Green Planets (9 page)

It has been nearly forty more years since Asimov made these remarks, and the ecological crisis (“energy” and otherwise) is now forty years further up the line. We seem to be in another upswing, both in
SF
and the wider culture. Ecological
SF
is particularly “hot” right now, if some of the most recent titles are any indication: Paolo Bacigalupi's
The Drowned Cities
, Tobias Buckell's
Arctic Rising
, Rob Ziegler's
Seed
, and Kim Stanley Robinson's
2312
, all released in the first few months of 2012 alone. Yet ecological issues have always been present in
SF
, integral to the background of the futures (human triumphant, apocalyptic, or otherwise) that
SF
writers imagine. Ecology is necessary for extra-planetary world building, according to Brian Stableford,
⁴
as the classic examples of Herbert's
Dune
and Le Guin's
The Left Hand of Darkness
attest. But it is just as central to any future-Earth scenario: what would future-Earth
SF
be without depictions of our planet either as degraded by the rampant waste and consumption of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or else as technologically sophisticated futures that have solved (or at least learned to manage) the crises precipitated by our era? Thus, almost all
SF
is foundationally ecological in nature.

Just as
SF
is inherently ecologically oriented, so too is much
SF
criticism. In the years since Brian Stableford remarked that ecocriticism “tended to ignore
SF
,”
⁵
many “ecocritics” outside of
SF
have begun to explore
SF
texts, including such critical writers as Stacey Alaimo, Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Timothy Morton, and Patrick Murphy.
⁶
Indeed, ecocriticism and
SF
criticism have much common ground and seem to be beginning to merge.
SF
and
SF
criticism have much to offer the ecocritical movement.

Certainly, the concerns of mainstream ecocriticism have important affinities with
SF
and
SF
criticism. Cheryll Glotfelty's observation in the introduction to
The Ecocriticism Reader
that “most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet's basic life support systems”
⁷
is compatible with the study of
SF
. Arguably,
SF
is the genre of literature best suited to probing these environmental limits. Ecocritic Glen A. Love goes so far as to say that “environmental and population pressures inevitably and increasingly support the position that any literary criticism that purports to deal with social and physical reality will encompass ecological considerations.”
⁸
We could push this one step further and say
any literature
.
SF
is an ideal venue for the type of engagement with biological and ecological issues that Glotfelty and Love call for here. If science fiction writers are inherently ecological writers, by extension science fiction critics are necessarily ecocritics in one way or another. Ecocritic Lawrence Buell, who works considerably outside
SF
, recognizes this centrality of
SF
to ecocriticism: “For half a century science fiction has taken a keen, if not consistent interest in ecology,
in planetary endangerment, in environmental ethics, in humankind's relation to the nonhuman world…. No genre potentially matches up with a planetary level of thinking ‘environment' better than science fiction does.”
⁹

The science fiction writers of the genre's golden age, like Asimov, who read the early issues of
Amazing
,
Astounding
, and
Wonder
were introduced to ecological issues in various ways in the often crude but insightful stories of the era. In his monumental catalog of the early magazine stories,
The Gernsback Years
, Everett Bleiler lists over sixty stories under the heading “Earth, future geography” alone that have some degree of ecological content.
¹⁰
Granted, most of this is the extrapolated background setting for what is often a crudely executed adventure story, but it is that very setting that is so crucial to the contemplation of futures built upon the consequences of present actions or the extrapolation of future alternatives. By the time Asimov's generation came of age, this ecological awareness had become so embedded into the discourse of
SF
that it was virtually invisible, assumed by the reader to be part of the scenario of the typical
SF
story.

Here I consider four exemplary works of ecological
SF
from that golden age: Laurence Manning's
The Man Who Awoke
stories, published in consecutive issues of
Wonder Stories
in 1933 and later put in book form in 1975; Clifford Simak's
City
series, published in John W. Campbell's
Astounding
throughout the mid-40s;
¹¹
Ward Moore's
Greener Than You Think
(1947); and George R. Stewart's
Earth Abides
, which, though written outside the generic
SF
discourse, has nonetheless become a genre classic since its publication in 1949. These four books participate in the two major modes of ecological thought as it appears in
SF
: the evolutionary and the apocalyptic.

EVOLUTION

Let's first consider the evolutionary mode. Evolution is paradigmatic in
SF
, as it is in science itself.
¹²
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. notes that “looking at the corpus of sf in the twentieth century, we see veritable schoolbook applications of evolutionary ideas.”
¹³
Both Manning's
The Man Who Awoke
and Simak's
City
exemplify the evolutionary mode of ecological
SF
. I would argue, however, that though there is much commonality between
The Man Who Awoke
and
City
, they engage with evolutionary ecological thought in rather different registers. As Norman Winters, the hero of
The Man Who Awoke
, awakens beyond the pastoral “forest society” of the nearer future, and technology reasserts itself, Manning's evolutionary mode becomes a saga of humanity's technological development
leading to universal mastery, much in the manner of Stapledon's
Last and First Men
. In
City
, though technology is ubiquitous in the background that makes the doggish utopia possible (unlimited atomic power and the guiding hand of Jenkins and other Asimovian robots that serve the dogs), Simak nevertheless emphasizes an antitechnological pastoral register.

