Science Fiction and Ecocriticism
A leading American journal in the field of critical analyses of science fiction is Extrapolation. Its title identifies a basic orientation toward defining the relationship between the genre of science fiction and literary realism and referentiality. The application of the concept of extrapolation to science fiction insists that the writing and reading of science fiction (SF) are intimately linked to, and based on, getting people to think both about the present and about this world in which they live. SF stories that emphasize analogy between imagined worlds and the reader’s consensual world encourage such thinking as well (see Suvin 1979, 28–29; 1988, 37). The encouragement of that type of critical thinking provides a linkage between SF and nature-oriented literature. Rather than providing the alibi of a fantasy—in the sense of an escape from real-world problems—extrapolation emphasizes that the present and the future are interconnected. What we do now will be reflected in the future, and, therefore, we have no alibi for avoiding addressing the results of our actions today.
Some critics of science fiction have recognized the relationship between their field of study and environmental concerns and appreciation for nature for decades now. Ecocriticism has also occasionally made use of SF works in courses and articles, such as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and various novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin (see, for instance, Alaimo 1998; Gough 1998; Tschachler 1998). Yet, the nonfictional prejudice of much ecocriticism that causes the slighting of fiction in general carries over to the slighting of SF. One subgenre of SF that does get some play would be that of the near future ecological disaster/nuclear destruction novel. Such texts as The Earth Abides and Alas, Babylon, for instance, come to mind, while Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is probably the most famous of these as a result of having been made into a major motion picture. Ecofeminists have been more open to including SF writing in their critical purview, perhaps because women writers concerned about nature and environmental issues have utilized the genre of fiction more readily and extensively than they have that of nonfiction. It also seems to be the case that environmentally concerned women have turned to SF in order to depict dystopias, utopias, and eutopias (good places) that demonstrate the connections between the oppression of women and the destruction of nature, as well as the changed relationship to nature that humankind would have if there were gender equality. Suzy McKee Charnas’s dystopian Motherlines and Walk to the End of the World and Marge Piercy’s eutopian/dystopian Woman on the Edge of Time include strong environmentalist dimensions, while Starhawk in The Fifth Sacred Thing links patriarchy with ecological destruction and binds heterarchy and ecological restoration insolubly together (see McGuire and McGuire 1998 for a comparison of the Piercy and Starhawk novels).
Certainly, SF is not nature writing, in the sense of that genre’s definition as being scientifically based, personal observation written in nonfiction prose. What it can be, however, is nature-oriented literature, in the sense of its being an aesthetic text that, on the one hand, directs reader attention toward the natural world and human interaction with other aspects of nature within that world, and, on the other hand, makes specific environmental issues part of the plots and themes of various works. SF also at times shares with both nature writing and other forms of nature-oriented literature detailed attention to the natural world found in the present, as well as to the scientific disciplines that facilitate such detailed attention (Van der Bogert 1983, 58). Large scope SF novels and series, such as Dune and its sequels, often combine a greater array of scientific disciplines that bear on perceiving, interpreting, and understanding the world than does most nature writing. Such SF works often bring together geology, hydrology, archaeology, physics, biology, biochemistry, and mathematics along with natural history, pseudo-natural history, psychology, social and environmental history, and other social sciences (see Gough 1998). In the next three sections of this chapter, I will initially survey a variety of SF works to show the diversity of SF treatments of nature. Then I will focus on a couple of recent novels to consider how writers of the 1990s were producing an ecologically informed or misinformed corpus of science fiction. And, finally, I will zero in on an explicitly environmental work of SF, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.
EXTRAPOLATIONS AND CAUTIONARY TALES HERE AND ELSEWHERE
Every year, on average, it gets a little hotter, and commentaries about this phenomenon of global warming have been regularly appearing for well over a decade, including reports that 2005 was the hottest year since modern measuring began (for examples of 1990s commentaries, see Linden 1998; War-rick 1998; and Schmid 1999; for 2005, see Eilperin 2005 and “2005 Hottest Year on Record”). While Time magazine and numerous other media outlets publicly recognized the general world scientific consensus on global warming in early 2006, the Bush administration continued to sandbag the issue, rewriting government reports to water down their language and avoiding any policy statements that might lead to binding agreements to take action to reduce American greenhouse gas emissions. Not only are their concerns about the environmental future that global warming is preparing for humanity, but there are also regularly occurring ecological disasters that impinge upon the present directly and, in some cases, irrevocably, as in 1998: “Authorities estimated . . . it would cost $105 million to clean up rivers and streams flowing into Europe’s largest nature reserve that were contaminated in one of Spain’s worst ecological disasters” (Spetalnick 1998); or in 2005 with the string of major hurricanes that hit the United States, or, before that, the tsunami that devastated numerous Indian Ocean countries.
The preceding topics and any prediction of environmental disaster that has been made in the past decade, however, have been prefigured in science fiction in one way or another. Until the resurgence of the environmental movement in the United States in the 1970s, the greatest threat to the natural world in the minds of most people was that of nuclear war. While activism against nuclear war centered on the possible extinction of humankind, there were many who also recognized the environmental threats posed by tactical as well as strategic nuclear weapons. SF addressed those fears in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of attention to the impact of such war on the world beyond humanity. Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) portrays a limited nuclear war in which the good people of small American towns survive by relying on the Jeffersonian agrarian-yeoman values that Frank believes to be the bedrock of the Heartland. At novel’s end, the U.S. military is going to help such people get back on their feet, but it is clear that their allegiance has shifted, at least temporarily, to the local community and away from the nation-state. Frank seems very aware of the degree to which urban people have become disconnected from both domesticated agrarian nature and wild nature, but presents a small town model of American life that can recover from devastation by separating out the necessities of life from the frivolities. These are people capable of learning once more to live off the land.
