Green Planets (11 page)

George R. Stewart's
Earth Abides
is an elegiac apocalypse depicting the end of the modern era when a disease strikes down all but a small fraction of the human population, leaving all other flora and fauna intact, until the lack of
humanity begins to alter the ecosphere. It has been tremendously influential upon works such as Stephen King's
The Stand
, Kim Stanley Robinson's
The Wild Shore
, and David Brin's
The Postman
, among others—and, as Gary K. Wolfe notes, it is “one of the most fully realized accounts in all science fiction of a massive catastrophe and the evolution toward a new culture.”
⁴²
It is fairly obvious that Jack London's “The Scarlet Plague” looms behind
Earth Abides
; however, Wolfe notes that “the sources of the novel seem to lie less in the tradition of science fiction catastrophes than in Stewart's own abiding concern with natural forces which seem almost consciously directed against human society.”
⁴³
Prior to
Earth Abides
, Stewart's commercially and critically successful novels
Storm
(1941) and
Fire
(1948) examined natural forces acting beyond human control.

The central character, Isherwood “Ish” Williams, a young graduate student studying ecology, is isolated in the mountains when the plague strikes. Bitten by a rattlesnake, Ish comes down the trail to the nearest dwelling for help only to find it empty. He finds a newspaper that gives details of the catastrophe:

The headlines told him what was most essential. The United States from coast to coast was overwhelmed by the attack of some new and unknown disease of unparalleled rapidity of spread, and fatality. Estimates for various cities, admittedly little more than guesses, indicated that between 25 percent and 35 percent of the population had already died…. In its symptoms the disease was like a kind of super-measles. No one was sure in what part of the world it had originated; aided by airplane travel, it had sprung up almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine.
⁴⁴

As an ecologist and a student of nature, Ish has an observer's temperament, and thus, rather than panic and fall into despair, he determines to travel across the country to see the extent of the changes wrought upon humankind and the subsequent environmental consequences. This is indicative of what Wolfe posits as the “journey through the wasteland,” where the protagonist must witness the aftermath of the catastrophe. As an ecologist, Ish is particularly well-suited to this role of witness: “Even though the curtain had been rung down on man, here was the opening of the greatest of all dramas for a student such as he. During thousands of years man had impressed himself upon the world. Now man was gone, certainly for a while, perhaps forever. Even if some survivors were left, they would be a long time in again obtaining supremacy. What would happen to the world and its creatures without man?
That
he was left to see!”
⁴⁵
And what Ish discovers is that the ecology begins to change dramatically: the various animals
and plants dependent upon and cultivated by humankind die out; they can only survive by humanity's stewardship; this includes such surprising creatures as rats and ants, both of which suffer massive die-offs because of overpopulation, since their populations aren't checked by human practices. This illustrates the extent to which humankind has shaped, shepherded, and cultivated the environment. Since all is interconnected, to eliminate humanity would fundamentally alter the ecology of the entire system. Ish realizes that new adaptations will occur and additional die-offs will open new niches; the evolutionary process begins to reassert itself throughout the biosphere.

As the novel progresses, Ish encounters other survivors and forges a relationship with an African American woman named Em. Returning to the West Coast, they form a community, raising families and adapting to change as the infrastructure of civilization begins to break down. Ish hopes to preserve some of the qualities of the lost era, but the children are adapting to another mode of existence. His hopes are shattered when a disease brought by an outsider into their community wipes out many, including his son Joey, who had showed a penchant for reading and contemplative thought. This signals the end of the old ways. In the final section, as Ish comes to the end of his life, he is dubbed the “Last American,” and we poignantly witness the end of our era, though we are left with a rather melancholy promise of something new. Though
Earth Abides
has pastoral qualities much like Simak's, the tone of this apocalyptic novel is decidedly more elegiac, perhaps because it is not about the transformation of the species but about the end of modern civilization.

The apocalyptic environmentalism of Moore and Stewart warns us against ecological complacency and self-assured and unexamined species triumphalism. Both Moore and Stewart remind us that apocalypse might be just around the corner, as we eat up the planet, poison and degrade its biosystems, and put into jeopardy the continued sustainability of the human species, and most others. Though these apocalyptic narratives function within the same evolutionary paradigm as Manning's
The Man Who Awoke
and Simak's
City
, they leave us less assured that the ecological challenges ahead will be manageable, resolvable, or survivable. Although Manning and Simak show us in their evolutionary narratives that change itself is inevitable, they are far less pessimistic in their long-term vision of the evolutionary saga, whether universal fulfillment is achieved by human, canine, or some yet evolved species. The struggle between an apocalyptic pessimism and an evolutionary optimism is a defining characteristic of
SF
, and one of the reasons why these golden age ecological narratives, be they evolutionary
or apocalyptic, are still relevant to the present. As Farah Mendlesohn has importantly noted, “Science fiction is less a genre … than an ongoing discussion,” an “argument with the universe.”
⁴⁶
The combined argument of evolution and apocalypse, optimism and pessimism, has the potential to coalesce in the reader and facilitate transformational ecological thought. It is in that struggle between optimism and pessimism, dramatized by these narratives and others like them, that we can begin to do the critical work of ecological transformation.