The overall trajectory of
The Man Who Awoke
stories traces a progressive evolutionary model in which humanity follows its “destiny” and masters the larger universe. This brand of evolutionism has its origins in the evolutionary controversies of the mid-nineteenth century. Though Darwin made no special place for humanity in the evolutionary saga theorized in
The Origin of Species
, many alternative evolutionary theories did.
¹⁴
In his late essay, “Evolution and Ethics,” T. H. Huxley, though firmly committed to the Darwinian evolutionary model in which all species must inevitably succumb to extinction, nevertheless suggested that human intelligence made possible an “ethical process,” what we call culture, from which we can collectively act within the universe to make it, at least for a time, a more sustainable and equitable place for us and the larger biosphere. This perspective greatly influenced H. G. Wells, the single most important influence on early American magazine
SF
,
¹⁵
and much of Wells's science fiction explores the implications of Huxley's argument, as does the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon, clear influences on Manning's stories.

The Man Who Awoke is one Norman Winters, a wealthy banker from the twentieth century who desires to see what the future will bring, and uses his wealth to create a sleep chamber that will allow him to awake in the far future. An obvious progenitor is Rip Van Winkle, but there are more immediate echoes in Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward
, W. H. Hudson's
A Crystal Age
, and Wells's
When the Sleeper Wakes
(which had been reprinted in
Amazing Stories Quarterly
in 1928). In the first story, titled “The Forest People” in the book version, Winters awakes three thousand years in the future, when the ruins of New York City are buried in a verdant forest landscape. He encounters a culture adapted to a forest economy, with no farming, manufacturing, or other practices of industrialization, much like that in
A Crystal Age
or William Morris's
News from Nowhere
. Sustainability is practiced much in the manner of Ernest Callenbach's later
Ecotopia
, and humans live in balance with the rest of nature. Bleiler calls this “a world that might be considered an ecological extremist's ideal.”
¹⁶
This ecologically centered society was evolved because of the consumption and waste of much of Earth's natural resources during Winters's era, referred to as the “age of Waste.” The Chief Forester voices a pointed indictment of our era:

The height of the false civilization of Waste! Fossil plants were ruthlessly burned in furnaces to provide heat; petroleum was consumed by the billion barrels; cheap metal cars were built and thrown away to rust after a few years' use; men crowded into ill-ventilated villages of a million inhabitants—some historians say several million…. For what should we thank the humans of three thousand years ago? For exhausting the coal supplies of the world? For leaving us no petroleum for our chemical factories? For destroying the forests on whole mountain ranges and letting the soil erode into the valleys?
¹⁷

But the Forest culture is not utopia. A growing discontent among the youth who are not allowed to step forth and create their own communities without careful population strictures and environmental management is emerging. Winters is captured by this underground movement and commiserates: “I understand you have a very poor opinion of my own times, due to our possibly unwise consumption of natural resources. Even then we had men who warned us against our course of action, but we acted in the belief that when oil and coal were gone mankind would produce some new fuel to take their place.”
¹⁸
Catalyzed by Winters's presence, the youth revolt, throwing their society into chaos; Winters must retreat to his bunker with the hope of finding utopia further in the future.

Taken by itself, this story fits well within the pastoral ecological mode, as an indictment of present ecological transgressions. But Manning's intention was not to end Winters's journey at this early period. Winters exits his chamber four more times and encounters various stages of human cultural, technological, and ecological evolution. At first glance the remaining stories might be left out of an ecological analysis, but each is crucial in its own right. In “Master of the Brain,” Winters emerges five thousand more years in the future and encounters a dystopian technological society, probably derived from Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
. The energy crisis of the Forest period has been solved, and technology has again triumphed. The “Brain,” a vast computer, controls all human activity. Humans indulge in controlled pleasure palaces, but no longer have any sense of self: “Here was material to delight his historian's soul—the very kind of future civilization that dreamers and prophets had imagined back in the twentieth century—a thrilling vista of wonders and a consummation of the mechanical evolution.”
¹⁹
Once again, Winters's presence facilitates a revolt, and he returns to his bunker. His evolutionary trajectory continues as he goes seven thousand years further in the third story, “The City of Sleep,” where “the climate had
long since changed”
²⁰
and people now escape into what amounts to permanent virtual reality. The previous pattern again asserts itself, with Winters providing a solution to the future's crisis, facilitating another change in the human social order. When Winters next awakens in another five thousand years in “The Individualists,” the problems he helped solve in “The City of Sleep” have led to a culture of sparse human population, where everyone is devoted to the pursuit of personal scientific interests. However, the society is out of balance, with each individual trying to best his fellows, leading to single combat using gigantic robotic machines, like those in
The War of the Worlds
. In the final story, “The Elixir,” Winters emerges in
AD
25,000, where immortality has been achieved and humanity explores the galaxy in search of the meaning of existence. The final chapter within this story, “The Search for Infinite,” brings Winters to the ultimate understanding of universal existence and makes overtures to a grand finale for human evolution into beings of pure energy. With this finale Manning achieves one of the central themes of
SF
, depicting an extraordinary vision of technological, evolutionary fulfillment.

Simak takes an alternative evolutionary view in
City
(which ranks among the highest achievements from the golden age of Campbell's
Astounding
), emphasizing the pastoral over the technological and making for a more pointed ecological fable, though ultimately he comes to a similar conclusion as Manning. Though humanity is the focus of the first several stories in the collection, our species eventually disappears from the scene, becoming a myth for our dog inheritors. Here Simak is more consistent with a Darwinian evolutionary paradigm, which gives no special seat to the human species, though the dogs' evolutionary process is a result of human manipulation via genetic engineering and legacy technology (the robot guardians, the unlimited energy). By removing humanity from the picture, Simak is able to explore an ecological alternative to the world-destroying technological practices of contemporary humanity.