Twenty-five years later, one of the last of the great American nuclear-war books was published, War Day and the Journey Onward, written by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka. War Day depicts a limited nuclear war, similar to that occurring in Frank’s Alas, Babylon. The United States is devastated by a war that lasts less than an hour in 1988 and is breaking up into independent states by the time the characters Strieber and Kunetka take a journalistic trip across the continent. Written in a pseudo-documentary style (see Murphy 1990), the authors are clearly intent on instilling as strong an aversion to nuclear war in their readers as possible. But they focus not only on human devastation but also on environmental destruction, thereby emphasizing the interdependence of nature and culture and reiterating the environmentalist message of the intervening years that people are a threat to the rest of the natural world, an idea frequently lacking in the cautionary novels of nuclear war that preceded theirs. Fifteen years later, in 1999, Strieber teamed up with Art Bell to write a nonfiction book that made the New York Times best-seller list, The Coming Global Superstorm, which became the basis for the movie, The Day After Tomorrow, and depicts the possible meteorological consequences of global warming’s disruption of the North Atlantic current.
But certainly nuclear war has not been represented as the only threat to civilization, if not humankind itself, in post–World War II SF. I find it quite interesting that a decade before Frank published his novel, George R. Stewart had published Earth Abides (1949), which steers a middle course between total human annihilation and the continuation of civilization. Nuclear war is not the cause of the decimation; civilization is not to blame. Rather, nature just runs its course, as it has throughout human history. A plague descends upon North America and wipes out the vast majority of the population. The protagonist Ish, who provides the novel’s point of view, just happens to be a graduate student alone in the mountains working on an environmental studies thesis when the plague hits and he is one of the people who is spared. As a result of this circumstance, Stewart’s novel provides the reader with a perspective that repeatedly works against anthropocentrism by emphasizing the long-term power, diversity, and self-regulating mechanisms of nature in opposition to the short-term ephemerality of human beings and their nations and states. At novel’s end, Ish defines himself as the last of the Americans and Stewart concludes the novel with the quote from Ecclesiastes 1:4, that provides the book’s title: “Men go and come, but earth abides.” In thinking about the relationship of SF to other forms of nature-oriented literature, it might be useful to remember that Earth Abides appeared in the same year that the first post-humous edition of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac was released and a year after the publication of Robinson Jeffers’s The Double Axe and Other Poems. At virtually the same time, then, authors were espousing deanthropocentric perspectives in a variety of literary venues and, no doubt, to very diverse audiences.
Five years before Jacques Derrida shocked American humanists and structuralists at Johns Hopkins University through his deconstruction of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1966, a Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem, had already deconstructed Western science and anthropocentrism in his SF novel Solaris, originally published in Polish in 1961 and published in English translation in 1971. Solaris is an apparently sentient planet, but one that has a sentience in-definable by any form of human scientific analysis, which has been undertaken exhaustively, excessively, and obsessively over many years when the novel commences. Darko Suvin says in his afterword to the English edition of Solaris: “The truth it teaches through its fable is an open and dynamic truth. Lem’s major novels have at their cognitive core the simple and difficult realization that no closed reference system . . . is viable in the age of relativity theory and post-cybernetic sciences” (Lem 1961/1980, 220; emphasis in original). And further, Suvin contends of Lem that he has a “central concern for a Copernican or Brunoan dethroning of anthropocentric theory. Man is not the measure of all things except for other people, and his mental models cannot be usefully projected onto the universe” (Lem 1961/1980, 221).
While some ecocritics and environmental philosophers doubt that it is possible to be anything but anthropocentric, others argue for the need to become, at least intellectually if not instinctively, ecocentric or biocentric. From that perspective literary works, then, that are anti- or de-anthropocentric can be understood as environmental literature. Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To . . . , a clearly primarily feminist work, has a secondary emphasis on critiquing not only androcentrism but also anthropocentrism. The plot of the story begins typically enough with a small crew of shipwrecked earthlings landing on an uncharted planet. The plot, however, proceeds atypically when one of the female characters refuses to participate in the men’s plan to establish human dominance over the planet through colonizing it, which would mean impregnating the protagonist against her will in order to increase the human population. In the end such plans come to naught and all of them die. But along the way, the protagonist has a startling revelation when she realizes that the spaceship’s equipment is not designed to determine for the crew and passengers whether anything on an alien planet is edible. Rather, the ship is designed to prevent the humans from accidentally contaminating the local ecology (Russ 1997, 14). The protagonist concludes that they have no right to invade this planet, even when arriving accidentally (Russ 1997, 27).
Russ’s We Who Are About To . . . raises ethical questions about human colonization of a planet that appears to be uninhabited by any creatures with higher intelligence. Usually in SF such planets are fair game, but colonization does not always mean adapting to the planet to meet the needs of a preexistent human civilization. In British author John Brunner’s short novel Bedlam Planet (1968), he emphasizes that the only hope for the colonists’ survival is to allow themselves to undergo adaptation to the ecosystem of the planet on which they land. They must learn the fauna and flora and figure out where they can fit into the food chain rather than simply terraforming the place to support terran agriculture. While making a claim, then, for the necessity of becoming inhabitants through transforming these individuals from exogenous to indigenous human beings, Brunner conveniently works with a planet with no competing sentient life (in Brunner’s Total Eclipse [1974] in contrast, the planet’s plant life kills off the stranded archeological team that is forced to try and establish a permanent colony).
