Chris Beckett’s 2012 novel Dark Eden (Beckett 2012) – together with its sequels, Mother of Eden (Beckett 2015) and Daughter of Eden (Beckett 2016) – tells the story of a small group of human beings stranded, far from Earth, on a dark rogue planet, somewhat ironically named Eden. This planet is alone in the cosmos. It does not circle any star, and it does not have any moons. This means that it is perpetually dark. There are no seasons, and no diurnal cycles. As Eden lacks a sun, its sole energy source is geothermal. Heat arises from deep within the planet’s core, and warms the surface to Earth-like temperatures. The gravity, too, seems to be Earth-normal; and the planet has plenty of water, and an Earth-like atmosphere that is thick enough to preserve the heat. The lower altitudes of the planet’s surface are warm and fertile; while the higher elevations are cold enough to be covered in ice and snow. The skies are usually overcast; but sometimes the clouds congeal into fog and warm rain (at the lower elevations) or snow (at the higher ones). At other times, the ubiquitous clouds dissipate for a brief while; the air gets cooler, and in the blackness of the sky the inhabitants can see what they call the “Starry Swirl.” Apparently this is our own galaxy, the Milky Way, appearing in its full spiraling glory.
Living organisms have evolved in this environment, both on land and in water, in forms roughly analogous to what we know as plants and animals. Of course, Eden’s plant-analogues – which the inhabitants call trees and flowers – do not photosynthesize as Earth plants do. Rather, they use the planet’s geothermal energy for fuel, pumping it up from deep beneath the surface. They “warm the air with their trunks,” and drive the ecosystem of the planet as a whole. Animals, for their part, bask in this warmth; they either forage upon the plants directly, or prey upon other animals. These animals are roughly analogous to terrestrial organisms – the inhabitants call them bats, monkeys, leopards, and so on – but they are unrelated to Earth life, and alien to human sensibilities and expectations. They have “green-black blood and two hearts and six limbs,” together with “round and flat” eyes that “don’t turn from side to side” the way that our eyes do. They don’t have facial expressions or bodily gestures that we know how to interpret. People find it hard to empathize with them.
The native life-forms provide Eden with its only light. The plants display softly glowing “lanternflowers”; animals similarly have “soft white lanterns on the tops of their heads.” The forests and valleys of Eden are thereby illuminated with “a dim light – pink, white, blue and yellow.” Such light “wasn’t much brighter than moonlight is on Earth”; but it is enough to allow the human inhabitants to see. However, the fertile areas, lit by abundant plant and animal life, are separated from one another by “Snowy Dark” – much more sparsely populated snowy ridges and mountain ranges. At these higher elevations, everything is “dark dark” and “cold cold.”
How did human beings come to inhabit Eden? It was all an accident. Five astronauts from Earth came upon the planet after passing through a wormhole. Three of them had illicitly commandeered a spaceship in order to go on a joyride; the other two were orbital police, who followed and tried to stop them. They all ended up landing on Eden after damaging their spaceship. Two of the astronauts – Angela Young, one of the cops, and Tommy Schneider, one of the joyriders – remained on the surface. The other three left, hoping to signal Earth for help; Angela and Tommy never saw them again. Dark Eden takes place some 160 years after this first landing. All the human inhabitants of the planet are descended from the founding heterosexual couple who remained. Tommy was a Jewish man from Brooklyn; Angela was a Black woman from London. We are told that they were not exactly companions by choice:
They say that Angela and Tommy didn’t get on so well. It’s said he got angry when he didn’t get his way. It’s said she was full of bitterness for what he’d done to her … She’d never have come here at all of her own choice, and she’d never have been with a man like him either.
Nonetheless, as the sole human beings on the planet, Tommy and Angela felt impelled to be fruitful and multiply. They had a son and three daughters, who in turn had more children, and so on. One of the results of this inbreeding, or lack of genetic diversity, is an accumulation of birth defects: many of Angela and Tommy’s descendants are “batfaces” (people with cleft lips and palates) or “clawfeet” (people with clubfeet). A smaller number are intellectually disabled.
