Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  Thus what we find in works such as Triffids is a political fear masked as an evolutionary one. With his focus on technology and Cold War politics, however, Ruddick doesn’t connect this fear and anxiety to Britain’s own colonial history, and a fear of reprisal from the colonised peoples of the Global south, then in the middle of the process of decolonisation.

  As I have argued, there are clear affinities between Triffids and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and one of the major, if possibly unintentional, influences on Wyndham seems to be Wells’s combination of Darwinism (biology) and imperialism (politics) into a double symbolism, much like a double helix, where the two are so intertwined that they are often both interchangeable and inseparable. As John Rieder has demonstrated, the linking of evolutionary theory and colonialism forms an important part not only of colonial ideology, but also of the early history of science fiction. In fact, with its transposal of stereotypical traits of enslaved and jungle peoples to the triffids, it could be argued that Triffids even employs what Rieder, building on Laura Mulvey and Ann Kaplan, calls the colonial gaze, a structure that ‘distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at’, and is ‘a cognitive disposition that both rests upon and helps to maintain and reproduce the political and economic arrangements that establish the subjects’ respective positions’.62 Whether this is done diegetically or primarily on an external or authorial level is probably moot, considering that the whole novel is narrated by and thus filtered through Bill Masen, but it should by now be indisputable that in its depiction of triffids, and its possible conflation of plants and people, the novel is both rooted in and reproduces colonial ideology on several levels.

  In the end, however, what distinguishes John Wyndham’s Triffids from many predecessors such as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds is that in its reverse colonisation, where the imperial centre and periphery, and the roles of master and enslaved, are reversed, the threat comes both on a symbolic level and in the form of a species from an entirely different biological kingdom, with plants hunting and eating humans, thus threatening hierarchies on almost all possible levels – evolutionarily, biologically, racially and politically – and where the challenge to a human-centric hierarchy is conflated with, or at least runs in parallel with, a challenge to Western, colonial power. Perhaps it is this, combined with the fact that the fears and anxieties expressed in the novel were not meant as a humbling of imperial aspirations, but instead seem to have struck a nerve among generations of British readers experiencing the diminishing importance of Britain, that has kept The Day of the Triffids in print all these years.63

  3 Botanical Tentacles and the Chthulucene

  Shelley Saguaro

  Tentacles are most often attributes of animal species, from giant squids and octopuses to microscopic flagellates and ciliates. In the plant world clinging tendrils, creeping rhizomes and far-reaching mycorrhiza are self-supporting and generative attributes, with little or nothing to engender fear. However, when these botanical features become ‘tentacular’, generic and taxonomic boundaries are crossed, apparently becoming ‘monstrous exaggerations of nature’ and thus, they can terrify.1 Anthropocentric, humankind also presumes not just to cherish but to control plants, and twentieth-century science fiction, in particular, imagines plants as cunning and vengeful and, in their rebellion and volition, monstrous.2 The stories discussed here have a specific horror at their core – sentient plants with myriad tentacles. These texts are as follows: H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), John Wyndham’s seminal The Day of the Triffids (1951) and John Boyd’s The Pollinators of Eden (1969). In Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, we have an ambiguous species, ‘semivege-table in structure’ with no less than twenty-five tentacles per substalk.3 Famously, there are Wyndham’s triffids, exploited as a potential planet-saving commodity until their rebellion: ‘monster plants on the march’ which deliberately lash out at humans to deadly effect with stinging tentacles.4 John Boyd’s homicidal extra-terrestrial tulips also object to the strict regime of the scientists who aim to regulate and exploit them. On the planet Flora and its verdant island, Tropica, meanwhile, a new Eden of symbiotic harmony is imagined, among the highly eroticised and tentacularly well-endowed orchids. The tales discussed here are twentieth-century engagements with the imagined unintended consequences of human interventions and technological experimentation which unwittingly wreak havoc and irrevocably disturb the so-called natural order. Further, they look beyond the consequences of anthropocentrism’s exploitative commercial interests and actions on an environmental object-world (natural resources) to what might best be called the revenge of nature. Plants fight back, with humans and their injustices, as the target. Finally, as a third strand in this discussion, is the matter of boundary crossing, genetically, generically and more.

