GERRY CANAVAN
What follows is an annotated list of selected SF works (very broadly defined) that stake out some position on questions of ecological futurity and the environment. Not all of the authors and creators listed necessarily understood themselves to be producing “ecological SF,” and by no means are all of these texts equally recommended from either a political or an aesthetic perspective. All, however, are at least potentially of interest to readers interested in the way SF has both drawn from and influenced ecological thinking and environmentalist politics.
Literature and Nonfiction
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Earth is demolished to build an interstellar highway in this timeless satire of progress, technology, capitalism, bureaucracy, life, the universe, and everything. Adams’s concern for the environment is also evident in his elegiac Last Chance to See (1989), cowritten with Mark Carwadine, on endangered species across the globe.
Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972). Rabbits are people, too.
Chris Adrian, The Children’s Hospital (2006). A hospital must shut its doors and become a completely self-sustaining entity following a global flood in this American magical realist novel.
Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958; Starship in the United States). The novel explores life inside the artificial environment of a generational starship that has lost all memory of its mission or even that it is a spaceship at all. Aldiss fans might also be interested in Hothouse (1962), set on a hot future Earth whose new temperature has caused the entire planet to be completely overrun with plant life, as well as White Mars, or, the Mind Set Free (1999), his quasi-reply to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.
Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidactus (c. 1268–77). One of the earliest SF texts ends with an apocalyptic vision of radical climate change.
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 Clouds™.
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 Ballard—The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Burning World (1964), The Crystal World (1966), etc.—but 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 novel—focused on an experiment with black holes that goes awry and threatens all life on the planet—depicts 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 (1980s–1990s), 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 back—and 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). Čapek’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 (1985–). 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 (1974–99).
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 animals—despite the way we treat then—have 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”—the outsized, space operatic answer to a child’s ant farm. Apocalyptic themes—both ecological and cultural—are 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 apocalypse—an 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.
Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” (1952). The inspiration for the Hitchcock film is, if anything, even more stark and apocalyptic.
Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember (2003). An underground city, founded after the surface became uninhabitable, faces an impending energy crisis.
Harlan Ellison, “A Boy and His Dog” (1969). The ultimate in post-nuclear horror.
Harlan Ellison (ed.), Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). This sequel to the original American New Wave anthology from 1968 marks the sea change in environmental consciousness that happened in those years; the first collection contains basically no stories about the environment, while the second contains multiple ecological stories, including the novella version of Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest.
Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd (eds.), The Wounded Planet (1974). Only one of a dozen anthologies Elwood put out with ecological and apocalyptic thematic focuses during the period, among them The Other Side of Tomorrow (1973), Omega (1973), Crisis (1974), and Dystopian Visions (1975).
E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909). An ur-text for the next century of stories about technological collapse. The people inhabiting Forster’s dystopia are hopelessly alienated from the natural world on which, they come to discover, their lives still depend.
Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (1959). Life in Florida at the dawn of the “thousand year night,” after a one-day nuclear war.
Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). Still the best known of the “Spaceship Earth” texts that combine a call for better technocratic management of Earth’s resources with a science-fictional reimagining of the planetary ecosystem as a starship.
Sally Miller Gearheart, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1980). Ecofeminist lesbian utopian fantasy that takes place after men (and patriarchy) have been confined to the cities.
David Gerrold, The War against the Chtorr (1983). Alien invaders seek to terraform Earth for settlement, while we’re still on it.
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome (1996). Medicine meets indigenous knowledge practices in this postcolonial critique of Western science.
William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981). The story marks the shift away from (or perhaps the final grave site of) the glittering techno-utopias of the Golden Age, which appear within the story as ghosts quite literally haunting a grittier, dirtier future much more like the Junk City we’ve actually come to inhabit.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1914). Among the innovations in this influential feminist utopia text is the willingness of the Herlanders to rationally control their population growth. The increased importance of explicitly eugenic themes in the sequel, With Her in Ourland (1916), makes it uncomfortable reading today.
Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day (1997). Quakers in space. Interconnected stories set before, during, and after the voyage of a generational starship to a harsh new planet.
Nicola Griffith, Slow River (1995). Biopunk noir with large narrative interest in water purity and treatment.
Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (eds.), Tomorrow, Inc.: SF Stories about Big Business (1976). The overarching attitude of this anthology of stories about capitalism run amuck is nicely suggested by the dedication the book bears: “To Fred Pohl, who tried to warn us.”
Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The novel that brought us Soylent Green (1973).
Jean Hegland, Into the Forest (1998). Teenage girls living alone in an isolated forest home try to ride out the collapse of civilization.
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). The quintessential novel of interplanetary settlement and revolution gives us the ecological proverb TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965). In addition to its ambitious depiction of a wholly alien ecosystem, Dune ranks among the best allegorizations of U.S. energy policy and Middle East imperialism ever achieved in SF. Also of interest: The Green Brain (1966), which has the human race seeking to exterminate insect life.
