Authors: Gerry Canavan
M. T. Anderson,
Feed
(2002). Dystopian cyberpunk novel set amid widespread pollution, ocean acidification, mass infertility, and even the replacement of natural clouds (which can no longer form) with artificial Cloudsâ¢.
Isaac Asimov,
The Gods Themselves
(1972). One of Asimov's most technically sophisticated novels; the narrative concerns a free energy machine called the Electron Pump, which, alas, is too good to be true. Although he is not commonly thought of as an ecological writer, ecological themes appear across Asimov's work in
such texts as
Foundation's Edge
(1982) and
Robots and Empire
(1985), discussed in the introduction, as well as in such texts as
The Caves of Steel
(1953), which converts Asimov's lifelong struggle with agoraphobia into a vision of immense domed cities in which no one would
ever
have to go outside. In the Foundation series we also have the city-planet Trantor, a fully urbanized planet with no natural spaces left to speak of; only in later entries in the series do we begin to get a sense of the unimaginable influx of food and fuel that would be required, on a daily basis, to make such a situation possible.
Margaret Atwood,
Oryx and Crake
(2003). The first entry in Atwood's MaddAddam series finds a mad scientist crunching the numbers and determining that it would be best to eliminate
Homo sapiens
in favor of an upgraded and improved Humanity 2.0. After reciting a cavalcade of long horrors both historical and futuristic, the novel more or less dares us to agree with him.
Paolo Bacigalupi,
The Windup Girl
(2009). Set in Thailand after a cascading series of global calamities including Peak Oil, climate change, and plagues and food shortages caused by genetically modified foods; the Western multinationals are finally ready to start global capitalism up again by raiding the independent kingdom's seed bank. Also of definite interest: Bacigalupi's short fiction (collected in
Pump Six and Other Stories
[2006]) and
Ship Breaker
(2010).
J. G. Ballard,
The Drowned World
(1962). Really, one could start with almost any of the apocalyptic and entropic disasters that appear across the early Ballardâ
The Wind from Nowhere
(1961),
The Burning World
(1964),
The Crystal World
(1966), etc.âbut this novel's rise of the sea levels and the spreading of the tropical zone as far north as England perhaps speaks most directly to our contemporary concerns about the future. Another noteworthy Ballard novel for students of ecological
SF
is
High Rise
(1975), which sees civilization utterly break down and all historical progress reverse in a modern apartment building once the lights go out.
Iain M. Banks,
Excession
(1996). The novel offers an extended rumination on what Banks called the “Outside Context Problem,” in which a society encounters something so wildly outside its historical-cultural-ideological assumptions that it is barely able to contemplate the situation in the first place. This is, to say the least, a very useful frame for thinking of the way modernity encounters ecological crises like climate change.
John Barnes,
Mother of Storms
(1994). A massive hurricane, caused by runaway climate change after methane release, breaks down into a series of even-more catastrophic global storms.
Greg Bear,
Blood Music
(1985). The nanobots get out.
Edward Bellamy,
Looking Backward
(1888). One of the key improvements in the Boston of one hundred years hence is the elimination of smokestacks and smog, as well as pollution from the Charles River.
J. D. Beresford, “The Man Who Hated Flies” (1929). A perfect insecticide isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Alfred Bester, “Adam and No Eve” (1941). In this remarkable Quiet Earth fantasy, an inventor's novel rocket fuel causes a chain reaction during the test flight that kills all life on Earth. Now the last man, the inventor commits suicide in the ocean so that the bacteria in his body can jumpstart a new cycle of life.
Lauren Beukes,
Zoo City
(2010). The inseparability of the human and the animal is staged in this inventive response to Philip Pullman's
His Dark Materials
trilogy, which sees human
beings receive a mystical animal “familiar” whenever they commit a sufficiently
grievous sin.
James Blish, “Surface Tension” (1952). Microscopic humans, descended from a crashed colony ship from Earth, befriend paramecia and battle predators under the ocean of an aquatic alien world.