Unlike Brunner, Ursula K. Le Guin in The Word for World Is Forest (1972) pits an indigenous sentient species against human interlopers, who consider themselves superior because they know how to exploit the planet, whereas the indigenous species only lives there. At the time of its publication, Le Guin’s novel was caught up in debates about SF being used to generate political parables about the Viet Nam War, and it certainly is amenable to such an allegorical reading. But more than that, it is an ecologically sensitive novel pitting not simply colonizers against colonized, but rather inhabitants against interlopers. SF has a strong potential to function as parable addressing the issue of how people become inhabitants and what it means to be indigenous in relation to environmental responsibility and the mutual adaptation between humans and the rest of nature (see Suvin 1979, 30).
In one of his most famous novels, The Sheep Look Up (1972), Brunner depicted—in the new wave style he had already established in Stand on Zanzibar (1968)—what happens when people don’t learn to become inhabitants but continue to try to live on the borrowed time of environmental depletion and pollution proliferation. Brunner, developing a kind of if-then extrapolation, describes in extensive detail a United States awash in hazardous waste sites, love canal–style housing complexes, leaky microwaves and other carcinogenic appliances, killer smog, and high security, sterile suburbs. Eventually, the intensification of despoliation reaches a trigger point and the American masses begin to revolt. Brunner suggests that the chaos that descends on the United States results in part from business, government, and developers refusing to listen to the more reasonable of the environmental activist movements, which provided programs of action that could have averted disaster.
Much of what Brunner depicts in The Sheep Look Up constituted only minimal extrapolation from information available in the late 1960s, while other projections in the novel quickly became modest versions of government acknowledged crises. Less than ten years after the publication of Brunner’s novel, and indicative of the extrapolative accuracy of the work, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation in 1980 to set up the Superfund to address national toxic waste sites. But after twenty-five years, the Environmental Protection Agency proudly announced that work had been undertaken on 966 sites, or62 percent of the sites ranked on the National Priorities List. At the same time, the number of toxic sites designated as needing Superfund cleanup continued to grow (“Annual Superfund Data”; “Basic Information”).
While Brunner spun out his extrapolation close to home and close to the present in both Stand on Zanzibar, which addresses human overpopulation, and The Sheep Look Up, Le Guin has usually not set her SF novels close to the present, and only rarely on earth. These distances make it easier for her to generate a what-if, rather than if-then, type of SF. For instance, in one of her award-winning novels, The Dispossessed (1974), the action takes place in another solar system a century or two into the future. There, Le Guin generates a novel that matches up the working out of an anarchist society with conditions of environmental scarcity. Her Anarresti develop their economy and culture on the inhabitable moon of an earthlike planet named Urras, from which they have been exiled.
Through this novel Le Guin is able to raise a series of questions about the possibility of environmental responsibility prior to conditions of scarcity, as well as the possibility of egalitarianism when there are margins of profit and luxuries that can be hoarded. She also suggests that the most important technologies are the ones that can increase communication and the free flow of information among people rather than the ones that generate higher rates of consumption and the excesses of possession. But lest the reader think that The Dispossessed is merely a thought experiment with no application to the present day, Le Guin introduces near novel’s end the Terran ambassador to Urras, who tells the protagonist Shevek about conditions on Earth. The ambassador describes Earth as a planet that human beings have spoiled through overpopulation and unsustainable consumption with the result that they have almost completely destroyed their own means of survival (Le Guin 1974, 279). In response to the devastation the survivors have had to submit to total centralization and rationalization of all resources. Destroying planetary biodiversity will lead, Le Guin argues, not only to human self-destruction but also to the loss of human freedom. In other words, unlike the arguments of some critics of the contemporary international green movement, Le Guin contends that it is not environmentalists who would deny freedom to other human beings but that the unbridled consumption of the present day will necessitate draconian measures tomorrow. Only if people today learn the lessons that Shevek and the anarchists of Anarres have to offer can they hope to have freedom in a future that is ecologically sustainable rather than diseased and blighted.
Brunner, then, provides what might be labeled a dystopian cautionary tale, while Le Guin provides a eutopian cautionary tale. In The Sheep Look Up people come to awareness as a result of environmental crises that devastate North America and other parts of the globe and throw the United States into chaos. He suggests that the conflagration could have been avoided but wasn’t. Le Guin posits the world of Anarres as a place where human beings are working out a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature, where culture and economy are being adapted to environmental constraints. And Le Guin wants readers to identify with that possibility in contrast to the blighted landscape of the Earth that the ambassador describes. But in a way, Le Guin might be providing a loophole, in that the Anarresti are able to work out this new nature-culture relationship on a planet separate from Urras, where business as usual is the order of the day, and on a planet where there are no other sentient beings to challenge the Anarresti over the right to settle and transform the environment even as they adapt to it. As with Russ’s We Who Are About To . . . and Brunner’s Bedlam Planet, this issue of the right to settle another planet as represented also in The Dispossessed will need to be revisited when considering Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.
But before doing that, I want to take a look at two novels published in 1994 and 1996, contemporaneous with Robinson’s Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996). While both of these novels address environmental issues explicitly from different angles, each suffers from certain problems if viewed ecocritically, and as a result I came away in both cases enjoying the adventure while it lasted, appreciating some of the education about nature and environment presented, and feeling troubled by some of the implicit conclusions in each work.
