Green Planets (53 page)

Robert Charles Wilson,
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
(2009). Set against a U.S. war in Canada with an emerging Dutch superpower over control of the thawed Northwest Passage, this inventive novel finds the people of a post-oil, post-climate-change future looking back on our era as “the Efflorescence of Oil”—the word “efflorescence” describing an evaporating of water that leaves behind a thin layer of salty detritus.

Jeanette Winterson,
The Stone Gods
(1997). Thematically intertwined, self-referential stories about the historical repetition of human-caused ecological disasters, in both the past and the future.

Gene Wolfe,
The Book of the Long Sun
(1993–96). Four-book series set on a generational starship in the Dying Earth setting of Wolfe's even larger
Book of the New Sun
series.

Austin Tappan Wright,
Islandia
(1942). Arcadian utopia located in the South Pacific.

Ronald Wright,
A Scientific Romance
(1996). The sudden, inexplicable appearance of H. G. Wells's
Time Machine
in a London flat facilitates a trip into a depopulated future.

Philip Wylie,
The End of the Dream
(1972). Ecological catastrophe comes to America. Also noteworthy is
When Worlds Collide
(1933) and its sequel,
After Worlds Collide
(1933), in which a small number of humans flee Earth, before it is destroyed by collision with a rogue planet, to settle on Bronson Beta.

John Wyndham,
The Day of the Triffids
(1951). Walking, intelligent plants take over the world. Also of interest:
The Chrysalids
(1955), set after an apparent nuclear holocaust that has altered the climate and mutated the biosphere.

Karen Tei Yamashita,
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
(1990). Surreal and comic magical realist novel depicting a network of ecological and capitalist disasters centering on the threatened Brazilian rain forest.

Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967). In the end, alas, time and entropy only run the one way.

Film and Television

A.I.
(Steven Spielberg, 2001). Decline and extinction for the human race, with only our robots left behind to succeed us.

Alien
(Ridley Scott, 1979). Invasive species wrecks havoc on prey lacking natural defenses.

The Atomic Café
(Jayne Loader, Kevin Raferty, and Pierce Raferty, 1982). Compilation and creative reframing of U.S. nuclear propaganda.

Avatar
(James Cameron, 2009). A human race desperate for energy sources to sustain their dying civilization attempts to steal unobtainium from the Pandora, only to be forced off the planet by a Gaia-like global consciousness uniting plants, animals, and the indigenous Na'vi.

Battlestar Galactica
(Ronald D. Moore, 2003). Humans and their robot servants are locked within a cosmic cycle of destruction.

The Birds
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1963). Sublime allegory of our absolute dependence upon nature, as well as its radical alterity and unknowability.

Children of Men
(Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). Outstripping its source material, this adaptation of the P. D. James novel depicts the human race eighteen years after it has been spontaneously struck infertile.

The Colony
(Beers and Segal, 2005). Reality TV series about people living in a simulated post-apocalyptic environment.

The Dark Knight Rises
(Christopher Nolan, 2012). The conclusion of Nolan's Batman trilogy sees billionaire Bruce Wayne mothballing a cold fusion device that would end class struggle and usher in universal global prosperity out of fear that it might be turned into a bomb. The series started, of course, with
Batman Begins
(2005), in which the main villain is deep-ecological ecoterrorist Ra's al Ghul.

Dawn of the Dead
(George Romero, 1978). U.S. consumer culture literally consumes itself.

The Day after Tomorrow
(Roland Emmerlich, 2004). Abrupt climate change brings an instant ice age to New York City, convincing even a sinister Dick Cheney analogue of the seriousness of the problem.

Daybreakers
(Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, 2009). Ten years after a viral epidemic has turned most of the global elite into vampires, humanity's successors now face critical shortages after hitting Peak Blood.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire
(Val Guest, 1961). Nuclear testing throws Earth off its axis, hurtling it toward the sun.

The Day the Earth Stood Still
(Scott Derrickson, 2008). Updated remake of the Robert Wise–directed 1951 original has Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) issuing a grim warning about humanity's failure to protect its ecosystem.

