Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  Lovecraft’s abhorrence of atavistic regression underpins the whole of At the Mountains of Madness and finds its cautionary nadir in the subterranean protoplasmic Shoggoths, once enslaved by the Elder Things, with their ‘shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules … crushing … slithering’.34 There are plants, too, and they have a surfeit of tentacles. At least, they may be plants. The fossilised prehistoric remains, uncovered by the group of male scientists that travel to Antarctica (and ‘its cryptic world of frozen death’35), are of an irresolvable species. As the meticulous scientific records of the palaeontologist narrator reveal, they comprise: a ‘monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable … Can’t decide whether vegetable or animal’; ‘Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any cell growth science knows about.’36 The notable features include: ‘[s]even-foot membranous wings … with orifices at wing tips’; ‘five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over three feet’; ‘single stalks three inches diameter [that] branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches … into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles’.37 Also: a ‘bulbous neck’, ‘starfish-shaped … head’ with ‘gills’ and ‘covered with three-inch wiry cilia’. The ‘“thick and puffy” head’ measures ‘about two feet point to point’ and is covered in ‘flexible yellowish tubes’. The animal-like ‘longer reddish tubes’, ‘saclike swellings’, ‘bell-shaped orifices’ and ‘white tooth like projections’,38 comprise a grossness at once both phallic and vagina-dentatal. Although bearing a ‘five-lobed brain’, there is evidence of reproduction by spores, like ‘the vegetable cryptogams’.39 Also present, rather than any blood, are traces of a ‘thick dark-green fluid’, ‘organic moisture of pungent and offensive odor’.40 The scientific jottings fail to arrive at a taxonomic conclusion: ‘Symmetry is curiously vegetablelike, suggesting vegetable’s essential up-and-down structure rather than animal’s fore-and-aft structure.’41 At last, the scientist, unable to name it definitively, surmises that it was ‘partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure’42. Unable to identify or classify the specimens, which are not as fossilised as the men at first believe, analogies are brought to bear. They are like ‘crinoids’ (from the Greek krinon, ‘lily’, and eidos, ‘form’), spectacularly tentacled marine animals, or other ‘radiates’ and yet they are also winged. However, in Lovecraft’s frozen wastes, any intact thawed specimens grotesquely kill a team of men and their dogs; the creatures that were such a groundbreaking discovery are revealed to be a horrific throwback and mutation. In time, it is agreed that these are creatures known as The Elder Things (or Old Ones) in the ancient myths of the Necronomicon, which outlines the rise and fall of a former and not altogether alien civilisation. The biological terror that Lovecraft so horrifically invokes is the result of the biological warfare of a distant civilisation, but one that, cryogenically, has effects for a later one. The horror of these monsters lies, it seems, in the way that ‘these vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms – animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial and aerial – were the products of unguided evolution’.43 As Sophus Reinert explains, Lovecraft saw in the contemporaneous Great Depression and its contributing factors, just the ‘unsupervised’ and ‘uncontrolled’ forces that he feared ‘would bring about an atavistic retrogression, economically, racially, civilizationally, and, ultimately, aesthetically’.44 The terrors of ‘unguided evolution’ and primal ‘aliens’ are ultimately the fears of human vulnerability to the point of extinction, or worse.

  Accidental Mutations

  ‘Accident’, whether coming about through ‘unguided evolution’ or by ‘forced development’ is a common thread in these three texts under consideration. In John Wyndham’s work this is very pronounced. Famously, in The Day of the Triffids, the main character Bill Masen predicts that the blinding comet storm, which gave the triffids such an advantage, was not in fact a celestial Act of God, but an accident of mankind or, possibly, a deliberate and diabolical strategy. Early in the novel, when the world has been bombarded with the blinding, green-flashes attributed to a meteor shower, he refers to the hidden but relative proximity of: ‘satellites with atomic heads … crop diseases, cattle diseases, radioactive dusts, viruses, and infections not only of familiar kinds, but brand-new sorts recently thought up in laboratories, all floating around up there … uncertain and potentially back-firing weapons’, all officially denied.45 Masen’s sight is saved, ironically, only because he was already in hospital with his eyes bandaged as a result of a direct triffid sting; it has become a common ‘strategy’ for the triffids to aim their poisonous tentacles at the eyes of humans. The ‘true origin’ of the increasingly terrifying triffids he notes, ‘remains obscure’ but in his view, ‘they were the outcome of a series of ingenious biological meddlings – and very likely accidental at that.’46 At first, the triffids, a completely new species, provide a nourishing, pale pink oil, potentially a valuable commodity in a world struggling to provide adequate, affordable food and aggressively competing for space to grow food-plants. As a nod to the Cold War context, the USSR had ‘deliberately organized itself into a land of mystery’ and ‘veiling secrecy’ while ‘intensively concerned with attempts to reclaim desert, steppe, and the northern tundra’ for food production.47 Thus the triffids become integral to international competition in the space-to-grow race. When a plane carrying a case of the trafficked triffid seeds is sabotaged and crashes, the seeds are, by accident, again, disseminated randomly and widely: ‘millions of gossamer-slung triffid seeds, free now to drift wherever the winds of the world should take them’.48