META-METEOROLOGY AND INDIGENOUS CLONING
The first book I want to treat here is Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather (1994). Well known as one of North America’s cyberpunk phenoms, Sterling fills this novel with computer technology and high-tech wizardry. It focuses on a team of high-tech nomadic tornado chasers. This iconoclastic team headed by Dr. Jerry Mulcahey is out in an environmentally devastated southwestern United States, which has been wracked, dried, and cracked by the greenhouse effect and the agribusiness practices that contributed to it. The “Storm Troupe,” is tracking tornados on the lookout for the mega-tornado, the F-6, that their leader has been predicting. Eventually, in the year 2031, it does arrive. Prior to that, however, readers are gradually educated about some other likely effects of global warming and the greenhouse effect, but such education often gets overshadowed by the loving attention Sterling pays to the technological details of the troupe’s eclectically developed equipment, especially the virtual-reality devices that let them observe tornadoes from the inside out. As Noel Gough remarks, Heavy Weather dramatizes
the ways in which our knowledge of climate change is constructed by the global networks of satellites, weather stations, supercomputers, meteorologists, and broadcasters that produce the images, models, and simulations that materially represent such knowledge. . . . In Sterling’s novel it is clear that much of what counts as nature is the measurement and projection of human interactions with the biosphere in and on a virtual ecology of global information flows. (1998, 413)
But beyond that, and perhaps inadvertently, Sterling also demonstrates how unreliable and limited such knowledge remains. When the F-6 does arrive, the story of its appearance gets mixed up with the plot of a group of behind-the-scenes terrorists who use it as a cover to become independent of their anonymous superiors. What remains unclear is whether the F-6 is the inevitable freak of nature unleashed by human eco-destruction or the results of meteorological manipulation by a secret organization of terrorists who have attempted to lessen human impact on the world through acts of sabotage and assassination. This point remains unclear, perhaps, because in either case the F-6 is a result of human manipulation of the environment gone awry. It is precisely the awry part, however, that casts doubt on the idea that we are witnessing today, or that we will witness in the future, “the end of nature,” since at novel’s end readers quite clearly see that neither Dr. Jerry or anyone else can accurately predict, much less control, the weather.
That, however, must be considered a rather pedestrian lesson to be proposed in the course of a novel that runs over 300 pages. Sterling does, however, provide other lessons, all of which I find troubling, even though I cannot refute any of them. First, and perhaps most important, is the lesson suggested by Jane Unger in an exchange with Jerry about the F-6. He points out that its winds could scour the planet and it could become a permanent fixture in the atmosphere, but she discounts such fears, remarking that other events take place that push predictions of doom to the side of the road (Sterling 1994, 207–8). Despite the tortured logic here, the point seems to be that warnings about catastrophes are just public relations and do not play a role in changing mass consciousness so that the disasters about which people are being warned can be averted and avoided. The examples she uses, nuclear war and a resulting nuclear winter, however, cast doubt on her argument, because one of the reasons they did not occur is that people did worry about them and worked to prevent them. Sterling establishes a double-voiced discourse here in which the reader is left wondering both whether Jane might be speaking for the author or if Jane is an authorial object lesson for the benefit of the reader who is expected to see through her foolish position.
A second message in this section of the book seems to be that no matter how bad it gets humanity will muddle through, and there is no evidence that this message is in any way double-voiced or ironic. Is such a message a positive or helpful one at this point in time? Does it encourage people to muddle toward a more ecologically sustainable human culture or does it provide them with another excuse to continue living their lives without assuming responsibility for the health of the biosphere? After all, the United States lived through one Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, so it can handle that same kind of extensive drought, even if on a grander scale, in the future, such as the one causing fires across Oklahoma and Texas in 2006, or will a megadrought brought on by global warming prove to be the last straw.
Another significant moment in the novel occurs when a reporter asks the members of the Storm Troupe when they think humanity lost control of its destiny (Sterling 1994, 243). The members of the troupe give a variety of answers: 1967 or 1968 when the first data came in on CO2 buildup in the environment; 1989 with the opportunity for a genuine New World Order; 1914; late 1980s with the ignoring of congressional hearings on global warming; the League of Nations, 1945; the arrival of Columbus; the French Revolution; the failure to go with nuclear power in the 1950s (Sterling 1994, 245). But Jerry and Jane basically question the question by doubting that humanity ever controlled its own destiny. Jane again takes the position that things have been worse and are likely to be worse again, but such catastrophic conditions are cyclical (Sterling 1994, 246). Her position seems to be that if we have never been in control, then we have never been responsible either.
As with Jane’s early dialogue with Jerry, these conclusions about a lack of control over “destiny”—whatever that term might mean—seem to undercut the value of environmental activism in the present. If something might not make any difference, why should people bother sacrificing to do it? Certainly one can reply that sacrifices for environmental health ought to be undertaken because they are what we understand to be the right and moral course of action to take today, and they may make a positive difference, but will that argument persuade the average undergraduate or average American consumer? Or will the argument that Sterling seems to be making at novel’s end have greater appeal?
At the end of Heavy Weather, Jerry has received a lucrative research appointment at the University of Texas and has settled down to academic life. He and Jane have married and she is a happy homemaker and mother in a walled-off and guarded university housing complex (Sterling 1994, 296). Jane’s chronically ill brother, who has been an important secondary character, has been completely transformed by gene therapy. In other words, at least for the professional middle class and the rich in the United States, “heavy weather” comprises just another inconvenience that cannot halt the continued striving for the post–World War II suburban American dream even in the warmer-globe years of the 2030s. Perhaps I find this conclusion to the novel so chilling because of just how realistically its portrayal seems for so many Americans in the early years of the twenty-first century. And yet, at the same time, I can see it from another angle in which the ability to weather the storms spawned by environmental irresponsibility in the early part of this century may mean the gradual development of a widespread ability to ameliorate and redress the damage later in the century, without apocalyptic or cataclysmic destruction of human life. I do not think the novel ends on any such note of ambiguity, but an ecocritical reading of Heavy Weather can productively pursue such ambiguity in terms of whether the novel’s conclusion is a pessimistic one regarding environmental accountability or an optimistic one regarding human adaptability to environmental change and environmental awareness.
