Green Planets (54 page)

Zardoz
(John Boorman, 1974). Surreal Sean Connery fantasy film that begins with the proposition that “The gun is good. The penis is evil.”

ZPG: Zero Population Growth
(Michael Campus, 1972). An overpopulated, environmentally degraded Earth installs a thirty-year-ban on procreation.

Comics, Animation, Music, Games, and Other Media

“Big Yellow Taxi” (Joni Mitchell, 1970). Song. They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.

Captain Planet and the Planeteers
(Barbara Pyle and Ted Turner, 1990). The Spirit of Earth,
desperate for a solution to the ecological crisis, entrusts five teenagers from around the world with element-themed magic rings capable of summoning an ecological superhero. The power is yours.

Civilization
(MicroProse, 1991). Long-running computer game series includes both fallout zones and global warming in later stages. Ecological themes are extended in the sequel,
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
(1999).

Cowboy Bepop
(Shinichirō Watanabe, 1998). Anime space opera in which Earth is a marginally habitable, ruined backwater as a result of both an apocalyptic scientific accident and everyday industrial degradation.

Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Sun
(TSR, 1991). Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting in which the release of wild, uncontrolled magic has laid waste to the world.

Fallout
(Interplay, 1997). Satirical series of post-apocalyptic video games, parodying 1950s and 1960s fantasies of post-nuclear-war survival.

Ferngully: The Last Rainforest
(Bill Kroyer, 1992). Didactic coproduction between animation studios in Australia and the United States on the need to save the rain forests.

Fraggle Rock
(Jim Henson, 1983). Children's television series about an underground ecological niche where all life forms have a necessary role to play. Another Jim Henson Productions project, the ABC sitcom
Dinosaurs
(1991–94), frequently focused on ecological themes, culminating in a highly unusual series finale that sees these anthropomorphic dinosaurs cause the ice age that leads to their extinction through excess capitalist development.

Futurama
(Matt Groening, 1999). Episodes of this long-running animated series frequently lampoon the excesses of consumer capitalism from an ecological perspective.

H. M. Hoover,
Children of Morrow
(1976). Another children's book series set after the end of the civilization, this once caused by pollution.

“In the Year 2525” (Zager and Evans, 1969). Song. In the year 9595, I'm kinda wonderin' if Man is gonna be alive; he's taken everything this old Earth can give, and he ain't put back nothing in….

The Jetsons
(Hanna and Barbara, 1962). Futuristic cartoon look at the world of tomorrow depicts a humanity that lives entirely in domed skyscrapers. Occasional references to the natural environment in follow-on movies darkly hint that the air below their homes is hopelessly polluted by smog, and that grass is recognizable only from history textbooks.

Katamari Damacy
(Namco, 2004). In this delightful and ecologically minded video game, the ceaseless accumulation of our disposable junk progresses on larger and larger scales until it ultimately rolls up the entire Earth.

Jack Kirby,
Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth
(1972). A young human boy emerges from a nuclear shelter (Command D) into a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by mutants and talking animals. Later issues of the comic book suggest this is, in fact, the actual future of the canonical DC Universe of Batman and Superman. Even stranger are the Atomic Knights created by John Broome and Murphy Anderson in 1960, with whom Kamandi shares a universe; the Atomic Knights wander a post-nuclear-holocaust (but surprisingly stable) America in medieval suits of armor, riding giant mutated dalmatians.

Robert Kirkman,
The Walking Dead
(2003–). Alongside
World War Z
, the best of the current zombie fictions depicting a bleak already-dead world, in which hardened bands of survivors struggle both to survive and retain their human decency.

The Land before Time
(Don Bluth, 1988). Perhaps the best children's film ever made about mass extinction.

Dr. Seuss,
The Lorax
(1971). Capitalism's ruthless exploitation of the environment inevitably destroys the conditions required for its own continuation, unless.

“Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)” (Marvin Gaye, 1971). Song. Things ain't what they used
to be.

Alan Moore,
The Saga of the Swamp Thing
(1982). While the character technically predates Moore, his take on the inhuman living swamp (who fights on behalf of Earth, either for or against the Justice League) is definitive. Current storylines have Swamp Thing (as the avatar of the Gaia-like “Green”) fighting alongside Buddy Baker, a.k.a. Animal Man (avatar of the “Red”), against the “Black” (the embodiment of death, decay, and rot). In Moore's
V for Vendetta
(1982) floods and crop failures are a major cause of the dystopian government in power in future Britain, while his seminal superhero comic
Watchmen
(1985) takes place against a backdrop of looming nuclear war and inevitable ecological disaster.

9
(Shane Acker, 2009). Insidious “Fabrication Machine” technology has destroyed the environment in this animated film, leaving nine self-aware rag-dolls the only conscious life in a ruined world.

“(Nothing but) Flowers” (Talking Heads, 1981). Song. There was a factory; now there are mountains and rivers. If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower.

Portal
and
Portal 2
(Valve Corporation, 2007, 2011). The madness of science. Apeture Science's slogan is the cracked motto of the American century: “We do what we must, because we can.”

Princess Mononoke
(Hayao Miyazaki, 1997). The most strident articulation of the ecological themes operative across Miyazaki's work, also evident in
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
(1984) and
Spirited Away
(2001).