Arthur Herzog, Heat (1977). A scientist discovers that the imminent release of the ocean’s CO2 reserves will trigger abrupt, catastrophic climate change, but the government doesn’t want to tell anyone before the next election.
Nalo Hopkinson, “A Habit of Waste” (1999). The anti-ecological practices of modern capitalism reach their apotheosis when people can simply discard their own body and select a new one.
W. H. Hudson, The Crystal Age (1887). Another classic late-nineteenth-century pastoral ambiguous utopia, notable for its near-total rejection of technology and its anticipatory gender politics.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1931). The nightmare of the future retains a “Savage Reservation” as an internal release valve.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005). Critically acclaimed alternate-history narrative of biopolitical exploitation run amuck through the harvesting of human clones for organs—in a world than seems to be in no other way different from ours.
Richard Jefferies, After London, or, Wild England (1885). England returns to the wild after a catastrophe destroys civilization.
Gwyneth Jones, White Queen (1991). Postcolonial reversal of the white, male alien invader narrative template set amid a future of ecological and economic collapse.
Janet Kagan, Mirabile (1991). Environmental troubleshooting on an off-world human colony stocked with genetically engineered life.
Stephen King, Under the Dome (2009). The sudden, inexplicable imposition of an impenetrable dome around a small Maine town—a story King had been trying to make work since the 1970s—highlights questions of sustainability and resource scarcity that have global implications. After all, the atmosphere may be much larger, but the sky is still a dome.
Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, “The Dark Mountain Manifesto” (2009). The joyful apocalypse contained in these “Eight Principles of Uncivilization” is posited as the only possible response to our ongoing “age of ecocide.”
C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants (1958). Wonderful novel, recently rereleased, which pits a capitalist world run by advertising execs against Greens with other plans.
James Howard Kunstler, World Made by Hand (2008). America’s premier Peak Oil doomsayer—see his 2005 predictive nonfiction The Long Emergency—imagines capitalism returning to a mid-1800s craft economy following the age of cheap oil.
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (2005). The handbook for anti-ecological fantasies of technological Singularity. Technology got us into this mess, now it’ll get us out….
Kurd Lasswitz, Two Planets (1897). German novel of a Martian base at the North Pole that likely inspired one of the founding fathers of American SF, Hugo Gernsback.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1973). Le Guin’s “ambiguous utopia” pits a utopia of abundance (rich, fertile Urras) against a utopia of scarcity (its barren moon, Anarres). Near the end of the novel a new possibility is introduced when the ambassador at an interplanetary embassy describes her home world: the ruined planet Earth, whose inhabitants could not adjust their destructive cultural practices until it was far too late. Le Guin’s interest in ecosystem and in the environment extends across her work, playing crucial roles in the development of such works as The Word for World Is Forest (novella 1972, novel 1976) and the earthbound Always Coming Home (1985), set in a future, post-technological California.
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961). Made into very different films by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002), the novel depicts an encounter with absolute, radical otherness, a living ocean. Also of interest: Eden (1959) and The Invincible (1964), in which spaceship crews likewise encounter strange alien species and bizarre ecosystems—even necrosystems—while exploring truly alien worlds.
Edward Lerner, Energized (2012). Solar satellites are our only hope for energy after catastrophic and permanent oil shortage.
Ira Levin, This Perfect Day (1970). Anti-utopian treatment of a society of total technocratic control.
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The first book in Lewis’s Space Trilogy sees first contact with a Martian civilization that doesn’t have the vocabulary to think in the selfish, wasteful manner of humans.
Laurence Manning, The Man Who Awoke (1933). A man from the twentieth century travels into the future by means of prolonged sleep, exploring future civilizations in crisis that are sometimes not happy to see a man from “the height of the false civilization of Waste.” The inevitable spirit of progress toward utopia, however, happily wins out.
D. Keith Mano, The Bridge (1973). Ecodystopia in which the absolute legal equality of all life has left civilization stagnant.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). SF published under the cover of magic realism, the novel (whose review in the New York Times Book Review famously declared it “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race”) explores the destructive influence of the introduction of foreign technology and global trade on the once-isolated, once-Edenic town of Macondo.
George R. R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging (1986). Interconnected stories about a space trader who winds up in charge of Ark, a “seedship” with terraforming and planetary engineering capabilities.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006). Father and son wander the blasted ruins of America scavenging for food after an unspecified apocalypse in what is surely the most depressing book ever to be chosen for Oprah’s Book Club.
Will McCarthy, Bloom (1998). Humanity has retreated to the asteroid belt after a gray goo disaster consumes Earth.
Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse (2011). Short story collection that includes catastrophes of all kinds, from ecological to pandemic to zombie.
Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake (1978). In a post-apocalyptic (but also radically bioengineered) desert America, the bite of the dreamsnake produces drug-like hallucinations in humans.
