Green Planets (16 page)

41
. Le Guin,
Lao Tzu
, 110–11.

42
. Ibid., 12.

43
. Le Guin,
Dancing at the Edge of the World
, 92–93.

44
. Ibid., 90.

45
. For Le Guin's account of this translation decision see Le Guin,
Lao Tzu
, 110. On the philosophical implications of translating
de
(
te
), see Alan Watts, “
Te
—Virtuality,” in
Tao: The Watercourse Way
(New York: Pantheon, 1975), 106–22.

46
. Quoted in Amy M. Clarke,
Ursula K. Le Guin's Journey to Post-Feminism
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 124.

47
. Suvin,
Positions and Presuppositions
, 137.

48
. For Le Guin's account of this see her
Dancing at the Edge of the World
, 93n, and
Lao Tzu
, 108.

49
. Ursula K. Le Guin,
Always Coming Home
(New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 163.

50
. Ibid., 352–53.

51
. Quoted in Susan M. Bernardo and Graham J. Murphy,
Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 83.

52
. Le Guin,
The Telling
(New York: Harcourt, 2000), 131.

53
. Ibid., 132.

54
. Ibid., 141.

55
. Le Guin,
Always Coming Home
, 239–41.

56
. For one version of the story see
The Book of Chuang Tzu
, trans. Martin Palmer with Elizabeth Breuilly (London: Arkana, 1996), 6.

57
. Le Guin,
Always Coming Home
, 240.

58
. Le Guin,
Telling
, 139. The “umyazu” or libraries are described on 128–29.

59
. Le Guin,
Always Coming Home
, 314–15.

60
. Suvin,
Positions and Presuppositions
, 147.

61
. Jameson,
Archaeologies of the Future
, 278.

62
. Suvin,
Positions and Presuppositions
, 148.

4

Biotic Invasions

Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction

ROB LATHAM

In an essay on H. G. Wells's
The War of the Worlds
(1898), Peter Fitting argues that tales of “first contact” within science fiction tend to recapitulate “the encounters of the European ‘discovery' of the New World.” They are thus, whether consciously or not, conquest narratives, though “usually not characterized as … invasion[s]” because “written from the point of view of the invaders” who prefer euphemisms such as “exploration” to more aggressive or martial constructions of the encounter.
¹
The accomplishment of Wells's novel, in Fitting's analysis, is to lay bare the power dynamics of this scenario by depicting a reversal of historical reality, with the imperial hub of late-Victorian London itself subjugated by “superior creatures who share none the less some of the characteristics of Earth's ‘lower' species, a humiliation which is compounded by their apparent lack of interest in the humans as an intelligent species.”
²
The irony of this switch of roles is not lost on Wells's narrator, who compares the fate of his fellow Londoners to those of the Tasmanians and even the dodoes, “entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.”
³
Stephen Arata uses the term “reverse colonization” to describe this sort of story, in which the center of empire is besieged by fantastic creatures from its margins; as Brian Aldiss puts it, “Wells is saying, in effect, to his fellow English, ‘Look, this is how it feels to be a primitive tribe, and to have a Western nation arriving to civilize you with Maxim guns!”
⁴

Taking this general argument one step further, John Rieder claims that all manner of disaster stories within
SF
“might profitably be considered as the obverse of the celebratory narratives of exploration and discovery … that formed the Official Story of colonialism.”
⁵
The sense of helplessness—geographic, economic, military, and so on—reinforced by catastrophe scenarios lays bare the
underlying anxieties of hegemonic power, its inherent contingency and vulnerability, notwithstanding the purported inevitability of Western “progress.” Moreover, disaster stories, by inverting existing power relations and displacing them into fantastic or futuristic milieux, expose the workings of imperialist ideology, the expedient fantasies that underpin the colonial enterprise—for example, “although the colonizer knows very well that colonized people are humans like himself, he acts as if they were parodic, grotesque imitations of humans instead,”
⁶
who may conveniently be dispossessed of land, property, and even life. The catastrophe story brings this logic of dispossession home to roost, shattering the surface calm of imperial hegemony and thrusting the colonizers themselves into a sudden chaos of destruction and transformation such as they have typically visited upon others. Narratives of invasion in particular are “heavily and consistently overdetermined by [their] reference to colonialism,” allowing a potentially critical engagement with “the ideology of progress and its concomitant constructions of agency and destiny”
⁷
—that is, the triumphalist enshrinement of white Westerners at the apex of historical development and the demotion of all others to what anthropologist Eric Wolf calls a “people without history.”
⁸