Settlers of Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995). The iPad “app” version of the game features a single-player “story mode” that culminates in a climate-change-inspired rules modification in which overdevelopment of Catan leads to total desertification of the island.

SimEarth
(Maxis, 1990). Early “god game” from Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, allows players to fiddle with the variables of the environment.
Spore
(Maxis, 2008), also designed by Wright, has a similar feel, but is dedicated primarily to biological evolution.

WALL-E
(Andrew Stanton, 2008). Let Disney sell you a critique of its own ecologically destructive practices, nicely packaged in an environmentally friendly cardboard DVD case never used again for any subsequent film releases. And yet the film has an unexpected utopian streak that somehow manages to transcend its troubled origins. Pixar similarly explores tough ecological questions in its 2001 film
Monsters, Inc.
(Peter Docter, 2001), which subtly and smartly allegorizes resource imperialism and the economics of scarcity in late capitalism.

Brian K. Vaughan,
Y: The Last Man
(2002). Killing off all the men is once again the necessary first step toward a rational and sustainable ecotopia.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

CHRISTINA ALT is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, currently researching intersections between early ecology and literary modernism. She will be taking up a lectureship at the University of St Andrews in 2013.

BRENT BELLAMY is a PhD candidate in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, writing a dissertation on contemporary U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction.

GERRY CANAVAN is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Marquette University, teaching twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one on
SF
and totality, and the other on the work of Octavia Butler. He is also (with Eric Carl Link) the editor of
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
.

SABINE HÖHLER is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Recently she has finished a book-length study titled
Spaceship Earth: Envisioning Human Habitats in the Environmental Age
that explores ecological discourses on the Earth's “life support systems” between 1960 and 1990.

ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA is Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her books include
The History of the Epic
(2006) and, edited with Catherine Brace,
Landscape: Process and Text
(2010). She is currently editing a special issue on climate change for the journal
symplokē
.

MELODY JUE is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University, writing her dissertation on intersections between ecological thinking and oceanic literatures, with particular interest in oceanic
SF
.

ROB LATHAM is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. A senior editor of
Science Fiction Studies
, he is the author of
Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption
(2002) and coeditor of
The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction
(2010). He is currently editing
The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction
.

ANDREW MILNER is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University in Melbourne, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, and the Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies for 2013 in the Institut für Englische Philologie at the Freie Universität Berlin. His recent published work includes
Tenses of Imagination
(2010) and
Locating Science
Fiction
(2012).

TIMOTHY MORTON holds the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, where he lectures on literature, ecology, and critical theory. He is the author of
Ecology without Nature
(2007) and
The Ecological Thought
(2010), as well as the forthcoming
Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality
.

ERIC C. OTTO is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Florida Gulf Coast
University. He is the author of
Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism
(2012).

MICHAEL PAGE teaches English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is currently working on two book projects,
Views of the Land: Romanticism, Agriculture,
Landscape, and Ecology
and
Ecology and Science Fiction
.

CHRISTOPHER PALMER is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Arts, and Critical Enquiry at Australia's La Trobe University. He is the author of multiple investigations into
SF
and related genres, including
Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern
(2003).

GIB PRETTYMAN is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Fayette. His recent work focuses on the role of Eastern religions in
SF
and utopia, with an emphasis on the work of Aldous Huxley, Ursula Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson. He also serves as associate editor of
Resources for American Literary Study
.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is the Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus-Award-winning author of myriad
SF
novels and stories, including most recently
Galileo's Dream
(2009) and
2312
(2012).

ELZETTE STEENKAMP recently completed a PhD in English at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Her research focuses on the treatment of ecological crisis in South African speculative fiction. She is currently working as the production manager of
LitNet Akademies
, an online academic journal based in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

IMRE SZEMAN is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of ten books to date, including most recently
Cultural Theory: An Anthology
(2010, coeditor) and
Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide
(2012, coeditor). He is currently working on a book on the cultural politics of oil.

INDEX

Alaimo, Stacey,
41

Aldiss, Brian,
7
,
47
,
77
,
81

alien encounters: advanced extraterrestrials in H. G. Wells,
25
–
28
; alien other in South African SF,
145
,
149
; alien susceptibility to bacteria in
War of the Worlds
,
27
; in
Avatar
,
220
–
24
; British “cosy catastrophe” narratives,
79
–
80
; colonized earth in
The Genocides
,
81
; cyborgs,
145
,
149
,
155
,
221
; empathy emergence in
War of the Worlds
,
29
–
30
; “first contact” narratives,
77
; human/animal couplings in
District 9
,
151
,
154
–
55
; human simulacra/phantoms in
Solaris
,
228
–
30
; indigenous Other in
Avatar
,
13
,
19
; Martians in
City
,
46
; 1950s alien menace narratives,
78
–
79
; sympathetic prawns in
District 9
,
151
–
52
,
154
–
55
,
157n20
.
See also
human beings
;
robots

Amazing Stories
,
2
,
42

Anderson, Perry,
158

animals: animal objectification in Bacigalupi,
185
–
86
,
188
; animal rights movement,
89
–
90
; dog paradise in
City
,
47
; human-animal analogy in H. G. Wells,
27
–
28
,
36
–
37
,
250
; human-animal couplings in
District 9
,
151
,
154
–
55
; nonhuman values and,
250
; primitivist conceptions of,
xi
.
See also
human beings
;
mass extinction
;
multispecies relations
;
nature