  The triffids are, perhaps, the most iconic of the tentacular plants in science and speculative fiction. Although looking ‘odd’ and ‘somehow foreign’ they seemed fairly innocuous at first (they were only plants, after all), and were allowed to grow widely and unhindered. In some respects, they are in appearance not unlike the Elder Things in At the Mountains of Madness: ‘straight stem’, ‘woody bole’, ‘three small bare sticks which grew straight up beside the stem’; ‘short sprays of leathery leaves’; ‘curious funnel-like formation at the top’; a ‘tightly wrapped whorl within’, and, revealing its carnivorous habits, a ‘sticky mess at base of cup’ where insects were caught and digested.49 However, this whorl is anything but botanically innocuous; rather, it is a combative tentacle: ‘the whorl topping a triffid’s stem could lash out as a slender stinging weapon ten feet long, capable of discharging enough poison to kill a man if it struck squarely on his unprotected skin.’50 Gradually, it becomes clear that the triffid consumes meat as well as insects, and its stinging tendril, while not (yet) having ‘the muscular power to tear flesh’ that is fresh, ‘had strength enough to pull shreds from a decomposing body and lift them to the cup’.51 Thus, once having blinded and stunned their human victims, they lurk until the flesh is ripe. ‘It was some time later that the first one picked up its roots, and walked’, but, as Bill Masen reflects, optimistically, the triffids were not necessarily more fantastical than ‘kangaroos’ or ‘much queerer than mudfish, ostriches, tadpoles, and a hundred other things’; ‘the bat was an animal that had learned to fly; well, here was a plant that had learned to walk – what of that?’52 Just as Lovecraft’s scientists compared the Old Ones to extant, tentacled marine crinoids, so Wyndham compares his triffids to ‘weird’ but more familiar, curious-but-harmless and variously adapted species. Unequivocally, the evolution of species, generally, is viewed as well contained, and although potentially a nuisance to humans, not a threat to their existence.

  Losing Control

  In a radical estimation that is relevant to current postcolonial, posthuman and Chthulucenic theses, William Lucknor notes that it is not that the triffids have an in
telligence ‘equal to man’ but, rather, ‘an altogether different type of intelligence’ that is nonetheless ‘well-developed’, highly adaptive and competitive. Sightless, they nevertheless persistently and tactically aim their stinging tendrils mainly at human eyes. The observant Lucknor explains the vulnerability of human animals: ‘Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that, our position becomes inferior to theirs because they are adapted to a sightless existence, and we are not.’53 In The Day of the Triffids the general response to any reports of triffid volition is that this cannot be true: ‘they’re just plants.’54 As the salesman Umberto Palanguez, himself of ‘assorted Latin descent’,55 explains, the triffids are ‘something quite new’ and of uncertain, but definitely hybrid, heritability: ‘I do not say there is no sunflower there at all. I do not say there is no turnip there. I do not say there is no nettle, nor even no orchid there. But I do say that if they were all fathers to it they would none of them know their child. I do not think it would please them greatly, either.’56 They are not simply plants, nor animals, nor are they terra-indigenous; they defy extant categorisation by a human culture that is obsessed with identification. Nevertheless, with the assumption that they are ‘just plants’, humans treat them derisorily in the confident expectation of their inferiority and limitations, and only with a view to intensive commercial exploitation and triffid ‘optimisation’. The precedents of human history, however, lend something, not just in terms of racial bias, but rather, kindred justice. Although they are, as Bill Masen says, ‘so different’, going ‘against all our ideas of inheritable characteristics’, the triffids appear to protest against their oppressors and to fight for their collective rights, ‘plants on the march’.57 Surely Bill Masen’s rousing pledge to continue ‘the great crusade’ and ‘drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped’, is John Wyndham’s ironising.58 On the one hand, Churchillian in resonance, but on the other, giving the post-empire and post-war reader reflective pause: just who are ‘the bad guys’ in this scenario, and according to what criteria or credo? That of which the triffids are accused is precisely the same kind of usurpation enacted by Western colonialism, for example, but it is also reminiscent of the respective stands taken against other usurpations (Nazi Germany, for instance). Further, it dramatises the fear of, possibly not just foreign, but alien, invasions to come. Tales of the accidents of human experimentation and its unexpected consequences raise questions concerning the rights and responsibilities of creators and creatures. Bill Masen’s acknowledgement of the ‘horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created and which the rest of us in our careless greed had cultured all over the world’, reinforces the view that, like other creatures, they should not be expected simply to acquiesce in their constrained condition.59 Even the fabled Adam and Eve wanted to improve their lot; Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein sets another relevant precedent. The perspective throughout the novel is, of course, anthropocentric, but in the tale’s terms, ironically so. Wyndham makes the reader aware of the potential of ‘the revenge’ of an abused and desperate Nature that had ‘seemed about finished’.60 There is no doubt, given the descriptions of their commercial interment and the historical resonances of slavery, that the triffids, whatever they are, exist and have been exploited as well as underestimated. There is never a hint of sympathy for the triffids expressed in the first-person narrative, and the reader (like the characters) cannot know a triffid’s perspective per se, but the reader’s experience of Wyndham’s narrative, especially in these posthuman times, is to be prompted to wonder about another species’s point of view and to recognise, with Wyndham, the folly of human hubris and myopia.

