Green Planets (2 page)

For over a century the thought experiments of
SF
have been probing our possible futures, providing an archive of the imagination where science, story, and political struggle can converge and cross-pollinate. The ambition of
Green Planets
is to trace key moments in this vital and ongoing conversation.

Gerry Canavan

Notes

1
. Mavis Linnemann, “William Gibson Overdrive,”
Phawker.com
(August 15, 2007),
http://www.phawker.com/2007/08/15/coming-atraction-william-gibson-qa/
.

2
. Fairfield Osborn,
Our Plundered Planet
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), quoted in Eric C. Otto,
Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 7–8; Norbert Weiner,
The Human Use of Human Beings
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1950), 40.

3
. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds.,
Man the Hunter
(Chicago: Transaction, 1969), 3.

4
. Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
(1962; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 2–3.

5
. Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,”
College English
34, no. 3 (1972): 372–82 (372).

6
. Kim Stanley Robinson, ed.,
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias
(New York: Tor Books, 1994): 10–11.

GREEN PLANETS

Introduction

If This Goes On

GERRY CANAVAN

Borrowing his categories from Auden, Samuel R. Delany has written that two ideological positions are available to us in modernity, each one carrying either a positive or a negative charge. One can imagine oneself to be the citizen of a marvelous New Jerusalem, the “technological super city where everything is clean, and all problems have been solved by the beneficent application of science”—or else one can be a partisan of Arcadia, “that wonderful place where everyone eats natural foods and no machine larger than one person can fix in an hour is allowed in. Throughout Arcadia the breezes blow, the rains are gentle, the birds sing, and the brooks gurgle.” Each position in turn implies its dark opposite. The flip side of the Good City is the Bad City, the Brave New World, where fascist bureaucrats have crushed the soul of the human, machines have replaced work and love, and smog blocks out the stars; the other side of the Edenic Good Country is the Land of the Flies, where the nostalgic reverie of an imagined rural past is replaced instead by a reversal of progress and an unhappy return to the nightmare of history: floods, wars, famine, disease, superstition, rape, murder, death.
¹

These loyalties shape our political and aesthetic judgments. The person whose
temperament draws her to the New Jerusalem, Delany goes on to say, will tend to see every Arcadia as a Land of the Flies, while the person who longs for Arcadia will see in every city street and every shiny new gadget the nascent seeds of a Brave New World. What seems at first to be a purely spatial matter (
in what sort of place would you rather live?
) turns out in this way to be as much about temporality and political projection (
what sort of world are we making for ourselves?
). Delany's four categories imply speculation about the kind of future we are building and what life will be like for us when it arrives. In this respect Delany's schema is of a piece with the dialectic between “thrill and dread,” between utopia and apocalypse, that Marshall Berman says in
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
defines “modernity” as such: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”
²
Though Berman pays little attention to the emergence of
SF
in that work, his description of modernity as the knife's edge between utopia and apocalypse nevertheless usefully doubles as a succinct description for virtually every
SF
narrative ever conceived. And little wonder:
SF
emerges as a recognizable cultural genre out of the same conditions of technological modernity that generated literary and artistic modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century, with the ecstatic techno-optimistic anticipation of
Amazing Stories
founder Hugo Gernsback matched always by the unending cavalcade of disaster, catastrophe, and out-and-out apocalypse that Everett and Richard F. Bleiler, in their massive index to the
SF
of the period, group under the single evocative heading “Things Go Wrong.”
³
Indeed, the persistence (and continued popularity) of
SF
into the contemporary moment can perhaps be thought of as the last, vital vestige of the original modernist project: from dazzling architectural cityscapes and off-world colonies to superweapons run amuck and catastrophic climate change, from Marinetti's worship of progress, technology, and speed to Kafka's deep and abiding suspicion of the project of modernity as such,
SF
extends the overawing directive to “make it new” to the farthest reaches of time and space.

Delany argues that the dialectics between city and country and between utopia and apocalypse that generate our New Jerusalems, Arcadias, Brave New Worlds, and Lands of the Flies are crucially operative in basically all
SF
. Thus the pastoral Arcadia of Wells's Eloi in
The Time Machine
(1895) is revealed to require the Brave New World of the Morlocks as its true material base, just as Huxley's
Brave New World
(1932) requires for its own continuation the preservation
of an Arcadian “Reservation” as an internal safety valve. In
1984
(1949) the Arcadian refuge has always already been corrupted by totalitarianism, with secret microphones hidden in the flowers and trees. In a host of post-apocalyptic nuclear and zombie fictions from during and after the Cold War, a hopeless and wretched Land of the Flies is imagined as the only possible alternative to the New Jerusalem / Brave New World of American-style consumer capitalism and the national security state; in
Soylent Green
(1973),
Silent Running
(1972), and dozens of other 1970s and post-1970s environmental disaster narratives, we find capitalism hurtling hopelessly toward a final Land of the Flies anyway, as the bitter consequence of its insistence on ceaseless innovation and endless expansion on a finite and limited globe. Ernest Callenbach's influential
Ecotopia
(1975) articulates in that moment of crisis the possibility of a New Jerusalem that
is
an Arcadia, precisely through the Pacific Northwest's imagined secession from a United States that is rapidly collapsing into both a fascist Brave New World and starvation-ridden Land of the Flies. And even in something like the children's film
WALL-E
(2008) we find tomorrow's desolate Brave New World of plastic trash and consumer junk can still be recovered as an Arcadia, if only because our robots are smart enough to love nature more than we do.