T. C. Boyle,
A Friend of the Earth
(2000). Novel following a convicted ecoterrorist, split between before (1980s) and after (2020s) an ecological collapse.
Ray Bradbury,
The Martian Chronicles
(1950). Bradbury's epic of Martian colonization includes within itself a strongly elegiac sense of what has been lost in the process. Few stories in the book (or anywhere else, for that matter) are as powerful as “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which depicts the automatic functioning and ultimate breakdown of a computerized house years after a nuclear war has killed off all the people.
David Brin,
Earth
(1990). The novelâfocused on an experiment with black holes that goes awry and threatens all life on the planetâdepicts human civilization at an inflection point between growth and final catastrophe, as ecological disaster and energy crisis reach their shared climax. Also of interest is Brin's long-running
Uplift
series (1980sâ1990s), which concerns great apes and dolphins raised to sapience by human beings.
Max Brooks,
World War Z
(2006). One of the more innovative entries in the zombie craze of the 2000s, Brooks's novel depicts the catastrophic consequences of a zombie outbreak on both governments and ecosystems.
John Brunner,
The Sheep Look Up
(1972). Formally modeled on John Dos Passos's
U.S.A.
trilogy, this innovative but utterly devastating work excoriates the denialism with which U.S. capitalism encounters the consequences of its own poisonous methods of production.
Stand on Zanzibar
(1968), about overpopulation, is also excellent.
Tobias S. Bucknell,
Arctic Rising
(2012). International intrigue amid rising sea levels and global warming.
Louis McMaster Bujold,
Barrayar
(1991). Harsh environmental conditions and lingering radiation from a nuclear war have led to a social tradition of killing “mutie” babies born with birth defects.
Kenneth Burke, “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision” (1971). Burke's scathing indictment of the logic of progress deploys science fictional tropes about pollution, sustainability, and lunar colonization: “When you find that, within forty years, a great and almost miraculously handsome lake has been transformed into a cesspool, don't ask how such destruction might be undone. That would be to turn backâand we must fare ever forward. Hence, with your eyes fixed on the beacon of the future, rather ask yourselves how, if you but polluted the lake ten times as much, you might convert it into some new source of energy. Thus, conceivably, you might end up by using the rotted waters as a new fuel. Or, even better, they might be made to serve as raw material for some new kind of poison, usable either as a pesticide or to protect against unwholesome political ideals.”
Octavia E. Butler,
Parable of the Sower
(1994). In Butler's near-future America nearly everything has gone wrong, from the disastrous neoliberal privatization of necessary governmental functions to global warming to widespread poverty. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, puts her hope in that great science fictional dream, the colonization
of the stars, founding a religion based upon this supposed destiny for humankind. The sequel,
Parable of the Talents
(1998) significantly complicates this ambition by revealing it as a kind of apolitical (perhaps even antipolitical) quietism. Also of interest is Butler's wonderfully ambiguous
Xenogenesis
series from the 1980s, in which an advanced alien race from the stars intervenes, following a nuclear war, to both interbreed with humanity and convert the entire Earth into one of their spaceships.
Samuel Butler,
Erewhon
(1872). Pastoral utopia in which all machines have been destroyed.
Ernest Callenbach,
Ecotopia
(1975). The novel that coined the term,
Ecotopia
imagines an alternative to U.S. social and environmental collapse located in a politically separatist Pacific Northwest, whose revolutionary institutions have been inspired both by ecological science and by Native American cultural practices.
Karel apek,
War with the Newts
(1936). Äapek's satire of imperialism and labor exploitation takes an apocalyptic turn in its final third, as the Newts transform the planet to their liking, sinking the continents so they have room to expand.
