Green Planets (10 page)

The first tale, “City,” tells of the dissolution of cities and the movement of humanity to a rural existence. The dogs find the very concept of the city unfathomable; doggish economists and sociologists regard it as “an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well.”
²¹
With the establishment of atomic power and hydroponics there is no longer need for urban centers or farms, reflections of the ideal of the technological future that was at the time being packaged in
Popular Mechanics
and similar publications.
²²
This in turn allows for the dispersal of families out of cities to rural acreages where they live in pastoral tranquillity. Improved
transportation via “the family plane and helicopter” make travel easier and convenient and thus facilitate this new pastoral cultural formation. The story introduces the first in the line of Websters (notice the similarity to Manning's Winters), John J. Webster, who is among the last to abandon the city. Ironically, the city becomes a sanctuary for displaced farmers who have moved into the abandoned houses after their farms have collapsed. Simak here illustrates the economic and social fallout that any new cultural formation will necessitate.

The second tale, “Huddling Place,” set in the second decade of the twenty-second century, involves Dr. Thomas Webster, John J.'s grandson. By now humanity has fully adapted to the rural, isolated life. But it comes with a cost. Contact with Martians has taken place, and Thomas Webster, an expert in Martian brain physiology, is close friends with Juwain, a Martian philosopher on the verge of an insight that will alter the consciousness of both human and Martian. They communicate regularly through televisor technology that anticipates today's Internet. Service robots take care of most human needs, leading to further isolation: “For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend theater or hear a concert or browse in a library half-way around the world. Could transact business one might need to transact without rising from one's chair.”
²³
Webster suffers from acute agoraphobia, and when Juwain requires an emergency brain operation that only Webster is qualified to do, Webster is unable to overcome his fears and take the trip to Mars. As a consequence of Webster's inaction, Juwain dies. The implication is that Juwain's discovery would have led humanity to a more balanced, ecologically sound existence, and thus opened the door for universal fulfillment. Thus Simak explores the possible consequences of isolated existence facilitated by technologies—technologies, it is worth noting, that are now commonplace.

The next three tales—“Census,” “Desertion,” and “Paradise”—show humanity's gradual migration to Jupiter and transformation into another form, which is condemned as a retreat from the universal fulfillment implied by Juwain's lost insight. The interstitial material for “Paradise” is important. The dog editor writes:

Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more that pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is
too poor. So far its lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character.
²⁴

With the sixth tale, “Hobbies,” humanity has mostly abandoned Earth, leaving it to the dogs. The dogs live, as the previous story suggested, in a pastoral paradise. In the prefatory note to “Hobbies,” the editor raises the question: “If Man had taken a different path, might he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog?”
²⁵
This is an important subtle critique, not only mocking anthropocentric narratives of evolutionary history but suggesting that the dogs' pastoral social order is a viable alternative to the mechanistic civilization of twentieth-century technological man. Ironically, however, the dogs are embedded in a technological civilization left them by humanity. Robots serve as their “hands” and caretakers. Yet this allows the dogs to maintain their doggishness and pursue a balanced (innocent?) existence. The dogs have formed what Jenkins calls “a civilization based on the brotherhood of animals—on the psychic understanding and perhaps eventual communication and intercourse of interlocking worlds. A civilization of the mind and of understanding … a groping after truth, and the groping is in a direction that man passed by without a glance.”
²⁶
In his recent book,
The Ecological Thought
, Timothy Morton argues that, “the ecological thought
is interconnectedness
in the fullest and deepest sense.”
²⁷
Simak here said much the same thing seventy years earlier. This animal society is realized in the seventh tale, “Aesop,” where the robot Jenkins becomes the teacher and storyteller for the dogs and their animal brethren, who are now completely free of humanity. The interrelation of all animals is again a central topic: “Man never thought of one great animal society, never dreamed of skunk and coon and bear going down the road of life together, planning with one another, helping one another—setting aside all natural differences.”
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However, harmony is soon lost when a fox kills a chicken. A crisis ensues, but is curtailed from a threat from the outside, from another dimension, and the dogs must leave Earth for a parallel world, leaving it to mutated ants. The interstitial prefaces throughout
City
suggest the dog utopia is restored in this alternate world.

Brian Aldiss notes the significance of
City
for investigating “new relationships among living things,”
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while Thomas Clareson calls it the key work of “criticism of modern urban-industrial society,”
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observing that “not one of Simak's immediate contemporaries condemned Western society so harshly; no one consigned humanity to oblivion…. He created a credible, nonhuman world
capable of sustaining metaphors regarding the human condition.”
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This critique of technological society specifically conveys a pastoral emphasis, as Darko Suvin has pointed out. According to Suvin, the pastoral's “imaginary framework of a world without money-economy, state apparatus, and depersonalizing urbanization allows it to isolate, as in a laboratory, two human motivations: erotics and power-hunger.”
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Simak himself said in a later interview: “At the time I wrote
City
I felt there were other, greater values than those we find in technology…. The city is an anachronism we'd be better off without.”
³³
Yet despite Simak's seeming indictment of technology, it should be stressed that the doggish utopia is only possible because of the technological innovations of humankind that have been left to them: sustainable and unlimited power, robot servants, and the very ability to speak and thus to tell tales. As Jill Milling observes, “Though Simak's fables appear to constitute a simple indictment of human destructiveness, the irony provided by the frame narrative and by the qualified resolutions of conflicts in this episodic narrative creates a moral ambiguity characteristic of many science fiction tales.”
³⁴

Like Manning, Simak takes a broad evolutionary perspective, but with an alternative trajectory: emphasizing balance and harmony in nature rather than technological development, and shifting the lens from humankind to other species. Simak is usually identified as
SF
's most rural, pastoral writer, and some critics have disparaged his later work as too conservative and overly sentimental. But in
City
, Simak offers an alternative critique to the urban, techno-futurism of much
SF
and much
SF
criticism, and it remains an important moment in ecological
SF
.