Bill McKibben, Eaarth (2010). The environmental activist argues that we have already so altered Earth’s natural systems and climate that it would be best to begin thinking of it as another planet altogether.
Judith Merrill, “That Only a Mother” (1948). Nightmarish exploration of the effects of radiation on pregnancy and motherhood.
China Miéville, Embassytown (2011). Miéville’s first foray into space opera, set on a human colony on an alien world at the margins of known space. See also the surreal, dark-comedic Kraken (2010).
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). Monks attempt to retain modern knowledge in the catastrophic dark age centuries following a nuclear war.
Walter M. Miller and Martin H. Greenberg (eds.), Beyond Armageddon (1985). Bracing collection of stories of what happens after the end. Also of interest to students of the apocalypse: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (edited by John Joseph Adams, 2008) and The Apocalypse Reader (edited by Justin Taylor, 2007).
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004). Multiple futures populate the middle sections of this formally innovative novel: cloned human fabricants in a dystopic Brave New World, and then tribal hunters and gatherers in Hawaii in a post-apocalyptic, post-technological future a little further down the line.
Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). This early feminist SF novel, anticipating later developments of the 1970s a decade in advance, is also noteworthy for its imagination of alternative biologies and ecosystems.
L. E. Modesitt Jr., The Forever Hero trilogy (1987–88). Superhero story set after ecological collapse that has its nearly immortal hero seeking to salvage a devastated Earth.
Judith Moffett, The Ragged World (1991). Aliens come and demand we clean up our mess.
Ward Moore, “Lot” (1953) and “Lot’s Daughter” (1954). Deeply disturbing visions of life after nuclear catastrophe in which we will, Moore suggests, finally be free to be the monsters we always were.
Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1516). More’s imaginary island remains the template for utopian form to this day.
William Morris, “News from Nowhere” (1890). Socialist utopia that is both anticapitalist and anti-progress, functioning instead as a primarily agrarian society in tune with nature.
James Morrow, This Is the Way the World Ends (1985). Survivors of a nuclear war are put on trial by the Unadmitted—the time-traveling spirits of the people of the future who will now never exist.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye (1974). Overpopulation novel in which a space-faring humanity encounters an alien culture whose bioforms must either reproduce or die, leading to inevitable cycles of population explosion followed by total civilizational collapse. The Moties (as they are called) have a social archetype called Crazy Eddie who believes that there must be some solution to this cycle of boom and bust; the humans realize with horror that if the Moties were able to get off their home world, “Crazy Eddie” would be right, and furthermore their rapid population cycle would help the Moties quickly overrun the galaxy. Fans of the fantasy genre will also be interested in Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away” (1976), which imagines a magic fantasy world experiencing the shock of Peak Mana.
George Orwell, 1984. Shortage, fascism, and misery after an atomic war.
Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010). One of the more interesting entries in the steampunk subgenre from an ecological perspective, as it begins with the fantasy of advanced machinery without the horrors and limits of the twentieth century, only to have the machines all fail in the end anyway.
Edgar Pangborn, Davy (1965). Science is suppressed centuries after an atomic war. Also recommended: West of the Sun (1953).
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). In this classic work of 1970s ecofeminist SF, a woman incarcerated in a contemporary mental institution travels to two possible futures—a pastoral ecotopia and an urban, technologized dystopia—and comes to realize her actions in the present will determine which one becomes real. Piercy’s excellent He, She, and It (1991) is also notable for its biopunk-inflected exploration of a post-apocalyptic America following an ecological collapse.
Frederik Pohl, The Cool War (1981). “Power piggery” is outlawed in world facing crisis at the end of the fossil fuel age. Pohl also edited an anthology called Nightmare Age (1970), which included work from Paul Ehrlich alongside C. M. Kornbluth, Mack Reynolds, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Heinlein, among others.
Christopher Priest, The Inverted World (1974). Sublime novel in which a city on rails (called “Earth”) must continually move forward in advance of a singularity that has inverted the categories of time and space, wonderfully allegorizing on the levels of both form and content the absolute dependence of civilization on resource management and the natural environment.
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992). In this cult classic continually being rediscovered on college campuses, a talking ape metaphorizes agricultural civilization as an outlandish nineteenth-century flying contraption rolled off a cliff; we think it’s working only because we haven’t crashed yet.
Mack Reynolds, Lagrange 5 (1979). Socialism in a closed environment in high orbit.
Adam Roberts, The Snow (2004). It starts snowing and just won’t stop.
Keith Roberts, The Chalk Giants (1974). Linked stories set in a dark age after the bomb.
Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy (1990s). While one could explore ecological themes almost anywhere in Robinson’s work, from his Three Californias trilogy (1980s) to his Science in the Capital trilogy (2000s), the incomparable Mars trilogy stages these questions in particularly unforgettable form. As the colonization of Mars gets under way, the colonists find themselves in two camps—the Green Martians, progressives who want to develop the planet, and the Red Martians, ecologists and aesthetes who wish to preserve Mars in its original state for its own sake. Robinson’s latest novel, 2312 (2012), is set in a kind of parallel history to the Mars books; here, Mars was maximally terraformed immediately upon settlement, bespeaking in miniature the crisis of a solar system where the problems posed by the Mars books never got solved.
Kim Stanley Robinson (ed.), Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (1994). Short-story anthology, collecting visions of primitivist and anarchist ecotopias.
Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975). Much of this novel is set on the beautiful ecotopia of Whileaway, a planet populated by only women centuries after a plague has killed off all the men—or, at least, that’s how they remember it.
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God (1998). Jesuits in space. First-contact novel that depicts a planet with two sapient races: one a predator, and one
their prey.
José Saramago, Death with Interruptions (2005). Death takes a holiday, leading to the catastrophic breakdown of all human institutions. Saramago’s Blindness (1995), while not focused on the environment per se, is nonetheless a riveting depiction of apocalyptic urban breakdown and radical scarcity following a city-wide epidemic of blindness.
Nat Schachner, “The Revolt of the Scientists II—the Great Oil War” (1933). Heroic scientists invent a device capable of transforming the world’s oil into useless jelly if their anti-monopolistic demands for oil industry reform are not met.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). First published anonymously the same year as her husband Percy’s poem “Ozymandias” (below), Frankenstein, widely acknowledged as the first SF novel, dramatizes man’s overstepping of his natural bounds in a manner that would become paradigmatic for the genre.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818). As discussed in the introduction, this poem templates a thousand visions of decadence and ruin that would follow both in and outside the science fiction genre.
Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957). The last survivors of mankind, living in Australia, await salvation or death, depending on the winds that may or may not blow radioactive fallout from the destroyed Northern Hemisphere southward after the last war.
Robert Silverberg, The World Inside (1971). Overpopulation pressures have forced massive changes to U.S. society.
Clifford Simak, City series (1940s). Earth goes to the dogs.
Dan Simmons, Hyperion series (1989–1999). Space opera detailing a human diaspora following the destruction of Earth during the “Big Mistake,” which frequently touches on ecological themes.
Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean (1986). Feminist ecotopia set among a community of “Sharers” on an ocean planet.
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937). Alongside Stapledon’s career-long fascination with the cosmic drama of life, the universe, and everything, we find here created dozens of alternative forms of sentient life as adapted to alternative planetary niches, from Insectoid Men and Echinoderm Men to Plant Men and intelligent flocks of birds. Also of significance: Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), which details the repeated collapse of human civilization across millions of years and eighteen evolutions of Homo sapiens, and his inventive, tragicomic Sirius (1944), which borrows from Frankenstein to imagine the life of a dog raised to human intelligence.
Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993). Life in an ecotopia, following the apocalyptic crash of the United States, is threatened by invasion from a dystopian theocracy.
Neal Stephenson, Zodiac (1988). Trash, toxic waste, and conspiracy in Boston Harbor.
George Stewart, Earth Abides (1949). After a plague kills nearly everyone in the United States, survivors band together to survive. The years-later final third depicts the old age of our protagonist, who has managed to build a new tribe but who is not of it; to his descendants, the word “American” connotes the time of myth, not real or relatable history.
Charles Stross, Accelerando (2005). Contact with interstellar civilizations means the introduction of Capitalism 2.0, in which corporations no longer require human beings for their smooth operation and can begin consuming the Earth directly. The last humans flee out into the far reaches of the solar system looking for refuge. Stross’s dystopian Singularity is thus not the moment computers become self-aware—it’s the moment corporations do.
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Beetle in the Anthill (1979). The title derives from the possibility that aliens interfering with Earth’s people and ecosystem might be akin to the human child who puts a beetle in an anthill just to see what will happen. Aliens are similarly thoughtless and incautious in Roadside Picnic (1972), the loose inspiration for Tarkovsky’s cinematic Stalker (1979), which suggests that the bizarre artifacts left behind after an alien Visitation might simply be the discarded trash from their lunch.
Theodore Sturgeon, “Thunder and Roses” (1947). Definitive staging of that central moral recognition of the Cold War—that there would be no point in firing back, even if the other side launched first. Our hero chooses life over universal death, even if he has to kill to ensure that the future gets its chance.
Leo Szilard, “The Voice of the Dolphins” (1961). Once we learn to speak with the dolphins, they ask us to please not destroy the planet with our bombs.
Sherri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988). Another secessionist ecotopia set in the Pacific Northwest, this one with more radical gender politics than Callenbach’s.
Sheree R. Thomas (ed.), Dark Matter (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004). Afro-futurist anthologies that each contain stories of ecological crisis, environmental justice, and environmental racism.