At the time Dark Eden begins, there are slightly over five hundred human inhabitants of Eden. They are all huddled together in Circle Valley, an enclave bounded by mountains and cliffs on all sides. The people think of themselves as a single (capital-F) Family, subdivided into eight “groups” or tribes, each of which has its own last name. The people of Eden are hunter-gatherers, who eke out their existence at a subsistence level. They live in a state of what might be considered primitive communism. They all work together, and equally share their food and other goods. Everyday life rests mostly upon the guidance of custom and myth. There are few explicit laws, and most decisions are made by consensus. Authority, such as it is, resides in the hands of the elders, and particularly the women. “Having a slip” – the term the people on Eden use for having sex – is a frequent and quite casual activity. The only rules about it are that “you mustn’t slip with a child or with anyone that doesn’t want to do it … and grown men mustn’t slip with young girls.” There is no monogamy, no sense of anything like a nuclear family, and no “ownership” of wives by husbands. Children are raised collectively; they retain ties with their mothers and their maternal siblings and cousins, but most of the time they do not know who their fathers are.
Despite all this, the people of Eden do not think of themselves as living in a paradise. Rather, they acutely feel that they live diminished lives, compared to their ancestors on Earth. This primitive Eden is already a fallen one. The people have heard stories about – and bemoan the lack of – such seemingly magical things as “Rayed Yo” (radio), “Telly vision” (television), and “Computer,” not to mention, more generally, “metal and plastic” and “lecky-trickity” (electricity). As the altered words suggest, their language has also been stripped down and simplified. It’s hard to retain the integrity of words whose referents and concepts are entirely unavailable. Some of Edenic speech also sounds a bit like baby talk. For instance, the people use repeated adjectives instead of intensifiers: they say “dark dark” instead of “very dark.” Everything on Eden, from language to lifestyle, is something of a degraded replica. Everything is haunted by the ghosts of what is missing.
Above all, the people of Eden are aware of being deprived of their “far-off world full of light … Our eyes need the bright light.” Their legends tell them that the Sun of Earth is “so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.” But they have no way to imagine what such illumination would actually be like; it goes too far beyond the bounds of their actual experience. Instead, they associate bright light with promises of salvation. They see themselves as exiles, and desperately want to return to the place of their origins:
We live as if Eden wasn’t where we really lived at all but just a camp like hunters make when they stay out in forest for a few wakings. We’re only waiting here to go back to where we really belong … We shouldn’t be here, that’s the real problem: it wasn’t the world we were made for. We were meant to live in light … We were trapped inside a dark little cave with no way out of it. And even though I’d never known anything else, and probably never would do. I longed and longed for that different world that was full of light.
This almost Gnostic yearning is the core of what can only be called the Edenites’ religion. The people live in hope for the moment when – however long it takes – a spaceship arrives from Earth, in order to take them back to their true home. Perhaps the spaceship will also take back the bones of the dead, and restore them to life. Other religious motifs stand out as well. For instance, the people tell the story of the astronaut Michael, who – just like Adam in the Bible – first “named the animals and plants.” This explains why the alien life-forms of Eden have Earth-reminiscent names.
By the start of Dark Eden, however, the ostensibly temporary condition of exile has already lasted for six generations. The Polish aphorist Stanislaw Lec wrote that gossip grown old becomes myth; and Chris Beckett himself has noted that “a lot of the Old Testament is small domestic stories elevated to a mythical level” (Goldschlager 2014). We literally see this process take place in Eden. The whole society is organized around the ostensibly “True Story” of Angela and Tommy. The Story contains many unpleasant details. We hear about Angela’s outbursts of rage, and her despair after losing the ring that her parents had given her back on Earth; Tommy’s violence (“once twice he even hit her”), and his ultimate suicide; and the brother-sister and father-daughter incest that were needed for the Family to grow in its early days. But this old gossip, however changed over years of oral transmission, is the only tradition or heritage that the people of Eden have.
Gossip still remains the basis of sociality on Eden, even in the present time of the novel. Several of the book’s “newhair” (teenaged or adolescent) narrators complain about it at length:
You can’t do anything in Family without everyone knowing about it, and weighing it up, and picking it over, and making their bloody minds up about what they thought about it … every bloody little thing that happened, in no time everyone in Family was talking talking about it and poring over it and prodding it and poking at it and clucking their tongues over it … In fact, we were so on top of one another, so in each others’ lives and in each others’ heads, we were hardly separate from one another at all … it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.
This suffocating intimacy is only reinforced when the whole Family gathers, every “Any Virsry” (anniversary), to perform the rituals that bind them together. They retell the gossip-turned-myth of the True Story. The Oldest, victims of dementia, and propped against a wall “like three empty skin bags,” drone on about the early days of the colony. “Mementoes” (i.e. relics, objects that once belonged to Angela and Tommy: “the Boots, the Belt, the Backpack, the Kee Board”) and “Models” (i.e. replicas, chintzy little toy models of spaceships and airplanes and cars and houses) are passed around for inspection. One of the tribes does a “Show,” a dramatic reenactment of the saga of Angela and Tommy. As the ceremony goes on, the older people are relieved and reassured, the children are entertained, but the newhairs are alienated and “bored.” The stasis of tradition, or of gossip-turned-myth, can only do so much.