District 9
(Neill Blomkamp, 2009). An alien spaceship arrives over Johannesburg, bringing not the untold riches of the future but an even more wretched version of the present: miserable, starving insectoids called “prawns,” who are promptly housed in a concentration camp until some more permanent solution can be found.

Doctor Who:
“The Green Death” (Michael E. Briant, 1973). The Third Doctor confronts the mad computer running Global Chemicals, which is hell-bent on polluting the planet. See also (among others) the Tenth Doctor's “The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky” (Douglas Mackinnon, 2008) in which carbon-dioxide-free cars turn out to be poisoning the atmosphere even faster.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(Stanley Kubrick, 1964). U.S. Cold War militarism absurdly reaches its logical conclusion.

The End of Suburbia
(Gregory Greene, 2004). Documentary depicting the coming collapse of fossil-fuel-intensive infrastructure in the United States.

Fail-Safe
(Sidney Lumet, 1964). U.S. Cold War militarism logically reaches its absurd conclusion.

Firefly
(Joss Whedon, 2002). The backstory for the Western-cum-space-opera has the “Earth-that-was” being “all used up” before the remnants of humanity takes to the stars in search of a new home.

Fringe
(J. J. Abrams, 2008). Contact between parallel universes causes the environment of one to catastrophically degrade.

Godzilla
(Ishirō Honda, 1954). Monster awoken by undersea nuclear testing ravages Tokyo.

The Happening
(M. Night Shyamalan, 2008). In an effort to protect itself from destruction, Nature generates a disease that triggers mass suicide in humans.

Idaho Transfer
(Peter Fonda, 1973). Time travel allows a small group of teenagers to skip over the ecological catastrophe that will soon wipe out humanity and start civilization anew fifty-six years in the future.

Ilha de Flores / Island of Flowers
(Jorge Furtado, 1989). A narrative voice reminiscent of the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
traces wealth, power, and waste through the networks of contemporary global capitalism.

I Live in Fear
(Akira Kurosawa, 1955). A man paranoid about nuclear war is desperate to relocate his family from Japan to Brazil. The Cold War as itself a nightmarish science fiction.

An Inconvenient Truth
(Davis Guggenheim, 2006). Al Gore tries to mobilize Americans toward climate action through an extended PowerPoint presentation.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(Philip Kaufman, 1978). Spore-like aliens invade San Francisco, replacing human beings whose gray, shriveled corpses are removed by ubiquitous sanitation trucks. As with the 1956 original, the implication is that these replacements may be better at being us than we are.

Lessons of Darkness
(Werner Herzog, 1992). An unknown intelligence unfamiliar with human society visits the apocalyptic site of burning oil fields following the first Gulf War.

Life after People
(2008). This paradigmatic example of the Quiet Earth subgenre of books and documentaries concerned a world emptied of people, frequently drawing on footage of
present-day
postindustrial cities for its supposedly futuristic visuals.

Logan's Run
(Michael Anderson, 1976). Based on the book by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, a future civilization has struck a sustainable balance for consumer capitalism by executing people the day they turn thirty.

Lost in Space
(Irwin Allen, 1965). Both the lighthearted original television series and the darker 1998 “reboot” film see the Space Family Robinson escape an ecologically threatened Earth.

Mad Max
(George Miller, 1979). Life isn't easy in Australia after the end of cheap oil.

The Man in the White Suit
(Alexander MacKendrick, 1951). Capitalism requires a logic of planned obsolescence and egregious waste for its continuance.

The Matrix
(Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999). The battle between man and machine takes a turn when humans black out the sky in an effort to stop their solar-powered creations from taking over. Later editions in the series make clear that humanity really can't leave the Matrix, even if they'd like to; the environment they've ruined could not possibly sustain their numbers.

Metropolis
(Fritz Lang, 1926). This seminal film of class division between a pastoral leisure class and a brutally exploited industrial class still speaks to us.

Moon
(Duncan Jones, 2009). Humanity has finally solved its energy problems through helium-3 mining on the moon. There's only one problem: someone's got to run the facility.