Kathleen Ann Goonan’s The Bones of Time (1996), like Sterling’s Heavy Weather, is set on Earth in the 2030s. But the prologue begins in the year 1887, introducing the story of the last princess of Hawai’i. Of all of the American and British authors discussed so far who write near-future SF set on Earth, Goonan is the only one to engage any culture in depth other than the dominant white American one. She sets her novel on Hawai’i with a protagonist who is a resident of Japanese descent. In this near-future world schools recommend genetic engineering of children, multinationals control the genetic marketplace, and Hawai’i continues to be controlled for the benefits of the military, agribusiness, and tourism to the detriment of the lives and culture of its indigenous people. The protagonist, Lynn Oshima, accidentally comes into contact with a Hawai’ian homeland movement to clone an ancient leader, Kamehameha, a movement under attack from those who would lose if a Hawai’ian independence movement were to make any gains. Intertwined with Lynn and the efforts to kill the Kamehameha clones is the story of another Hawai’ian, a brilliant mathematician who discerns how to travel in time in an effort to save Princess Kaiulani. Eventually these strands are brought together, of course.
Throughout the novel, Goonan provides a good deal of information about the environmental destruction of Hawai’i and the exploitation and oppression of the colonized Hawai’ians. She also introduces the perspective that there are other forms of scientific thought than the Western laboratory model. Specifically, she discusses at some length traditional Polynesian navigation, which enabled such people to travel across the Pacific from one far-flung island to another. The economic and environmental degradation of other parts of the world are also depicted, but Goonan’s attention remains focused on the survival of indigenous cultures and the possible knowledge that they may have to offer the rest of humanity. And yet, curiously enough, Goonan in the end has this knowledge and environmental sensibility brought to bear not on the reclamation and recovery of the Hawai’ian islands, but on the seizing of an interstellar spaceship. This spaceship becomes a new ark of sorts taking 5,000 human beings and various animals on a voyage of Polynesian navigation across the vast stretches of space rather than the vast stretches of the Pacific. Navigation through space is combined with navigation through time to enable them to travel to the stars. Earth is left behind as a new voyage of discovery is initiated, one in which an indigenous people will go off to find an uninhabited planet to call home. The implication is that such a voyage will be an inversion of European voyages of discovery and decimation, but I wonder. Left unsaid is how the new voyagers will know that they are not colonizing a planet already inhabited, perhaps by less intelligent self-conscious species, or ones so different that their intelligence cannot be recognized. Left unsaid, also, is what will come of Hawai’i as its most adventurous and most brilliant children leave the islands.
While Goonan’s The Bones of Time may be the most multicultural SF novel of the 1990s, one that is sympathetic and respectful of indigenous cultures, it also presents a highly romantic assessment of the history of human impact throughout the Pacific. It ignores the devastation of the ecologies of islands, such as Rapa Nui, the extinction of species by first settlers, and the problems of population pressures, historically and in the present day. Invariably the image of a fresh start is at once highly appealing and deeply flawed if readers are to experience the kind of cognitive estrangement necessary to rethink their relationship to nature and culture in the present, on an Earth where no more locations remain for fresh-start new beginnings; unless, of course, they are being encouraged to believe that the solution to Earth’s environmental problems lies in human expansion, or departure, to other planets.
THE ETHICS OF COLONIZING THE DEAD
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s massive Mars Trilogy, which runs to about 2,000 small-print pages in the paperback edition, he addresses in one way or another almost every major question of environmental ethics and does so from a variety of persuasive positions. And it appears very likely that many of these questions will move from the realm of “what if” to “we can but will we” in the lifetimes of most of the people who will read this chapter. The voyage of the landing party of 100 in Red Mars takes place in the year 2026, when I will be seventy-five years old and my current undergraduate students the same age as many of the characters depicted. That Robinson is generating an extrapolation more than a thought experiment is suggested by the fact that in 1998–1999 NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander, to analyze the climate and search for ice at a cost of $356 million (Dunn 1999, 3), and have followed them since with other missions. As Robinson’s trilogy depicts, the availability of water is probably the single most important factor in the determination of the viability of Mars colonization in the next century.
One of the first ethical questions that arises among the 100 is whether or not to terraform the planet to adapt it to human inhabitation or to require that humans adapt to Mars in its current condition. These two become the extreme Green Mars and Red Mars positions until the ill-fated revolution of 2061. Although the exact scope and character of terraforming is debated for the next thirty-five years in rather dichotomous terms, it is initiated on the basis of the argument that Mars is an inorganic mass and therefore environmental ethics do not apply to it, since such ethics only apply to biospheres and without indigenous organisms there is no ecology—a crucial philosophical question that Robert Sparrow addresses in the fall 1999 issue of Environmental Ethics. But a second argument also develops, which could be depicted as one between terraforming and terragouging. In the former case, a Martian biosphere would be developed sufficient to sustain human life without people having to wear spacesuits, but higher altitudes would remain virtually unchanged. In the latter, whatever necessary would be done to facilitate extraction of raw materials for earthly consumption.