Dark Eden actually starts at the point of a looming social crisis, although this only becomes apparent gradually. The material cause is environmental stress. The Family lives in one small valley, closed off from the rest of the planet by dark, icy mountains. As their numbers expand, the people find themselves overexploiting and depleting their limited resources. Animals become scarcer and harder to catch; people are forced to adopt food sources they previously disdained. Tradition doesn’t offer any suggestion for dealing with the crisis, aside from working harder and eating less. Family can only fumble about, as it is
full of stupid people, full of hateful, disappointed people, full of sour people, full of ignorant people who never thought anything through for themselves.
The end of abundance means, however, that something has to change. The combination of scarcity with adolescent boredom and restlessness, not to mention male aggression no longer held in check, makes for an explosive mix. The novel is mostly concerned with how the established society of Eden breaks down, and what replaces it. Dark Eden therefore provides the narrative of what in other language might be called the Fall of humanity – albeit this is a secularized and materialistic Fall, driven by ecological limits rather than by original sin.
There is a complex irony to this account. For, as we have already seen, the society of Eden, at the start of the novel, is already a fallen one. It defines itself largely in terms of exile and deprivation, and yearns for a supposed lost plenitude. And yet, this minor, diminished society is still a sort of paradise, from which the people suffer yet another Fall. In the course of the book, we descend from gossip-turned-myth into history, from harmony and stasis into rupture and betrayal, and from peaceful, egalitarian matriarchal communism into patriarchy, private property, and militaristic violence.
The storytelling of Dark Eden is divided among eight first-person narrators. As the unity of Edenic society is shattered, we cannot understand what is going on from a single point of view. The various narrators both embody, and focus, the tensions beneath the surface of Family life. Most of them are newhairs, but they also include the querulous Mitch London, one of the Oldest, and Caroline Brooklyn, the official Family Head, the closest thing to a leader that the old society has. The divergences among these narrators work to convey the way that Eden’s small society splinters in the course of the novel. One index of this general collapse – much more a symptom than a cause – is the end of common assent to the Family’s mythical narrative. People stop believing in the value, here and now, of a communal life; some of them also stop believing in the promise of an ultimate salvific return to Earth. At the end of the novel, the people even discover the crashed vehicle in which the three missing astronauts tried to call for help. It is evident that they died without ever having a chance to do so. This destroys the people’s hope, but it is also a potential source of renewal, or secular rededication: “now we know for sure we can just get on with things and don’t have to wait around for Earth.”
John Redlantern is the most important of the book’s narrators, and the character who is most instrumental in changing Edenic society. John is a restless newhair; he perceives the danger of limited and decreasing resources, and he feels stifled by the Family’s conservative adherence to tradition. First he disrupts Any Virsry with his impertinent questions; then he coolly and deliberately desecrates the Family’s central symbols. As a result, the Family sends him into exile – something that has never happened on Eden before. When John leaves, he is joined by a few other newhairs, who in effect become his acolytes. This sort of hierarchy between a single leader and a mass of followers is something else that has never been seen on Eden before. John’s followers are united, at least, in the hope that his vision will make it possible for them to establish a new social order elsewhere.
The exodus of John and his followers requires – and indeed leads to – an energetic burst of social and technological innovation. There isn’t enough room for them in Circle Valley; aside from the limited resources, they are still too close for comfort to the Family. John wants to cross the dark, snowy mountains – something that tradition opposes, and that nobody has ever thought to do before. But in order to accomplish this, John and his followers must devise new means of transportation, domesticate some of the native fauna, and produce warm clothing for the first time. By the end of the novel, John and his group have succeeded in all of these tasks; on the other side of the mountains they find a new fertile region, one that is far larger, and richer in resources, than Circle Valley.
John Redlantern might well be the unproblematic hero of a more traditional science fiction novel. And indeed, in her review of Dark Eden, N. K. Jemisin accuses Chris Beckett precisely of this:
What really dims Eden’s glow, however, is the 1950s ethos underpinning the whole thing … John himself is that most threadbare of science fiction types: the impossibly handsome, impossibly forward-thinking young man who gets the prettiest girl with no particular effort, and saves the day through sheer bloody-mindedness.