Lavie Tidhar (ed.), The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012). Stories across both collections of global SF suggest the increasing indistinguishability between postcolonial theory, anticapitalism, antiglobalization, and ecocritique. Also strongly recommended along these same lines: So Long Been Dreaming (edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, 2004).
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” (1969). Another mad scientist decides the only answer to the ecological crisis is to destroy the human race through a virus. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) is also noteworthy for its refreshingly straightforward articulation of the premise of much 1970s feminist and ecofeminist works of SF—“First, let’s kill all the men.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954). Another fantasy entry, The Lord of the Rings depicts a clash between the Brave New World of the orcs and the Arcadia of the hobbits, culminating with a snake-in-the-garden moment of attempted industrialization within Hobbiton itself.
Karen Traviss, City of Pearl (2004). The first book in Traviss’s Wess’har Wars series of novels details competition between colonizing groups with very different cultural assumptions on the alien world Cavanaugh’s Star.
George Turner, The Sea and Summer (1987). A future historian looks back on the society whose collapse (ours) created his own. A new edition has just been released from Gollancz.
Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (1950). Seminal fantasy series deals with an Earth near the end of time, with a transformed climate and biosphere.
Gordon Van Gelder (ed.), Welcome to the Greenhouse (2011). An anthology of previously unpublished stories about climate change from well-known authors across the genre.
Jules Verne, Invasion from the Sea (1905). Verne’s last novel concerns the possibility of terraforming Africa by flooding the Sahara.
Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos (1985). Vonnegut’s evolutionary novel sees the last fertile human beings on the planet shipwrecked on the Galápagos Islands and evolving, over millennia, into creatures much like dolphins. The next evolution of man has much-diminished cognitive capacity, but for the darkly comic Vonnegut that’s just another argument in its favor. Also of note is Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), which has civilization end as a result of man’s propensity to invent insane, destructive, and totally unnecessary devices without ever stopping to ask first if it should.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996). Ecological disasters abound in this important novel of the near future, which also memorably treats consumer capitalism, nuclear war, and the porousness of the human-animal boundary.
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975). This strange but intriguing novel includes frequent trips inside the minds of whales. Fans of Watson will also enjoy his “Slow Birds” (1983), about an idyllic pastoral world that is periodically invaded by strange, metal cylinders, nuclear missiles from another dimension (ours).
Peter Watts, Starfish (1999). Grim novel finds bioengineered humans working power stations at thermal vents deep underwater.
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (2007). Speculative nonfiction concerning what would happen to human infrastructure following the disappearance of the human race, from the near term (days, weeks, months) to geologic time (hundreds of millions of years). Draws in part from Weisman’s journalistic work in the Chernobyl zone, a “world without us” that already exists in the present.
H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Vivisection horror. Environmental themes actually characterize most of Wells’s early fiction, from the pseudo-pastoral of The Time Machine (1895) to the near-miss asteroid collision of “The Star” (1897) to the climate change that causes the Martians to invade Earth in The War of the Worlds (1898). 1914’s The World Set Free depicts a human race saved from its plunderous waste of fossil fuels by the invention of atomic energy; Leo Szilard credits the book as his inspiration for the initial theorization of the nuclear bomb.
Scott Westerfield, Uglies (2005). The occasion for the formation of this Young Adult dystopia is a social collapse brought about by energy scarcity.
Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976). Environmental panics collide when, in a collapsing world of pollution, climate change, and overpopulation, an isolated planned community seeking to weather the storm discovers it is universally infertile and must turn to cloning for reproduction.
Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009). Set against a U.S. war in Canada with an emerging Dutch superpower over control of the thawed Northwest Passage, this inventive novel finds the people of a post-oil, post-climate-change future looking back on our era as “the Efflorescence of Oil”—the word “efflorescence” describing an evaporating of water that leaves behind a thin layer of salty detritus.
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (1997). Thematically intertwined, self-referential stories about the historical repetition of human-caused ecological disasters, in both the past and the future.
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96). Four-book series set on a generational starship in the Dying Earth setting of Wolfe’s even larger Book of the New Sun series.
Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia (1942). Arcadian utopia located in the South Pacific.
Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance (1996). The sudden, inexplicable appearance of H. G. Wells’s Time Machine in a London flat facilitates a trip into a depopulated future.
Philip Wylie, The End of the Dream (1972). Ecological catastrophe comes to America. Also noteworthy is When Worlds Collide (1933) and its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1933), in which a small number of humans flee Earth, before it is destroyed by collision with a rogue planet, to settle on Bronson Beta.
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951). Walking, intelligent plants take over the world. Also of interest: The Chrysalids (1955), set after an apparent nuclear holocaust that has altered the climate and mutated the biosphere.
Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Surreal and comic magical realist novel depicting a network of ecological and capitalist disasters centering on the threatened Brazilian rain forest.
Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967). In the end, alas, time and entropy only run the one way.
Film and Television
A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001). Decline and extinction for the human race, with only our robots left behind to succeed us.
