Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age
MICHAEL PAGE
In the 1974 anthology Before the Golden Age, Isaac Asimov writes of The Man Who Awoke series of stories by Laurence Manning: “In the 1970s, everyone is aware of, and achingly involved in, the energy crisis. Manning was aware of it forty years ago, and because he was, I was, and so, I’m sure, were many thoughtful young science fiction readers.”1 At the time of Asimov’s writing, ecology as a topic in the cultural conversation and in SF was on an upswing. Books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, Gordon Rattary Taylor’s The Biological Time Bomb, Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age, Frank Herbert’s New World or No World, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth were reaching wide audiences. In SF, several anthologies focused on ecological issues, including Fred Pohl’s Nightmare Age, Tom Disch’s The Ruins of Earth, Terry Carr’s Dream’s Edge, Harry Harrison’s The Year 2000, and Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd’s The Wounded Planet—as did numerous novels, notably Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive, Philip Wylie’s The End of the Dream, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, and films like Soylent Green, Silent Running, Logan’s Run, Phase IV, and Zardoz. Carr remarks in the introduction to Dream’s Edge that “concern for the problems and prospects of our earthly environment come naturally to writers and readers of science fiction—it is as intrinsic to the genre as knowledge of physics, chemistry, the workings of politics and human psychology.”2 Herbert similarly writes in the introduction to The Wounded Planet that ecology was the “hot gospel blasting at us from all sides … ecology as a phenomenon reflects a genuine underlying malaise…. The species knows its travail. This shines through every bit of ecological science fiction I have ever read.”3 For Herbert, SF writers and ecologists are fellow travelers.
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.
The first tale, “City,” tells of the dissolution of cities and the movement of humanity to a rural existence. The dogs find the very concept of the city unfathomable; doggish economists and sociologists regard it as “an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well.”21 With the establishment of atomic power and hydroponics there is no longer need for urban centers or farms, reflections of the ideal of the technological future that was at the time being packaged in Popular Mechanics and similar publications.22 This in turn allows for the dispersal of families out of cities to rural acreages where they live in pastoral tranquillity. Improved transportation via “the family plane and helicopter” make travel easier and convenient and thus facilitate this new pastoral cultural formation. The story introduces the first in the line of Websters (notice the similarity to Manning’s Winters), John J. Webster, who is among the last to abandon the city. Ironically, the city becomes a sanctuary for displaced farmers who have moved into the abandoned houses after their farms have collapsed. Simak here illustrates the economic and social fallout that any new cultural formation will necessitate.
The second tale, “Huddling Place,” set in the second decade of the twenty-second century, involves Dr. Thomas Webster, John J.’s grandson. By now humanity has fully adapted to the rural, isolated life. But it comes with a cost. Contact with Martians has taken place, and Thomas Webster, an expert in Martian brain physiology, is close friends with Juwain, a Martian philosopher on the verge of an insight that will alter the consciousness of both human and Martian. They communicate regularly through televisor technology that anticipates today’s Internet. Service robots take care of most human needs, leading to further isolation: “For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend theater or hear a concert or browse in a library half-way around the world. Could transact business one might need to transact without rising from one’s chair.”23 Webster suffers from acute agoraphobia, and when Juwain requires an emergency brain operation that only Webster is qualified to do, Webster is unable to overcome his fears and take the trip to Mars. As a consequence of Webster’s inaction, Juwain dies. The implication is that Juwain’s discovery would have led humanity to a more balanced, ecologically sound existence, and thus opened the door for universal fulfillment. Thus Simak explores the possible consequences of isolated existence facilitated by technologies—technologies, it is worth noting, that are now commonplace.