(Jemisin 2014)
I think, however, that this is an ungenerous, and unfairly reductive, view of the novel. For Beckett gives us a far more nuanced and – dare I say? – dialectical view of John Redlantern, and the changes he initiates, than Jemisin implies. Social tensions (or what traditional Marxists call contradictions) may well impel or necessitate change, but this does not mean that the change is automatically progressive or good. It is true that John is genuinely imaginative; he is able to see problems before other people become aware of them, and to envision alternatives that wouldn’t cross anyone else’s mind. However, although John knows that things have to change, he only wants – and he will only accept – change on his own particular terms. He hates when somebody else takes the initiative. As the Family Head Caroline Brooklyn tells us, what John’s disruption “was really about was him being the hero of the story, and no one else.” Or as John’s first supporter and sometime companion Tina Spiketree puts it, John “can’t leave a thing alone, he can’t bear anything that hasn’t got his personal mark on it.”
John has something of a messianic obsession. No matter what happens, he requires his followers “to go on believing in me,” and not listen to anyone else. He is always calculating the angles and looking for a tactical advantage. When his friends first come to join him in exile, for instance, he doesn’t go out to greet them, but hides instead, because “it needed to be them coming to me, not me going to them. I didn’t want to have to owe them anything, not when I had so many plans.” And later, when the group runs into difficulties that he cannot solve, and his cousin Jeff Redlantern works things out instead, John regards his cousin’s success as “yet another problem that I had to figure out how to fix.”
In order to maintain his authority, John never tells anyone what he really feels and thinks. He always keeps his face “still still like a mask.” He continually monitors and manipulates the image he projects to others. He knows on some level that he needs collaborators, and that he cannot accomplish anything alone. But as Tina notes, he is “scared” of her, or of anyone else whom he might have to treat as an “equal” instead of a follower or a hanger-on. Tina joins John’s group, in preference to staying with Family. But she is continually annoyed that John had “expected us to follow him and trust him, but he hadn’t trusted any of us at all.” Indeed, John doesn’t even seem capable of respecting others or treating them with any degree of reciprocity. Jeff complains to John at one point that he is acting as if “everything in the world is just stuff for you to use for your plans.” And Tina says that John “just didn’t quite get it. He didn’t quite get that other people apart from him had their own thoughts and their own plans and their own things in their heads.”
Moreover, since John’s talent consists in “breaking out of something old and making something new,” he is only satisfied when he is shaking things up. He is “happy happy happy” even or especially when he has “bad bad news … he liked having trouble to deal with.” On the other hand, John is unable to accept situations in which people are actually settled and contented. As Tina puts it, “ordinary waking-by-waking stuff seemed to make him restless and uneasy: the chit-chat, the joking about, the little arguments, the kids, the chores.” When John’s group finally reaches a situation of sufficient abundance so that “you didn’t need to have everyone working working all waking long just to get enough to eat,” all John can do is fret and brood and complain. He scorns his own friends and followers as people who
just try and make things easy and comfortable right now … if I left it to the others, no plans would get made. They’d just eat and sleep and play and slip, until something happened to stop them.
In other words, John is somebody who doesn’t want to live, under any circumstances, in a peaceful, egalitarian, and unfallen condition. He scorns the very idea that things could be “easy and comfortable.” Even if Eden had not already been in a state of crisis, he would have sought to provoke one – although, without the objective existence of economic stress, he probably would not have succeeded. John compulsively needs to break things, if only so that he can be the one to fix them. In showing us this, Dark Eden offers a critique, rather than an endorsement, of the “1950s ethos” of golden-age science fiction about which Jemisin complains.
John’s opposite number, and his biggest enemy, is his somewhat older kinsman David Redlantern. David is by far the nastiest character in the book, and the closest the novel gets to a traditional antagonist. He is not one of the eight narrators, and we only see him through others’ eyes. From the very beginning, David is highly unpleasant, with his “angry spluttery voice,” his aggressive sarcasm, and his inclination toward violence. He always has it in for John, in particular. David is one of those angry men who “want the story to be all about them,” and who “turn into bullies and try and control people.” He is “cruel and cold and hard,” a “sour sarcastic lump of misery,” and nobody likes him – but many people fear him, even at the start of the book, when Eden is entirely peaceful.
Questions of disability have their place here as well. (Chris Beckett, a former social worker, is sensitive to issues of disability and ableism.) Some people in the Family say that David is the way he is because he is a batface: he is embittered because he is ugly, and because he has always been “left on the outside of things.” Ableism is certainly a problem in Edenic society; as the batface Sue Redlantern (John’s aunt and Jeff’s mother) remarks, “we batfaces took a lot of stick and we had to stand up for each other.” Nevertheless, it is worth noting that other batfaces, especially the women, are generally described as “kind and giving,” or “always cheerful cheerful,” or “as sweet-natured as anyone could be.” David’s anger cannot be blamed on his disability; he exhibits a distinctively masculine pathology, though it is initially kept in check by Eden’s matriarchy.