  Creepy Plants: The Botanical Tentacle

  The fascination with monstrous tentacles as a feature in science fiction and fantasy horror is long-standing but it has also now given rise to some new contemporary articulations, both literary and theoretical. For example, T. S. Miller’s article ‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies’ (2012), notes that the growth of animal studies and its criticisms of speciesism has significantly overlooked plants. Miller proposes that ‘the monster plant may point to a deep unease about the boundary between taxonomic kingdoms that even recent work done in animal studies can have some difficulty navigating’.5 Thus, he seeks to ‘understand the place of the monster plant in fiction and to propose a place for it in contemporary theoretical discourse’.6 Donna Haraway similarly acknowledges the generative changes in perspective on speciesism posited by posthumanism. However, she also notes some shortcomings in these recent theoretical realignments with which she is herself unhappy. Such shortcomings have been highlighted, she says, ‘by all the tentacular stringy ones’ that have been generally neglected and that she extols in her 2016 article, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, and in a related but not identical chapter in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), from which this discussion takes some crucial points.7 Whereas Miller seeks to investigate the role of plants as an ‘alternative origin for tentacle horror itself’,8 the proponents of tentacularity on which this essay relies, Donna Haraway and China Miéville, do not focus on plants. However, the fictions discussed here do, and have been chosen precisely for their preoccupation with botanical tentacles and at a time prior to recent interest in tentacularity.

  China Miéville, contemporary fantasy author often associated with ‘the New Weird’, has discerned what he calls ‘the Tentacular Novum’ in an essay entitled ‘M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire’ (2011). Here he claims, not least on his own behalf: ‘The spread of the tentacle … from a situation of near total absence … to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to Weird culture.’9 Miéville has in mind precursor H. P. Lovecraft’s hybrid octopus-like monster, Cthulhu, and other tentacled ‘cephalopods’, including his own composite creation, depicted in Kraken (2010). While these are tentacular creatures, they are, despite their complex hybridity, not in any way plants. Miller, in fact, refers to Miéville’s essay, which is in his estimation ‘the best existing theorization of the woefully under-theorised phenomenon of tentacle horror’; nonetheless, he finds ‘a complete lack of plants’ is its ‘weakness’.10 Haraway’s interest is in ‘multispecies muddles’ and ‘chthonic powers’ and, whereas she too may be criticised for a neglect of plants, she aims to be all-inclusive, celebrating myriad tentacled creations of all kinds, both ‘biotic’ and, importantly, ‘abiotic’, ‘both ancient and up-to-the-minute’.11 For Haraway, the chthonic ones are ‘monsters in the best sense’, ‘replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair’.12

  Thinking like a Tentacle

 
Haraway’s main aim is to revise the current naming of our present epoch as the Anthropocene: ‘Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!’ She posits a conflict between the assumptive powers of anthropocentrism and all the ‘rich wallow’ of ‘biodiverse terra’: ‘the chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere.’13 Such oppositionalism between sky gods/chthonic mortals, Apollo/Dionysus, masculine/feminine is not new per se, although Haraway’s take on dominating contemporary discourses is. She aligns the Capitalocene and the Anthropocene as being readily lent ‘to cynicism, defeatism and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions’ such as ‘the “game over, too late” discourse’ common today, and it is to these two that she adds a contrasting third dimension, the Chthulucene.14 The Chthulucene, by contrast, engenders a vital, collective and creative approach to ‘staying with the trouble’. As Haraway outlines in her chapter ‘Tentacular Thinking’,

  unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake … We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene … the order is reknitted.15

  Tentacularity is thus both a mode of being and of representation: ‘myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene’.16 Haraway imagines and encourages a multifaceted sympoiesis (“making with” or co-creation) that will challenge both the anthropocentric autopoiesis (self-creation) of the Capitalocene and the ubiquitous double-pronged hubris/fatalism of the Anthropocene. In the light of these various discourses, and with a view to the potential of the tentacular in a new era, the retrospective consideration of tentacled plants in twentieth-century speculative fiction is salient. In each of the twentieth-century speculative texts and cautionary tales considered here, written at the height of the Capitalocene, scientific advances, inter-galactic exchanges, taxonomic boundaries and moral expectations, were all being interrogated by the deployment of the botanical tentacle.

