Authors: Gerry Canavan
Notes
1
.
The Blue Planet: Seas of Life
, nar. David Attenborough (2001; London: BBC, 2002), DVD.
2
. Philip Steinberg's
Social Construction of Ocean Space
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) discusses more historically specific conceptions of ocean space in relation to culture and economy.
3
. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
4
. Stanislaw Lem,
Solaris
(New York: Walker, 1970), 22.
5
. Ibid., 21.
6
. Fredric Jameson,
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
(New York: Verso, 2007), 108.
7
. She also cannot be permanently killed. When Kelvin panics at her first appearance, he tricks her into entering a space shuttle alone, and then remotely programs the shuttle to launch into space, a clean death. Yet after his next sleep cycle, a new simulacrum-Rheya returns with no memory of having arrived before.
8
. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,”
Representations
108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1â21 (1). Clearly in response to Fredrick Jameson's
Political Unconscious
and strategies of reading for ideology, Best and Marcus aim to broaden “the scope of critique to include the kinds of interpretive activity that seek to understand the complexity of literary surfacesâsurfaces that have been rendered invisible by symptomatic reading.”
9
. Quoted in Ann Weinstone, “Resisting Monsters: Notes on âSolaris,'” in
Science Fiction Studies
21, no. 2 (July 1994): 173â90.
10
. Lem,
Solaris
, 98.
11
. Ibid.
12
. Ibid., 99.
13
. Ibid., 101.
14
. Ibid., 72.
15
. Specifically, I mean the second simulacrum Rheya.
16
. Lem,
Solaris
, 202.
17
. Ibid., 203.
18
. Ibid.
19
. Ibid.
20
. Relating a friend's description, Freud writes, “it is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of âeternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unboundedâas it were, âoceanic.' This feeling, he adds, is purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless exhausted by them. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusionâ¦. I cannot discover this âoceanic' feeling in myself.” See Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents
, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 11â12.
21
. Greg Egan, “Oceanic,” in
The Year's Best Science Fiction, 16th Annual Collection
, ed. Gardner Dozois (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 1â36 (4).
22
. Ibid., 8.
23
. Ibid., 28â29.
24
. Ibid., 30.
25
. Ibid., 35.
26
. Ibid., 20â22.
27
. I could give many examples. Gaston Bachelard's
Water and Dreams: The Imagination of Matter
, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 1983) has a detailed chapter
on the poetics of maternal waters. In critical theory, Luce Irigaray allies the ontological difference of the feminine with water in
The Sex That Is Not One
, and also in
Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
, where she reads and critiques Nietzsche from the perspective of water. In Chinese medicine, women are associated with the “yin,” which is dark, cool, and associated with water. See Luce Irigaray,
Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
28
. Egan, “Oceanic,” 22.
29
. Lateral gene transfer refers to the condition in which genes are not only passed from parent to offspring, but parent to other parents, within the same lifetime.
30
. “You've got to look around in Kafka's writings as you might in such a wood. Then you'll find a whole lot of very useful things. The images are good, of course. But the rest is pure mystification. It's nonsense. You have to ignore it. Depth doesn't get you anywhere at all. Depth is a separate dimension, it's just depthâand there's nothing whatsoever to be seen in it.” Quoted by Walter Benjamin in
Understanding Brecht
(London: New Left Books, 1973), 110.
31
. Egan, “Oceanic,” 36.
32
. I want to qualify my use of “human” here by reminding the reader that the people of “Oceanic” are biologically different from Earth's humans, because males can give birth, and the phallus can be passed between any couple.
33
. Although from a different literary and critical tradition, Kamau Brathwaite's “tidal dialectic” and Elizabeth Deloughrey's elucidation of the concept in
Routes and Roots: Navigating Pacific and Caribbean Island Literatures
(Honolulu: University of Hawaiâi Press, 2010) also offer valuable perspectives on figurations of the tides.
Afterword
Still, I'm Reluctant to Call This Pessimism
GERRY CANAVAN & KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
GC
âº
What is the relationship between ecological science fiction and crisis? Are there other categories beyond “crisis” available to us in
SF
today? Or is crisis the only relevant category if we want to think seriously about the future we are creating for the planet?
KSR
âº
The coming century will bring to one degree or another a global ecological crisis, but it will be playing out at planetary scales of space and time, and it's possible that except in big storms, or food shortages, things won't happen at the right scales to be subjectively experienced as crisis. Of course it's possible to focus on moments of dramatic breakdown that may come, because they are narratizable, but if we do that we're no longer imagining the peculiar kinds of ordinary life that will precede and follow them. Maybe to find appropriate forms for the situation we should be looking to archaic modes where the seasons were the subject, or to Hayden White's nineteenth-century historians, whose summarized analytical narratives were structured by older literary modes, turning them into philosophical positions or prose poems or Stapledonian novels.
I think even the phrase “climate change” is an attempt to narrate the ecological situation. We use the term now as a synecdoche to stand for the totality of our damage to the biosphere, which is much bigger than mere climate change, more like a potential mass extinction event. I don't think it's a coincidence that we are representing the whole by the part most amenable to human correction. We're thinking in terms of thermostats, and how we turn them up or down in a building. That image suggests “climate change” has the possibility of a fix, maybe even a silver bullet of a fix. No such fix will be possible for a mass extinction event.