David Redlantern is the very first to take offense at John’s transgressions; and he is louder about his objections than anyone else. But David’s ostensible defense of tradition is just as destructive of the old order as John’s innovations are, if not more so. When John desecrates and destroys the Family’s central symbols, David immediately demands that he be put to death: “Hang him up from a spiketree like we hang a buckskin out to dry … Spike him up to burn, like Hitler did to Jesus.” (The name “Hitler” is known in Eden’s lore as the murderer of “the Juice” – i.e. the Jews – and their leader Jesus; this combination of the Holocaust and the Crucifixion, neither of which is really understood by anyone on Eden, is another example of how the Family’s oral tradition works.)
David, like John, is quick to recruit followers and flunkies – and especially disaffected newhairs – to his cause. Soon he has formed an (all-male) order of Guards, with himself as the Head of Guards. The Guards are “thirty forty young men, [who] grinned and smirked at each other with their big blackglass spears over their shoulders.” They intimidate everyone else, and arrogate special privileges for themselves. Caroline Brooklyn and the older women are stripped of authority; they are simply ignored by David and the Guards, and eased out of the picture. Everyone else is intimidated into obeying the Guards’ instructions. Almost without anyone’s concrete awareness of what is going on, the Family is transformed from a peaceful, egalitarian matriarchy into a violent, militaristic, and hierarchical patriarchy.
The last time we see the formerly peaceful people of Circle Valley, they have become a lynch mob, vowing vengeance against John and his followers, all of them chanting: “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” Events outpace deliberative awareness. Many of the people, and even some of the Guards, are still a bit “troubled by what was happening.” But as Sue Redlantern tells us, “it made no difference, though.” If members of the Guard “didn’t do what they were told, they were at risk themselves.” In other words, David’s militaristic coup has a self-reinforcing dynamic. People are impelled to join in, because other people have already joined in. If I don’t want to get in trouble by showing my doubts and hesitation, I had better prove my loyalty by persecuting anyone else who dares to express their doubts.
The clash between John’s and David’s factions leads, inexorably, to the (re)invention of rape and murder: practices that are all too familiar to us on Earth, but that were previously unknown on Eden. Even though a truce between the two groups is ostensibly in place, some of David’s followers go out to stir up trouble. They beat and very nearly kill Jeff, and they are on the verge of raping Tina. But John and some of his other male followers come to the rescue; in their turn, they kill the three aggressors. Having committed the first murders on Eden, John and his associates have evidently (as Tina puts it)
changed. They’d changed completely. They were trembling worse than me, they were shaking all over, and their faces were all blotchy and twisted and puffed up, so you couldn’t tell if they were scared or angry or excited or ashamed or what.
There is no going back from a change like this. And although John and his friends did in fact act in self-defense, this is not really an alibi. Murder and rape are no longer unthinkable; they are now real possibilities in Eden. And John and his people are just as capable of these deeds as David and his people are. Once again, there is an obvious Biblical parallel: the story of Cain and Abel. But in Dark Eden’s secularized version of the Fall, the first murder is not a consequence of eating the apple and being expelled from the Garden; rather, it is the precipitating and irreversible moment of the Fall itself.
Dark Eden, however – in this matter quite unlike the Bible – insists that the state of a given society’s gender relations, in addition to being of concern in itself, is also an index, and a harbinger, of social relations more generally. Tina Spiketree, despite being one of John’s first supporters, is presciently aware of what his innovations will do to gender relations. “The time of men was coming,” she reflects; “in this new, broken-up world it would be the men that would get ahead.” Women will not only be subordinated under David’s rule, but under John’s as well. Having sex will no longer be entirely consensual on both sides; “a time was coming,” Tina reflects, when a man would be able to “do to me whatever he pleased and whenever he felt like it, with whichever bit of my body he chose.”
Tina’s grim premonitions are correct; and they apply to John’s group, as much as they do to David’s. When John sets up his new society, he becomes obsessed with enforcing monogamy, so that a man “knows which kids he was the dad of.” John also pays no attention to child-rearing, which he regards as women’s work – except when he is assured that the child in question is biologically his own. John and Tina are sort of a couple, and he doesn’t want her to have sex with anybody else. Tina is strong and independent enough to reject John’s demands; but it is unlikely that her children and her grandchildren will have a similar freedom. John also tries to hide from Tina the fact that he himself is doing precisely what he wants to stop her from doing: having sex on the side with other people. The double standard, and the sexual division of labor, go together with John’s overall drive to put his stamp on everything, and to reform Edenic society in his own image.