The next three tales—“Census,” “Desertion,” and “Paradise”—show humanity’s gradual migration to Jupiter and transformation into another form, which is condemned as a retreat from the universal fulfillment implied by Juwain’s lost insight. The interstitial material for “Paradise” is important. The dog editor writes:
Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more that pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor. So far its lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character.24
With the sixth tale, “Hobbies,” humanity has mostly abandoned Earth, leaving it to the dogs. The dogs live, as the previous story suggested, in a pastoral paradise. In the prefatory note to “Hobbies,” the editor raises the question: “If Man had taken a different path, might he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog?”25 This is an important subtle critique, not only mocking anthropocentric narratives of evolutionary history but suggesting that the dogs’ pastoral social order is a viable alternative to the mechanistic civilization of twentieth-century technological man. Ironically, however, the dogs are embedded in a technological civilization left them by humanity. Robots serve as their “hands” and caretakers. Yet this allows the dogs to maintain their doggishness and pursue a balanced (innocent?) existence. The dogs have formed what Jenkins calls “a civilization based on the brotherhood of animals—on the psychic understanding and perhaps eventual communication and intercourse of interlocking worlds. A civilization of the mind and of understanding … a groping after truth, and the groping is in a direction that man passed by without a glance.”26 In his recent book, The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues that, “the ecological thought is interconnectedness in the fullest and deepest sense.”27 Simak here said much the same thing seventy years earlier. This animal society is realized in the seventh tale, “Aesop,” where the robot Jenkins becomes the teacher and storyteller for the dogs and their animal brethren, who are now completely free of humanity. The interrelation of all animals is again a central topic: “Man never thought of one great animal society, never dreamed of skunk and coon and bear going down the road of life together, planning with one another, helping one another—setting aside all natural differences.”28 However, harmony is soon lost when a fox kills a chicken. A crisis ensues, but is curtailed from a threat from the outside, from another dimension, and the dogs must leave Earth for a parallel world, leaving it to mutated ants. The interstitial prefaces throughout City suggest the dog utopia is restored in this alternate world.
Brian Aldiss notes the significance of City for investigating “new relationships among living things,”29 while Thomas Clareson calls it the key work of “criticism of modern urban-industrial society,”30 observing that “not one of Simak’s immediate contemporaries condemned Western society so harshly; no one consigned humanity to oblivion…. He created a credible, nonhuman world capable of sustaining metaphors regarding the human condition.”31 This critique of technological society specifically conveys a pastoral emphasis, as Darko Suvin has pointed out. According to Suvin, the pastoral’s “imaginary framework of a world without money-economy, state apparatus, and depersonalizing urbanization allows it to isolate, as in a laboratory, two human motivations: erotics and power-hunger.”32 Simak himself said in a later interview: “At the time I wrote City I felt there were other, greater values than those we find in technology…. The city is an anachronism we’d be better off without.”33 Yet despite Simak’s seeming indictment of technology, it should be stressed that the doggish utopia is only possible because of the technological innovations of humankind that have been left to them: sustainable and unlimited power, robot servants, and the very ability to speak and thus to tell tales. As Jill Milling observes, “Though Simak’s fables appear to constitute a simple indictment of human destructiveness, the irony provided by the frame narrative and by the qualified resolutions of conflicts in this episodic narrative creates a moral ambiguity characteristic of many science fiction tales.”34
Like Manning, Simak takes a broad evolutionary perspective, but with an alternative trajectory: emphasizing balance and harmony in nature rather than technological development, and shifting the lens from humankind to other species. Simak is usually identified as SF’s most rural, pastoral writer, and some critics have disparaged his later work as too conservative and overly sentimental. But in City, Simak offers an alternative critique to the urban, techno-futurism of much SF and much SF criticism, and it remains an important moment in ecological SF.