  Donna Haraway notes that ‘tentacle’ is derived from ‘the Latin tentaculum, meaning “feeler” and tentare, meaning “to feel” and “to try”’.17 The Oxford English Dictionary provides an overarching definition: ‘1. A slender, flexible limb or appendage in an animal, especially around the mouth of an invertebrate, used for grasping or moving about, or bearing sense organs.’ Three sub-definitions are relevant to this study: ‘1.1 (in a plant) a tendril or a sensitive glandular hair; 1.2 something resembling a tentacle in shape or flexibility [e.g. a vapour trail]; 1.3 (usually tentacles) An insidious spread of influence and control – the Party’s tentacles reached into every nook and cranny of people’s lives.’18 If the verbs are highlighted, each of these definitions provides further understanding of the creepiness (activity and effect) of tentacles: grasp, move, spread, reach. The adjectives are also revealing: slender, flexible, sensitive, insidious. John Wyndham invokes primal elemental fears when, in The Day of the Triffids, the hospitalised and unseeing Bill Masen, intuiting something badly amiss, recalls a common childhood apprehension: ‘I got to fancying that horrors were lurking in the shadowy corners … that something should reach from under the bed and grab my ankle.’19 The monster-under-the-bed is usually not anything as homely as a plant. Rather, something sharply toothed or clawed, carnivorously voracious and with a noisome roar, possibly an extraterrestrial, but certainly alien.

  Until recently there was no serious conjecture that the plants themselves acted with any volition or ambition; plants were devoid of the attributes that distinguished human beings and other animals in the natural order and chain of being. However, in 2001, the gardening and food journalist Michael Pollan suggested a more inclusive approach in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World:

  domestication was something people did to plants, never the other way round. It probably never occurred to … the Dutch burgher … the tulipmania [sic] he unwittingly helped fire was an inestimable boon to the genus, Tulipa, which may be said to have had the last laugh. Its fortunes, at least have been in the ascendant ever since the Dutch burghers lost their fortunes on its account. Witting or not, all these characters have been actors in a coevolutionary drama, a dance of human and plant desire that has left neither the plants nor the people taking part in it unchanged.20

  Pollan notes the inspiration for him of time-lapse photography in, for example, David Attenborough’s 1995 television series, The Private Life of Plants.21 Now, other technologies, including genetics and the discovery that plant and human genes overlap, and a move, in the face of environmental catastrophe, to theoretical ‘dis-anthropocentrism’,22 are evident in books such as Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (2013) or Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2017). These have made consideration of ‘the plant’s point of view’ more plausible. Michael Pollan’s estimation that: ‘our sense of plants as passive objects is a failure of imagination, rooted in the fact that plants occupy what amounts to a different dimension’,23 anticipates the ‘plant studies’ that in 2012 T. S. Miller still lamented as deficient.

  Although ‘plant studies’ has lagged behind study of other genera, plants have nonetheless long captured human imagination and given rise, even in the name of science, to some fanciful speculations. The rise of science, which was coincident with the expansion of travel, made some inroads into understanding plants and the biosphere more generally. Evolutionary scientists spoke of the survival of the fittest, natural selection and also of the incidence across the globe of ‘exotic’ species and peculiar adaptions. Many of these specimens were brought back to Western metropolitan centres, such as Kew in London, in the interests of curating the planet’s curiosities and expanding knowledge. Fevered imaginings were also increasingly fostered, notes Chad Arment, editor of Botanica Delira: More Stories of Strange, Undiscovered, and Murderous Vegetation (2010). Whereas ‘tall tales of strange plants’ began to appear in the eighteenth century, with the mention of ‘plants like the Venus flytrap and the “deadly” Upas tree’ it was not until the 1870s, with ‘stories of man-eating trees’, for instance, that ‘deliberate newspaper hoaxing of botanical wonders (or, more often, horrors)’ began to catch on.24 Significantly, the locations tended to be tropical and the foliage, factual or fabricated, included giant sinuous vines, dense rainforests and canopies full of well-camouflaged, unfamiliar inhabitants, zoological as well as botanical. As Chad Arment’s collection reveals, from ‘vegetable boa constrictors’ in the South Pacific to anonymously published tales such as ‘The Man-Killing Tree of Ceylon’ (1895) or ‘The Flesh-Eating Plant’ (1901) encountered in Costa Rica, the expansion of travel expanded the conjectures about curious species, whether well founded or not. ‘One positive aspect to these stories’, notes Arment, ‘is that they influenced the development of a fascinating subgenre of speculative fiction’ focusing on the ‘crypto-botanical’,25 tales, that is, of ‘plants that are reported to exist but which have not been taxonomically identified by scientific consensus’.26 The popular venues for many ensuing tales of fantasy and science fiction were magazines with titles such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories or Weird Tales that first grew to prominence in the 1920s. H. P. Lovecraft and John Wyndham both published in these magazines. Several Weird Tales covers of the period (late 1920s until the 1950s) depict the tentacular coils of a giant serpent, or of a sharp-fanged octopus-like creature rising from the deep, but strangulating plants are relatively rare. One exception is the depiction in September 1928 of ‘The Devil Plant’ (story by John Murray Reynolds; cover art by C. C. Senf), where a giant, tentacled, toothed plant is enclosing, and apparently eating, as it resembles a ‘carnivorous’ Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), a desperate young woman, as a knife-wielding man in a pith helmet comes, perhaps futilely, to her rescue.27 The jungle setting is telling, and the flesh-eating plants, while an inversion of norms (plant
s eating humans instead of humans eating plants), are also resonant of other reputed unnatural acts in jungle venues, such as cannibalism.

  Boundary crossing

  Sensationalist scaremongering combined with expanded horizons gave rise to the dramatisation of a range of fears that were precisely about boundary crossing and slippery taxonomies. Plants that were carnivorous, that is, behaved like animals including humans were unsettling in and of themselves, but they also gave rise to metaphors for other fears of hybridity. This tendency is most apparent, perhaps, in the fantasy-horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft. In a much-cited essay of 1927, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft posited his own early definition of the ‘true weird tale’:

  A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos …28

  To this ‘recipe’ for ‘true weird’ fiction, Lovecraft adds as another ingredient the advances of twentieth-century science: ‘the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought’.29 This combination of concerns, ‘the fixed laws of Nature’ and the ‘broken barriers of modern science’, is integral to Lovecraft’s conservative and yet extravagant futuristic mode. Lovecraft was notoriously racist and dubiously reactionary, as has been claimed variously, and evidenced explicitly in many of his letters. Lovecraft biographer, Michel Houellebecq, discusses his own surprise at Lovecraft’s ‘obsessive racism’: ‘never in the reading of his descriptions of nightmare creatures could I have divined that their source was to be found in real human beings.’ He continues: ‘as an author of horror fiction (and one of the finest) he brutally takes racism back to its essential and most profound core: fear.’30 Sophus Reinert notes that underpinning all of Lovecraft’s elaborate horror-laden myth-making is ‘the deeper terror … a chillingly resonant fear that, amidst the chaos of globalization, miscegenation and economic decline, “Anglo-Saxon” civilization would surrender to lesser races’.31 For Lovecraft, ‘a melting pot of mongrelism’ was an indication of atavistic regression back to the ‘protoplasmic evil’ that the civilised, corporeally defined Teutonic races had definitively left behind.32 The scene-setting notes for just one of Lovecraft’s best-known tales, ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ (1931), provide a lens through which to understand other texts, too: ‘Horrible incidents – hybridization … Things threaten to rise in limitless numbers.’33 The very ‘multi-species muddle’ that Haraway now celebrates was for Lovecraft and other eugenicists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the grounds for terror and loathing.