John’s group and David’s group are finally not all that different from one another; their very antagonism ties them together. John puts aside his disturbed feelings after the first killings, and convinces himself that they were justified for reasons of policy; he see this as the best way to manage his group efficiently. David more simply just revels self-righteously in the call to murder, since this helps him push forward his own project of domination. John’s people continue to be the innovators, but David’s people quickly imitate and adopt all of their inventions. David and his men are overt rapists, in a way that John and his followers are not (or at least not yet); but we can see the same tendencies of male domination at work on both sides.
By the second and third volumes of Beckett’s trilogy, taking place two centuries after Dark Eden, the “Johnfolk” and the “Davidfolk” have divided most of the known world between them. The two societies are enemies, and they come to war. But both societies are male-dominated and extremely hierarchical, with privileged ruling groups, militias to enforce order, and the vast majority of the people forced into incessant and difficult labor. We can only conclude that John’s stress on innovation, and David’s stress on tradition, are in fact two sides of the same coin. They are both ultimately grounded in resentment: John resents what he sees as the Family’s oppressive traditions, and David resents what he sees as the undue independence of young people and of women. They both channel discontent into urges for expansion, in contrast to the steady state of the earlier Family. And they both undermine communal solidarity, by subordinating it to the commands of an individual masculine will.
In tracing these developments, the Eden trilogy might well be described as a work of speculative anthropology. Beckett offers us an updated, and highly self-reflexive, version of the sort of nineteenth-century ethnographic speculation that we find in books like Johann Jakob Bachofen’s Mother-Right (1861), Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), and above all Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). These works all tell the story of a primordial matriarchal and egalitarian communism, and of a secular Fall from this state into one of patriarchy and wide class divisions.
These nineteenth-century works were largely deprecated in the twentieth century, on the grounds that they make overly broad generalizations on the basis of piecemeal empirical evidence. But it is worth noting that, despite all the discoveries and research advances of the past century, our evidence on human origins and human evolution is still unavoidably piecemeal, and likely to remain so. The question of human social and cultural development requires speculation of one sort or another, since there is too much that can never be objectively traced and reconstructed. In social history, no less than in evolutionary biology, we cannot get anywhere without organizing our data into narratives; and these narratives must involve some sort of speculation, since the information upon which they are based is necessarily incomplete.
However, not all forms of narrative speculation are equal. Consider, for instance, the discipline of so-called “evolutionary psychology.” It claims that universal “human nature” is genetically determined and socially invariant, and that it consists of instincts and traits that evolved in primordial human populations over the course of the Pleistocene, and have been unchanged since (Barkow et al. 1995). Evolutionary psychology’s flat denial of sociocultural influences and differences coincides with its tendency to read our present circumstances and assumptions back into all of evolutionary history. Thus it uncritically adopts, and projects all the way back into the Pleistocene, both a “1950s ethos” with regard to gender norms, and a distinctly neoliberal conception of Homo economicus (according to which atomistic individuals compete in zero-sum games for relative advantage).
The evidence for the story told by evolutionary psychology remains exceedingly slender and dubious (see, e.g., the critiques by Kitcher 1985 and by Richardson 2007). And its assumptions are overly narrow and reductionistic; for instance, it has no room for an evolutionary approach that includes feedback from cultural development (such as that of Tomlinson 2018). But perhaps we should be wary of simply denouncing evolutionary psychology for its “just-so stories,” as so many of its opponents, from Stephen Jay Gould onward, have done (Gottleib 2012). The problem is not that evolutionary psychology resorts to storytelling per se, but rather that its stories are so lame and simplistic. These stories tend to isolate individual traits from their broader contexts, and give univocal explanations for these traits. Such explanations always come down to saying that a particular trait gives the organism that inherits it a particular adaptive advantage; but no consideration is given to how the various adaptations interact with and feed back upon one another, or how they alter and feed back upon the very environments to which they are supposed to adapt. These stories also fail to come to grips with the way that they themselves work as stories; they pretend to be more objective, more generalizable, and more empirically grounded, than they actually are. Evolutionary psychology is particularly poor at coming to grips with aesthetics. This is a serious problem, since aesthetic considerations are deeply embedded both in the act of telling stories, and in the life situations to which these stories refer.
