Green Planets (28 page)

 

1
. Paolo Bacigalupi,
The Windup Girl
(San Francisco: Night Shade, 2010); Kim Stanley Robinson,
Forty Signs of Rain
(2004; London: HarperCollins, 2005),
Fifty Degrees Below
(2005; London: HarperCollins, 2006), and
Sixty Days and Counting
(London: HarperCollins, 2007). For a comprehensive review of fictional treatments of climate change, see Adam
Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra, “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism,”
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change
2, no. 2 (2011): 185–200.

2
. Margaret Atwood,
Oryx and Crake
(2003; London: Virago, 2004), and
The Year of the Flood
(2009; London: Virago, 2010); T. Coraghessan Boyle,
A Friend of the Earth
(2000; London: Bloomsbury, 2001); Cormac McCarthy,
The Road
(2006, London: Picador, 2007); Will Self,
The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and Distant Future
(2006; London: Penguin, 2007); Jeanette Winterson,
The Stone Gods
(London: Penguin, 2008).

3
. Doris Lessing,
Mara and Dann
(London: Flamingo, 1999), and
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
(2006; London: Harper Perennial, 2007).

4
. Maggie Gee,
The Ice People
(1998; London: Telegram, 2008). Future references to this novel will be presented in parentheses in the main text.

5
. Sheila Jasanoff, “A New Climate for Society,”
Theory Culture Society
27 (2010): 237.

6
. Winterson,
Stone Gods
, 83.

7
. One could say that Atwood exposes the ethical fine line between environmentalism and misanthropy that characterizes deep green sabotage movements: a similar dilemma on a smaller scale faces eco-warrior Ty Tierwater in Boyle,
Friend of the Earth
.

8
. Carolyn Merchant,
Earthcare: Women and the Environment
(London: Routledge, 1995), xix.

9
. Ibid., 216.

10
. For a brief but effective discussion of the “subjectivation” of nature in environmentalist discourse, see Catriona Sandilands,
The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 77–78.

11
. John Barry, “Sustainability, Political Judgement and Citizenship: Connecting Green Politics and Democracy,” in
Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship
, ed. Brian Doherty and Marius de Geus (London: Routledge, 1996), 122.

12
. Chris J. Cuomo,
Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing
(London: Routledge, 1998), 129.

13
. Joan C. Tronto,
Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 170–71. For a more recent critique of the promotion of personal care as a political ideal, see Sherilyn MacGregor,
Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 57–80.

14
. The phrase comes from MacGregor,
Beyond Mothering Earth
, 20.

15
. However, McCarthy's
The Road
remains an important exception. The novel, which some have read as a climate change narrative even though the catalyst for the destruction of the biosphere is never named, is a sparse but poignant description of the love between a father and son as they make their way through the devastated landscape. Yet love is carefully sifted here, for it is not clear if the father's steadfast, protective love for his son is really the best way to make sense of one's place in a dying world, compared with the boy's more trusting compassion for others.

16
. For the invention of the term
ecoféminisme
, see Françoise d'Eaubonne,
Féminisme ou la mort
(Paris: Femme et Mouvement, 1974); see also Barbara T. Gates, “A Root of Ecofeminism:
Ecoféminisme
,” in
Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation,
Pedagogy,
ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 15–22.

17
. For Andrée Collard, for example, the apparent tendency in matriarchal religions toward respect for nature means that motherhood can be invoked as the essential link between women and the environment. Collard writes of early goddess societies, “Women's skills developed beyond her famed endurance and purveyance of care and wellbeing. She learned the ways of plants. She learned the ways of other creatures of the land, air and sea. She learned them in a spirit of recognition and respect. And with a similar spirit, she partook of them” (11). This allows Collard to state unequivocally, “Pregnancies and child-bearing … are a woman's link to the natural world and the hunted animals that are part of that world” (14–15); See Andrée Collard with Joyce Contrucci,
Rape of the Wild: Man's Violence against Animals and the Earth
(London: Women's Press, 1988).

18
. See, for example, Mary Mellor's version of ecofeminist political economy: “Feminism is concerned with the way in which women in general have been subordinated to men in general. Ecologists are concerned that human activity is destroying the viability of ecosystems. Ecofeminist political economy argues that the two are linked. This linkage is not seen as stemming from some essentialist female identification with nature, for which some early ecofeminists were criticised, but from women's position in society, particularly in relation to masculine-dominated economic systems.” See Mary Mellor, “Ecofeminist Political Economy and the Politics of Money,” in
Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology
, ed. Ariel Salleh (London: Pluto Books, 2009), 251.

19
. Deborah Slicer, “Toward an Ecofeminist Standpoint Theory: Bodies as Grounds,” in
Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy
, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 49–73.

20
. Mellor,
Feminism and Ecology
(London: Polity, 1997), 105–6.

21
. The “ethic of care” was first put forward by Carol Gilligan,
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and further disseminated by Nel Noddings,
Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

22
. This is despite the careful historicist work by some ecofeminists in discovering and interrogating a dualistic system of thinking about women and nature at the heart of patriarchal thought. See, for example, Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in
Woman, Culture, and Society
, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67–87; Carolyn Merchant,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
(1980; San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990); and Val Plumwood,
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
(London: Routledge, 1993).

23
. Cuomo,
Feminism and Ecological Communities
, 117.