  John Boyd’s The Pollinators of Eden, published in 1969, no doubt owes a debt to Wyndham’s seminal The Day of the Triffids. No writer of science fiction after Wyndham could be unaware of the award-winning and much-adapted work; in 1962 a film of The Day of the Triffids starring Howard Keel was released, bringing it to wide attention. The main film poster strap-line is still arresting: ‘BEWARE THE TRIFFIDS… they grow … know … walk … talk … stalk … and KILL!’ Significantly, the movie poster also has a book icon bearing the title and Wyndham’s name, heralding it as ‘the greatest science fiction novel of all time!’ The historian Edmund Morris noted that ‘Wyndham’s stroke of genius was to invent the triffid, a killer plant that is inscrutable in its malevolence, yet so ordinary, even uninteresting on first acquaintance’.61 The triffids were always a curiosity, and they were expected to be an adventitious source of profit, but certainly, their instincts were not anticipated. Of course, the plant depicted on the movie poster is graphically malevolent and, to an extent, sexualised: a black, grotesque, rather mechanical-looking monster clutches, most prominently, a struggling, high-heeled blond woman, along with an overthrown helpless man and a half-digested corpse, while its stinging tentacle looks more like a thin, aimless, almost lascivious tongue.

  The Botany of Lust

  Lasciviousness is precisely where John Boyd goes with his own tale of tentacular plants. He exploits, simultaneously, the pulp science fiction trope of female sexual vulnerability in an alien world (or a world of aliens), the coy, compulsory-heterosexual discourses to which the tale of Eden gave rise, and the ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexual characteristics of plants. Boyd also explicitly acknowledges, albeit enigmatically, the inspiration he found in his precursor: ‘John Wyndham solved the problem.’62 The problem in question was, ironically, Boyd’s reluctance to let his main protagonist, Dr Freda Caron, ‘submit to the caresses of another man’: ‘When Freda finally yielded, it was to a lesbian orchid on a planet of ambulatory plants’, thereby also acknowledging that Wyndham’s arsenal-tentacles might be reconceived.63

  Dr Freda Janet Caron, a ‘cystologist’ (sic) for the Bureau of Exotic Plants, Department of Agriculture, San Joaquin, California, sublimates her sexual frigidity by her energetic dedication to plant science. Her fiancé, Paul Theaston, fails to return for their wedding from the planet Flora, where he has been studying the pollination of orchids. His absence is compensated for by his gift to her of a number of beautiful extraterrestrial tulips and, as a human proxy, his research assistant, Hal Polino. Freda’s repeated analysis underscores but also satirises 1960s psychoanalysis and sexology: ‘She had known from childhood, with a knowledge since reinforced by analysts, that she was emotionally unstable, a woman living on the edge of a volcano’.64 In fact, not just Freda but her reluctant fiancé, Paul, seem to be suffering from an ‘unaroused libido’.65 As Freda later learns, Paul has merely been protecting her virginal self from his masculine sexuality (by visiting prostitutes), but in fact he much prefers the orchids on Flora. Freda, too, despite her ‘deep-seated phobia for human contact’, actually, it turns out, has a ‘libido, which is stronger than most’ but one that is ‘focused on plant life’.66 However, before her sexual liberation and gratification amongst the extraterrestrial orchids, Freda has the beautiful yellow tulips and the adoring research student Hal Polino to contend with. Murderous and wayward though the tulips prove to be, Freda nonetheless adores them with the nurturing and forgiving love of a mother. Thus, her maternal instincts awaken before her sexual ones have been fulfilled, and she and Hal (whose attentions she can easily resist despite the fact that he smells wonderfully of elm trees), become the tulips’ surrogate parents. The extraterrestrial tulips have unexpected adaptedness, such as the following: communication (a language heard by humans as singing), individual heterosexuality, volition (exploitation and control of pollinators) and emotions. The final Oedipal scenario (and patricide) is when two young male specimens turn a ‘howler’ sound-recording experiment on its head, ‘zapping’ Hal with ‘high-frequency sound waves’, thereby causing him a brain haemorrhage.67 ‘What you heard’, says one colleague in relation to a post-mortem analysis of the recordings, ‘was a bunch of flowers picking a human.’68

&
nbsp; ‘Is the goal of life the superman or the superplant?’ asks Paul from his adopted home on Flora.69 The adaptations and advances that engender the ‘superhuman’ take little thought for the separate and ‘inferior’ species, but Boyd, as others, imagines the consequences of plant ‘consciousness-raising’, an apposite sixties term. The co-evolution and subsequent symbiosis of species is crucial to sustainable ecologies but also instructive in terms of collective mutability. As one illustrative summary has it: