Green Planets (19 page)

In his environmental history of the twentieth century, J. R. McNeill summarizes recent biotic invasions and concludes with a prognostication: “In the twenty-first century, the pace of invasions is not likely to slacken, and new genetically engineered organisms may also occasionally achieve ecological release and fashion dramas of their own.”
⁷⁸
If they do, one can be certain that
SF
writers will be there to chronicle the results, and to craft powerful moral allegories out of them. While they will doubtless draw upon the compelling example of major New Wave precursors, it is likely that their treatments of the topic will cleave closer to Le Guin's ethical-political ambivalence than to Disch's neo-Wellsian despair.

Notes

1
. Peter Fitting, “Estranged Invaders:
The War of the Worlds
,” in
Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia
, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 127–45 (127).

2
. Ibid., 130–31.

3
. H. G. Wells,
The War of the Worlds
, in
Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells
(New York: Dover, n.d.), 307–453 (311).

4
. Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist:
Dracula
and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,”
Victorian Studies
33, no. 4 (1990): 621–45; Brian W. Aldiss,
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction
, with David Wingrove (New York: Avon, 1988), 120–21.

5
. John Rieder, “Science Fiction, Colonialism, and the Plot of Invasion,”
Extrapolation
46, no. 3 (2005): 373–94 (376).

6
. Ibid.

7
. Ibid., 378.

8
. Eric R. Wolf,
Europe and the People without History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

9
. Brian Stableford and David Pringle, “Invasion,” in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
, ed. Peter Nicholls and John Clute (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 623–25 (624).

10
. John W. Campbell Jr., letter to A. E. Van Vogt, March 3, 1945, in
The John W. Campbell Letters
, vol. 1, ed. Perry A. Chapdelaine Sr., Tony Chapdelaine, and George Hay (Franklin, TN: AC Projects, 1985), 49–55 (55).

11
. Robert A. Heinlein,
The Puppet Masters
, rev. ed. (New York: Del Rey, 1990), 338. For a reading of the novel as an allegory of Cold War conflicts, see H. Bruce Franklin,
Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 98–101.

12
. Rob Latham, “Subterranean Suburbia: Underneath the Smalltown Myth in the Two Version of
Invaders from Mars
,”
Science-Fiction Studies
22, no. 2 (1995): 198–208 (201). For a discussion of the 1956 film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
that links it with Wells's and Heinlein's novels, see David Seed, “Alien Invasions by Body Snatchers and Related Creatures,” in
Modern Gothic: A Reader
, ed. Victor Sage and Allen L. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 152–70.

13
. Cyndy Hendershot, “Anti-Communism and Ambivalence in
Red Planet Mars
,
Invasion U.S.A.
, and
The Beast of Yucca Flats
,”
Science Fiction Studies
28, no. 2 (2001): 246–60.

14
. Roger Luckhurst,
Science Fiction
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), 131–32.

15
. Aldiss,
Trillion Year Spree
, 255. For an alternative take on Wyndham's work, which defends him as a more subversive writer than Aldiss allows, see Rowland Wymer, “How ‘Safe' is John Wyndham? A Closer Look at His Work, with Particular Reference to
The Crysalids
,”
Foundation
55 (1992): 25–36.

16
. Roger Luckhurst,
“The Angle between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 53.

17
. Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?”
Science-Fiction Studies
9, no. 2 (1982): 147–58 (152).

18
. For an overview of the New Wave movement, see my “The New Wave,” in
A Companion to Science Fiction
, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 202–16. See also Luckhurst,
Science Fiction
, 141–95.

19
. Algis Budrys, “Galaxy Bookshelf,”
Galaxy
25, no. 2 (1966): 125–33 (130).

20
. Ibid., 127.

21
. Ibid., 130.

22
. Ibid., 128.

23
. David Hartwell, introduction in
The Genocides
by Thomas M. Disch (Boston: Gregg Press, 1978), v–xv (xiv).

24
. Budrys, “Galaxy Bookshelf,” 129.

25
. Ibid., 131.

26
. Brian W. Aldiss, “Book Fare,”
SF
Impulse
1, no. 11 (1967): 51–54 (51–53).

27
. See, for example, William Appleman Williams,
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1962); David Horowitz,
The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1965); Gabriel Kolko,
The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945
(New York: Vintage, 1968); and Harry Magdoff,
The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy
(New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1969).

28
. Thomas M. Disch,
The Genocides
(New York: Pocket, 1979), 104.

29
. See Frank B. Golley,
A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More Than the Sum of the Parts
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

30
. Charles S. Elton,
The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1972).

31
. Ibid., 31.

32
. Ibid., 31–32.

33
. Ibid., 109.

34
. Ibid., 51.

35
. Ibid., 77–93.

36
. William H. McNeill,
Plagues and Peoples
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1976), 177.

37
. William Cronon,
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).

38
. Alfred W. Crosby,
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 279.

39
. Alan Taylor,
American Colonies
(New York: Viking, 2001), 47.

40
. Thomas M. Disch, “Introduction: On Saving the World,” in
The Ruins of Earth: An Anthology of Stories of the Immediate Future
, ed. Disch (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971), 1–7 (5).

41
. Ibid.