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). Invasive species wrecks havoc on prey lacking natural defenses.
The Atomic Café (Jayne Loader, Kevin Raferty, and Pierce Raferty, 1982). Compilation and creative reframing of U.S. nuclear propaganda.
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). A human race desperate for energy sources to sustain their dying civilization attempts to steal unobtainium from the Pandora, only to be forced off the planet by a Gaia-like global consciousness uniting plants, animals, and the indigenous Na’vi.
Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D. Moore, 2003). Humans and their robot servants are locked within a cosmic cycle of destruction.
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963). Sublime allegory of our absolute dependence upon nature, as well as its radical alterity and unknowability.
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). Outstripping its source material, this adaptation of the P. D. James novel depicts the human race eighteen years after it has been spontaneously struck infertile.
The Colony (Beers and Segal, 2005). Reality TV series about people living in a simulated post-apocalyptic environment.
The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012). The conclusion of Nolan’s Batman trilogy sees billionaire Bruce Wayne mothballing a cold fusion device that would end class struggle and usher in universal global prosperity out of fear that it might be turned into a bomb. The series started, of course, with Batman Begins (2005), in which the main villain is deep-ecological ecoterrorist Ra’s al Ghul.
Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978). U.S. consumer culture literally consumes itself.
The Day after Tomorrow (Roland Emmerlich, 2004). Abrupt climate change brings an instant ice age to New York City, convincing even a sinister Dick Cheney analogue of the seriousness of the problem.
Daybreakers (Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, 2009). Ten years after a viral epidemic has turned most of the global elite into vampires, humanity’s successors now face critical shortages after hitting Peak Blood.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961). Nuclear testing throws Earth off its axis, hurtling it toward the sun.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (Scott Derrickson, 2008). Updated remake of the Robert Wise–directed 1951 original has Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) issuing a grim warning about humanity’s failure to protect its ecosystem.
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009). An alien spaceship arrives over Johannesburg, bringing not the untold riches of the future but an even more wretched version of the present: miserable, starving insectoids called “prawns,” who are promptly housed in a concentration camp until some more permanent solution can be found.
Doctor Who: “The Green Death” (Michael E. Briant, 1973). The Third Doctor confronts the mad computer running Global Chemicals, which is hell-bent on polluting the planet. See also (among others) the Tenth Doctor’s “The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky” (Douglas Mackinnon, 2008) in which carbon-dioxide-free cars turn out to be poisoning the atmosphere even faster.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). U.S. Cold War militarism absurdly reaches its logical conclusion.
The End of Suburbia (Gregory Greene, 2004). Documentary depicting the coming collapse of fossil-fuel-intensive infrastructure in the United States.
Fail-Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964). U.S. Cold War militarism logically reaches its absurd conclusion.
Firefly (Joss Whedon, 2002). The backstory for the Western-cum-space-opera has the “Earth-that-was” being “all used up” before the remnants of humanity takes to the stars in search of a new home.
Fringe (J. J. Abrams, 2008). Contact between parallel universes causes the environment of one to catastrophically degrade.
Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1954). Monster awoken by undersea nuclear testing ravages Tokyo.
The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, 2008). In an effort to protect itself from destruction, Nature generates a disease that triggers mass suicide in humans.
Idaho Transfer (Peter Fonda, 1973). Time travel allows a small group of teenagers to skip over the ecological catastrophe that will soon wipe out humanity and start civilization anew fifty-six years in the future.
Ilha de Flores / Island of Flowers (Jorge Furtado, 1989). A narrative voice reminiscent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy traces wealth, power, and waste through the networks of contemporary global capitalism.
I Live in Fear (Akira Kurosawa, 1955). A man paranoid about nuclear war is desperate to relocate his family from Japan to Brazil. The Cold War as itself a nightmarish science fiction.
An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006). Al Gore tries to mobilize Americans toward climate action through an extended PowerPoint presentation.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978). Spore-like aliens invade San Francisco, replacing human beings whose gray, shriveled corpses are removed by ubiquitous sanitation trucks. As with the 1956 original, the implication is that these replacements may be better at being us than we are.
Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1992). An unknown intelligence unfamiliar with human society visits the apocalyptic site of burning oil fields following the first Gulf War.
Life after People (2008). This paradigmatic example of the Quiet Earth subgenre of books and documentaries concerned a world emptied of people, frequently drawing on footage of present-day postindustrial cities for its supposedly futuristic visuals.
Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976). Based on the book by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, a future civilization has struck a sustainable balance for consumer capitalism by executing people the day they turn thirty.
Lost in Space (Irwin Allen, 1965). Both the lighthearted original television series and the darker 1998 “reboot” film see the Space Family Robinson escape an ecologically threatened Earth.
Mad Max (George Miller, 1979). Life isn’t easy in Australia after the end of cheap oil.
The Man in the White Suit (Alexander MacKendrick, 1951). Capitalism requires a logic of planned obsolescence and egregious waste for its continuance.
