Green Planets (6 page)

20
.
An Inconvenient Truth
, directed by Davis Guggenheim (2006; Los Angeles: Paramount, 2006), DVD.

21
. Chad Harbach, “The Politics of Fear,
Part III
: Business as Usual,”
n + 1
(December 4, 2007),
http://nplusonemag.com/politics-fear-part-iii-business-usual
.

22
. Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,”
Harper's
, May 2008, 36.

23
. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,”
Critical Inquiry
35 (Winter 2009): 197–222 (208). See also Timothy Mitchell,
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
(London: Verso, 2011).

24
.
Soylent Green
, directed by Richard Fleischer (1973; New York: Warner Home Video, 2003).

25
. Margaret Atwood, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet,”
Guardian
, September 25, 2009,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-sciencefiction
.

26
. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 768.

27
. Christopher Woodward,
In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature
(New York: Random House, 2003).

28
. “Pumzi,” directed by Wanuri Kahiu,
Africa First: Volume One
(2010; New York: Focus Features, 2011), DVD.

29
. Slavoj Žižek,
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
(London: Verso, 2009), 151.

30
. K. William Kapp,
The Social Costs of Private Enterprise
(New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 231.

31
. Octavia E. Butler, “‘Devil Girl from Mars': Why I Write Science Fiction” (MIT Communications Forum, 1998),
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/butler.html
.

32
.
Avatar
, directed by James Cameron (2009; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2010), DVD.

33
. Karl Marx,
Capital
, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 342.

34
.
Daybreakers
, directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig (2009; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2010), DVD.

35
. Quoted in Darko Suvin,
Defined by a Hollow
, Ralahine Utopian Studies, vol. 6 (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 218.

36
. Ibid., 11.

37
. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,”
New Left Review
21 (May–June 2003),
http://newleftreview.org/?view=2449
.

38
. “Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.” Geoff Manaugh, “Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson,” BLDGBLOG (2007),
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html
.

39
. James Joyce,
Ulysses
(New York: Vintage, 1990), 34.

40
.
WALL-E
, directed by Andrew Stanton (2008; Burbank, CA: Disney-Pixar, 2008), DVD.

41
. Carl Freedman, “Marxism, Cinema, and Some Dialectics of Science Fiction and Film Noir,” in
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction
, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 66–82 (72).

42
. Alison Flood, “Kim Stanley Robinson: Science Fiction's Realist,”
Guardian
, November 11, 2009,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/10/kim-stanley-robinson-sciencefiction-realist
.

1

ARCADIAS AND NEW JERUSALEMS

1

Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells

CHRISTINA ALT

Over the course of his long writing career H. G. Wells passed through alternating periods of optimism and pessimism in his views of humanity, science, and the future of the earth. In his late-Victorian works of scientific romance, he reveals a pessimistic attitude arising in part from evolutionary ideas circulating at the time. In
The Time Machine
he expresses anxieties over devolution; in
The Island of Doctor Moreau
he warns of the dangers of scientific overreaching and suggests the ineffectuality of human attempts to intervene in evolutionary processes; and in
The War of the Worlds
he challenges assumptions of human primacy and dominance by introducing a threat to humanity in the form of a highly evolved Martian competitor. These works taken together convey a sense of human beings existing at the mercy of natural processes beyond their control. However, as the twentieth century began, Wells found reason for new optimism, as evidenced by works such as
Anticipations
,
A Modern Utopia
, and
Men Like Gods
. One factor contributing to this modern optimism was the emergence of new scientific disciplines that promised to provide new ways of understanding and intervening in natural processes. Ecology was one of these emerging disciplines; however, perhaps unexpectedly, given current popular conceptions of ecology, in the early twentieth century the optimism engendered by the growing understanding of the relationships between organisms and their environments manifested primarily as a new confidence—even arrogance—in humanity's ability to exert control over the natural world. In fact, Wells's use of ecological ideas in his early twentieth-century works of
SF
suggests that in the early stages of its development as a discipline, ecology helped to restore the confidence in human dominance that had been unsettled by evolution's revelation of humanity's animal origins.

To illustrate this claim, I will compare the attitudes and actions toward the natural world depicted in Wells's late-Victorian novel
The War of the Worlds
, published in 1898, with those represented in his early twentieth-century novel
Men Like Gods
, published in 1923. These two novels are useful texts to consider in an exploration of Wells's changing views of science and nature because they center on similar scenarios. In both novels, terrestrial human beings encounter a more advanced species or culture that possesses greater scientific knowledge and technological skill than they themselves; in both novels, the advanced culture endeavors to exert control over the natural world through the management or extermination of other life forms; and in both novels, a struggle between the terrestrial human beings and the alien culture ensues and is ultimately decided in a contest between nature (in the form of disease germs) and biological science. However, despite the similar scenarios considered in these two novels, the resolutions that they offer differ dramatically, registering the shift in attitude that Wells underwent in the intervening quarter century.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

The War of the Worlds
famously describes the invasion of Earth in the closing years of the nineteenth century by a highly evolved and technologically advanced Martian species seeking a new planet to colonize as their own more distant planet grows cold. The Martians plan to first subdue human beings by force, destroying their homes and decimating their population, and then to cultivate the human species as a form of livestock and a food source. The threat to human dominance posed by the arrival of the Martians causes the human narrator of the tale to experience “a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.”
¹
The War of the Worlds
thus dramatizes the ways in which the promulgation of evolutionary ideas in the Victorian period stripped humans of their sense of special status as beings deliberately set above the rest of creation, leading them to recognize themselves as animals and, moreover, as animals subject to competition for their place in the hierarchy of nature and for their survival as a species. In an extension of this argument, Wells's allusion to the obliteration of the indigenous people of Tasmania by European invaders alongside his references to the extinction of numerous animal species brought about by European exploration and colonization demonstrates that the history
of imperialism, although typically driven by one human group's belief in its superiority over others, ultimately refutes rather than confirms human exceptionalism and highlights human beings' vulnerability to extinction.