APOCALYPSE
The second major mode of ecological thought in SF is the apocalyptic, which generally involves a widespread destruction of human civilization, but which also often works on a small-scale level of destruction of an insular group or ecosystem. While much SF explores the notion of human evolutionary progress, many stories examine the consequences of human destructiveness and species annihilation. The apocalyptic mode in SF is central to the early development of the genre, from Cousin de Grainville’s technological, Christian apocalypse The Last Man to the secular apocalypses of Mary Shelley—the micro-apocalypse of Frankenstein and the macro of her own The Last Man. Wells, of course, introduced the evolutionary apocalypse in several of his quintessential scientific romances, such as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and The Food of the Gods. The apocalyptic tradition seems to me to break down into two modes: the pastoral-elegiac, which looks back upon a lost civilization but also often posits a new beginning; and the satiric-ironic, which imagines the end of humanity within the evolutionary saga and ironically reflects on human folly. To use Wells as a marker, we could, perhaps, consider The Time Machine, which is certainly the quintessential evolutionary SF story, as also the quintessential elegiac apocalypse for its meditation on the waning of the human species—whereas the insular apocalypse of The Island of Doctor Moreau or the near-miss Martian invasion of The War of the Worlds might both best fit within the satiric-ironic sub-mode. Gary K. Wolfe’s five stages of action in the apocalyptic narrative are useful for considering both Greener Than You Think and Earth Abides: “(1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world.”35
Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think, first published in 1947, is a consummate example of the satiric-ironic apocalypse, bringing into question humankind’s ethic of scientific innovation, consumerism, capitalism, and power. It engages with the possible threats of bioengineering and what could possibly go wrong when we manipulate the environment. Following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, SF was exploring the ecological implications of nuclear warfare; in Greener Than You Think, Moore showed that the coming doom might not come from the bomb, but from some other form of catastrophic technology. In his study of the secular apocalypse in literature, Terminal Visions, W. Warren Wagar calls the novel significant for depicting “the sense of man’s helplessness before nature raging out of control.”36 Initially, it reads like Wells’s The Food of the Gods (which starts as satire before shifting to Wells’s utopian agenda) before echoing The War of the Worlds, then ending bitterly with no hope for humanity, let alone all other life, as the grass covers the entire planet. Much of the novel develops into a satire of contemporary politics, both at home and abroad, anticipating the follies of the Cold War. Since the tone is generally satiric and witty—as Sam Moskowitz put it, “told with broad catastrophic sweep”37—the black humor somewhat masks the fact that this novel is as dark in its implications as Thomas Disch’s much more somber The Genocides.
In the novel an itinerant salesman, Albert Weener, interviews Josephine Francis, inventor of a process called the Metamorphizer that transforms the genetic structure of plants. Francis’s hope is to increase the fecundity of the harvest, thus eliminating hunger and poverty: “It will change the face of the world, Weener. No more used-up areas, no more frantic scrambling for the few bits of naturally rich ground, no more struggle to get artificial fertilizers to worn-out soil in the face of ignorance and poverty…. Inoculate the plants with the Metamorphizer—and you have a crop fatter than Iowa’s or the Ukraine’s best. The whole world will teem with abundance.”38 Weener sees a moneymaking opportunity, and before Dr. Francis can finish her laboratory fail-safes, he applies the substance to a barren lawn in the San Fernando Valley. The sparse devil grass instantly begins to grow out of control, and Los Angeles is soon absorbed by an unrelenting patch of grass. Weener later comes face to face with the green colossus: “As I stood there with fascinated attention, the thing moved and kept on moving; not in one place, but in thousands, not in one direction, but toward all points of the compass. It writhed and twisted in nightmarish unease, expanding, extending, increasing; spreading, spreading, spreading. Its movement, by human standards, was slow, but it was so monstrous to see this great mass of verdure move at all that it appeared to be going with express speed, inexorably enveloping everything in its path.”39
Dr. Francis is called before a congressional hearing by the “Committee to Investigate Dangerous Vegetation,”40 and here Moore’s political satire is at its finest. Francis works for a solution, but the grass spreads across the continent, and war soon breaks out between the United States and Russia as the grass begins to gain footholds around the globe. As the narrative continues, Weener invests in a food substitute, which becomes essential to survival as the grass ravages farmland, and he becomes a wealthy magnate. His abject acquisitiveness and brutal disregard for the victims of the disaster he has caused is a biting attack on industrial capitalism and the quest for power. Weener is certainly one of the most despicable lead characters in all of SF, but a fitting foil for Moore’s satiric purposes. Eventually, as the entire planet is consumed by the grass, Dr. Francis’s efforts to find an antidote have failed, and Weener, on his extravagant yacht, filled with nubile women, sails the ocean, until the grass begins to take hold there as well. The black comedy of the final line is devastating: “The Grass has found another seam in the deck.”41 Moore’s satiric vision anticipates the ironic apocalypses of J. G. Ballard and forces us to take a stern look at contemporary values that threaten the very sustainability of our planet.
George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides is an elegiac apocalypse depicting the end of the modern era when a disease strikes down all but a small fraction of the human population, leaving all other flora and fauna intact, until the lack of humanity begins to alter the ecosphere. It has been tremendously influential upon works such as Stephen King’s The Stand, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, and David Brin’s The Postman, among others—and, as Gary K. Wolfe notes, it is “one of the most fully realized accounts in all science fiction of a massive catastrophe and the evolution toward a new culture.”42 It is fairly obvious that Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” looms behind Earth Abides; however, Wolfe notes that “the sources of the novel seem to lie less in the tradition of science fiction catastrophes than in Stewart’s own abiding concern with natural forces which seem almost consciously directed against human society.”43 Prior to Earth Abides, Stewart’s commercially and critically successful novels Storm (1941) and Fire (1948) examined natural forces acting beyond human control.