Planet of the Apes
(Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968). Catastrophic climate change following a nuclear war has scorched the United States, transforming New York into Arizona. Later films in the series reveal that the mass extinction of both cats and dogs is responsible for the very importation of great apes first as pets and then, quickly thereafter, as servants, which is what started the whole mess in the first place.

“Plastic Bag” (Ramin Bahrani, 2010). Solitary inner monologue of a plastic bag (unforgettably voiced by Werner Herzog) that survives the human race by millions of years, wishing only that his creators had manufactured him so he could die.

Pumzi
(Wanuri Kahiu, 2010). Spellbinding Kenyan short film depicts a dystopian future for Africa in which all life on the surface has died.

The Quiet Earth
(Geoff Murphy, 1985). An experiment to create a new global energy grid goes horribly wrong, causing nearly everyone on Earth to vanish.

Quintet
(Robert Altman, 1979). Almost excruciatingly slow film about high-stakes gambling after a new ice age.

Revolution
(J. J. Abrams, 2012). What happens when all the lights go out.

Silent Running
(Douglas Trumbull, 1972). All planet life is extinct, save for those housed in a threatened orbital nature preserve.

Sleep Dealer
(Alex Rivera, 2008). Among the many deprivations of this post-apocalyptic future is the privatization of water.

Soylent Green
(Richard Fleischer, 1973). A wildly overpopulated globe is fed by Soylent Green, a tofu-like food substitute that is absolutely derived from high-energy plankton, not from ground-up human corpses.

Stalker
(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). Surreal film loosely based on the Strugatsky's
Roadside
Picnic
, whose depiction of a dangerous depopulated “Zone” eerily anticipates the Chernobyl disaster seven years in advance.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
(Leonard Nimoy, 1986). Facing certain destruction at the hands of a whale-friendly alien probe, the crew of the
Enterprise
travels back in time for a madcap romp in twentieth-century San Francisco as they try to save the whales.

Star Trek: The Next Generation
: “Force of Nature” (Robert Lederman, 1993). The Federation discovers that their overuse of warp drive is slowly destroying the fabric of the galaxy. A galactic speed limit is imposed, but the imposition of even this slim reality check so disrupts the series's cornucopian, expansionist fantasy that it is essentially never mentioned again.

Terra Nova
(Brannon Braga and Steven Spielberg, 2011). Settlers from a dying future seek to colonize the Cretaceous.

Things to Come
(William Cameron Menzies, 1936). Based on a novel by H. G. Wells, the film depicts a human race that repeatedly destroys itself through violence and blunt stupidity. The film's final lines argue that unless mankind is ultimately able to conquer the stars, it might as well have never existed at all.

Threads
(Mick Jackson, 1984). Incredibly bleak BBC miniseries about life in a blighted England following a nuclear war.

The Time Machine
(Simon Wells, 2002). Accidental overdevelopment of the moon destroys technology civilization, ushering in the familiar Eloi and the Morlocks of Wells's 1895 novel. Almost entirely forgettable aside from its sublime, time-lapsed vision of Earth's destruction and renewal after the loss of the moon.

Time of the Wolf
(Michael Haneke, 2003). A family seeks clean water and safe food after an ecological catastrophe has destroyed civilization.

Torchwood: Miracle Day
(Russell T. Davies, 2011). Everybody living forever is not as great as you'd think.

Twelve Monkeys
(Terry Gilliam, 1996). A virologist deliberately releases a supergerm to kill off the human race in the name of protecting the environment.

The Twilight Zone:
“The Midnight Sun” (Anton Leader, 1961). Rod Serling's vision of an Earth growing ever hotter takes on new relevance in an era of climate change. See also “Two” (Montgomery Pittman, 1961), in which a post-apocalyptic landscape is revealed to be a new Garden of Eden in one of the series's few happy endings.

Waterworld
(Kevin Reynolds, 1995). Catastrophic sea level rise after the ice caps melt.

Weekend
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1967). This New Wave apocalyptic masterpiece is required viewing for the long tracking shot of an endless traffic jam alone.