42
. Hartwell, xiv.

43
. Disch,
Genocides
, 49, emphasis in original.

44
. Ibid., 206.

45
. Ibid.

46
. Ibid., 26.

47
. Ibid., 169.

48
. The publication of
Silent Spring
is generally seen as the catalytic event that spawned the modern environmental movement: see Victor B. Scheffer,
The Shaping of Environmentalism in America
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 119–21, and John McCormick,
The Global Environmental Movement
, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 65–67.

49
. Disch,
Genocides
, 208.

50
. Cronon,
Changes in the Land
, 53.

51
. Disch,
Genocides
, 78–79.

52
. Ibid., 11. Emphasis mine.

53
. Ibid., 51.

54
. Michael Stern, “From Technique to Critique: Knowledge and Human Interests in Brunner's
Stand on Zanzibar
,
The Jagged Orbit
, and
The Sheep Look Up
,”
Science-Fiction Studies
3, no. 2 (1976): 112–30. See also Neal Bukeavich, “‘Are We Adopting the Right Measures to Cope?': Ecocrisis in John Brunner's
Stand on Zanzibar
,”
Science Fiction Studies
29, no. 1 (2002): 53–70, and, for a review of ecological themes in post-1960s
SF
, Patrick D. Murphy, “The Non-Alibi of Alien Scapes:
SF
and Ecocriticism,” in
Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism
, ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 263–78.

55
. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Word for World Is Forest,” in
Again, Dangerous Visions
, ed. Harlan Ellison (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 32–117.

56
. Ibid., 34.

57
. Ibid., 35.

58
. For a discussion of Le Guin's ecofeminism, see Patrick D. Murphy,
Literature, Nature, Other: Ecofeminist Critiques
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 111–21.

59
. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction to
The Word for World Is Forest
,” in
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
, by Le Guin, ed. Susan Wood (New York: Perigee, 1979), 149–54 (151).

60
. Le Guin, “Word,” 73.

61
. In her essay “Discovering Worlds: The Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin” (in
Ursula K. Le Guin: Modern Critical Views
, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1986] 183–209), Susan Wood complains that the author was “unfortunately [not] successful in avoiding the limitations of moral outrage at contemporary problems” (186–87). In the afterword to the novel published in
Again, Dangerous Visions
(117–18), Le Guin herself acknowledged that she is “not very fond of moralistic tales, for they often lack charity. I hope this one does not” (118).

62
. Ian Watson, “The Forest as Metaphor for Mind:
The Word for World Is Forest
and ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,'” in Bloom,
Ursula K. Le Guin
, 47–55 (48).

63
. Cronon,
Changes in the Land
, 124.

64
. Clifton Fadiman and Jean White,
Ecocide—and Thoughts toward Survival
(Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1971). For a contemporaneous history, see Carroll Pursell, ed.,
From Conservation to Ecology: The Development of Environmental Concern
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973).

65
. Among the many versions of this text is Donella H. Meadows et al.,
The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind
(New York: Universe Books, 1974).

66
. Le Guin, “Word,” 35.

67
. Though both these works were published after Le Guin's novel, the issues they treated were widely debated during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For an excellent
overview of these debates, see Roderick Frazier Nash,
The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

68
. Ibid., 129. He goes on: “Fines would be assessed and collected (by guardians) on behalf of these creatures and used to restore their habitat or create an alternative to the one destroyed.”

69
. On the emergence of Green activism, see McCormick,
Global Environmental Movement
, 203–24.

70
. National Staff of Environmental Action, eds.,
Earth Day—The Beginning: A Guide for Survival
(New York: Pocket, 1970), v. On the origins of Earth Day, see Scheffer,
Shaping of Environmentalism
, 124–25.

71
. For a critique of essentialist views of nature, see Jeffrey C. Ellis, “On the Search for a Root Cause: Essentialist Tendencies in Environmental Discourse,” in
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 256–68. Major theoretical/historical studies of nature as a social construction are Neil Evernden,
The Social Creation of Nature
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and Carolyn Merchant,
Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2004).

72
. Le Guin, “Word,” 86. Emphasis mine.

73
. On Lyubov in relation to other similar figures in Le Guin's work, see Karen Sinclair, “The Hero as Anthropologist,” in Ursula K. Le Guin:
Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space
, ed. Joe De Bolt (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979), 50–65.

74
. On Romantic imagery in the novel, especially the anthropomorphizing evocation of the forest as “a metaphor for the landscape of consciousness,” see Peter S. Alterman, “Ursula K. Le Guin: Damsel with a Dulcimer,” in
Ursula K. Le Guin
, ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Taplinger, 1979), 64–76 (65).

75
. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in
Politics and Environment: A Reader in Ecological Crisis
, ed. Walt Anderson (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear, 1970), 338–49 (342). On the influence of White's essay, see Nash,
Rights of Nature
, 88–96.

76
. See, for example, Climate Ark's continuously updated “Climate Change and Global Warming” website at
http://www.climateark.org
(accessed May 22, 2012).

77
. See T. F. H. Allan, Joseph A. Tainter, and Thomas W. Hoekstra,
Supply-Side Sustainability
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 259–61.

78
. J. R. McNeill,
Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 262.