It is only in postmodernity, Delany goes on to say, that new ideological forms are generated at the interstices of the first four. The first of these is the Junk City—the dysfunctional New Jerusalem in slow-motion breakdown, where the glittering spires haven't been cleaned in quite a while, where the gas stations have all run out of gas, and where nothing works quite the way it did when it was new. The positive side of Junk City is an ecstatic vision of improvisational recombinative urban chaos, “the Lo Teks living in the geodesic superstructure above Nighttown in Gibson's ‘Johnny Mnemonic,'” to borrow Delany's example, or perhaps something like a fix-it shop in the ruins of today's Detroit. The other hybrid position is the ruined countryside, toxified by runoff from the cities and factories, which we need not even to turn to
SF
to imagine; we sadly have enough of these places in the real world as it is. And the flip side of the ruined countryside, its positive charge, is the unexpectedly sublime vision of decadent beauty that Delany calls the Culture of the Afternoon—the way a sunset, shining splendidly through the smog, glistens off the antifreeze.
⁴

►
►
►

Among other things, the shift from the modern to the postmodern as articulated by Delany registers a loss of political-historical agency in favor of a sense
of doomed inevitability. The science fictional “Fable for Tomorrow” that opens Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
(1962), we might note, tells of an Arcadia “in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” that is corrupted and destroyed by the introduction of chemical poisons that slowly kill all life in the area. But “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves”—and thus
we
, reading
Silent Spring
before the final disaster, might yet choose to do otherwise.
⁵
Similarly, in the nuclear apocalypses that dominated the Cold War imagination of the future, agency is retained always in the spirit of an urgent but still-timely warning; living in the present, rather than the scorched and radioactive future, we can choose not to build the last bomb, and choose not to push the button that will launch it. The haunting
UNLESS
that punctuates the end of Dr. Seuss's
The Lorax
(1971) captures well the sense of hope that is retained even in the most dire jeremiads, which presume that politics and indeed revolution are still possible, that we might still collectively choose to leave the world better than we found it.

For Fredric Jameson, it is also this loss of faith in the possibilities of political and social transformation—the evacuation of futurity that Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history”
⁶
—that marks the shift from modernity to postmodernity. The incapacity for the imagination of alternatives to global capitalism has been frequently encapsulated by Jameson's well-known, oft-misquoted observation from
The Seeds of Time
that “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.”
⁷
Back when we were modern, we believed real change was possible; now that we are postmodern, we are certain it is not.

Shifts in the dominant vision of ecological apocalypse between the modern and postmodern periods reflect this paradigm shift in our relationship to futurity. The superweapons of early twentieth-century
SF
—and their terrible actualization in the nuclear bomb—threatened to unpredictably explode at any moment in the future, destroying all we have, and transforming the planet into a radioactive cinder. Thus the urgent need in the present, expressed in so much leftist
SF
of the period, to oppose more bombs, more wars. But, as
Green Planets
contributor Timothy Morton has noted, the temporality of climate change, the characteristic planetary apocalypse of our postmodern moment, is rather different: “Global warming is like a very slow nuclear explosion that nobody even notices is happening.…That's the horrifying thing about it: it's like my childhood nightmares came true, even before I was born.”
⁸
In the unhappy geological
epoch of the Anthropocene—the name scientists have proposed for the moment human activities begin to be recognizable in the geological record, the moment visiting aliens or the future's
Cockroach sapiens
will be able to see scrawled in their studies of ice cores and tree rings that
humanity wuz here
⁹
—the climate has always already been changed. The current, massive disruptions in global climate, that is to say, have been caused by the cumulative carbon release of generations of people who were long dead before the problem was even identified, as well as by ongoing release from the immense networks of energy, production, and distribution that were built and developed in the open landscape of free and unrestricted carbon release—networks on which contemporary civilization now undeniably depends, but which nobody yet has any idea how to replicate in the absence of carbon-burning fossil fuels. As Benjamin Kunkel has wittily noted: “The nightmare, in good nightmare fashion, has something absurd and nearly inescapable about it: either we will begin running out of oil, or we won't.”
¹⁰
That is: either we have Peak Oil, and the entire world suffers a tumultuous, uncontrolled transition to post-cheap-oil economics, or else there is still plenty of oil left for us to permanently destroy the global climate through continued excess carbon emissions.

Despite the urgency of these increasingly undeniable ecological constraints placed upon human activity, however, late capitalism remains a mode of production that insists (culturally) and depends (structurally) on limitless expansion and permanent growth without end: into the former colonial periphery, into the peasant countryside, through oil derricks into the deepest crevices of the earth, and, then, in futurological imaginings, to orbital space stations, lunar cities, Martian settlements, asteroid belt mining colonies, sleeper ships to Alpha Centauri, and on and on. It is a process of growth whose end we can simply not conceive. “The Earth got used up,” begins the intro to several episodes of Joss Whedon's western-in-space
Firefly
(2002), “so we moved out and terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths.”
¹¹
It sounds so easy! But from a scientific standpoint the other planets in the solar system are simply too inhospitable, and the distances between solar systems far too great, for the fantasy of unlimited expansion to ever actually be achievable.