Of course, to interpret most invasion stories of
SF
's pulp era as critical of Western progress requires reading against the grain, since their evident message is the fearlessness and ingenuity of Euro-American peoples when confronted by hostile forces. The magazine
Astounding Science Fiction
, during its 1940s golden age, operated under a philosophy that Brian Stableford and David Pringle identify as “human chauvinism,” by the terms of which “humanity was destined to get the better of any and all alien species.”
⁹
Editor John W. Campbell saw the extraterrestrial expansion of the human race not only as a logical extrapolation of the exploratory impulse of Western civilization but also explicitly as an outlet for martial aggression; as he remarked in a letter to A. E. Van Vogt, when “other planets are opened to colonization … we'll have peace on earth—and war in heaven!”
¹⁰
One of the few tales of successful “foreign” invasion published during
Astounding
's heyday was Robert Heinlein's
Sixth Column
(1941), where the invaders are not aliens from space but a Pan-Asiatic horde that occupies the United States, only to be undermined and eventually defeated by an underground scientific elite masquerading as a popular religion; reverse colonization is thus foiled and the Westward trend of empire reaffirmed.
Sixth Column
is a forerunner of postwar tales of communist menace, such as Heinlein's own
The Puppet Masters
(1951), in which slug-like parasites seek to brainwash the U.S. citizenry
but ultimately prove no match for the native resourcefulness and righteous rage of humankind: “They made the mistake of tangling with the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting—and ablest—form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed.”
¹¹

The cinema of the 1950s was filled with similar scenarios of sinister alien infiltration and dogged human resistance that basically allegorized the U.S. struggle with global communism and usually ended with the defeat of the invaders. Yet close readings of these stories reveal a strong undercurrent of unease beneath the bland surface confidence in American values: for example, in
Invaders from Mars
(1953), as I have argued in a previous essay, “the paranoia about alien invasion and takeover may merely serve to deflect anxieties about how seamlessly militarist power has inscribed itself into the suburban American landscape.”
¹²
Similar disquiets can be perceived in films that depict literal communist attacks and occupations, such as
Invasion U.S.A.
(1952), which is, as Cyndy Hendershot has shown, as much about fears of U.S. decadence and conformism as it is about Soviet perfidy.
¹³
In other words, even invasion stories that valorize human (that is, Western) cunning and bravery may be troubled by doubts regarding the susceptibility to external incursions, the lurking rot at the imperial core that permits such brazen raids from the periphery.

By contrast with American treatments of the theme, which were pugnacious in their refusal to succumb to invasion, postwar British disaster stories had a distinctly elegiac tone, a quality of wistful resignation in the face of imperial decline. As Roger Luckhurst points out, British tales of catastrophe had “always addressed disenchantment with the imperialist ‘civilizing' mission,” but 1950s versions, confronted with the ongoing collapse of the global empire, used the disaster plot as “a laboratory reconceiving English selfhood in response to traumatic depredations.”
¹⁴
The popular novels of John Wyndham, such as
The Day of the Triffids
(1951) and
The Kraken Wakes
(1953), take refuge in pastoralist fantasy as Britain's cities are overrun by marauding invaders, the imperial hegemon shrinking to beleaguered individual (or small-communal) sanctuaries. Brian W. Aldiss has coined the term “cosy catastrophe” to describe these sorts of plots, a category in which some have also placed the early fiction of John Christopher, though here, as Aldiss says, “the catastrophe loses its cosiness and takes on an edge of terror.”
¹⁵
In Christopher's
The Death of Grass
(1956) and
The World in Winter
(1962), there is no refuge from the crisis because the environment itself has grown hostile, stricken by a virus that kills off crops or the advent of a new ice age. The absence of an alien menace in these novels vitiates the possibility
of heroic resistance, replacing it with an ethos of brute survivalism, whose long-term prospects are desperate and unpromising. The sense of imperial comeuppance is particularly strong in
World in Winter
, where Britons displaced by glacial expansion flee to Nigeria, only to be rudely treated by their former colonial subjects.