Together, these four books not only show historically the engagement with ecological challenges by Golden Age
SF
writers, but they still offer valuable reflections and insights on ecological questions for today, as we edge closer to ecological crisis, and provide avenues for fresh ecological thinking, through the persistent struggle between optimism and pessimism. The importance of ecological thinking to our contemporary crisis is self-evident.
SF
provides us with a methodology to begin formulating alternatives. Lawrence Buell asks “whether planetary life will remain viable for most of the Earth's inhabitants without major changes in the way we live now.”
⁴⁷
Studying
SF
(and more broadly literature) using an ecological lens can perhaps better prepare us for impending environmental change. Glen Love points to a possible future for literary studies: “Literary studies today may find new purpose in redirecting human consciousness, through our teaching and scholarship, to a full consideration of our place in an undismissible but increasingly threatened natural world. Paradoxically, taking nature seriously in this way—embracing the social within the natural—may provide us with our best hope of recovering the disappearing social role of literary criticism.”
⁴⁸
Ecocritic Patrick Murphy concurs: “How might the long-term attitude of our students and other members of our culture toward environmental protection and restoration be affected by the teaching of works … that are devoted to nature and environmental topics? The ideas taught today can become the practice of tomorrow, but only if they are taught today.”
⁴⁹
This is a call for a more ecologically oriented literary criticism, a call for a deeper engagement with the literature that examines the human animal in the fullness of its environment—which is to say, a call for all of us to read, study, and teach
SF
.

Notes

1
. Isaac Asimov, ed.,
Before the Golden Age
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 344.

2
. Terry Carr, ed.,
Dream's Edge
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books), 1.

3
. Frank Herbert, introduction to
The Wounded Planet
, ed. Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd (New York: Bantam, 1973), xi–xvii.

4
. Brian Stableford, “Science Fiction and Ecology,” in
A Companion to Science Fiction
, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 129.

5
. Ibid., 140.

6
. See Stacey Alaimo,
Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Lawrence Buell,
The Future of Environmental Criticism
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Ursula K. Heise,
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Timothy Morton,
The Ecological Thought
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Patrick D. Murphy,
Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

7
. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in
The Ecocriticism Reader
, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xx.

8
. Glen A. Love,
Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 1.

9
. Buell,
Future of Environmental Criticism
, 56–57.

10
. Everett F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler,
Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), 634–35.

11
. The last story, “The Simple Way” (“Trouble with Ants”) appeared in
Fantastic Adventures
in 1951.

12
. I have discussed this in my book
The Evolutionary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). See, among other studies, John J. Pierce,
When World Views Collide: A Study in Imagination and Evolution
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989); Nicholas Ruddick,
The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009); Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.,
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). A good introduction to modern science is Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus,
Making Modern Science
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

13
. Csicsery-Ronay Jr.,
Seven Beauties
, 90.

14
. See Michael Ruse's
The Evolution Wars
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO, 2000) and
Monad to Man: The Idea of Progress in Evolutionary Biology
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

15
. Wells's fiction appeared in every issue of
Amazing Stories
from its inception in April 1926 to August 1928.

16
. Everett F. Bleiler, “Laurence Manning,” in
Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers
, ed. Douglas Ivison (Detroit: Gale, 2002), 181.

17
. Laurence Manning,
The Man Who Awoke
(New York: Ballantine, 1975), 20–21.

18
. Ibid., 25.

19
. Ibid., 45.

20
. Ibid., 71.

21
. Clifford D. Simak,
City
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 1.

22
. See Gregory Benford and the Editors of
Popular Mechanics
, eds.,
The Wonderful Future That Never Was
(New York: Hearst Books, 2010).

23
. Simak,
City
, 37.

24
. Ibid., 96–97.

25
. Ibid., 121.

26
. Ibid., 151.

27
. Morton,
Ecological Thought
, 7. Emphasis mine.

28
. Simak,
City
, 166.

29
. Brian W. Aldiss,
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction
(New York: Atheneum, 1986), 225.

30
. Thomas D. Clareson,
Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period (1926–1970)
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 45.

31
. Ibid., 48.

32
. Darko Suvin,
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 9.

33
. Quoted in Bruce Shaw, “Clifford Simak's
City
(1952): The Dogs' Critique (and Others'),”
Extrapolation
46, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 498.

34
. Jill Milling, “The Ambiguous Animal: Evolution of the Beast-Man in Scientific Creation Myths,” in
The Shape of the Fantastic
, ed. Oleana H. Saciuk (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 105.

35
. Gary K. Wolfe, “The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End,” In
The End of the World
, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 8.

36
. W. Warren Wagar,
Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 187.

37
. Sam Moskowitz,
Seekers of Tomorrow
(Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1966), 425.

38
. Ward Moore,
Greener Than You Think
(New York: Crown, 1985), 3.