The central character, Isherwood “Ish” Williams, a young graduate student studying ecology, is isolated in the mountains when the plague strikes. Bitten by a rattlesnake, Ish comes down the trail to the nearest dwelling for help only to find it empty. He finds a newspaper that gives details of the catastrophe:
The headlines told him what was most essential. The United States from coast to coast was overwhelmed by the attack of some new and unknown disease of unparalleled rapidity of spread, and fatality. Estimates for various cities, admittedly little more than guesses, indicated that between 25 percent and 35 percent of the population had already died…. In its symptoms the disease was like a kind of super-measles. No one was sure in what part of the world it had originated; aided by airplane travel, it had sprung up almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine.44
As an ecologist and a student of nature, Ish has an observer’s temperament, and thus, rather than panic and fall into despair, he determines to travel across the country to see the extent of the changes wrought upon humankind and the subsequent environmental consequences. This is indicative of what Wolfe posits as the “journey through the wasteland,” where the protagonist must witness the aftermath of the catastrophe. As an ecologist, Ish is particularly well-suited to this role of witness: “Even though the curtain had been rung down on man, here was the opening of the greatest of all dramas for a student such as he. During thousands of years man had impressed himself upon the world. Now man was gone, certainly for a while, perhaps forever. Even if some survivors were left, they would be a long time in again obtaining supremacy. What would happen to the world and its creatures without man? That he was left to see!”45 And what Ish discovers is that the ecology begins to change dramatically: the various animals and plants dependent upon and cultivated by humankind die out; they can only survive by humanity’s stewardship; this includes such surprising creatures as rats and ants, both of which suffer massive die-offs because of overpopulation, since their populations aren’t checked by human practices. This illustrates the extent to which humankind has shaped, shepherded, and cultivated the environment. Since all is interconnected, to eliminate humanity would fundamentally alter the ecology of the entire system. Ish realizes that new adaptations will occur and additional die-offs will open new niches; the evolutionary process begins to reassert itself throughout the biosphere.
As the novel progresses, Ish encounters other survivors and forges a relationship with an African American woman named Em. Returning to the West Coast, they form a community, raising families and adapting to change as the infrastructure of civilization begins to break down. Ish hopes to preserve some of the qualities of the lost era, but the children are adapting to another mode of existence. His hopes are shattered when a disease brought by an outsider into their community wipes out many, including his son Joey, who had showed a penchant for reading and contemplative thought. This signals the end of the old ways. In the final section, as Ish comes to the end of his life, he is dubbed the “Last American,” and we poignantly witness the end of our era, though we are left with a rather melancholy promise of something new. Though Earth Abides has pastoral qualities much like Simak’s, the tone of this apocalyptic novel is decidedly more elegiac, perhaps because it is not about the transformation of the species but about the end of modern civilization.
The apocalyptic environmentalism of Moore and Stewart warns us against ecological complacency and self-assured and unexamined species triumphalism. Both Moore and Stewart remind us that apocalypse might be just around the corner, as we eat up the planet, poison and degrade its biosystems, and put into jeopardy the continued sustainability of the human species, and most others. Though these apocalyptic narratives function within the same evolutionary paradigm as Manning’s The Man Who Awoke and Simak’s City, they leave us less assured that the ecological challenges ahead will be manageable, resolvable, or survivable. Although Manning and Simak show us in their evolutionary narratives that change itself is inevitable, they are far less pessimistic in their long-term vision of the evolutionary saga, whether universal fulfillment is achieved by human, canine, or some yet evolved species. The struggle between an apocalyptic pessimism and an evolutionary optimism is a defining characteristic of SF, and one of the reasons why these golden age ecological narratives, be they evolutionary or apocalyptic, are still relevant to the present. As Farah Mendlesohn has importantly noted, “Science fiction is less a genre … than an ongoing discussion,” an “argument with the universe.”46 The combined argument of evolution and apocalypse, optimism and pessimism, has the potential to coalesce in the reader and facilitate transformational ecological thought. It is in that struggle between optimism and pessimism, dramatized by these narratives and others like them, that we can begin to do the critical work of ecological transformation.