Christopher's novels welded the traditional British disaster story with an emergent trend of eco-catastrophe that gained strength during the 1960s. The master of this new genre was J. G. Ballard, whose quartet of novels—
The Wind from Nowhere
(1960),
The Drowned World
(1962),
The Drought
(1964), and
The Crystal World
(1966)—variously scoured the earth, inundated it, desiccated it, and (most curiously and perversely) immured it in a jewel-like crust. Throughout these works, the author appears fundamentally uninterested either in explaining the disasters (only
The Drought
posits a human cause: widespread pollution of the oceans) or in depicting valiant efforts to fend off their ravages. Instead, the protagonists struggle toward a private accommodation with the cataclysms, a psychic attunement to their radical reorderings of the environment; as Luckhurst argues, “the transformation of landscape marks the termination of rationally motivated instrumental consciousness.”
¹⁶
In other words, the very mind-set that produced imperial hegemony—the confidence in reason, disciplined deployment of techno-science, and posture of mastery—has eroded, replaced by a deracinated fatalism and an almost mystical embrace of its own antiquation.

For Fredric Jameson, Ballard's scenarios of “world-dissolution” amount to little more than the exhausted “imagination of a dying class—the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny [that] seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death.”
¹⁷
Yet, while it is difficult to argue that Ballard's novels express a conscious politics—aside from the ironized libidinal commitments of a surrealism tinged with Freud—his influence over what came to be known as
SF
's “New Wave” helped foster an overtly anti-hegemonic strain of eco-disaster stories during the 1960s and early 1970s. The New Wave generally adopted an anti-technocratic bent that put it at odds with the technophilic optimism of Campbellian hard
SF
, openly questioning, if not the core values of scientific inquiry, then the larger social processes to which they had been conjoined in the service of state and corporate power.
¹⁸
This critique of technocracy gradually aligned itself with other ideological programs seeking to reform or revolutionize social relations, such as feminism, ecological activism, and postcolonial struggles, adopting a countercultural militancy that rejected pulp
SF
's quasi-imperialist vision of white men conquering the stars in the name of Western progress. While Ballard might not
have embraced this polemical thrust, his subversive disaster stories, with their stark irrationalism and pointed mockery of techno-scientific ambitions, gave it a significant impetus as well as a potent model to follow.

Thomas M. Disch's 1965 novel
The Genocides
is definitely cast in the Ballardian mode, a positioning that drew the fire of critics opposed to the New Wave's ideological renovation of the field. Disch's novel, which depicts an Earth transformed by faceless aliens into an agricultural colony in which humans are mere pests awaiting extermination, became something of a political hot-potato within the genre. The most prominent advocate for the New Wave among American commentators, Algis Budrys, responding to a laudatory review of the book by Judith Merril, attacked the novel as “pretentious, inconsistent, and sophomoric,” an insult to “the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man.”
¹⁹
Contrasting it with Heinlein's latest effort,
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
(1966)—which depicts “strong personalities doing things about their situation,” its hero a “practical man-of-all-work figure” who just keeps “plugging away”
²⁰
—Budrys complains about Disch's “dumb, resigned victims” who simply wait passively to be destroyed.
²¹
Unlike the can-do heroism of Heinlein and his ilk,
The Genocides
is an “inertial”
SF
novel, modeled on the disaster stories of Ballard, wherein “characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws,” putter about listlessly in a suicidal haze.
²²
As David Hartwell comments, Budrys clearly could not imagine a successful work of
SF
in which scientific knowledge is not “
a priori
adequate to solve whatever problem the plot poses”—even, in this case, when vastly superior alien technologies have seeded and irretrievably transformed the entire surface of the planet.
²³