APOCALYPSE

The second major mode of ecological thought in
SF
is the apocalyptic, which generally involves a widespread destruction of human civilization, but which also often works on a small-scale level of destruction of an insular group or ecosystem. While much
SF
explores the notion of human evolutionary progress, many stories examine the consequences of human destructiveness and species annihilation. The apocalyptic mode in
SF
is central to the early development of the genre, from Cousin de Grainville's technological, Christian apocalypse
The Last Man
to the secular apocalypses of Mary Shelley—the micro-apocalypse of
Frankenstein
and the macro of her own
The Last Man
. Wells, of course, introduced the evolutionary apocalypse in several of his quintessential scientific romances, such as
The Time Machine
,
The Island of Doctor Moreau
,
The War of
the Worlds
, and
The Food of the Gods
. The apocalyptic tradition seems to me to break down into two modes: the pastoral-elegiac, which looks back upon a lost civilization but also often posits a new beginning; and the satiric-ironic, which imagines the end of humanity within the evolutionary saga and ironically reflects on human folly. To use Wells as a marker, we could, perhaps, consider
The Time Machine
, which is certainly the quintessential evolutionary
SF
story, as also the quintessential elegiac apocalypse for its meditation on the waning of the human species—whereas the insular apocalypse of
The Island of Doctor Moreau
or the near-miss Martian invasion of
The War of the Worlds
might both best fit within the satiric-ironic sub-mode. Gary K. Wolfe's five stages of action in the apocalyptic narrative are useful for considering both
Greener Than You Think
and
Earth Abides
: “(1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world.”
³⁵

Ward Moore's
Greener Than You Think
, first published in 1947, is a consummate example of the satiric-ironic apocalypse, bringing into question humankind's ethic of scientific innovation, consumerism, capitalism, and power. It engages with the possible threats of bioengineering and what could possibly go wrong when we manipulate the environment. Following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan,
SF
was exploring the ecological implications of nuclear warfare; in
Greener Than You Think
, Moore showed that the coming doom might not come from the bomb, but from some other form of catastrophic technology. In his study of the secular apocalypse in literature,
Terminal Visions
, W. Warren Wagar calls the novel significant for depicting “the sense of man's helplessness before nature raging out of control.”
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Initially, it reads like Wells's
The Food of the Gods
(which starts as satire before shifting to Wells's utopian agenda) before echoing
The War of the Worlds
, then ending bitterly with no hope for humanity, let alone all other life, as the grass covers the entire planet. Much of the novel develops into a satire of contemporary politics, both at home and abroad, anticipating the follies of the Cold War. Since the tone is generally satiric and witty—as Sam Moskowitz put it, “told with broad catastrophic sweep”
³⁷
—the black humor somewhat masks the fact that this novel is as dark in its implications as Thomas Disch's much more somber
The Genocides
.

In the novel an itinerant salesman, Albert Weener, interviews Josephine Francis, inventor of a process called the Metamorphizer that transforms the genetic structure of plants. Francis's hope is to increase the fecundity of the harvest,
thus eliminating hunger and poverty: “It will change the face of the world, Weener. No more used-up areas, no more frantic scrambling for the few bits of naturally rich ground, no more struggle to get artificial fertilizers to worn-out soil in the face of ignorance and poverty…. Inoculate the plants with the Metamorphizer—and you have a crop fatter than Iowa's or the Ukraine's best. The whole world will teem with abundance.”
³⁸
Weener sees a moneymaking opportunity, and before Dr. Francis can finish her laboratory fail-safes, he applies the substance to a barren lawn in the San Fernando Valley. The sparse devil grass instantly begins to grow out of control, and Los Angeles is soon absorbed by an unrelenting patch of grass. Weener later comes face to face with the green colossus: “As I stood there with fascinated attention, the thing moved and kept on moving; not in one place, but in thousands, not in one direction, but toward all points of the compass. It writhed and twisted in nightmarish unease, expanding, extending, increasing; spreading, spreading, spreading. Its movement, by human standards, was slow, but it was so monstrous to see this great mass of verdure move at all that it appeared to be going with express speed, inexorably enveloping everything in its path.”
³⁹

Dr. Francis is called before a congressional hearing by the “Committee to Investigate Dangerous Vegetation,”
⁴⁰
and here Moore's political satire is at its finest. Francis works for a solution, but the grass spreads across the continent, and war soon breaks out between the United States and Russia as the grass begins to gain footholds around the globe. As the narrative continues, Weener invests in a food substitute, which becomes essential to survival as the grass ravages farmland, and he becomes a wealthy magnate. His abject acquisitiveness and brutal disregard for the victims of the disaster he has caused is a biting attack on industrial capitalism and the quest for power. Weener is certainly one of the most despicable lead characters in all of
SF
, but a fitting foil for Moore's satiric purposes. Eventually, as the entire planet is consumed by the grass, Dr. Francis's efforts to find an antidote have failed, and Weener, on his extravagant yacht, filled with nubile women, sails the ocean, until the grass begins to take hold there as well. The black comedy of the final line is devastating: “The Grass has found another seam in the deck.”
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Moore's satiric vision anticipates the ironic apocalypses of J. G. Ballard and forces us to take a stern look at contemporary values that threaten the very sustainability of our planet.