Robinson employs throughout the trilogy a semi-omniscient narrator with the story told with different characters selected as focalizers for each chapter, so that various points of view are represented in internally persuasive discourse. Also the point of attention is adjusted to vary the attitude toward and concern with Mars, the people on it, and their activities in line with such shifts in point of view. As a result, not only do readers hear the debate over whether or not to terraform from opposing viewpoints, but also hear about debates about the relationship between terraforming Mars and at the same time changing the human culture on its surface, so that it does not become another Earth. One of the Russian characters, Arkady, for instance, argues for the need to have a new architecture representative of the physical, chemical, and mineral properties of Mars as part of a necessary social and psychic transformation of its settlers, so that they will become Martians rather than Russians on Mars, Americans on Mars, and so on (K. S. Robinson 1993, 59–61).
In the context of the same general argument, an American, Sax Russell, suggests that terraforming will change the human beings on Mars in an evolutionary way. But Arkady disagrees by distinguishing evolution from history. He argues that the former consists of the environment plus the occurrence of chance, while the latter consists of the environment plus the making of choices (K. S. Robinson 1993, 88). In particular, he strenuously argues that the decisions about social change should be made by the people on Mars and not the people on Earth, declaring basically that the people must be transformed into Martians even as they transform Mars to have an earthlike atmosphere (K. S. Robinson 1993, 89). Later in the novel, about a decade or more into the settlement period, the term “aeroform” will be introduced to suggest this process by which human beings are transformed by and on Mars. This argument seems to run precisely counter to the kind of position taken by Sterling in Heavy Weather. Muddling through would mean a form of evolution in which society and individuals are subjected to chance determined by large scale fundamentally unplanned decisions and unintended results. Aero-forming would become a form of history in which conscious choices are made about fundamentally planned decisions with an effort to realize intended results at the level of social transformation. And in this context, such social transformation is interdependent and mutually interserving with environmental transformation.
This argument is developed from a sociopolitical perspective by a Russian scientist in reaction against the pragmatic apolitical perspective of an American scientist. But Robinson also provides a third perspective, a mystical, ground-based spirituality spearheaded on Mars by a Japanese agronomist, Hiroko. It is perhaps telling that she leads the team establishing greenhouses because soil proves one of the most difficult materials to generate on Mars because it requires such interdependent action between the organic and the inorganic. Hiroko claims that Mars will tell them what it wants and then they will have to do it (K. S. Robinson 1993, 115). Terraforming, then, not only has to react to the specificities of the landscape, but also react to the particularities of the spirit of place. It may be that Robinson has chosen a Japanese character for this role, since she and other Japanese settlers who arrive later speak of Martian kami or local spirits in an application of Shinto to their locale (K. S. Robinson 1993, 229). And noteworthy here is that Shinto finds kami in both organic and inorganic matter, trees and rocks, animals, and rivers. Such a spirituality contradicts the argument initially made by the terraformers that Mars has no ecology since it has no organic matter (K. S. Robinson 1993, 205), even though it does not contradict the concept of terraforming in general.
In the character of Nadia, readers begin to learn how one might appreciate Mars as Mars and be open to large-scale terraforming. Early in the novel Nadia suddenly realizes that she is learning really to see Mars when she recognizes how utterly alien it is (K. S. Robinson 1993, 141–43). To see it as such and not as analogous to Earth requires a fundamental shift of consciousness. And as the novel progresses, it is suggested that the people who have the ability to become inhabitants are the ones who learn to see the Mars environment as distinct from the Earth’s as much as possible, rather than those who are always trying to explain it through earth terminology, symbols, and metaphors.
At one point Sax Russell takes the strong anthropocentric approach by claiming that human beings give meaning and beauty to Mars and that it has no intrinsic value. Ann Clayborne, his staunchest intellectual opponent, takes a radical biocentric approach and claims that Sax values science too much and rock too little (K. S. Robinson 1993, 177–79). And it is noteworthy that Sax is criticized by Ann and depicted by other characters as not really seeing the planet or even going outside much. Later in the trilogy, however, he does undergo a significant change in awareness and as he begins to get outside more and more and begins to moderate his position, even as Ann moderates hers over time, to the point where in the third volume they become a couple.
Unfortunately, while the original 100 are having these marvelous debates about the degree of terraforming to undertake and whether or not to attempt to build a new civilization, the United Nations decides to support mega-terraforming and announces that it is immediately sending 1,500 more colonists (K. S. Robinson 1993, 202). As the second decade of settlement proceeds, it becomes clear that the U.N. is little more than a front for transnational corporations who want to exploit Mars for resources and so send up temporary workers who are not settlers and will not become residents of the planet. Mars is to be a colony in the nineteenth-century sense of that term, rather than its usual usage in SF (K. S. Robinson 1993, 270–80). Such a position runs directly counter to considerations of settlement based on arguments about the carrying capacity of the extremely limited and fragile ecosystem and atmosphere being developed on the planet (K. S. Robinson 1993, 309). With such pressure and clarification of Earth’s view of their function, the 100 begin to talk about the need to establish a different kind of economic system on Mars, one that will work with the environment and contribute to cultural change rather than cultural and economic recidivism. Thus Robinson links the issue of inhabitation with that of environmental transformation and engineering, with that of cultural change, with that of political and economic change.