In contrast, science fiction writers like Chris Beckett, and the nineteenth-century speculative anthropologists upon whom he implicitly draws, tell far better and richer stories than the evolutionary psychologists do. Engels relied upon the best anthropology of his own day, much of which is now obsolete; but he was closely attentive to the complex interactions between social and economic conditions and gender relations. In general, the narratives of speculative anthropology are far more sophisticated and incisive, and far more aware of multiple, overlapping and interacting, causes, than are those of evolutionary psychology. Where evolutionary psychology sees our contemporary gender stereotypes and economic traits as having existed for all of human history as a result of narrowly adaptive mechanisms, speculative anthropology rather seeks to envision the particular historical and social conditions that could have led to the emergence of particular stereotypes and traits.
Of course, Dark Eden differs from the texts of Bachofen, Morgan, and Engels, in that it is overtly a work of science fiction. I consider this an advantage. Beckett’s account of social transformation, unlike these earlier ones, has the virtue of being explicitly and self-consciously an act of fabulation. Of course, Beckett tries to make his speculations as plausible and far-reaching as possible; but he does not claim that they tell us, once and for all, who and what we really (deeply and truly) are. Rather, Dark Eden presents itself as a heuristic parable. The novel offers us a speculative reconstruction of human origins; but it calls attention to this very act of reconstruction as a narrative fabulation in its own right.
This is why the novel’s speculative storytelling includes so much reflection on storytelling itself. When Angela and Tommy are first stranded on Eden, they are faced with the task of rebuilding human civilization from scratch. But they do not do this in a vacuum; like Robinson Crusoe, they have a legacy from the past. Karl Marx sarcastically notes that Robinson Crusoe starts out, not only with all the stuff that he is salvages from the shipwreck, but also with his already-ingrained bourgeois values and assumptions. Even as he builds himself a shelter, and makes his own garments and tools, so also he “soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books” (Marx 1976). Angela and Tommy similarly rely, at the very least, upon their memories of life on Earth, or what might be called their intellectual capital. Even six generations later, the people of Eden are still dominated by the narratives that have thus been handed down to them.
Later in the novel, even as John Redlantern disrupts the Family, he is acutely aware that his own actions are themselves already the elements of a new narrative:
It wasn’t just in the future that this meeting would become a story to be acted out. Even now, even when it was happening for the first time round, it had already become a story in a way, with me as an actor in it, playing a part, and not just being myself. I was acting me.
Of course, this goes along with how John shapes himself as an agent, manipulating his own image, and holding back from revealing his inner thoughts to others. We might well say that John, unlike everyone else before him in Eden, is conscious of being a historical figure. This self-consciousness is the reason why his actions move the story of Eden out of the realm of myth, and into that of history. John is aware of his present actions as part of a story-in-process, because he realizes that his actions have the power to determine the future, by moving it onto a new path. But John also discovers that the story in which he sees himself as an actor is not entirely his to control:
It had never occurred to me before that the story of John Redlantern might end up as the story of a famous killer, the first one in Eden ever to do for another human being. But now that story suddenly took shape in my mind.
John cannot entirely shape the future, because he cannot eliminate unplanned circumstances and unintended outcomes from his story. As Marx famously wrote, human beings “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.” In Dark Eden, this even applies, on a meta-level, to the emergence of history itself.
In reflecting upon its own narrative process, Dark Eden forcibly calls our attention to the way that the “origin” it recounts is already tainted – or at the very least, already fictional. It is not a true origin, since it derives from the previous history of human beings on Earth. There is no true origin, therefore, but only an imperfect repetition – or perhaps an adaptation, using this word as much in the literary sense as in the biological one. The story of human beings adapting to the somewhat different conditions of life on the dark planet Eden is itself an adaptation, under different circumstances, of a story that is already old, already played out on Earth. As a work of science fiction, Dark Eden views both the “primitive” and the “advanced” states of humankind retrospectively, through a kind of inverted extrapolation. It gives us a future that recapitulates our past, and for which our own future is already its own vanished past.
How does all this relate to our present historical moment, the time in which Dark Eden was written, and in which it is now being read? The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that
science fiction works by a kind of double action, like the glasses people wear when watching 3D movies. One lens of science fiction’s aesthetic machinery portrays some future that might actually come to pass; it’s a kind of proleptic realism. The other lens presents a metaphorical vision of our current moment, like a symbol in a poem. Together the two views combine and pop into a vision of History, extending magically into the future.
