articles that comprise the core of the collection are grouped into three sections: “Arcadias and New Jerusalems,” “Brave New Worlds and Lands of Flies,” and “Quiet Earths, Junk Cities, and the Cultures of the Afternoon”—all categories derived from Samuel R. Delany’s reflections on the ideological positions available in modernity, here helpfully cited by Gerry Canavan in his opening essay. The fact that these groupings also largely reflect the historical development of science fiction provides an additional dimension of coherence, a quality that can be notoriously difficult to achieve in edited collections. From a different perspective, all contributions can also be divided, along an alternative classificatory axis, into two categories: those that, by addressing larger ecological contexts and directions in environmental criticism, function as a backbone of sorts for the entire volume, and those that fill the interstices with more focused case studies. (Inevitably, even the backbone pieces refer to specific texts to make their point, but their usefulness resides in more general diagnoses and broader overviews, rather than in their close readings.) While neither category is more important than the other, the almost perfect integration of the two groupings combined with practically no overlap is certainly the editors’ most admirable accomplishment. For all its diversity of approaches and perspectives, Green Planets is incredibly tight as a coherent argument about the centrality of the ecological imagination to science fiction and vice versa.
Michael Page’s “Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age” is the first in the series of “framework” articles, in which the author recovers the important tradition of ecological thinking in Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1933), Clifford Simak’s City series (in book form, 1952), Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think (1947), and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949). Page demonstrates that such issues were very much at the heart of sf culture long before the inception of the environmental movement and its literary expressions. Rob Latham’s “Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction” uses Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides (1965) and Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1972) to unpack what Canavan, in his introduction, calls “the critique of exterminative and genocidal fantasy” (17). More generally, however, Latham situates science fiction’s explorations of these themes in a thick context of non-science fictional ethical and ecological texts of the 1960s and 1970s, some of which may have been forgotten but, as the author demonstrates, cannot and should not be left outside any relevant discussion of fantastic visions of ecology. Opening the volume’s second section and riffing on the science-fictional parabola of the generation starship, Sabine Höhler’s “‘The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People’: Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction” bears its argument on the sleeve of its title, but it also, like Latham’s piece, salvages a number of nonfiction texts central to the discussions of environmental topics in sf, including Kenneth E. Boulding’s lecture “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth” (1966) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), as well as several works by Garrett Hardin, an American ecologist famous for his warnings against overpopulation, which include his 1968 Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle (1972), and his “Lifeboat Ethics” articles.
The last of the backbone articles in Green Planets is Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman’s “Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures,” which is located in the third, chronologically most contemporary section. The titular “science faction” is “a fiction of science fact,” a seemingly non-fictional mode of representation focused on “a landscape devoid of people, an emptiness that bizarrely and of necessity generates an immediate challenge to narrative logic (that is, that narrative can persist even in a world without either narrators or audience)” (195). The category comprises texts in various media: Alan Weisman’s bestseller The World Without Us (2007) but also documentary series such as The Future Is Wild (2002), Life after People (2008-10), and Aftermath (2010). Bellamy and Szeman argue, though, that such texts do very little to engage any consequential politics related to ecology or natural preservation.
Complementing these articles are a number of textual case studies whose selection covers the entire twentieth century and a number of mostly Anglophone sf traditions. Writers and texts as diverse as Wells, Le Guin, Maggie Gee, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Avatar (2009) are discussed, as are texts from Australia, South Africa, and Poland. Necessarily, these articles can offer only very fragmentary glimpses onto the rich landscape of the ecologically oriented texts of the last century, which again emphasizes the importance of the more theoretical contributions mentioned earlier that provide an overview of the territory.
The thirteen articles are bookended by two pieces by the editors that situate the contributions in an even broader landscape, albeit each of them differently. Gerry Canavan’s “If This Goes On” not only introduces the volume and briefly announces its contents but also maps out the major vectors and planes along which ecology and environmental thought gel, mesh, and imbricate with science fiction. In his introduction, Canavan also makes clear that sf writing is more than just a cultural product thematically rehearsing and engaging the increasingly pressing questions of ecological devastation and climate change. Science fiction can, Canavan proposes, “help us collectively ‘think’ [the] leap into futurity in the context of the epochal mass-extinction event called the Anthropocene” (16). Kim Stanley Robinson’s declaration that “the world has become a science fiction novel” (17) is very appropriate here. Even more appropriate is the fact that the writer is the volume’s co-editor.
While Robinson is no stranger to literary criticism, there are probably very few collections of critical essays edited by a practicing writer who is not an academic. And yet Canavan and Robinson’s co-editorship feels not only natural but almost necessary, embodying the need to talk about ecology over traditional professional divides. It is not practical to consider the exact impact Robinson had on the final shape of the articles in Green Planets, but given his strong interest in issues of ecological sustainability, socioeconomic justice, and the centrality of science in public discourses, it is not difficult to imagine that it had to be positive. If science fiction wants to see itself as a conversation that is more pragmatic and more consequential than merely interpreting literary and media texts, then people other than academic critics need to be its interlocutors. Thus, it is more than appropriate that Green Planets ends with “Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism,” a conversation between the two editors—and it really is a conversation, rather than a straightforward interview, which should from now on become a recommended supplementary reading for sf courses with the Mars Trilogy (1993-96) as well as Robinson’s later work such as 2312 (2012) on their syllabi. It would be impractical even to summarize the dialogists’ reflections here, but if there is one conclusion that can be extracted from the piece, it is that Robinson genuinely believes that science fiction can help scientists and those invested in the improvement of our world, and explains how exactly this support can work. He also expounds in detail why he refuses to feel entirely pessimistic in the face of ongoing environmental degradation and the widespread ignorance and even active hostility against the realization of its extent, as exemplified by Wisconsin’s and Florida’s recent policies forbidding use of the phrase “climate change.”
All of this already makes Green Planets a supremely comprehensive examination of ecological presence in sf, but Canavan and Robinson have yet another little present for the readers at the very end: a fairly extensive, although necessarily selective, annotated list of ecologically-themed sf works. Featuring fiction and nonfiction, film and television, and a medley section of virtually all other media, the list does sometimes sport rather enigmatic comments, such as describing Adam Roberts’s The Snow (2004) as “It starts snowing and just won’t stop” (270). But it will be, no doubt, intensely useful to all scholars and readers interested in the ways in which science fiction has drawn upon—and also has influenced—ecological thinking and environmental politics.
Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction is many things: a superbly edited critical collection, a timely contribution to public discussion on the natural environment and its transformations, a useful resource for those interested in the intersections of ecology and science fiction, and a much needed study of the latter which, in the absence of a truly systematic monograph, comes as close to one as possible. It also eliminates the remnants of excuses for “mainstream” scholars to use, in their accounts of environmental writing, randomly selected novels as a lip service to science fiction’s engagement of ecological issues.
WORKS CITED
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
─────. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 2001.
Clark, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.
Garrard, Greg. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.
Westling, Louise, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013.
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