The various factions within the 100 join with their children and later settlers and begin to form two major parties and a variety of lesser ones. The major two are the Red Mars Party, which seeks minimal terraforming, and the Green Mars Party, which favors large-scale terraforming for the benefit of the inhabitants not the metanationals. Both favor independence from Earth (K. S. Robinson 1993, 370–79). These political developments are accelerated by strong pressure from Earth to significantly increase immigration to Mars to relieve population pressures on Earth, while exploitation of Mars by the transnationals is facilitated by the large corporations taking control of smaller countries to utilize their political access to the planet. Members of the 100 realize that a place will change people if that place is given the time to do its work on people committed to learning to inhabit it and the place is not overwhelmed by settlers bringing the past with them in sufficient numbers to re-create the world they have left behind (K. S. Robinson 1993, 420–30). But with time appearing to run out, the Red and Green parties attempt a revolt and are crushed. The last 150 pages of Red Mars, then, are concerned with the failed revolt of 2061 and how the violence of its suppression results in unleashing major natural forces that accelerate terraforming beyond the wildest dreams of its most ardent proponents. The members of the original 100 who survive are forced into hiding.
The first part of Green Mars, the second book of the trilogy, is titled “Aero-formation,” indicating that even though the revolt of 2061 was crushed the process of human adaptation to Mars will continue. That process, however, will necessarily develop in a complex way since the place itself is undergoing rapid and fundamental changes, with the altering terrain functioning as a genetic transformer (K. S. Robinson 1995, 2). This claim clarifies two points at the beginning of Green Mars. One, the planet has a biosphere now; it is an ecology and therefore environmental ethics have to be thought through differently from before. Two, while human beings make history through making choices, that history is made in the context of evolution, which means chance; therefore, while people have choices, plans, and intentions, they can enjoy no condition of control and reach no point of inevitability.
Hiroko early in this part of Green Mars makes a crucial claim that bears acutely on the issue of human colonization of other planets, whether they are dead like Mars or alive like the planets that Brunner and Le Guin imagine and perhaps like the one discovered in the summer of 1998, 30,000 light years from Earth. She believes that there is a spontaneous process of patterning that promotes complexity and human beings are obligated to encourage that process of increasing complexity in whatever way they can (K. S. Robinson 1995, 9).
How is this position fundamentally different from the pragmatist position that Sax Russell takes when he claims that humans impute beauty and give meaning to Mars? Robinson certainly seems to think a difference exists as their perspectives are clearly developed as nonidentical throughout the trilogy. And I think he is right. Hiroko does not claim that humans provide the beauty and the meaning, but rather that they are entities, and not necessarily the only ones, who recognize the beauty and the meaning and are able both to express it and to foster it.
Our responsibility is not to do what we want with the Earth or with Mars but rather to determine who might best assume responsibility for fostering life on these planets in all its forms and permutations. The problem, however, is that such a position may lead to similar conclusions as the ones reached by the scientific pragmatists and the transnationals: explore and colonize other planets. Oh, certainly for different purposes, but colonize nevertheless. Is such colonization ethical? I think this question needs to be debated today, because colonization of Mars has already been placed on the drawing boards. If it is a potentially ethical action, then how do writers, critics, and philosophers help to develop the kind of public consciousness that may enable its enactment to be ethical in practice? As Green Mars develops, it will become clear that this ethic of fostering life wherever it may become rooted applies not only to Mars and how human beings from Earth treat life there, but also to Earth and how Martians treat the struggle for life on the home planet. And while a secondary question in the second part of the trilogy, it will become a primary one in the third part, Blue Mars.
A significant portion of Green Mars is given over, on the one hand, to describing the transformations of the Martian landscape unleashed by the violence of 2061, particularly water flow, ice cap melting, and atmosphere development; and, on the other hand, to efforts to establish an alternative form of economics combining features of gift and barter economies to develop an ecological economics (K. S. Robinson 1995, 293–94), along with efforts to transform the transnational corporations on Earth into cooperatives in the post-nation-state decades. As a sidebar, it is important to note for people unfamiliar with the trilogy that Robinson has scientists on Mars discover a longevity gene therapy that enables him to keep some of his main characters alive through the approximate two hundred years that the trilogy covers. At the same time, Robinson introduces characters and their viewpoints from succeeding generations and how the perspectives of people born and raised on Mars can differ substantially from the first settlers as well as recent settlers. Also in Green Mars Robinson gives attention to the increasingly multicultural character of the new settlers populating the planet. As a result, even as he is working on the alternative economics to go along with a new biosphere, he also develops an argument about cultural syncretism (K. S. Robinson 1995, 335–56), concluding that survival requires cultural cross-fertilization.
Robinson introduces, then, in this part of the trilogy, arguments for a sustainable prosperity rather than a sustainable development (1995, 389), and a form of government with the power vested most heavily at the local, cooperative, community level, and most lightly at the centralizing level. By the end of Green Mars, then, a fairly clear picture of the pace and character of terraforming emerges with an understanding to leave at least 30 percent of the planet as originally Martian as possible, to promote and develop an alternative economics, and to form a type of government that will best support an eco-regional, cooperative, and community-based sense of identity—a politics of place, centered around the locations that people call home. All that is needed is independence! And the opportunity for that comes when environmental cataclysms due to volcanic eruptions under Antarctica cause rapid sea level rise on Earth. With their attention diverted, the governments and corporations of Earth cannot prevent the second Martian revolution from succeeding in achieving the goal of planetary independence from Earth.
And so, while volume one ended on a note of defeat and chaos, volume two ends on a note of triumph and also chaos (K. S. Robinson 1995, 559). Rather than struggle against it, the colonists need to read its patterns and deal with its cascading complexity through making appropriate compromises. Domestically on Mars that means negotiating the degree of terraforming that all parties on the planet can accept and the degree of immigration that will continue to be allowed from Earth. To protect what they had gained the new free Martians would have to work out the ways in which they would help Earth with its population and environmental crises. Otherwise, they could expect to lose quite quickly the freedom they had just gained.