Together, these four books not only show historically the engagement with ecological challenges by Golden Age SF writers, but they still offer valuable reflections and insights on ecological questions for today, as we edge closer to ecological crisis, and provide avenues for fresh ecological thinking, through the persistent struggle between optimism and pessimism. The importance of ecological thinking to our contemporary crisis is self-evident. SF provides us with a methodology to begin formulating alternatives. Lawrence Buell asks “whether planetary life will remain viable for most of the Earth’s inhabitants without major changes in the way we live now.”47 Studying SF (and more broadly literature) using an ecological lens can perhaps better prepare us for impending environmental change. Glen Love points to a possible future for literary studies: “Literary studies today may find new purpose in redirecting human consciousness, through our teaching and scholarship, to a full consideration of our place in an undismissible but increasingly threatened natural world. Paradoxically, taking nature seriously in this way—embracing the social within the natural—may provide us with our best hope of recovering the disappearing social role of literary criticism.”48 Ecocritic Patrick Murphy concurs: “How might the long-term attitude of our students and other members of our culture toward environmental protection and restoration be affected by the teaching of works … that are devoted to nature and environmental topics? The ideas taught today can become the practice of tomorrow, but only if they are taught today.”49 This is a call for a more ecologically oriented literary criticism, a call for a deeper engagement with the literature that examines the human animal in the fullness of its environment—which is to say, a call for all of us to read, study, and teach SF.
Notes
1. Isaac Asimov, ed., Before the Golden Age (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 344.
2. Terry Carr, ed., Dream’s Edge (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books), 1.
3. Frank Herbert, introduction to The Wounded Planet, ed. Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd (New York: Bantam, 1973), xi–xvii.
4. Brian Stableford, “Science Fiction and Ecology,” in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 129.
5. Ibid., 140.
6. See Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).
7. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xx.
8. Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 1.
9. Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 56–57.
10. Everett F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), 634–35.
11. The last story, “The Simple Way” (“Trouble with Ants”) appeared in Fantastic Adventures in 1951.
12. I have discussed this in my book The Evolutionary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). See, among other studies, John J. Pierce, When World Views Collide: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989); Nicholas Ruddick, The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009); Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). A good introduction to modern science is Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
13. Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Seven Beauties, 90.
14. See Michael Ruse’s The Evolution Wars (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO, 2000) and Monad to Man: The Idea of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
15. Wells’s fiction appeared in every issue of Amazing Stories from its inception in April 1926 to August 1928.
16. Everett F. Bleiler, “Laurence Manning,” in Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, ed. Douglas Ivison (Detroit: Gale, 2002), 181.
17. Laurence Manning, The Man Who Awoke (New York: Ballantine, 1975), 20–21.
18. Ibid., 25.
19. Ibid., 45.
20. Ibid., 71.
21. Clifford D. Simak, City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 1.
22. See Gregory Benford and the Editors of Popular Mechanics, eds., The Wonderful Future That Never Was (New York: Hearst Books, 2010).
23. Simak, City, 37.
24. Ibid., 96–97.
25. Ibid., 121.
26. Ibid., 151.
27. Morton, Ecological Thought, 7. Emphasis mine.
28. Simak, City, 166.
29. Brian W. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 225.
30. Thomas D. Clareson, Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period (1926–1970) (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 45.
31. Ibid., 48.
32. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 9.
33. Quoted in Bruce Shaw, “Clifford Simak’s City (1952): The Dogs’ Critique (and Others’),” Extrapolation 46, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 498.
34. Jill Milling, “The Ambiguous Animal: Evolution of the Beast-Man in Scientific Creation Myths,” in The Shape of the Fantastic, ed. Oleana H. Saciuk (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 105.
35. Gary K. Wolfe, “The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End,” In The End of the World, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 8.
36. W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 187.
37. Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1966), 425.
38. Ward Moore, Greener Than You Think (New York: Crown, 1985), 3.
39. Ibid., 53.
40. Ibid., 90.
41. Ibid., 322.
42. Wolfe, “Remaking of Zero,” 16.
43. Ibid., 16.
44. George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 12–13.
45. Ibid., 24.
46. Farah Mendlesohn, “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–2.
47. Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, vi.
48. Love, Practical Ecocriticism, 163–64
49. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations, 4.