Lots of words and phrases are being applied to this unprecedented situation: global warming, climate change, sustainable development, decarbonization, permaculture, emergency century, climate adaptation, cruel optimism, climate
mitigation, hopeless hope, the sixth mass extinction event, and so on. But maybe sentences are the minimum unit that can begin to suggest the situation in full. “This coming century looks like the moment in human history when we will either invent a civilization that nurtures the biosphere while it supports us, or else we will damage it quite badly, perhaps even to the point of causing a mass extinction event and endangering ourselves.” A narrative rather than words or labels.
GC
âº
Is it a problem, then, that our narrative forms (both fictional and political) seem to rely on “crisis” for their internal energy?
SF
, especially ecological
SF
, seems to trend toward sudden, apocalyptic breaks that may not reflect the glacial pace of environmental change. Even in your
Science in the Capital
series (to take one example) you turn to “abrupt climate change” as a way of narrativizing, on human spatial and temporal scales, a complex network of feedback loops that in actuality is almost impossible to perceive at the level of day-to-day perception. Are there other models for thinking about change, and where do you see these at work in your work?
KSR
âº
It's true that I puzzled over how to narrate a story about climate change, which I got interested in when I went to Antarctica and listened to scientists down there talking about it. That was in 1995, and I could not think of a plot for such a story. Then in 2000 the results from the Greenland ice coring project showed that the Younger Dryas had begun in only three years, meaning the global climate had changed from warm and wet to dry and cold that quickly. That finding was a big part of the impetus behind the coining of the term “abrupt climate change.” By 2002 the National Academies Press had published a book exploring this new term and assembling a good explanation for the drop into the Younger Dryas; it appeared that the Gulf Stream had stalled, because the North Atlantic had gotten much less salty very quickly as the result of one of the massive outflows of fresh meltwater that were occasionally pouring off the melting top of the great Arctic ice cap. These same studies pointed out that the North Atlantic was now freshening again, because of the rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice cap.
Major climate change in three years: that was a story that could be told, I thought. But while writing the novel I found that even in this crisis, abrupt on geological scales, events still resolved to individual humans living variants of ordinary life. There would be storms and freezes, power outages, and the threat of food shortages; these would make those years expensive and inconvenient, and give them a tinge of dread, it seemed (like now); but doing something about it was going to consist mostly of political action in Washington and elsewhere, and in geo-engineering projects of doubtful effectiveness and safety, which
would be executed by some people, but not everyone. Beyond that, it would be daily life of a slightly different sort, and seldom more. I still wasn't finding the crisis. And the movie
The Day after Tomorrow
showed me what can happen if you choose to represent climate change only as crisis. I wanted something better than that.
So in
Science in the Capital
, and again in
2312
, I kept coming up against the lack of a break to something radically different. It seemed as if the story of climate change was going to have to be told as some kind of daily life, which in narrative terms meant it could not be a thriller. Thrillers live in crisis mode, and anything extraneous is a category error. A review calling
Science in the Capital
“a slow-motion thriller” made me smile, because there can be no such thing. If a thriller stops to portray the protagonist frolicking in the snow with his toddler son, or changing his diapers, that's a blatant genre break. It's true I wanted those, and wrote in as many as I could. At the time I thought of it as just fooling around, giving the novel surprises, but maybe it was also a stab at representing how it might feel to live during climate change. The biggest crisis in the story is thus not any weather event, but the scientist Frank going through a change of consciousness. For any of us that is always a big crisis.
Now I think that the novel proper has the flexibility and capaciousness to depict any human situation, including ordinary life. That's what the modern novel was created to do, and that capacity never leaves it. It's only when you shrink the novel to the thriller that you run into problems in representing ordinary realities.
GC
âº
It seems to me that the dystopian or apocalyptic side of your work has increased in importance since
Pacific Edge
and the
Mars
trilogy, especially in your most recent novels. In the
Science in the Capital
trilogy our relationship to ecological crisis is much more contingent and haphazard, almost just-in-time. In
Galileo's Dream
âthough we don't find out all that much about the transition between the present and humanity's future on the moons of Saturnâthe strong implication is that this has been a terrible, even tragic history, with great losses. And in your most recent novel,
2312,
we return to something very much like the Accelerando of the
Mars
trilogy, only now the environmental problems of Earth have not been dealt with at allâleaving Earth a “planet of sadness,” home to starving billions. Does this reflect an increasing pessimism about the possibilities of the future? Or is something else at work?
KSR
âº
I try to give my novels whatever attitude I think will help them work best. The bleak history sketched in
Galileo's Dream
, for instance, is there because
I needed a reason for people from the far future to be interfering in Galileo's life, and what I came up with was a history so bad that some future people would want to erase and rewrite if they could. I'm always working like that, so I don't feel my own sense of the future is well expressed by my books. Indeed in
Green Mars
I had the West Antarctic Ice Sheet slip off into the sea, just in order to create so much chaos that it would seem more plausible that Mars could successfully secede from Terran rule. That's not pessimism, but just a somewhat brutal focus on making plots seem realistic.
I do have a constantly shifting sense of what the future will “most likely bring,” like everyone else. And I am still very interested in writing about utopian futures. How to express that interest changes over time, and in the wake of previous efforts.