Orson Scott Card,
Ender's Game
series (1985â). While the first book in the novel takes place almost exclusively within an anthropocentric context, later entries imagine alternative environments and ecologies, as well as the sorts of subjectivities that might be produced under radically different modes of life (such as hive consciousness). Ender's crime rises even above the level of genocide: he exterminates the biosphere of an entire planet.
Terry Carr (ed.),
Dream's Edge
(1980). Anthology of ecological
SF
including Herbert, Le Guin, Niven, and Sturgeon, among others.
Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
(1962). Carson notably chooses to begin her work not with scientific data nor with political polemic but a science fictional “Fable for Tomorrow.”
Angela Carter,
The Passion of New Eve
(1977). Race war, sadomasochism, and rape culture in a decadent, disintegrating United States.
Suzy McKee Charnas,
The Vampire Tapestry
(1980). Charnas's translation of the classic horror genre into a science fictional register imagines the vampire as a highly specialized predator operating in the very particular ecosystem that is human culture. Also of interest: her
Holdfast Chronicles
(1974â99).
Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008). Transcendent novella in which a race of argon-breathing artificial life forms, living in some sort of sealed canister, confront the inevitable and tragic end of their civilization.
John Christopher,
The Death of Grass
(1956). A virus kills off a huge swath of Earth's plant biomass, including varieties of grass (like wheat and barley), leading to massive upheaval and starvation.
Arthur C. Clarke, “The Forgotten Enemy” (1949). A new ice age comes to London. Clarke's famous 2001 series of novels may also be of note, given its interests in space colonization and in evolution.
J. M. Coetzee,
The Lives of Animals
(2001). Philosophical-ethical treatise on vegetarianism and justice for animals premised on the cognitively estranging notion that animalsâdespite the way we treat thenâhave a self-evident right to life and safety.
Suzanne Collins,
The Hunger Games
(2008). Teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death in gladiatorial games in a post-apocalyptic America.
John M. Corbett, “The Black River” (1934). A massive oil spill destroys Los Angeles.
Michael Crichton,
Jurassic Park
(1990). Science brings back the dinosaurs for an amusement park. What could possibly go wrong?
Daniel DeFoe,
Robinson Crusoe
(1719). This is the unacknowledged template for any number of future post-apocalyptic narratives of survival after the collapse of civilization, beginning with the truly prodigious amount of material Crusoe is able to salvage from his wrecked ship.
Samuel R. Delany, “The Star Pit” (1967). An extended mediation on the confrontation with limit, this novella takes as its central metaphor an “ecologarium”âthe outsized, space operatic answer to a child's ant farm. Apocalyptic themesâboth ecological and culturalâare also quite important in
Dhalgren
(1975),
Triton
(1976), and
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
(1984).
Don DeLillo,
White Noise
(1985). Airborne toxic event.
Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (1987). Agriculture.
Philip K. Dick,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968). Largely left out of the novel's adaptation as
Blade Runner
in 1982 is its intense focus on animals as an object of both empathy and desire. Among Dick's less-known novels can also be found
The Crack in Space
(1966), which depicts the first black president's attempt to save his badly overpopulated, economically depressed Earth by invading the apparently empty one in the universe next door.
Grace Dillon (ed.),
Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction
(2012).
This collection of “Native slipstream” speaks directly to debates over indigenous science and sustainable culture practice, as well as to native visions of the apocalypseâan apocalypse which, as Dillon notes in her introduction, is commonly thought of as having already taken place at the moment of North America's disastrous first contact with Europe.
Thomas Disch,
334
(1972). Overpopulation has caused shortages and made birth control compulsory in this novel of 2020s New York. See also
The Genocides
(1965), discussed in this volume, and the ecologically themed anthology Disch edited,
The Ruins of Earth
(1971), which includes stories from Dick, Vonnegut, Ballard, and du Maurier.
Harold Donitz, “A Visitor from the Twentieth Century” (1928). A lack of cars makes the future a utopia after oil runs out around 1975.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Comet” (1920). The end of the world briefly seems like it will, at least, include an end to white supremacy. Briefly.