24
. Indeed, as Sandilands reminds us, “social construction and essentialism are not necessarily opposed concepts”; Sandilands,
Good-Natured Feminist
, 71.

25
. Ibid., xiii, 209.

26
. Ibid., 121.

27
. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century,” in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Free Association Books, 1991), 149–81. Material feminist Karen Barad has recently updated such ecofeminist critiques by showing how our relationship with the nonhuman is better understood in terms of agency rather than (gendered) identity, specifically, as what she calls “agential intra-action”; “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31.

28
. John Sears, “‘Making Sorrow Speak': Maggie Gee's Novels,” in
Contemporary British Women Writers
, ed. Emma Parker (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 55.

29
. Maggie Gee,
The Burning Book
(1983; London: Faber, 1985), and
The Flood
(London: Saqi, 2005).

30
. Margaret McKay, “An Interview with Maggie Gee,”
Studia Neophilogica
69, no. 2 (1997): 216.

31
. Both
The Flood
(2004) and
Where Are the Snows
(2006) come closest to this, being near-future treatments of environmental crisis; Gee,
Where Are the Snows
(London: Telegram, 2006).

32
. According to Gee, the novel was written as a distraction from the disappointment of her publisher's rejection of
The White Family
for, among other things, its controversial race issues: “So I wrote another book,
The Ice People
, which saved me from despair. It dealt with a bi-racial child, but in a very different, light way”; Maya Jaggi, “Maya Jaggi in Conversation with Maggie Gee:
The White Family
,”
Wasafiri
17, no. 39 (2002): 6.

33
. That Saul is of mixed race is another aspect of Gee's interrogation of the race politics of environmental crisis and justice, which is, unfortunately, outside the scope of this essay.

34
. Saul's survivalist tactics and Luke's compassionate protests against these are echoed by McCarthy's father and son in
The Road
, which, in a comparable way, questions the seemingly unquestionable “good” of parental care as a way of surviving environmental destruction.

8

Future Ecologies, Current Crisis

Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction

ELZETTE STEENKAMP

In a 2004 essay titled “Science Fiction in South Africa,” Deirdre Byrne laments “the regrettable dearth … of published science fiction and science fiction readers” in South Africa. Byrne argues that “one cannot expect an advanced awareness of technological or scientific developments” or “even a basic acquaintance with published literature” in a country where the majority of the population live well below the breadline, the spread of
HIV/AIDS
is rampant, and levels of technological literacy are extremely low.
¹
Fast-forward a decade, and the prospects of the South African
SF
scene seem far less dismal. In 2009, South African–born Neill Blomkamp's Oscar-nominated film
District 9
captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, resulting in an unprecedented boom in local science fiction and fantasy. Add to this the success of Lauren Beukes's Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning
SF
noir,
Zoo City
(2010), and South African speculative fiction appears to be blipping happily on the international radar.

Aside from comparisons between the sudden international popularity of South African speculative fiction and the meteoric rise of the Scandinavian crime novel,
²
very little has been written in the way of scholarly articles examining the role of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction in South Africa literature. This is partially due to science fiction's association with “pulp” fiction and lowbrow escapism, but can also be attributed to the widely held perception that
SF
has more to do with shiny machines and spaceships than with actual people. Because of the country's complex history of colonial and apartheid oppression, much attention is paid to the narrative representation of human conflict, and particularly the issues of race and gender, in South African literature; the neglect of
SF
as an area of critical inquiry in South Africa is based on the mistaken belief that the genre does not address these sorts of
“real world” issues. In “Subversive, Undisciplined and Ideologically Unsound or Why Don't South Africans Like Fantasy?” Felicity Wood asks: “Why is there so little fantasy in English South African literature?” Wood attributes this “resistance to fantasy” to the fact that “it's sometimes perceived as being distinct from reality, an escape from it, and thus the way in which fantasy serves as a means of exploring reality has often not been adequately acknowledged.”
³
This chapter argues that South African speculative fiction is in fact deeply concerned with the very issue that “serious” South African authors have been examining for many years—alterity.

The notion that
SF
is more concerned with technology than human lives is explored in Ursula Le Guin's “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown.” Le Guin employs Virginia Woolf's conception of “Mrs. Brown”
⁴
as representative of a fully rounded, “human” literary character, in order to comment on the apparent lack of “real people” in fantasy and science fiction narratives.
⁵
Le Guin questions whether there is room for the “too
round
” Mrs. Brown in the “gleaming spaceships” of
SF
—in short, whether “a science fiction writer [can] write a novel.”
⁶

Le Guin, inspired by a hobbit named Frodo who looks very much like Mrs. Brown, concludes that
SF
is
“worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life for the imagination, a good tool, an enlargement of consciousness, a possible glimpse, against a vast dark background, of the very frail, very heroic figure of Mrs. Brown.”
⁷
The questions surrounding Le Guin's Mrs. Brown are equally important from a South African perspective. What place does Mrs. Brown's South African counterpart—let's call her Mrs. Khumalo, or Mrs. van der Merwe for that matter
⁸
—have in a spaceship equipped with ray guns? Surely we cannot dismiss the plight of Mrs. van der Merwe, for she has for too long been restricted to impoverished townships, forcefully displaced, left to die in concentration camps, subjugated, and ignored. The region's legacy of violence demands that the stories told in post-apartheid South Africa should be those of
real
people. But can we successfully write about
real
South Africans who happen to be clones, or genetically engineered donors, or cyborgs?