The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999). The battle between man and machine takes a turn when humans black out the sky in an effort to stop their solar-powered creations from taking over. Later editions in the series make clear that humanity really can’t leave the Matrix, even if they’d like to; the environment they’ve ruined could not possibly sustain their numbers.
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926). This seminal film of class division between a pastoral leisure class and a brutally exploited industrial class still speaks to us.
Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009). Humanity has finally solved its energy problems through helium-3 mining on the moon. There’s only one problem: someone’s got to run the facility.
Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968). Catastrophic climate change following a nuclear war has scorched the United States, transforming New York into Arizona. Later films in the series reveal that the mass extinction of both cats and dogs is responsible for the very importation of great apes first as pets and then, quickly thereafter, as servants, which is what started the whole mess in the first place.
“Plastic Bag” (Ramin Bahrani, 2010). Solitary inner monologue of a plastic bag (unforgettably voiced by Werner Herzog) that survives the human race by millions of years, wishing only that his creators had manufactured him so he could die.
Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2010). Spellbinding Kenyan short film depicts a dystopian future for Africa in which all life on the surface has died.
The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985). An experiment to create a new global energy grid goes horribly wrong, causing nearly everyone on Earth to vanish.
Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979). Almost excruciatingly slow film about high-stakes gambling after a new ice age.
Revolution (J. J. Abrams, 2012). What happens when all the lights go out.
Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972). All planet life is extinct, save for those housed in a threatened orbital nature preserve.
Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008). Among the many deprivations of this post-apocalyptic future is the privatization of water.
Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973). A wildly overpopulated globe is fed by Soylent Green, a tofu-like food substitute that is absolutely derived from high-energy plankton, not from ground-up human corpses.
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). Surreal film loosely based on the Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, whose depiction of a dangerous depopulated “Zone” eerily anticipates the Chernobyl disaster seven years in advance.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986). Facing certain destruction at the hands of a whale-friendly alien probe, the crew of the Enterprise travels back in time for a madcap romp in twentieth-century San Francisco as they try to save the whales.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Force of Nature” (Robert Lederman, 1993). The Federation discovers that their overuse of warp drive is slowly destroying the fabric of the galaxy. A galactic speed limit is imposed, but the imposition of even this slim reality check so disrupts the series’s cornucopian, expansionist fantasy that it is essentially never mentioned again.
Terra Nova (Brannon Braga and Steven Spielberg, 2011). Settlers from a dying future seek to colonize the Cretaceous.
Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936). Based on a novel by H. G. Wells, the film depicts a human race that repeatedly destroys itself through violence and blunt stupidity. The film’s final lines argue that unless mankind is ultimately able to conquer the stars, it might as well have never existed at all.
Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984). Incredibly bleak BBC miniseries about life in a blighted England following a nuclear war.
The Time Machine (Simon Wells, 2002). Accidental overdevelopment of the moon destroys technology civilization, ushering in the familiar Eloi and the Morlocks of Wells’s 1895 novel. Almost entirely forgettable aside from its sublime, time-lapsed vision of Earth’s destruction and renewal after the loss of the moon.
Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003). A family seeks clean water and safe food after an ecological catastrophe has destroyed civilization.
Torchwood: Miracle Day (Russell T. Davies, 2011). Everybody living forever is not as great as you’d think.
Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1996). A virologist deliberately releases a supergerm to kill off the human race in the name of protecting the environment.
The Twilight Zone: “The Midnight Sun” (Anton Leader, 1961). Rod Serling’s vision of an Earth growing ever hotter takes on new relevance in an era of climate change. See also “Two” (Montgomery Pittman, 1961), in which a post-apocalyptic landscape is revealed to be a new Garden of Eden in one of the series’s few happy endings.
Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995). Catastrophic sea level rise after the ice caps melt.
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967). This New Wave apocalyptic masterpiece is required viewing for the long tracking shot of an endless traffic jam alone.
Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974). Surreal Sean Connery fantasy film that begins with the proposition that “The gun is good. The penis is evil.”
ZPG: Zero Population Growth (Michael Campus, 1972). An overpopulated, environmentally degraded Earth installs a thirty-year-ban on procreation.
Comics, Animation, Music, Games, and Other Media
“Big Yellow Taxi” (Joni Mitchell, 1970). Song. They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.
Captain Planet and the Planeteers (Barbara Pyle and Ted Turner, 1990). The Spirit of Earth, desperate for a solution to the ecological crisis, entrusts five teenagers from around the world with element-themed magic rings capable of summoning an ecological superhero. The power is yours.
Civilization (MicroProse, 1991). Long-running computer game series includes both fallout zones and global warming in later stages. Ecological themes are extended in the sequel, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999).
Cowboy Bepop (Shinichirō Watanabe, 1998). Anime space opera in which Earth is a marginally habitable, ruined backwater as a result of both an apocalyptic scientific accident and everyday industrial degradation.
Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Sun (TSR, 1991). Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting in which the release of wild, uncontrolled magic has laid waste to the world.
Fallout (Interplay, 1997). Satirical series of post-apocalyptic video games, parodying 1950s and 1960s fantasies of post-nuclear-war survival.
Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (Bill Kroyer, 1992). Didactic coproduction between animation studios in Australia and the United States on the need to save the rain forests.
Fraggle Rock (Jim Henson, 1983). Children’s television series about an underground ecological niche where all life forms have a necessary role to play. Another Jim Henson Productions project, the ABC sitcom Dinosaurs (1991–94), frequently focused on ecological themes, culminating in a highly unusual series finale that sees these anthropomorphic dinosaurs cause the ice age that leads to their extinction through excess capitalist development.
Futurama (Matt Groening, 1999). Episodes of this long-running animated series frequently lampoon the excesses of consumer capitalism from an ecological perspective.
H. M. Hoover, Children of Morrow (1976). Another children’s book series set after the end of the civilization, this once caused by pollution.
“In the Year 2525” (Zager and Evans, 1969). Song. In the year 9595, I’m kinda wonderin’ if Man is gonna be alive; he’s taken everything this old Earth can give, and he ain’t put back nothing in….
The Jetsons (Hanna and Barbara, 1962). Futuristic cartoon look at the world of tomorrow depicts a humanity that lives entirely in domed skyscrapers. Occasional references to the natural environment in follow-on movies darkly hint that the air below their homes is hopelessly polluted by smog, and that grass is recognizable only from history textbooks.
Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004). In this delightful and ecologically minded video game, the ceaseless accumulation of our disposable junk progresses on larger and larger scales until it ultimately rolls up the entire Earth.
Jack Kirby, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth (1972). A young human boy emerges from a nuclear shelter (Command D) into a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by mutants and talking animals. Later issues of the comic book suggest this is, in fact, the actual future of the canonical DC Universe of Batman and Superman. Even stranger are the Atomic Knights created by John Broome and Murphy Anderson in 1960, with whom Kamandi shares a universe; the Atomic Knights wander a post-nuclear-holocaust (but surprisingly stable) America in medieval suits of armor, riding giant mutated dalmatians.
Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead (2003–). Alongside World War Z, the best of the current zombie fictions depicting a bleak already-dead world, in which hardened bands of survivors struggle both to survive and retain their human decency.
The Land before Time (Don Bluth, 1988). Perhaps the best children’s film ever made about mass extinction.
Dr. Seuss, The Lorax (1971). Capitalism’s ruthless exploitation of the environment inevitably destroys the conditions required for its own continuation, unless.
“Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)” (Marvin Gaye, 1971). Song. Things ain’t what they used
to be.
Alan Moore, The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1982). While the character technically predates Moore, his take on the inhuman living swamp (who fights on behalf of Earth, either for or against the Justice League) is definitive. Current storylines have Swamp Thing (as the avatar of the Gaia-like “Green”) fighting alongside Buddy Baker, a.k.a. Animal Man (avatar of the “Red”), against the “Black” (the embodiment of death, decay, and rot). In Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982) floods and crop failures are a major cause of the dystopian government in power in future Britain, while his seminal superhero comic Watchmen (1985) takes place against a backdrop of looming nuclear war and inevitable ecological disaster.
9 (Shane Acker, 2009). Insidious “Fabrication Machine” technology has destroyed the environment in this animated film, leaving nine self-aware rag-dolls the only conscious life in a ruined world.
“(Nothing but) Flowers” (Talking Heads, 1981). Song. There was a factory; now there are mountains and rivers. If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower.
Portal and Portal 2 (Valve Corporation, 2007, 2011). The madness of science. Apeture Science’s slogan is the cracked motto of the American century: “We do what we must, because we can.”
Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997). The most strident articulation of the ecological themes operative across Miyazaki’s work, also evident in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Spirited Away (2001).
Settlers of Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995). The iPad “app” version of the game features a single-player “story mode” that culminates in a climate-change-inspired rules modification in which overdevelopment of Catan leads to total desertification of the island.
SimEarth (Maxis, 1990). Early “god game” from Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, allows players to fiddle with the variables of the environment. Spore (Maxis, 2008), also designed by Wright, has a similar feel, but is dedicated primarily to biological evolution.
WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). Let Disney sell you a critique of its own ecologically destructive practices, nicely packaged in an environmentally friendly cardboard DVD case never used again for any subsequent film releases. And yet the film has an unexpected utopian streak that somehow manages to transcend its troubled origins. Pixar similarly explores tough ecological questions in its 2001 film Monsters, Inc. (Peter Docter, 2001), which subtly and smartly allegorizes resource imperialism and the economics of scarcity in late capitalism.
Brian K. Vaughan, Y: The Last Man (2002). Killing off all the men is once again the necessary first step toward a rational and sustainable ecotopia.