In a sense these two arenas of compromise become the background issues driving the plot of the third volume of the trilogy, Blue Mars. This volume also affords Robinson the opportunity to describe in detail the multiplicity of ennatured cultures and communities developing out of the environmental, economic, political, and cultural transformations occurring on Mars, cultures and communities that he believes could be developed on Earth with the right phase changes and the appropriate compromises. In Blue Mars Robinson also considers the problem plaguing almost every political revolution intent on creating a new society: what happens to the ideology when political power shifts from the revolutionary generation to the next one and the one after that, particularly when by the third generation the conditions of scarcity, pioneering experience, and intensity of collective self-sacrifice have dissipated and the heirs of the fruits of struggle experience relative prosperity.
Robinson continues a strong focus on the development of political practice in a rapidly evolving postcapitalist era on both Mars and Earth. He also depicts the transition of Mars from being largely alien wilderness for the first generation to familiar garden for the second and third generations, who have known nothing else. With more and more of Mars becoming developed and populated, Robinson’s major characters representing the Red and Green positions continue to debate the issue of maintaining wilderness as enclave or park (K. S. Robinson 1997, 134). One of the key political innovations represented throughout Blue Mars is the establishment of an environmental court, which functions as the equivalent of the Supreme Court in deciding major cases about development, population, settlement, and terraforming—both its pace and its characteristics (K. S. Robinson 1997, 155). Clearly, Robinson does not envision such a court as applying only to Mars, but also perhaps an eventual step on Earth in establishing a world environment court to adjudicate disputes over the implementation of international environmental treaties, accords, and protocols.
While Green Mars depicted acts of ecotage as part of the struggle for independence, it cast the most extreme forms of such action in a negative light. In Blue Mars arguments against ecotage are developed with Robinson’s position appearing to be to accept it tactically but not strategically and to favor the promotion of alternative communities instead (K. S. Robinson 1997, 271–72). The feasibility and sustainability of such alternative communities is seen to rest with the firm establishment of a cooperative dominated economy.
Again, as it has been in the preceding volumes, Earth’s population problem and the pressures for immigration to Mars generate political crises. But, even though it becomes the critical political issue, Robinson demonstrates convincingly that human emigration to other planets will never address Earth’s population problems because of the logistics and equipment involved in moving large numbers of people through space (1997, 348). Mars functions, then, more as a symbol of possibility and as a safety valve rather than a practical solution to a problem that must be solved on Earth—the balancing out of human society in relation to the carrying capacity of the planet.
As Blue Mars moves toward the third Martian revolution, Robinson trims down the successes and achievements of individuals, especially the original 100 to counter romantic tendencies to see individuals as heroes determining the outcome of events. He counters the romantic tendency to see technology and science as the determining force in the successful establishment of a new society on a new planet. For example, various scientists recognize that the genetic engineering of plants and animals on Mars has gone out of control and that what is developing, despite, and because of, human intervention, has become an evolution of contingency, that is, natural evolution (K. S. Robinson 1997, 412). Robinson also has major characters modifying their ideological positions, as when Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell, the antagonists in the Red versus Green debate, learn to engage in dialogue with each other and eventually become a couple in their old age. Aligned with this anti-dogmatism position is the depiction of zealots in a generally negative light as well as a critique of purist positions that refuse to engage in dialogue and compromise. What becomes key in the last pages of the novel is the development of the ability to love an entire planet, not just a locale or a bioregion (K. S. Robinson 1997, 639). That feeling must include a multigenerational perspective, as Ann Clayborne remarks about their responsibilities toward future generations to strive to shape the best world possible and avoid leaving a toxic mess behind for the great-grandchildren to clean up (K. S. Robinson 1997, 728). That closing point demonstrates with startling explicitness that SF can thematically be very much about the present time and the present place.
CONCLUSION
Some of the works that I have discussed in this chapter either briefly or in detail provide what I would call “alibis,” invoking Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “non-alibi” in Toward a Philosophy of the Act. By that I mean they provide loopholes and ways out to justify ethically questionable behavior or else to sidestep the ethical questions. Brunner, I think, does that with Bedlam Planet, so too Sterling in Heavy Weather and Goonan in The Bones of Time. David Brin in Earth, a novel I have not previously mentioned, does so also in three very damaging ways, although he tries to ameliorate those novelistic actions through a nonfiction afterword that calls on people to take responsibility for the planet and even provides the names and addresses of various environmental organizations. But the alibi is invoked when Brin uses a deus ex machina device to resolve the plot of the novel. First, it turns out that the black hole at the Earth’s core apparently threatening the planet’s very existence has been introduced there by a benign alien intelligence that has even sent one of its own to Earth to aid the protagonist. Second, through the aid of this alien force, a planetary Gaia consciousness is established as an all-powerful artificial intelligence that can henceforth limit and punish ecological destruction. Human beings, then, are not required to assume full responsibility for their actions in this novel. Third, the psychotic ecoterrorist, presented as the only truly evil person in the entire novel, annihilates millions of people before the Gaia consciousness destroys her, thereby ameliorating the population pressures on the planet’s ecology long enough for humanity to get its act together under granny Gaia’s guidance.
In contrast, the strengths of such works as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Robinson’s Mars Trilogy are precisely that they provide no deus ex machina alibis. Human beings have to act in ethically responsible ways while realizing that they are not ever in control of the overall situation and that what they understand to be ethically justified or technically correct today may prove erroneous tomorrow. Such works as these can turns readers’ attention toward the major socioenvironmental issues facing humanity today. And in the case of Robinson’s work, SF can through near-future extrapolation orient readers to thinking about ethical questions just over the horizon but rapidly coming into sight, such as the colonization of Mars.