(Robinson 2019)
Following this logic of double action, we might well say that John Redlantern prefigures (or should I say postfigures?) what we currently call an entrepreneurial type, somebody like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, whose modus operandi is to “move fast and break things” (Taplin 2017). And we might equally well say that David Redlantern prefigures what we currently call a populist, quasi-fascistic demagogue, somebody like Donald Trump, who loudly demands the restoration of old values, but does not really believe in them, and really aims only at untrammeled domination. Several recent social theorists, most notably Melinda Cooper, have argued that the neoliberal cult of innovation and the neoconservative cult of the family and tradition are in fact mutually interdependent, two sides of the same coin (Cooper 2017). Dark Eden envisions the joint emergence (or better, re-emergence) of these two tendencies, co-dependent precisely in their hostility to one another. Beckett’s outlook is grim; but in accounting for the highly contingent development of the two sides, he offers us a multidimensional “vision of History,” of the sort that Robinson calls for. Even as Dark Eden recapitulates the steps that helped lead to our actual deplorable social configuration, it helps us to realize that this configuration is not given once and for all. The way we live now, just like the way they come to live in Eden, requires particular conditions of emergence. This means that there may also be particular conditions under which it could be transformed, or pass away.
Is there truly no alternative (to cite Margaret Thatcher’s infamous phrase) to the bifurcation envisioned by Dark Eden? In passing, Beckett at least lets us glimpse two versions of a less hierarchical, and less exploitative way of life after the fall of primitive communism. One of these is the vision of Tina Spiketree, who feels – as strongly as John does – the need to escape from the stifling conservatism of Family, but who also objects to what she rightly sees as the noxious consequences (gender hierarchy, private ownership, and authoritarianism) of John’s charismatic form of leadership.
The other divergent vision is expressed in the person of John’s cousin, Jeff Redlantern. Jeff is a clawfoot, which means that he cannot walk very easily, or very far. Due to his disability, Jeff is spared from the expectations of normative masculinity that mark both John and David:
Other boys became men by putting on the masks of men, and shutting out of their heads all the things that didn’t fit with their masks, but if you were a clawfoot no one expected you to wear that mask, or to shut those things out of your head. That was why I saw things that other people didn’t see.
As a result, other people in Eden find Jeff a bit strange. We might even say – to use a term that applies in our own world, but that is unknown in Eden – that Jeff is a person who is located somewhere along the autistic spectrum. This is manifested in various ways. For one thing, he never tires of the wonder of sheer existence: he frequently cries out things like “We’re here! … This is happening. We really are here!” Tina remarks that Jeff is “interested interested in everything”; and even John recognizes that Jeff is able “to see the wide world beyond” what everyone else pays attention to. He will “never settle for seeing only one side of a thing.” Jeff is always aware that there are many other perspectives besides his own; he reflects that, even if he were to die, “the world would still have had lots of other eyes to see through … even when someone died, the secret awakeness that had been looking out of their eyes would always still be there.”
Thanks to this open sensibility, Jeff is quite original and inventive. It is he, for instance, who first domesticates the woollybucks, large herbivores on Eden. He is able to empathize with these animals, despite their alien weirdness that repels everyone else. By riding on the back of a woollybuck, Jeff is able to compensate for his disability, traveling far distances without having to walk. Despite his inventiveness, however, Jeff has none of John’s mania about innovation for its own sake, and none of John’s ambitions to be a leader, and to manipulate and control other people.
In the second and third volumes of the trilogy, we learn that, after the events recounted in Dark Eden, both Tina and Jeff seceded from John’s group, and founded their own communities on more egalitarian lines. Their survival is quite tenuous, however. In the course of these volumes, Jeff’s people are not far enough away to escape subordination to the Davidfolk. Half Sky, the community founded by Tina, is widely scorned by the patriarchal Davidfolk and Johnfolk. It sounds like a utopia; men and women remain on equal terms, and leaders are chosen democratically. But Half Sky only survives for the moment thanks to its geographical distance from the other societies of Eden. In the long run, it remains under military threat.
Probably all speculation – not just about human origins, but also about potential future directions – requires a certain degree of reversion and recapitulation. Just as the people of Eden cannot possibly imagine what bright sunlight is really like, so there are doubtless conditions that we are unable to conceive adequately. Most likely, we are not even able to grasp how off the mark we are. As a result, we are all too often compelled to fall back upon the very formulations that have already disappointed us. This is perhaps why Fredric Jameson ultimately concludes that the utopia imagined by science fiction can have no positive content, but can only be “a radical break or secession … from political possibilities as well as from reality itself” (Jameson 2005). Chris Beckett touches upon this dilemma in his own way, by giving us a speculative fabulation of the very limits of fabulation.