Human beings are accorded little agency in
The War of the Worlds
. Wells stresses that in encounters with the Martians, both individual people and larger human groups survive largely by chance. The artilleryman that the narrator befriends is saved from the heat ray that kills the rest of his regiment only because his horse stumbles in a rabbit hole and throws him just as the alien weapon is fired.
²
London is saved from immediate destruction not by human defenses but by the Martians' decision to wait for the arrival of the rest of their invasion party before moving on the city. The narrator states that it is only “by a miracle” that he escapes the Martians in their tripods, and he speaks of feeling overwhelmed by “the immensity of the night and space and nature, [and] my own feebleness and anguish.”
³
It is not any special capacity or insight that saves individuals and communities, but only luck and the unintended effects of the Martians' own decisions and strategies.

This lack of human agency extends to the final contest between the inhabitants of Earth and the Martian invaders, a contest in which human beings play no conscious or deliberate role. Unlike the majority of alien invasion narratives that were to follow Wells's novel,
The War of the Worlds
does not culminate in a heroic confrontation between human beings and aliens in which the invaders are repulsed by the brave and ingenious actions of human beings. In
The War of the Worlds
humanity and the Earth are saved from conquest not by human knowledge, might, heroism, or ingenuity but rather by the unanticipated susceptibility of Martian organisms to earthly bacteria. It is nature, not science, that is decisive in this battle; human beings play no active role in their own salvation.

The defeat of the Martians by earthly bacteria indicates that the Martians are not entirely in control of their destiny either. Wells suggests that, subsequent to the Martians' failure to establish themselves on Earth, they may have launched a more successful invasion of Venus; nevertheless, the novel as a whole makes clear that scientific knowledge and technological power cannot guarantee the survival of a species, and that even the most advanced species has only limited agency in the face of the natural world and the physical laws that govern it.

Reflecting their sudden experience of dethronement by the Martians, human beings are repeatedly compared to animals in
The War of the Worlds
. Wells's chosen animal analogies overtly signal the diminishment of human beings, but they also operate more subtly to unsettle the hierarchy of value from which
these diminishing allusions take their meaning—with the result that what might otherwise constitute the wholly diminishing equation of a “higher” species with a “lower” one instead suggests a fundamental troubling of the boundaries between the high and the low. Wells repeatedly likens people fleeing from Martian attacks to ants, whether to suggest that human beings are so insignificant as to be beneath the notice of the invaders or to stress the fact that the Martians at times destroy targets randomly out of a “mere wantonness of power.”
⁴
However, the descriptions of ants that he offers do not simply serve as an image of powerlessness and insignificance. The narrator's companion the artilleryman declares: “The ants build their cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now—just ants.”
⁵
The artilleryman's intended point is that humans, like ants, live at the mercy of other, more powerful species, but his account of the social life of ants also functions as a reminder that ants are themselves highly complex social organisms.

This is not the only comparison that Wells makes between human beings and social insects. The narrator likens the Martians' use of a stifling black vapor to suffocate any creature that stands in the way of their progress to “smok[ing] out a wasps' nest,” and elsewhere he ponders the extent of the Martians' understanding of human beings, wondering, “Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees?”
⁶
This analogy is perplexing, for by the nineteenth century the highly complex and cooperative behavior of bees, wasps, and other social insects was common knowledge, thanks to the work of naturalists such as François Huber and John Lubbock. The bee is therefore a strange choice for a model of random, disorganized behavior, leading one to question whether Wells's choice of analogy is intended to suggest that the Martians' underestimation of human beings' level of organization and cooperation is paralleled by human beings' underestimation of other species.

The most dramatically dehumanizing of all Wells's animal analogies in
The War of the Worlds
is the comparison that opens the novel: “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope
might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
⁷
This opening comparison of human beings to microscopic organisms suggests the radically reduced significance, the puniness and negligibility of human beings when viewed from an extra-planetary perspective; however, this analogy also fundamentally destabilizes notions of hierarchy, for it foreshadows from the very first sentence of the novel the ultimate downfall of the Martian invaders owing to their susceptibility to terrestrial bacteria. Within this radically diminishing analogy, then, is a hint that the most seemingly negligible of species have crucial roles to play and that the accepted hierarchy of higher and lower forms of life is an inaccurate measure of worth or power. Thus, although
The War of the Worlds
initially appears to dethrone human beings only to set up the Martians in their place, its depiction of the seemingly indomitable Martians as vulnerable to seemingly lowly bacteria fundamentally destabilizes conventional notions of dominance and hierarchy.